Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty
“It’s insane, it’s just insane,” Valerie Haney kept saying as she emerged from her first day undergoing the Church of Scientology’s ultra-secretive “religious arbitration” process.
Dressed in a tight black minidress and thigh-high leather boots, which, with her long curly hair and spiky sharp fingernails, Haney presented a picture about as far as possible from the drab Sea Org uniforms she had been forced to wear for decades.
Her two attorneys, Guy D’Andrea and Graham Berry, were ready with their notepads, and all eyes were on Haney, who was set up in front of a portable backdrop in a hotel room at the Commerce Casino, just a mile away from Scientology’s massive printing plant warehouse southeast of Los Angeles—where she had just spent the past several hours reliving the most traumatic events of her life.