My gut is telling me something fishy is going on here.
I posted a comment to Marty Rathbun's blog. I realized a few minutes ago that there are some very strange details about Wendy Honnor's e-mail. There's enough out of step for the usual "Fuck Off Miscavige!" missive that comes out that something else entirely may be going on.
I am starting to get the gut that the cult may be running a "dead agent" operation on Wendy Honnor for some reason, much as they did on Debbie Cook. Soon after Debbie's e-mail message appeared, her Facebook page was apparently hacked into and she accepted "friend" request from all sorts of indies who were declared SP's. This was almost certainly to show loyal culties that they shouldn't believe anything coming from Debbie Cook. I think the same sort of thing is happening here.
Note that I have never heard of Wendy Honnor before, and couldn't care less what happens to her. From some of the stuff that was unearthed in this thread and from her own words on her web site, she seems like a delusional narcissist, with imagined accomplishments that are even more bizarrely grandiose than most culties claim. I just know that something doesn't pass the smell test on this.
Here are my concerns:
1) Nobody commenting on any site that I can find has said they know this woman and contacted her to hear from her own lips that the e-mail is valid. A lot of people immediately tried to contact Debbie Cook when her e-mail went out, and the word quickly got out that the e-mail was authentic. That hasn't happened here in nearly 24 hours. This woman seems to be enough of a fame whore that lots of people should have her phone number and she ought to be bubbling over with excitement to talk about her brilliant realizations that allowed her, after only ten years, to discover through her impressive specialness, that Scientology is a dangerous and evil cult, something outsiders typically take about ten minutes to figure out.
2) Wendy’s web site does not appear to have been updated in quite some time. She appears to be a bit of a fame whore, attempting to cultivate a reputation as a brilliant globetrotting genius. One would think that her web site would have been updated immediately with her declaration of independence. Yet it feels dusty and musty, like the content hasn't changed in a while. But that hasn’t happened.
3) Similarly, the list of humanitarian organizations she lists involvement with include well-known front groups like The Way to Happiness, and a couple of front groups affiliated with TWTH. From what I understand, most people, particularly those who leave the cult due to the over-regging for donations, would not be too likely to stay involved in these organizations, and it would thus be surprising that she’s left her involvement in these groups intact. Remember that Priscilla Presley, who hasn't even "officially" blown yet, removed all the front groups from her personal web site a couple weeks ago when Tony Ortega speculated that she had "blown" the cult.
4) Wendy’s web site talks about “life improvement programs” and all sorts of other stuff which not only doesn’t sound like it attributes proper credit to LRH “tech” but sounds like it may not be based on Scientology at all. That would clearly be a no-no from the cult’s point of view, and this could be the reason that the cult is trying to sink her -- she's making too much money that could go to them. There might be some other economic reason for her falling into disfavor with the cult, perhaps something as simple as the fact that as an apparently enthusiastic field auditor, she could be embarrassing the downstat Australian orgs by her productivity and results.
5) I notice that the e-mail is surprisingly vague and short of details about what exactly she saw as sufficiently compelling misbehavior that made her blow. I have noticed that the “coming out” declarations that Marty Rathbun has posted have almost always gone into extreme details about what started to create doubt in the minds of the newly independent member. Most of them are so long I can't make it more than halfway through.
There’s none of that here, only a reference to the Debbie Cook e-mail, no specifics of the issues raised. It seems to me like this is how a cult insider would write if trying to "dead agent" Wendy — someone who wants to make it look like Wendy Honnor is now an opponent of the cult, but the author of this e-mail doesn’t want the reader to actually know what was contained in Debbie’s e-mail — since they were all told not to read the original e-mail on pain of “losing their eternity.”
6) Claiming to use “the tech” to cure cancer, but only in concert with a qualified medical practitioner does not sound like the approach that a hardcore Church of Scientology member would use — it seems to me that such an approach could be seen as counter to the belief that once you “drop the body” it is simple to “pick up a new one” and start the next cycle where you left off; working with physicians could almost be seen as doubtful of this belief. In other words, she’s claiming that she’s going to continue what may have been seen as “squirrel tech” before.
7) This e-mail talks about Wendy continuing her work with the “Worldwide Auditor’s Guild.” There is no web presence for a group that claims 600 members, what ought to be a significant portion of the field auditors in the world. It sounds to me like this may have been an attempt to portray Wendy as a purveyor of “squirrel” auditing technology. The only people who would not actually check to verify that there’s no such group would be cult members in good standing, who wouldn’t take a chance on running such a search because they would be afraid they might (gasp!) stumble on some entheta of some sort and end up blowing. Why would Wendy lie about the existence of a group like this in her e-mail, especially when she doesn’t mention it on her web site? She seems very driven by publicity, so if she was heading a group like this, one would think that every last little brain fart she had about this group would be plastered everywhere she could possibly plaster it.
Again, I would like it to be true that a highly visible Australian public has indeed left the cult and resigned. But I am increasingly concerned that this one doesn't add up. Sometimes you have to go where the facts take you...
