To counter Leah Remini’s return to A&E, Scientology recruits her father in smear attack

We’ve been documenting how the Church of Scientology’s personal attacks on actress Leah Remini have been rolled out since word was announced that A&E had approved a second season of Leah’s series, Scientology and the Aftermath.

For weeks, we’ve watched as Scientologists who knew Leah or were friends of her family dutifully sat for slickly filmed interviews, attacking Leah for being bossy or rude. Two things especially struck us about them: The complaints were so trivial they were comical, and as Scientologists, the subjects of the videos weren’t really in a position to refuse becoming part of the church’s smear campaign.

Then, yesterday, in the hours before A&E aired a two-hour special episode of Scientology and the Aftermath, we noticed that a new and very different kind of video had been added to Scientology’s attack website. It was highlighted in a way that made it obvious that Scientology’s operatives were very excited that they had landed such a big fish, and just in time.

The video features George Remini, 69, Leah’s estranged father, and his 36-year-old wife, Dana Connaughton (who suspiciously has a difficult time pronouncing the name “Remini” in the video), and it looks very different from the other vids posted on the website. The couple is sitting at their dining table, and George, who was never a Scientologist, rants about how his famous daughter had described him in her book, which came out a couple of years ago.

If you’re familiar with Leah’s book, Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology, you know she opens it up by “dead agenting” herself. She knows Scientology will likely come after her with “noisy investigations,” and so she admits right up front to her own transgressions and misdeeds.

She admits to having fought with nearly everyone she has known, being self-centered, and skipping funerals. (“I don’t deal well with death,” she writes.)

“The same goes for every single person in my family,” she adds. “My dad sold cocaine (and committed various other crimes), and then served time at Rikers Island.”

Leah doesn’t name her father at that point, but this is the line that has apparently set him off, a couple of years after she published it. And so he did a video for use by the Church of Scientology.

George’s former wife and Leah’s former stepmother, Donna Fiore, confirmed for us that it was, indeed, George Remini in the video. And she also confirmed what Leah wrote about him.

“That’s it. It’s true,” she says. She was married to George when he was arrested on a felony weapons charge and spent four months in jail. “It was the 90s, and everyone was doing something,” she adds.

Fiore told us that she was shocked to see George’s appearance in the new video. She hadn’t seen him in 14 years. “I spoke to him on the phone for the first time in four years last week. He was fuming over Leah’s book,” she says. “He looks like death.”

Fiore notes that the page containing the video also features an angry email she wrote to Leah, but it was something she wrote just ten days after the death of her daughter Stephanie, Leah’s half-sister. It was an emotional time, she points out. “We’re an Italian family, you know how it is,” she says. And she disagrees with George, who complains in the video that Leah didn’t offer to help with Stephanie’s medical bills — “Those bills were already taken care of by a prior source and had nothing to do with Leah. And she did pay for the memorial,” Donna says. Donna adds that she has no idea how Scientology has a copy of her email to Leah.

After we pointed out the video to Donna, she called the Church of Scientology to ask about her email being included on their website. “I said, ‘Are you looking to interview me, too?’ Oh, they were very excited,” she tells us. “They offered to send down a film crew from Washington DC or fly me there that night.” She tells us, however, that she was just winding them up and has no interest in being filmed.

The video lasts for 18 minutes, and George and his wife make the same accusations about Leah that she made of herself in her own book. Which, somehow, George only recently found out about.

Scientology leader David Miscavige is no doubt beside himself that his minions convinced Leah’s father to trash her on video. But the accusations against Leah amount to little more than what we’ve heard in the other videos. Leah was rude. Leah was full of herself. Leah didn’t go to a family funeral.

But Miscavige just can’t seem to comprehend that these attacks only confirm what Leah presented so effectively last night on A&E. Scientology ruthlessly goes after its enemies with the same tactics it’s used since the 1960s.

Someone will inevitably make the point that portraying Leah’s family this way, as a group estranged over perceived slights and angry accusations, somehow diminishes criticisms of Scientology’s “disconnection” policy.

It’s bunk. Families are what they are. They’re loving support systems and they can also be deep wells of sorrow and bitterness. Some of us are tight with our kin. Some of us would rather be solitary. But that’s the point — those are decisions we make ourselves.

Disconnection is about an organization requiring that a parent never see their child again, or siblings separate forever, and for reasons of political leverage and extortion.

Opening a window onto the Remini family’s private washing doesn’t change that in the slightest.

 
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Bonus items from our tipsters

What happens when you build an Ideal Org and no one wants to work there?

 
New from Narconon Ojai: Will someone please think of the poor rich people?

 
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Countdown to Denver!

 
HowdyCon 2017: Denver, June 23-25 at the Residence Inn Denver City Center. Go here to start making your plans.

 
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Posted by Tony Ortega on May 30, 2017 at 07:00

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The Best of the Underground Bunker, 1995-2016 Just starting out here? We’ve picked out the most important stories we’ve covered here at the Undergound Bunker (2012-2016), The Village Voice (2008-2012), New Times Los Angeles (1999-2002) and the Phoenix New Times (1995-1999)

Learn about Scientology with our numerous series with experts…

BLOGGING DIANETICS: We read Scientology’s founding text cover to cover with the help of L.A. attorney and former church member Vance Woodward
UP THE BRIDGE: Claire Headley and Bruce Hines train us as Scientologists
GETTING OUR ETHICS IN: Jefferson Hawkins explains Scientology’s system of justice
SCIENTOLOGY MYTHBUSTING: Historian Jon Atack discusses key Scientology concepts

Other links: Shelly Miscavige, ten years gone | The Lisa McPherson story told in real time | The Cathriona White stories | The Leah Remini ‘Knowledge Reports’ | Hear audio of a Scientology excommunication | Scientology’s little day care of horrors | Whatever happened to Steve Fishman? | Felony charges for Scientology’s drug rehab scam | Why Scientology digs bomb-proof vaults in the desert | PZ Myers reads L. Ron Hubbard’s “A History of Man” | Scientology’s Master Spies | Scientology’s Private Dancer | The mystery of the richest Scientologist and his wayward sons | Scientology’s shocking mistreatment of the mentally ill | Scientology boasts about assistance from Google | The Underground Bunker’s Official Theme Song | The Underground Bunker FAQ

Our Guide to Alex Gibney’s film ‘Going Clear,’ and our pages about its principal figures…
Jason Beghe | Tom DeVocht | Sara Goldberg | Paul Haggis | Mark “Marty” Rathbun | Mike Rinder | Spanky Taylor | Hana Whitfield