Hard manual labour, long work hours, cold oats and milk for breakfast.. and a relationship with a 30-year old member of The Jive Aces: that’s what life looked like for 14 year old Zoe Hancock. In a damning new interview, yet another victim of abuse has stepped forward and detailed the horrors of life at the Church of Scientology’s UK headquarters near East Grinstead, Sussex.
At the age of 14 Zoe left home in Sunderland and made her way to Saint Hill, destined for what she thought would be a life of service: helping to ‘Clear’ the planet and make a difference in the world. But within days she was ordered to shovel clay from a lakebed and single-handedly flatten a 5 acre field with a pickaxe so that it could be used as a car park for the forthcoming gathering of Scientology’s membership body, the IAS (International Association of Scientologists).
Hard manual labour, she was told, forms part of the ‘Estates Project Force’ (EPF) – a boot camp all new recruits must pass before joining the ranks of the church’s elite Sea Organisation. She’d signed a one billion year contract dedicating not just this life, but all future lives to working for the Church and the two-month program was almost like a rite of passage. “If I could just get through this, it’ll all be okay” she told herself.
12 weeks later she graduated the EPF and was given the job of recruiting new people into the Sea Org… but was quickly transferred to become the Director of Communications for Saint Hill’s evening and weekend shift known as ‘Foundation’. But the workload and pressure from other executives meant she rarely had a morning off. “Whether we had chance to get breakfast before we left [our accommodation] was touch and go. But even if we did get breakfast, it would be raw oats with cold milk.” She says. “We were lucky if there might have been some sugar left over.”
The Sea Organisation is a para-military group of committed Scientologists the Church describes as a “religious order.” In return for a life time of service, they are provided communal berthing, food and a weekly stipend of just £50. But according to Zoe, although food was provided it was often subpar. “We would eat chickpeas and rice because there was no money for food, so it was basic rations. We were being sustained on chickpeas and rice and raw porridge oats if we had time in the morning to eat them.” She explains. “It was probably around 9 hours a day on hard manual labour and 4 hours a day on course – with very short meal breaks.”
But perhaps most harrowing of all, at the age of 14 Zoe found herself in a relationship with a 30-year old man. “Children aren’t children” in Scientology, she tells us. “They’re an adult stuck in a small body” and “that’s not something I was aware of before I joined the Sea Org.”
According to Scientology scripture, we are immortal spiritual beings known as ‘thetans’ and have lived millions of lives prior to this one – and are destined to live millions more. This means that although you may be in a child’s body, you have the same life experience as any grown adult – and in Scientology, you’re treated as such. “If you complain as a 14 year old that you are tired, you’re told to stop being ‘effect’. Get on with it. You’re billions of years old, what’s your problem?”
“There’s nothing that you can equate to it outside of Scientology. I wasn’t a 14 year old, I was the same as the 30 year old man I was speaking to.”
And it is due to that belief that a relationship was permitted with a member of Scientology band The Jive Aces despite a 15-year age difference. The Britain’s Got Talent semi-finalists are all members of the Sea Org and by traveling across the world to perform upbeat jive and swing shows, they are seen as a PR front: an opportunity to disseminate L. Ron Hubbard’s teachings by promoting Scientology-sponsored social betterment programs like The Truth About Drugs or United for Human Rights.
“He is in a public facing role within Scientology, I was 14 and he was around 30 years old – double my age. We were openly in a relationship despite the massive age difference and power imbalance. It wasn’t even questioned,” Zoe tells us.
“I started looking at um Scientology stuff online and realised that there are people now who have stepped out from that shadow of fear that we have all lived with for so long. You just don’t talk about what goes on within Scientology because hey will come after you and they will be relentless and you will suffer.”
When Zoe reported her abuse to the Police, she was told she’d struggle to seek justice. “Under current laws, it would be classed as grooming. But we’re going back to a time when modern slavery and grooming weren’t legislated,” she says.
But then she found a community of ex-Scientologists speaking out. “So many of their stories ring true for me in my experience. And if we want change to happen, we have to all bring our stories forward because if we don’t, then nothing changes.”
You can watch her interview in full, below:
