Ex-Scientologist story #342, Lifestyles of the Rich and Hungry. Violence at the top.

Lana Michell once cooked the beans; now spills them.

Normally I don’t include the stories of independent Scientologists in this blog but this tasty morsel was just too rich to pass up.  Lana Mitchell was a gourmet cook who used to cook up fantastic meals until Ton Cruise got food poisoning and the blame fell on her for feeding him a bad shrimp.   She took the blame and consequently it was out of the kitchen and scullery into hard labor among the more common slaves of the cult.  She confirms the rumor that Tom’s butt is on the menu for the cult leader’s dessert.

Interesting Scientology news coming out of Australia in this piece which aired during what were the wee hours here for us this morning.

Australia’s Bryan Seymour has produced some of that country’s biggest scoops about Scientology in recent years, and he has a diverting item in this Today Tonight piece about Lana Mitchell, who helped to lavish gourmet meals on Scientology leader David Miscavige at the church’s secretive desert headquarters in California — until, that is, she was accused of feeding a bad shrimp to Tom Cruise, and as a result lost her job, lost her family, and lost her friends.

Mitchell was a Sea Org member for 15 years, one of the hardcore Scientologists who sign contracts promising to work for the church for a billion years, lifetime after lifetime.

After working at several different posts, by 2003 she had become a cook at “Int,” the sprawling, 700-acre international headquarters of the church in the California desert Scientology leader David Miscavige calls home.

Last year, Mitchell first surfaced to tell publicly some of her story at Marty Rathbun’s blog, where many other longtime church members are making public their own stories of disaffection with Miscavige and the official church.

Mitchell explained that she had left the church in 2004 and was now part of the growing independent Scientology movement. But in that blog item, she didn’t go into detail about what caused her fall from grace at the Int headquarters: “I will not at this time include a long account of how I came to be declared,” she wrote.

Now, she’s apparently changed her mind. In her interview with Seymour, she explains that as Miscavige’s cook, it was her job to lavish on the church leader gourmet meals every few hours, and especially when Miscavige’s good friend Tom Cruise showed up.

But when Cruise got food poisoning from a bad shrimp, Mitchell says she was unfairly blamed, and found herself cut off not only from her job, but also from her friends and family.

The above was taken from the Village Voice Blog, November 2, 2011,  Go here for the link which includes a very cool video.  http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2011/11/lana_mitchell_scientology_tom_cruise_poisoned.php

The violence of David Miscavige

Here is a chilling statement that is contained in the text of Lana Mitchel’s interview with Bryan Seymour on November 2, 2011.

“I was working in [Miscavige’s] organisation which is called the Religious Technology Center, I worked there for six years. … It would have been in 1994 in a meeting in the International Building and he struck his brother Ronnie Miscavige. He hit him with the back of his hand, right in the stomach and Ronnie wasn’t expecting it and it winded him, that was the first time. I’ve seen him do a similar thing to Norman Starkey many times who is the trustee of Scientology. I’ve seen him hit Ray Mithoff. I know I’ve heard many accounts of other instances of violence which I know would be true because I have witnessed enough myself to be able to say well you know there’s substance to that because I’ve seen and witnessed it myself. …     “[Miscavige] does character assassination continually on anybody that he considers to be a threat; anybody who he considers is speaking out or has the potential to be a threat, he will go out of his way to assassinate or to destroy the character of that person in the eyes of others.     “This is how he ‘de-powered’ all of the other executives within international Scientology; this is how he’s become virtually the head of Scientology. There is nobody else left, everybody else if you go back and have a look at videos of events back in the nineties you see… They’re all gone, Guillaume Leserve, Mark Yager, Mark Ingber… When I left [in 2004], the entire place was in a state of fear.”   (Source: http://au.news.yahoo.com/today-tonight/lifestyle/article/-/11285270/cruise-out-of-control [see link to transcript at the end, for above quote.])