Perfectly Clear

by Michelle LeClair

  “I’m on it! We can do this, Michelle,” she said, bouncing out of the office.

  I prayed she was right.

  * * *

  I didn’t anticipate hearing from Dror, but he called and asked that I meet him for lunch. I didn’t know what to expect, but I wanted answers. Dror was already at the restaurant when I arrived. He looked disheveled and nervous. I felt no compassion for him, just anger. There was no way this man, who had pretended to be my friend, was going to get away without answering questions, not if I had anything to say about it.

  Over lunch, I fired away. What happened to the distribution deal for Not Forgotten? I asked. Where were the contracts? What was the status of the bank loans I’d guaranteed? Why hadn’t he provided the financial audit he’d promised? What had happened to the other projects he said we had?

  Beads of sweat formed on Dror’s face. Shifting in his seat, he began stuttering and stammering. He seemed to be having trouble forming words. I looked him dead in the eye, determined to make him tell me what he knew. When he finally collected himself enough to speak, he reiterated what was in the letter from his attorney. Not Forgotten was a dead issue, he stammered. There was no contract with a distributor. They had backed out long ago and he was sorry that he had not told me the truth back then. Whatever money the investors had already gotten back—which, for most, wasn’t even half of their original investment—was all there was. There would be nothing forthcoming. As for future projects for Windsor, he said, there were none. Any association we had with Selma or Alicia Keys had ended. Lee Daniels, who had been our connection to Selma, was no longer associated with the movie. Keys had found another producing partner for her project. The only project left was Twist. “And you can have that,” he said, as if giving me a gift.

  In typical Scientology style, he then turned the tables on me.

  “Look, Michelle,” he said. “I never knew how you were selling this project. I’m just the director. I never offered any guarantees.”

  I was incredulous. Was this new, concocted story supposed to make what he had done wrong my problem? I wasn’t having it.

  “Dror, you aren’t fooling me,” I said. “You can sit here and tell me your made-up story, but I know exactly what happened. You handled the business. You were the sole signer on all bank accounts. You provided me with the distribution contracts and all of the financials. You met with my clients. You gave me the guarantees. You must have lied about everything. The only thing I did wrong was trust you!”

  I stood to leave.

  “Michelle, please sit down. There have been too many people that have come between us and filled you with information that is incorrect. You and I just need to talk and get back together as partners. We can work everything out together,” Dror wheedled.

  At that moment, I could see through this evil man. I was no longer swayed by Scientology or his facade. He was trying to set me up for his crimes and I was not having it!

  “You can take care of the check,” I said, grabbing my briefcase. “That’s the least you can do. You’ll hear from my attorney.”

  A week or so later, Dror came back to me again with a proposal.

  “I want to work with you,” he said, seeming contrite. “Let’s do a WISE arbitration. I’ve already spoken to them.”

  WISE is an acronym for World Institute of Scientology Enterprises. Its mission is to share L. Ron Hubbard’s management philosophy for “strict standards of ethical conduct in the workplace.” At a price, of course. The organization claims to be independent from the church, but it is staffed entirely by Scientologists, and the mediators are ethics officers who base their decisions on L. Ron Hubbard “technology.” The way it works is that the mediators review the evidence presented to them by both sides and then make a finding, which is final. The settlements are usually predicated upon both parties agreeing to get back in the church for auditing, courses or Sec Checks.

  “Let’s get back on church lines,” he said. “Then I’ll provide the rest of the paperwork you need to take over Windsor.”

  “Have WISE call me,” I said.

  I had about as much intention of turning myself over to WISE—aka the church—as I did of marrying another man.

  Later that month I took a call from Scott Foulk, a former business partner and one of my top life insurance agents. Scott hadn’t been supportive of my relationship with Charley. We’d had our ups and downs over the course of our twelve-year business relationship, but we deeply respected each other.

  “Michelle, do you know a Mark Loweree?” he asked.

  I’d met Mark Loweree through Mary Mauser. He was a high-ranking Scientologist and a good friend of hers. He had been Beth Linder’s life insurance agent, and after she started working with me instead, he had spitefully submitted a Knowledge Report accusing me of insurance fraud. Ironically, back then, Dror had written a Knowledge Report defending me against Loweree’s slanderous accusation: “Let me put it simply,” he wrote. “Loweree’s accusations of fraud (or any other inappropriate behavior, for that matter) have no basis in reality. And I know, and he doesn’t.”

  “Yes, I know Mark Loweree,” I said. “Why?”

  Scott sounded worried. “He called me last night and wanted a list of all our clients,” he said. “He told me that he and Mary Mauser and Dror and other Scientologists were doing a formal investigation of you and writing reports and he wanted to know if I would like to join them.

  “I told them no and hung up.”

  More than a year had passed since my confrontation with Mary Mauser about my sexuality. I should have known her righteous vengeance wouldn’t end there. I was about to learn that only six days after my final e-mail on July 14, 2010, dismissing her as my church counselor, her husband, Steve Mauser, submitted a “Things That Shouldn’t Be” report on me to the church’s Office of Special Affairs implicating me as “out ethics” in my insurance business. Mark Loweree followed up a week later with a second report charging that I was running an insurance scam and possible Ponzi scheme for a movie “and it must be investigated now.” Loweree followed up with a request to the Office of Special Affairs that the allegations be turned over to the state. In his report, he wrote, “Unhandled, Michelle’s activities are going to turn up front-page news. The headline is going to say ‘Scientology Defrauds Insurance Company of Millions.’”

  “I thought you needed to know this,” Scott said.

  I thanked Scott for his loyalty and hung up.

  It had been months since my last large donation to the Church of Scientology. Since I’d cut it off completely, there was nothing to protect me from the wrath of the thetans anymore. The full weight of the Black Propaganda campaign was bearing down on me.

  Suddenly, what was happening to me was crystal clear. My coming out had set in motion a predictable series of steps that we were taught in the church. As a lesbian with no intention of seeking a cure within the church, I was in violation of L. Ron Hubbard’s Second Dynamic of human survival, which promotes procreation and “is the urge toward existence as a future generation.” That automatically put me at a 1.1 on the Tone Scale and meant I was “perverted,” “covertly hostile” and “a danger to society.” Tolerance of such perversion was as actionable as the “crime” of homosexuality itself, Hubbard wrote. Failing to strike a blow against the enemy was itself a crime.

  Hubbard wrote that all of the Eight Dynamics of human survival are so closely connected that if someone is “out ethics” on one, he or she is likely “out ethics” on all the others; therefore, as Scientologists, we were encouraged to investigate any suspect’s Third Dynamic, or work, to find out what he or she was hiding there. Mary would have had no choice but to report me for being gay, and she then would have been asked in session what she was doing to “handle” me, this “out-ethics” person. The only correct response she could have given was that she was digging for dirt on what other “crimes” I
had committed.

  In October I received notification that I was under investigation by two separate state agencies: the Department of Corporations and the Department of Insurance.

  It was pretty clear what had prompted the government probe. If I had been reluctant to purge myself completely of the church and anyone associated with it, I wasn’t now.

  * * *

  Charley and I were lying in bed one night when she asked, “Honey, are you sure Celeste isn’t working for the church? I’ve always thought that she was the person who told Mary about us.”

  Everything Charley said to me was out of love and truth and I trusted her judgment. I realized with a jolt that she was right. Celeste had come to me three months before the Mary Mauser call, and at Dror’s behest. She handled all my travel arrangements and had the passwords to all my e-mail accounts. I felt sure she was working with Mary and Mark and Dror and whoever else was on the team to take me down.

  The next morning, I called Monica into my office.

  “Do you have any reason to believe that Celeste may be working with Dror directly and the church?” I asked her.

  “Michelle, we have all felt like something has been off with Celeste. She’s very secretive. She works late with Dror. She’s constantly asking for information that doesn’t pertain to her job. I constantly have to do her work as well as mine. I never wanted to bring this up to you because you had so much on your plate. What should we do?” Monica asked.

  “Give me thirty minutes and call everyone into the boardroom.” I said.

  I called my attorney and informed him of my conversation with Monica. He advised me on my next steps.

  I walked into the boardroom and explained that at nine a.m. the following morning a forensics specialist would be in the office to copy everyone’s work computers and laptops. This was purely a precaution to make sure that our computers and servers had not been hacked.

  I watched the blood drain out of Celeste’s face. I believed at that moment that she was guilty of something, and my intuition was confirmed when she left work early that day and took her laptop with her.

  I fired Celeste the next day.

  After Celeste left, the attorneys sent in an IT person, a computer whiz named Julian, to ensure that my computer network was secure. He informed me that he had been unable to remove Celeste as the administrator because my company didn’t own the server, and without her password, which she refused to give us, he wasn’t able to access any of our computer files or e-mails. I had always been under the impression that my company hosted our computer network. When I found out who did, I googled the name. Celeste had switched to a tech firm in Clearwater, Florida—near the church’s Flag compound—that was owned by a Scientologist.

  I needed to dig deeper, but didn’t know where to start.

  I remembered a man I’d met several years earlier at a city council meeting. I was appealing for funds to help tsunami victims in Thailand. He approached me afterward with the names of contacts he had in Asia. Our meeting led to a philanthropic partnership to get schools built in Sri Lanka. We ended up getting three schools and a day care center built, and the rest of the money was put in trust to fund scholarships for Sri Lankan orphans.

  I hadn’t seen Jonathan Kraut in years, but I knew that he was a private investigator with years of experience. More importantly, he had no affiliation with the Church of Scientology. I reached out to him and explained as briefly as I could my problems with the church and told him I was concerned that my computer had been illegally breached.

  Jonathan didn’t hesitate. He said he had a friend who was a forensic analyst for the government and he was certain they could help.

  He and the forensic analyst culled through all the data on my hard drive. After more than two hundred hours of probing, they were able to follow a trail of virtual evidence that led back to Celeste.

  While she was still in my employ, she had downloaded everything from my office hard drive—e-mails, confidential client information, my divorce documents—and sent over nineteen hundred e-mails to her personal e-mail address, as well as to an e-mail address listed to her husband, who was also a Scientologist.

  I would later discover an invoice in my bookkeeper’s files showing that Celeste had instructed her to pay a different IT specialist whose name I also didn’t recognize. I did some investigating of my own and discovered he was an administrator for the church’s computer network.

  My company was paying him to handle my server—which gave him admittance to all my personal correspondence and client information—and I didn’t know it.

  My entire digital life was in my computer, and all these Scientologists had access to it.

  “To me, this looks clearly like a coordinated effort,” Jonathan said. “I firmly believe Celeste is operating in concert with the church. I am concerned for you, Michelle, and I will do everything I can to help you.” I was beyond grateful for Jonathan’s help because I was starting to feel like I was crazy or some conspiracy theorist.

  It was one thing to have suspicions, but an investigator with twenty-plus years of experience and no score to settle with the church confirmed what I’d been fearing all along.

  If I couldn’t say definitively that the church was directing my downfall, I strongly believed that was the case.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Paul Haggis

  In January 2012, I reached out to Paul Haggis for advice about how to gain control of what was becoming an out-of-control situation. I was grateful when he agreed to meet with Charley and me for lunch. Paul is one of the church’s most famous defectors. An Oscar-winning screenwriter and film director, he had broken with the church three years earlier, in part because of its cruel treatment of his daughter when she came out as a lesbian. He’d told his story to Lawrence Wright, who went on to publish a long exposé in The New Yorker, after which the church excoriated both him and the writer. I admired his grit. We arrived at the restaurant after Paul. He was obviously a regular.

  “Oh, yes!” the hostess said. “Yes! Of course! He’s right over there.”

  Paul was unshaven and dressed in jeans and scuffed boots, the embodiment of what I thought a laid-back director type should look like. For the first few minutes, Paul and Charley talked about people they knew in common and projects each of them was working on. I found Paul to be warm and easy to talk to, but I was anxious about raising the subject of the church. Even though he had left Scientology behind in defense of his gay daughter, I wondered how much, if any, of the “groupthink” lingered.

  The church had launched a full-fledged smear campaign against Paul after the New Yorker piece. In a rebuttal published in the church’s magazine, his own sister, a Scientologist, was quoted, calling him “a chronic liar” and “a born con artist.” In an accompanying video on the church magazine website, she said his avarice drove him to step over anyone who got in his way.

  “He can’t do this,” she cried. “He has to know it’s not okay to destroy the reputations of good and decent people on the altar of his ambitions.”

  I wondered if the tears she shed were even vaguely about betraying her own brother. Or had she, like the rest of us, been programmed to defend the church at all cost? Even at the expense of our own families.

  Watching Paul’s interaction with Charley, I decided to trust him with my story. I found him to be compassionate and genuinely concerned about the state investigations and the flurry of damning reports that had been written about me by my fellow Scientologists.

  “This is a lot of crazy shit,” Charley said, looking between Paul and me. “And what kind of religion has people write reports on each other?”

  “This is not a religion,” he said. “This is a cult that has brainwashed you, Michelle. I know how difficult it is to realize what you were a part of and how hard it is to get out.”

  I assured Paul that my eyes were wide-open. Over
the past several years, I’d recognized the lunacy and distanced myself from the church. My worry was, how could I stop the runaway train that I was certain had been engineered by the church?

  Paul didn’t mince words. There was more trouble ahead, he said. He could almost guarantee it. The church considered me an enemy and that meant one thing: No matter what it took or how long, I had to be discredited and destroyed. If they couldn’t accomplish it by feeding the state with their bullshit, he said, they would find another way. “They will go through your trash, they will follow you, they will do whatever they have to do to destroy you, the same way they did to me,” he said.

  Paul was steadfast with his advice that I go public with my story. He said if I hadn’t already, I needed to come clean with everything in my past that the church could—and would—use against me. He had been open with Lawrence Wright about having done drugs and stolen as a kid because he knew the church would cull the contents of his ethics file and make hay with whatever was there.

  The book Wright was writing would be a perfect platform for me to tell my story, Paul said. Transparency was the only way.

  “Let me get him in touch with you,” he said.

  * * *

  I consulted my attorneys and they advised against going public with my story. It was too soon, they said. While the state was still conducting its investigation, I could incriminate myself without even knowing it. But I hadn’t done anything wrong except trust the wrong person, I said. I was a victim as much as anyone in the case. Why couldn’t I just go to the state and tell them what I knew? The attorneys said it was too risky. The state could take whatever I said and twist it to their advantage. Government agencies worked together, they said. Depending on the outcome of investigations by the Department of Corporations and the Department of Insurance, I was still subject to criminal charges.