Here in the United States we are celebrating our independence, and we hope you are too, wherever you are.
Your proprietor decided that this contentious year he would go back to the very beginning and think about the forces that led a people to break bonds with received traditions of monarchy and subservience to ethereal powers.
Yes, we’ll be at Independence Hall in Philadelphia this morning, where it all started. It’s our first time to celebrate the 4th in Philly, and with the way things have been in this country recently, with insurrections and radical theocracies breaking out, we thought it was a pilgrimage worth making.
As usual however, we mark Independence Day by asking readers to tell us about their own declarations of freedom from Scientology indoctrination. What first led you to question your involvement in the organization? How did you negotiate the tricky path of leaving if you still had family members in?
If you’ve told us before about how you left Scientology, what’s changed for you in the last year or two? Has your conception of your Scientology experience changed over time? Would you have done things differently to leave the group if you could?
And for the never-ins, tell us which of the escape stories you find most illustrative, most exciting, most devastating.
And maybe most importantly, what advice can you offer to those under-the-radar types who today are sneaking a peek at this website as they consider whether it’s time, finally, for them to declare their own independence and dissolve the bands which have connected them to David Miscavige and the Church of Scientology?
Thank you for reading today’s story here at Substack. For the full picture of what’s happening today in the world of Scientology, please join the conversation at tonyortega.org, where we’ve been reporting daily on David Miscavige’s cabal since 2012. There you’ll find additional stories, and our popular regular daily features:
Source Code: Actual things founder L. Ron Hubbard said on this date in history
Avast, Ye Mateys: Snapshots from Scientology’s years at sea
Overheard in the Freezone: Indie Hubbardism, one thought at a time
Past is Prologue: From this week in history at alt.religion.scientology
Random Howdy: Your daily dose of the Captain
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Valerie Haney’s escape story is my favorite. I love how she employed the help of a contractor to ship her out in the trunk of her car.
My own escape story was just good planning. I knew everyone was a little lax after 2 pm on Thursday. I parked near the side entrance of the Anthony Building on Fountain and grabbed my stuff in a few duffle bags and was on the road. I checked into a hotel in Vegas, won $600 and headed to Salt Lake City in the morning.
In the late 1990's, someone from scientology called me, wanting me to delete an EarthLink customer's website.
I had been a scientologist since 1977, getting in at San Francisco Org. I had been on staff 4 times, three of them in the Sea Org. Finally putting that stupidity down, I had been a public scientologist since 1985 when I left SMI Int. I finally, still a scientologist, had gotten a job at the internet service provider EarthLink. It was started by the Scientologist Sky Dayton, and a lot of scientologists had been hired as well.
I worked my ass off making the company succeed. I rose to a manager position in the Information Technology Division, managing many staff who had jobs such as domain name registration, Network Operations Center, and other things. As such I had critical passwords to various machines, including the webservers EarthLink ran for their customers.
So, around the time that the OT III materials (unbeknownst to me) had been published in various places on the web, someone from scientology called me up and asked me to delete an EarthLink customers personal website on which they had posted copies or something containing the OT III materials.
I was still a scientologist. I was hoping to get onto the "OT Levels" and get what scientology promised. I had paid for a lot of scientology's counseling using my stock options in EarthLink.
Yet, I could see that I would be found out if I deleted the website. I would not only lose my job, but my career and any future hope of a job in the internet sector. And possibly be involved in much legal action. Plus, it was not a right thing to do. Customers had a right to their website and to their own free speech content. Almost all of this went through my head while talking to this presumably OSA person on the phone.
So I told them, this person on the phone asking me to do this thing, that scientology had to go through the EarthLink Lawyers just like anybody else. I refused. They hung up.
I think this is what triggered the hundreds of hours of scientology auditing "security checks" that were required, for me to get onto the "OT" levels. The longer they went on, the worse I became mentally. I became unable to do my job. I was replaced at work by a person from a faction inside the technical areas of EarthLink. And I continued my decline, eventually taking a leave of absence, getting more "auditing" which just made me worse. After a short stint at another job, I had to quit there. In 2002, I sold my house in L.A., and in my own mind, moved to Oregon where I grew up, to die.
Scientology destroyed my mental and physical health. I became deeply depressed. Finally, after moving to Oregon, on the coast. I was so debilitated that I finally overcame the scientology installed prohibition against looking for information about scientology on the Internet. Trying to answer long-term questions about scientology that I had never successfully gotten answers to.
I considered I was dying and there was really no downside to finding out the truth. Things like, "How did L. Ron Hubbard really die?" and others. I got an account on Xenu.net and was reading alt.religion.scientology news group on UseNet News. I was saddened and outraged by the lies that had been told me for all the 27 years I had been in scientology. So I wrote up a by-the-book "Doubt Formula" as per the scientology ethics book, and published it to the world on Xenu.net and alt.religion.scientology, and sent hard copies to scientology and my remaining close friends in scientology. And then Arnie Lerma, became a friend, asked me if he could send out copies of the "doubt formula" to a mailing list he had, 1500 or so names and addresses of scientology businessmen and women and organizations. I said yes, as I had expressly copyrighted it and in the formula itself okayed people publishing it complete and unaltered. So he did. And that got me noticed.... So that is how I left scientology and L. Ron Hubbards decades long mind-fuck.