Tony Ortega is a journalist who was formerly the editor of The Village Voice. He's written about Scientology since 1995, and in May 2015 released a book about Scientology's harassment of Paulette Cooper titled 'The Unbreakable Miss Lovely.' He continues to monitor breaking developments in the Scientology world from an undisclosed location in an underground bunker he shares with four cats and one of them wrinkly Shar Pei dogs. Despite his super-secret security protections, you can still reach him pretty easily by sending him a message at tonyo94 AT gmail.com (Drop him a line if you'd like to get an e-mail whenever a new story is posted.) [Header image courtesy John Rickard]
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Scientology escaping justice is no reason Nxivm should, Judge rules before trial

[Judge Nicholas Garaufis and Keith Raniere]

Judge Nicholas Garaufis just took a sledgehammer to Nxivm leader Keith Raniere’s final hopes for having some or all of the various charges he’s facing dismissed before next week’s trial []

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NXIVM: Keith Raniere poses no threat, his lawyer says, so witnesses should be named fully

[Glenn Marcus and Keith Raniere]

Nxivm leader Keith Raniere, through his attorney Marc Agnifilo, struck back at a motion in limine by prosecutors that sought to set some last-minute ground rules for Raniere’s trial, which is scheduled to begin on May []

Scientology stepping up its promotion of chiropractic, demonizing of the AMA

 There’s a new article by the Scientology front group Citizens Commission on Human Rights. CCHR blog posts and press releases are generally intended for an internal Scientologist audience rather than the public. This article is aimed at members of Scientology who are chiropractors, and there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of them. Many Scientologists will see []

Leah Remini and Mike Rinder dare Scientology defenders to go on camera

 Yesterday, Leah Remini and Mike Rinder used their Twitter accounts to call out church leader David Miscavige and other Scientology figures, daring them to be interviewed on []

Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard on family and sex: As enlightened as you’d imagine

[Hubbard in 1950]

Earlier this week, Sunny Pereira mentioned that Brad Pitt took a Scientology course that would have involved reading part of L. Ron Hubbard’s 1951 follow up to Dianetics, the ponderous tome Science of Survival. So for our ‘Scientology Lit’ feature this week, we thought we’d introduce you to that delightful volume of Hubbard []

NXIVM: Prosecutors push back on Keith Raniere’s attempt to suppress explicit images

 Prosecutors are pushing back hard at Nxivm leader Keith Raniere’s claim that explicit images of a 15-year-old girl found in an FBI search on a hard drive in his possession were from 2005 and too old to include in Raniere’s upcoming trial, scheduled to begin on May []

Atlantic magazine subjects talk about sudden interest from Jehovah’s Witnesses elders

[Lloyd Evans, Kimmy and Mark O’Donnell]

Ever since they appeared last month in an Atlantic magazine feature about the cover up of child abuse in the Jehovah’s Witnesses organization, Mark and Kimmy O’Donnell say they’ve been subjected to some strange and aggressive tactics by elders of the local congregation in Baltimore. []

Scientology, breaking bad: Signs of desperation here and abroad

 On Monday we posted a report from Phil Jones about how dead the Cambridge, Ontario “Ideal Org” is. Among the reactions to that piece were a couple of additional dispatches from our tipsters. Is Scientology dying? And how []

‘There are bad men in America’: An ex-JW activist explains his work to a 5-year-old

 In an airport waiting to fly to the US, ex-JW activist Lloyd Evans shares with his followers the story of how he answered when his nearly 5-year-old daughter asked, “Daddy, what do you do for []

VIDEO: Danny Masterson accusers face down Scientology ploy at Denim Day rally

[Chrissie Carnell and Cedric Bixler Zavala with a mostly concealed additional Masterson victim]

Yesterday, we told you we were anticipating that Mike Rinder’s estranged daughter Taryn Teutsch might repeat her ploy from last year and attempt to co-opt the message of the Denim Day rally in Los Angeles for Scientology’s disingenuous smear campaign against her []