Escaping Scientology : An Insider's True Story: My Journey With the Cult of Celebrity Spirituality, Greed and Power

Escaping Scientology Part I sweeps you into the lives of two young adults filled with hope and love as designer Karen and her award-winning musician-composer husband Peter overcome obstacles to success in the music and fashion business together. Scientology re-focuses their goals toward the importance of clearing the planet and recruiting celebrities into Scientology to built its social capital. Karen unfolds the basic beliefs of Scientology that led to her radicalization into the Sea Organization at the Celebrity Centre, a fortress where artists aspire to achieve greatness while attaining spiritual freedom through L. Ron Hubbard's teachings. Karen shows how celebrities and Scientology are lured into the group, and develop a co-dependent relationship from which few can break out.Part II reveals Karen as a flawed and complex woman when she and Peter move to the secretive International Management headquarters, where they join 800 fanatical Sea Org members that made billion-year commitments to make this a Scientology world without war, criminality, and insanity. Karen finds the dystopian outpost and its global operations to be proof that Time magazine's 1991 article, "The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power" captures the essence of Scientology's mindset that she describes as "war is everything and everything is war." She is no passive victim as she attempts to stay in the driver's seat and keep their marriage intact while fighting the pressures of the Int base culture that attempts to break them apart. Scientology goes under "Cruise Control" as Miscavige becomes obsessed with his biggest trophy, Tom Cruise, and stiffens his control and abusive punishment methods on the Int base staff. Karen rebels against regulations and spends time in Scientology's prison camp. After two attempts to escape the Int base, she is trailed by security guards and coerced into returning. Failing to escape, she questions the evidence of her own senses, and makes a mind-twisting re-commitment to become the best version of a Sea Org member she can be. Karen carves out a world she can live within as she is promoted into the highest echelons of management, appointed by the Chairman of the Board RTC to Int Management Public Relations Officer and later to take charge of the image of Sea Org staff internationally from the Int Finance Office. While working on special projects under David and Shelley Miscavige, she travels to Scientology bases around the world where she sees human rights violations set in place by Hubbard's policies that cause her to conclude Scientology is a profitable business building up billions of dollars of assets on the backs of Sea Org slave labor, while hiding behind the banner of the First Amendment, claiming benefits and protection as a non-profit religion.The epilogue of Part III portrays the mind-wrenching process of physical escape, and psychological agony as Karen plies herself out of Scientology's grip and endures its cruel disconnection policy. She re-acclimates herself to life on the outside while, brick by brick, she disassembles the walls of the mental prison she had built, and survives with the help of her accomplice and the love and support of her family.Karen Schless Pressley's narrative memoir shows that Scientology's plan, authored by L. Ron Hubbard and David Miscavige, is filled with flaws: While the leaders manage to impose their will on thousands of members who followed blindly and spent exorbitant amounts of money or dedicated their lives to achieve spiritual freedom, they grossly underestimate the power of individual free will in members brave enough to question the status quo and to take control of their own outcome in Scientology's "total spiritual freedom" game.