Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology Read Online Free PDF Page A

child, because finally, after feeling subpar for so long because I never had the right clothes, apartment, furniture, food, toys, you name it, I now had something on other people. Traveling to the city, taking responsibility for my actions, working on my communication skills all contributed to my sense of superiority. I could do things my friends couldn’t (like steal leg warmers without getting in trouble) because now I had this “technology” and they didn’t. I used words like “affinity,” which as a kid was pretty awesome. Or “You don’t have to yell, just communicate,” I would say to my friends’ mothers. They were impressed that I could use a multi-syllable word.
    My dad, however, wasn’t so impressed. After he moved out of our apartment, he moved into a big house with Donna, the woman who became my stepmom. My sister and I spent weekends there with him and Donna, and then their two daughters, Elizabeth and Stephanie, and Donna’s daughter, Christina.
    During visits to my dad’s, more often than not he would complain about my mother.
    “Does your mother ever brush your hair?” he said, looking at me. “What are you, homeless? Doesn’t your mother take care of you? Or is she too busy with that cult?”
    Now that I had been doing my communication course, I was going to get my “TRs in” to confront him. So over dinner with Nic and my stepfamily, all seated around a huge table covered with the best whipped potatoes, corn, salad, and warm Italian bread with butter, I summoned the courage to take on my dad.
    “I don’t think you should be talking about my mother,” I said in a voice that was a little less assured than I had hoped for.
    “Wha?”
    “I don’t want you talking about my mother.”
    “Or what?”
    “Well, no ‘or.’ I just don’t want you to…It’s, like, not nice.”
    “You don’t come into my fucking house and tell me what’s nice—”
    The heat in my body rose so quickly I wanted to crawl into my own face. Whenever my dad spoke in that tone, it always felt like being slapped.
    Don’t react. Don’t react. Remember Bullbait, Leah.
    “Dad, I really think it’s better if you just communicate with us without putting us or our mother down.”
    “Oh. Is that what we should do? We should
communicate
? Is that what L. Ron told you to say?”
    He was laughing now, and despite my best efforts to keep it together, I started to lose confidence in what I was saying and how I was saying it.
    Why couldn’t my dad treat me like an equal the way people at the church did? Why couldn’t he value me as someone who had something to say?
    These were the kinds of exchanges that proved what Scientology was teaching us—that people who don’t get the ideals of Scientology are not as able, or not as healthy and mentally sound, as we are and will attack it. And now I believed that was right. It
was
us against them.
    —
    I T WAS AROUND THIS TIME that the Sea Organization recruiters came to talk to my mom and Dennis, and us girls. The Sea Organization was founded by L. Ron Hubbard in 1967 to staff his three ships, on which he’d taken up residence after the UK denied his visa extension. He wanted to live outside the jurisdiction of any governments and away from the media, and he said he was continuing research—he produced the “OT” levels on the ships. These levels—OT is short for “Operating Thetan”—are the secret advanced levels of the Scientology Bridge that you move onto only after you achieve the State of Clear. Originally the people with him were sailors, brought on to keep the ships running. The crews then started taking on more functions within Hubbard’s Sea Org, and the main ship
Apollo
grew into a center for training Scientology staff from around the world. Subsequently those people who were with Hubbard and the Sea Organization were entrusted with the highest-level functions, secrets, and control of Scientology internationally, tasked with clearing the planet through