These two antireligious haters, a husband and wife team, form part of the corrupt nucleus of the “Aftermath” hate group—a bitter clique of anti-Scientologists seeking revenge and profit at the expense of their former faith.

How did they arrive to this point, hostile and hate-filled? A look back is revealing and important, since it helps in understanding their motivations and what they will attack next.

For example, trace earlier along his long pattern of crime and violence and one finds a teenage Marc Headley in a pool, stopping just short of drowning his mother. He would do the same to his younger sister, periodically holding her under the water, inducing terror. And then the next happenstance where, in a fit of rage, young Marc shoved his mother to the floor—when she was seven months pregnant.

When he wasn’t brutalizing family members, Marc spent his youth carrying out hundreds of thefts and acts of vandalism, arson or public mayhem.

Thus it comes as no surprise to find that, as an adult serving in the Church of Scientology, Marc Headley was discovered to be embezzling Church funds.

On the heels of that discovery, Headley vanished one morning—on the very day he was to be interviewed as part of an internal investigation into the extent of his criminal wheeling and dealing.

His wife, Claire, followed him soon after—it was later found that she had also stolen and sold items from the Church for personal gain.

By 2009, the Headleys had a scheme underway to hit the big-time. They had their sights set on “bankrupting” the Church and making millions with a pair of frivolous lawsuits. In 2010, those lawsuits were both dismissed by a U.S. District Court judge stating “Plaintiff’s ‘disputes’…lack merit, and do not create genuine issues of fact.” And with that, the Headleys were ordered to pay costs to the Church, totaling more than $42,000.

The Headleys appealed and by July 2012, they lost again—this time in a unanimous decision handed down by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, its findings destroying every one of the Headleys’ bogus claims. Their grand plan for fame and riches was history.

Four years later, however, Leah Remini would try to revive the couple’s scandalous claims for her Aftermath campaign, but their flawed, invented narrative continued to flat line in terms of effect—all it lacked was veracity.

That’s Marc and Claire Headley, who proved so useful to Leah Remini and Mike Rinder in filling their vacant guest couch, the couple was featured again and again with more repeat-performances than any of the other “contributors” on Aftermath. They appeared in four episodes spanning Aftermath’s programming—including several other “bonus” or “extra” chapters.

Their contribution? Dramatic fictionalized accounts of their earlier discredited claims and misadventures, with apparently no scruples about burying the truth in their distorted accounts.

Take the Headleys’ personal backstories for example. The documented truth differs dramatically from the stories they recounted and fobbed off on the Aftermath audiences.

In Marc Headley’s case, that backstory marks a long and winding road back into his childhood years.

His mother, Trudy Hensley, describes how her son was criminal and violent even as a child—and how he never changed, continuing to commit vicious acts as an adult and turning his back on his family.

“His growing-up behavior of mischievousness turned into viciousness, turned into destructiveness—that was a decision he made,” Hensley said. “He could have made any other choice.

“He became a criminal at a very early age. So, you know, it’s like he had a whole pattern growing up of doing things that were destructive and that hurt people.”

So Hensley was amazed when, in 1989, Marc Headley suddenly announced that he wanted to volunteer and join in the Church’s religious order, the Sea Organization. “As a parent, I wanted to do what I could do for him to make him self-sufficient so he could be a contributing, responsible adult,” said Hensley. “And I thought that had been achieved …. The happiest day of my life is when he decided to work with the Church.”

By 1990, Headley was working at the Church’s film studio, Golden Era Productions, holding various posts in the tapes manufacturing department, film department and audiovisual systems section. He married fellow staff member Claire Whitt in 1992.

Just when it seemed that Marc Headley had finally settled into a productive lifestyle, his mother’s hopes for his future proved to be a fleeting illusion.

In short order, Headley turned out to be an unrelenting troublemaker. He was repeatedly disciplined, brought before ecclesiastical justice, demoted, and removed from numerous positions. Each time it was the same: Headley would feign accountability and promise to reform. But he proved incapable of keeping his criminal and brutish impulses in check, generating a highly toxic work environment for those around him.

In a written confession, Headley confirmed his abuse of one of many female victims. “I grabbed her very violently...She got upset and went into the bathroom crying.”

Other women also spoke out. “He physically shoved me around,” a former co-worker recalled of an enraged Headley. Yet another detailed how Headley grabbed and shoved her: “My clipboard went into my chest, and the force of his shove really hurt.”

In a rare concession, Headley pledged to “never push girls around.” But he kept doing just that. Another woman later confirmed his continuing misconduct:

“He physically pushed me to such a degree that I fell to the floor…. This was very upsetting, as I’d never been assaulted like this before.”

Once again, he promised to reform, and wrote of the overpowering rage that ruled his life:

“I would get in fights all the time for almost no reason. I would get so [upset] over the slightest thing. I would just go psycho. This was a real gigantic problem for me because I was just out of control.”

For Headley’s mother, Trudy Hensley, this was nothing new. She had experienced her son’s rage and vindictiveness firsthand, over and over. When in his teens, she told how he was “getting about my size, strength-wise, so it was getting harder and harder to handle him.” Hensley described how they were swimming together in a pool when Marc suddenly dunked her under the water. She remembers thinking, “‘He’s a kid, you know, it’s an innocent thing.’

“But what wasn’t innocent about it was the fact that when I tried to come up for air, he put my head under the water again,” she said. “Now he did this about three, four times. I could hold my breath for a long time.

“But he wasn’t playing. He was actually trying to drown me. And he will remember this. He was trying to drown me...to the point where you feel like you’re going to die.”

Hensley said Marc stopped just short of the point where she would have to hurt him to defend herself.

On another occasion, Marc’s younger sister, Stephanie, witnessed her brother, now age 14, screaming at their mother who was then seven months pregnant. Without warning, he then shoved her to the floor, making no attempt to find out if she was hurt or to help her up.

“My mom was just so upset and angry she kicked him out,” Stephanie said.

“I was standing there totally afraid and not knowing what was going to happen with my mom’s unborn son and my mom. It’s his mom, no matter what, it’s his mother—and he didn’t care and he left.”

Today, Marc Headley admits it all—how from that young age until well into his 20s, he led an incorrigible, criminal existence. Hundreds of thefts—taking cash or goods from vending machines of all varieties and stealing myriad items from supermarket and liquor store shelves. Once he made off with a bag of cash taken from the vehicle of a pizza company owner, and on another occasion burglarized a warehouse to steal fireworks.

He admits it, but he seems proud of his past, not ashamed. Simply put, he hasn’t changed and he proved it in his actions since he was caught with his hand in the till at the Church.

Marc Headley first set off alarm bells with the Church finance department staff after turning in false accounting records that, as one finance official wrote, amounted to “plain theft.” Headley’s problematic records set in motion a formal internal investigation, whereupon it was first discovered that he had arranged kickbacks from an outside audio-video equipment distributor, costing the Church over $200,000.

But there was more. Records under examination showed that, since January 2005, Headley had been selling old and surplus film studio equipment (Church property) on eBay and depositing the proceeds into his personal PayPal account. He had already collected over $15,000 and had started using some of it for personal purchases of motorbike parts, insurance, flash drives, gasoline, and more. That constituted embezzlement and Headley was scheduled to be interviewed on the matter the next day, January 5. But he was a no-show. He had vanished.

Headley described his departure to an online radio host in 2009:

“What actually happened is that I decided after this whole, you know, embezzling fiasco, I basically said, ‘Okay, fine…I’m out of here.’ So, I drove off. I had a small motorcycle.”

Without a word, he abandoned his friends, co-workers, his only job—not to mention, his wife Claire.

But there was one more surprise farewell for Headley’s sister Stephanie …

“Marc is a complete and utter toxic personality,” she said. At the time of his departure, she was also working at Golden Era Productions. But then she found one more criminal act by Headley, a more personal one.

“He very strategically went and acquired my pay before he left—stole his little sister’s pay—with no word to me,” said Stephanie.

A few months later, however, Claire followed. After departing, co-workers discovered she had ripped off and sold dresses from the film studio’s wardrobe department, pocketing the money.

Now gone from the Sea Organization, Marc and Claire —true to form—began monetizing their unbalanced hate and desire for revenge against the Church and its members. Their new “career” started by selling gossip stories to the media but soon expanded into a grandiose litigation scheme.

In 2008, three years after leaving, Marc Headley announced a plot he concocted with the help of an attorney to “bankrupt” the Church. He planned to induce disgruntled ex-members of the Sea Organization to file lawsuits attacking the Church and to collect a cut from each one.

It came to fruition on January 5 and January 20, 2009, with the launch of the first two cases by the Headleys themselves, filing his-and-her lawsuits against the Church and its ecclesiastical leader. The suits included the same absurdly false and scurrilous claims of being held against their will and described so-called abuses at the Golden Era Productions campus. In short order, their claims of involuntary servitude and labor violations morphed—in an effort to pander to the media—into allegations that they were victims of “human trafficking.”

To further bolster their legal position, the Headleys reiterated their “human trafficking” fiction in a complaint to the FBI, which then allowed an anti-Scientology reporter to print the invention that an “open FBI investigation” was underway targeting the Church, simply because the FBI is obligated to look into any complaints received. But Church officials were never informed of any “investigation” until the Headleys’ report appeared in the media.

The next year, in August 2010, the federal U.S. District Court, Central District of California, dismissed the Headleys’ twin cases. The facts opposing their lawsuits were so unassailable the Court agreed that no trial was warranted and rejected the Headleys’ claims on summary judgment—a judgment rendered before trial. The couple’s claims or “disputes,” the judge wrote, “lack merit, and do not create genuine issues of fact.” The Court then ordered the couple to pay the Church’s costs, an outlay of more than $42,000. And, that “FBI investigation”? With the dismissal of the Headleys’ lawsuits and the debunking of their reported claims, it too evaporated, if it ever existed.

The Headleys appealed and lost again. In July 2012, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals handed down a unanimous decision:

“The record overwhelmingly shows that the Headleys joined and voluntarily worked for the Sea Org because they believed that it was the right thing to do, because they enjoyed it, and because they thought that by working they were honoring the commitment that they each made and to which they adhered.”

As their doomed suits progressed through the courts, Marc Headley was busy making it abundantly clear that his sole intention was to harass, troll and incite attacks against the Church and its ecclesiastical leader.

Headley specialized in ad hominin attacks on the Church’s leader, posting prurient and scatological insults online. In one such post, he wrote, “I just sent Costco size tubs of lube and first aid/sewing kits [to the Church’s leader and a Church spokesperson]. If that does not give them a heads up, nothing will.”

Subsequent postings from Headley made further puerile references to “that Costco size tub of lube,” “penetrate,” “taking it in the backdoor,” “take it in the asterisk,” and further vulgar and pornographic remarks.

The whole time, the Headleys never let up on their anger at the Church they had robbed and attacked. Marc, in particular, directed his fury along different avenues of assault—in ways that had violent ramifications.

In 2008, the Headleys joined Anonymous, the online collective of cyberterrorists under investigation for criminal operations at the time by law enforcement internationally. That same year, Anonymous members generated malicious distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on Church websites, leading to prison terms for key perpetrators. The group also engineered multiple bomb threats and death threats targeting Churches of Scientology, the Church’s leader and Scientologists, and other crimes, resulting in more Anonymous member arrests and convictions.

Marc Headley took on the role of advisor to the Anonymous cyberterrorist group, channeling their energies toward harassing Scientologists and their Churches. Vocal in his praise of Anonymous for its attacks on the Church and Scientologists, he announced in an online radio interview: “I couldn’t be more pleased with what they’ve done and how they’ve done it.”

Headley pressed Anonymous members (“Anons”) to disrupt Churches of Scientology activities with so-called “flash raids” (mob harassment)—because “that just totally messes with them”—and urged Anons to yell offensive language at Scientologists so as to distract them away from Church services.

Headley even sent in Anonymous agents to harass his own family members who were Scientologists. On radio he told local Anons to track down his own mother-in-law at her job and “you know, get in her ear.”

He likewise instructed his Anonymous cohorts to target his sister at her new place of work in Canada.

“Marc had arranged for people to have picket boards with my name specifically on them in huge letters gallivanting outside my office,” said Stephanie. “Just my normal working day, going on about my life, to come outside of my building with all these strange people that I don’t know saying things that aren’t true.

“None of this was said to me directly by Marc. He never made an effort to resolve whatever it was he was trying to do by plastering my name on signs, unbeknownst to me.”

Headley fired off incendiary postings directing Anons to call certain Church receptions, up to “a few thousand calls per day….it would shut that place down,” he wrote, urging them along: “Oh yeah, you guys rock!”

Evidence and surveillance footage provided by the Church to law enforcement resulted in prosecutorial action against Anonymous for its criminal attacks on the Church, with numerous perpetrators sentenced to prison. Accordingly, threats from the central Anonymous enclave died down. But Headley kept up the pressure from the side.

In 2009, Headley engaged an Anonymous member from Las Vegas, later identified as Colby Schoolcraft, on a group Internet forum. Schoolcraft subsequently sent out a hostile post threatening to “blow shit up with guns and explosives” and assassinate the leader of the Church. The Las Vegas Police Department’s Anti-Terrorist Unit arrested Schoolcraft for “bomb/explosives threat” and “act of terrorism” and impounded two AK-47s and several other rifles. A restraining order was issued against Schoolcraft to prevent him from approaching the Church or its leader.

In 2010, the Church received an anonymous email warning of “a vehicle-borne IED heading towards” a specific Church building that Headley was well acquainted with—it used to be where the Church leader lived. The message also threatened violence against a school Headley once attended. The threat was traced to a Virginia-based serviceman who specifically blamed his hate-filled mindset on inflammatory information sourced to Marc Headley. When brought before a nonjudicial military panel, the serviceman was found guilty and discharged.

Another Anonymous member Headley cultivated became a regular interloper harassing Scientology Churches in Los Angeles. As a result, the man—Donald Myers—was convicted and placed under criminal restraining orders four times between 2010 and 2020.

Myers vandalized the Church’s film studio where Headley previously worked; harassed and frightened schoolchildren in the private school network Headley attended; and committed sexual battery of a Church staff member. In January 2020, Myers, while being arrested by police after the assault of a Scientologist, yelled hysterically at the officers, “What you should find threatening is that I am setting you up to be on Leah Remini’s show.”

Which leads us to a question Leah asked Marc Headley during one of his and Claire’s many Aftermath appearances. She asked why he had finally decided to leave the Church?

“I knew I wasn’t helping people,” Headley said, intentionally omitting to mention his record of violence and harm against people he should have been helping. Also conveniently left out was the fact that Headley had certainly been helping himself to Church funds before he was found out—which was what really prompted his departure.

For her part, Claire Headley, when asked the same question, never answers it. Instead, she retells her story of “escaping the Church” while visiting her optometrist to obtain new contact lenses. Her escape then, required a stroll from the doctor’s office to the local bus station and hopping on a bus.

Before the launch of the Aftermath series in late November 2016, an A&E ad ran featuring the Headleys. In response, the Church warned A&E and its producers that the couple’s claims had been dismissed as unfounded by two federal courts. The Church representatives stated that in the ad, one statement voiced by Claire Headley directly contradicted a claim she made during the Headleys’ doomed lawsuits.

A&E representative and attorney Lincoln Bandlow responded:

“So she said one thing and then she said another thing, and we have presented her an opportunity to tell her story.

“We are telling people’s stories.”

That says it all. Aftermath is telling stories, uncaring whether or not the stories are true or false.

In the case of the Headleys’ claims, two of the highest Courts in the land have already made that call.