Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology

by Leah Remini

  So, knowing I was already in trouble I approached the wedding planner with a very light touch. “Um, is there any way we can add two chairs to our table? Or is that too much? I don’t want to make a big deal about this.” She assured me it was no problem, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

  The reception made my stomach turn as a Scientologist. I watched Jessica openly flirting with Tommy, which was nothing compared to the sight of Norman Starkey, the Scientology minister who had performed the wedding ceremony, getting handsy and inappropriately dancing with Brooke Shields. Starkey was a church leader who had captained one of the original Sea Org ships when LRH was still alive and who was close to Scientology’s founder.

  I kept my mouth shut, though, through the whole night, which included the traditional cake cutting with, of course, Tom making out with Katie; fireworks set to classical music; a party after the reception at another castle hall that turned into a nightclub with superstar DJ Mark Ronson spinning. With all eyes on Tom, he put on quite a performance reprising his famous Top Gun moment by singing “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ ” (an odd choice of song for a groom to be serenading his new bride with, but okay) directly to Katie, who played the part of the perfect bride. So I was relieved when at some point the hall seemed to empty out of A-listers. Angelo, Marc, Jennifer, and I climbed into her car and headed back toward the hotel. But about halfway through the drive home, I got a call on my cell phone from one of Tom’s lackeys, Michael Doven.

  “Hey, where are you guys?” he asked.

  I explained that we were in the car, on the way to the hotel.

  “Right,” he said. “And I’m telling you, you need to come back.”

  Not knowing what else to do—this was beyond crazy—I said, “Here, talk to Jennifer,” and I handed the phone over.

  “Hey!” I could hear him say on the cell to Jennifer, sounding loud and nervous. “So, Tom and Katie really want you to come back!”

  “We’re already forty-five minutes into the drive and really tired. We didn’t know where you guys were,” she said.

  “We just went in the kitchen with a bunch of people to make pizza. Everybody was hungry.”

  “Oh, well. You know, I loved the wedding. It was great.”

  “You sure you don’t want to come back? Tom really, really wants you to come back.”

  “No, sweetie. We’re going to go back to the hotel.”

  “Are you sure?”

  What the fuck? Leave it alone.

  Had everyone in my church lost their minds? This was all just too weird. Top officials were here and going against everything I was taught and believed to be right. I had seen behind the curtain. There, in the role of the great and powerful Oz, was not LRH, as I had come to believe, but instead, it seemed to be Tom Cruise. All of these rules appeared to have been broken because of or in relation to him and his standing in the church. Was my church falling apart? Was Tom in charge?

  As soon as I got back to the room, I called my mom and in between sobs I told her everything that had been going on.

  “I think Jessica’s cheating on her husband with Tommy,” I ranted. “Norman Starkey is drinking and humping Brooke Shields on the dance floor! I think I saw David Miscavige’s assistant touching him inappropriately at the welcome dinner. And Suri was on the floor and these women were talking to her like she was LRH!”

  She was in total disbelief and agreed that I had to write it up in Knowledge Reports.

  I then called my assistant back home (who was also a Scientologist) and relayed the details of what I had witnessed to her. She was as devastated as I was.

  “I need the facts. Give me the facts,” she kept saying over and over. “I’m writing it up for the Watchdog Committee”—the highest management group in the church, charged with overseeing Scientology activity worldwide. “Give me the details.”

  “This is our church,” I said. “How can the highest members of our church, the most so-called devout and esteemed members, just ignore policy and operate so outside the lines of what is expected of them, and of us? How did Tom amass all of this power and why is he treated like a church official? Doesn’t anyone else care that this is happening?”

  “Let’s get it handled,” she replied.

  I agreed with her that we needed to handle things by solving the problem, which in my view was Tom Cruise and David Miscavige. I was still LRH’s girl and I remained confident that if I operated within his world, by his policies, writing up everything I had witnessed these last few days, that I was going to be the one to solve the church’s problems, and that my friends would stand by me in this important work.

  —

  I COULDN’T WAIT TO LEAVE Italy and get back home. But when Jennifer invited Angelo and me to return on the jet she decided to charter on her own (Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey, Will and Jada Smith, and the Beckhams all chartered their own jets home instead of taking the one provided by Tom and Katie), I declined. I would have liked nothing more than to go home with her, but if we did that, it would mean another whole day of not seeing Sofia, which I definitely didn’t want to do. The chartered jet that Tom and Katie had provided was going back earlier, so I thanked her but explained that I had to get back.

  On the way to the airport from the wedding, Angelo and I found ourselves in the same van as Bella and Connor Cruise.

  Over the years at the Celebrity Centre I had watched Tom and Nicole Kidman’s children grow up, but more recently I’d gotten to know them better by spending time with them at Tom’s house. The siblings, who were supervised by Sea Org members, often had their computers taken by the security force at CC to make sure they weren’t up to anything and to keep filters on so they couldn’t go on any websites that might get them asking questions. Still, Connor was a bit of a rebel. He would show up to course a little disheveled from whatever “fun” he was able to steal.

  I had always wondered why they didn’t have a relationship with their mom, but I could never ask them, because there was always someone else around. Driving to the airport alone with them, I had my chance.

  “Hey, guys. How’s your mom? Do you see her a lot?” I asked.

  “Not if I have a choice,” Bella said. “Our mom is a fucking SP.”

  I was shocked by her answer.

  “I’ve never seen her do anything publicly to give her that label—and she is your mom.”

  Bella scoffed and said, “Well, she is.”

  Connor just looked out the window. There was something more human about his silence and the sadness I felt in it. My heart broke for him, his sister, and their mother as we rode the rest of the way to the airport without saying another word.

  When he and I arrived at the private part of the airport where everyone from the chartered flight was already lined up to get on the shuttle to depart, people ignored us and acted as though we had the plague. After we got on the plane I settled into my seat next to Angelo and didn’t really say much to anyone else for the rest of the trip back to the States.

  I felt terrible—confused, angry, betrayed, and without friends. But I didn’t want to let anyone—not even Angelo—see how upset this whole experience had made me. I was a Scientologist and I knew how to lean on my training and get my TRs in so that I didn’t show any reaction. I didn’t know who I was going to turn to for this, but I knew that I was on a mission at this point to save Scientology.

  Chapter Fourteen

  AFTER I RETURNED FROM ITALY, I had planned on going down to Flag for a six-to-eight-week upper-level course. The timing worked out perfectly, since I had hiatus from The King of Queens. However, right after I got home from the wedding, my auditor, Todd Woodruff, my handler Shane’s brother, called to tell me I was wanted down at Flag earlier than planned. I questioned if this directive had anything to do with what had happened at the wedding. If it did, I was not going to go. Todd downplayed the request, telling me that it
was just a little Ethics cycle that I had to do and that afterward I would get onto OT VII, no problem. This didn’t seem like anything too terrible, so I agreed and dutifully packed up myself, Angelo, and Sofia and headed to Flag.

  But almost as soon as I arrived in Clearwater, I was routed to Ethics, where I was confronted with all the Knowledge Reports that had been written about me from the wedding. There were so many, it’s hard to know where to begin. I guess I’ll start with the plane ride to Italy, where someone I didn’t know accused me of being drunk and disorderly—on a plane trip where I didn’t touch alcohol. I hate flying, since it’s the ultimate loss of power. There was no way I was going to relinquish my last vestige of control by drinking. And if I was going to die, I wanted to be alert enough to strangle my husband while we plunged to our deaths. Another report detailed how I had tried to steal Brooke Shields’s hotel room from her, which was, as earlier noted, a strange twist on the truth.

  According to these reports, I was the rudest person ever to walk the face of the earth. All my crimes were on the spectrum of things that you have immature fights about in your teenage years. Apparently the delay of the wedding ceremony, which started forty-five minutes behind schedule, was my fault because I showed up late to the castle. As if Tom Cruise was waiting for me to arrive to get married. (I had heard that the delay was caused by a reporter who had snuck onto Jenna and Bodhi’s van to the wedding location and was trying to get access.)

  Jasmine, the MAA conducting the interrogation, showed me the Knowledge Report written by Katie Holmes, in which she referred to my behavior during the wedding weekend as “very upsetting,” and accused me of disrupting the party, which she claimed was a “poor example to others.” She went on to say, “[She] made the party all about her,” and concluded the report with reference to the fact that all of this so-called bad behavior “disturbed me greatly.” Jasmine told me I was a bad example for Scientologists and then asked me, “What do you say about this report?”

  “What do I say about this childish report that looks like it was written by a seventh grader with all the exclamation marks?”

  After that she showed me Jessica Feshbach’s Knowledge Report, where she went on and on about how she had to defend my actions to numerous people at various wedding events (including but not limited to CAA president Kevin Huvane and film producer Kathleen Kennedy). She wrote that I was perceived as “loud,” “late,” and “rude,” and that while I may have been trying to “solve a certain problem,” the way that I had apparently handled it was “BPR [bad PR] for TC and Scn.” She claimed to have successfully managed and “handled” all of these complaints because she knew the “real me.”

  Both of these Knowledge Reports, like all that are written and submitted to the church, are signed “This is True” or “This is Okay,” meaning the person who wrote the report acknowledges that it is accurate in its reporting.

  Jasmine continued, “I just need to know what’s true about it and what isn’t true.”

  We went through each report that way, because I wasn’t about to back down. At this point, I felt LRH was on my side. It wasn’t that I thought something was wrong with my faith. It was that there was something wrong with the people at the top, like Jessica and Tommy. Look, I copped to some shit; yes, I’m rude and I shouldn’t have been late to the wedding and shouldn’t have asked to change seats. But there was something way more alarming going on in our church.

  It was naive to think that I was saving my church when I filed Knowledge Reports on top officials in Italy like Norman Starkey for humping Brooke Shields; Jessica and Tommy for being inappropriate with each other; and none other than COB himself, David Miscavige, for letting his assistant treat him more like her date. While technically it’s acceptable to write reports on people above you in the church, no one writes reports on senior executives and certainly not on COB. Although I didn’t know it at the time, those who write up top officials are usually intimidated into recanting or wind up being declared Suppressive Persons.

  As a result of these Knowledge Reports, rather than partake in an Ethics cycle as Todd had mentioned, I was instead sent into a sec-check. With those reports I had written in Italy in her hand, my auditor went at me for hours, days, weeks, and then months. It was relentless—absolutely relentless—as we went around and around on the same questions:

  What have you done to Tom?

  Do you have evil intentions toward Tom?

  Do you have sexual intentions toward Tom?

  What have you done to Katie?

  Do you have evil intentions toward Katie?

  What have you done to David Miscavige?

  Do you have evil intentions toward David Miscavige?

  It was understood that the only reason I was saying those things about such high-level Scientologists was because I myself was guilty of those same crimes. “You’re a cheater, a liar, a home wrecker,” I was told over and over. Well, yes, this was true. All true. I was a liar, a cheater…but that didn’t change the facts that so were they, and they were violating Sea Org policy and LRH policy.

  The only way I could be done with it and leave Clearwater was if I retracted everything I said. They wanted me to say I didn’t see David’s assistant tap his ass affectionately or the young Sea Org member he brought along getting drunk.

  When I wasn’t in session or Ethics I was up in my room, crying and writing reports. Angelo, who felt so bad about seeing me so upset, thought the whole thing was nuts. He knew I was being put through the wringer but I wasn’t allowed to share with him the details of my sessions or what sec-check questions they were asking me. “Babe,” he said, “just say the word and we are out of here.” He wasn’t attached to Scientology in the way I was. For him it was simply a tool to better your life, and if it wasn’t doing that, it was time to leave the church. He never got to Clear, despite spending more than $100,000 trying to get there.

  But for me, leaving was way too much to contemplate. As my mom explained, if I kept causing trouble it was just going to result in more problems for her, George, Shannon, and Shannon’s boyfriend, William, who were all auditing. “Just get through it,” Mom said. “Answer their questions.”

  I was completely responsible for the fate of so many people. There were no good choices before me. As I explained it to Angelo, “Either I decide that I’m going to drastically change everyone’s life and we leave, or I have to say what they want me to say.”

  Still, I continued to fight, thinking that at any point David Miscavige was going to barge into my auditing room and give me life protection from Ethics for the way I had stood up for policy. Instead, my auditor, Irit, and my MAA, Jasmine, did a Truth Rundown—an interrogation process typically reserved for Sea Org members.

  In a Truth Rundown, the auditor looks at all the reports you have written, all the reports written by others about you, and all of the notes from your auditing sessions, Ethics Officer interviews, and any other material collected by the church to find critical reports or remarks about LRH, David Miscavige, or any person or policy of importance. Everything is fair game. So for example, if I said, “Tom Cruise is an asshole and I think he is damaging Scientology,” the auditor would say, “Let’s go to the earliest time you saw Tom being an asshole.”

  “In 2004 when I saw him at a party and he ignored the guy who handed him a water.”

  “Okay, so that was the earliest time you saw Tom being an asshole?”

  “Yes.”

  “Right before you saw Tom being an asshole, what overt did you commit?”

  In response to that question you have to find something that you did wrong. When that is answered, the auditor moves on to the next question.

  “Was there an evil purpose or destructive intention that prompted you to commit that overt?”

  You keep doing this until you get to the earliest time you can recall—and that’s just for one report or remark. Then the
auditor goes on to the next report. When the reports are done, they go the main part of the sec-check, which is two hundred different questions like “Have you ever said anything derogatory about Scientology?”

  The Truth Rundown worked; I started to crack. I begged Irit to stop, and when that didn’t work, I looked into the camera in the wall of the auditing room and directly at the person watching the sessions. “This is not LRH,” I pleaded. “You are destroying my and your own faith.”

  Irit announced we were taking a break, and when she opened the door of the room, which automatically stops the camera from recording, she broke every policy in the church by whispering to me, “Answer the fucking questions and let’s finish this shit.” In that moment, Irit didn’t care about the truth or the technology; she just wanted me to get through it.

  Soon I started to question what I saw.

  Maybe it is me? I have so many overts. I upset people. I did something to pull all this in.

  Exhausted after a long day of auditing, I lay down with Sofia, who was sleeping in one of the large hotel room beds. I stroked her beautiful hair and studied her innocent little face. The last thing I thought before I fell asleep next to her was, What did you do to deserve such an evil person as a mother?

  After weeks and weeks of twelve hours a day in auditing, they broke me and I retracted almost everything. I admitted that I caused a problem at the wedding. I admitted that I shouldn’t have asked to change seats. And I held seats that caused upsets to people at the wedding. I guess that was true. Then I started in on the process of creating “good effects” to offset my transgressions at the wedding that caused “bad effects.” So in the this-equals-that cosmology of Scientology, because I had bad manners I had to purchase Emily Post books for the library at Flag. I was making up the damage everywhere. I sent gift baskets accompanied by letters of apology to wedding guests like J. J. Abrams, who I was told I also upset. I bought everybody staying in the Fort Harrison a Christmas gift, and lastly I spent $2,000 on framing the invitation and other mementos from the Cruise wedding in a picture box for Katie, which I sent along with a note that said, “I’m so sorry that I destroyed your wedding.” Katie responded with a text: “Just handle it with your MAA.”