Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [182]
The following day, Stefan ordered Tanja some items from the Victoria's Secret catalog. Then he sat down and composed a letter. "I love you and know you still have love for me too," he wrote. "Regardless of everything, I have no regrets of having left the Sea Org. I am free. I have my dignity."
Stefan then tucked the letter into a pair of jeans and put a cell phone in the box as well. He taped the package securely and, for good measure, "kicked it around to make it look like it was coming from Ohio. And then I sent it by UPS." Then he waited.
A few days later, Tanja received the package. Knowing she hadn't ordered anything, she took it as a message. "It was surreal," she said. "But there was a calmness about me." She opened the package and read her husband's letter. "Call me!"
Tanya wavered. She wanted to be with Stefan, of course. But after all she'd been through, how could she leave? She considered all the ways in which people had escaped from the base: They'd driven off in a car or motorcycle—Tanja didn't have either. They jumped the fence—exhausted from working long hours and eating rice and beans, Tanja was too weak. Simply walking down the highway would be easiest, but that hardly ever worked: only three people she'd ever heard about had successfully blown using that technique.
She wrote Stefan a letter telling him she didn't see how it would be possible. But she couldn't stop thinking about her husband. "I knew once I had sent the letter I had crossed a line," she said. One night, summoning every ounce of her courage, she called him.
Overjoyed, Stefan urged Tanja to communicate with him by voice mail and text message, methods he knew would be hard to trace. Through these furtive exchanges, Tanja learned about her husband's new life. He was making over $100,000 per year as a production designer. He had a house in the San Fernando Valley and a car. Were she to join him, they could have children, he promised her. Finally, after several weeks, Stefan convinced his wife to risk escape.
On August 5, 2006, Tanja took a ladder and walked toward the wall near the Castle, the only spot on the base not surrounded by an electric fence. It was just after midnight. Outside the wall, Stefan sat in his dark blue Mustang, waiting. His friend John, in a separate vehicle, drove down the road to an area where it was possible to pull onto the base. This, they knew, would alert the security guard, who would immediately go to investigate, at which point Tanja would jump over the wall. Even if she happened to trip the wire at the top, setting off an alarm, she would still have at least two minutes to run.
Stefan had painstakingly organized the plan. He and John stayed on the phone as John parked on the base. A few minutes later, a roving security guard walked toward his car. John hung up—the agreed-upon signal. Then Stefan called Tanja. "Go baby, go!" he said. "Now!"
"I'm going!" Tanja said, and taking a deep breath, jumped over the wall into the darkness. She saw her husband's waiting car and ran toward it. Then, with no one behind them, they sped off down Highway 79, out of the dust-choked San Jacinto Valley, and toward Los Angeles, and freedom, unleashed from the bonds of Int, David Miscavige, the Sea Organization, and the Church of Scientology.
The Scientologists who have left the church since the mid-2000s, a group from all strata of the organization, form part of what some have called the Second Great Exodus. There is a significant difference between this generation and those who were part of the exodus of the 1980s, largely thanks to the Internet, which has enabled former members, both Sea Org and public, to find one another and unite over their shared experience. "You don't tend to blame yourself when you see that others went through the same thing," commented Jeff Hawkins, who has become an outspoken critic of Scientology's current management. "It's made for a strong, well-informed, and coordinated group of ex-members, which the church has never had to face before."
Hawkins has helped this