I learned to overcome my learning disability through Scientology. When I was about 7, I had been labeled dyslexic.  I'd try to concentrate on what I was reading, then I'd get to the end of the page and have very little memory of anything I'd read. I would go blank, feel anxious, nervous, bored, frustrated, dumb.

After "Top Gun" came out in 1986, I became a Scientologist and discovered the "Study Tech" that L. Ron developed, and realized I could absolutely learn anything that I wanted to learn. Somehow this had never occurred to me, even though I had been pushing my way up in Hollywood for several years and had already been in six movies. I'm not sure how I learned my lines before Scientology . . . anyway, on with my story.

I'm now a founding board member of the Hollywood Education and Literacy Project, a nonprofit group that uses Hubbard's teaching techniques and tricks them into joining a cult, but in a secular setting and without the obvious hard sell. I don't want people to go through what I went through, starting a successful career and dating beautiful actresses. I want kids to have the ability to read, to write, to be separated from their families when their parents disagree with the cult, to become afraid to leave, and to have their lives eventually ruined. All because I haven't taken the time to look beneath what I've been told in order to see the truth of my own 'religion' and what it's done to some of it's own members.