Karen#1
Well-known member
At 61, I look back and it’s not some polished story.
It’s wreckage I’ve had to crawl through.
On my 25th anniversary in the Sea Org (2002–2003), I wasn’t celebrating. I was busted. Thrown off Building 50. Imprisoned at the Int/Gold Base in the berthing buildings, structures that had been started but left incomplete long before me, yet were somehow now my fault.
I was questioning everything.
What the hell had I done with my life?
What had I committed it to?
Why?
I hated everything. Everyone.
I questioned my own sanity and my own worth.
And even then, it took me three more years to go.
Go where? To what? I didn’t know.
I had no formal education. No training. No credentials of any sort.
I didn’t even know “what I wanted to be when I grew up.” I was already over 40.
I had nothing to fall back on. Nothing.
Those next years inside, years 26, 27, 28, were like going through my own private hell.
Untangling from the only world I’d ever known.
Becoming myself—not a cog in a machine that demanded I submit and suppress who I was.
The next three years felt like being tossed around inside a burning, churning clothes dryer, fed hypnotic commands by an evil midget I couldn’t escape. It was unlike anything I’d experienced before him. A living, recurring nightmare. But it wasn’t a dream. It was real.
In 2005, I finally left.
It wasn’t freedom. That was zero.
Starting over with nothing. No plan. No identity. Just the certainty that I wasn’t going back.
I told myself I could let it all go physically, psychologically, emotionally.
But I was wrong.
The first ten years out? I made bad decisions. Plenty of them.
Because 28 years inside screws up how you think.
How you trust. Who you trust.
How you love. Who you love. What you love.
And how and what you think.
Had I really escaped?
I was gone, but the nightmares weren’t.
I’d wake in cold sweats, dreaming I was back in plotting my escape all over again.
Sometimes I dreamt I went back on my own.
Other times, someone else I knew had returned.
Either way, I’d wake up stunned that we could make such a mistake and desperate to get out. Again.
Some mornings it took hours to shake the grip.
Until the next dream came again the following night.
How could anything still hold on so tightly?
How could it live this long in my head?
Psychologically, what I (and we) went through has a name.
It’s called thought reform.
Robert Jay Lifton documented it in the 1950s after studying survivors of Chinese Communist “re-education” camps. He wasn’t talking about Scientology but he might as well have been. Every single one of the techniques he described, confession, ideological purity, sleep deprivation, mental conditioning, language loaded with control played out daily in my last three to four years inside.
A new era under Miscavige, one that would become untenable.
He didn’t just scream at you he broke you down and demanded you be the same as everyone else. No one different from the rest.
That wasn’t discipline. It was carefully planned and executed thought reform, weaponized by Miscavige who feared we might think differently, or tell the truth about him, if you escaped.
It was as if Miscavige had read the manuals himself and gone to great lengths to replicate them on the Gold/Int Base.
And undoing that? That doesn’t happen the day you leave.
It starts after you leave.
And it can take the rest of your life.
Suggested Read:
Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism by Robert Jay Lifton (1961)
This book analyzes the techniques used during Chinese Communist “re-education” in the 1950s. Lifton interviewed Westerners and Chinese intellectuals subjected to those programs and broke down the methods used to dismantle and rebuild identity.
He outlines eight criteria for thought reform, including:
In comparison, regular Scientology and Sea Org life felt palatable. Even fun at times. But under Miscavige, it became something else entirely: a prison camp.
Who Was I When I Left
Let me give you some perspective, not just of the psychological aspect of this, but the reality of being stuck in a cult from a young age. That I felt I had been in prison was more than a feeling.
Two weeks after arriving in Central Florida, where my younger brother lived, I was stir-crazy. I was not used to “just relaxing,” as he would insist I do. It drove him crazy that I would watch a movie with him from behind the couch, pacing back and forth for its entire length. What’s worse, I was unaware I was doing the pacing. I was hot-wired, mind and body rigged to keep moving. I was 130 pounds, no meat or muscle, just skin and bone.
So I went and got a job as a car salesman. Here, no credentials or particular skill were needed. They’d hire anyone and give them a chance, hoping that I, like most new salespeople, would bring in a family member or friend. That was usually the best-case result of hiring in that industry.
Desperate to be on my own, to support myself, I did well selling cars, though I hated it. But the long hours kept my mind focused on other things, instead of replaying the first 42 years of my life that had been spent locked behind a belief system.
But let me get to the point.
It was about 6 to 9 months in that I really needed to get a car of my own. The sales manager asked why I didn’t just buy a new one, he’d help me out by combining all discounts, plus employee pricing, etc. A down payment wasn’t an issue. I was making decent, above-average income on commission alone.
So he ran my credit.
I stood at the manager’s desk, anxiously waiting to see if I qualified, if I even had credit to finance a car. Then I noticed Clint’s face had gone blank. White.
I’d never told him my background.
Finally, he looked at me and asked, “Tom… have you been in prison?”
Astonished, I asked why he’d say that.
“You’re a ghost.” He said I had no credit history whatsoever. I had never bought anything on credit. Never owned anything. I was a zero.
I’d spent 28 years trying to be someone in Scientology—and out here, I was no one.
This was the telltale sign of a criminal who’d been locked up in prison for crimes that resulted in life imprisonment.
My First Date
When I did finally get my own car and place, I dated a girl I met, the first woman I would get involved with outside of the Church. About three months out of the hole.
Having never laid a finger on a woman other than Jenny Linson who despised the idea of sex but allowed me to get off, just as long as she only had to lie there like a dead fish; I was much like a 40-year-old virgin.
I wasn’t sure if I had arrived in heaven or hell.
If I was winning or sinning, when I took her home with me for the first time.
My apartment had a tall, two-story window at the head of my bed, as if it were the headboard.
She undressed herself slowly in front of me, with moonlight and a little bit of streetlight bouncing off her smooth, silky skin. Slowly, sexually, and intentionally, she undressed me, refusing to let me help.
She went to her knees and put her lips around me.
I watched as if I were “exterior with full perceptions” (a Scientology way of saying an out-of-body experience).
It was, believe it or not, the first blowjob I had ever gotten.
In bed, she threw open the curtains of the window above and rode me like I was a bull, over and over again. She screamed in ecstasy as we came and each time, for a split second, I worried we might wake up others in the dormitory I wasn’t in anymore.
She gave herself to me to do whatever I pleased.
I touched, kissed, licked, and sucked in tune with her moaning and desires.
And desires of my own.
Something I had never experienced or made anyone else experience before.
I, for the first time, felt what it was to be a man and to experience a woman the way it was supposed to be.
It lasted most of the night. And many long nights thereafter.
But it came to an abrupt end one afternoon when she called me while walking my dogs.
“Tom, why am I being followed by two men every time I leave the apartment to walk the dogs?”
She disappeared.
I had left Miscavige’s prison. But he had not left me.
Out of spite, I hoped that maybe a PI had videoed our wild sex in the window and it got to Dave so he’d see how free I had become. The very “cunt-licker” he always insisted I was.
Such things as these are ordinary to most.
To me, then 42 or 43 years old, they were significant.
My First Christmas Morning on the Outside Looking In
My first Christmas morning alone, in my apartment, I woke up with bright sunlight coming through the window and two Pugs snuggled next to me, snorting away as usual.
I was sweating, as usual.
I’d dreamt and woken up from another harrowing attempt at escaping from Miscavige, who had all 100 of us stuffed into a single garbage dumpster, insisting we clean it with our tongues.
He laughed, screamed, “You cunt-lickers,” “You cock-suckers,” and his face was red, his eyes glowing with hatred and—
I was awake. Alone. And free.
Part of me missed being part of a group.
I certainly missed friends I’d known for years.
I might have enjoyed being with my brothers and sister, but they were under Miscavige’s watchful control.
My brother would lose his job if he was seen with me.
My sister was in the RPF in LA.
My other brother too scared to be pulled back in or be harassed.
And I was unsure I could explain to another woman who I was and who I wasn’t or why I had only left at this ripe age.
Or that she’d actually believe my story that it was my Pugs being followed by private investigators, not me.
So I took the dogs for a walk, and again realized I was not alone.
The PIs that had been assigned to me by Miscavige were still working, even on Christmas morning.
I said, “Merry Christmas to you!”
Just another day in the life.
Nothing says “freedom” like being tailed by a guy in a rental car on Christmas morning.
What Led to My Not-So-Harrowing Escape
In the second part of this series, I will attempt to take you with me into those final four years in the Sea Org.
While I’ve written and am still writing about many other incidents, what follows is my personal story.
The moments that stuck with me.
The moments that cracked me.
The moments that made me finally see past the lies and catch a glimmer of the truth.
And of hope.
And a way to say “Fuck you” to Miscavige, who’d finally pushed me to my breaking point.
This is my “escape” story. And it’s not like the rest.
I didn’t “blow.”
I didn’t sneak out in the middle of the night.
I walked out in broad daylight.
There is only so much a man can take before his own life, his own sanity, and his own integrity matter more than survival.
And when that day comes—when you no longer care what he can do to you, you finally become something he can’t control.
This wasn’t about escaping Scientology.
It was about escaping the thought reform David Miscavige had embedded to keep people like me from ever speaking out.
https://devodevocht.substack.com/p/28-years-in-a-lifetime-crawling-out
It’s wreckage I’ve had to crawl through.
On my 25th anniversary in the Sea Org (2002–2003), I wasn’t celebrating. I was busted. Thrown off Building 50. Imprisoned at the Int/Gold Base in the berthing buildings, structures that had been started but left incomplete long before me, yet were somehow now my fault.
I was questioning everything.
What the hell had I done with my life?
What had I committed it to?
Why?
I hated everything. Everyone.
I questioned my own sanity and my own worth.
And even then, it took me three more years to go.
Go where? To what? I didn’t know.
I had no formal education. No training. No credentials of any sort.
I didn’t even know “what I wanted to be when I grew up.” I was already over 40.
I had nothing to fall back on. Nothing.
Those next years inside, years 26, 27, 28, were like going through my own private hell.
Untangling from the only world I’d ever known.
Becoming myself—not a cog in a machine that demanded I submit and suppress who I was.
The next three years felt like being tossed around inside a burning, churning clothes dryer, fed hypnotic commands by an evil midget I couldn’t escape. It was unlike anything I’d experienced before him. A living, recurring nightmare. But it wasn’t a dream. It was real.
In 2005, I finally left.
It wasn’t freedom. That was zero.
Starting over with nothing. No plan. No identity. Just the certainty that I wasn’t going back.
I told myself I could let it all go physically, psychologically, emotionally.
But I was wrong.
The first ten years out? I made bad decisions. Plenty of them.
Because 28 years inside screws up how you think.
How you trust. Who you trust.
How you love. Who you love. What you love.
And how and what you think.
Had I really escaped?
I was gone, but the nightmares weren’t.
I’d wake in cold sweats, dreaming I was back in plotting my escape all over again.
Sometimes I dreamt I went back on my own.
Other times, someone else I knew had returned.
Either way, I’d wake up stunned that we could make such a mistake and desperate to get out. Again.
Some mornings it took hours to shake the grip.
Until the next dream came again the following night.
How could anything still hold on so tightly?
How could it live this long in my head?
Psychologically, what I (and we) went through has a name.
It’s called thought reform.
Robert Jay Lifton documented it in the 1950s after studying survivors of Chinese Communist “re-education” camps. He wasn’t talking about Scientology but he might as well have been. Every single one of the techniques he described, confession, ideological purity, sleep deprivation, mental conditioning, language loaded with control played out daily in my last three to four years inside.
A new era under Miscavige, one that would become untenable.
He didn’t just scream at you he broke you down and demanded you be the same as everyone else. No one different from the rest.
That wasn’t discipline. It was carefully planned and executed thought reform, weaponized by Miscavige who feared we might think differently, or tell the truth about him, if you escaped.
It was as if Miscavige had read the manuals himself and gone to great lengths to replicate them on the Gold/Int Base.
And undoing that? That doesn’t happen the day you leave.
It starts after you leave.
And it can take the rest of your life.
Suggested Read:
Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism by Robert Jay Lifton (1961)
This book analyzes the techniques used during Chinese Communist “re-education” in the 1950s. Lifton interviewed Westerners and Chinese intellectuals subjected to those programs and broke down the methods used to dismantle and rebuild identity.
He outlines eight criteria for thought reform, including:
- Milieu control – isolating people from outside information
- Mystical manipulation – creating engineered “spiritual” experiences
- Demand for purity – imposing unattainable standards and guilt
- Confession – requiring repeated self-denunciation
- Sacred science – promoting a belief system as absolute truth
- Loading the language – using jargon to control thought
- Doctrine over person – rejecting personal experience if it conflicts with ideology
- Dispensing of existence – deciding who is worthy to exist based on belief conformity
In comparison, regular Scientology and Sea Org life felt palatable. Even fun at times. But under Miscavige, it became something else entirely: a prison camp.
Who Was I When I Left
Let me give you some perspective, not just of the psychological aspect of this, but the reality of being stuck in a cult from a young age. That I felt I had been in prison was more than a feeling.
Two weeks after arriving in Central Florida, where my younger brother lived, I was stir-crazy. I was not used to “just relaxing,” as he would insist I do. It drove him crazy that I would watch a movie with him from behind the couch, pacing back and forth for its entire length. What’s worse, I was unaware I was doing the pacing. I was hot-wired, mind and body rigged to keep moving. I was 130 pounds, no meat or muscle, just skin and bone.
So I went and got a job as a car salesman. Here, no credentials or particular skill were needed. They’d hire anyone and give them a chance, hoping that I, like most new salespeople, would bring in a family member or friend. That was usually the best-case result of hiring in that industry.
Desperate to be on my own, to support myself, I did well selling cars, though I hated it. But the long hours kept my mind focused on other things, instead of replaying the first 42 years of my life that had been spent locked behind a belief system.
But let me get to the point.
It was about 6 to 9 months in that I really needed to get a car of my own. The sales manager asked why I didn’t just buy a new one, he’d help me out by combining all discounts, plus employee pricing, etc. A down payment wasn’t an issue. I was making decent, above-average income on commission alone.
So he ran my credit.
I stood at the manager’s desk, anxiously waiting to see if I qualified, if I even had credit to finance a car. Then I noticed Clint’s face had gone blank. White.
I’d never told him my background.
Finally, he looked at me and asked, “Tom… have you been in prison?”
Astonished, I asked why he’d say that.
“You’re a ghost.” He said I had no credit history whatsoever. I had never bought anything on credit. Never owned anything. I was a zero.
I’d spent 28 years trying to be someone in Scientology—and out here, I was no one.
This was the telltale sign of a criminal who’d been locked up in prison for crimes that resulted in life imprisonment.
My First Date
When I did finally get my own car and place, I dated a girl I met, the first woman I would get involved with outside of the Church. About three months out of the hole.
Having never laid a finger on a woman other than Jenny Linson who despised the idea of sex but allowed me to get off, just as long as she only had to lie there like a dead fish; I was much like a 40-year-old virgin.
I wasn’t sure if I had arrived in heaven or hell.
If I was winning or sinning, when I took her home with me for the first time.
My apartment had a tall, two-story window at the head of my bed, as if it were the headboard.
She undressed herself slowly in front of me, with moonlight and a little bit of streetlight bouncing off her smooth, silky skin. Slowly, sexually, and intentionally, she undressed me, refusing to let me help.
She went to her knees and put her lips around me.
I watched as if I were “exterior with full perceptions” (a Scientology way of saying an out-of-body experience).
It was, believe it or not, the first blowjob I had ever gotten.
In bed, she threw open the curtains of the window above and rode me like I was a bull, over and over again. She screamed in ecstasy as we came and each time, for a split second, I worried we might wake up others in the dormitory I wasn’t in anymore.
She gave herself to me to do whatever I pleased.
I touched, kissed, licked, and sucked in tune with her moaning and desires.
And desires of my own.
Something I had never experienced or made anyone else experience before.
I, for the first time, felt what it was to be a man and to experience a woman the way it was supposed to be.
It lasted most of the night. And many long nights thereafter.
But it came to an abrupt end one afternoon when she called me while walking my dogs.
“Tom, why am I being followed by two men every time I leave the apartment to walk the dogs?”
She disappeared.
I had left Miscavige’s prison. But he had not left me.
Out of spite, I hoped that maybe a PI had videoed our wild sex in the window and it got to Dave so he’d see how free I had become. The very “cunt-licker” he always insisted I was.
Such things as these are ordinary to most.
To me, then 42 or 43 years old, they were significant.
My First Christmas Morning on the Outside Looking In
My first Christmas morning alone, in my apartment, I woke up with bright sunlight coming through the window and two Pugs snuggled next to me, snorting away as usual.
I was sweating, as usual.
I’d dreamt and woken up from another harrowing attempt at escaping from Miscavige, who had all 100 of us stuffed into a single garbage dumpster, insisting we clean it with our tongues.
He laughed, screamed, “You cunt-lickers,” “You cock-suckers,” and his face was red, his eyes glowing with hatred and—
I was awake. Alone. And free.
Part of me missed being part of a group.
I certainly missed friends I’d known for years.
I might have enjoyed being with my brothers and sister, but they were under Miscavige’s watchful control.
My brother would lose his job if he was seen with me.
My sister was in the RPF in LA.
My other brother too scared to be pulled back in or be harassed.
And I was unsure I could explain to another woman who I was and who I wasn’t or why I had only left at this ripe age.
Or that she’d actually believe my story that it was my Pugs being followed by private investigators, not me.
So I took the dogs for a walk, and again realized I was not alone.
The PIs that had been assigned to me by Miscavige were still working, even on Christmas morning.
I said, “Merry Christmas to you!”
Just another day in the life.
Nothing says “freedom” like being tailed by a guy in a rental car on Christmas morning.
What Led to My Not-So-Harrowing Escape
In the second part of this series, I will attempt to take you with me into those final four years in the Sea Org.
While I’ve written and am still writing about many other incidents, what follows is my personal story.
The moments that stuck with me.
The moments that cracked me.
The moments that made me finally see past the lies and catch a glimmer of the truth.
And of hope.
And a way to say “Fuck you” to Miscavige, who’d finally pushed me to my breaking point.
This is my “escape” story. And it’s not like the rest.
I didn’t “blow.”
I didn’t sneak out in the middle of the night.
I walked out in broad daylight.
There is only so much a man can take before his own life, his own sanity, and his own integrity matter more than survival.
And when that day comes—when you no longer care what he can do to you, you finally become something he can’t control.
This wasn’t about escaping Scientology.
It was about escaping the thought reform David Miscavige had embedded to keep people like me from ever speaking out.
https://devodevocht.substack.com/p/28-years-in-a-lifetime-crawling-out
