It was a conversation about Scientology she’d wanted to have forever. And then it happened.

[Tammy Synovec]

It was an encounter she had hoped might happen some day, and she had even played it out in her mind, over and over.

And then, suddenly, it happened.

A few weeks ago, Tammy Synovec took the middle seat on the airplane so her son could get the window. Already in the aisle seat next to her sat an older man she didn’t know.

He seemed friendly, and so she asked him about his reason for flying.

They were leaving Los Angeles for a destination we’re going to hold back in order to protect the identity of the man.

That’s because the reason he’d been visiting Los Angeles was that he’s a Scientologist, and had been in town for an event.

Now he was flying back home. When he said that he was a Scientologist, Tammy responded by saying, “Oh shit.”

He gave a knowing look, like he realized how unpopular Scientology is, but then Tammy leveled with him to explain her response. She said, with a smile, “I’m an ex-Scientologist.”

She asked him if the event he’d come out for was the New Year’s taping at the Shrine Auditorium on December 16.

“He was happy that I knew about that, and said yes,” she tells us.

They had a three-hour flight ahead of them. Tammy took a deep breath. This was something she’d been anticipating for a long time.

“We talked for the entire trip,” she says. And she did her best to take advantage of a rare opportunity.

He said he was excited about the new “Golden Age of Admin” that Scientology leader David Miscavige touted at the New Year’s event.

“I didn’t burst his bubble. I just told him it will be exciting to see public packing the orgs once standard admin goes in,” Tammy says. “I’m not sure if he picked up on my sarcasm.”

The man said another thing he learned from the speech was that an Ideal Org was opening in Chicago. Tammy pointed out that Miscavige had actually promised the opening a year ago, but he didn’t seem fazed by her comment.

At his org he was a staff executive, so she told him about her own experience on staff.

“I told him about how I was always tired because staff hours were brutal. And I had to keep it up while I was pregnant, that I worked until the day I went to the hospital,” she says.

That seemed to register with him. “You mean you were in labor and didn’t go to the hospital until your hat was turned over?” he asked, using the Scientology word “hat” for a job or position.

“I told him I had to find three replacements to cover for me the three days I was off to have my baby.”

But whenever she brought up negative things about her own experiences, the man tended to respond with positive statements about his own experiences.

“I’ve had great wins with Scientology. I’m going to keep on doing it,” he said.

“I told him I had wins too, I wasn’t denying that,” Tammy says she responded. “But the bad far outweighed the good, and that’s why I told my comm ev that I was done with Scientology.” (A “comm ev,” short for “committee of evidence,” is something like a Scientology court martial.)

She says she did her best not to push too hard, but she managed to bring up a lot of things she hoped he’d think about long after their conversation.

“I didn’t just plant seeds, I planted trees,” she says.

“The Debbie Cook email about how Miscavige has usurped the church, for example. He thought she had been kicked out and declared. I told him that wasn’t true, and her court testimony is online,” she says. “I talked about abuses at the Mace-Kingsley Ranch, and how all of those kids are out and some of them are speaking publicly now. I brought up the Exec Strata, that they’re all gone and haven’t been seen at events in years. It was only Miscavige on stage now.”

She brought up disconnection, and that her own daughter, a public in Clearwater, hasn’t talked to anyone in the family in seven years, and that her daughter had to get permission before she could talk to her father, Tammy’s husband Derrick, before he died of cancer in 2021.

“I told him I was impressed that he would even talk with me after I told him about that. But he said, ‘Do you know if you’ve been declared?’ I told him my comm ev had not declared me, but by now I figured I must be,” she says.

She explained that she’d been quoted at this website, and she figured that was a guarantee that she’d be declared.

“I told him the church doesn’t let people know if they are declared these days. You’re never shown a declare, but you know it when everyone you’ve ever known in Scientology disconnects from you at once.”

He said that while he was in Los Angeles, he had done Scientology’s “False Purpose Rundown” and that he “loved it.”

“I told him I hated it, but I was glad he liked it,” she says. “He told me the FPRD had ‘handled’ his bad back, and I ‘acknowledged’ his win. There were several times I would just say, ‘I get it, I used to think the same way when I was in,’ and left it at that.”

But even as she smiled at his “wins,” she was doing her best to feed him as much information as she could.

“My angle was to tell him the difference between what I was seeing after leaving Scientology from what my observations were when I was in. I told him the OT levels are online. I told him to keep away from Grant Cardone. I told him about ‘The Truth Rundown’ in the Tampa Bay Times. I asked him if he knew about Shelly Miscavige missing, but he didn’t seem to have a clue about that. I told him that the ‘expansion’ wasn’t really happening, that the PR was terrible and the Internet was the worst thing for Scientology. I made sure he heard that L. Ron Hubbard had been a bigamist, that all of his family was out now except for his daughter Diana, that Miscavige’s family had left and his dad had been outspoken before he died,” Tammy says.

“At one point he mentioned that he had heard about ‘that actress’ being on television talking about Scientology, but he said he hadn’t seen any of her shows.”

She kept planting seeds.

“I told him that I’d learned more about the history of Scientology since I had left than I ever knew when I was in. I told him about all of the original CMO Messengers who were out. I told him about Heber Jentzsch. I told him that Heber’s son had died and they not only didn’t tell his mother, they would not allow her to be at the funeral service at the Celebrity Centre. I told him about the Mission Massacre. I told him that missions were closing all around the world, that very few were left,” she says.

He pointed out that Miscavige was opening “Ideal” missions now.

“I told him I had heard about that, but I reminded him that there’s Scientology policy about orgs having a certain number of missions in their field. Closing all of those missions was off-policy and not really justified by opening a few Ideal Missions. The truth was, I told him, Scientology was shrinking everywhere, and it wasn’t just my own local org, which is what I used to think.”

And while she did her best to bring up things that might make him think about the health of his own home org, she says she avoided allegations of physical abuse of staff, figuring that he wouldn’t have seen any of that, and it would have less impact than the other things she was telling him.

They covered many other subjects as well, but eventually Tammy says she apologized to him, saying that she figured she was going to cost him a lot of money in an ethics program.

Scientologists know that if they encounter someone like Tammy and hear the kinds of things she was saying, they will be hauled into an ethics session, put on the E-meter, and made to confess what they’d heard, and at steep prices.

But he told her he wasn’t worried about that, that they were just talking. He seemed unworried about being hauled in for an interrogation.

At one point, she asked him if knew who Dan Sherman was, and he said yes. He had heard that Dan had died earlier in the year.

“I asked him if he knew that Dan wrote speeches for Miscavige, and he said yes. And I was surprised about that, because that was something I never knew when I was in. I then asked him if the speech on Saturday had still sounded Shermanesque.”

The man said that in fact, he was surprised how much the speech had sounded like Dan Sherman.

“I told him I wondered who was writing Miscavige’s speeches now, and he said he was wondering the same thing.”

As a result of Miscavige’s speech, the man said that trained staff were “firing” back to the orgs, and it would “boom” them.

“He almost sounded like he was trying to convince himself more than me. I think he sees the shrinking,” Tammy says.

“At the beginning, I had told him my name. At the end of the trip, he asked for my full name. I told him and said he’d need it for his report. He shrugged it off like he wasn’t going to write it up,” Tammy says with a laugh.

“As an ex-Scientologist, the conversation I had with him was one I’ve played over and over in my mind. To actually have that opportunity is something few exes will ever have. Of course I thought about all the things I wish I had said, but what I did say will rattle around in his mind,” she says.

She’s just glad she had the opportunity that she did. And she said she had a question for the readers of the Underground Bunker: What would you have said in her place?

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