Rock band Linkin Park’s new lead singer grew up in Scientology dorms for its most zealous followers’ children before becoming a “hardcore” church member, the Daily Beast has learned.
Emily Armstrong was unveiled by Linkin Park as its new frontwoman in September, after lead singer Chester Bennington died in 2017. Their first album featuring Armstrong was released Friday.
Armstrong’s history as a Scientologist has already proven controversial. Bennington’s son Jaime slammed Linkin Park for embracing a Scientologist when she was announced, writing on Instagram that the band “erased my father’s life and legacy in real time.”
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Now documents obtained by the Daily Beast reveal how Armstrong grew up in the Cadet Org, a church-run order for children of Sea Org members, and how her mother, Gail, has been deeply involved in Scientology, working in its “intelligence” unit and attacking one of its highest-profile whistleblowers.
Gail Armstrong also wrote speeches for the religion’s leaders and edited an in-house publication which claimed Osama bin Laden was duped into committing the 9/11 attacks by “unknown” psychiatric methods and which blamed the Columbine massacre on anti-depressants.
Her daughter was also accused of being part of a group which attempted to intimidate a victim of Scientologist child star-turned rapist Danny Masterton.
The release of a new album, and plans for a 50-date world tour, by one of the top-selling bands of all time makes the 38-year-old one of the controversial religion’s biggest stars when its traditional roster of big names, including John Travolta and Tom Cruise, has long been unchanged.
The endorsements of headline talent like Travolta and Cruise—who joined Scientology when they were emerging superstars—brought glitz and appeal to the organization that no amount of money could buy.
A confidential 2004 memo describes the outsized importance of famous members to Scientology’s success and growth, saying a “great deal of positive media comes from actions done by celebrities.” But Armstrong didn’t require any recruiting effort: she is a celebrity success story raised inside the Church.
Now the Daily Beast had pieced together just how deeply enmeshed she and her family are in the Church of Scientology, which said that our reporting about her history had the “reek of religious intolerance and ignorance.”
Childhood in a Cockroach-Infested Dorm
By the time she was elementary school-aged, in the early 1990s, Armstrong lived in a Los Angeles dormitory for the Cadet Org, the children of the Sea Org, Scientology’s innermost corps of devoted staff, former members told the Beast.
Her time in the Cadet Org is partially recounted in The Bad Cadet, a memoir by ex-Scientologist Katherine Spallino, who was raised in the church at the same time as Armstrong.
Spallino’s memoir uses pseudonyms for the people she grew up with, but multiple former Scientologists who were raised at the same facilities and are aware of the details of the book told The Daily Beast that “Ava” in the book is Armstrong.
In their elementary school years, Spallino and Armstrong were among the children housed in a four-story apartment complex called the Anthony Building, she said. Other former Scientologists have identified the building as a Church property.
Children slept in three-tier bunk beds and “cockroaches were everywhere” in the bathroom, Spallino wrote. Zoe Woodcraft, another Scientologist who lived at the Anthony Building as a child in the 1990s, said that “the carpets were old and smelly and there were a lot of cockroaches.”
“There was no proper bedding; not one of us had a complete sheet set, blanket and pillow,” Woodcraft added. “I slept without a pillow for many months.”
During the day, the kids at the LA dorm were taken several blocks away to The Apollo Training Academy, a Scientology-run elementary school named after one of church founder L. Ron Hubbard’s original Sea Org ships.
Here, she wrote, the children were trained in Scientology’s paranoid ways, being made to write “Knowledge Reports” about one another that described bad behavior. They were also sent, frequently, to the L. Ron Hubbard Life Exhibition, Scientology’s peculiar Los Angeles museum dedicated to its founder, according to Spallino.
Part of the exhibit, she wrote, involved them watching a movie about Dianetics, the name of the counseling system Hubbard developed that has been rejected by doctors and scientists.
Because their Sea Org parents worked so much, the children were tended to in groups by a caretaker and most, Spallino said, “only saw their moms on Saturday evening and Sunday morning.”
Several former Church members told The Los Angeles Times in 1990 that “youngsters have gone for days without a visit from their parents, who believe that their work for the group is transcendent.”
Stephen Kent, a sociologist at the University of Alberta in Canada who has studied Scientology for four decades, told the Beast that “the entire, twofold purpose of removing children to remote locations in the Cadet Organization was to eliminate parents’ child-rearing time demands, while at the same time providing Scientology the opportunity to groom the children and teens for eventual Sea Organization recruitment.
“The removal of children from their parents, the requirement that the kids intensively study their leaders’ teachings at the expense of normal educational material, and their extreme regulation in often neglectful and abusive environments is, regrettably, typical of many cults.”
The Church of Scientology said that it “ceased providing childcare services to members” of the Sea Org more than two decades ago and that currently, members of the Sea Org who wish to have children can resign.
“There were parents at the time you refer to who chose to raise their children in the Sea Org,” said a spokesperson. “Some of those children became quite successful, even famous, a testament to the quality of their education and upbringing.”
Home on the PAC Ranch
Spallino’s memories of Armstrong become much stronger later in their youth, when they were moved to the Canyon Oaks Ranch, or PAC Ranch, a former Sea Org-run boarding school in Santa Clarita, northwest of Los Angeles.
Armstrong, or “Ava”, she says, arrived aged 11 and Spallino was shocked to learn she was yet to make rank in the Cadet Org.
“I guess I don’t really want to be a cadet,” she recalled the young Armstrong saying. “I guess I just wanna play guitar.” Spallino suggested she join the Sea Org’s in-house band, but Armstrong seemed more keen on skateboarding.“I bet once Ava studied L. Ron Hubbard’s policy, she would change her mind,” she added.
However Armstrong did go on to be a Cadet. A copy of a 1999 issue of the Cadet Times, a newsletter for ranch cadets, contains a photo of Armstrong among children who “completed their educational requirements and graduated to a Cadet” by that year, when she turned 13.
The Canyon Oaks cadet chapter was known as the “PAC Ranch Cadet Org” because the children were bussed to Scientology’s Pacific Area Command (PAC) base in Los Angeles to do work, former Scientologists including Spallino have said.
Spallino wrote that a job there was called a “mission.”
Saina Kamula, a former Scientologist who appeared on Leah Remini’s docu-show Scientology and the Aftermath in 2017, alleged that in the mid-90s, not long before Armstrong was there, she was made to work 60 hours for $50 a week as a teen in the PAC Ranch Cadet Org.
The church told the Beast that the public accounts of former Scientologists were “based on false assumptions, inaccurate and misleading information or outright false reports.”
One task at the ranch was to plant an apple orchard at the ranch, Spallinowrote. The children were made to dig trenches into the night, illuminated by the headlights of a parked truck, she said, and she “wanted to complain, but… didn’t want to seem like a whiner.”
An undated photo posted in a social media group of former Cadets shows Armstrong and other children standing in front of the orchard.
Cadets were also allegedly subject to grotesque punishments. Kamula said the school principal at the ranch once forced several minors to eat lunch in a maggot-infested dumpster after claiming they were too messy.
Spallino recalls a similar incident where children were made to eat next to a dumpster full of rotten food and then clean it.
In a statement, Scientology called Remini’s series a “hate-filled propaganda TV show,” claiming it was rife with “many false representations” about the Church. After Remini’s show aired in 2017, Scientology set up a website to counter the claims made by former members about the Cadet Org.
One of those on the website was Adeline Armstrong, Emily’s older sister.
“I have some of these fond memories of just cracking open a watermelon that we grew and sitting on a railroad tie and eating the big ole watermelon,” she said in one video. “It was fun.” Adeline did not respond to a request for comment.
Mother in High Places
There is no indication that Armstrong joined the Sea Org, but her mother, Gail, has held several prominent posts at the Office of Special Affairs, the Sea Org’s most powerful arm. It was described by former Scientologist and actor Carmen Llywelyn in 2015 as “a sophisticated intelligence agency” and “a complex system dedicated to ruining the lives of those it sees as enemies in any way possible.”
The OSA has been involved in organizing campaigns against ex-members. Gail Armstrong took part in one against Mike Rinder, the former Church executive who turned whistleblower in 2015 and later co-starred in Remini’s documentary.
In a video on a site Scientology set up explicitly to discredit him, Gail accused Rinder of having “a very demeaning attitude towards women.”
Gail’s appearance in the video was after years working for Scientology propaganda efforts.
In 1991, acting as the President of the Church of Scientology California, she contacted the FBI in a failed effort to ask the agency to include official Scientology leaflets in responses to freedom of information requests about the Church, claiming it would combat the FBI files’ “misleading and erroneous information” about Scientology.
She was listed on the masthead of OSA-published newsletter Scientology Today in 1994, then promoted in the late 1990s to lead Scientology’s in-house investigative magazine Freedom as executive editor.
It was there that she helped spread some of the organization’s most brazen assertions about psychiatry, which it has long attacked because medical experts dismissed Hubbard’s 1950 work Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health for its lack of empirical basis.
In Volume 31, issue 2 of Freedom, released in September 1999, an article by two authors partly blamed the 1998 Columbine massacre on one of the perpetrators, Eric Harris, taking an antidepressant. The piece goes on to attribute other violence and murder committed by adolescents to Ritalin, Dexedrine, and Prozac.
In the same edition, Gail, the executive editor, herself laid blame for school shootings partly on “psychological conditioning” as well as medical professionals diagnosing children with conditions like ADHD.
In an issue of Freedom Gail edited after the 2001 World Trade Center attacks, the main feature claimed that Osama bin Laden had been goaded into 9/11 by his deputy, doctor-turned-terrorist Ayman al-Zawahiri, using “unknown” psychiatric methods, and claimed without evidence that al-Zawahiri was secretly a psychiatrist.
In a statement about psychiatry, Scientology touted its support for its own anti-psychiatry non-profit, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, and, among other things, flagged a 2021 apology by the American Psychiatric Association for “structural racism.”
In a September interview, Rinder, who once led the OSA, said Gail held multiple other roles at the Church, including public relations work and writing speeches for leadership in the 2000s. News articles show her acting as a Church spokesperson as early as 1997 and as late as 2008.
Rinder also alleged that, in 2006 or 2007, Gail was thrown in “The Hole” a detention building where Scientologists have been allegedly held after Church leader Miscavige found their performance or behavior wanting.
In a statement, the Church called Rinder “a degenerate and an inveterate liar,” and said Gail is “a very intelligent and competent woman.”
Alleged ‘Intimidation’ of Scientologist’s Rape Victim
While her mother was a high-profile part of the church, Armstrong was relatively low-key while pursuing a rock career as frontwoman of Dead Sara.
But in September 2020 she publicly supported That 70s Show star Danny Masterson, a Scientologist, at his trial, where he was accused of raping three women.
He was convicted of raping two of the women and sentenced to 30 years in prison. The third case ended in a hung jury.
Chrissie Carnell Bixler, the former church member whose case ended in the hung jury, alleged, on the day after Armstrong was unveiled as the Linkin Park singer, that she came to the trial as a “hardcore Scientologist” and was part of a group intended to intimidate one of the two unnamed victims.
Her husband, Mars Volta singer and ex-Scientologist Cedric Bixler-Zavala, echoed the allegations.
Later that day, after a hail of media coverage about the claims, Armstrong said in an Instagram story that she “misjudged” Masterson, should not have attended the hearing, and stopped speaking with him afterwards.
“I do not condone abuse or violence against women, and I empathize with the victims of these crimes,” she added.
She did not mention Scientology or address the allegation that she attended the hearing as part of a Scientology-related campaign. The church said it was “not a party” to Masterson’s criminal trial and that those who attended were exercising their right to be part of a public hearing, not as part of any organized effort.
Scientology also called Bixler’s claim “unhinged” and said they “are part of an attempted money grab in a civil suit.” Carnell Bixler, her husband and Masterson’s two other alleged victims are suing him and the Church for damages. She claims to have faced retaliation for speaking out against him.
Scientology strenuously denies the claims and said the Bixlers have “never produced a shred of evidence to support their campaign of hate against the Church.” The Bixlers did not respond to requests for comment.
Wall of Secrets
It is unclear if Armstrong remains a member of the church.
Linkin Park’s management and record label both failed to respond to requests for comment on whether Armstrong remains a Scientologist, and on her past in the church. The Church of Scientology declined to state whether she is a member, citing privacy concerns.
Former members noted Scientology’s practice of “disconnection”–dissociating family and friends from former members–as a key lever that keeps members silent, in line, or loyal. The church has both denied the practice exists and previously justified it on its official website.
Longtime observers of the organization suggested that Armstrong may stay quiet about her ties because of its treatment of members who have earned the ire of David Miscavige, the Church’s mercurial leader.
“She could be the target of retaliation,” Tony Ortega, a journalist who has covered Scientology for two decades and a Daily Beast contributor, said. “She knows that if she were to speak out she’d never see her mother again, so that’s a big threat.”
If she does remain a Scientologist, he said, its celebrity members are trained on how to conduct publicity while avoiding making any negative associations with Scientology.
“They‘ve been conditioned for so many years, the most they will say is, ‘it’s been helpful in my life, you should read a book,’“ he said. ”It would be unusual for her to say anything, they can’t imagine themselves being candid, it’s not even in the realm of possibility for them.”
Linkin Park’s first album with Armstrong as lead vocalist, From Zero, released Friday, may contain a hint about her membership. On the lead single, she sings: “I only wanted to be part of something.”
