Valerie Haney: Here’s why the press should be asking Tom Cruise about Shelly Miscavige
Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One hasn’t done quite the business that its creators were hoping, but still, with $91 million in domestic sales and $168 million overseas for a total of $259 million as of yesterday, it was well along to making up for its whopping $290 cost.
Its star Tom Cruise hit the red carpet in various staggered openings in places like Rome and Sydney before showing up in theaters in Atlanta and Washington DC.
Australian singer Kate Ceberano attended the Sydney premiere and then posted a photo of herself arm in arm with Cruise on her Instagram account. Media outlets pounced on it because besides being a fellow entertainer, Ceberano is also an OT 8 Scientologist: She’s spent decades in the Church of Scientology so she could reach the highest level of its “Bridge to Total Freedom,” its incrementally-more-expensive regimen of cosmic, past-life therapy that can take many years to complete.
It’s the latest evidence that Cruise remains dedicated to Scientology, and it’s once again been noted in various press treatments of him, just like last year with the release of Top Gun: Maverick.
But this year, Cruise’s critics have been thinking about a different kind of impossible mission: locating Shelly Miscavige, the wife of Cruise’s best friend, Scientology leader David Miscavige.
Former Scientologist Leah Remini has been raising new questions about Shelly after a recent report by journalist Yashar Ali that called into question how the LAPD handled a 2013 missing person report Remini had filed about Shelly.
And now Valerie Haney, who worked in the private quarters of Dave and Shelly before her own harrowing escape from the organization, has some new details about the private lives of Scientology’s ruling couple that demonstrate Cruise’s direct connection to Shelly’s story. (Both Cruise and the Church of Scientology did not respond to requests for comment for this story.)
As Cruise enjoys another round of press, we wonder if anyone will have a chance to ask him, “Where’s Shelly?”
****
Leah Remini first noticed that Shelly Miscavige seemed to be missing when she didn’t show up with her husband David Miscavige at the wedding of the new century: Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’ November 2006 nuptials in an Italian castle.
For the second time, Dave was acting as Cruise’s best man (he had also fulfilled that role at Cruise’s 1990 wedding to Nicole Kidman), but this time Dave was conspicuously without his wife.
For years, David and Shelly Miscavige had been Scientology’s ultimate power couple. They had both been raised as children in the organization, were married in 1980 (Dave was 20, Shelly 18), and, when founder L. Ron Hubbard died on January 24, 1986, Dave had already begun muscling other pretenders to the throne out of the way.
David Miscavige soon became Scientology’s ruthless leader, and adopted the moniker “C.O.B.” for “chairman of the board.” Shelly, as a sort of lesser co-ruler, was given the title “C.O.B. Assistant,” and former members of the “Sea Org” — Scientology’s hardcore wing who’ve signed billion-year contracts — who worked close to the Miscaviges say they always used these titles around them and would never dare to say their actual names.
C.O.B. and C.O.B. Assistant ran Scientology as a dictatorship for the next 19 years and spent most of their time at the church’s secretive international management base, a sprawling 500-acre compound near Hemet, California, about 90 miles east of Los Angeles.
Surviving the death of a founder can be tricky for any insular organization, but that same year, 1986, when Miscavige was consolidating control, Scientology had an amazing stroke of good luck.
Several months after Hubbard’s death, Mimi Rogers, an actress who had grown up in Scientology, began dating Tom Cruise and started bringing him around to a North Hollywood facility to get some experience in Dianetics and Scientology.
Cruise was only 24, but he was already a star, with Risky Business and All the Right Moves under his belt and Top Gun coming out that summer. Rogers told family members that she hoped Scientology would help cure Cruise’s notorious skirt-chasing.
They were married on May 9, 1987, one of the holiest dates on the Scientology calendar: Hubbard’s book that started the movement, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, was released on May 9, 1950, and getting married on that date (during Scientology’s “AD 36,” for “After Dianetics”) suggests that Cruise was already pretty well-indoctrinated by that point.
But former Scientology executives told me that David Miscavige had an issue with Rogers’ father, a “squirrel” ( a Scientology slur for someone who had left the official church but still practiced Hubbard’s ideas).
In 1990, Miscavige had Cruise’s auditor encourage him to split with Rogers in favor of Nicole Kidman, his young Days of Thunder co-star. And initially, Kidman became an enthusiastic Scientologist, achieving the rather advanced level of OT 2 in only a few years, her former auditor told me.
But then, around 1992, Kidman soured on Scientology and pulled Cruise away from it with her, which included several years filming Eyes Wide Shut in the U.K. with Stanley Kubrick. By the time they broke up in 2000, Miscavige had become determined to pull Cruise back into the fold and make him more dedicated to Scientology than ever.
By 2004, Cruise was so committed, he showed up at a grand opening of a new “Ideal” church in Madrid, Spain (the only Ideal Org grand opening he’s ever attended) and even gave a speech to the crowd in Spanish. And it was at that event that Cruise told Miscavige that he was having some difficulty finding a new girlfriend after recently splitting up with his Vanilla Sky co-star, Penelope Cruz.
Miscavige became determined to help his friend, dreamed up an elaborate mission to find Cruise a suitable partner, and put in charge of the operation his most trusted aide:
His wife, Shelly.
****
By then it was 2004, and Valerie Haney had been working in the intimate personal quarters of David and Shelly Miscavige for two years. She served them their meals, changed their sheets, traveled with them on Cruise’s private jet, and went with them on vacations with Cruise to places like the Caribbean.
That summer, for Cruise’s 42nd birthday, Dave threw a lavish party for the actor on the Freewinds, Scientology’s cruise ship. Video eventually emerged of Cruise being feted on the ship by the Scientology band playing hit songs from his movies, and included Cruise doing his best Bob Seger impression for a rendition of the Risky Business hit “Old Time Rock and Roll.”
But as Miscavige was throwing the lavish party for Cruise — flying in chefs from Nobu for a sushi night, and chefs from Paris for another night — Shelly was becoming more and more conflicted about her husband’s bromance.
“That was on the Freewinds, in 2004. Shelly would be crying in her cabin, hiding her tears from Dave, of course,” Haney says. She stresses that as Shelly’s personal steward she had very close contact with her in those years, and the two would share private details of their marriages with each other.
“She was crying from how much disrespect Dave had for her, and how much Dave would absolutely do anything for Tom. And he told Tom that,” Haney says.
“Shelly asked me at one point, what do you think about Dave doing all this for Tom? I told her, ‘It’s like Dave’s married to him.’ And she agreed.”
Haney adds that Shelly had gotten along with Cruise and didn’t have a problem with his increased Scientology involvement.
“They did get along. Shelly didn’t hate Tom. She just hated the way Dave acted around Tom,” Haney claims.
She watched as Dave lavished luxuries on Cruise, which often included work performed by Sea Org members.
“Tom was used to getting perks, like having his car and his house remodeled by Sea Org workers. We even decked out his whole hangar,” she says, referring to the Burbank home of Cruise’s airplanes. “It would have cost over a million dollars if he’d outsourced it, and we did it all in-house. It took us two months to do it. If he’d used outside workers, it would have taken a year.”
But as a dedicated Scientologist, Cruise knew he couldn’t be “out-exchange” (giving less than one’s received) by accepting so many benefits without offering something in return, she points out.
“He gives Dave the use of his plane. He donates millions so he’s not out-exchange for the perks he gets,” she says.
“Dave would only fly private — on Tom’s plane. And while using parishioner money. It was Tom’s pilot and flight attendant. But I was told we were paying for the gas,” she remembers.
Then, in 2004, Dave dreamed up the idea of auditioning actresses without telling them that they were really trying out to be Cruise’s next love interest, as chronicled in a 2012 Vanity Fair exposé.
He put Shelly in charge of it.
Haney says she was aghast at the prospect.
“Shelly said, ‘This is fucking ridiculous. I can’t believe I have to do this. Do we really have to babysit Tom to get him a wife?’ That’s when she started to go negative on Dave,” Haney remembers.
The Madrid event happened in September 2004. By that November, the auditions organized by Shelly had produced a candidate: a young Scientologist actress named Nazanin Boniadi who dated Cruise for about three months, till January 2005.
According to Alex Gibney’s 2015 HBO documentary Going Clear, one of the reasons that Boniadi frustrated Cruise was that she had a hard time understanding Miscavige’s thick New Jersey accent (Boniadi is British and was born in Tehran). She was told her relationship with Cruise was over by his Scientology aide, Tommy Davis.
Cruise, meanwhile, was reaching new heights as Scientology’s poster boy. In October 2004, Miscavige had rewarded him for his new all-in attitude by giving him a special “Freedom Medal of Valor” and then sending Cruise out to be the church’s ambassador. The actor even convinced director Steven Spielberg to let him set up information tents about Scientology as they were filming War of the Worlds, and then in June, Cruise had his infamous TODAY interview with Matt Lauer, spewing Scientology views about psychiatry and appearing unhinged.
By April 2005, Cruise had made public that he was now dating Katie Holmes. But the auditioning program had, as Haney indicates, done real damage to the relationship between Shelly and Dave.
Later that year, around early September 2005, several former Sea Org workers who were at the base near Hemet at the time say that Shelly angered Dave when she showed some initiative while he was in Los Angeles. With Dave away, she was able to fill some job positions that had remained open because of his indecision, and she had some of their belongings crated up so a renovation could take place. When Miscavige returned and saw what she had done, he blew his stack, several people who were there told me.
A week later, Shelly vanished.
Cruise and Holmes had Suri the following spring, in April 2006, and their wedding at the castle in Italy took place in November.
That’s when Remini noticed that Shelly wasn’t there, and, as she describes in her bestselling memoir, Troublemaker, Remini noticed David Miscavige getting handsy with his “personal communicator,” a woman named Laurisse Stuckenbrock.
When Remini asked about it, she was told by Tommy Davis that she didn’t have “the fucking rank” to even ask the question.
Remini went back to her hotel room that night, called a close friend in Los Angeles, and then wrote up a report about what she’d seen. Scientologists are encouraged to turn in fellow church members for breaking the rules, but in this case Remini dared to turn in the leader of the church itself, David Miscavige.
In Troublemaker, she describes the alleged price she paid: Months of bizarre mental conditioning that she was made to pay $300,000 for, conditioning that convinced her that she hadn’t seen what she did at the wedding.
Shelly, meanwhile, was seen again a year later, in the summer of 2007, onboard a ship in San Pedro harbor for the funeral of her father, Maurice “Barney” Barnett.
I began writing about Shelly’s disappearance in 2012 at the Village Voice as evidence began to mount that she had been moved to a small Scientology compound in the San Bernardino Mountains near Lake Arrowhead, California.
In July 2013, Remini went public that she had defected from Scientology, and a month later she filed a missing person report about Shelly Miscavige with the LAPD, who almost immediately told the media that Remini’s report of Shelly missing was “unfounded.”
At that point I talked to Lt. Andre Dawson of the LAPD, who told me that two of his detectives had met with Shelly, that she was fine, and that she had chosen not to make a public statement.
He wouldn’t tell me where the meeting took place, and when I asked him if the meeting had taken place in the presence of other Scientology officials, he said “that’s classified.”
Three years later, in 2016, Remini had an attorney send official requests to the LAPD for more information about what they had done in response to her missing person report. (They had never responded to her at all about it after she initially filed it.) After several weeks, she was told the LAPD had no intention of giving her any more information.
Then, last month, Yashar Ali released his new bombshell report. He learned not only where the 2013 meeting with LAPD detectives had taken place — a coffee shop in West Covina, California — but that Shelly had been accompanied by Jeffrey Riffer, an attorney who has made appearances in court as David Miscavige’s personal lawyer. (Riffer did not respond to a request for comment.)
Yashar had also found that in 2010, five years after her disappearance, Shelly had renewed her driver’s license, also in West Covina, and he obtained the photo that was taken for it. It’s the first photo of Shelly since 2004, when she was at the Madrid Ideal Org opening where Tom Cruise delivered an impassioned speech in Spanish.
“She looks like a beaten-down puppy dog, like she was going to cry,” Haney says after looking at the 2010 driver’s license photo.
Haney spent a total of 22 years in the Sea Org. She had been born to Scientologist parents in 1979, and was raised in the “Cadet Org” as young as 6 years old, signing the Sea Org’s billion-year contract at 15. She then caught the eye of Shelly Miscavige, who had her moved to the secretive Gold Base near Hemet to work in Shelly and Dave’s private quarters.
In 2005, when Shelly’s relationship with Dave deteriorated, Haney was “busted” down to more menial work, as Shelly vanished from the base.
Eventually, Haney found work in the casting department at the base, and had access to non-Scientologist actors who came to the base for shoots. One day, in 2016, she knew that her job was about to change again and she would have her last chance to be around outsiders. She climbed into the trunk of one of the actors’ cars, who then unwittingly drove her to Los Angeles.
It was a daring escape story that Remini featured in 2018 as the premiere episode of the third and final season of her A&E series Scientology and the Aftermath, revealing that after Haney’s escape she had gone to work as Remini’s assistant. (Valerie works for another producer today.)
Then, in 2019, Haney filed suit against Scientology and David Miscavige, alleging that she had been held against her will while she was a Sea Org worker, and that she had become the focus of an intense Scientology harassment campaign because she dared to speak out.
The lawsuit, however, was forced into Scientology’s brand of internal “religious arbitration” when a Los Angeles Superior Court judge ruled that contracts Haney signed with Scientology obligated her not to sue but to take her dispute to the church and a panel of arbitrators who must be Scientologists in good standing.
Remini, meanwhile, has been continually reminding her large online audience about Shelly Miscavige.
“I will never stop fighting for Shelly,” she tweeted late last month.
When Scientology does respond to questions about Shelly Miscavige (which is rare), it puts out statements that Shelly is on a special work assignment. In 2018, attorney Jeffrey Riffer (yes, the same one who reportedly accompanied Shelly to the LAPD meeting in 2013) wrote to Jezebel to complain about a story it ran about Shelly “missing.” That was untrue, Riffer said, adding that “Mrs. Miscavige has no interest in appearing in public merely because Remini… wants to use that as some cheap publicity stunt to get ratings.”
And Shelly may be resigned to her fate, working and living at the small compound in the mountains above San Bernardino.
But we wonder what Cruise has been told about a woman he was once close to, and who had run the auditions to find him a suitable mate in 2004.
“Dave has told Tom that Shelly is out-ethics and has turned suppressive,” Valerie Haney says, referring to Scientology concepts about wayward church members who are expelled and designated enemies of the church (“suppressive”).
“That’s the only way that Tom would be OK with it. Because Tom loved Shelly. So Dave told him some lie of some sort, because Dave and Tom have this bromance,” Haney says.
“He would have told Tom that Shelly had committed suppressive acts and ‘needs to be off my lines.’ And Tom would have said, ‘Oh, that sucks, but I trust you.’ That’s my assumption.”
In 2012, I interviewed John Brousseau, a former Scientology Sea Org official who had been David Miscavige’s brother-in-law for 16 years, and who had also worked very closely with Cruise.
Like Haney, Brousseau was one of a small handful of people who had any chance of understanding what the relationship between Cruise and Miscavige was really about.
Here’s what he told me: “Tom Cruise worships David Miscavige like a god.”
Cruise is a true believer, not a reluctant follower. He actually believes that Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard was the greatest human being who ever lived, and that David Miscavige is the most important person living today, these former Sea Org members tell me.
And Haney says it’s important to keep that in mind when you’re trying to figure out why Cruise does what he does.
For example, from 1986 to 2012, Cruise had been in a series of monogamous relationships and by all accounts was extremely involved in the lives of his partners.
Why, I asked Haney, has he gone so long without another serious committed relationship?
Haney floored me with her answer. She thinks Cruise may be under orders by Miscavige not to get involved with someone while Miscavige is distracted and stuck in litigation.
“Tom’s following orders,” she says.
Want to help?
You can support the Underground Bunker with a Paypal contribution to bunkerfund@tonyortega.org, an account administered by the Bunker’s attorney, Scott Pilutik. And by request, this is our Venmo link, and for Zelle, please use (tonyo94 AT gmail).
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
Here’s the link to today’s post at tonyortega.org
And whatever you do, subscribe to this Substack so you get our breaking stories and daily features right to your email inbox every morning.
Paid subscribers get access to two special podcast series every week…
Up the Bridge: A weekly journey through Scientology’s actual “technology”
Group Therapy: Our round table of rowdy regulars on the week’s news
So TC can't get laid because Dave Miscavige says no?? What a monumental cock block. And what a brain damaged fool TC is. I had hoped that TC would be asked about Shelly during any press tour, but as everyone is on strike, that is not going to happen. Perhaps some crowd in some 'premiere' city can shout that slogan out?
If you are already a bit dim when you get into scientology, a continuous influx of botox, ducats, fame, and El Bong Slobbard auditing will just make you...dumber.
Bouffanted Homunculus and Intergalactic Stuntman: Dumb and Dumber!