She Escaped Scientology in the Trunk of a Car. Her Nightmare Is Far From Over
“I’m literally shaking right now as I’m talking to you,” Valerie Haney says, speaking by phone from Florida.
Her 22 years in Scientology’s hardcore elite unit, the Sea Organization, has left her with what her therapist has diagnosed as PTSD, she explains. And a court ruling on March 15 had left her trembling as those years of trauma were stirred up again.
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“I was like, am I on another planet? Is this really correct? The court is OK with me having to go back to the place where I literally had to escape in the trunk of a car to get out?”
In November 2016, Haney, who worked casting Scientology’s internal films, crawled into the trunk of an actor’s car during a film shoot in order to get away from Scientology’s secretive international management compound “Gold Base” near Hemet, California. Her unusual escape became the subject of the premiere episode of Leah Remini’s third season of Scientology and the Aftermath, which aired on A&E in 2018.
The episode explained that after Haney made it to Los Angeles, Remini hired her as an assistant, and once Scientology found out about it Haney was allegedly subjected to a frightening campaign of surveillance and stalking.
She also began talking to law enforcement.
“I went to the authorities three months after I got out. I went to the FBI. I was thinking, of course we’re going to court, because this is all illegal!”
No charges were filed, but Haney herself filed a lawsuit against Scientology in June 2019 alleging kidnapping, stalking, and libel, which turned into a legal nightmare that now has her facing the prospect of going to the church to submit herself to an internal “religious arbitration” proceeding.
Haney, like other former Scientologists, finds that the church’s “arbitration” strategy is an impediment to getting a day in court. An exception was the lawsuit filed by Danny Masterson’s rape accusers, who sued Scientology for, they said, harassing them for taking their allegations to the LAPD. That case was also forced into arbitration initially, but then a California appeals court ruled that because the allegations of harassment (including the alleged poisoning of pets) had occurred after the women had left the church, the arbitration contracts shouldn’t apply.
In her first interview since filing her lawsuit four years ago, Haney says she still can’t believe that a Los Angeles court granted Scientology’s arbitration motion, forcing her to take her case to Scientology itself, and without an attorney, or a court reporter, or even a friend by her side.
“Scientology literally abused me my entire life, I finally escaped, and I’m trying to use the U.S. judicial system, and now they’re going, oh no, you need to go back and do everything that your abuser says.”
She’s fought back in interesting ways: Since the arbitration requires that she nominate an arbitrator, she’s suggested names like Tom Cruise, Elisabeth Moss, and Jenna Elfman — a total of 19 well-known and less well-known Scientology figures, drawing the ire of the church’s attorneys.
Scientology denies that Haney was held against her will and that she was harassed after she left the church. But it has made assurances to the court that its arbitration rules will provide a fair hearing for her accusations. Rolling Stone sent multiple requests for responses to Haney’s allegations to the Church of Scientology’s spokeswoman Karin Pouw, who has not replied.
Valerie Haney was born to Scientologist parents in 1979, and from ages six to 12 was raised in Scientology’s Cadet Org, a version of the Sea Org for children, at its “spiritual mecca,” the Flag Land Base in Clearwater, Florida.
At 10, she alleges in her lawsuit, she was subjected to “bullbaiting,” a common Scientology procedure that requires a subject to sit without flinching while insults are being hurled at them by a “coach.” Some of the things shouted at her were, “I am going to fuck you and your mother,” and “You are going to suck my dick,” she alleges in the suit.
Haney graduated from the Cadet Org to the Sea Org and signed its billion-year contract, promising to serve Scientology lifetime after lifetime, at the age of 15. She caught the eye of Shelly Miscavige, wife of Scientology leader David Miscavige, who then had Haney moved to Gold Base in California in order to serve the couple directly. Before she could qualify for such sensitive work, she was interrogated about her sexual history.
After passing that ordeal, Haney became “steward” to the Miscaviges, working in their quarters and serving their meals. She was with them nearly 24 hours a day for three years.
“I gave [David] his meals. I made his bed. I woke him up in the morning. I knew everything about their private lives,” she explains. She claims their relationship deteriorated in 2004 as David Miscavige and actor Tom Cruise, a prominent Scientologist, grew closer.
In the summer of 2005, Haney and others working with Shelly Miscavige were “busted,” Scientology’s word for demoted, to lower positions as Shelly vanished from the base. (Shelly was seen at the funeral of her father in Los Angeles two years later in the presence of a Scientology handler, and has not been spotted in public since. Scientology claims that Shelly is simply working on a special project and is not “missing.”)
Haney says she endured four months of manual labor, doing maintenance of the base facilities and other menial and physical tasks, before eventually being moved to the “Cine Castle” where Scientology’s video productions were filmed at the base, and she was assigned to the job of casting director.
In the Aftermath episode, she describes how she had learned that filming was going to be moved from Gold Base to another location, in Hollywood, and this would be her last chance to be around non-Scientologist actors who were not employees at the secretive base. So she crawled into the trunk of a car belonging to one of the actors, who then drove to L.A. not realizing that they had a passenger.
After emerging from the trunk, Haney immediately went to Burbank Airport and flew to Portland, Oregon, to be reunited with her father. But as a Scientologist, he was unhappy that his daughter had escaped the way she did (called a “blow” in Scientology parlance), and he encouraged her to return to “route out” properly, or following a prescribed set of steps before being allowed to leave.
She refused to go back to Gold Base, where she had escaped, but agreed to go through the routing-out process at Scientology’s headquarters in Los Angeles, which she was told would last three weeks.
Instead, it lasted three months, and she says that she was treated like a prisoner, with a 24-hour guard. She says she was not allowed to go to her grandmother’s funeral during this time.
Finally, she was asked to be videotaped signing an agreement in order to leave. In the video, she denied that she had been treated poorly as a Sea Org worker, and she said that David Miscavige had been an “amazing” boss.
In the Aftermath episode, she explained that she was nearly suicidal at that point, would have said or signed anything in order to be allowed to leave, and that an armed guard was present to make sure she followed directions.
After she took the job with Remini, she underwent what she characterized as a scary campaign of harassment by Scientology. It included statements made about Haney that are still on Scientology-owned websites today, accusing her of “rampant sexual promiscuity” and that she was a “paid liar.”
The Aftermath episode aired on Nov. 27, 2018, and by that time Haney was already talking to attorneys about filing a lawsuit against the church that would not only accuse Scientology of holding her against her will in the Sea Org, but also for libeling her online and stalking her with the use of private investigators after she had left the church.
But there was a problem: Lawsuits by former Scientologists were running into an issue because church members are repeatedly asked to sign contracts for work or for services, and those contracts contain arbitration clauses.
In 2013, a California couple, Luis and Rocio Garcia, filed a federal fraud lawsuit against Scientology that was forced into religious arbitration, the first the church had ever held in its 60-year history. The Garcias described the proceeding as a farce, saying they were prevented from bringing an attorney or smartphones, that no transcript was created, and 90 percent of their evidence was disallowed. Despite their objections, their judge accepted the result and the Eleventh Circuit upheld that decision on appeal.
Since the Garcia case, the arbitration clause in Scientology’s service contracts has become a major impediment to former Scientologists trying to sue their former church.
Some of Haney’s allegations — the stalking and libel she says she was subjected to for going to work for Leah Remini — took place after she had signed her exit agreement and had left Scientology. But she has been unable to get the judges in her case to take that into consideration, as they’ve ruled that a contract is a contract.
In Tampa, a labor-trafficking lawsuit filed by three former Sea Org workers is awaiting a ruling in federal court about whether they, too, must take their case to religious arbitration because of contracts they signed while in the church.
Scientology leader David Miscavige was found to be evading service of the suit by a federal magistrate judge, who on Feb. 14 declared Miscavige an official defendant in the case. Miscavige is objecting to that ruling, and District Judge Thomas Barber will soon rule on whether Miscavige is still a defendant in the lawsuit, and also whether the lawsuit will be forced into Scientology arbitration.
Even though the Garcias had gone through their arbitration in 2017, Valerie Haney says she still didn’t think the same thing would happen in her case when she filed her lawsuit in 2019.
On Jan. 30, 2020, that’s exactly what did happen when Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Richard Burdge ruled that the exit agreement Haney had signed while being videotaped that day at the Scientology headquarters obliged her not to sue Scientology in court, and that she would have to take her allegations to the church’s own internal court for arbitration.
“I was completely shocked and appalled. I didn’t think it was real what was happening,” she says.
Haney’s attorneys spent the next two years fighting the decision, asking Judge Burdge to reconsider his ruling — to no avail.
Then, the matter was reassigned to Judge Gail Killefer, who told Haney that she needed to get the arbitration process going or risked having her lawsuit thrown out altogether.
The first step in that process would require Haney to nominate a Scientologist in good standing to be an arbitrator.
So she nominated The Handmaid’s Tale actress and lifelong Scientologist Elisabeth Moss.
“I was thinking, OK, they’re trying to circumvent the judicial system and keep it all hush-hush, so I need to keep this in the public eye. Because otherwise they can do what they want and the law doesn’t apply to them,” Haney says.
She hadn’t met Moss in Scientology, but she had seen The Handmaid’s Tale and its portrayal of the dystopian world of Gilead. “It’s very similar to the Sea Org. I thought, OK, maybe she could sympathize with my situation. Maybe she has some decency as a human being and maybe she could see that my human rights were being violated. And she was a person I knew was in good standing.”
Moss had, after all, defended Scientology in a New Yorker profile just a few months before, in April 2022. But Scientology’s “International Justice Chief,” a Sea Org official named Mike Ellis, informed Haney that Moss was unavailable, and instructed her to nominate someone else.
This time she submitted two names, in case one of them was busy: Tom Cruise and Shelly Miscavige.
“I knew Tom was in good standing. He’s done a lot of things to support Scientology, and he spearheaded David Miscavige’s exploits,” Haney says.
During her three years working in the Miscavige private quarters, Haney had gotten to know the Top Gun: Maverick star.
“I knew him. He liked me. We were on a first-name basis. I knew Penelope [Cruz], and I knew Katie [Holmes]. I served Tom his meals,” she explains.
For Cruise’s 42nd birthday in 2004, Miscavige threw a party for him on Scientology’s cruise ship, the Freewinds, which sails the Caribbean, and Haney remembered seeing chefs being flown in from around the country.
“They probably spent $50,000 on it, minimally. All of it parishioner money. It was like a five-night extravagant private dinner. I was serving it. There was a sushi night, and the chefs came in from Nobu. There was an Italian night, and we had to wear costumes. And there was a French night,” she remembers.
“When Tom was first going out with Katie, Dave brought them to Las Vegas for an acknowledgment or celebration on church money, and he paid for the largest suite in Caesars Palace and had it for him and Shelly and me and Tom and Katie,” she continues. “That was the first time I met Katie. I just remember Tom bringing her in and introducing her to Dave and Shelly and me. I thought, oh my gosh, this is amazing. And then they left to go to dinner and I had to make sure the hotel rooms were spotless.”
After Scientology told Haney that Elisabeth Moss wasn’t available, she nominated Cruise and Shelly, and not simply as a publicity stunt.
“After Elisabeth Moss, who I didn’t know, I was like, let me nominate people I was intimately connected to. Shelly was my dear friend and Tom was also a friend. And we were on a first-name basis. I was close with them,” she claims.
Again, however, Scientology said the two couldn’t act as arbitrators, and this time they complained to Judge Killefer that Haney was being “obstructionist” by nominating people who were so obviously unavailable.
Haney’s attorney, Graham Berry, responded that there was nothing in Scientology’s arbitration agreement that prevented Haney from nominating famous people.
And then Haney submitted another 15 names of Scientologists, many of them very well-known, others more familiar to the readers of Scientology news stories.
Haney said she looked up names online, looking for evidence that she was choosing people who would still be in good standing.
“I left years ago, and all the people I know, I don’t know if they’re in good standing. I don’t know if they’re still there,” she says.
She decided that figures like actors Jenna Elfman, Giovanni Ribisi, and Catherine Bell; designer Rebecca Minkoff; motivational speaker Grant Cardone; and prominent attorney and husband of Greta Van Susteren, John Coale, were more likely to be in the church’s good graces, based on her internet searches. Haney had also gone to school with Minkoff, and she’d had a conversation with Elfman.
Matthew Feshbach, a short-seller, was the first million-dollar donor in Scientology history. Haney says she added his name to the nomination list because she had known him and his son while she was in the Sea Org.
She had also known Matt’s niece Jessica Feshbach, who was known for being Katie Holmes’’ aggressive media handler while the actress was with Cruise. “I knew Jessica when she was married to [former Scientology spokesman] Tommy Davis. I worked with her. We talked about the ridiculousness of the schedule, and the abuses going on,” Haney says.
Haney added Bob Duggan’s name because she saw him at Scientology events. By his own estimate, the pharmaceuticals investor has contributed more than $300 million to Scientology.
“Dave has a list of all the millionaires in Scientology,” Haney says, and she nominated Duggan and tech entrepreneur Craig Jensen, founder of Diskeeper, because they were both on Miscavige’s list.
She also included the names of Scientology officials who were spokespeople or members of the church’s notorious spy wing, the Office of Special Affairs.
“She was the one who did my retrieval after I escaped,” Haney says of one of the women she put on the list. “She harassed my entire family to have me come back to the cult to get interrogated for three months. She was the one there for my exit interview. She was a part of my abuse. She was doing everything she could to keep me there.”
And then, after Valerie Haney submitted her list of 15 names, Scientology came to court and informed Judge Killefer that one of the 15 had agreed to sit as an arbitrator.
What’s more, Scientology had selected its own arbitrator, and then those two arbitrators had selected a third.
The panel of three arbitrators is set, but Scientology isn’t releasing the names of any of them at this point, even to Haney, she claims.
At the hearing on March 15, Haney’s attorney Graham Berry asked the judge to order Scientology to allow Haney to bring a lawyer with her, a friend, and a court reporter who could also videotape the arbitration.
But Killefer refused. She set a hearing date six months out to consider the result of the arbitration. She admitted that she didn’t know what rules Scientology’s International Justice Chief Ellis had set up for it, but what mattered were “the rules of the arbitral forum.” In other words, Scientology sets all the rules.
It also became obvious that Haney wasn’t receiving notices about the arbitration because she’s now in Florida and Scientology is still mailing notices to a P.O. Box in California.
Judge Killefer told Berry to get Haney’s address to Scientology. “That’s an order,” she said.
“That was disgusting,” Haney says, reading an account of the hearing later and realizing that the judge couldn’t be bothered to make sure Haney had someone with her at the arbitration, but did order that she turn over her home address to the church she had escaped.
“So I sent a mailing address to Graham to give them,” she says.
Now, Valerie Haney is facing the idea of going, alone, into an arbitration set up by the Church of Scientology.
“There’s no more fighting, really. We just need to get it done and then bring it back to the court,” she laments.
For now, she awaits word from Scientology’s International Justice Chief about when and where the arbitration will take place.
“It’s the worst thing you could probably have a victim do,” she maintains. “Someone who has been abused her entire life, to go back into the abusive environment with the abusers. It’s appalling. And absolutely disgusting. It’s so crazy.”
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