The Bad Cadet: Growing Up in the Church of Scientology's Sea Organization

At age six, Katherine Spallino is separated from her parents and sent to train for her future in the Church of Scientology’s clergy—the Sea Organization. Naively happy at first, she thinks it’s a fun adventure to live in a Scientology-owned dorm room in Los Angeles with thirteen other girls, rarely seeing her parents and never going to a normal school. She’s committed to her Scientology studies and her life’s purpose of clearing the planet.

Later, Katherine is sent to live at a secluded ranch with other young prospective Sea Org members, called cadets, where she studies Scientology and does manual labor—weeding fields, digging trenches, and working in the galley. The indoctrination escalates and her family slips even farther into the background. But as she enters her teenage years, a host of new, more immediate concerns emerge—namely boys, popularity, fits of rebellion, and fantasies of what else life has to offer.

As the Sea Org beckons, the fundamental question intensifies—should she commit herself to the church, or reject everything she’s ever known for a chance at a different life? The Bad Cadet is the shocking and highly engaging account of a child’s life in Scientology. Katherine’s parents signed a billion year contract, putting aside all of their rights, to serve in Scientology’s Sea Organization. They also signed away Katherine’s rights at birth, tricked into believing that they were saving humanity. Katherine and her siblings grew up without parents, shipped away to a ranch run on military lines, without proper care or education, where they were taught to adulate Scientology’s fabulist creator Ron Hubbard, and forced into child labor. This poignant account is made even more remarkable by Katherine’s lack of bitterness and her eye for detail in a sequence of compelling events. She shows that even her indomitable spirit was almost cowed into belief in the bizarre ideas of Scientology’s narcissistic founder. Every reader will find this well-written book fascinating, but it will be especially useful to survivors of childhoods in authoritarian cults. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Jon Atack, author of the best-selling history of Scientology, Let’s Sell These People a Piece of Blue Sky ; Scientology: The Cult of Greed ; and Opening Our Minds: Avoiding Abusive Relationships and Authoritarian Groups.