Where is Scientology’s David Miscavige? Opposing lawyers want to know.

Published December 30, 2022 By admin with Comments 1

The process servers showed up to 10 Church of Scientology properties in Clearwater and California with legal documents in hand.

They tried 27 times over four months to serve Scientology leader David Miscavige with a federal trafficking lawsuit that names him as a defendant, according to records in the case.

Security guards, the court filings state, refused to accept documents from the process servers, declined to answer questions and said they did not know where Miscavige lived or worked despite him being the ecclesiastical leader of the organization.

The case revolves around allegations from three former Scientologists who say they were trafficked into the church as children and forced to work through adulthood for little or no pay. Valeska Paris and husband and wife Gawain and Laura Baxter, who filed the complaint in April, left the church’s military-style workforce called the Sea Org in 2009 and 2012, respectively.

Five church entities named as co-defendants already have been served and filed motions in July to push the lawsuit into internal arbitration, where it would go before a panel of loyal church members. A judge has not yet ruled on the church’s request to divert the case out of the U.S. court system. But as that decision is pending, attorneys for the three former church workers still have been unable to serve Scientology’s secretive and elusive leader.

A hearing is scheduled for Jan. 20 in Tampa federal court on the plaintiffs’ motion for a judge to declare Miscavige served and in default due to the “intentional concealment of his location and evasion of service.”

Content retrieved from: https://www.tampabay.com/news/clearwater/2022/12/29/scientology-miscavige-lawsuit-serve-trafficking-paris-baxter/.