I Talk To a Former High Ranking Scientologist
We talk cults, child labour, Shelly Miscavige, Sea Org, Tom Cruise - and escaping.
Hi,
Scientology has fascinated me since I watched that episode of South Park in 2006 — “Trapped in the Closet”. I think that episode illustrates how powerful South Park could be at its peak — breaking down and commenting on various bits of culture with intelligence, humour and wit.
That particular episode (season nine, episode 12) disseminated the actual beliefs of Scientology. It’s where I first learnt about L Ron Hubbard and e-meters, trapped Thetans and a galactic alien warlord named “Xenu”.
Once upon a time, you had to be way up the chain in Scientology to get all this backstory — now it was being disseminated and mocked on a popular mainstream TV show.
It also struck me that the stories Scientology told were no more whacky than the stories of most other religions. Talking snakes or souls exploding out of a volcano? Take your pick.
Scientology is just so easy to mock because it’s so new. We have photos of L Ron Hubbard, the guy who dreamt it up — and we know where his head was at when he did it. In his own words, “If a man really wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion”. I’d say in that regard, the Catholic Church and Scientology are both doing pretty well.
I see little difference. I mean — can you?
Don’t worry, I’m not here to defend the Church of Scientology — the latest in a long line of tax-exempt businesses/religions.
And yes — Scientology is a lot more secretive and culty (as in, yes, it’s definitely a cult) than your average religious organisation. The last time I walked into a church with a recording device, they didn’t lock the doors on me and call security (which is exactly what happened when I walked into the LA Church of Scientology).
I like to call out horrific things in this Webworm, and so today I thought I’d call out Scientology. Weirdly, I lived a 10 minute walk from the Church of Scientology in New Zealand — and here in LA, it’s also 10 minutes away from me.
Maybe it’s calling me.
Cutting critiques of Scientology are certainly nothing new — Going Clear, Louis Theroux’ My Scientology Movie, and Leah Remini’s excellent Scientology and the Aftermath — but I recently interviewed a man who brought all of Scientology’s mess into sharp focus for me.
He reached out to Webworm wanting to share his story (as always: davidfarrier@protonmail.com).
And I gladly obliged.
Meet Mike Brown
Mike Brown is a 48 year old Chinook Instructor Pilot for the US Army. He hit 21 active years last month, and has served five combat tours — two in Iraq and three Afghanistan. He’s happily married to someone who was never in a cult, and they have three daughters together.
Rewind four decades — and Mike’s mother had just joined Scientology. Mike was 7, so didn’t have much say in the matter. He was raised and worked in some of the cult’s highest ranks, until he finally escaped age 27. Three years ago, in 2022, he helped his elderly mother escape.
I wanted to share this information about Scientology from Mike, in his own words.
On joining Scientology with his mother:
“She thought she was getting into a church group that would be a good place to raise her son. And quickly what happened is that I was separated from her. We lived separately most of the time. She ended up at their confidential base that’s out in Gilman Hot Springs, over on the other side of Riverside County.
They have a huge film studio and their international base is out there. She was working there while I was basically living communally with other kids in LA County by myself all week long. And this was the same for about 80 other kids whose parents were also up at that secret base.
The kids were referred to as cadets. We were being trained in Scientology as our main schooling. We weren’t getting a normal education and we’re just studying Hubbard.
Like little military children — not to be over the top, but it probably was a lot like Hitler Youth in that you’re being indoctrinated and trained from such a young age to do nothing but be a Sea Org member.”
On Scientology engaging in a little casual child labour:
“That’s what my life consisted of for those first several years. Eventually they realized that the senior executives wanted more access to their children who were a two hour drive away.
They would only come down to see us for a short time on Saturday night, Sunday morning before they went back to work. So we’d see our parents for like an hour or two a week, and then we would be working and studying.
So they created kind of a children’s ranch. It was sort of like a boarding school. It was an old nun convent that was on the other side of an Indian reservation, the Soboba Indian reservation and just outside of Hemet and San Jacinto. And they moved us up there and we were the workforce to renovate these old buildings.
We were the workforce to renovate these old buildings. They were very old, dilapidated buildings. By that time I’d spent about three years pretty much separated from my mother — I was about 12 years old. So we were then moved up there, which is about a 20 minute drive from their international base.
It’s like child labor. It was 100% child labor — we were removing asbestos from buildings, burying it out in locations on the property and being used to renovate this school.”
On the Sea Org:
“My mother joined the Sea Organization when I was 10 years old, after my parents got divorced. And she brought me out into this thing and I grew up in it. The Sea Org is a group of the most dedicated Scientologists that signed the billion year contracts.
When they join the organization, they sign a contract, which is not legally enforceable because of how absolutely crazy it is, but it’s almost the same as a member of the clergy in another religion, dedicating their life to service of the organization.
They do not have contact with the rest of the world, the way anyone else does. They don’t have cell phones, they don’t watch the news. They don’t have access to normal information. They work 24/7 — I mean, they stop to sleep, but literally it’s 16 hour days, every day.
There’s no vacations. They’re supposed to get time off, but normally that does not happen. They try to control them and get them for cheap labor and they pay them $50 a week. It’s literally indentured servitude that is occurring right in the middle of LA County.”
On trying to leave… officially:
“I tried to leave on their terms, which means to go through their process, which includes a lot of interrogations on their little machine called an E-meter.
It was 18 months of interrogations separated from the other kids, heavy manual labor, and I didn’t have access to my father. It was very similar to probably what it would be like to be a POW. And I was able to continue to say I wanted to leave.
But after about 18 months, I was kind of like... the clock was running out on being a kid. I was 17, gonna be turning 18 soon, with no more education than I had before.
And after a lot of demands and stress and interrogations, I agreed to stay.”
On getting married at 18 to a 16-year-old:
“I can tell you right now, if one of my daughters told me she wanted to get married to some kid and he was 18 and she was 16, I would lose my shit. But that was my life back then.
I can tell you that military service deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan over the course of the last 21 years — it’s way better than living in Scientology. It was horrible there. She got pregnant twice. Both times were forced to have abortions, because they are unwilling for children to exist in the organization because that would be a distraction and it would pull the mother away from work.”
On his breaking point, and leaving:
“She [his wife] said, “If we leave, they’re just going to get me back in and I’m going to end up wanting to stay because of my family, and we’re going to get divorced.” When she told me that something broke inside of me.
I was one of the few people on their base up there that was able to get access to the outside world because I did manufacturing. I was out for a print job. I was manufacturing some of their books and CDs and things and I was going to one of the printers, and almost on a whim one day I decided I can’t take it anymore. I’ve got to go.
I had nothing more than a joint credit card that we had with probably a $500 credit limit, and my Oakley sunglasses, and just not much else. And I went to Ontario Airport in California and got on a one-way flight to Denver to hopefully reconnect with my father, and left without even talking to him.
They tried to get me to come back, but they did not pursue me. I was somebody that they trusted as one of their own. They would deputize people in their security force to go and look for people that did depart and blow without authorization — I was part of those recovery teams. So I was on the bad end of this stuff for multiple years before.
And they knew that I knew how to take care of this and they kind of just let me go.”
On being cut off:
“They locked down my mother and my ex-wife and interrogated them for many weeks, and they were then both required to write letters to me saying that they were going to disconnect from me if I didn’t return. I got divorce papers in the mail when I was in basic training.”
On rescuing his mother three years ago:
“So after I left, my mother continued to stay in the organization. She continued to work for them for multiple years, and was put into their thought reconditioning program, which is like a Scientology gulag.
It’s called the rehabilitation project force. She spent approximately six years on that until she was about 65 when she finally ended up graduating. At the same time, she had heart failure and required bypass surgery. After she got that, she remained in the organization for approximately another 10 years. During that time, I was under the impression that she very much was a true believing Scientologist.
What I didn't realize is after she turned 65, Scientology is all about making money. Everything that they do is for harvesting more and more money out of their public Scientologists. But for lack of that, they started doing it to their elderly members as well. So they started opening up credit cards in her name. They ran a debt in her name, basically by identity theft to the tune of about $160,000.
When I helped her escape, this was after she had basically been worked to death. She should have had oxygen. She didn’t have it. She had a bunch of pulmonary problems. And she had collapsed. They thought she had a stroke, but she really just had pneumonia. They put her in a hospice facility.
And in 2023, through the help of a very exceptional group of people in some of the nonprofits that exist to help former Scientologists, we were able to get her out of there.
I went out there with the help of some very close friends, one of which is the granddaughter of L Ron Hubbard, a direct descendant of this guy. The other one is the grandchild of David Miscavige — two people that I grew up with, and some of my closest friends in the world.
We went into this place. They kept her off campus in Glendale because they were having problems with old people dying, and their conditions that exist inside of that blue building, they look really nice for the public, but where the staff members actually live are horrible living conditions.
So they had her at a care facility in Glendale. We swooped out there. We got her. This was after I was able to reconnect with her and let her know that life was okay out here. She saw Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, and that ended it for her.
She then watched all of the Leah Remini shows and she was ready to go, but she had to play undercover until I could figure out how to get an old woman that needed massive healthcare. I didn’t know how to travel with somebody that needed to be on oxygen, that had to be in a wheelchair. So we had to get all those logistics in place.
So I kind of just tried to plan it the way I would plan an air assault, from the objective backwards and just got all the little things in place until we’re ready to execute it. One March morning in 2023, we went in there, we were in and out of there in 15 minutes on our way to LAX during rush hour so they couldn’t track us.”
On Scientology, today:
“Scientology would have us believe that there’s millions of Scientologists. There’s not — it’s in the tens of thousands at most, and most of them are second and third generation and just born into it at this point.
They’re a declining movement and it’s continuing to shrink. There’s certain things that are keeping them alive. They’re most represented both in the LA area, which is probably the largest population of Scientologists in the world. And then in Clearwater, Florida, where they have their largest base for their upper level services.
Other than that, you have probably less than a hundred Scientology organizations across the United States. And most of them are small and failing. And the way that they still exist in simplicity is because they were given tax exemption by the IRS. And that’s the only reason why they exist.”
On who decided Scientology was a religion (spoiler alert: it was the IRS):
“L Ron Hubbard applied for tax exempt status just because there’s so many benefits behind it. You’re really avoiding paying for a tremendous amount of things that other organizations have to pay for.
He was enriching himself in the 60s, so they lost tax exemption in ‘67. In 1989, the US Supreme Court actually had a ruling. There was a case — Hernandez versus the Commissioner — where they ruled that Scientology is not qualified for tax exempt status strictly because you have to pay for everything you do there.
Any other religion, there’s free services. And the reason why religions have tax exemption is strictly and only because they provide a service to the population that would otherwise be a burden on the government. And that’s why you get things like tax exemption for soup kitchens, for charities — because they’re taking the burden off of the government.
So the Supreme Court said, “Hey, they don't qualify for it.” So they sued the shit out of the IRS down to individual IRS agents for years, and this was a battle that was going on being waged a very very litigious battle that went on until 1993 where the IRS commissioner, Fred Goldberg, gave them their tax exempt status kind of on his way out the door — just to make all the legal noise go away!
So in our country, as ridiculous as this sounds — and it sounds ridiculous to me as a US service member who agreed to support and defend the Constitution of the United States — our First Amendment rights come from recognition of something as a religion… and the metric to do that is the Internal Revenue Service.”
On why Scientology is so secretive:
“There’s a growing protest culture with people outside of these organizations saying, “Hey, it’s a cult, stay out of it” — especially in the LA area.
At its core, Scientology isn’t even honest with the entry-level Scientologist in terms of what its belief system consists of at the highest levels, and what the actual investment is going to be, both personally, familiarly, and just economically, long-term. It’s going to completely absorb you.
So at this lowest level they’re actually targeting disadvantaged populations — immigrants, people from third-world countries that want a better life — and actually trafficking them into work in their organizations, giving them an opportunity that they think is amazing, and then indoctrinating them to be part of the cult.”
On Shelly Miscavige, and why the hell we haven’t seen her publicly since 2007:
“It’s a good question, and it’s important to ask where she is. What happened is she was her husband’s assistant for many, many years. And the only reason why she would be seen with her husband is because she was working directly for him.
So it is not unusual in Scientology and the Sea Org that you might be at a different base than your spouse, and you might not be seen by the public.
For Shelly specifically, there have been high-level executives that came out and specifically said, “Hey, she pissed off Dave really bad.” He assigned her to another base. I believe she’s up in Twin Peaks, California, and she’s at their secretive base that is actually responsible for doing a lot of their archival projects.
They are similar to the Mormon religion, where they archive everything so that in a post-apocalyptic era, the only thing that they could find would be the Mormon vault and the Scientology vault with all of Hubbard’s teachings. Like, they’re making them literally bomb proof with all his rambling writings inside of them so that they could exist in an age that man ceases to exist.”
On Tom Cruise, Hollywood’s last big star:
“So, Scientology leader David Miscavige and Tom Cruise are literally besties. They hang out together. Tom Cruise was given one of their big IAS freedom medals. They cater to Tom Cruise in every aspect of his life. His entire staff of his household, his production company, everything is manned by Sea Org members.
He is involved in this thing, and I think that David Miscavige tells him what he wants to tell him, but Tom Cruise is aware of things at a level that no other celebrity Scientologist is. But they also make Tom Cruise’s life amazing. And Tom Cruise has catered to on a level that nobody else is in Scientology.
So they’ve literally found him girlfriends, they, you know, auditioned for and brought to him Katie Holmes on a silver platter and then that went very badly for him after a while.
I think he’s willfully ignorant of what he wants to be ignorant of. He’s an amazing actor. I grew up on Tom Cruise, Maverick, Top Gun, it’s my jam. The Mission Impossible’s are kinda getting a little Fast and Furious — we’re getting a little deep into them at this point. I think we need to tone it back.
But his production company — its profit and overhead go towards the Scientology war chest and fighting against critics. So he’s funding a lot of their efforts to silence people. So I like him as an actor. I think he's a shit person.”
On the chances of Scientology suing Webworm:
“Zero risk, and this is why. Scientology right now has a bunch of protections that it makes all of their members sign, which are basically arbitration agreements that say “If you have a beef with us for civil cases, you cannot sue us.” It has to go to Scientology's internal arbitration, which is a total kangaroo court and completely made up. So nothing happens from the civil perspective on lawsuits.
And if you got sued, that would be a civil suit against you. Scientology did this in one of their former executives that started speaking out. She started telling the truth.
This was a lady named Debbie Cook. She started basically giving testimony. And it opens up Scientology discovery in both directions, both by the defense and the prosecution. They cannot stand up to that. So the biggest gift you could possibly have, David, is if Scientology sued you, because then you could just get a defense attorney that would ask Scientology questions.
With Debbie Cook, they ended up settling with her just to get her to shut up after they sued her. So Scientology hasn’t actually sued anybody in years. They try to pretend like they’re big and bad. They hire private investigators, they harass people, they’ve harassed us, I couldn’t care less.”
On what Mike says to anyone thinking of signing up:
“I just want people that are getting involved in Scientology to know to educate yourself. If you want to be involved in something that is a little bit self-help guru, a little new age spirituality, kind of some Freudian talk therapy, a little alien space cult, put a little pinch of Buddhism in there, wrap it up in some good old fashioned communism and then sell it to you in the most capitalistic way possible — just know that there’s some side effects.
It’s highly addictive. It’ll make you feel euphoric a little bit, but you’re gonna have social isolation, family disconnection, loss of ability to think for yourself, personal time gone, financial hardship, cognitive dissonance, sunken cost fallacy, and depression.
So those are your “side effects may include”.
I’m just saying, like, it's a big investment. If you’re man enough, go ahead and hit it up.”
-Former Scientologist Mike Brown in conversation with David Farrier.
Amazing interview and incredible for Mike to speak up so loudly.
When I was a teenager in the 00s, I spent a significant amount of my weekends protesting scientology. They had a little base in Belfast, Northern Ireland of all places. I and some friends used to camp out at the bus stop outside with protest signs, and when they went out to do their demonstrations etc on the main street we'd follow them and hand out flyers. Talk about what happened to Lisa McPherson, that kinda stuff. Sometimes we'd just put music on really loud to drown them out and dance in front of their tables so no one approached. They *hated* us and used to take photos of us very obviously every time we showed up to try and show that they were taking 'evidence' or whatever. The guy who organised the protests was in his 20s and they used to show up in a car outside his house and just watch him all day during the week to try and intimidate him. At one point they stormed out of their premises and tried to steal our bags while shouting and screaming at us. Luckily there were some police officers nearby who got our stuff back and escorted them away!
It was a wild time. I moved away to Scotland in '09 and veeeery occasionally see them out on the street. It's nowhere near as big as it is in the US, but it's still so strange to me that they have even a small foothold in the UK. Terrible, awful cult. Please be careful <3
Okay, I had no idea that's what Scientology was like?!! I honestly just thought it was a rich people money-laundering thing.
David & Wormfolk! The cat rescue I have been volunteering at since March may have a paid position for me! I am trying not to get my hopes up because I don't know the details but two different people there have independently brought me up to the board of directors to replace an out-going person. It's a very small nonprofit and there are only two paid employees so I would definitely not be rich or anything but this is the kind of job I'd love to have! I'd be doing a good mix of administrative work for the org, dealing with the public and coordinating volunteers, and actually taking care of the cats (and lots of cleaning). I already help take care of the cats and share the social media accounts with another volunteer.
Anyway, positive vibes appreciated! I've been mostly unemployed for two years and have never "stumbled into" a job like this before; I am usually the most unemployable person ever and I'm terrible at interviews. I can't believe two different people there actually like me enough to be like, "Hey, I think you'd be perfect for this!" MY COWORKERS WOULD BE CATS!!!