Yuliya Keaton tells us that she had lost her three children — ages 9, 11, and 13 — to foster care and felt helpless and depressed. She figured she would never get them back, and didn’t want to just sit around the house. She wanted to do something meaningful.
So she decided to infiltrate the Church of Scientology.
Yesterday, Keaton put a series of five short videos on YouTube explaining her spy mission and what happened once she was caught. This morning, we called her up to ask her some things she didn’t address in those video segments.
Why, for example, did she think it was worth her time to try such a stunt?
“I was depressed when I lost my kids, so I thought, what the heck. At that time I didn’t think I had any chance to get my kids back,” she says.
She was living rent-free with her ex-husband, and had saved up some money from a job. So she spent about a thousand dollars on spy equipment — including hidden cameras, one even concealed in a tampon — and also spent money to enroll in classes at Scientology’s Tampa “org.”
She had previous experience as a church member, but under a different name. She says she took the courses at Tampa in order to establish a new record as Yuliya Keaton. Then she volunteered to join the Sea Org, and was taken to the church’s administrative headquarters in Los Angeles to do her Estates Project Force (EPF), a sort of boot camp for new Sea Org members that usually takes about a month to complete.
Keaton says she finished it in ten days. We can confirm that because for an upcoming story, we’ve talked to two people who were at the LA headquarters at the same time as Keaton, and they knew her there. One of them tells us they were surprised to see Keaton complete her EPF so quickly. Keaton says she was able to finish it quickly because she’d taken some of the courses at the Tampa org.
Like other Sea Org members, Keaton was required to fill out a detailed life history in order to join. How, we asked her, did she manage to do that and go through security-checking (interrogations with an e-meter) and not give up information about her previous time in the church or reveal her intentions to do surveillance?
“I lied,” she says. “They sec checked me so many times… I don’t know, I can make the needle float at will,” she added, referring to the needle on the e-meter, which Scientologists believe can tell when someone is holding back information. But Keaton says she could produce a “floating needle” when she wanted to, indicating that she had told the truth.
We had seen an e-mail she sent to a friend saying that she was hiring an attorney, but Keaton now tells us that she does not have one.
“I can’t afford an attorney,” she says.
As she explains in the videos below, her plot was discovered on May 30 when a security official spotted her surreptitiously recording a video of Scientology leader David Miscavige’s speech at the recent Portland Ideal Org opening. She was interrogated for hours, then on May 31 through June 5 she was held in a hotel near the Los Angeles airport.
She says the church threatened to have her arrested, but never did. As far as she knows, she’s not facing any criminal charges.
She tells us the church tried to get her to say that former high-level Scientology officials Marty Rathbun or Mike Rinder or Karen de la Carriere were behind her plot, but she said it wasn’t true. “They were trying to make a deal — If I cooperated with them they wouldn’t have me arrested,” she says.
On June 5, she was allowed to leave and travel back to Florida because she threatened to “drop the body” — Scientology jargon for suicide. She says she told them that she had to attend an upcoming court hearing about her children, and if they made her miss it, she would kill herself.
“The didn’t want me to drop my body in the hotel,” she says.
She says the church officials told her they may bring her back to California to face legal charges of some sort, but since she arrived in Florida on June 5, she has heard nothing from them.
We asked her about the videos that she had taken while she was in the Sea Org. If she did give her password out to multiple people, why haven’t those videos surfaced?
“I don’t know what people did with them. I asked people not to post them, but some of the videos are very good. In one, for example, I have someone teaching us how to take money from people.” She says she taped an instructor explaining that when a person says they have no money to donate to the church, it’s best to take them down to their bank to see how much they actually have and get them to withdraw it.
Another person, who asked not to be named, did confirm to us that they had seen documents that Keaton had smuggled out of the Sea Org, but told Keaton that they didn’t want them and wanted nothing further to do with her.
We also had to ask about reports that a few years ago, Yuliya had claimed in Internet posts that she had lived as L. Ron Hubbard’s son Quentin in a previous life.
“It’s a result of that auditing, I guess,” she says. “I made some crazy posts in the past, that I was Quentin Hubbard. I think it’s just a result of that auditing. I have done that in the past, but I’ve erased that.”
In her videos, she gave more detail about her infiltration, and how she was caught…
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
As we reported earlier, based on its interrogations of Keaton, the church sent out legal threat letters to several church critics, including Karen de la Carriere. But these letters were only e-mailed, and no letters followed.
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The Sun Apologizes to Space Aliens
We told you earlier that The Sun had reported some UFO sightings over Saint Hill Manor, Scientology’s UK headquarters. Predictably, the church’s attorneys sent letters asking for a retraction or an apology or something. So The Sun decided to write an apology — but to the space aliens, not the Scientologists.
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So Much for Cheering Up Will Smith
Just a few days after we celebrated the parody website Cheer Up Will Smith, it appears to have been nuked. We can imagine why.
The comedians behind it call themselves The Good Liars, and their hilarious video about Scientology’s New York org is still online. In case you missed it the last time…
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Las Vegas Actress Turns to TV for Help with Scientology Harassment
Vitina Marcus figured she was being targeted for Scientology recruitment because of her past as an actress. So she turned to KLAS-TV Channel 8 in Las Vegas — Nathan Baca’s station! — and look what happened…
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Posted by Tony Ortega on June 13, 2013 at 12:20
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