The Top 25 People Crippling Scientology, No. 16: Marc Headley

On August 5, we started a countdown that will give credit — or blame — to the people who have contributed most to the sad current state of Scientology. From its greatest expansion in the 1980s, the church is a shell of what it once was and is mired in countless controversies around the world. Some of that was self-inflicted, and some of it has come from outside. Join us now as we continue on our investigation of those people most responsible…

The Top 25 People Crippling Scientology#16: Marc and Claire Headley

Marc Headley

Marc Headley and his wife Claire come up several times in the pages of Janet Reitman’s book, Inside Scientology. The young couple met while working in the Sea Org at Scientology’s secretive desert headquarters near Hemet, California. They were not Even though they achieved high-ranking positions in the organization, they endured stark and primitive conditons as two of the many nameless Sea Org drones who work so very hard. Reitman captures the drama of their meeting and marriage, the dread Claire felt when she realized she was pregnant even though Sea Org members were not allowed to have children, and the devastation Claire felt as she aborted two pregnancies knowing that not to do so would mean she’d be separated from her husband.

Claire Headley

Eventually, they escaped from that life, and Marc went on to start a lucrative business in Los Angeles (which he recently sold — the couple now lives with their two children in Colorado). But what really puts Marc on this list is what he did once he got out of Scientology — he didn’t let well enough alone. Headley knew that he possessed crucial, damning information about Scientology: he’d worked directly with Tom Cruise as the actor’s guinea pig while Cruise learned how to audit. Headley had also worked closely with Scientology leader David Miscavige and had witnessed the violence and chaos on the base. Headley began leaking his observations under the name “Blown for Good” on the Internet. What BFG had to say alarmed Scientology so much, we know now that the church expended enormous resources to confirm that it was Headley leaking that information.

But Headley didn’t stop at Internet posts. He wrote a book, also called Blown For Good, and he and Claire filed lawsuits against Scientology for years of sub-minimum wage pay. The lawsuits were dismissed, but not after becoming another resource-suck for the church, and there’s still a chance that the lawsuits may be revived.

The book, however, didn’t miss. It’s easily the best self-published book I’ve ever run across, and its escape scenes seem ready to film. What I wrote about the book when it was first released:

Headley’s story provides a damning account of life working for Scientology leader David Miscavige at the secretive desert base, where young people who sign billion-year contracts work 100-hour weeks for little or no pay with the ever-present threat that they may be pulled into hellish disciplinary drills, or separated permanently from friends and family members for the slightest perceived infraction.

The experience of the Sea Org is so alien to life for the rest of us, it can be difficult even for former members to really communicate what that life is like. And that’s one of the reasons I found Headley’s book so useful:

Perhaps the best service that Headley provides with Blown for Good is giving non-Scientologists the sense of what it’s really like to work, day in and day out, in such a strange organization, from the lowliest laborer mucking out excrement in a Gold Base pond (Headley says shit was coming out of his ears and pores for days) to what kind of luxuries the celebrities and high-ranking members enjoy.

Even with their lawsuits stalled, the book done, and their new life going well in Colorado, Marc is not finished getting the word out about Scientology’s abuses. Just last month, he shared leaked Scientology spying documents with the Voice, showing that the church’s method for retaliating against his outspoken views was to turn his friends into spies.

Headley shared something else with us as that we’ve been working on for some time. We’re finally going to give you a look at it next week. For now, you can be sure that Marc Headley continues to do what he can to expose what his former employer is all about. Now, for some videos…

Marc was part of a group that traveled to Germany in 2008 to speak at a conference about Scientology’s abuses. Here’s one of the videos of Marc’s talk: