[Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Chrissie Carnell]



“The dog was yelping in pain,” Cedric Bixler-Zavala says, telling us about a nightmare scenario that took place in October when he got home after a grueling tour with his band, At The Drive In.

At the time, home for Bixler, 43, his wife Chrissie Carnell, 39, and their five-year-old twin boys was a house in Austin where a lot of strange things had been going on for several months.

The day before, Chrissie had noticed two men in a car following her. One of them was aiming a camera at her, and when she sped up, so did the two men. They only peeled off when she turned in to the parking lot of Austin’s police heaquarters. Panicked and unsure what to do, she made a phone call to a law enforcement official in Los Angeles.

Acting on his advice, Chrissie decided to take her boys to a hotel to wait for Cedric to arrive home the next day. She rushed to their house, grabbed some clothes and the dogs, took them to a kennel, then picked up the twins and checked into a hotel.


After Cedric arrived the next day, they went back to the house and noticed that a pile of their mail was missing and other signs that someone had been in the house.

They made notes of those differences, as they’d become accustomed to, and then they went to pick up their animals.

But that night, Chrissie’s favorite dog, seven-year-old Ethel, kept barking suddenly like she was in agony.

“We thought her leg was broken or something,” Cedric says. “Chrissie took the dog to the vet. And then she called and said Ethel wasn’t going to make it through the night. She died in Chrissie’s arms.” The vet explained to them that a membrane in Ethel’s throat was ruptured, and there was no way to treat it.

Cedric and Chrissie wanted answers, and the kennel did a complete investigation, checking its cameras to make sure that nothing had been done to the dog while it was in their care.

“Something had been done to Ethel while we were both out of the house,” Cedric says, pointing to the time — about an hour — after the men following Chrissie had abandoned the chase and before she was able to get back home to pick up the dogs.

“I think Ethel was kicked in the throat, so the membrane in her throat was severed,” he says.

It was the single worst moment in the months the family has spent being followed, hacked, and harassed — and all of which is being logged and taken seriously by law enforcement.

And the singer of At The Drive In believes that none of it has anything to do with his long career as a rock performer, or his wife’s career as an actress and model.

It all started, he says, when Chrissie Carnell, a former Scientologist, reported Scientology actor Danny Masterson for rape.





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[Cedric: “If I don’t look like a wet poodle that’s throwing up and coughing like an amateur stoner afterwards then it probably wasn’t a good show.”]




On March 3, 2017 we broke the news that Danny Masterson was being investigated by the Los Angeles Police Department after three women came forward with allegations of violent rape that had occurred between 2001 and 2003.

In our story, we referred to those three accusers as Victim A, Victim B, and Victim C.

Later that day, the Los Angeles Police Department put out a short statement confirming the investigation. Masterson’s publicist Jenni Weinman put out a statement denouncing the accusations and named Chrissie Carnell as one of the accusers. A few websites published Weinman’s statement in full, but most redacted Chrissie’s name.

Angry that she had been identified by Weinman, Chrissie later acknowledged publicly in a statement to the Daily Beast that she was one of the accusers (the person we had been calling Victim A).

Since then, a fourth Masterson accuser came forward to police, and she ended up also identifying herself publicly, as actress Bobette Riales.

As the investigation has plodded on for more than a year, there have been press reports that the case was on a “slow roll” after the LAPD handed it over to the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office. But there are apparently a number of reasons why the case is taking so long. For one thing, we learned that because the DA’s office was considering charges that were so harsh, it had to be approved by all of the managers in the office in a special review board. We reported in February that the board did approve charging Masterson under a law that would have him facing 15- to 25-to-life and without a statute of limitations. But that plan still awaits approval by the DA herself, Jackie Lacey.

Meanwhile, we have watched as Chrissie’s husband has posted increasingly trenchant Twitter messages aimed at Masterson, and revealing details about the harassment that he and his wife have been through.

He agreed to speak with us, along with Chrissie, about what they’ve experienced over the last 19 months since Chrissie went to the police.

Cedric is originally from El Paso, where he encountered a burgeoning early-90s underground music scene with a friend, Omar Rodríguez-López. They formed several bands before joining guitarist Jim Ward to create At The Drive In. By the year 2000 and the release of their album Relationship of Command, At The Drive In was being talked about like the next big post-punk breakout, but a little more than a year later, the band was no more.

Cedric and Omar then formed the prog-rock band The Mars Volta, which had its own run of success before it too evaporated in 2013. At The Drive In was then resurrected and has been enjoying a popular new incarnation, which has Cedric almost constantly on the road, playing shows as far away as Europe and South America.

He also has a fascinating give-and-take going on with his fans in social media. And they gave him an earful when, for a while anyway, Cedric experimented with Scientology

“The reaction I got from people was, how could you, someone who is a part of avant-garde music, how could you fall for such a stupid thing? But I had got to a point where I wanted to try something different, and to try something people were telling me not to do. Scientology’s claims had made me really intrigued, and I wanted to find out what it was actually like,” he says.

And motivating his need for change, he adds, was his marijuana habit. “My pot use was at an all time high — I’m talking with breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Chrissie said, you need a change, try this.”


They had met in 2009 at a lounge in Los Angeles, Bardot, across the street from Capitol Records. Chrissie had left Scientology, quietly, in 2004.

“When we first started dating, she would get hounded by them to get back in. So you’re a Scientologist? I asked her. But she would deny it.”

They were married in 2009, and the next year they lost a pregnancy. Cedric says that in 2011, he was having a hard time finishing his part of The Mars Volta album Noctourniquet. Stalled musically and hammered emotionally by the loss of their pregnancy, Cedric was ready for a change.

“Just go down and try it,” Chrissie told him.

“When I realized the pot-smoking thing was going to be an issue in our marriage, I told him about the Purif. I’m the one who talked him into doing it. This was after the loss of a pregnancy, so we were both depressed,” Chrissie says.

They called ahead, and then Cedric drove down to Scientology’s Hollywood Celebrity Centre for the first time. “Yes, come down, they said. We got the nice parking and all the little perks,” Cedric says.

“They rolled out the red carpet for us,” Chrissie remembers. “They gave us $10,000 in books and lectures for free. They gave me my Purif for free — it was my second time. We saw Juliette Lewis, she was redoing it. Mike Rinder has told me they never do that, give free stuff, so that’s how big a deal it was that I’d brought in Cedric. We went to two Celebrity Centre galas, again for free, and sat with the big celebrities.”

Cedric, meanwhile, was beginning to learn what Scientology was all about. “The guy who first interviewed me, Eric, said let’s find out where your ‘ruin’ is. At the time I was naive to what they were going for.”

Cedric was probed for his emotional buttons. He was still harboring strong feelings over the deaths of a couple of former bandmates, for example, and he was led to believe that his excessive pot use was connected to it.

“First thing, they said I had to give up pot. Completely. I had headaches daily, and they were having me take these big vitamin packs. I wasn’t allowed to take Advil for the pain. After about a week the headaches went away, and then I was getting ready for the Purif.”

All Scientologists are expected to put themselves through the Purification Rundown, a process Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard came up with in the late 1970s that he believed “detoxified” the body and the soul, cleansing them of problems that have been stored up for years. The process involves several hours spent every day in a sauna and a massive ingestion of vitamins. There’s no proof that it “detoxes” anything, but Scientologists swear by it as a rite of passage in the church.

“It was a little scary at first. You would start exercising before going in the sauna, and you’d be sweating around strangers. I saw several people arguing with the people in charge, but they’d be shown something by Hubbard about how wrong they were. I thought, just give in, let it happen,” Cedric says with a laugh.

Other musicians were taking the Purif at the same time, he remembers, including Dead Sara singer Emily Armstrong. “Also, some people were sort of part-time doing it. They would show up not even for an hour. A lot of the time rules were being bent for people,” he remembers.

We asked how the other members of The Mars Volta felt about his experiment in Scientology.


“I think they were terrified and concerned. My partner, Omar, he was super supportive for the focus my sobriety gave me.”

And he also heard from fans, who were astonished that he’d turned to the church. “I think a lot of people were pissed. In the middle of my time on the Purif, I saw a lot of people online talking shit about it. So I wrote a post defending it on Facebook. But it just went downhill from there,” he says with a laugh.

Cedric admits that he wanted people to give him some credit for walking right into the lion’s den to find out what it was about for himself. Instead, he was being mocked for it.

“There were things I could see that were questionable. But I was feeling so good that I kept going,” he says.

If some fans were angry, Cedric says he pushed back when he finally did get his lyrics written for Nocturniquet, which was released in March 2012. “I was pretty blatant about it in my lyrics. I was using Scientology terms that I thought were really cool and interesting. Hubbard, he did have some unique language, and I was really interested in that phrasing and terminology. I was already a Sci Fi guy, and I was really intrigued by lingo like ‘comm lag’ and ‘Dev-T.’ The fans were talking shit, but I was blocking them or just not listening.”

The Purif became Cedric’s most extensive involvement in the church. Except for some brief coursework, he didn’t go back. But he does credit it with helping him stop using marijuana, which continues to this day.

By 2016, he was through with the church, The Mars Volta had disbanded, and he and Omar were getting At the Drive In back together again. But at home, conversations with his wife increasingly turned to her past before their relationship, and one incident in particular.

Cedric realized that his wife was thinking about something that had happened to her in the wrong terms.





———————–





[Emily Armstrong and Cedric — celebrity musicians at Scientology’s 2013 Celebrity Centre Gala]



“We would have these uncomfortable discussions,” Cedric remembers about his conversations with Chrissie.


Chrissie had joined Scientology around 1996 through the influence of her boyfriend at the time, actor and lifelong Scientologist Danny Masterson.

In 1998, Masterson’s career skyrocketed when he landed a starring role in That ’70s Show as the character Steven Hyde.

But it was an incident in 2001 that Chrissie kept bringing up years later to Cedric. In December of that year, Chrissie had woken up and realized she was injured — her anus was bleeding. She says Masterson laughed at her, telling her he’d had sex with her anally. She broke up with him a few months later.

In the meantime, she reported the incident to the Church of Scientology. “I was put on an ethics program that lasted a month, and then I was ordered to get auditing,” she says. In Scientology, you’re never a victim — if something bad has happened to you, you need to search through your past (even past lives on other planets) to find what evil deed you had committed which caused you to “pull in” the current problem.

In 2016 she was still confused and disturbed by the incident.

“I knew there were some unresolved issues she had with Danny,” Cedric says. “I mean, it’s normal to talk about your exes. But we would have these uncomfortable discussions about what happened to her in 2001. And I told her, what she had been through was rape.”

Meanwhile, Chrissie was stunned when a friend she had known in Scientology reached out to her, asking if Masterson had attacked her. And that’s when Chrissie learned for the first time, from her friend, that there were other women who believed they had been victimized.

Her friend told Chrissie about a woman we’ve referred to in news stories as “Victim B.”

The news devastated Chrissie. “Two days later, I went to the emergency room with my first massive panic attack. I thought I was dying,” she says.

As Chrissie tried to assimilate the new information, something remarkable was happening online. Under the hashtag #WhyWomenDontReport, Twitter users were reacting to Donald Trump’s denials about several women who had come forward during the 2016 presidential election, accusing him of sexual misconduct. The accusers were ridiculed and harassed online, which motivated the hashtag as thousands of other women spoke out on Twitter about their own experiences struggling with whether to report being mistreated.

Chrissie says she had a visceral reaction to what was going on at Twitter. She decided to say something publicly for the first time about what she’d been through.

“I tweeted Danny the definition of rape. And I tweeted asking if anyone knew [Victim B]. A mutual friend contacted me and said he was friends with her and he told her about my tweets. He said she wanted to speak with me,” she says. “I spoke with her and my mind was blown.”

Victim B told Chrissie that she had been raped by Masterson at a party in 2003, and she not only had reported the incident to the Church of Scientology, but also to the LAPD in 2004, which closed the case after Scientology submitted numerous affidavits from church members countering her testimony. Her incident was two years after what had happened to Chrissie.

Meanwhile, Chrissie’s tweets got a reaction from Masterson’s attorney, Marty Singer, who sent a threatening letter demanding that the tweets be taken down — and he sent it to Cedric, not Chrissie.


“I have a blue checkmark and I retweeted it,” Cedric points out, explaining that his reach on Twitter was much greater than his wife’s, which is why he thinks the letter (which we previously made public) was addressed to him and not his wife.

Chrissie and Cedric did take down the tweets. But by then, Chrissie was ready for her next move: It was time to go to the police.





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[Ethel]



“When Chrissie finally went to the police, somehow every turn we made they knew,” Cedric says. “There was an empty house in our backyard. We had talked to the owner about how hard a time he was having selling it. Then magically, two days after Chrissie reported to the police, the house had people move in. They never gave us the time of day. If they saw us, they’d rush into the house. Then we noticed there was a daytime person and a night person.”

“Any time I’d go outside, the day shift guy would go outside,” Chrissie adds. “I usually went out to talk about the case on the phone so my kids couldn’t hear. Every single time I went out, day shift or night shift guy would come out. There was no furniture in their home minus a table I could see with computer equipment all over it.”

At one point, Cedric says he was taking the boys to school when a technician showed up saying he needed access to their backyard where he needed to install some kind of special WiFi unit. Cedric says he wouldn’t give the technician permission to enter the backyard, but the technician then used a different approach to the house.

“After that time, it was obvious there was private information about us that others were accessing,” Cedric says. “Our lives turned into this Cold War spy movie. Every day there were problems. Lots of phone problems. I still get an obscene number of wrong phone calls — I just got one from someone asking for Chrissie’s Social Security Number over a 1996 debt. No way I’m going to give him that.”

“Our phones were acting really strange,” Chrissie says. “Anytime I’d talk on the phone, I’d hear weird clicking sounds. I’d hear other people talking bleed into my conversations. There was weird static and weird computerized mechanical sounding noises. I’ve never experienced anything like this. Emails I had sent vanished. New emails were marked as read even though I hadn’t read them. I kept getting alerts that my Twitter account, Gmail account, and iCloud account were trying to be accessed by someone. Then, our phone bills started doubling and tripling. I checked to see why and the phone company said our phones were only using 3G or LTE even though our phones were always connected to our WiFi. I called our WiFi carrier and talked with a woman in tech support. She told me they had evidence that someone had been interfering with our WiFi. She put us on a high security status and changed our modem. That lasted for about a week.”

“We got a new security system, but it got hacked multiple times,” Cedric says. “We’d tell the people setting it up that Chrissie was part of a case, but they couldn’t seem to keep the system from getting messed with.”

And then things got even more blatant.

“We were in the backyard. A van pulled up at the house behind us and someone was openly filming us,” Cedric says. “I waved at him, asking, why are you filming us? I tried to drive over to see him and he took off.”

Cedric and Chrissie know enough about Scientology to understand that what’s been happening to them sounds an awful lot like a classic Scientology “Fair Game” campaign.

L. Ron Hubbard first announced a “Fair Game Law” in 1965 at a time when he was writing policies to crack down on splinter groups that infuriated him. In 1967, Hubbard gave his most notorious definition of what he meant by the policy, writing that Scientology’s enemies may be “deprived of property or injured by any means by any Scientologist without any discipline of the Scientologist. May be tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed.” And there are many examples in the ensuing decades of Scientology trying to do just that with the use of private investigators, lawyers, and other hired agents. In some of those campaigns, people who were targeted reported their pets dying in mysterious ways.

Scientology denies that it engages in Fair Game today. It says that the Fair Game policy was canceled by Hubbard in 1968. But Hubbard’s 1968 policy actually said, “The practice of declaring people FAIR GAME will cease. FAIR GAME may not appear on any Ethics Order. It causes bad public relations. This does not cancel any policy on the treatment or handling of an SP.” (When the church decides someone is an enemy, it labels them a “suppressive person” or SP.)

In other words, the policy of ruining SPs utterly and destroying people would continue, so long as the words “Fair Game” weren’t involved.

Were the Bixlers the subject of a Fair Game campaign? Whoever was behind it, for Cedric it was becoming increasingly difficult to go on the road for shows.

“While I was on tour, they would send people over. Just thugs to intimidate Chrissie while I was out of the country.”

“Men started showing up at the house at all hours, saying they wanted to do a ‘survey.’ I said no and told them to get off my property,” Chrissie says. “Then they’d always smile creepily and say OK and walk down the street. A few times I followed after them and asked why they aren’t ‘surveying’ my neighbors. They’d always turn around, smile, and say I only want to survey you. Then I caught a man looking into my kitchen windows. I asked him what the hell he was doing and he said, smiling, ‘I want to do a survey.’ Through my kitchen window? I told him to get the eff off my property right now. He did, and walked down the street bypassing all my neighbors’ homes just like all the other men coming to ‘survey’ me and only me.”

Chrissie would call Cedric to tell him the latest strange occurrence — their trash taken, for example, or their car doors mysteriously all left wide open.

“I’d be up in the middle of the night talking to her, telling her to go to a hotel to be safe,” he says.

Then, in October, she took that advice, but they ended up coming home to a dog in extreme pain. They still sound stunned that Ethel died in such a violent manner.

And even then, the strange incidents didn’t stop.

“The following week I went to a nail salon,” Chrissie says. “No one else was in the salon, there were 20 vacant chairs. A man followed me in after I sat down and he demanded to sit next to me. Instantly I became nervous. He started antagonizing me. I told the manicurist that I was afraid and I wanted to leave. I took his photo without him knowing and walked towards my car. He actually followed me, filming me and my car and license plates. I called 911.”

Both of them say law enforcement is taking their experiences seriously. “The DA in Los Angeles contacted the unit in the Austin police department that handles stalking. They showed up with a handful of officers. They checked our cars, looked for bugs, and then brought in their own camera system that was more secure. And they were always willing to take our phone calls,” Chrissie says.

After that, with the new camera system installed, there were no more men arriving to ask to conduct surveys.

By January 2018, they were through with Austin and decided to move to Los Angeles.

“A few days before we moved, our strange neighbors behind us moved out. They had been there less than a year,” Chrissie says.

Cedric says the move to Los Angeles was definitely motivated by the strange things happening in Austin. “I wanted to get away from all the bad feeling there. My wife didn’t feel safe there. And I had a lot more friends in LA. Even though we were moving back to where Scientology was, we did it to brighten the mood and get some fresh air.”

But even in LA, strange incidents continue to happen.

“On Twitter, a troll account named FettiHG started harassing a former Scientologist friend of mine,” Chrissie says. “She called me very upset. She said that Fetti is saying things that she had only said in [Scientology] session, or things that would be in her ethics file. I chimed in on Twitter to defend her. Fetti ignored me at first, but then he called me by the name only my late father called me — ‘Christmas.’ No one else knew about this, but I had discussed it in a Scientology session when I was dealing with the sadness about having had to disconnect from my parents.”

The Fetti account also said other things to Chrissie that she says could only have come out of her confidential Scientology folders. And his insults were getting vile: “He said a few things to me like that he was going to give me a rubber dildo and show Danny what he should have done.”

Chrissie and Cedric say that law enforcement officers have told them that they have traced the FettiHG account to a Scientology facility in Clearwater, Florida.

“I think that’s very terrifying,” Cedric says. “When they can regurgitate that kind of information about you, and you know the only way they could get that information is in those confessional sessions.”

We sent a message to Scientology spokeswoman Karin Pouw, asking whether the church would comment on what appears to be a rather robust retaliation campaign against Chrissie Carnell Bixler. We’ll let you know if she responds.

In the meantime, Cedric and Chrissie continue to wait to see what charges might get filed against Masterson. And they continue to deal with bizarre goings on in LA — again with their trash, and their car doors being opened, and with their phones and their email accounts.

“They’re trying to shake us. But it hasn’t stopped us,” Cedric says. “It’s heartbreaking, but you have to persevere. Their whole operation is based on fear.”



———–

See our previous coverage of the Masterson investigation…

Mar 3, 2017: LAPD probing Scientology and Danny Masterson for multiple rapes, cover-up

Mar 8, 2017: Danny Masterson: Victim C gets support from a veteran actress, but will LAPD answer the call?

Mar 11, 2017: Source: Scientology made Danny Masterson’s Victim B search past lives to explain being raped

May 9, 2017: Danny Masterson hires Michael Jackson criminal defense attorney Tom Mesereau in rape probe

Nov 2, 2017: Read the threatening letter Danny Masterson’s attorney Marty Singer sent a victim’s husband

Nov 26, 2017: Scientology interrogated Danny Masterson and accuser, didn’t notify LAPD

Feb 14, 2018: Prosecutors prepare charges carrying life sentence for Danny Masterson



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Make your plans now!

HOWDYCON UPDATE

Wow, we’re now less than two months out, and Chee Chalker is working hard to make sure things are going to run smoothly at this year’s HowdyCon in Chicago, June 21-23. As in past years, we’re looking forward to meeting readers of the Bunker, culminating in Saturday night’s main event.

The biggest difference this year is that our Saturday night event is separate from that evening’s dinner. Chee is setting up an inexpensive pizza dinner that you don’t need to pay for ahead of time, after which we’ll walk over to the theater where our event, hosted by Chicago Fire star Christian Stolte, will take place. Because it’s a separate event, we’re asking that you pay $10 each to get into the Saturday night event, which will help us recoup what the Bunker paid for the venue. (We have never made a penny on our HowdyCon meetups, we only try to break even.)

Please email your proprietor (tonyo94 AT gmail) in order to reserve your spot for Saturday night’s main event. Seating is limited, and we’re going to have some really interesting people on stage and they may make a few announcements that you don’t want to miss.







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Posted by Tony Ortega on April 27, 2018 at 07:00

E-mail tips and story ideas to tonyo94 AT gmail DOT com or follow us on Twitter. We post behind-the-scenes updates at our Facebook author page. After every new story we send out an alert to our e-mail list and our FB page.

Our book, The Unbreakable Miss Lovely: How the Church of Scientology tried to destroy Paulette Cooper, is on sale at Amazon in paperback, Kindle, and audiobook versions. We’ve posted photographs of Paulette and scenes from her life at a separate location. Reader Sookie put together a complete index. More information can also be found at the book’s dedicated page.

The Best of the Underground Bunker, 1995-2017 Just starting out here? We’ve picked out the most important stories we’ve covered here at the Undergound Bunker (2012-2017), The Village Voice (2008-2012), New Times Los Angeles (1999-2002) and the Phoenix New Times (1995-1999)

Learn about Scientology with our numerous series with experts…

BLOGGING DIANETICS: We read Scientology’s founding text cover to cover with the help of L.A. attorney and former church member Vance Woodward

UP THE BRIDGE: Claire Headley and Bruce Hines train us as Scientologists

GETTING OUR ETHICS IN: Jefferson Hawkins explains Scientology’s system of justice

SCIENTOLOGY MYTHBUSTING: Historian Jon Atack discusses key Scientology concepts

Other links: Shelly Miscavige, ten years gone | The Lisa McPherson story told in real time | The Cathriona White stories | The Leah Remini ‘Knowledge Reports’ | Hear audio of a Scientology excommunication | Scientology’s little day care of horrors | Whatever happened to Steve Fishman? | Felony charges for Scientology’s drug rehab scam | Why Scientology digs bomb-proof vaults in the desert | PZ Myers reads L. Ron Hubbard’s “A History of Man” | Scientology’s Master Spies | The mystery of the richest Scientologist and his wayward sons | Scientology’s shocking mistreatment of the mentally ill | The Underground Bunker’s Official Theme Song | The Underground Bunker FAQ

Our non-Scientology stories: Robert Burnham Jr., the man who inscribed the universe | Notorious alt-right inspiration Kevin MacDonald and his theories about Jewish DNA | The selling of the “Phoenix Lights” | Astronomer Harlow Shapley‘s FBI file | Sex, spies, and local TV news