Lisa Marie Presley is inching ever closer to speaking publicly about leaving Scientology. And yesterday, she seemed to take a pretty big move in that direction.
In April of last year, we first pointed out that a new song by Lisa Marie contained words a Scientologist in good standing would never use. The song was “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet,” and it was released ahead of the album Storm and Grace. Based on those lyrics, we said it was pretty likely that longstanding rumors were true and Lisa Marie had left the church.
A month later, we obtained from her label the lyrics to the rest of the album’s songs, and revealed that the words in the song “So Long” no longer left any doubt that Lisa Marie had left Scientology behind.
This here is a city without lights
Those are all the people without eyes
Soup for sale without a bowl
Religion so corrupt and running lives
Farewell, fair weathered friends
I can’t say I’ll miss you in the end
In the year since, we’ve received further confirmation from our celebrity sources that Lisa Marie Presley has, indeed, given up on Scientology. But she has not spoken publicly about it, and generally, when reporters ask her about the lyrics of her songs, she’s offered only vague stories about leaving a group of people who had been holding her back.
Yesterday, however, the CBS-distributed show with the unfortunate name omg! Insider interviewed Presley at Graceland, and co-anchor Kevin Frazier asked her once again about the lyrics to “So Long.” (For some reason, he got the name wrong, calling it “Sticks and Stones,” which is another song on the album, but the lyrics on the screen are definitely from “So Long.”)
Although the word “Scientology” is never uttered by Frazier or Presley, it’s only too obvious that her answer is all about leaving the church. And what an answer.
Here’s what she said:
Kevin: What’s that about?
Lisa Marie: Well, it’s pretty self-explanatory.
Kevin: But when you were writing it, what was going through your mind?
Lisa Marie: There was a point in my life where no one would ever tell me anything bad. No one was telling me what was happening or what was going on, really. So I had a very obscure and actually completely blocked view of reality for a very long time. So, when I got rid of all these nuts in my life and these, whatever they’re crazy criminal people, away, that I was like, OK, I’m going to go find out what’s really going on out there.
Like other ex-Scientologists, Presley describes what it’s like to be inside the church’s bubble, kept from what’s really happening in the world. Other church members tell us that at some point, they became aware of the corruption in the church, and then became determined to learn what was really going on.
Said former Scientology spokesman, Mike Rinder, when he saw this video last night, “She is less circumspect than I have heard her before about her views of the church.”
She certainly is. We’ve been told she’s not more vocal because she doesn’t want to lose contact with members of her family who are still in the church. As we’ve shown time and again at this website, people who dare leave Scientology often find themselves “declared” a “suppressive person,” and church members who want to remain in good standing then have to cut off all ties with that “SP,” even if it means splitting up families.
Actress Leah Remini managed to keep her family intact when she left Scientology this summer. Can Lisa Marie eventually do the same?
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Four Days to Super Power — And Look At This View!
With just four days to go until Scientology dedicates its new “cathedral” in Clearwater, Florida, we were sent this view of the Super Power Building from an angle we’ve never seen before.
As you can see, this photo was taken from inside one of the most holy places in Scientology’s earthly existence, the Fort Harrison Hotel! Looking over Fort Harrison Avenue from what looks like the fifth or sixth floor of the hotel, in the lower left you can see the air bridge that connects the two buildings. And yes, you can see the big bow on the Super Power Building, so you know this was taken in the last day or so. That’s so cool!
With hardly any notice at all, Scientologists are being asked to drop everything and get themselves to Flag (the name church members use for their complex in Clearwater). The following e-mail was sent to one of our celebrity sources inside the church, and gives you some idea of the big rush…
We are now only a few days away from the most HISTORIC event EVER in our history and the opening of the New Flag Building with the release of Super Power and the Cause Resurgence Rundown!
Thousands of Scientologists are flying in from 53 different countries to attend the live event and you are invited!
If there was ever a time to come to Flag to celebrate the biggest event, it is NOW!
We are fully set up and prepared to arrive YOU to Flag for this historic occasion. There are currently over 40 people standing by to help you with any of your questions regarding accommodations, transportation, meal arrangement, or any other aspect of the trip.
Time is of the essence – please respond today so we can arrange ALL logistics and accommodations for your stay.
If you have any questions you can email me or reach me by phone at 1800-233-FLAG. Can’t wait to see you here.
Sincerely,
Meagan Tucker
Dir Public Relations FSO
We’re very confident of this e-mail’s provenance and of the source that forwarded it to us. But that’s not always the case.
Yesterday, some readers were taken in by an e-mail that turned out to be another unfunny hoax sent out by a group calling itself “Thetaburst.org.”
We’re all for satire here at the Underground Bunker, but the fake Scientology e-mails sent out by Thetaburst aren’t funny, and they just end up making more work for us as some of our loyal tipsters rush to get them to us.
It’s usually pretty easy to spot these fakes. In this case, “AssistantRegistrar” — one of Thetaburst’s giveaway names — claimed that the Super Power opening had been moved back to December 29.
“The event is being postponed to give the City of Clearwater 6 weeks lead time for the necessary permits,” the e-mail said. Hardy har har.
So who is Thetaburst? Karen de la Carriere and her husband Jeffrey Augustine have been accused of being behind the hoaxes, but we’re convinced that isn’t the case.
We’re not certain who is behind the hoax e-mails, but recently we had an interesting exchange with a man named Dave LaCroix.
On October 3, LaCroix sent us an e-mail which began, “I created the website www.scientolipedia.org and will be publishing a major biography about Yvonne Gillham Jentzsch in a couple weeks.”
The Yvonne Gilham article was published, and it has a wealth of information about Scientology in the 1970s. But we told LaCroix that about the same time he had reached out to us, we learned that another e-mail was being sent around promoting the Yvonne Gilham article, and it encouraged readers to send their own remembrances of her to the e-mail address “biographer@thetaburst.org”
When we asked LaCroix about that, he responded, “Why do you want to know?”
“I’m curious about the connection between scientolipedia.org and thetaburst.org that the e-mail implies,” we told him.
“I’ll be glad to answer any questions about the story but not about my marketing strategies,” he responded. We sent him a follow-up question, but it was the last we heard from him.
Is LaCroix behind the Thetaburst fake e-mails? Whoever it is, we just wish it would stop. They’re just not funny.
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SUPER POWER COUNTDOWN: 4 Days to Go!
With Scientology’s “Super Power Building” opening this Sunday, we’re counting down the days with some of the wild schematics of contraptions that were planned for the space-aged fifth floor. Today, we remember when we were first looking at one particular part of the floor plan and noticed a somewhat egg-shaped space on the right side with the strange name “Endocrine States”…
Later, we found this wild cutaway view of the room, which apparently features some sort of tilt-a-whirl apparatus to rock a person back and forth…
How such an apparatus would help to hone your endocrine system is a mystery to us, but here’s another view for the engineers out there to ponder…
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Posted by Tony Ortega on November 13, 2013 at 07:00
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