In 2020, after winning a second Emmy for her explosive documentary series on the Church of Scientology, Hollywood actress Leah Remini took to the stage with some heartfelt words.
“It’s been a painful but meaningful ride,” the former King of Queens star said about the third and final series of Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath.
Remini, whose three-season series from 2016-19 on the controversial church won her multiple awards for creating a platform for victims and survivors to speak out, is now taking her fight to the courts.
The 53-year-old, who joined the church aged eight in 1979 and left in 2013, this week delivered a bombshell announcement on her website that she had filed a lawsuit against Scientology and its leader, David Miscavige, in the California Superior Court.
“For 17 years, Scientology and David Miscavige have subjected me to what I believe to be psychological torture, defamation, surveillance, harassment, and intimidation, significantly impacting my life and career,” she wrote, attaching the official 60-page complaint.
“While advocating for victims of Scientology has significantly impacted my life and career, Scientology’s final objective of silencing me has not been achieved.”
‘A cult’
“While this lawsuit is about what Scientology has done to me, I am one of thousands of targets of Scientology over the past seven decades.
“People who share what they’ve experienced in Scientology, and those who tell their stories and advocate for them, should be free to do so without fearing retaliation from a cult with tax exemption and billions in assets,” she wrote.
Remini is one of the few high profile celebrities to confront Scientology head-on in recent years, while many others who have embraced the organisation, including Tom Cruise, John Travolta and The Handmaid’s Tale‘s Elizabeth Moss, continue to enjoy successful careers in Hollywood.
Cruise is close friends with Miscavige and perhaps the highest profile Scientologist, and while Remini’s suit does not target Cruise, her falling out with him at the Hollywood star’s wedding precipitated her split from Scientology.
‘Mob-style operations and attacks’
High profile cases against members of the Church of Scientology rarely make their way to court.
In one recent case, Reuters reported on June 1 That ’70s Show actor Danny Masterson, 47, who was raised as a Scientologist, was convicted of raping two women at his Hollywood Hills home.
The actor had pleaded not guilty to the rape charges.
“The case drew attention in part because Masterson met the women through the Church of Scientology, and two of the accusers said the organisation discouraged them from contacting law enforcement,” reported the US news outlet.
The Church of Scientology rejected that claim and said Masterson’s religion should not have been an issue in the case.
“The church has no policy prohibiting or discouraging members from reporting criminal conduct of anyone, Scientologists or not, to law enforcement,” a statement read.
In Remini’s lawsuit, as summarised in a press statement on her website, she says it is an attempt to end what she alleges “are mob-style operations and attacks on her and other alleged victims and survivors of the Church of Scientology and their advocates”.
“The lawsuit seeks to require Scientology, and any entity it controls and funds, to cease and desist its alleged practice of harassment, defamation, and other unlawful conduct against anyone who Scientology has labeled as an “enemy.”
“It also requests compensatory and punitive damages to compensate Remini for the harm she alleges Scientology has inflicted on her and her career.”
‘Punishment orders’
The named defendants are the Church of Scientology International, Inc., and David Miscavige and Religious Technology Center, Inc., which the complaint alleges manages policing operations and principally enforces Scientology’s punishment orders.
The complaint concerns alleged actions of the Office of Special Affairs (OSA), formerly known as the Guardians Office, including monitoring the activities of Scientologists and non-Scientologists and exacting revenge and retribution on anyone who has been declared an enemy of Scientology.
According to the complaint, OSA Network Orders, a series of directives from Scientology’s founder, the late L. Ron Hubbard, institutionalised a series of retaliatory actions to be taken against any individual, organisation, business, or government entity that Scientology declares as an enemy.
Under the organisation’s rules, directives originating from Hubbard cannot be changed.
The complaint alleges that attacks on Remini were activated by OSA and their operatives under Hubbard’s OSA Network Orders, meant to “totally restrain and muzzle”, “obliterate” and “ruin utterly” her, and demonstrate a pattern and practice of harassment, defamation, and abuse.
The lawsuit lays out the ways in which Scientology leaders and agents, beginning in 2006, seven years before Remini left Scientology, allegedly financed and ordered co-ordinated campaigns against Remini, her family, friends, businesses partners, associates, advertisers, proposed future advertisers, future employers and support office staff who have never even met her.
Parallel lives: Fame and Scientology
Over the years, a handful of high-profile celebrities, including Hollywood A-listers Tom Cruise and John Travolta, have been the faces of the controversial, and very closed, church.
Their beliefs, high profiles and successful workloads in the film, television and music industries run parallel, and they rarely speak about this part of their private lives.
Stephen Spielberg cornered Cruise, deeply respected in Hollywood, at an Oscars party in February, telling him: “You saved Hollywood’s ass and you might have saved theatrical distribution.
“Seriously, Top Gun: Maverick might have saved the entire theatrical industry,” said the highly respected director.
The Independent reported in April that Travolta joined the Church in 1975 and was quoted on the Church of Scientology’s website as saying: “I would say Scientology put me into the big time.”
However, “he has been rumoured to split from the Church following the medical treatment and death of his wife, Kelly Preston”.
“Preston died of breast cancer in 2020 following a course of chemotherapy and radiation – treatments that L Ron Hubbard, the founder of the Church, was staunchly against,” it wrote.
Second generation
In an interview with The New Yorker on May 6 last year, the Emmy-winning star of The Handmaid’s Tale, Elisabeth Moss, made headlines when she gave a candid interview about her ties to Scientology.
TNY points out that while Moss downplays her lifelong association with the religion, she’s part of a small set of “second-generation Hollywood Scientologists” whose “network has played a role in her career”.
Promoting her lead role in new Apple TV+ thriller Shining Girls, the 41-year-old was quizzed about her lifelong links to the church.
“I don’t want to come off as being cagey,” she replied when asked about Scientology.
“If you and I met, just hanging out as friends, I’m, like, an open book about it … I don’t want people to be distracted by something when they’re watching me. I want them to be seeing the character.
“It’s not really a closed-off religion. It’s a place that is very open to, like, welcoming in somebody who wants to learn more about it,” she told journalist Michael Schulman in the latest May edition of the magazine.
“I think that’s the thing that is probably the most misunderstood.
“People can obviously hold in their mind whatever they want to, and I can’t control that. If it’s not that, it’s going to be something else.”
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