One of our highlights of 2012 was getting to know Joel Sappell, the former Los Angeles Times journalist who, with his partner Robert Welkos, produced a series of blockbuster Scientology investigations in the late 1980s, culminating in their giant 1990 series about the church.
We lived in Los Angeles at the time, and can still remember the billboards that the church put up in retaliation.
We were reminiscing about that with Joel earlier this year when he told us he had an idea for a new story, and could we put him in touch with former Scientology executive Marty Rathbun? We were happy to help, and boy, does it look like it paid off.
Joel told us that Rathbun’s defection made him wonder, all these years after Rathbun was the church’s chief enforcer, if he could now fill in some details about the kind of harassment that Sappell and Welkos went through when their stories were coming out.
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Chief among those incidents was the apparent poisoning of Sappell’s dog.
Pity poor PIX 11 reporter Hilary Whittier, who had to put together one of those cloying, cliche-filled pieces in the wake of the Newtown massacre, the kind of thing where shell-shocked locals are interviewed talking about hope and prayers in the face of tragedy.
Near the end of her report, Whittier wants to give an example of what locals are doing to comfort each other, and she holds up a pamphlet, The Way to Happiness, that “people” were handing out.
She was apparently unaware that the pamphlet is a classic come-on from the Church of Scientology, which has quickly descended on Newtown to exploit the mass murder.
New Year’s Eve is one of the biggest days in the Scientology calendar. The church really pulls out the stops with a big party, and then urges members — and their wallets — to attend. What fun!
And this year, the event is coming early! As you’ll see in our weekly collection of Scientology fundraising mailers, an interesting date has been set for the church’s worldwide party welcoming in 2013.
So join us as we look at the items our tipsters sent us this week.
Nothing could match the revulsion we felt yesterday at the mass murder of 20 schoolchildren in Newtown, Connecticut.
But there was something else that made the bile rise in our throat yesterday.
Marty Rathbun, at his blog, pointed out that one of the anonymous attack web sites operated by the Church of Scientology has begun putting up slimy allegations about his mother’s mental health.
It turns out that it’s regurgitated material from a larger article that appeared in the church’s propaganda magazine, Freedom. (We won’t link to it. You can find it easily enough if you want to, or you can just assume that it’s the usual juvenile smear that Freedom specializes in.)
In a previous article, we showed the connections between the anonymous attack sites and the church. And now, Scientology leader David Miscavige appears to be dropping all pretense of holding the attack sites at arm’s length.
Officials in Hernando County, Florida aren’t backing down in a lawsuit brought by a wealthy Scientologist who wants to expand a Narconon drug rehab site against the wishes of local residents.
The Narconon center’s landowner has asked federal Judge James D. Whittemore that the facility’s connection to Scientology, and the recent deaths of three Narconon patients in Oklahoma, be kept from a jury if the lawsuit goes to trial. We have copies of two motions that Hernando County filed this week pushing back on that request.
And actually, we can think of several other things that a jury should hear if this case gets its day in court.
For at least eight months, the US Department of Homeland Security has been investigating allegations of human trafficking in the Church of Scientology, TONYORTEGA.ORG has learned.
Since at least the spring, agents with Homeland Security working out of its Tampa office have been interviewing former members of the church who have information about the way children are used as laborers in Scientology’s “Sea Organization” and other matters.
We put in a call to the lead investigator of the probe at the Tampa office, Justin Deutsch, who has been questioning former church members. We have not received a reply.
But we decided to reveal this news after talking to four different ex-Scientologists who gave us detailed information about being interviewed by Homeland Security, and after learning that the probe has been going on for so long.
That meany Jon Stewart and just about everyone else has made fun of this video from America’s favorite cute movie couple, Danny Zuko and Sandy Olsson.
But we know that our readers will have special affection for this darling Christmas carol that features so many of the things that make the holidays special.
After all the new “Ideal Org” churches David Miscavige has been opening around the world in the last decade, there must be a giant surge of new members joining the Church of Scientology, right?
Um, well, no. In fact, the figures from the 2011 England and Wales census are out, and they are grim. In the second most important country to Scientology in the world, only 2,418 people claimed that they belonged to the church.
That’s not the only alarming number that came out this week regarding Scientology’s fortunes. Let’s dig in.
Tiziano Lugli just released at his website a new version of the “Blown for Good” rap that he and Marc Headley (author of the book Blown For Good) conceived and recorded.
When we were in Los Angeles, Tiziano played for us a version of the song that featured several ex-Scientologists, including Nazanin Boniadi, who was once “auditioned” by the Church of Scientology to be Tom Cruise’s girlfriend.
But Tiziano wanted to get an actual audio clip out with better quality than could be heard on our flip cam video, and he assembled a new version that features Marc Headley along with Marty Rathbun, Mike Rinder, and Jamie Lugli.
