The Church Of Broken Homes

A murder at Sydney’s Scientology centre has thrown the shadowy organisation back into the spotlight. A former member tells Genevieve Gannon how the church almost destroyed her life.

- Genevieve Gannon

The first person Valeska Paris lost to religion was her mother. There are pieces of that cold day in September that have been blanked from her memory, but she will never forget how it felt to stand on a windy English hillside and watch the woman who had raised her be escorted away. Valeska was six years old and she felt confused and scared. Only a few hours earlier she had been at home in Switzerland saying goodbye to her teary grandmother as she and her family departed for Geneva airport. Her grandmother looked hopeless, she recalls. Valeska, now 41, hadn’t been told what was going on, but she knew it related to her parents’ divorce, and their religion, Scientology.

“It was a clear, crispy day,” Valeska says. She and her sister Melissa, then four, her two-year-old brother Raffael and their father were on a hillside in East Grinstead, Sussex. Her mother, Ariane, was standing apart from them, flanked by two men in grey uniforms. An old, blue bus was idling nearby and Ariane was crying.

“She said, ‘I’m going to the canteen to get hot chocolate, I’ll be right back’.” When she walked away, the men in grey went with her. The year was 1984 and the Paris children were about to become cadets in the Sea Org, the secretive and strict inner sanctum of the Church of Scientology. Their mother would remain a “public”, or non-Sea Org member of the church. “It was so upsetting. My mum just disappeared,” Valeska says. “I was crying my eyes out, ‘Where’s mum?’.”