[Today’s guest post is by Jonny Jacobsen]
A junior minister in the French government has recently recorded a summary of how her mother became a devoted Scientologist — and of her own years inside one of its schools in Paris.
It is making a few waves across the social media, even if this is not the first time she has spoken publicly on the matter.
Sonia Backès (née Dos Santos) was appointed Secretary of State for Citizenship by Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne in July last year.
When she realised that her new responsibilities included the tackling the issue of cults, she decided to talk about her childhood experience with the movement — and the damage it did to her relationship with her mother.
In the video, produced by Réel Média, Backès explains how her mother was recruited into the movement when she was in a vulnerable state following the divorce with her father. She was approached by a recruiter in the street and took the personality test.
Once her mother was recruited and had enrolled her in a Scientology school, everyone she knew was inside the movement, says Backès. The only person outside with whom she had any contact was her grandmother.
Her summary of the time she spent in the l’Ecole d’Eveil, the Scientology school in Paris, will be familiar to former members who attended similar schools in Britain and the United States.
The school had no teachers as such, but supervisors, who handed out photocopies of worksheets to be completed by the students. Once a student completed a chapter, they would be tested on it by someone who used an e-meter to make determine whether they had properly understood it. She has no problem describing the e-meter as a kind of lie detector.
Backès said she was a strong student before she entered the school, so the nearly two years she spent in there did not do her too much harm. But the same could not be said of those children had passed their entire education in such schools, she added.
At the time, she says, she did not fully understand that this kind of education was anything out of the ordinary. Her grandmother, who had a senior post in a Paris school, did from time to time try to run up red flags to her, but she was also wise enough to tread carefully so as not to antagonise her own daughter — Backès’s mother.
It was only when she returned to conventional education that she began to realise that none of it had been normal. Her real awakening came when a schoolfriend from her new school found out that she was in Scientology.
She started warning her about it and took the trouble to do the research and find material for her to read. (Backès, who is 47, points out that this was before the Internet.)
That allowed her to realise that what she had experienced was not normal — but when she tried to raise those doubts with her mother, she made it clear that that was not acceptable. Her response was to take her to England for auditing at Saint Hill (she doesn’t name it, but describes it as the European headquarters in England).
The way the questions were framed, she says, made it clear that they were trying to make out her father to be the root of all evil. She wasn’t having any of that.
She walked out and hitchhiked to London, where she phoned her father and asked her to come and fetch her. He lived in New Caledonia, one of France’s overseas territories in the southwest Pacific. Her father, she says, had known nothing about her mother’s involvement in Scientology following their divorce.
From that point on, she wanted nothing to do with her mother. It was only with the encouragement of her father that she made contact with her again a few years later. But, she says, they never managed to fully restore their relationship because of their differences over Scientology.
This is not the first time she has spoken about her childhood experience: it was covered in an interview with Le Figaro newspaper published last September, which was picked up by other news media at the time (here on France Info, for example).
The video, which runs to just over seven minutes, was produced by Réel Média, which is based near Paris. They posted it on Thursday, and it is slowly picking up momentum as it does the rounds of social media.
Here in France, we are still waiting for a case against another school alleged to have links with Scientology, the Institut Aubert, to come to trial.
The relevant dossiers, opened back in 1997 and 1998, have been repeatedly delayed for procedural reasons. The trial was meant to start in February, was again postponed — at the request of the prosecution — while they tried to get the papers in order.
But after more than 25 years in the legal machine, the chances of the case actually getting to court look increasingly fragile.
— Jonny Jacobsen
Paris-based journalist Jonny Jacobsen ran the Infinite Complacency blog covering Scientology between 2008 and 2015 and has covered trials related to the movement in France and Belgium.
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Jonny Jacobsen is one of my heroes. His coverage of $cieno affairs in Europe has been excellent and I continue to worship him from afar. Sonia Backès testimony is a wonderful 'outing' of the $cienoverse and all the damage that verse does. Well said Sonia, well said.