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]
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

Monthly Archives

Aftermath Foundation billboard pulled down, and ClearChannel isn’t saying why

[Phil Jones and his newest billboard on Monday morning.]

When we spoke to Phil Jones last night, he had just arrived back home in Canada after his flight from Los Angeles, and he sounded tired and a bit bewildered by what he’d been through over the last few []

ADVERTISEMENT

Chris Shelton marks a Scientology milestone, and reveals something about himself

[Chris Shelton, Sea Org, circa 2009]

On the day before Christmas, Tony posted something here at the Underground Bunker that really caught me by surprise.

It was the latest roll call of Scientology’s wealthy donors, dressed in their finest to receive their latest trophies for turning over $1 million or []

The Guardian’s expose of Narconon is great — except for this puzzling issue

[Narconon Ojai and ABLE’s ED]

We want to thank all of the readers who sent us messages about this weekend’s terrific expose of the Narconon drug program in the Guardian*, which involved a nine-month investigation and publication on the newspaper’s front []

Scientology leader David Miscavige’s New Year’s speech in Los Angeles — the transcript

 It’s happened again!

We were leaked audio of Scientology leader David Miscavige’s IAS speech that he gave November 3, and now, audio of his New Year’s event speech which he gave just this past Saturday in Los Angeles has also gotten to us. We want to thank Chris Shelton in particular for helping to make this []

Judge: Jane Doe 1 can have ‘limited discovery’ before arbitration showdown

[Judge Robert Broadbelt III]

We’ll have a correspondent in the courtroom today as Jane Doe 1’s forced-marriage lawsuit has a hearing at Los Angeles Superior Court. And in this case, Judge Robert Broadbelt III has already tipped his hand: Last night he issued a tentative ruling showing that he’s going to side with Jane Doe []

New court leak: Scientology lied that Leah Remini had ‘blood on her hands’ in knife slay

As Leah Remini’s Emmy-winning A&E network series Scientology and the Aftermath neared the end of its three-season run in 2019, it was a refrain we were beginning to hear constantly from the Church of Scientology itself: Leah Remini had blood on her []

Scientology’s elder abuse: The legal demand that even the church couldn’t ignore

[Graham Berry does it again]

If you’ve been watching Mike Rinder’s YouTube channel, you know he’s been detailing a horrific case of elder abuse spelled out by whistleblower Mike []

More letters — from Ethan Suplee and others — on behalf of Danny Masterson to Judge Olmedo

 Last week, we created a firestorm when we published letters by Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis that they had written to Judge Charlaine Olmedo, asking for leniency after their That ‘70s Show costar Danny Masterson was convicted May 31 for two counts of forcible []

Danny Masterson’s attorneys ask for concurrent sentences to lessen his time

 We announced last month the reasons that we would not be in court today for Danny Masterson’s sentencing. It’s a great disappointment for us not to be there, after the days we spent in both trials bringing you as much as we could during every moment of this court []

Scientology attacked us with new social media ads, and the reactions are hilarious

[Scientology finally gave us our close-up]

For many years now Scientology has spread a lot of garbage about your proprietor, and we do our best just to ignore it. The exception we’ve made is to talk a little, for the movie Going Clear and for Leah Remini’s series, about some of the in-real-life stuff Scientology has []