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

Tonight: Our conversation with Mike Rinder on ‘A Billion Years’ for Mark Twain House

 Our first trip to the Mark Twain House in Hartford was with our friend Dan Perkins, the man behind Tom Tomorrow and the This Modern World comic strip. We got a special tour, and at one point found ourselves in Twain’s upstairs billiards room where his writing desk was tucked away in a corner. It []

ADVERTISEMENT

Mike Rinder’s ‘A Billion Years’: A gripping takedown of Scientology and its leader

 There are many books about Scientology now, including some put out by major publishers. If you wanted a robust history of where Scientology has been over many decades, you could turn to Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear, or the earlier, deeply researched investigations by Russell Miller (Bare-Faced Messiah) or Jon Atack (A Piece of Blue []

When L. Ron Hubbard assigns you to the deep: A slice of Scientology in new book

 Debbie Norwitz reached out to us last year with some questions about Paulette Cooper and Scientology’s Snow White caper, telling us that she was working on putting together a memoir. []

Scientology’s legendary ‘Liability Cruise,’ including color photos, like it was yesterday

 Janis Gillham Grady has graciously sent us an excerpt from Commodore’s Messenger, the first of her three-part history in the Sea Org as a child. (Part three is coming.) And we were pretty happy that she sent along some great color photos — they’re black and white in the book. Still looking for a gift []

Betrayed by L. Ron Hubbard, and stuck in a desert prison: A Scientology horror story

 Janis Gillham Grady has sent us a real treat today: It’s an account taken from her first book, ‘Commodore’s Messenger,‘ along with some photos never before seen, which she plans to include in her third volume, still in progress. If you don’t have her two books, we hope this thrilling excerpt will convince you to []

More proof that governments are aware of how Scientology abuses its own members

[Attila Péterfalvi, still on the case in Hungary]

In 2017 Chris Owen wrote a story for the Bunker about the efforts by Hungary’s government to investigate Scientology’s abuse of the information its members are required to hand []

A new book about escaping Scientology has already made waves overseas

[Diana Dudas]

Péter Bonyai is a name that should be familiar to readers of the Bunker. He’s been a correspondent for us in Hungary, and we’ve covered his own book about his experience in Scientology. For some time now he’s been telling us about a new book by a woman named Diana Dudas that has made []

Narconon whistleblower Lucas Catton puts out a new memoir about his Scientology nightmare

[Lucas Catton]

We have a new entry in our ‘Scientology Lit’ series, this time an excerpt from a new book by Lucas Catton, who at one time was president of Scientology’s flagship drug rehab clinic, Narconon Arrowhead in Oklahoma. Back in 2012 Luke became a major whistleblower which got him an appearance on NBC’s ‘Rock Center’ []

Scientology banned his book and trashed him as an apostate. Here’s his full-throated reply!

 Last Saturday, we had fun posting a 1995 Scientology bulletin that banned Scientologists from reading the 1989 ancient aliens book The Gods of Eden and warned against interacting with its author, former church member William Bramley. In our comments section, Bramley reached out to us and said he was interested in answering Scientology’s criticisms of []

The Scientology-‘Ancient Aliens’ tie-in we just know you were waiting for

[Bramley on Ancient Aliens]

We want to thank the reader who went deep into their personal Scientology documents collection to find the weird entry we have for you on this Saturday, which just happens to be the day of the week when we consider “Scientology []