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How Scientology lured a Sci-Fi fan, but drove him away with its lack of imagination

[Ron Kasman, young Scientologist SF artist]

I first heard about Scientology from a cousin at my mother’s kitchen table. From that introduction, I entered the Church of Scientology on Sunday, December 27, 1970 to attend a Sunday service. I wrote about that experience here previously. That story was written fifty years to the day after that []

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Hey, everybody, Scientology’s sneaky school front, Applied Scholastics, is hiring!

 While Scientology leader David Miscavige is evading process servers and trying to convince the federal government to keep its legislation out of his E-meters, he also has sneaky front groups to []

RIFFER MADNESS: Scientology’s David Miscavige says he’s not been served Jane Doe 1 lawsuit

[David Miscavige and his attorney, Jeffrey Riffer]

Here we go again.

On July 31, we told you about the efforts that attorney Graham Berry and some process servers were making to serve Jane Doe 1’s new lawsuit against Scientology and its leader, David []

PODCAST: Apollo crew member Sandy Holeman on serving L. Ron Hubbard and fleeing Scientology

 We’ve been talking to Sandy Holeman for years, and we should have introduced you to her long ago. And when she told us that she had attended the San Jose world premiere of ‘Brothers Broken’ last month, we decided to make up for lost []

Los Angeles gets its premiere of the Scientology documentary ‘Brothers Broken’

[Reunited: Robbie and Geoff Levin]

We received this statement from Geoff Levin, and we’re happy to post it here…

It’s been a long journey getting out and speaking out and Tony’s been there from the very beginning of my deprogramming in September 2011, when I read my first article in the Village []

Liz Gale: How she grew up in Scientology, and then smartly traded it for being a pothead

 In 2016, our old friend Mark Ebner had a suggestion for us.

More than a decade earlier, Ebner had written a terrific story for New Times Los Angeles (where we worked from 1999-2002) about the suicide of Philip Gale, a math prodigy who had grown up in Scientology and threw himself from a building at MIT []

A 2017 flight suggests that Scientology leader is still canoodling with his ‘communicator’

[Dave, Lou, and a private jet cabin]

It’s one of the most important and telling details from Leah Remini’s bestselling memoir, Troublemaker, a moment that helped begin her journey out of []

Before Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard wanted to be thought of like one of his pulp fiction heroes

 In 1938, L. Ron Hubbard was a 27-year-old budding celebrity living in Bremerton, Washington, across the Puget Sound from Seattle, and in relative []

Is this the lamest tabloid ‘Tom Cruise has left Scientology’ speculation ever?

 You’ll have to forgive us that we didn’t get to this sooner, because we were just out of surgery and lying rather helpless in a hospital bed last week when the Daily Mail’s entertainment gossip columnist Alison Boshoff “reported” that Tom Cruise has stopped going to Scientology’s UK headquarters for the past three []

PODCAST: Jonny Jacobsen, our man in Paris, was on Scientology’s abuses before most

 We’ve had a lot of fun recently talking to great reporters who have covered Scientology like John Sweeney, Mark Ebner, and Steve Cannane. So of course we wanted to check in with our man in Paris, one of the very best journalists we know, Jonny []