Tonka Talk Community and Connection
Welcome to Tonka Talk, the podcast that explores community and connection around Lake Minnetonka.
Nestled near the serene shores of Lake Minnetonka in the Twin Cities, our show is your guide to discovering the inspiring stories of individuals and groups who are crafting vibrant, meaningful community and connection in this picturesque setting.
From lakeside gatherings to community events, from stories of local heroes to heartwarming tales of collaboration, we dive into the ways people are coming together to create a strong sense of belonging.
Whether you're a longtime resident, a newcomer to the area, or simply interested in the power of community, Tonka Talk has something for you.
Do you know of someone creating community and connection in a unique or big way? Share it with us. We would love to hear from you.
Learn more and connect with us at https://www.tonkatalk.com
To connect with Natalie: Natalie@tonkatalk.com
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Tonka Talk Community and Connection
The FBI and a Murder: Part 2 Scientology - Life After a Cult
What happens when a child's innocent hustle inadvertently brings the FBI to the Church of Scientology's doorstep? I lived it and I'm ready to share my story. This episode of Tonka Talk is a powerful testament to my journey of growing up in, and eventually escaping from, the Church of Scientology.
Every moment was a life lesson, from my childhood in Hawaii spent selling drawings, to the dramatic incident that drastically changed my life—a mall shooting where I was forced to reassess my ties with the Church, risking the loss of my family.
The impact Scientology had on my family dynamics was profound and complex. Join me, Natalie Webster, as I narrate my life-altering journey, shedding light on my experiences with Scientology, and the community I found in its aftermath. Stay tuned as I promise to delve deeper into my story in the coming weeks, releasing an episode each Friday.
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Hi and welcome to Tonka Talk, where we talk about community and connection. I'm Natalie Webster. Each Friday, I'm sharing my personal story about why I'm passionate about discovering and sharing how people connect, how people create community. For me, it has everything to do with having grown up in a cult. I was raised in the Church of Scientology and I left as an adult with three generations of my family. I'm going to do this in a way that hopefully, you won't need to listen to each part in order. This is part two. This is Lake Minnetonka, a safe haven after Scientology. Part two. I did part one last week and asked if you'd want to hear more about my story and how it relates to community and connection and why I'm passionate about it, and it sounds like it's a topic you want to hear more about. So again, I'm going to release an episode on Fridays where I'll be sharing my personal story of what happened in Scientology and why I do what it is I do today.
Speaker 1:In part one, I talked about the moment I decided with certainty that I had to leave Scientology, and that was when I was taking shelter in the back of a shoe store at a mall in Seattle during a mall shooting. And again you can go back and listen to part one, but that was kind of the gist of it. In that moment I realized that I needed to leave, no matter what I could, possibly, what I would lose. And when you leave Scientology, you risk losing your family. And again, I had three generations of my family in Scientology. But I realized that I could not go another day, didn't want to, without being able to really figure out who I was and live my life and make my own decisions and have a sense of freedom and free will. So today I'm going to share. Last week I also talked about how, ironically, it was gun violence that got me truly started in Scientology and it was gun violence that ended it. It ended with the mall shooting in 2008 when I made that decision. When your life is flashing before your eyes, it puts a lot of things in perspective.
Speaker 1:Now, what happened when I was a child? It was 1980 and I was turning 10 years old. My younger sister, lana, she was turning eight at the end of the year. Our mom worked for the Church of Scientology in Hawaii, on Oahu at the time. In fact, I think that the church was on Nahuwa Street, if I remember correctly, which is just blocks from Waikiki Beach. It was right near the Alawai Canal and because our mom was there evening and weekends that was her shift she would take us with her and we were pretty much completely unsupervised. She worked a regular job during the day, which she needed to do because the church did not pay their staff even minimum wage, so pretty much everybody had to work another job to support themselves. And the way that the church got around paying their staff is because they're a church and they had different rules that applied to them. Now, which again I often get this question is when do you think that? Do you think Scientology is just going to go away? I'm not sure, but I'll tell you what I do know their tax exempt status as a church needs to be re-evaluated and taken away. Kind of just a side note there.
Speaker 1:My sister and I, we were pretty much left to fend for ourselves in Waikiki, which again is where the Scientology organization was located. I always had a hustle going on, even as a child. My sister and I wanted to make money to buy candy. That was our big motivation. And again, remember, we were almost eight and 10. So we would draw pictures and try to sell them for a quarter a piece, and we didn't sell many within the Scientology organization because everybody was busy and working. And one of the worst things you could do as a child, even just as a person, is to interrupt someone when they're either doing their Scientology services or working at the. At the Church of Scientology they have a very different view on children. You're not really children. You are spiritual beings in small bodies. So in Scientology kids aren't given a lot of the same concessions or treated in ways that you would normally see a child being treated. So to have us running around here unsupervised was not, was not that big of a deal. Plus, it was the 80s. It was more common to have latchkey kids, but this was not that. Remember, this was nighttime In Waikiki and my sister and I would kind of go wandering around trying to sell our little drawings for a quarter to make some money so that we could buy candy, which was a very prime motivation for us at that age.
Speaker 1:We had one customer really, who was a really good customer. He worked as a security guard across the street from where the Church of Scientology was, on Nahua Street, again not far from Waikiki Beach. Now, in the evenings, after we colored our pictures, we would go across the street and see if our best customer but frankly our only customer, mark, was there. Again, he was a security guard, so we would see him outside and we'd go out there and chat and we'd try to get him to buy these photos, and sometimes he'd even make a request of what we should draw. He seemed into it. All we cared is. We got 50 cents, I think we even got a dollar once for two pictures.
Speaker 1:Eventually we didn't see him there anymore, which wasn't unusual for us. In Hawaii there's a lot of people coming go, you know, tourists or even people who live there that change jobs. Plus, we were, you know, almost eight and 10. What do we know? People come and go, so we don't see him. We think, really we don't think anything of it.
Speaker 1:Eventually, what happens is our mom pulls us aside and she is hissed, I mean very upset. She's explaining to us that she got in trouble with the Church and that we were in trouble with the Church because my sister and I brought the FBI and investigators to the Church, onto the property, and that was not okay, and she was going on about what a distraction it was and you know what a crime it was. In Scientology, one of the worst crimes you can commit is interfering with somebody's ability to continue taking Scientology services. So from Scientology's point of view, this was a very serious thing. At the time I didn't even understand what fully was going on. I mean, I don't think I fully understood what the FBI was at 10, but I understood that we were in some massive trouble.
Speaker 1:When my mom years later, when I was I think I was about I was 40 the year that we left Scientology and thankfully my mom left as well we had a lot of conversations about a lot of things that happened over the years that we weren't allowed to talk about when we were Scientologists, and we talked about this incident and my memories about it and, interestingly, I remembered it very accurately and she had said what had happened was the FBI did come over for an investigation and that did end up getting my mom temporarily suspended from going to the church. What I didn't know at the time I actually didn't know this until I left Scientology was that the church of Scientology had several people who went to jail in the mid to late 70s. It might've been 77,. I'm not positive for infiltrating the US government and Mary Sue Hubbard, the wife of Elron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, was one of those people. The church of Scientology was raided as well. So I didn't know.
Speaker 1:There was this holds drama going on between the FBI and Scientology and again, this was 1980. So you're probably wondering like, what the heck did we do to get the FBI involved and show up at the church? So remember, my sister and I would make these photos where we draw these pictures, we go across to Art only in our best customer mark and we'd sell them to him and then we'd go back and we'd walk around the street, kind of where we were, go down to the main drag by Calicoa, or we would be back in the building. Frankly, I am super thankful that nothing happened to us as children. Well, I should rephrase that a lot happened to us as children, but we weren't kidnapped off the street or anything like that. So come to find out, cause we're trying to find out here. I am 10 years old.
Speaker 1:I don't understand what the big deal is. I don't even understand what it was that happened and we were told that the person that we were going and selling these pictures to, these drawings, he flew to New York and he shot someone. He murdered someone in cold blood and that person died and still we were having a hard time processing that. But that someone was John Lennon, and the mark that we knew as the security guard was Mark David Chapman, which pretty much the whole world knows by now that he did fly to New York. He flew to New York from Hawaii, where he was living at the time and working as a security guard, and he shot and killed John Lennon. He went to prison and he's still in prison today, as far as I know.
Speaker 1:The crazy thing is no one in the Scientology world ever brought up that, hey, these two kids who are barely eight and 10 years old are wandering around Waikiki without any supervision and stumble upon and have a acquaintance type of relationship for us who was a customer because we would sell him these pictures that we would draw. No one cared about that. The big deal was that we brought the attention of the FBI to the church and that was one of the worst things we could possibly, possibly, possibly do For many years. When I would look back on this, I would feel this tremendous amount of guilt and I thought is that guilt? Because I feel some type of guilt having this Connection to Mark David Chapman. And then within months he went and he did what he did and I realized, no, because I rationally understand, I had nothing to do with that. My sister had nothing to do with that. We were kids. The guilt was what was kind of implanted, planted in me, that I was responsible for having my mom banned from Scientology, at least temporarily. That was so driven into our heads as such, this horrible thing that we did now keep in mind. But all we did was draw pictures, go across the street selling to somebody. We had no idea we were kids, kids we did not know what was going on, but it created this really big hoo-ha within the church. Eventually my mom was allowed to come back.
Speaker 1:But for that to happen my sister and I had to really officially start our Scientology indoctrination. We had done, I think, maybe one Children's course a couple of years prior, but we hadn't really dug in and started with our actual official training and indoctrination into Scientology. I Was actually happy at the time that we were kind of banned from the church because I enjoyed being home at that age. You know, it just wasn't fun to go to Waikiki and be there into the you know late evening hours. But because we felt all this pressure and we knew that it would make our mom happy, we agreed we would go back to Scientology and we would start our indoctrination. So my sister and I started on our Scientology courses and it went from there. Our mom stayed later than our course would go and we weren't. I don't think we were doing our course every evening. There were. There was someone who would help with the children who were in the course room and that person wasn't there every night. So thankfully we didn't have to do that every night.
Speaker 1:We were told we weren't supposed to leave the property. Of course we did. No one was watching and we were bored and we made friends with a woman who lived in a building directly next door to the building that the church was in and she would. We were like these stray animals and she met us out on the street and we would chat and eventually we just followed Her up to her apartment. She would let us watch television, she would feed us chips and snacks and then in the evening, about the time that we knew our mom would, would be done at the church and we would have to rush back and make like we'd been there the whole time. She would shoe us out and say that she had to go to work. She would get really dressed up and then she would. She would go to work.
Speaker 1:It didn't take us long to figure out that this woman, who, frankly, was more kind to us and concerned about our well-being than anyone at the church was, was a transsexual female and and Also was a transsexual prostitute. We saw her when we would leave Waikiki, sometimes with our mom, in the areas where when sex workers would be, would be doing their thing, and we would see her. We never talked about it with her. It didn't change you again. We were eight and ten years old and this is, at the time, one of the only adults who was saying hey, are you hungry? Hey, why don't you have a seat over here? She created what felt like a safe and comfortable space for us.
Speaker 1:I, my sister and I, didn't tell our mom that until we left Scientology, she never knew, no one from the church ever knew. We didn't really want to get in more, in more trouble, and, and this experience in first getting into Scientology, even though I was really young, I think it really, it really it really made me want to be a mom so that I could protect my own children, so that I could make them feel like they were wanted, like they, they somebody was watching and paying attention to what they were doing, which is something that was very absent from most of our childhood because of the role that Scientology played in our lives. Now we went on and we did more Scientology services. My sister and I went into the C organization essentially when we were when we were very young, and I'll talk more about that later I but I wanted to share this because, again, in part one, I talked about how, when I was in that mall shooting, hiding in the back of the shoe store, and realizing that I could die today and I would die not having control over my life, not doing things that I or I had always wanted to do because of my limitations within Scientology, and I had wanted to leave, I had thought about it, but that solidified it and again, I think it's kind of odd and unusual that it was gun violence that got me started in Scientology in the first place and it was gun violence that prompted me to end my time in Scientology. It took me two years from the time of the mall shooting till I actually was able to leave, and I'll show more about that in in detail.
Speaker 1:If you have any questions about any of this too, shoot me an email. You can reach me at natalie at tonkatalkcom, you know. Let me know if you have any questions. This is something I openly talk about. I find it's very helpful for me to also process a lot of what, what happened and the impact that this cult had on my family growing up. Next week, I think, I'm going to talk about how the church affected my family dynamic and how my grandpa became my dad. For now, I hope that you're finding community and connection in a way that works for you. I'm Natalie Webster, and this is my personal story of finding community and connection, part two.
