TikTok battle between exes captivates the country — and has a Scientology angle?

At just before 8 pm last Sunday, a Tampa woman named Elizabeth Teckenbrock, 29, posted a 32-second video to TikTok that has now been viewed more than 45 million times.

It features her weeping wordlessly as she prepares to make cupcakes in her kitchen, with music playing over it (“A Thousand Years” by Christina Perri), and with the following words on screen: "Being a single mom is making your own birthday cake on your birthday so that your babies can feel happy they are singing to you."

Four days later, on Thursday, Newsweek wrote about the viral sensation after speaking with the mother of four herself. "I was not upset about making the cake, it was just a ton of emotions coming from exhaustion and loneliness," Teckenbrock said.

But then on Friday morning, Teckenbrock’s ex-husband and father of her two youngest children, a Clearwater, Florida optometrist named Andrew Cormier, re-posted the video but “stitched” himself into it to identify himself and provide a counter-narrative to what people were seeing.

"I'm her ex-husband, and right now I have full custody of our kids. This is our parent agreement. As you can see, I have all weekdays and weekends timesharing with the kids. All holiday academic breaks. And for her to get any rights back to the kids, these are the things she needs to do. And yes, child support, she owes that. It's up to over $21,000. So, she's a mother and doesn't pay child support. She was then arrested for check fraud and during that hearing it turned out that, it was found that she stole almost a million dollars from another guy, and also, she faked cancer in the past. These are scans that she would send and post before...So to sum it up, this person...she's really not a full time mom, she barely has her kids, she goes out all the time, and she doesn't even have a job even."

Cormier’s video resulted in a Daily Mail piece yesterday afternoon titled “Mother's dark past emerges after heartbreaking video of her crying while baking her own birthday cake went viral - as her ex-husband makes bombshell claims.” It included a mugshot of Teckenbrock, who was arrested in August for third degree grand theft and cash or deposit item with intent to defraud.

Saturday morning, Teckenbrock reacted to Cormier’s video with a new TikTok video of her own that was more than 9 minutes long. She didn’t respond to the allegations about faking cancer or owing child support, but she did accuse Cormier of being the subject of multiple restraining orders from other women, and she accused him of hiding his income so that it appears he makes much less than he actually does. And she revealed something else, which is then why we began hearing from various readers about this online conflagration.

“Andrew has created websites, TikToks, I think that is the Scientologist aspect of his life. If you go on the website there's actually Scientologist links that he's added there....Andrew is extremely, extremely abusive and always has been abusive.”

It turns out that Cormier has been posting TikToks about Teckenbrock for more than a year, and he appears to be behind a fairly elaborate website that documents her legal troubles with the name “elizabethteckenbrockinfo.”

And, as Teckenbrock pointed out, you can currently find at least one link on that website to a Scientology website.

That link takes you to scientologyhandbook.org and a page about the “Third Party Law,” an L. Ron Hubbard theory about how disputes between two people can always be traced back to a third person creating the conflict.

So is Andrew Cormier, an optometrist in Clearwater — one of Scientology’s most important strongholds — a member of the church? We’ve seen references to Cormier denying that he’s a Scientologist, but not something from him directly. We don’t find anything definitive about his involvement online, and we’ve reached out to both of them for more information.

The link to a Scientology website on its own is not proof that Cormier is a Scientologist himself, but Teckenbrock was married to him and repeatedly refers to him as a Scientologist in her video.

She characterizes him as a Scientologist following Scientology’s well known penchant for retaliating against people with a Fair Game campaign. He characterizes her as a grifter who has lost custody of all four of her children and who is facing prosecution for theft.

She has said that she had refrained from talking about him in her videos because she didn’t want her children to have to deal with seeing that information online later on. Cormier, meanwhile, has featured their daughters in taunting videos about his ex-wife well before this current very public fight blew up.

We are just beginning to dive into this story and we’re looking over court documents and other information about both of these social media figures. If you happen to know anything about Cormier’s involvement in the church, please drop us a line.

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