Donnerstag, 9. August 2012



















"At 13, They Told Me I Was a Freeloader" - "Oluremi "Mimi" Faust is one of the stars of VH1's popular show Love & Hip Hop: Atlanta, which runs on Monday nights. A week ago, Mimi stunned the show's largely African-American audience when she revealed that she had been abandoned at 13 by her mother, who was a Scientologist.
With the help of our commenting community, we soon identified her mother, and then tracked down some people who had worked with her in Scientology's hardcore "Sea Org."
... Each week, hundreds of urban culture websites compete to summarize the stormy triangle between Stevie J, a singer he's been sleeping with named Joseline, and the mother of his young child, Mimi Faust. As the show has developed, Faust has come off as the adult in the group, and she's attracted a large following who characterize her as a strong woman with smart entrepreneurial skills.
It was something of a shock, then, during the seventh episode, aired on July 30, when Mimi admitted during a therapy session that she's dealing with abandonment issues because of her mother's obsession with Scientology.
Twitter lit up with viewers asking, what the hell is Scientology? (An exceedingly white movement, Scientology has been trying to make inroads in the black community for years. One result of that effort is the bizarre involvement of Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam.)"






via
Steve Hassan - Freedom of Mind









"Kirsi left Scientology in 2007. She's from Finland and today lives in France. And she not only worked with Olaiya in Clearwater, she had the same job: clearing church members for services. (She sent me the photo of Olaiya and Joyce Earl. I then confirmed their identities with their former boss, Mike Rinder, who ran OSA during these years.)
"I asked Kirsi to describe the job that she and Olaiya were doing.
Scientology is a very security-conscious organization. Not only is the church constantly on the lookout for outsiders trying to infiltrate it, it also constantly interrogates its own members to sniff out anyone who might be tempted to speak to the press or to law enforcement. Also, it wants to know when a member has secrets which might compromise them. If they're hiding something, they are not allowed to get access to the church's counseling, called "auditing."
It was Kirsi and Olaiya's job to get those secrets from church members coming to Clearwater -- Scientology's spiritual mecca."








'Ramana and I spoke at length Friday night over Skype; she lives in the Blue Mountains outside Sydney today. As a child, she grew up on Sydney's outskirts and then lived in its inner city.
It's an unusual name, I pointed out, and she explained that her last name is a combination that came from her mother's Hungarian background and her father's British family, respectively. And Ramana? "It's Indian. My parents were hippies," she says.
They separated when she was young, and her mother became a schoolteacher. Her father, meanwhile, was into "alternative" therapies. "He was a bit of a seeker. But it was my mom who got into Scientology."
Ramana was 4 years old. "Basically, I was raised in it," she says. "I went to a Scientology school. I started on course at the org in Sydney probably from about 7."'


















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