A Family Dinner Helped This Author Escape Scientology

Author and former Scientology Sea Org member Anne Gollert Hill says a family dinner reminded her what love felt like — and helped her find the courage to leave.

“Life outside of Scientology is beautiful. It’s not what you think it is,” Hill told television host Jenny McCarthy Wahlberg in an Oct. 15 episode of “The Jenny McCarthy Wahlberg Show,” offering encouragement to people afraid to walk away.

For Hill, that realization began with something ordinary: relatives laughing around a restaurant table. No confrontation, no lecture — just the family she said she had spent years apart from, happy to have her back.

In the interview, Hill described spending 20 years in Scientology, including years in its Sea Organization. She alleged that members worked seven days a week, sometimes slept only four hours and faced punishment for showing fear or grief.

The Church of Scientology describes the Sea Organization as a religious order whose members volunteer, work long hours and receive housing, meals, medical care and a personal allowance.

Hill traced her turning point to August 2007, when her parents celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary in Lakeland, Florida. Working in nearby Clearwater, she said she obtained permission to attend after submitting a petition and meeting productivity requirements.

Related: Actress Laura Prepon Leaves Scientology for Her Children

At dinner, her relatives swapped childhood stories and treated her with warmth. Hill recalled realizing she had forgotten how it felt simply to be loved.

Just as important, nobody used the reunion to demand that she leave Scientology. They asked about her writing and marketing work instead, she said, and she enjoyed herself so much that she did not want to go.

She returned the next morning, expecting to get back to work. Instead, Hill alleged, a senior staff member screamed at her for visiting her family before finishing a marketing campaign.

The contrast with the previous evening changed everything, she recalled.

“I’m done. I’m out of here,” Hill remembered deciding, although she said she kept that decision to herself.

According to Hill, she spent the night writing a departure letter, then left with her purse and the clothes she wore. She drove to the hotel where her brother and sister-in-law had been staying, and her sister-in-law welcomed her inside.

Her brother, a truck driver, then took her along on a cross-country trip lasting about two and a half weeks, Hill said. Leaving did not instantly make her feel free; she still had to work out who she was and what she believed.

On her own website, Hill describes that rebuilding as a gradual process of learning to trust herself again. Today, she writes, and her life includes her husband, three stepchildren and eight grandchildren.

The small freedoms mattered, too. In a separate personal essay, she recalled buying a novel, ordering a cappuccino and reading for pleasure in a Lakeland coffee shop — an ordinary afternoon that helped her recognize she could make her own choices.

Hill’s message was not that starting over would be effortless. It was that the life she once feared could hold people who would support and love her.

“It’s a beautiful life and you can build the life that you always dreamed of,” she said.