Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology by Leah Remini, Rebecca Paley Read Free Book Online Page B

my tickets came into the office, I could take them to my room, burn them, and flush the ashes down the toilet. And that’s exactly what I started doing.
    I didn’t tell a soul what I was up to and I never got caught for my food scam. My attitude during this time was like “I gotta eat. I’m a Sea Org member, part of an elite group, and I’m clearing the planet, so get out of my way.” I was being trained to make the impossiblehappen. Rising above my own mental and physical limitations. I was feeling fierce. Having said that, I still had to live and operate within the very strict constraints of the Sea Org.
    Scientology is based on thousands of policies that leave no room for interpretation. Your actions are either “on policy” or “off policy.” One of the challenges Nicole and I had was keeping track of these many policies. There were so many and they were so hard to keep straight that we didn’t always know when we were breaking a rule. That’s what happened one day when the two of us were walking through the building while on post. A girl around our age, walking in front of us, stopped when she got to a door, paused in front of it, and told us to open it for her.
    “Are your arms broken?” Nicole said. “Open your own fucking door.”
    “I am a Messenger.”
    “What are you delivering?”
    We had no idea that she was a member of the Commodore’s Messenger Org (CMO), or even what that was. Well, we found out soon enough when we were routed to the Department of Inspections and Reports, otherwise known as Ethics, the department that deals with enforcing policy.
    Waiting for us in his office was a Master-at-Arms (MAA), essentially the person you were sent to when you were in trouble. Sort of like the strict parent. There are Ethics Officers throughout Scientology, and their job is to apply ethics technology to Scientologists at all levels.
    The MAA waiting for us walked around carrying a wooden stick, and his office was decorated with a picture of LRH and the Bridge, like pretty much every other room. There he showed us an organizational board with all twenty-one departments that made up Scientology. At the very top, of course, was “L. Ron Hubbard.”
    “So when you’re talking to a Messenger, you are talking to LRH,” the MAA said. “And when you’re disrespectful to a Messenger, you’re being disrespectful to LRH.”
    He showed us all these policies about Messengers and said thatfrom now on we were to address all CMOs as “Sir” or “Mr.” no matter what their gender.
    My takeaway from the MAA’s speech was that being a CMO was the shit. On our way back to our berthing, I told Nicole that I was going to be a Messenger.
    “You’re an asshole.”
    “I might be an asshole, but you’re still going to be calling me ‘Sir’ in about a minute.”
    I made an appointment with the Messenger recruitment office. The recruiter, reviewing my Ethics folder, which contained reports on all my “crimes,” had a different take. My record showed that I had a “problem with authority” and flirted too much with boys. “If you are pristine for six months, I will reevaluate you,” he said. I accepted his review and vowed that he would see me again and that I would get in.
    A few days after the Messenger incident, Nicole, my mom, and I were summoned to the Ethics office, in the CMO building. The Ethics Officer told me that he had a Knowledge Report that a friend of mine had written up about me. Knowledge Reports are a system of Scientologists reporting on one another, basically setting up the idea that
not
telling on your friends bars their freedom as well as makes you an accessory to the crime. It’s like systematic tattling. The report he had on me stated that Danny Burns (my first boyfriend, whom I claimed as soon as he arrived at Flag and kissed a lot) had touched my boobs over my blouse. Sex before marriage was forbidden for members of the Sea Org, as was heavy petting—but kissing was okay. In his