FOLLOW ME ON
Daily Notifications
Sign up for free emails to receive the feature story every morning in your inbox at tonyortega.substack.com

Categories

Atack: What I meant when I said Scientologists suffer from arrogance when they leave

Jon Atack is the author of A Piece of Blue Sky, one of the very best books on L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology. He has a new edition of the book for sale, and for more than a year on Saturdays he helped us sift through the legends, myths, and contested facts about Scientology that []

ADVERTISEMENT

Explain your vote, judge tells Maryland county that denied Scientology rehab

[Judge William R. Nicklas Jr., photo source]

We were out on the road all day yesterday and so missed some of the drama happening down in Frederick County, Maryland. Our regular readers know that we’ve been following the action as Scientology struggles to put in a new drug rehab “Narconon” center there with a cute maneuver []

Oscar snubs Alex Gibney’s Scientology documentary ‘Going Clear’ despite buzz

 A day after Alex Gibney learned that he’d been nominated for an award by the Director’s Guild of America for his documentary Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, his movie was left out of the nominations for Documentary Feature which were announced this morning for the 88th Academy Awards, to be presented in []

DOX: Government disclosure shows extent of Scientology’s reliance on cheap foreign labor

 In 2009, researcher Jeff Jacobsen wrote about Scientology’s documented problems bringing foreigners to the United States to work in its “Sea Organization.” Anecdotally, ex-Scientologists say that the church relies heavily on foreigners to accept jobs under the bizarre working conditions of the Sea Org, which requires signing a billion-year contract and working 16-hour days, seven []

A great peek into how Scientology uses fronts to love-bomb a public official

[Chief Chad Loewen]

We’ve been really busy with an investigative story that we hope to uncork tomorrow. But in the meantime, we want to thank reader QBird, who took it upon herself to follow up on one of our recent stories. []

David Bowie, 1947-2016

 “We used to call him Garson The Parson in the Spiders, poor love, when he was into Scientology. But it did cause us one or two problems. I was thinking about having him back in the band and the thing that really clinched it was hearing that he was no longer a Scientologist.”

— David Bowie, []

A business executive looks at Scientology as a (poorly run) business

[Blue states contain active Scientology orgs.]

Jeffrey Augustine is back, this time with a new look at Scientology’s current strength in the United States. We think he’s got a unique perspective in this []

‘Archetypical newshound’ Paulette Cooper described in ‘thrilling account’ — Kirkus

 Our London publisher, Humfrey Hunter of Silvertail Books, submitted our book about Paulette Cooper, The Unbreakable Miss Lovely, to Kirkus Reviews. []

Jon Atack: The best thing ever written about the language traps in Scientology’s Bible, ‘Dianetics’

Jon Atack is the author of A Piece of Blue Sky, one of the very best books on L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology. He has a new edition of the book for sale, and for more than a year on Saturdays he helped us sift through the legends, myths, and contested facts about Scientology that []

AUDIO: Hear Scientology boast about the $5.7 million it got from Google in free ads

 In September 2014, we published a story that we expected would get more attention. We reported that at a gala celebration in the San Fernando Valley, a gathering of about 500 Scientologists who had paid $100 each to attend were told that the Church of Scientology had benefited from its relationship with Google, which had []