Dear Tom,
It’s been more than a year since our last open letter to you.
In February 2012, we suggested that it was time you started speaking publicly about Scientology again. At that time, court testimony and press reports revealed some of the shocking and degrading ways your church treats employees — some of them children — and we warned you that increasingly, your position as the celebrity symbol of Scientology would become a liability.
Boy, we were right about that.
Scientology is in even worse shape than the last time we wrote to you. Narconon — the church’s drug rehab network that you’ve so heartily endorsed in the past — is sinking into a mass of lawsuits and government investigations. Meanwhile, more Scientology defectors are bringing out stories of families ripped apart by the church’s toxic “disconnection” policies and retaliation campaigns.
And now, Leah Remini has quit. We probably don’t have to tell you why that’s going to become a huge headache for you.
You remember the stink that Leah raised at your wedding to Katie Holmes in 2006. Leah was surprised to see that your best man, Scientology leader David Miscavige, was there without his wife Shelly. And when she asked about it, Tommy Davis told her, “You don’t have the fucking rank to ask about Shelly.”
Well, if you know Leah — and we know you do, Tom — you could have predicted that she wasn’t going to take that lying down.
It turned out that several months before the wedding, Shelly had vanished. And every time Leah asked about it, no one could give her a satisfactory answer about it.
How could the wife of David Miscavige, leader of a billion-dollar worldwide organization, suddenly disappear, and stay disappeared, for years without any sort of accounting?
Leah Remini’s anger over that was one of the things that ate away at her, and led her to quit the Church of Scientology. This week, the rest of the world learned that stunning news, and we’re all anxiously waiting for Leah to talk about her defection publicly.
But we’re also wondering about you, Tom.
Why didn’t you raise a stink about Shelly Miscavige vanishing? We know you knew her very well. In 2004, after you broke up with Penelope Cruz, it was Shelly who oversaw the auditions for new girlfriends that enabled you to spend a few months dating Nazanin Boniadi in late 2004 and early 2005 — Shelly had your interests in mind, and was trying to help you hook up, man.
Our sources tell us that David Miscavige banished his wife to a super-secret compound, the CST Headquarters, near Lake Arrowhead in the mountains above L.A. in late 2005 or early 2006. He told a gathering of his top executives that as the leader of a religious organization, he couldn’t be seen to get a divorce. So instead, he put his wife away where almost no one else in Scientology, and certainly no one in the outside world, would ever see her again.
We have reason to believe she’s still there at the CST compound, being kept out of sight, and she’s most likely working with the small group of CST employees who are archiving L. Ron Hubbard’s works in a nuclear-bomb-proof underground vault. She probably has no idea that she’s the subject of news stories.
Shelly’s banishment ate away at Leah Remini, but as Tommy Davis pointed out, Leah really didn’t have the position and power to question what David Miscavige was doing.
You, on the other hand, did.
If anyone could question what Miscavige was doing, if anyone could raise a stink about Shelly’s vanishing and actually get something done about it, it was you, Tom.
So we’re left wondering: Why didn’t you?
Drop us a line, Tom. It’s time we talked.
[Photo: Shelly Miscavige several years before her disappearance, another never-before-published photo, courtesy of Claudio and Renata Lugli.]
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Brian Culkin on Scientology
Mark Bunker let us know last night that he was going to release the full interview he did with Brian Culkin for his upcoming documentary, Knowledge Report. This was filmed well before Culkin became a subject of much debate when he signed a declaration for the Church of Scientology that has been used to disrupt the federal fraud lawsuit filed by Luis and Rocio Garcia. Culkin has told friends he signed the statement in return for a refund of the $350,000 he gave the church during his short time as a member.
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Posted by Tony Ortega on July 12, 2013 at 07:00
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