Karen#1
Well-known member
EXCERPT:
[With Scientology spy wing, the Guardian’s Office, in tatters, Val Ross left us last time with her family heading from Los Angeles to Bellevue, Washington in 1978…]
We made good time to Washington. Although Bellevue mission was not fun, the accommodations were a giant step up from our previous ones. We lived with Mark’s brother Darryl and his then wife Jane in a large drafty house right up against Lake Washington on the Bellevue side close to the Mercer Island expressway. I don’t know what it would look like now but back then we had an unobstructed view of Mt. Rainier, and it was spectacular.
We arrived and discovered that Jane had decided to divorce Mark’s brother for undisclosed reasons at the time. Those reasons finally came to light in the Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath series years later. It has taken me this long to get the timeline straight in my head and realize that was going on in the middle of the chaos that was my life, and it just shows that Scientology secrets are very secret.
If you know what was described in the very first episode of that show, the man accused of assaulting Amy Scobee was my ex-brother-in-law. I was not aware of what he did back then. If my husband knew, he never told me, and drunk Mark didn’t keep secrets so my guess is he didn’t know either. Nor, as far as I know, did anyone else at the mission besides the few involved in cleanup. It was definitely hush-hush.
For the record I also didn’t see any evidence of Mark’s brother abusing his wife, and I am unaware of any consequences he incurred other than losing his spouse for any bad behavior he exhibited. But I don’t know if that means much. I doubt many people saw evidence of Mark abusing me.
While in Bellevue, I stayed home at first because I was in a cast and Mark didn’t want people seeing “how clumsy I was.” As in the photo above, I was wearing long sleeved shirts to hide my cast, but my right arm was basically useless. It was quite awkward as the cast was up past the elbow so I told Mark I’d just go to a doctor and get it taken off. He had a better idea. He had me come into the mission where some guy he knew on course cut it off with a hacksaw. Problem solved.
Walking into the mission was like walking into an ashtray. The people who smoked far outnumbered the non smokers and they smoked everywhere. After having my nose broken and not repaired properly three times by then, I had enough trouble breathing without inhaling smoke nonstop. While there I would take the Peugeot and take the baby on road trips in the forests and to the mountains, but I got really tired of rain all day every day.
Darryl and Jane ended up not getting a divorce but that’s only because Darryl had a secret he sprung on her. They had never been legally married! He had kept the marriage certificate after the ceremony and never filed it with the court. He told her that in front of us, laughing at just how clever he was. She had a motorcycle, she slammed her helmet on her head left him and Scientology in the dust when she discovered that. I don’t have any idea where she went. To the best of my knowledge that was the last anyone in our circles heard from her.
Drunk Mark admitted to me that his brother, who was the officiant at our wedding, had tried to get Mark to pull the same tactic at our wedding. However, after my dad and Mark and Darryl’s mom signed the document, I took it and said “I’ll drop it off on my way downtown Monday.” It was hard to fight that since Mark was headed to New York for a job. I did his brother’s second wife a favor when he remarried and took their marriage certificate to the courthouse for her.
With Jane leaving, that left us down one breadwinner. Darryl was on staff at the Mission, Mark was doing courses, and I was almost out of funds in everything but my secret savings account. The three of us rang in the New Year 1979 watching the ball drop in Times Square while the guys polished off a fifth of Chivas Regal that I had bought for them and I drank a coke. I went to bed about five minutes after it midnight in New York, only a little after 9 pm in Washington. The guys stayed up most of the night.
While they were mostly sober earlier in the evening, we had decided that in order to stay there, I had to get a job and start supporting us, or Mark and I needed to head to Salt Lake City where his mom had bought a house she wanted to flip. We chose Utah because more of his family lived there.
It was a five-bedroom house in horrible condition, but it was in a really good neighborhood. This was the condition of the master bathroom when we moved in.
tonyortega.substack.com
[With Scientology spy wing, the Guardian’s Office, in tatters, Val Ross left us last time with her family heading from Los Angeles to Bellevue, Washington in 1978…]
We made good time to Washington. Although Bellevue mission was not fun, the accommodations were a giant step up from our previous ones. We lived with Mark’s brother Darryl and his then wife Jane in a large drafty house right up against Lake Washington on the Bellevue side close to the Mercer Island expressway. I don’t know what it would look like now but back then we had an unobstructed view of Mt. Rainier, and it was spectacular.
We arrived and discovered that Jane had decided to divorce Mark’s brother for undisclosed reasons at the time. Those reasons finally came to light in the Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath series years later. It has taken me this long to get the timeline straight in my head and realize that was going on in the middle of the chaos that was my life, and it just shows that Scientology secrets are very secret.
If you know what was described in the very first episode of that show, the man accused of assaulting Amy Scobee was my ex-brother-in-law. I was not aware of what he did back then. If my husband knew, he never told me, and drunk Mark didn’t keep secrets so my guess is he didn’t know either. Nor, as far as I know, did anyone else at the mission besides the few involved in cleanup. It was definitely hush-hush.
For the record I also didn’t see any evidence of Mark’s brother abusing his wife, and I am unaware of any consequences he incurred other than losing his spouse for any bad behavior he exhibited. But I don’t know if that means much. I doubt many people saw evidence of Mark abusing me.
While in Bellevue, I stayed home at first because I was in a cast and Mark didn’t want people seeing “how clumsy I was.” As in the photo above, I was wearing long sleeved shirts to hide my cast, but my right arm was basically useless. It was quite awkward as the cast was up past the elbow so I told Mark I’d just go to a doctor and get it taken off. He had a better idea. He had me come into the mission where some guy he knew on course cut it off with a hacksaw. Problem solved.
Walking into the mission was like walking into an ashtray. The people who smoked far outnumbered the non smokers and they smoked everywhere. After having my nose broken and not repaired properly three times by then, I had enough trouble breathing without inhaling smoke nonstop. While there I would take the Peugeot and take the baby on road trips in the forests and to the mountains, but I got really tired of rain all day every day.
Darryl and Jane ended up not getting a divorce but that’s only because Darryl had a secret he sprung on her. They had never been legally married! He had kept the marriage certificate after the ceremony and never filed it with the court. He told her that in front of us, laughing at just how clever he was. She had a motorcycle, she slammed her helmet on her head left him and Scientology in the dust when she discovered that. I don’t have any idea where she went. To the best of my knowledge that was the last anyone in our circles heard from her.
Drunk Mark admitted to me that his brother, who was the officiant at our wedding, had tried to get Mark to pull the same tactic at our wedding. However, after my dad and Mark and Darryl’s mom signed the document, I took it and said “I’ll drop it off on my way downtown Monday.” It was hard to fight that since Mark was headed to New York for a job. I did his brother’s second wife a favor when he remarried and took their marriage certificate to the courthouse for her.
With Jane leaving, that left us down one breadwinner. Darryl was on staff at the Mission, Mark was doing courses, and I was almost out of funds in everything but my secret savings account. The three of us rang in the New Year 1979 watching the ball drop in Times Square while the guys polished off a fifth of Chivas Regal that I had bought for them and I drank a coke. I went to bed about five minutes after it midnight in New York, only a little after 9 pm in Washington. The guys stayed up most of the night.
While they were mostly sober earlier in the evening, we had decided that in order to stay there, I had to get a job and start supporting us, or Mark and I needed to head to Salt Lake City where his mom had bought a house she wanted to flip. We chose Utah because more of his family lived there.
It was a five-bedroom house in horrible condition, but it was in a really good neighborhood. This was the condition of the master bathroom when we moved in.
Val Ross: From Scientology spy to extreme drug withdrawal guinea pig
[With Scientology spy wing, the Guardian’s Office, in tatters, Val Ross left us last time with her family heading from Los Angeles to Bellevue, Washington in 1978…]
tonyortega.substack.com
