Free to shine
Shiny & Free
I'm starting this thread in this forum as overall it shows the devastation disconnection and 'scientology handling' and the fear of talking causes within familes. It's a harrowing read and there are thousands of stories with the same themes. It happened, it happens, it has to stop.
http://tonyortega.org/2016/12/09/di...de-scientology-its-even-worse-than-you-think/
Comment:
http://tonyortega.org/2016/12/09/di...de-scientology-its-even-worse-than-you-think/
Disconnection, neglect, and suicide: Scientology, it’s even worse than you think
We first heard from Marie Bilheimer more than a year ago. Like so many other former members of the Church of Scientology, she wanted to communicate with us even though she wasn’t ready to go public with her story.
We understood. Marie’s is one of the more disturbing tales that we’ve heard, and we told her we’d be here when she decided she wanted our readers to hear what she’d been through.
We’re hearing from a lot of people now that Leah Remini is changing the public understanding of Scientology in a big way with her A&E series, Scientology and the Aftermath. And one of the people we heard from was Marie. Emboldened by Leah’s show, she’s decided it’s time to come forward.
And we’ll just say, you should brace yourself.
<snip>
So she walked down the stairs, past the area of new construction, and out of the building to the van.
She only found out later that day that she’d walked right past her husband, who had hanged himself in the area of the building being renovated.
Aaron Poulin’s suicide — as a Sea Org worker, and in a Sea Org facility right in the heart of Los Angeles — somehow didn’t make the Los Angeles Times or any other newspaper. Marie tells us that Scientology worked very hard to keep Aaron’s death a secret so that only a very few people ever heard about it. For years afterward, she would run into people who would ask her how Aaron was doing.
<snip>
The certificate June is holding reveals that she had finished the Student Hat, and had learned L. Ron Hubbard’s “study technology.” Usually, this is one of the first courses that a new Scientologist encounters in their church career. But under leader David Miscavige, longtime Scientologists are being pressured to retake beginning courses such as Student Hat. For a veteran educator like June to be holding this certificate, you might imagine a PhD showing off a diploma for redoing an elementary school class. Such is the upside down state of Scientology under Miscavige.
Three days after June posted this photo of herself to Facebook, she made a grim discovery in her own house.
Her daughter Alison had hanged herself.
Comment:
http://tonyortega.org/2016/12/09/di...even-worse-than-you-think/#comment-3043959466Aaron Smith-Levin • 8 hours ago
It's incredible that Marie has come forward with this story. I was in the Sea Org at PAC when Aaron committed suicide. All I knew of Aaron is that he was a good-looking guy who had a reputation for always being in trouble, but was married to someone at CMO IXU, which was kind of a big deal, because CMO IXU is as close as you can get to Int Management without actually being promoted to Int. CMO IXU is the CMO unit that supervises middle managment. Aaron was just a low-level staff member at AOLA, one of the local service orgs.
I remember when people started asking where Aaron had gone. The security guards would literally say,
"What do you mean? I don't know. He's around. Aaron's not missing", like literally twilight zone shit. You're supposed to think you're nuts for thinking Aaron's missing.
Then later on, when I was working for Kurt Feshbach, I hired a guy who had just left the Sea Org after spending over 10 years as a security guard outside the ASI building on Hollywood Blvd. His name was Bart Zacks. Really good guy. Bart also lived at the Hollywood Inn. One day Bart tells me the story of how he (Bart) found Aaron Poulin hanging from the rafters at the HI, and he'd left a note, so it wasn't an accident.
I could not fucking believe it; that someone I knew, someone I had been in the Sea Org with, had taken his own life years earlier, and that it had been 100% successfully covered up.
Because of learning this...that the Church would cover up a death even of someone who was IN GOOD STANDING and was IN THE SEA ORG, and cover it up from PEOPLE WHO ACTUALLY WERE ALSO IN GOOD STANDING and WERE HIS FRIENDS...this was part of what drove me to secretly message Karen de la Carriere when I found out her son Alex had died. I thought, "They're not going to fucking tell her...".
Not only did the Church not tell her; they actively conducted an investigation to find out WHO DID.
Man, this shit is crazy. Thank you Marie for telling your story today. It all helps.