Last week, Leah Remini’s sister Nicole had to call bullshit on an unnamed source who told the Chicago Sun-Times that Leah and Kirstie Alley were “chatting” to make sure there was no “loss of friendship” between the two. Didn’t happen, Nicole told us.
Now, the National Enquirer is saying it talked to an unnamed source who says Leah isn’t accepting phone calls from John Travolta and Kelly Preston, who just want to ask her what’s going on.
This too, never happened, Nicole tells us.
It’s not very surprising that Scientology would use unnamed sources in the press to try to make it look like it’s Leah who is being uncooperative. What is surprising, however, is what else Nicole tells us about John Travolta.
She says Leah has described Travolta as one of the kindest people she’s ever met. (We hear that a lot from our other sources, whatever Travolta’s problems with the media or in his personal life.)
Nicole also says that Leah describes Travolta as someone who is completely dedicated to L. Ron Hubbard, and when he’s told to do something by the church, wants to see a reference to a Hubbard policy letter.
Despite that dedication, however, Travolta has been largely uninvolved with the church that is run by David Miscavige. Unlike Tom Cruise, he’s not seen as a big asset to expanding the church, he’s not consulted on upcoming plans, and he’s largely drifted away from the church’s day to day operations.
In 2010, former top Scientology officials Marty Rathbun and Mike Rinder were interviewed on video about the making of Battlefield Earth, the disastrous 2000 movie based on a novel by L. Ron Hubbard. Rathbun and Rinder discuss the total control Miscavige had over the making of the film, but after it opened to awful reviews, Miscavige then blamed Travolta (referred to as “JT” by Rathbun).
(Note their reference to Barbara Ruiz of Author Services, Inc. — the Hubbard literary agency — who they say Miscavige harassed as the film was being made. As we pointed out in an earlier story, Ruiz helped run “The Hole” early in its existence, 2004, but has not been seen since. We’d still like to know what happened to her.)
After the movie tanked, Rathbun explained, Travolta was suddenly on the outs, and Miscavige blamed him for taking too much money on the film.
Rathbun then describes a scene when he was in the presence of Tom Cruise and David Miscavige, and Cruise brought up all the bad publicity around Battlefield Earth. Miscavige blamed Travolta, Rathbun says: “They were just nattering away, just full-tilt boogie on what a criminal, out-ethics son of a bitch John Travolta was.”
Since then, we’re told, Travolta has largely been kept at arm’s length from Miscavige and his inner corps of friends like Cruise.
Meanwhile, Nicole says she has heard from friends in the last two days that a man is contacting them through Facebook, offering to buy information about her. “It has me worried about the safety of our family,” she says.
As we reported earlier, since the Leah Remini defection, there has been a major increase in the use of private investigators and harassment techniques with people like Karen de la Carriere and Mike Rinder. We expect to have some surprising new information about that soon.
——————–
Posted by Tony Ortega on July 24, 2013 at 16:00
E-mail your tips and story ideas to tonyo94@gmail.com or follow us on Twitter. We post behind-the-scenes updates at our Facebook author page. Here at the Bunker we try to have a post up every morning at 7 AM Eastern (Noon GMT), and on some days we post an afternoon story at around 2 PM. After every new story we send out an alert to our e-mail list and our FB page.
If you’d like to help support The Underground Bunker, please e-mail our webmaster Scott Pilutik at BunkerFund@tonyortega.org
