The Real Story

Marc and Claire Headley were members of the Scientology religious order at the Church’s Golden Era Productions film studio campus when, in early 2005, Marc was discovered to be selling Church audiovisual equipment on eBay for his own profit. He had pocketed $15,000 of proceeds in his PayPal account, from which he was making personal expenditures. While under internal investigation for embezzlement, Headley drove off on his motorcycle and never returned. His wife left and joined him shortly after. As a federal court later confirmed, Headley departed the Church when informed he was under investigation for embezzlement.

Marc Headley went on to devise a profit scheme with the stated intention to “bankrupt” the Church by inducing former members of the religious order, the Sea Organization, to file lawsuits. Headley planned to get a cut from each one.

Those dreamed-of lawsuits started and ended in disaster for the Headleys.

Courts threw out the Headleys’ lawsuits and ordered them to pay the Church $42,000

Marc and Claire Headley filed frivolous twin lawsuits in 2009 containing false and absurd allegations of involuntary servitude, labor violations, and human trafficking while in the Sea Organization—fraudulent claims intended for maximum propaganda, harassment, and monetary reward of more than $2 million.

In August 2010, a federal U.S. District Court shot down the Headleys’ suits in light of overwhelming evidence demonstrating the Headleys were liars. The facts against them were so unassailable the court found no trial was warranted and dismissed the cases on summary judgment, writing that the couple’s disputes “lack merit, and do not create genuine issues of fact.” The court sanctioned the Headleys, ordering them to pay the Church $42,000 in restitution for bringing their fraudulent claims.

The Headleys appealed. In July 2012, they lost again—this time in a unanimous decision handed down by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The federal judicial panel upheld the dismissal of the lawsuits and the sanctions because the Headleys’ claims proved false—not because of some technicality or First Amendment issue as Marc Headley has tried to falsely assert.

The Headleys, in resounding defeat, paid the Church.

In a scam to flank their case, the Headleys had also made their same false allegations in a “complaint” to the FBI. It was an effort to further harass the Church and to get an allied reporter to generate “news” of a “federal investigation.” The Church never even heard of any so-called investigation until it was mentioned in an ensuing media report. When the Headleys’ civil suits went down in flames, the bogus complaint went up in smoke.

Marc Headley targeted the Church and its leader with scatological and sadistic harassment

While the Headleys’ doomed suits made their way through the courts, Marc Headley left no question that his intent was to harass, troll and incite attacks against the Church and his principal target, the Church’s ecclesiastical leader.

Headley became obsessed with the leader, posting prurient and scatological insults on the Internet. As he wrote in one such post: “I just sent Costco size tubs of lube and first aid/sewing kits” to the Church’s leader and a Church spokesperson. “If that does not give them a heads up, nothing will.”

A string of subsequent postings demonstrated Headley’s continued, puerile fixation, with references to “that Costco size tub of lube,” “penetrate,” “taking it in the backdoor,” “take it in the asterisk,” and further vulgar and pornographic remarks.

The day before Headley was deposed in his ill-fated case, he also unleashed an ad hominem attack on the Church’s attorney taking his deposition. Headley knew that the attorney, Kendrick Moxon, had lost a daughter in a tragic electrocution accident years earlier.

“I will tell Ken Moxon ‘hi’ for everyone in between talking to him about his daughter,” Headley posted to his cronies, with malicious reference to the tragedy: “Was thinking about bringing him some KFC, but figured that might appear to be bad taste on my part. Maybe El Pollo Loco?”

Marc Headley showed a lifelong pattern of violence against women, including his mother

Headley’s history reveals that sadism, lewdness and criminality are hallmarks of his character.

He exhibited a violent streak and was physically abusive toward women in particular. Among his first victims was his own mother, Trudy Hensley. In one incident, adolescent Marc’s rough play in a swimming pool turned lethal, pushing his mother underwater in an attempt to drown her.

“When I tried to come up for air, he put my head under the water again. He did this about three, four times,” Trudy recounted. “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.”

Trudy said Marc stopped just short of her having to hurt her son in self- defense. “His pattern was turning from innocent or pranks into destructive activities that are almost unforgivable.”

Headley’s younger sister, Stephanie, recounted a strikingly similar incident of Marc holding her underwater by force, terrorizing her.

When Headley got older and made a commitment to volunteer in the Church’s religious order, he proved unable to keep his sadistic impulses fully in check, generating a highly toxic work environment. Repeatedly disciplined, brought before ecclesiastical justice, demoted, and removed from positions several times, Marc Headley feigned accountability and reform.

In a rare admission, Headley confirmed his abuse of one victim. “I grabbed her very violently,” he wrote. “She got upset and went into the bathroom crying.”

Other women would speak out years later in testimony. “He physically shoved me around,” a former co-worker recalled of an enraged Headley. Another detailed how Headley grabbed and shoved her: “My clipboard went into my chest, and the force of his shove really hurt.”

After one disciplinary measure, Headley wrote his promise to “never push girls around.” But it only continued to be his modus operandi, as another woman confirmed: “He physically pushed me to such a degree that I fell to the floor….This was very upsetting, as I’d never been assaulted like this before.”

Violence, it turned out, was a lifelong pattern. At one point, Headley wrote of the overpowering rage that ruled his life: “I would get in fights all the time for almost no reason. I would get so [upset] over the slightest thing. I would just go psycho. This was a real gigantic problem for me because I was just out of control.”

Criminality was a way of life for Marc Headley and it caught up with him in the Church

Marc Headley led an inveterate, criminal way of life, starting in his youth.

From his preteen years well into his 20s, Headley built up an admitted record of hundreds of thefts. He stole cash or goods from vending machines of all varieties, lifted multifarious items from supermarket and liquor store shelves, and stole a bag of cash earnings from the vehicle of a pizza company. He committed the felony of breaking and entering a warehouse to pilfer fireworks, and he further concealed fireworks on a commercial flight: “It is highly illegal and a federal crime to transport fireworks by way of airplane and I did so,” he wrote.

Marc Headley’s later thievery in the Church came on the radar of Church finance staff after he turned in accounting records that, as one staff member wrote, amounted to “plain theft.” Headley’s financial records caused the Church to initiate an internal investigation, which found that he had organized a kickback scheme to a video equipment distributor, costing the Church in excess of $250,000.

Ultimately, the paper trail of Headley’s financial corruption led to the discovery in early January 2005 that he was selling off Church film studio equipment on eBay and spending proceeds on personal items, including motorbike parts, insurance, gasoline, flash drives, a dog rug and a number of other miscellaneous items, as well as a cash withdrawal.

Headley was to be further interviewed for the internal investigation on January 5, but didn’t show up. As he put it during a 2009 radio show: “What actually happened is that I decided after this whole, you know, embezzling fiasco, I basically said, ‘Okay, fine…I’m out of here.’ So, I drove off; I had a small motorcycle.”

After Marc left, the internal investigation discovered his additional thefts in the Church, including a TV monitor, video recorder and cash. The investigation also found that both Marc and Claire had been stealing garments from the Church film studio’s costumes department and that Claire had been selling stolen dresses for her personal profit. Just like Marc, Claire took off.

Headley turned on his family and launched a campaign of harassment

After leaving the Church, the Headleys found pay as scandalmongers selling scurrilous tales and manufactured gossip about Scientologists to tabloids—including Life & Style and the since-defunct News of the World—netting as much as $10,000 for a “story.”

As of 2008, Marc Headley had joined Anonymous—the masked hate collective which by then was notorious to authorities for cyberterrorist attacks, real-life terrorist threats, pornography, racism and anti-Semitism. Headley took on a self-styled advisory role in directing Anonymous leaders in criminal harassment of Scientologists.

Headley made it personal, using the group to harass his Scientologist family because he knew Anonymous members (“Anons”) could easily be incited to attack strangers from behind the obscurity of their masks. He urged Anons to bird-dog his mother-in-law, supplying the specifics about her place of work at a tech company so they would “you know, get in her ear.”

Headley likewise sicced Anonymous on his sister, Stephanie, at her place of work in Canada. Anonymous members gathered on the street outside Stephanie’s office—the location, again, supplied by Headley—and yelled and waved placards with her name as harassment.

Anonymous launched malicious distributed denial-of-service attacks on Church websites, for which key perpetrators later went to prison. The group was also behind multiple bomb threats, anthrax threats and death threats against Scientology churches, the Church’s leader and members, as well as vandalism and other crimes, resulting in arrests and convictions of orchestrators.

After the first of those orchestrators was arrested, Headley called on Anonymous to up their harassment. On radio, Headley urged Anonymous members to disrupt Churches of Scientology with so-called “flash raids” because “that just totally messes with them.” He urged Anons to obstruct Scientologists from trying to enter their Churches by standing outside and hurling offensive slogans and language at them.

Headley further inflamed Anons to harass Churches by calling designated receptions up to “a few thousand calls per day”—hoping to “shut down” at least one Church on his hit list—and cheered the Anons on with, “Oh yeah, you guys rock!”

Headley incited threats of death and violence against Scientologists

Headley’s malice and incendiary language incited threats of violence and death against Scientologists and the Church’s leader.

In 2009, Headley engaged an Anonymous member, later identified as Colby Schoolcraft of Las Vegas, on a group Internet forum. Schoolcraft went to the Golden Era Productions campus, where the Headleys had served in the Church, and then threatened to “blow shit up with guns and explosives” and assassinate the leader of the Church. The Las Vegas Police Department Anti-Terrorist Unit arrested Schoolcraft on charges of “bomb/explosives threat” and “act of terrorism” and recovered two AK-47s and several other rifles. A court issued a restraining order against Schoolcraft to forbid him from coming near the Church or its leader.

In another instance of Headley-incited crime, in 2010, the Church received an anonymous email threatening “a vehicle-borne IED [improvised explosive device] heading towards” the Church facility that Headley knew was at one time the Church leader’s living quarters. The message further threatened violence against a school—one that Headley had attended and wrote about, and was known for being attended by many children of Scientologists. Authorities traced the threat to a serviceman stationed in Virginia. The offender explicitly blamed his inflamed, criminal mindset on incendiary information from Marc Headley. The serviceman was brought before a nonjudicial military panel, where he was found guilty and discharged.

One Anonymous cohort whom Headley egged on and showed up with at Scientology churches in Los Angeles, Donald Myers, was convicted and placed under criminal restraining orders four times between 2010 and 2020. Myers’ acts included vandalizing property at Golden Era Productions, harassing and frightening schoolchildren in the private school network Headley had attended, sexual battery of a Church staff member, and assault of a Scientologist.

Marc Headley never stopped his efforts to harass and incite hate against the Church that caught him red-handed and expelled him. He and his wife, Claire, took to supporting vindictive former Scientologists, who, like themselves, were expelled by the Church for criminal and antisocial conduct.

The couple has been a mainstay for the anti-Scientologist hate group—centered on Leah Remini, Mike Rinder and their hired blogger, Tony Ortega—with their multiple false reports to law enforcement, criminal conspiracy to hack Church computers, harassment and failed, frivolous litigation…all in keeping with the real story of the Headleys themselves.