Karen#1
Well-known member
[In this map, you can see the location of Scientology’s Los Angeles headquarters, “Big Blue,” and about 90 miles east the location of its international management base, Int Base, near Hemet, where Shelly was living until 2005 when she vanished. Shelly was then moved to the CST headquarters near Lake Arrowhead, a tiny compound about 60 miles northwest of Int Base and marked on the map. That’s where Shelly has been for the last 20 years.]
She has been seen outside the compound on numerous occasions. Two years after she was banished there, in 2007, she was allowed to go to the funeral of her father, Maurice “Barney” Barnett, which took place on a boat in San Pedro Harbor. We know this because her sister Suzette was living with Marc and Claire Headley at the time and told them that she saw Shelly on the boat at the service. Shelly was in the presence of her “handler,” a woman named Anne Joasem, who had been sent to Twin Peaks with Shelly along with another woman, Shelly’s Scientology auditor Antonella Tisi.
Suzette told the Headleys that Shelly met her in the bathroom on the boat in order to get away from Joasem for a moment, and quickly told Suzette that she was in trouble and wouldn’t be able to help her anymore.
Shelly, in other words, knew in 2007 that she was a prisoner. And she’s a prisoner today.
Leah Remini had been friends with Shelly, and she didn’t know that something was up with Shelly until she went to the wedding of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes at a castle in Italy in November 2006. Leah noticed that Dave was there without his wife, and that he was playing grab-ass with his “personal communicator,” a woman named Laurisse “Lou” Henley-Smith. Shocked and outraged, Leah filed an internal Scientology report on Dave that got her sent to the Flag Land Base in Clearwater, Florida for three months of reconditioning that she was charged $300,000 for. She has written that the wedding, and seeing that Shelly was not there, was a key moment in her eventual defection from the church seven years later.
We first wrote about Shelly missing from the public world of Scientology in 2012, while we were still at the Village Voice. The next year we broke the news at the Underground Bunker in July 2013 that Leah had left Scientology. And a month later, we broke the news in August 2013 that Leah had filed a missing-person report about Shelly with the Los Angeles Police Department.
There was a lot of confusion about Leah’s missing-person report caused by other media, confusion that Scientology has taken advantage of. Leah filed her report with the LAPD on Monday, August 5. The police dispatched two detectives to meet with Shelly, who told them she was all right and didn’t want to make a public statement. (We only learned years later where this meeting took place and that Shelly was accompanied by Dave’s personal lawyer, Jeffrey Riffer.) We found out about Leah’s missing-person report on Wednesday night, August 7, and broke the news of it at the Bunker the next morning, August 8.
By then, the LAPD had already met with Shelly, and told reporters who were calling about our story that Leah’s report was “unfounded.” Some news outlets then made it sound like the case had been opened and closed that same day, and that it was a frivolous report on Leah’s part. Scientology has pretended that this is the case to this day.
The truth is, Scientology took Leah’s report very seriously, served up Shelly to the LAPD to convince them nothing was wrong, and then promptly put her back in her mountain prison, where she has remained another twelve years.
There were other times Shelly has been seen outside the CST compound. Mitch Brisker, Scientology’s former film director, saw her in Redlands with her handlers in 2008. A woman in Crestline, about a mile from the Twin Peaks compound, believes she saw Shelly with some handlers in town at a grocery and a hardware store in 2015 and 2016. There’s also a voter registration record which suggests Shelly may have spent at least a short amount of time at another CST vault location in Petrolia, California.
But based on our sources and documentary evidence, we still believe that Shelly has spent almost every day of the last 20 years at the small Twin Peaks compound in the San Bernardino Mountains, cut off not only from the outside world, but even from her own family.
Why? Because David Miscavige has decided, like he has in other cases, that he cannot trust Shelly anymore, and that she is an enemy, and that he will keep her in her mountain prison so that he never has to see or think about her ever again.
As Jean Brousseau put it on Leah’s TV series — JB was David Miscavige’s brother-in-law for 16 years when he was married to Shelly’s sister — “Dave will keep her where she is until she dies.”
Some former Scientologists are ambivalent about her. This has always been the case. They remember that Shelly helped Dave run Scientology and could be a ruthless Sea Org taskmaster in her own right.
But for how long will California and San Bernardino County law enforcement allow David Miscavige to get away with imprisoning his wife for 20 years?
Shelly is now 64 years old. She has sisters and other family members who would like to communicate with her and see her.
And Leah Remini would still like to know what happened to her friend, and to offer Shelly the opportunity to come out and rejoin the world.
How many more years will the number one question we get, and that Leah gets, be “Where is Shelly?”
20 YEARS: Scientology leader David Miscavige made his wife Shelly vanish
According to our sources who were actually there at the time, it was near the end of August or the beginning of September in 2005 — 20 years ago this week — when Shelly Miscavige obtained a car from the motor pool at Scientology’s “Int Base” near Hemet, California, and made a desperate drive to...
tonyortega.substack.com
