Leah Remini left the Church of Scientology last year after many years because it’s an awful cult that seriously believes aliens created the world and are going to come back and take us all away on a spaceship sometime soon to our home planet or something. I suppose in that light, it’s no more ridiculous than the whole Christianity thing, but nonetheless, I think we can all agree followers of Scientology are all cuckoo. The ones who aren’t get out – but at a price.
While Leah has remained somewhat mum about the ins and outs of her exit from the scene, she’s finally spoken out about what a bunch of insane liars Scientologists are. Apparently her family was involved in the “religion” since Leah was a kid, and the story behind it is BONKERS!
From Buzzfeed:
Remini has since learned, albeit the hard way, that honesty isn’t always the best policy in Hollywood, a place she’s called home since 1983 when her pregnant mother, Vicki, could no longer stand the living conditions her daughters endured at The Church of Scientology’s Clearwater, Florida location.
“We went from a middle-class lifestyle [in Brooklyn, N.Y.] to living in a roach-infested motel with six other girls off a freeway in Clearwater,” Remini recalled of her family’s transition to the Church’s compound in Florida, before her 10th birthday. “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?’”
“We were working from morning until night with barely any schooling,” Remini said of her early days at the Church. “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,” Remini continued. “And although that was horrendous for a child to deal with, at the same time, it gave me my work ethic.”
Eventually her family moved to Los Angeles, she became an actress, etc. So what made her finally leave the church? Well, she has a daughter of her own now who’s getting to the age where she’d have to start being indoctrinated, and Leah was not having that shit.
“I started thinking of my own childhood and how I grew up resenting my mother because she was never home,” Remini explained. “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. But my mom thought she was doing something good; she thought she was helping the planet. That’s what the Church tells you.”
Remini soon began to speak to her friends within the Church, many of whom she’d known for nearly three decades, about implementing changes, yet she was only met with opposition.
“We had a chance to make a change from within, but they didn’t want to,” Remini said. “That showed me they didn’t actually care, which went against everything I thought we stood for. They only cared that their lives would be disrupted if they stood with me. They didn’t care about doing the right thing. That showed me everything the Church taught me was a lie.”
“In the Church, you’re taught that everybody is lost,” Remini explained. “They say they’re loving, caring, non-judgmental people, but secretly, they were judging the world for not believing what they believed. To me, that is not a spiritual person. That’s a judgmental person and that is the person that I was. I was a hypocrite, and the worst thing you can be in this world is a hypocrite.”
There’s so much more to it than this, so I recommend giving the full article a read, as Leah’s had an interesting life and comes off to me as really likeable. As for the Church of Scientology’s response to this? Here’s what a rep for the Church said in a statement:
“It comes as no surprise that someone as self-absorbed as Leah Remini with an insatiable craving for attention would exploit her former faith as a publicity stunt by rewriting her history with it, including omitting that she was participating in a program to remain a Scientologist by her own choice, as she was on the verge of being expelled for her ethical lapses,” a rep for the Church tells Us Weekly exclusively.
Calling someone “self-absorbed” sounds like a super brotherly/sisterly religious thing to do, eh? Fuck off, man.
Scientology is a piece of shit.
I wonder if they realize the church’s official statement made them sound whiny and even less creditable. It sounds like something a high school girl would write about their rival. “Oh, she’s just jealous of how great I am and is mad she’s no longer my friend.” I mean come on, you could sound at least a little professional, since you do call yourself a “church”.