Missing friend, child labor, stalking by private investigators.
Leah Remini has worked hard to remove herself from Scientology, but her life is still very
much haunted by it.
Keep watching to see the tragedy unfold.
When Leah Remini was seven years old, her mother Vicki Marshall was drawn into Scientology,
and she brought her two daughters, Leah and Nicole, along with her.
Leah dropped out of school when she was in eighth grade, as Scientology had other expectations
about how kids should be using their time.
Remini became a member of the Sea Org, a group of Scientology employees that function like
a nautical-themed priesthood.
Children in the Sea Org were expected to work.
That often meant hard physical labor, including cleaning, construction projects, and moving
debris for 12 hours a day.
As Remini told The Hollywood Reporter in 2017,
"If you join the Sea Org as a child, your parents give you over to Scientology.
Children are treated as crew.
They are assets."
"It could go from working in a laundry room to working industrial sanders."
When Remini was 13, she and her sister Nicole moved into a Scientology dorm for children,
which was actually a motel with a roach infestation.
Remini and the other children were often responsible for cleaning the motel in 12-hour shifts.
The sisters shared their dorm, which only had a single bathroom, with more than 10 other
girls.
They weren't allowed to see their family, and if they overslept or were late for meal
times, they weren't given any food.
Nicole was eventually recruited by Scientology to act as a spy and report any misbehavior
to the church's authorities.
Ultimately, though, it would be Leah and Nicole who were accused of breaking the rules.
As members of the Sea Org, Leah and Nicole Remini signed a contract that swore they would
continue to serve Scientology for a billion years.
While they were forced to work, the teenage Leah didn't take the abuse quietly.
She most often got in trouble for voicing her anger about the horrendous living conditions,
food, and hard labor that was required of her and the other young Sea Org members.
In her book Troublemaker, Remini described how she was once shouted at by a Sea Org leader
for sitting down in a public place where other people could see her.
As he shouted, she refused to respond with "yes, sir," as was expected.
In retaliation, he allegedly took her out on a boat and threw her over the side.
As Remini wrote,
"He picked me up, and before I even realized what was happening, he threw me overboard.
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 Scientology, having sex before marriage is a punishable offense.
Both Leah and Nicole Remini were accused of this transgression.
Nicole had a boyfriend, and one of her friends accused her of sleeping with him.
They weren't actually sleeping together, but it didn't matter.
As Nicole explained in a 2013 interview with Tony Ortega,
"I told them I wasn't going to be punished for something I didn't do.
They interrogated me, yelling at my face like it was something on TV.
'You know you had sex!
Just come clean!'"
As for Leah, someone saw her boyfriend touching her chest, and she was also accused of having
premarital sex.
"It was light.
It was very light.
It wasn't like- it was a real grabbed-in, like- Very hard to have this discussion with
a straight face."
"Exactly."
Scientology authorities searched both of the sisters' rooms and found lacy underwear, which
they took as proof.
They were both ordered to go to the Rehabilitation Project Force.
As noted by the University of Alberta's Stephen A. Kent,
"[The RPF] put coerced participants through regimes of harsh physical punishment, forced
self-confessions, social isolation, hard labor, and intense doctrinal study."
Leah and Nicole's mother ultimately took her daughters to Los Angeles to protect them,
but they weren't yet able to leave Scientology completely.
After Leah Remini and her family moved to Los Angeles, she was cast in a lead role on
the CBS sitcom The King of Queens.
Celebrities are coveted within the Church of Scientology.
Now that Remini was famous, the church had her spend hours in classes and auditing every
day.
This was expensive, and Remini ended up losing millions of dollars.
As she explained on her docuseries Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath,
"There is no other religion that I know of that requires two and a half hours of your
day, a quarter of a million dollars minimum, and at least 40 years of your life."
"Every parishioner of the Church of Scientology is paying an enormous amount of money."
All Scientologists are expected to purchase a full set of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard's
books, which cost around $4,000.
They're also encouraged to buy multiple sets to donate to libraries.
The first Scientology courses cost only $35 each, but they eventually grow more expensive,
with certain required courses costing $650.
Auditing is another mandatory practice that costs approximately $800 per hour.
As Remini revealed to NPR in 2015, she spent over $2 million on classes and auditing, and
church officials convinced her into donating around $3 million more.
Despite the horrors of Scientology that Remini experienced in her childhood and young adulthood,
she wasn't ready to leave yet.
She no longer believed that the money they took from her was going to good causes, but
she also knew that leaving or even questioning Scientology could cost her her family.
"Fight for your family."
Scientology reportedly has a policy known as "disconnection."
When someone criticizes Scientology, anyone in the church who knows them has to cut all
contact with them.
So if Remini left the church or asked too many questions, her family would be forbidden
to talk to her.
Even if she kept her suspicions to herself, it was likely that it would be revealed when
she did her mandatory auditing.
As Remini noted to NPR in 2015,
"[Auditing is] sort of like a lie detector test.
So you're hooked up to that, and you're asked a series of questions [...] you're just interrogated."
During Remini's time in Scientology, she became friends with Shelly Miscavige, the wife of
Scientology leader David Miscavige.
In 2006, Remini attended Tom Cruise's wedding to Katie Holmes.
As a major celebrity, Cruise is very important to Scientology, so it was immediately suspicious
to Remini when she saw that David Miscavige was attending, but Shelly wasn't.
When she asked other guests where her friend was, high-ranking church officials became
hostile and told her to stop asking questions.
Remini filed a missing persons report, but in 2013, the Los Angeles Police Department
closed the case, ruling it "unfounded," suggesting that Miscavige is not missing.
Tony Ortega's The Underground Bunker blog reported that Shelly was transferred to a
secret Scientology compound, which is completely shut off from the outside world.
Remini has stated that she fears Shelly Miscavige isn't allowed to leave.
Besides a few unconfirmed sightings, she hasn't been seen since the summer of 2005.
"Do you believe that Shelly Miscavige is a threat to David?
Oh!
Absolutely.
Yeah."
The threat of disconnection kept Leah Remini in Scientology.
But after the birth of her daughter Sofia, the idea of disconnection drove her to leave.
She feared that if she raised Sofia in the church, it would eventually tear them apart.
As she told the Washington Post in 2015,
"I didn't want [Sofia] to be raised that way.
Let's say in 10 years, if I didn't want to be connected with the church anymore, my own
daughter would be taught to disconnect from me."
Remini and her family agreed to leave together, but that didn't mean that they were unaffected
by disconnection.
She's described how she was unable to invite any of her friends to celebrate her daughter's
birthday because none of them were allowed to talk to her anymore.
This even included her goddaughter's mother.
As she revealed to NPR in 2015,
"I saw my goddaughter at my local coffee shop, and I couldn't go and embrace her because
her mother can't really talk to me."
Remini's parents split up before her mother moved the family to Scientology's headquarters
in Clearwater, Florida.
Her father George was never in Scientology, but that didn't stop the church from trying
to use him to hurt her.
Scientology opposes the use of any drugs and goes to extreme lengths to demonize them under
any circumstances, even when they're prescribed by medical professionals.
In her memoir Troublemaker, Remini attempted to disclose anything about her life that Scientology
might reveal to discredit her so that readers would hear her side of the story.
This included some details about her father.
She didn't name him specifically, though she did reference the fact that he'd served time
on Rikers Island for selling cocaine, among other things.
As reported by Tony Ortega, individuals working for Scientology likely informed her father
that she'd talked about him in her book, and they recorded an 18-minute video of George
cruelly insulting his daughter.
He went on to create several more videos for Scientology denouncing her, and it's speculated
that he was paid by church officials.
In September of 2019, a stranger reached out to Nicole Remini with condolences about the
death of her father.
Neither Nicole nor Leah were aware their father had passed, but they would soon discover that
he'd been dead for a month, and no one had even told them that he was sick.
Leah spoke about her complicated feelings for her estranged father on Instagram, as
she revealed,
"My father and I had a difficult relationship, but I always forgave him with a daughter's
painfully endless love and hope.
Regardless of his neglect and abuse, I had hoped one day to have some closure [...] Scientology
took my dad in as a pawn against me and likely robbed him of any last ounce of heart that
might have been left in him.
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."
"When you stop (bleep) people's lives and families, I'll stop, too."
It's now been years since Leah Remini left Scientology, but she still receives threats.
As she told Us Weekly in 2018,
"They try to destroy our lives."
The church has also released numerous statements attempting to undermine Remini's integrity,
calling her a liar and a "has-been" and accusing her of religious bigotry.
As she noted to Entertainment Weekly in 2019,
"They have policies that call for the utter destruction of someone speaking out against
Scientology."
According to Remini, when her docuseries about the abuses of the church was on the air, Scientology
officials did everything they could to halt the show, including targeting its advertisers.
Under the moniker of the "STAND league," which claims to stand up for religious rights, they
allegedly reached out to each company that ran ads during the series.
Almost 450 letters were sent.
Scientology also created websites dedicated to discrediting Remini.
Scientology is notorious for its use of private investigators, as they're hired to harass
former members and collect information on them.
This can even include stealing their trash.
They also conduct what are referred to as "noisy" investigations, which can consist
of following their targets in obvious ways to intimidate them.
Although Leah Remini has been out of Scientology for years, she claims that she's still regularly
stalked by individuals paid by the church.
During the production of her docuseries about Scientology, the production was often followed.
In June of 2021, Tony Ortega reported for The Daily Beast that a pair of former police
detectives had been paid their typical rate of $50 an hour to follow Remini in New York
City.
Leaked text messages from the investigators revealed that they knew what hotel she would
be staying at, who she would be with, and what they were doing.
In the exchange's most disturbing message, one of the investigators told the other,
"Word is they want to kill her.
Or at least know what she's doing when in NYC."
In 2022, Ortega reported that one of the two investigators, Mike Greene, was unlicensed
after he was accused of sexually assaulting another woman he was hired to follow.
If you or someone you know is dealing with spiritual abuse, you can call the National
Domestic Violence Hotline at 1−800−799−7233.
You can also find more information, resources, and support at their website.