At five o'clock, my bus left Hollywood for Los Angeles, where I had to change trains. My head was pounding, and I was still worried that they would find me. It didn't stop until my bus finally left Los Angeles, and only then was I able to relax, feeling the greatest relief I've ever had. I felt as if a huge weight had been lifted from me, and I was finally free.

I'm starting a new life

For nine months, I didn't leave the house, trying to find some meaning in what I had experienced and adjust to my new life. A week after I left, I began to write down my thoughts about what had happened to me in a journal, which I still have today. I was at a loss. For several months, I saw only my parents and felt solitude.

Six months after leaving, I made an attempt in my journal to analyze this group and see if I could figure out what was wrong with it. I wrote, "There's something very wrong with the way this organization is run, something fundamental that I can't point out yet." At this point, I wasn't ready to blame LRH for this situation, and I didn't know anything about mind control. However, one observation I made that I thought was an invaluable insight for me: people are cared for little or not at all. People are looked at from the point of view of benefits for the team.

An example is a girl from Holland who trained on Flag to be an auditor. She still had difficulty with English, which led to problems understanding the course materials and later in her attempts to audit. She was never able to rise above the most basic levels in auditing because of language problems. When she made mistakes, she was sent to ethics, and she was one of the first to be placed in the RPF. It didn't seem to occur to anyone that her problem was not "evil intentions towards the group" but a simple misunderstanding of English. No one cared enough about her to see the obvious. All that was noticed was that she was not fulfilling her duties as an auditor and must therefore have evil intentions, and that appropriate disciplinary measures were applied to her. If someone had taken care of her as a person rather than a commodity, they could have easily seen what her problem was and helped her learn English, but that's not the way things were done in the Sea Org.

I began to realize that, in the grand scheme of things, there was no real care and love in the Sea Org. All the "love" was performance-driven, and performance standards were often ridiculous. Of course, there were exceptions, sometimes genuine friendship arose between people against all odds, but this was just the exception, not the rule. Often, when such friendships were formed, every effort was made to separate people, as happened to Quentin and me. The real threat to Hubbard was not that there might be sex between us, but the friendship and emotional intimacy that developed between us. This separation from friends makes people feel isolated, even though they may be surrounded by hundreds of people in a cult environment.

In my opinion, the most effective thing an exit counselor can do when working with a Scientologist is to treat him with genuine concern. Scientologists, especially staff members, crave this kind of empathy. I can't stress that much enough. A compassionate, caring attitude is more likely to help a person break free from their mental prison than any information about the group. If you just give a person information, it won't work, because they will dismiss it as the lies of the "Vogue press."

I know this because I have lived in this environment for over five years. The main key to freeing a person from this cult is empathy. This is true of all cults, but especially of Scientology, where there is not even a hint of such feelings in the upper echelons. Showing empathy can be the key to breaking through the cult self to the real self. When an emotional connection is established, you can give them facts and help them see the way out of the trap.

The friendship that the Church of Scientology was never able to destroy was the friendship between Quentin and me. We continued to write to each other. In September, I received a letter from him saying that he was going through a difficult period. He was removed from auditing for "mistakes" made with a preclear who had cancer. Quentin desperately tried to help this man, but nothing worked. The letter was written in a very depressed tone. He sent me a photo, saying that it was a souvenir. I was very worried that he might try to commit suicide again and immediately wrote a response. I wrote that I was worried that he might feel like he had to kill himself, and if he had something like that in his mind, he might call at any time and talk about it.

On October 12th, I received the last letter from Quentin. He asked me not to worry, he would never try to commit suicide again. Things seemed to be going uphill for him. He wrote a proposal to his father, asking for unlimited leave so that he could enroll in flight school and study. It seemed to me that if this request was not approved, he would leave Scientology, which would be difficult for him. He will have to cut himself off from his parents and the only life he knew. I was determined to support him as much as I could if he so decided. Once again, I replied to the letter immediately. This time I didn't get a response. For the next eight months, I continued to send letters, hoping that they would reach him. I thought that maybe his parents found out that he was writing to me and made him stop receiving my letters. Since I had left Scientology, I was considered a suppressive person, and no Scientologist in good standing was allowed to associate with me, but that didn't stop Quentin. It occurred to me that the worst could have happened, and Quentin committed suicide, but I kept writing.

I've had many dreams about Quentin and Scientology. For a year, every night I had nightmares about this group, in which I ran away from Scientologists who were trying to get me back. Sometimes I dreamed of escaping from prison. A year later, I began to have such dreams less and less often.

In June 1977, I received a phone call from Chuck Ol, who worked in the custodians' office. He told me that Quentin had died in October. According to him, Quentin was found in a coma in his car near the airport in Las Vegas. The cause of death is "unknown" and Mary Sue has ordered a full investigation into his death. Chuck wanted to know if Quentin had called me or tried to make contact with me. I was stunned. I've felt like something had happened for a long time, but the message just shocked me. I told Chuck that Quentin had written to me shortly before his death, and that I would send him copies of the letters and do everything I could to help the investigation. I felt that his mother had a right to know what had happened to her son. I knew that she loved him very much. I made copies of the letters and sent them to Chuck.