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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A Christmas Eve treat: Our man Down Under on Scientology’s antipodean troubles in 2016

 How’s this for a Christmas Eve miracle? We asked Bryan Seymour to give us a look back at 2016 for Scientology in Australia, and he was good enough to send us this []

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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. []

LIVE IN L.A.: Hearing in Laura DeCrescenzo’s Scientology forced-abortion lawsuit

[Laura DeCrescenzo, Sea Org worker, circa 1996]

Today, in a Los Angeles courtroom, the Church of Scientology will try to convince a judge that it can treat its own workers as harshly as it wants to and a US civil court can have nothing to say about it.

Laura DeCrescenzo filed her abuse lawsuit against the []

The Scientologist who sold a hot dinosaur skull to Nicolas Cage

[Izzy Chait at LAX, the actual skull sold in 2007, and an actor out $276,000.]

By now you’ve probably heard the news that actor Nicolas Cage is giving back to the nation of Mongolia a stolen Tyrannosaurus bataar skull he bought at an auction in 2007. It’s the latest shoe to drop after a notorious broker, []

Would you buy a used car from this man? Scientology and refunds — a primer

 We always enjoy Jeffrey Augustine’s explorations of Scientology’s own internal rules and documents in order to explain how it really works. In this case, he exposes how Scientology is violating the promises it made the IRS regarding refund requests by its members. And if that’s the case, it should put Scientology’s tax exempt status into []

The Church of Scientology: A rollicking legacy of belligerence, profanity, paranoia, and violence

The Church of Scientology has long promoted itself as the most ethical group on the planet. However, the following thirty examples, collected by our friend Jeffrey Augustine and listed here chronologically, present a prolific portrait of Church belligerence, profanity, paranoia, and violence in recent years. We sense a trend.

1. September 2004: Scientology OT Tom []

INDEX to ‘The Unbreakable Miss Lovely’

 Our thanks to Underground Bunker reader Sookie for compiling this index to our book about Paulette Cooper, The Unbreakable Miss Lovely…

60 Minutes   291, 294-297, 306-307, 361, 391

A

“Abdulamiar, Aquil”   326, 330-331; see Ala Fadili Al TamimiAdvertisement (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); Abel, Alan   313The Alan Burke Show   27, 356Alexander, Minty   170Alexander, Rick   170The All Clear Signal []

Guest post: 20 reasons the Church of Scientology is a cult and a fraud

One of the many things the Church of Scientology has done as a reaction to Alex Gibney’s documentary, Going Clear, is to post numerous letters it wrote to Gibney and HBO in the lead-up to the film’s release, as well as in its aftermath.

Collected at the website of its propaganda magazine, Freedom, the letters vary []

Should Louis Theroux be worried? What a Scientology ‘documentary’ actually looks like

We thought it was very smart of filmmaker Louis Theroux to tweet last week that Scientology’s attorneys have told him the church plans to make a documentary about him now that his own film about Scientology is in the can.

We’ve been telling you for some time that Louis and the BBC have been working on []

‘You encourage people to leave the Church of Scientology’: The Mike Rinder deposition

On Wednesday, we told you about the startling admission by Mike Rinder in his January 6 sworn deposition that Leah Remini, who defected from Scientology in 2013, has been in talks to join a federal fraud lawsuit against the church.

Now, we’re going to post the entire deposition for you to examine, and we think you’ll []