A Murky Pool of Family Abuse and Deceit

When Marc Headley tried to drown his own mother, he sank to a low of abusive conduct toward his family from which he would ultimately never return.

“He was getting about my size, strength-wise, so it was getting harder and harder to handle him,” said Trudy, his mother, of the incident when her son was in his early teens. They were swimming together in a pool when Marc dunked her under the water. Trudy recalled thinking, “‘He’s a kid, you know; it’s an innocent thing.’

“But what wasn’t innocent about it was the fact that when I tried to come up for air, he put my head under the water again. Now he did this about three, four times. I could hold my breath for a long time, right. But he wasn’t playing. He was actually trying to drown me. And he will remember this. He was trying to drown me,” she said, “to the point where you feel like you’re going to die.”

Trudy said he stopped just short of the point where she was going to have to hurt her son to defend herself.

“At that point it went way beyond being mischievous,” she said. “His pattern was turning from innocent or pranks into destructive activities that are almost unforgivable.”

Marc used the same underwater torture on his younger sister, Stephanie, in a similar fashion.

“He thought it was a great game to hold me under the water as long as he could, until he knew I couldn’t breathe…on the verge of drowning,” Stephanie said. “Marc thought this was funny.”

Marc Headley’s path to terrorizing his mother and sister had already been rough.

In grade school, there were the calls from Marc’s school to Trudy and his father about fights, arguments, attitude and other behavioral problems.

Trudy hoped her troubled son would get interested in Cub Scouts. She became a den mother, planning activities for Marc and a half-dozen other kids so they could learn to work together and “have some fun and a learning experience at the same time.”

But Marc “would just get in the middle of it and personally attack me and belittle me,” she said. “It was mortifying because I was doing it for him and for the other kids. He would viciously insult me in front of all of them.”

As Marc got older, his “pranks,” said Trudy, “were turning into a frame of mind of destruction and pain and delivering hurt—and it didn’t matter who it was.”

After Headley injured a fellow soccer player so seriously he had to be taken off the field on a stretcher, a coach threatened to throw Marc off the team before he hurt anyone else. Trudy heard the searing words:

“Marc doesn’t play for the game, he plays to take people out. He plays to injure people, he’s out there to hurt them.”

Marc’s behavior only worsened, with Trudy taking the brunt of it.

Stephanie witnessed with horror as Marc, at age 14—and much taller and bigger than Trudy—screamed at their mother, who was then seven months pregnant, and pushed her to the floor. He made no attempt to find out if she was hurt or to help her up.

“My mom was just so upset and angry, she kicked him out,” Stephanie said. “I was standing there totally afraid and not knowing what was going to happen with my mom’s unborn son and my mom. It’s his mom, no matter what, it’s his mother—and he didn’t care and he left.”

Trudy had hope when Marc, at 16, decided to join the Church of Scientology’s religious order, devoting his life to helping others. She believed her son had finally grown up and decided to be a responsible young man. Stephanie later followed her brother.

But Marc’s lack of concern for his family continued to surface. When his father was struggling with cancer treatment and asked for his family, only Stephanie responded, flying to his home and caring for him until he recovered. Marc, Stephanie says, was indifferent. “He never went to visit him, didn’t help him, didn’t go out there. He did nothing.”

Marc’s relationship with his mother was equally indifferent. After she moved from California to Florida, Marc avoided her when he came to town.

“My mother spent days trying to get in touch with him, see him, maybe have a dinner, a coffee,” Stephanie recounts. “Marc made no effort. He didn’t even inform her that he was there….She spent two or three days and eventually gave up.”

In the end, both Trudy and Stephanie realized that inherently, Marc Headley had not changed.

When Headley departed the Church in early 2005 while under investigation for embezzlement, his parting shot toward his sister was to steal her pay under false pretenses. “He never apologized,” says Stephanie. “If he really cared about me he could have taken the time to apologize and make right what occurred.”

Marc soon picked up where he had left off with his family before joining the Church’s religious order. To his mother and sister, Marc’s malevolence toward them in his youth had metastasized to create the adult he became.

After having refused to help his cancer-stricken father, Marc had no qualms about moving in with him rent-free. In the course of doing so, Marc estranged his father from Stephanie, his only daughter.

According to Marc’s mother, he next drove a wedge between her and her most beloved brother, who turned cold and went out of touch. “We were always so close. We were inseparable. I loved my brother, and I know he loved me,” she said.

In 2008, Marc Headley joined the ranks of Anonymous, then known to authorities as a cyberterrorist group, and used cohorts to harass both his mother-in-law and sister.

During an online radio interview, Headley urged Anonymous members to bird-dog his mother-in-law, a member of the Church, at her place of work at the time. “My wife’s mom, her name is [name] and she works at [name of large tech company] in Los Angeles,” he said. “So any Anons that work at [company], you know, get in her ear.”

Headley similarly directed Anonymous members to harass Stephanie, who was then working in Canada. “Marc had arranged for people to have picket boards with my name specifically on them in huge letters,” she said, recounting how it was “just my normal working day, going on about my life, to come outside of my building with all these strange people that I don’t know, saying things that aren’t true.” This type of harassment occurred repeatedly.

Trudy sees that Marc has played out his reign of childhood terror in adulthood. “As long as I can remember, that’s been his attitude,” Trudy said. “Do things behind people’s backs—cowardly, covert, spineless things to bring pain and suffering to people and to derive pleasure from it.”

“He would be embarrassed for the world to know he’s just a friggin’ coward. A spineless creature, a mercenary, a terrorist. He’s not a hotshot,” Trudy said of her son. “He was the one that decided to turn his back on his mother. Turn his back on his sister. Anyone that meant anything to him, all his friends in the Church, all his friends that he worked with.

“He can’t front up to that.”