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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What happened when one of our readers got into a Scientology ‘Flag World Tour’ event

 What a treat we have for you today. On Friday, we brought your attention to a flier that had been posted online claiming that there would be a meeting in Houston Saturday night to discuss the possibility of a new “Ideal Org” project starting there. The flier had been posted by a Scientologist who is []

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Battle for a Scientology soul: Kazakh 20-year-old ‘prisoner’ is back home, but will she stay?

[Rigina Hikmatulina and her mother, Dina Tylevich, in a photo taken yesterday for the Underground Bunker]

 Rigina is back. But is she there to []

Tell us how you declared your independence of Scientology on this glorious Independence Day

 To our international readers, today is a special day in the United States, when we mark the anniversary of our declaration of independence from Great Britain in 1776 and dared to commit ourselves to a new form of self-government without the need for monarchs. We hope our American readers make the most of this meaningful []

Scientology has a plan to rescue the U.S. military, and it involves ‘Battlefield Earth’

 It’s time again for Rod Keller’s Scientology Social Media Review. He’s made a specialty of hunting down the odd and wonderful things Scientologists post to the ‘net. He’s a chronicler who piece by piece builds a highly detailed assessment of what Scientology is doing around the world, and this is what he found for us []

Field report: Visiting the mission that told the Church of Scientology to take a hike

 It’s not every day that we’re in Haifa, Israel, so we decided we had better take advantage of the situation and drop by to see Dani and Tami Lemberger at their remarkable breakaway Scientology mission. []

Scientology’s ‘Ideal’ program really reaching at this point as it eyes a city without an org

 Houston, Texas is now the fourth-largest city in the United States, and with 2.2 million people, it’s only outdone by New York (8.5 million), Los Angeles (3.9 million), and Chicago (2.7 million).

Yet, despite that size and rank, Houston only rates a Scientology mission, and not an org. []

Scientology produces miracles — but you only get to hear about them in one place

 We want to thank the tipster who sent us our favorite section of Scientology’s newest Advance! magazine, the publication of the Advanced Organization of Los Angeles (AOLA).

We really enjoy the “OT Phenomena” in each issue, a collection of fun stories submitted by advanced Scientologists with all of the miraculous things they can now do []

Why Lisa Marie Presley’s custody battle likely has nothing to do with Scientology

 In April, we laid a bombshell on you: We revealed that in 2014, Lisa Marie Presley attempted to have a showdown with Scientology leader David Miscavige, but he chickened out and sent his two sisters in his stead. []

How Google is getting gamed in the fight both for and against the Church of Scientology

 Bryan Seely contacted us recently saying that he’d found some really interesting things about the way Google Maps was being manipulated to benefit Scientology’s drug rehab program, Narconon. Bryan is a fascinating character. He’s a “white hat” hacker, who uses his hacking abilities to help corporations understand where they’re vulnerable. And his work on Google []

Leah Remini is shooting a TV series about Scientology

 We figure it’s about time that we revealed what we’ve known for some time about upcoming television projects that feature Scientology, because it’s getting really interesting. []