Valerie Haney describes two more days of Scientology 'arbitration' torment

“They did it again. I had to overcome their brainwashing.”

It was the first time we’d talked to Valerie Haney in weeks, during which she had not answered our messages or voicemails. Now, suddenly, she had sent a single word: “Hi.”

When we got her on the phone, she apologized and said she had allowed Scientology to convince her that she couldn’t say a word.

“The brainwashing is strong. But I realized, what am I doing? So yeah, I’m ready to talk again.”

We had spoken only a little since a lengthy December 10 profile in The Daily Beast that described her three days of what Scientology calls “arbitration” in a Los Angeles warehouse in October, when we had secured a hotel room at the Commerce Casino, less than a mile from the warehouse. At the end of each day, Valerie, her attorneys, and a court reporting duo had set up in our room and took sworn statements from her about what she was going through.

The only previous court-ordered “arbitration” that Scientology had ever held in its 70-year history, involving a California couple named Luis and Rocio Garcia, had taken place in 2017 in a single day.

But this time, Scientology and its panel of members in good standing (the requirement for “arbitrators”) were putting Valerie through a grueling and humiliating sort of multi-day catechism, having her go over hundreds of records of her own employment as a child and adult in Scientology’s Sea Org.

None of it had anything to do with the actual claims she had made in her 2019 lawsuit alleging kidnapping, stalking, harassment, and libel. But a Los Angeles Superior Court judge ruled that because Valerie had signed an exit agreement that contained an arbitration clause when she left her job, she was obliged not to sue but instead submit to what Scientology was calling “arbitration,” but was actually a form of founder L. Ron Hubbard’s instructions for a sort of court martial called a “committee of evidence.”

And there was no doubt about who was on trial.

On the third day of that October session, Scientology sprung their surprise witness, bringing in Valerie’s ex-husband to call her a liar. It was pure theater intended to overwhelm her, she said.

And after three days of it, Scientology had announced that it would go on, and two more days were scheduled in January. As those dates approached, Valerie asked for them to be moved back for personal reasons, and so we waited to hear what dates were selected. As it turned out, the two days Scientology came up with, in February, happened to be when we were out of the country on a family vacation.

We wouldn’t have the opportunity to wait in a hotel room nearby this time, but we made arrangements with Valerie to talk on the phone at the end of the two days when she was subjected to more of the arbitration on February 20 and 21.

But then, after that first day came, we heard nothing.

Now, after several weeks of radio silence, Valerie got back in touch and she could now reveal that when the proceeding resumed that first day, the panel was livid over the piece in The Daily Beast.

“They were saying I was violating the contract I’d signed, and if I continued to talk to you they would press charges against me. They told me to stop calling them abusers, and said they didn’t want to see their names in the media,” Valerie told us.

Valerie decided, however, that the public deserved to know what Scientology continues to put her through: Two more days of humiliating questioning in February, and Scientology is talking about doing even more later, ahead of a scheduled June 5 court date, when they need to have things wrapped up and report the result of the proceeding to Judge Gail Killefer.

For Valerie, it’s been a devastating experience that has left her depressed and despondent.

“In Scientology, we were brought up being told not to trust civil authorities. But after I got out, I realized that the authorities were there for the public, and I put my trust in them. Going to court made sense because it was there to provide justice. But then they forced me into this arbitration, and I’ve seen it was a mistake to trust them. It’s been very disorienting,” she says. “When you have this organization inflicting mental pain, and it’s being allowed to do it by the government, it just makes me feel helpless. I’ve cried so many times since the arbitration started. But I don’t know what else to do but go on through this torture, and that’s not right. It’s very hard. But then I think, OK, am I just going to let them win?”

On that first day the proceeding resumed, on February 20, the panel had not only complained about being named in the Daily Beast article, but they went through several of her statements, telling her that they were mistaken. She had not been confronted with 10 boxes of her ethics files, as the article said, but ten binders of them. And hadn’t Valerie herself demanded copies of her files in the lawsuit?

That was Scientology’s reason, the panel said, for bringing in the thousands of pages to the arbitration, dating back to her teen years, and methodically going over each of her ethics issues in order, for days. She wanted her files? This was how she was going to get them.

As in the October session, Valerie was not allowed to have her attorneys with her or anyone else, not even a cellphone. No recording or transcript would be created, but she was allowed to take handwritten notes. And even now, four days into the proceeding, Valerie had not been allowed to make her case or call a witness.

Again, the panel’s chair, Sarah Heller, told Valerie that she could discuss what was going on with her attorneys, but no one else and especially not the press.

“I have heard you, but I am not in agreement with this,” Valerie responded, according to the notes she took at the time.

In the afternoon, the panel turned its attention to her lawsuit’s claim that she had been held against her will at the Gold Base while she was in the Sea Org. In order to refute that, the panel began going through detailed records of every instance when Valerie left the physical limits of the base. There was a time 2002 when she left to do work at RTC in Los Angeles. A time in 2003 when she had broken her leg. There was the period from 2005 to 2007 when she was “on the decks” — doing manual labor in Los Angeles as punishment. In 2011, she was on the base every single day except for a week at Christmas. In 2013, she got to see her husband off the base twice, and two more times the next year, when they were then divorced. In 2015, she got to see her family three separate times, so what could she possibly complain about?

The next year, 2016, is when she made her daring escape in the trunk of an actor’s car.

After reviewing those records, the panel then brought out hundreds of photos and videos of Valerie, some of which, she says, were illegally taken from her phone by the church. And again, while this may have been evidence she herself might have sifted through and presented in a court case, here it was all being posted one after another by the panel as a way to portray Valerie as a liar.

It included an interview she gave when, she says, David Miscavige’s father Ron Miscavige was making terrible allegations about Scientology in the press, and so Valerie and other staff were asked to give glowing testimonials about Dave on camera. In the video, she gushed about working for Dave and what a wonderful place the Gold Base is.

As the second day began on February 21, Valerie was told the panel objected to the way she had called the Sea Org “slave labor” in the Daily Beast article.

“The courts have said that the Sea Org is not slave labor, and we are not going to be getting into what the Sea Org is and what it is not. The court has already decided what that is and it is not slave labor,” Valerie was told, according to her notes, and she was asked to stop referring to the panel members as her “abusers.”

“You need to refrain from saying that. We saw a happy Valerie in the video yesterday,” a panel member said.

“There are a lot of people in North Korea that are happy, and there are prisoners of war who look happy, too,” Valerie responded.

At least now, on February 21, day five of the proceeding, they were finally beginning to take up the actual claims in Valerie’s lawsuit. One of which was that she had no freedom on the base, and that, for example, she wasn’t allowed to have a phone. But she did have a phone, didn’t she, the panel asked? They had records of it.

Valerie realized they were talking about an official RTC telephone that she used for business. She explained that any call she made on it she knew was monitored and recorded, and so no, it didn’t count as a personal form of communications.

Proving her point, the panel then also noted Valerie had used another business phone owned by Gold Base before that, and began bringing out voluminous records of all the calls Valerie had ever made on either of them.

Also, whenever Valerie had used a Sea Org-owned computer on the base, every single search she made on it was logged and recorded — hundreds of pages of searches and every page she visited and for how long.

Then they brought out 15 folders six inches thick that contained more than 13,000 emails she had sent during her work at the base, including emails she sent to family members about birthdays and other things.

Valerie again objected. “If you look at each and every phone call, it’s all work related and nothing personal. Any personal calls had to be monitored and listened to by a staff member. There was no freedom to look at anything. If I Googled the news, if it had anything to do with Scientology, it was blocked and access was denied and there was no way of getting to the truth,” she told them.

Then the panel began going through each phone call and email.

Valerie told them this was another complete waste of time. “You’re literally proving my point right now. That everything is monitored and that this is slavery!” she says she told them.

After the lunch break on Feb 21, the panel began going through records of the times Valerie was assigned a “condition.”

This is a form of punishment in Scientology. So on September 11, 2005, for example, she had been assigned the condition “Doubt” for using “misunderstood words” and “putting up a facade.”

On July 28, 2007, she was written up because another staff member had gone off base to buy them some food items, and Val had chirped the guy on his walkie talkie to tell him to buy a bicycle seat for someone as a gift. (Again, more evidence that she was not allowed to leave the property herself, she notes.)

There were also commendations, when she organized camera shoots efficiently. On February 9, 2009, for example, she was given a commendation for filming at several outside locations.

And then there’s the notation from May 9, 2014.

Valerie was written up in a “Knowledge Report” after a “sec check” — Scientology’s form of brutal interrogations. While being questioned, it came out that Valerie had “hired an actor who was actually not qualified because he was in a gay film, and I had to pay him and lie to him that the scheduled changed.”

We checked with Valerie: According to these notes, she was saying that the Scientology panel had showed her a record of how they had punished her for hiring someone for appearing in a “gay film.”

“Yes. One hundred percent correct,” she responded.

What do she mean by ‘gay film’?

“I don’t really remember. He was probably playing that character in a normal film. Yeah, it doesn’t need to be a gay film to not hire someone. If an actor plays the role of a gay person (whether the film is gay or not) then you’re not allowed to hire them in Scientology. And it doesn’t matter what time the person was in such a film. It could have been 20 years ago,” she says.

It’s well known how homophobic Scientology is, but here they were proving it in their own quasi-judicial proceeding. Kind of amazing.

Looking back on the total of five days of this grueling treatment, Valerie says the thing that she finds most remarkable is how Scientology is providing the evidence that what she’s saying about them is true.

“Their evidence is proving my point. They’re showing that I had no freedom on the base. You can’t call 9-1-1, for example. It’s literally dismantled from the phone system,” she says.

“They’re proving that everything is monitored and recorded. My abusers are providing incredible detail about how they abused me, and they’re abusing me again in the process!”

Well, we’re very glad that Valerie has decided to get back in touch, and to let the public know what’s going on.

And so goes only the second court-ordered “arbitration” in Scientology history, with no end in sight.

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