Karen#1
Well-known member
Six years ago we decided that on Christmas Day it would be a good time to review what we knew about the disappearance of Shelly Miscavige, wife to Scientology’s leader David Miscavige, who vanished from Scientology’s Gold Base in summer 2005. We wondered if Shelly, kept hidden in a remote mountain compound, even knew it was Christmas. For the seventh Christmas in a row, we’re posting that story, since it still represents what we know about Shelly’s whereabouts.
We understand that Shelly Miscavige may be resigned to her fate.
But there’s a reason that “Where’s Shelly” is the number one question we get from the public — and it’s the same for Leah Remini. (We checked.)
For non-Scientologists, it’s simply incredible to think that David Miscavige, the leader of a worldwide “religious” organization, could get away with banishing his wife to a small mountain compound, never to be heard from again. On a day like today we can only wonder, does Shelly Miscavige really feel no desire to be with her family, or even just to see a few faces besides the dozen other people she has seen day in and day out for 19 years?
The question “Where’s Shelly” reached a whole new audience in December 2018 thanks to Leah’s television show, which provided a lot of background for viewers about Shelly’s upbringing. But the episode was light on details about Shelly’s current whereabouts and what we’ve learned about it in recent years. It was obvious from the huge number of questions we got on social media that week that viewers were left with a lot of questions. So on this meaningful day, let’s revisit some facts.
It was late August or early September in 2005 when Shelly vanished. We know that you heard Valerie Haney, in her Aftermath episode, say it was 2006, and a lot of media tends to say that. But when we talked with Valerie directly for our follow-up interview and compared notes with her, she agreed with our other eyewitnesses that it was late summer 2005 when Shelly disappeared, not 2006.
As we pointed out in a video we put out recently, the last public footage we have of Shelly was from September 2004, when Shelly was with Dave and with Tom Cruise at the Ideal Org opening in Madrid. It was at that event when Tom admitted to Dave that after breaking up with Penelope Cruz he was looking for a new girlfriend. Shelly was then put in charge of the effort to audition actresses to find a new mate for Tom, resulting that November in recruiting Nazanin Boniadi for the role. After that relationship broke up in January 2005, Tom found Katie Holmes on his own and their relationship became public in April.
As 2005 progressed, Valerie Haney and Mike Rinder and others have told us, the relationship between Dave and Shelly became more and more strained as they lived at Int Base (also known as “Gold Base”), Scientology’s secretive 500-acre international management compound near Hemet, California, where, the year before, an increasingly unhinged Miscavige had created “The Hole,” a literal prison for some of his closest lieutenants. Concerned with how Dave’s erratic behavior and epic tantrums were affecting other people, Shelly took it upon herself to make a few changes when Dave spent some time in Los Angeles without her that summer. First, she rearranged some job positions (filled in an “org board”). It was Valerie who explained to us that Shelly did so in part to assign some people to positions where they would be less likely to be in contact with her husband. Shelly was trying to lessen their exposure to his volcanic temper, in other words. And she also had Dave’s belongings crated up so that a long-planned renovation to their quarters could finally get going.
When Dave returned and saw that she had taken the initiative, he blew his stack and returned to Los Angeles. A week later, Shelly vanished. A new detail that was finally confirmed for us by Valerie was that during that week between Dave’s freakout and Shelly’s disappearance, she grabbed a car at the base and drove to Los Angeles in a last-ditch effort to save her marriage. But she soon returned after that mission failed. She was then taken away. This is an important detail, we believe, because it counters the suggestion that Shelly, by taking the initiative while Dave was gone, purposely sabotaged herself so she could be sent away. Would Shelly have made the dramatic gesture of driving to LA to appeal to her husband if that was the case?
So, sixteen years ago at the age of 44, Shelly was escorted from Int Base (where “The Hole” was) about 60 miles to the much smaller compound in the mountains near Lake Arrowhead, the headquarters of the Church of Spiritual Technology, where super-secret CST operates its project to archive the words of L. Ron Hubbard to store in vaults for thousands of years. (We are constantly asked, could Shelly be in “the Hole”? No, the Hole is located at the base where Shelly was taken away from. And we have eyewitnesses to the poor wretches.
Read more:
Does Shelly Miscavige know it's Christmas 2025?
Six years ago we decided that on Christmas Day it would be a good time to review what we knew about the disappearance of Shelly Miscavige, wife to Scientology’s leader David Miscavige, who vanished from Scientology’s Gold Base in summer 2005.
tonyortega.substack.com
