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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Leah Remini: Where’s the outrage about Scientology’s disappeared?

 We hope we can convey to you how much it hit us square in the solar plexus when Leah Remini sent us the photo above, which she came across as she was going through some of her []

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She was stunned by the lion’s beauty — so she shot it dead

 Have you seen these trophy hunting websites? Seriously, they are something else. This is an actual caption to a photo that we’ve replaced above with an illustration by talented cartoonist Chad Essley. We’re not making this []

Lloyd Evans gets out his crystal ball to see the future for Jehovah’s Witnesses

 Where is the Watch Tower and Bible Society of Pennsylvania, A/K/A, the Jehovah’s Witnesses organization, headed? We’ve seen a lot of bad news about child abuse being covered up in the church here and abroad. But does that mean changes are coming? Or, with 8 million members, is this a movement that’s too big to []

Allison Mack may be on her way to prison, but she can sing really well!

 Frank Parlato is having too much fun at his blog as the leaders of Nxivm are, one after the other, getting the boom lowered on them in federal court. And now that Smallville actress Allison Mack has pleaded guilty and will be sentenced in September to perhaps up to 20 years in prison, Frank has []

L. Ron Hubbard: Scientology will thrive when medical doctors are reined in

 Thanks again to Rasha for bringing to us the newest edition of International Scientology News. The magazine is generally one of the most tiresome, as it serves mainly to repeat all of the propaganda that had been presented at one of David Miscavige’s big events, in this case the most recent L. Ron Hubbard Birthday []

Jehovah’s Witnesses and legal warfare: What it looks like in the trenches

 Yesterday we listened in on Lloyd Evans, Mark O’Donnell and the Electronic Frontier Foundation talking about Watch Tower’s attempt to “dox” Darkspilver, who has posted critical information about the Jehovah’s Witnesses organization at []

L. Ron Hubbard defines religion for you skeptical non-Xenu believers

 Rod Keller has the week off, and we’re grateful to Rasha for coming through in the meantime by sending us the new issues of Impact and International Scientology News. Today, we’ll look at a couple of choice items from the []

‘I buried your dog today’: A searing message for a nameless dog owner

 We ran across this moving tribute written by Diz Schroeder of Montana. She posted it to Facebook on April 5 and made it shareable for the public, and it now has more than 64,000 shares. We thought you’d want to see []

VIDEO: Jehovah’s Witnesses, subpoenas, and the attempted unmasking of apostates

 We mentioned the other day that the ex-Jehovah’s Witnesses community is experiencing something very like what ex-Scientologists went through 25 years ago, when the Church of Scientology went to war with the early []

Scientology and evolution: The otherwordly experience of reading ‘A History of Man’

 This week in ‘Scientology Lit’ we’re looking at perhaps our favorite book by L. Ron Hubbard himself, the infamous ‘A History of Man’ of 1952. By that year, Hubbard had committed to the idea that Scientology, grown from the ashes of Dianetics, would pursue the idea of past-life therapy. This book was intended to give []