Leah Remini rose to fame on the hit sitcom The King Of Queens,
and she was thrown into the spotlight once more when she left The Church of Scientology.
Join us as we explore some of the more tragic details about Leah Remini's life.
Upon leaving Scientology in 2013, Leah Remini was on a TLC reality show with her family
called It's All Relative. For two seasons, she starred alongside her husband, Angelo
Pagan and their daughter, as well as members of her extended family, including her mother,
stepfather, and one of her sisters. Missing from the show was Leah's biological father,
George Anthony Remini. George split from Leah's mother, Vicki Marshall, when Leah was young,
and he's been estranged from the family ever since. Leah told BuzzFeed in 2014,
"It's funny; somehow my father, the guy who left his kids and never paid child support,
was excluded from my resentment and I grew up resenting my mother
for not being home to make food, like all my friends' moms were."
Although he was never a Scientologist, George bashed Leah in a 2017 interview
with the Church of Scientology International. One of the most serious allegations he made
against his daughter was that she didn't pay his cancer testing fees after allegedly promising to
cover them. He claimed that he couldn't get the biopsy until a year after he asked for her help,
and claimed that her failure to come through with the money is part of the reason he got sick.
George Remini wasn't a member of Scientology,
but Leah Remini believes the organization fueled their estrangement. In September 2019, Leah shared
on Instagram that she learned about her father's death a month after his passing. She wrote,
"I received a message from my sister Nicole, who had been contacted by a stranger passing
on his condolences for the passing of our father [...] We had no idea that he had died a month ago.
We weren’t aware that he had been sick leading up to his death. A funeral
came and went and none of us knew anything about it. We were not able to say goodbye."
She also alleged that Scientology came between them, as she revealed,
"Regardless of his neglect and abuse, I had hoped to one day have some closure. [...] I’m
angry that the last chapter in our relationship was dictated by Scientology. Scientology took
my dad in as a pawn against me [...] I’m angry that Scientology found his personal weak spots
and got him on board not with their beliefs but with their smear campaign against me."
"Most people choose their church over their own family in this
scenario and with this organization." Despite their estrangement,
Remini still longed for the chance to reconcile with her dad, and explained on Instagram,
"I would have forgiven him as I always did. The little girls inside of my sisters and me
will never forgive Scientology for taking away our last chance to have the one thing
we always wanted from our father [...] And that was for him to say 'I’m sorry and I loved you.'"
When Leah Remini was in elementary school, her mother, Vicki Marshall, joined Scientology.
Remini followed suit, and their family eventually moved to the church's compound in Clearwater,
Florida. In 1983, then 13-year-old Remini relocated from Florida to
Los Angeles because of the poor conditions at the compound. She revealed to Buzzfeed,
"We went from a middle-class lifestyle [in Brooklyn, New York] to living in a
roach-infested motel with six other girls off a freeway in Clearwater [...] We were
separated from our mother. We had to sign billion-year contracts we didn't understand.
And we kept saying, 'Why are you doing this to us? Why are we here?'"
In the same interview, Remini discussed some of the hard labor
she found herself doing as a child within the Church of Scientology. She explained,
"We were working from morning until night with barely any schooling. [...] There was no
saying no. There was no being tired. There was no, 'I'm a little girl who just lost her father and
everything I've ever known.' There was only, 'Get it done.' [...] If the church needed a ballroom
wall knocked down, you made it happen because there were heavy repercussions if you didn't."
One of Remini's sisters, Shannon, was an infant at the time,
and Remini recalled what the baby endured at the compound in her book,
2015's Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology. She noted,
"The first time I went to the nursery I was devastated by what I found. The person in
charge was a kid like me, just some random teenage Sea Org member on post, who was hardly qualified
to be taking care of children. Shannon was crying and soaked with urine in her crib."
Understandably, the harrowing memories stayed with Remini, and she felt compelled to document them.
Leah Remini's negative experiences in Scientology were not limited to poor
living conditions. As a teenager, she was a member of the church's Sea Organization.
According to the official Scientology website,
"The Sea Organization is a religious order for the Scientology religion
and is composed of the singularly most dedicated Scientologists—individuals
who have committed their lives to the volunteer service of their religion."
According to Remini, members are also allegedly subjected
to physical abuse. In Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology,
she claimed that one Sea Org leader threw her overboard when the group was out on the
ocean in a speedboat because she did not address him as "sir." Remini continued,
"The shock of the moment and the freezing water took my breath away,
and for an instant, I thought I was going to drown."
In 2015, the church denied the allegations in Remini's book in a statement.
As Leah Remini shared in Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology,
the psychological scars she developed from her time in the church run deep, and she's spent the
years following her departure adjusting to her post-Scientology life. She told People in 2017,
"You rebuild slowly. It doesn't happen overnight. [...] It’s a learning process;
it’s changing the way you think.”
Part of that adjustment includes going out with friends and enjoying herself,
as she revealed in a 2014 interview with BuzzFeed,
"There's no going to dinner with friends and having a glass of wine [in Scientology] — I
never did that in my adult life. I always thought people who had a glass of wine at
dinner were alcoholics. It was so crazy to me because you can't get counseling
the next day at the Church if you've had a drink, so most Scientologists don't drink.
Not that that's a bad thing, but it also prevents you from having fun."
After winning an Emmy in 2017 for Leah Remini:
Scientology and The Aftermath, her three-season-long A&E docu-series,
Remini jokingly ribbed her mother in her acceptance speech and said,
"Mom, thank you. You are officially forgiven for getting us into a cult."
Scientology has prominent celebrity members, and when Leah Remini left in 2013,
she lost many famous friends, including actor Kirstie Alley. On a 2013 episode
of The Howard Stern Show, Alley called Remini a "bigot" and asked,
"If someone was out there [attacking your religion], would they be your friend? They
wouldn't be mine [...] It's not selective, I just won't have people in my life that are [bigots]."
During a Q&A session on Reddit, Remini was also very direct about how she felt
about Tom Cruise when asked if he was a good person. She replied,
"No! Just going to get straight to it, no! There is a public persona of the guy who looks at you
directly in the eye and shakes your hand and hugs you and is an attentive person to you
and there’s the person behind the mask who is a completely different person."
"He appeared to have an enormous amount of power within the church."
During an interview with Buzzfeed,
Remini addressed the reason she continues to speak out against her former religion.
"I don't want to be known as this bitter, ex-Scientologist. [...] I'm not trying to bash
anybody and I'm not trying to be controversial. I just want people to know the truth."
"I want the truth."
"You can't handle the truth."
Leah Remini was one of the original hosts of the CBS show The Talk,
which began airing in 2010. Before the second season of the show, however,
she and co-host Holly Robinson Peete were let go from the cast. Seven months later,
she offered up the alleged reason why in a since-deleted tweet when she wrote,
"Sharon thought me and Holly were 'ghetto' [...] we were not funny,
awkward and didn't know ourselves. [...] She has the power that was given to her."
Osbourne responded on Facebook and wrote,
"In response to Leah Remini's continuous comments that I had her fired from The Talk,
let me just go on the record to say that I had absolutely nothing to do with her
departure [...] Leah knows that I have never been in the position to hire or fire anyone on
the show. [...] That being said, my only wish is that Leah would just stop all this negative,
unprofessional, and childish behavior. It’s been seven months. It’s time to move on."
Here's a little bit of Friends trivia for you. Leah Remini played a pregnant woman
named Lydia on an episode that aired in 1995 called, "The One With The Birth." However,
according to her book, Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology, she almost played the
iconic role of Monica Geller on the hit sitcom. She recalled walking out of the final round of
network auditions with an unnamed actress, and they both figured they would find out who landed
the part later on. However, as luck would have it, that's not what happened, as Remini wrote,
"We chatted on the way to our cars, wishing each other the best,
and then we saw Courteney Cox walking toward us, then past us and right
into the building. [...] We both knew it right away: She had the part of Monica."
Losing roles is part of being a working actor,
and Remini eventually landed a lead role on the successful sitcom, The King Of Queens.
Still, just barely missing out on a part in a show that immediately became such a cultural phenomenon
has got to sting. But at least she didn't have to dance around with a turkey over her head.
Remini told BuzzFeed that during her very first audition,
a well-known casting director laughed at her, and not for reasons an up-and-coming actor would hope.
"I went to the $5 clothing store, bought myself a miniskirt, some Skippies,
and I walked into that audition being my most Brooklyn [...] I'm thinking,
'This guy loves me and I'd be showing up on a set the next day.'"
The casting director would later admit to Remini that her audition was one of the
worst he'd ever watched, but he liked her vibe so much that he reportedly begged producers to
cast the star in her first, brief role in Head Of The Class. Remini told Buzzfeed,
"I do believe when it's your turn, it's your turn. I envision Hollywood as a race and some
people simply drop off before their turn comes around. It's all about stamina — your ability to
get back up and keep going even though everything is pointing at the odds not being in your favor."
After gaining her first role, Remini was cast on many short-run shows
and failed pilots, but rather than give up, she kept moving forward. And eventually,
she landed her career-making part in The King of Queens, opposite Kevin James.
All good things must come to end, and that includes The King Of Queens. In 2007,
the sitcom drew to a close after nine successful seasons, but Leah Remini
was not exactly on board with this decision. She said in a 2014 interview with BuzzFeed,
"Kevin [James] loved the show, but his film career was taking off and he didn't
want it to end up being the show that trickled off. I understood his position,
and looking back, he was right, but I'm still mourning that loss. I can't
really watch the reruns because I still feel that show in my bones."
Even though Remini and James officially reunited when she joined his sitcom Kevin Can Wait,
lightning doesn't strike twice, and the show was canceled after its second season.
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