Mariette Lindstein, A Biography

Here is the unvarnished truth about Mariette Lindstein from the people who knew her best. These are the firsthand experiences of those who lived with and worked alongside her for nearly 25 years.

So who is the real Mariette Lindstein? She was a volunteer staff member at the Church of Scientology. In January 2004, she was dismissed from her position for incompetence and immoral activities, but was graciously offered a second chance to remain with the Church if she reformed. She refused and was expelled.

Lindstein is a serial liar. From her earliest beginnings in the Church, she falsified and inflated her work history for practically every position she held. She continuously made up wild stories about her life, including one especially bald-faced lie involving a member of the Beatles.

Lindstein is an admitted kleptomaniac who quietly stole money from her coworkers’ purses over a period of years. She would repeatedly take small amounts to hide what she was doing. She also took personal belongings—shoes, clothes, jewelry, food, etc., and also “borrowed” money from other coworkers that she never repaid.

Lindstein cheated on each of her husbands, culminating in her final act in the Church in which she conspired with her illicit partner, Dan Koon, to abandon their spouses.

Unable to make an honest living, she now peddles lies about the Church for money, exploiting her failed time in the Church in an effort to satisfy her insatiable desire for attention.

Lying and Stealing As a Way of Life

Lying comes easily to Mariette Lindstein. She has compulsively lied about every aspect of her life.

Here are the provable lies she’s told about her personal life:

• That her mother was a professional photographer when in truth she was a housewife.
• That big band jazz groups jammed inside her home with her father when she was a child. None of it is true.
• That she was a Swedish clothes model for stores and catalogs between ages 14 and 16, when she was actually cleaning and babysitting.
• She made the absurd claim that she danced with Paul McCartney at a London nightclub. She was never at that disco and never danced with him, there or anywhere else. Total fiction.
• She lied about working as a music mixer for a famous Swedish band when she was 16. In truth, she never worked for the band. She apparently sat in front of a mixing board once, and didn’t know the first thing about the console.
• She faked being sick, even inventing fake injuries, to avoid working.
• Then there was the time she fabricated a story that she saved a friend from committing suicide. By Mariette’s account, the friend had slit her wrists. She claims she put towels on the friend’s wrists, got her to the hospital and saved her life. To say the story was embellished is an understatement. What really happened is the friend told Lindstein once that she was feeling down.

Stealing was also a way of life for Lindstein.

“I also constantly stole the property of others. I went into purses in bathrooms as well as stole money from the [location’s] canteen between 1984-1994.”—Mariette Lindstein

Mariette Lindstein would enter the canteen with $5. Magically, she would leave with $20. What was her secret? Theft.

She would also take coffee, cigarettes and snacks. In a two-year period, it was estimated she shoplifted $800 worth of items. In the laundry room, she stole panties from other women. She also helped herself to shampoo and milk from others, and stole food from fellow staff members that was stored in refrigerators and cupboards.

Sometimes she would take 50 or more things in a single theft. There was ice cream, pens, razors, envelopes, chocolate bars, cups of noodles, hair conditioner, shoes, shirts, hairbrushes, drinks, makeup. She never wanted to honestly pay for anything.

When nobody was around she stole money out of others’ purses.

“I did these actions KNOWING they were suppressive. I knew they would harm,” she wrote when found out.

She also would steal from her former husband. As she put it, “I have constantly ripped off/cheated my husband concerning money.”

A former friend wrote:

Dear Mariette:

You and I worked together for some time and the thing I remember most about it is that during this time I began losing money from my purse and thought that I must have misplaced it, forgotten it or spent more than I believed that I in fact had. I did not place too much attention on these losses as the amounts were $5 to $10 at a time, but it was enough to cause me consternation as the incidents continued and it remained a mystery to me.

After you confessed I thought that you would pay me back or at least come and see me about it. Frankly if you had asked, I would probably have forgiven [you].

A Life of Sexual Obsession

Mariette Lindstein’s favorite pastime is sexually manipulating men. In fact, to her, it is like a sport.

Just as with her other derangements, Lindstein had an early start with perversions, writing S&M stories in her early teens, and indulging her fantasies.

She repeatedly made passes at married men. She flirted with them, giving out her apartment address or hotel room number so they could join her after work—even leaving her door open. If her prey didn’t show up, Lindstein would act out her fantasies, exposing herself in bright light in the window of her apartment or on a rooftop.

She boasted of her attempts to seduce married men in her workplace while she was married herself. “I finally aimed for the [top executive] who was married and had several children. I also undermined his wife so that he would leave her and start a [relationship] with me.” Lindstein’s seduction resulted in the couple divorcing, shattering their family.

When Lindstein began her conquest of her current partner Dan Koon, it was far from the first time she wrecked a marriage. Calculatingly assessing Koon’s character, she was able to find his weaknesses and reel him in as she had done with so many other men. As Lindstein once put it, Koon was soon “like a fish flopping on a line.”

A Neglectful Mother

Mariette Lindstein neglected her son. As her former husband Billy Lindstein can attest, she only has her selfishness to blame for her failures as a mother.

Mariette alienated herself from her son and myself by repeatedly seeking liaisons with other men while legally married to me. These occurred in 1983, 1986, 1989, …1996 [and 2003]…

I was the one making sure he [our son] was cared for, brought up properly and educated. He was trained as a professional photographer and a highly specialized SFX technician. Using his education, he is now pursuing a successful and well-paid career…

Violent and Unhinged

Lindstein’s bizarre behavior was not limited to sexual acts. She also was known for sudden violent outbursts aimed at family and friends. While today she describes herself as “an energetic little girl from a creative family,” her behavior at home was more like something out of The Shining.

In one incident, Lindstein chased her mother through the house wielding a belt and trying to hit her with it. Her mother locked herself in the bathroom. Overcome with rage, Lindstein repeatedly beat the door with the belt buckle, terrorizing her mother and cowing her into submission.

Lindstein’s bullying wrath included shouting at the top of her lungs, threatening people with violence and even resorting to it in some cases.

Lindstein admitted to several instances of physical abuse with one woman, “shaking her or pushing her against the wall. …I pushed her and she fell back into rose bushes and she got scared. ...I also turned [her] head violently and told her ‘stop looking at me’—‘stop looking at me’.”

With another woman, Lindstein half bragged, “I slapped her right in the face.”

About another incident she wrote: “I took [sic] my hands around her neck and pushed her into the wall physically.”

And with another she attacked, “It started with shaking her, then screaming about 1/2 inch close to her face…. Once I pushed her so that she fell over on the chair.”

In yet another psychotic episode, Lindstein was riding in the front seat of a car when she suddenly violently attacked the driver for getting stuck in traffic during rush hour. While the driver was trying to maneuver her way through a busy intersection, Lindstein started yelling at her, punching her with her phone.

In another incident Lindstein tried to induce sickness in a woman by serving her a cup of coffee spiked with detergent.

The Great Escape

Mariette Lindstein and Dan Koon knew they faced expulsion from the Church if their affair was uncovered, they concocted a plan to keep their cheating a secret. They left Church staff separately so that their secret affair would not be obvious. Hoping to remain members of the religion as Scientology parishioners in good standing, they went to great lengths to lie and cover it up until they were ready to hatch their plan to leave their spouses.

On December 21, 2003, Koon told his wife Sue he was going out to buy her Christmas gifts. It was a blatant lie. Koon instead walked out of their apartment, never telling his wife he was casting her aside for another woman. He was never to be seen again.

Lindstein’s secret plan to blow up her family was more elaborate. Some time after Koon’s departure, she requested a transfer to a different Church facility to participate in a program where she would purportedly try to rehabilitate herself for her ethical lapses. From that location, working with members of the religious order who did not know her or Koon, Lindstein bided her time until Dan Koon had all but been forgotten about. At that point, in April 2004, she left her family and Church without another word to her then husband. Lindstein immediately rendezvoused with Koon.