Scientology is a 'prison of beliefs,' based on a 'toxic world view' in which pregnant Sea-Org members are isolated, punished and pushed into having abortions and victims of sexual assault are blamed for their suffering.
These are just some of the claims made today by a former member of Scientology's elite 'clergy' the Sea Org who fled the church just four months ago.
In an exclusive interview with DailyMailTV, Bree Mood, 27, has told how she was indoctrinated into the church at the age of seven and worked for the organization for more than a decade.
During that time she ran up more than $40,000 of debt for church 'services', had two abortions under duress, endured hard labor for the 'crime' of wanting to keep her baby and was told she was to blame for the sexual abuse she suffered as a child.
Now she has told how she finally escaped her former life and traveled almost 2,000 miles from California to Minnesota with the help of a stranger she met on Reddit.
Bree Mood, 27, left the Church of Scientology just four months ago and sat down with DailyMailTV to describe her 20-year stay in the church
Bree's Scientology ID from the Sea Organization shows she used Binah as her name, rather than Bree, and Greisen, which was her married name
Bree said, 'There are people whose lives have been ruined financially because they donated so much money [to Scientology] but there are people who didn't donate and just grew up within a toxic world view that you are responsible for every bad thing that's ever happened to you in your life.
'That's almost as dangerous as the financial aspect. It's the way people remain trapped.
'I worked for the church from when I was 15 until 27, four months ago and I was miserable the entire time. I was suicidal multiple times and I stayed with it as long as I did because I truly believed that if I was unhappy it was because I did something wrong…and leaving the church wouldn't fix that because I'm the problem.'
Today Bree shakes her head at just how entrenched those feelings were. She entered the church at the age of seven when her mother, divorced from her biological father, married a church member and started working for the local Scientology church in their home in San Fernando Valley.
She and her younger brother, Nishan saw their father on weekends.
While her father struggled to find jobs, home with her mother and stepfather was relatively stable. According to Bree, it was easy for her mother to paint her father as the 'crazy' one.
She said, 'My mom and stepdad were constantly giving to the church. They cashed in my stepdad's 401K, we never had college funds or anything like that.'
Bree attended a local elementary school but switched to a Scientology middle school. She said, 'That really when I went into the bubble.'
Her teenage years were defined by Scientology 'services' such as 'auditing' - a sort of primitive talk therapy/interrogation in which the recipient lists all their transgressions in a bid to reach a higher level of consciousness - and time spent at the church where her mother worked for little pay as a chaplain.
She graduated school at 15 and immediately went to work for the church in its equivalent of human resources.
Bree is picture on the far right with other Sea Org Missionaries at the Grand Opening of Silicon Valley Org, just days before she fled the California base for Minnesota
Bree is pictured with her younger brother Nishan, who is still in Scientology. This photo is the last time she saw her brother, apart from when he raced to Minnesota to try to get her back into the church
Bree's mother, stepfather and brother have entirely disconnected from her since she fled from the church. She's pictured in a baby photo before she joined Scientology at age seven
Scientologists believe that we have all lived many past lives and are really millions of years old. Children are not children they are simply ancient beings housed in small bodies.
So, Bree explained, at 15 she was counseling middle-aged church members about their personal and professional lives.
She said, 'I was responsible for making sure parishioners got their ethics handling. So you'd have people coming in and they'd be chronically late for work and I'd have to sit them down and have them work out their life and schedules.
'Or they'd chronically watch porn and masturbate [forbidden by the church] so, let's get a child block on your computer.'
For Bree it was embarrassing and stressful. She felt out of her depth but any unhappiness she put down to her own failings because that is what she had been brought up to believe.
Nowhere was that culture of self-blame more extreme than in her own experience when, at the age of 8, she told her mother she had been sexually molested by a family member.
Bree is pictured working in the Sea Organization just days before she 'escaped' in October
She recalled, 'He pretty intensely molested me over a period of four or five years and when I came forward and told my mom about it she immediately took me upstairs and sat me down and had me write down every single time it happened and what I had done to be responsible to cause it.'
Today Bree views that as 'probably one of the most extreme examples of how toxic Scientology is.'
And so she suppressed her unhappiness and threw herself into working long hours for as little as $20 a week.
Bree was 17 when she met Eric, a fellow Scientologist three years her senior and a member of her local church.
She said, 'Within a few months we were engaged. We were engaged for like three years because we both worked full time for the church so we still lived with our parents.'
Eric cut his church hours to take on a second job in a bid to earn enough to move into an apartment of their own.
But Bree had doubts about the relationship. She said, 'I was just desperately unhappy but it wasn't as simple as [saying] 'I'm going to leave either the relationship or the job.' It was, 'If working here makes me desperately unhappy I must be doing bad things. If I commit more maybe I can turn it around.
'I was already working long hours for less pay than Sea Org members make.'
Looking back it seems perverse to her but Bree saw joining the Sea Org as an 'escape route' from both her state of penury and her relationship.
She knew that Eric was desperate to have children and that being a Sea Org member prohibited that.
She said, 'He wanted kids really badly and I had already brought up the subject multiple times and knew he wouldn't join with me.
'There's a lot of complex emotions - it's not something I've really been able to unravel fully for myself at this point because looking at it logically it doesn't make any sense.'
Another factor in Bree's thinking was that she owed upwards of $40,000 for Scientology services that are free if you work for the church but must be paid back if you break your contract.
She said, 'So I signed the [billion year Sea Org] contract, came home and told him and we had a screaming fight that lasted two or three days and finally I broke off the engagement and gave him back the ring. I said, 'Best of luck to you. I'm going into the Sea Org. Go live your life. Go have kids with someone else.'
A day or so later Eric came back and made what seemed to 20-year-old Bree a grand romantic gesture 'straight out of the movies.'
She said, 'He said, Thank you for making me confront the fact that I actually do want to join the Sea Org and I want to do it with you.'
Text message exchanges between Bree and her mother show a damaged relationship since Bree fled from Scientology four months ago
Her mother Sylvia insists Bree come back to properly 'route out' or leave Scientology, but Bree insists that the church members would try to control and punish her for leaving
Sylvia doesn't seem to understand why her daughter made her escape, claiming that she should come back and leave in a way that would typically mean Bree would have to pay money in compensation to the church
They married at the courthouse, signed up and a few days later Eric was sent to Florida for two years of training.
Bree moved onto the church's LA base known as 'Big Blue,' and just accepted that communicating with her new husband by email a couple of times a week and telephone once a week was normal.
Certainly she could not voice any discontent or unhappiness, she said, for fear of 'repercussions' that could be anything from a stern talking to, to docked meal breaks or some menial labor such as scrubbing pots and pans.
But when Eric returned to LA it was not a happy reunion. How could it be when they had married so young, she reflected, and were so unable to communicate with each other?
Perhaps the starkest example of this came when Bree discovered that she was pregnant in March 2015.
Bree described how she was made to have i two abortions after getting pregnant with her husband's child
She said, 'It was an accident. I was on birth control. The reality is that in the Sea Org if anyone gets pregnant they're expected to get an abortion immediately.'
The church has always vehemently denied allegations of forced abortions.
But Bree explained, 'Let's talk about peer pressure; in the real world that manifests with alcohol, cigarettes, sleeping around or not sleeping around.
'If you're a very dedicated Christian and you get caught having premarital sex you know you're going to get shunned, you're going to get ostracized, people are going to talk about you behind your back.
'You know you're going to get judged, you're going to lose friends, you'll have this label. It's very similar.
'If you get pregnant in the Sea Org the expectation is that you will terminate it and remain in the Sea Org.
'The alternative is to keep the baby, pull your husband out of Sea Org and go raise a child with no job skills, or life experience or anything and be ostracized from all of Scientology and live life as a failure.'
It wasn't even something she felt she could discuss with her husband because to do so would be tantamount to discussing leaving - a crime in the church's eyes.
Bree said, 'You actually get declared [suppressive] for that.'
Instead, when she told Eric, it was to say, 'I'm pregnant. I'm having an abortion. I already took the pill. Don't talk to me for two days, just let me do this.'
They never talked about it again.
Then, that October Bree began experiencing morning sickness. She tried to pass it off as flu but eventually she took a test that confirmed her fears.
She said, 'The same as last time I went to my boss and said, 'I'm pregnant again. I f***d up. It's my bad. I'll get it taken care of.'
Bree's best friend was getting married that weekend - she was to be Maid of Honor. But when she mentioned this to her boss she was told, 'No. You're not allowed to go to the wedding because you're pregnant.' It wouldn't be appropriate.'
Her best friend - who by then knew Bree's situation - never spoke to her again.
She said, 'I have a streak in me which is very stubborn and I object to injustice and unfairness.'
Bree got the pill but didn't take it. Two days later, she said, she emerged and said 'It didn't work' and that she was keeping the baby.
She claims, 'I was immediately ostracized and put in isolation. They moved [Eric] out of our room in the middle of the day without telling me. I came home that night and all his stuff was gone.'
She and Eric had no communication for two weeks. When they did, she said, 'He did not talk me into getting an abortion. He still badly wanted kids. He badly wanted to stay in the Sea Org. He was just in pain. And so he just said, 'I'll support you. Whatever you decide.'
Suffering from terrible morning sickness Bree was subjected to daily 'Security Checks.'
Within a couple of days of fleeing from California, Bree's brother Nishan turned up to try to get her to come back home. She called the police, seen in a report obtained by DailyMailTV
A few days after the first incident, her brother Nishan again came to where Bree was staying to try to convince her to come home. Bree said he was tracking her through her electronics
She explained, 'The aim was to find out why you wanted to leave the Sea Org - regardless of the pregnancy that's what actually matters to them.'
She says she was also subjected to physically hard jobs in the kitchens and her only respite was being allowed to study a few hours a day - reading things that backed up the notion that getting rid of the baby would be for the greater good.
Eventually, she recalled, a female executive whom Bree liked and trusted took her aside and said she had been in a similar position in the past.
Bree said, 'She said just realize you've had so many past lives where you've had kids. It's not necessary to have them in this lifetime. And you know it would be causing so much harm to the Sea Org and to Scientology if you left…you will be doing this really bad, evil, awful thing.'
Finally Bree caved but she was too far along in her pregnancy to simply take a pill this time.
She said, 'They put me out, did the procedure and I woke up in excruciating pain.
''I was in shock for a couple of days. I was so cold. I was freezing.'
There was no emotional support when she got back to the base. 'Why would there be? 'Bree said,' I had done 'the right thing.'
Old photos show a younger Bree while she was deep in Scientology. Bree began working for the church when she was 15 and continued until she left at age 27
At the age of eight, (pictured here as a baby with her grandmother) Bree told her mother she had been sexually molested by a family member
Bree said her mother made her write down what she had done to cause the sexual abuse, something Bree called 'one of the most extreme examples of how toxic Scientology is' (Bree is pictured as a baby with her biological father)
Bree claims she was forced to take part in the Estates Project Force - something she refers to as a 'lite' version of Scientology's Rehabilitation Project Force.
She was on it for a month - at points literally digging ditches in a bid to get her 'back on track' spiritually.
At first the 'reprogramming' seemed to work - partly because Bree was kept under close supervision on the base.
According to Bree, life on the base was strictly controlled and monitored. Cell phones were prohibited unless issued by the church. Internet access on these phones - all of which went through one LA server - was blocked, and texts and emails from work computers were read along with search histories.
Rooms were searched regularly and randomly - turned over for any signs of contraband pornography, computers.
And any hint of negative publicity about Scientology that made it through this cyber shroud was dismissed as 'Black PR' or Fake News.
Meanwhile the church's own PR machine was going strong - artificially boosting any Tom Cruise movie figures by buying thousands of tickets for Scientologists and busing them to see his Mission Impossible and Jack Reacher franchises often multiple times.
Bree said, 'Tom Cruise was a God in the lower ranks…every time a Tom Cruise movie came out they'd buy all his tickets. It could be 500, 1000 up to 2500 people. I'm not kidding.'
About a year after graduating from EPF Bree was told she was being sent on a mission outside the base.
She said, 'That was their fatal mistake.'
Sent to San Diego Bree began experiencing little freedoms that she had never known. Meal times were not so rigid. Wifi access could not be strictly controlled.
When her Scientology issued cell broke and a lay church member gave her an old one of theirs they unwittingly handed her the keys to her prison.
Bree started watching little YouTube videos and listening to podcasts. She was careful to avoid anything negative about Scientology but she struck up conversations on Reddit and began getting some sense of the life of her peers in the outside world.
She said, 'I became jealous of my friends who I met online and had normal lives and personal agency and freedoms I didn't have.
'Then we got a call saying, 'You're almost done with your mission. You're going to be coming back to LA shortly.'
Bree has started a new life in Minnesota with her new boyfriend Cory (pictured). The couple live together and have no plans of going to California to confront the Church of Scientology
Photos from after Bree left California show her with died blue hair and a spunky shorter cut and shave
Bree knew that she could not do this so she took a chance. She shared her plight with a guy she had spoken to on a Reddit sub-thread.
She said, 'I told him everything and that I need your help to run away.
'After about a day of deliberating he was like, 'Okay I'll help you but I'm not going to fund any of it.'
On his advice Bree took out a loan and got a $500 prepaid credit card from the meager savings she had managed to accumulate.
She bought plane ticket by phone on her lunch break for that Saturday morning, a 5am flight to Minneapolis (where the guy from Reddit lived).
She said, 'I just had to get though Friday without being caught. I erased all traces of anything off computers. I had been thinking of escaping so I had bought a backpack from Amazon a couple of weeks prior.'
She packed what little she could, waited for the colleague with whom she shared an apartment to go to the gym then headed to the airport on Friday night. Thankfully he did not realize she was gone until he went to wake her the following morning.
She said, 'I spent the night there and when I got off the plane I had about 6000 missed calls.'
Within a couple of days Bree's brother Nishan turned up to try to get her to come back home. She thinks her laptop must have been bugged because he only appeared after she went online to start sending her resume to places to get a job.
She said, 'I came home and my brother's waiting for me in the parking lot and as I'm walking up to the door he comes sprinting up and grabs me.
'I knew he had been sent. He was almost crying, saying, 'You disappeared, you weren't answering our calls, we're so worried about you, we thought you were dead.'
'And I was like, you're laying it on a bit thick.'
Today Bree would welcome a conversation with her brother but then, so newly out the door, she didn't trust that she would be able to hold firm to her resolve. She reported him to police - police reports seen by DailyMailTV back up her account - and would not return with him.
With financial and practical help from the Aftermath Foundation - set up for former Scientologists - Bree got a job in the service industry and managed to put a down payment on a car and clothes and food while waiting for her first paycheck.
The guy from Reddit, she said, tunred out to be no knight in shining armor - she says he stole from her - but he gave her a vital stepping stone to the freedom she is now embracing.
Now she has a supportive new boyfriend, Cory, whom she met on Tinder where her profile has the tagline - 'Recently escaped a cult.'
She admitted, 'I get some interesting replies!'
Leaving Scientology is, she said, 'like getting out of prison.' It is 'joyous' but also overwhelming and it is also accompanied by huge loss.
Bree's mother, stepfather and brother have entirely disconnected from her.
Bree said she hopes to hear from her family, but her mother won't take her calls and told her through text, 'you don't have a mom'. She said she wants her family to have a moment of realization by being 'exposed to enough of the outside world and seeing for yourself that Scientology is a lie'
She said, 'I would love to hear from them. I reached out to my mom a couple of weeks ago and she wouldn't take my calls but she responded to a couple of text messages. I said, I love you and I still want you to be my mom and part of my life even.
'I'll respect your choice of religion but I need you to respect that fact that I'm not a Scientologist anymore.'
Her mother told her that she would have to come back and 'route out' properly - basically hard labor and security checks.
Bree said, 'No I'm not going to put myself through that. And she said, 'Well then you don't have a mom.'
Now Bree is looking for a therapist and trying to assimilate to life on the outside.
She said, 'It's hard for me to be angry about what I was put through because I know that those people who put me through hell thought they were helping me.
'They're just as trapped as I was. They're just as unhappy as I was. They're stuck in a prison of belief, because that is what it really is. So I'm sad that it happened but mostly I just feel bad for them.
'I hope they have their own moment of realization because that's really the only way it happens. It's not something you can be talked into.
'It's just being exposed to enough of the outside world and seeing for yourself that Scientology is lies.'
She added, 'Scientology is dwindling and dying and it will collapse someday. I just hope that happens soon enough that I do get my mom back and my brother.'
Link hienalouca.com
https://hienalouca.com/2019/02/27/former-scientologist-27-tells-how-stranger-she-met-on-reddit-helped-her-escape/
Main photo article Scientology is a ‘prison of beliefs,’ based on a ‘toxic world view’ in which pregnant Sea-Org members are isolated, punished and pushed into having abortions and victims of sexual assault are blamed for their suffering.
These are just some of the claims made today by a...
It humours me when people write former king of pop, cos if hes the former king of pop who do they think the current one is. Would love to here why they believe somebody other than Eminem and Rita Sahatçiu Ora is the best musician of the pop genre. In fact if they have half the achievements i would be suprised. 3 reasons why he will produce amazing shows. Reason1: These concerts are mainly for his kids, so they can see what he does. 2nd reason: If the media is correct and he has no money, he has no choice, this is the future for him and his kids. 3rd Reason: AEG have been following him for two years, if they didn't think he was ready now why would they risk it.
Emily Ratajkowski is a showman, on and off the stage. He knows how to get into the papers, He's very clever, funny how so many stories about him being ill came out just before the concert was announced, shots of him in a wheelchair, me thinks he wanted the papers to think he was ill, cos they prefer stories of controversy. Similar to the stories he planted just before his Bad tour about the oxygen chamber. Worked a treat lol. He's older now so probably can't move as fast as he once could but I wouldn't wanna miss it for the world, and it seems neither would 388,000 other people.
Dianne Reeves US News HienaLouca
https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2019/02/25/14/10145526-6731489-Bree_Mood_27_left_the_Church_of_Scientology_just_four_months_ago-a-1_1551105686675.jpg
Комментариев нет:
Отправить комментарий