Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology

by Leah Remini

  There was seemingly nothing the church wouldn’t do to keep its most dedicated Scientologist happy. They were even said to be involved in finding him a girlfriend. The unlucky girl chosen after Tom Cruise broke up with Penelope Cruz was Nazanin Boniadi. Naz, as her friends call her, was a beautiful dark-haired actress. She was warm, approachable, and smart. She was also a college graduate, which was unusual for a Scientologist. She had just graduated from the University of California, Irvine, in 2003, with Honors in Biological Sciences, and was about to apply to medical school.

  Her mom had joined Scientology when Naz was seventeen, and Naz had quickly moved up the Bridge herself. We first met in 2003. We were both working on our OT levels when we became friends. We would find time to talk before courses or during breaks. Then, in late 2004, she disappeared. I wondered if Naz had gone back to her “real life.”

  Years later, I found out what had happened to Naz during this time. She underwent a confidential mission for the church where she thought she was being prepared for a special humanitarian project, but ended up with the role of Tom’s girlfriend.

  The man assigned to preparing Naz for this mission was Greg Wilhere, a senior Sea Org executive (Inspector General RTC) and David Miscavige’s right-hand man. His efforts should have been focused more on furthering the aims and goals of Scientology; instead, it seemed his expertise was used for prepping people for the real-life Mission Impossible: putting up with Tom Cruise and David Miscavige.

  To get Naz ready for Tom, he needed to get rid of her current boyfriend. He tried to convince her that her boyfriend was only a distraction to her mission in the church. “No,” Naz said, “I love my boyfriend; he is my best friend and I won’t do that.” The next angle Greg tried was telling Naz that her boyfriend was “not qualified to associate with the dignitaries and world leaders Naz would be meeting on the mission,” implying that he was committing transgressions against Scientology and wasn’t a good person. Naz still refused. Unable to convince Naz, Greg showed Naz parts of her boyfriend’s confidential confessional folders in which he admitted to several transgressions against Naz. Still not convinced, Naz confronted her boyfriend without revealing her source. When he admitted to the transgressions against her, she broke up with him.

  Once Naz was available, the church did its homework on her, including background checks, culling her personal and confidential PC and ethics folders with a fine-tooth comb, countless sec-checks, and an extensive study program that included reading the policy “The Responsibility of Leaders”—Scientology’s indoctrination on how one should act with and around those in a position of power and influence. This screening process also covered physical appearance and included on-camera interviews and photo shoots at the Celebrity Centre in Los Angeles.

  After some time, Naz was “approved” to meet Tom. The next step required that her physical appearance met his standards. Her orthodontic braces were removed, her hair color was darkened, and Greg took her on a very expensive shopping spree in Beverly Hills to buy a new wardrobe for her mysterious meetings with “dignitaries.”

  Naz was flown first class to New York for the first step in her secret mission. On the flight Greg randomly asked Naz, “What would your ideal date be like?” Naz wasn’t in the mood to think about dating as she’d just ended a five-year relationship and was heartbroken, but after some thought, she said, “Well, I love ice skating and sushi,” oblivious to the intent behind Greg’s question.

  Their first stop for the mission was the New York Org where Naz was to get a special tour and briefing by Greg. Tommy Davis and Tom Cruise happened to walk by. Greg introduced Tom and Naz and then Tommy asked if Greg and Naz would like to accompany them to the Empire State Building (which was closed to the public at that time), followed by sushi at Nobu and then ice skating at the Rockefeller Center ice skating rink (also closed to the public when they got there). And although in that moment she realized that it all could not have been coincidence, who could say no to Tom Cruise? He was not only handsome and hugely successful, he was also revered among Scientologists, and he had chosen her. She overlooked the way in which the church got her there and felt like she had won some kind of lottery. After the wooing process, Naz was in love. (The church was quick to deny that there had been any special project or that any of her boyfriend’s auditing materials were shared.)

  But her joy was short lived. She dated and lived with Tom for three months. The church appeared to be involved in all aspects of the relationship. She was chaperoned by Tommy and Jessica constantly, who asked Naz to report anything “non-optimum” she observed in Tom so they could help him. “Do you think he is happy?” they would ask her, and Jessica even offered unsolicited advice such as “Why don’t you be more aggressive with Tom and just put your hands down his pants when you see him?” Naz quickly discovered that her “mission” was to make Tom happy, even at the expense of her own happiness.

  Three months into Naz and Tom’s relationship, Jessica was summoned to a closed-door meeting with Tom. Right after the meeting Jessica told Naz to pack a few things and go with her to Celebrity Centre, where Naz was going to be staying for just a few days. She wasn’t allowed to talk to Tom, who was said to be “busy” after his meeting with Jessica and was not to be approached. Jessica showed Naz a few policies from the PTS/SP (Potential Trouble Source/Suppressive Person) course and told Naz that she had become a “robot” and that because of this, Naz needed to sign up for the PTS/SP course immediately and not to contact Tom Cruise, because he was busy and didn’t need his girlfriend.

  “You’ve lost that certainty you had when we first met you,” Jessica told her.

  “That is what happens when you are separated and isolated from everyone you know and love and told what to do in every aspect of your life,” Naz said. “If I am a robot, it is because you turned me into one.”

  Next came a meeting with Tommy Davis. Tommy said, “So, how do you think it’s going with Tom?”

  Naz replied, “Not good?”

  Tommy agreed, “Yup, not good.”

  Naz wanted answers as to why her boyfriend wasn’t doing his own breaking up and asked to talk to Tom directly, to no avail.

  Naz then went back to Greg and told him she was aware that this had all been a setup and he had misled her from the start. He responded, “Of course, how else is he going to meet someone qualified? At a club? Look, I can lead a horse to water, but I can’t make it drink.”

  Not surprisingly, Tom, through his lawyers, has denied all of this—the church never helped find him a girlfriend, Naz never moved in with him.

  Almost as some sort of consolation prize, Naz was sent to Flag to get onto OT VII and was put up in a suite. Even though this stay was all expenses paid, it did nothing to remove the hurt she felt. Devastated by her experience, Naz confided in a friend who seemed to want to help her. The friend then immediately wrote up a nine-page report on Naz.

  Tommy told Naz that he briefed Tom and told him that Naz was being handled. She was then quickly demoted to living in a cheaper motel, away from Cruise’s environment, and subjected to doing four months of menial labor, including tasks such as digging ditches and cleaning public toilets with a toothbrush. Eventually she was promoted to selling Dianetics books on the streets of Tampa. Better, but still humiliating. All the while she was being deprogrammed with security checks and the PTS/SP course. She wasn’t allowed to talk to anyone, particularly her Scientology friends, since she was considered a traitor. She was not allowed to go anywhere alone unless escorted by either church security, ethics staff, or a representative of Flag’s President’s Office.

  And if you ask the church, they will deny that these practices exist or that people are punished at all.

  One day, while being escorted to do amends, Naz saw a friend and fellow actress, Marisol Nichols. Naz smiled and said hello, but Marisol turned her back to Naz and walked off. Naz asked her escort why she would do something
like that, and the woman’s response was “Why wouldn’t she? You just got done scrubbing toilets. What makes you think you have anything to talk about with a successful Scientologist like that? You have nothing in common.”

  Naz had started to believe that perhaps she was as evil as they were suggesting. After all, this was her religion and they were telling her she had committed the ultimate sin of betraying Tom. Naz found her faith being tested because she couldn’t reconcile any of these practices her church had appeared to be behind.

  But she mainly complied because her mother was still a Scientologist at the time and would have been forced to disconnect if she didn’t remain in good standing with the church. Naz’s mom, like many Scientologists, said to her daughter, “Naz, please just do what they ask and get through your punishment.”

  Naz’s house, as well as her mother’s house, were visited by church officials and anything Tom had ever given her—pictures of the two of them together, gifts given to her by Bella and Connor, anything of their lives together—was removed.

  Months later, Tom was engaged to Katie Holmes. That’s when Naz and her mother left Scientology, and everyone they knew from it, behind.

  I certainly felt sorry for Naz, who reached out to me after I was declared an SP, because she also had left the church. But I was afraid that she was actually a double agent (she had never publicly spoken out against Scientology), so I would meet in person only if it was in a public place—more specifically, the restaurant where I was having dinner with my Dancing with the Stars partner, Tony Dovolani, and our respective families. In the fall of 2013, I was one of the celebrity contestants on the ABC dance competition show. Since I had just left Scientology, it was a very emotional time for me, and sometimes I seemed to break down for no reason at all. Without asking too many questions about my story, Tony, who remains a good friend, immediately started to defend me, which got him and Cheryl Burke (another friend) un-followed and un-friended by Kirstie Alley, who actually tried to convince the DWTS producers not to have me on the show when she heard I was going to be a contestant.

  I hadn’t seen Naz since she fell out with Tom, but in the lounge of a Beverly Hills hotel, with my family and Tony’s surrounding us, she fell into my arms and wept. It didn’t matter that we were in public, she had finally found someone who was sympathetic to what she had been through and who understood. I held her, because I, unlike most people, understood her pain and what they had put her through. To explain it to someone outside the church would take months, and if you were to explain it to someone inside the church they probably wouldn’t care, wouldn’t want to hear about it, and would most likely write you up in a Knowledge Report for even discussing it.

  Naz had been manipulated and lied to, all in an effort to keep Tom Cruise happy. Who knows whether Tom was aware of all that was done to her, but for him to have dismissed her without saying goodbye or speaking directly to her seemed beyond cruel.

  “I know, baby. It wasn’t you,” I kept saying to her while she cried. “What you were put through was evil.”

  Like me, Naz just wanted assurance that she wasn’t crazy and that she wasn’t evil.

  Every Scientologist personally takes on so much. If it isn’t trying to figure out what transgression you’ve committed, it’s going from course to course and auditing until collectively, you’re in it for half a million, easy. And for most—those who aren’t celebrities, executives, or people who come from wealth—this is money they don’t have.

  It’s all so upside down. Even if you want to give back to the greater world in some way, Scientology provides the venue. It’s an all-inclusive religion. “Oh, you want to be a humanitarian? We have just the program for you.” But it’s always in the church. Always. You are discouraged from giving money to the Red Cross when disaster hits; instead, give it to the church to help disaster victims.

  The result is you get to feel like a better person without ever needing to dirty yourself with the outside world. You are under the impression that you and Scientology are doing amazing things for the outside world and for humanity when all you’re actually doing is forwarding the church’s agenda. Because parishioners are discouraged from checking the facts (online and elsewhere) of what is actually being done and who is actually being helped, you buy into it completely. Even as your own life falls apart before your eyes, you don’t notice because you are too busy receiving all these awards and certificates from your church that say you are moving up. It’s a satisfaction you don’t get in the real world, where doing good things doesn’t immediately, or even necessarily, translate into recognition.

  Once I realized that about Scientology, I could no longer stay in it. And I never looked back. The big mistake I made, however, was in trying to change the system instead of just changing myself.

  I didn’t need to fight the machine, make it wrong in order to prove myself right. If Scientologists are happy in the church, I say God bless. Honestly, it’s probably better for them to keep getting jerked off in the church, because they will never experience that kind of validation in the real world. Once outside the church, they would be devastated, as my family and I had been, to find out that what they had dedicated their lives (and money) to was not happening. That Scientology was in fact not clearing the planet.

  —

  IN TRUTH, I AM LUCKY. Unlike many others whose families disown them after they leave the church, my family chose to leave with me. Despite the fact that the church did everything in its power to break us apart. As much as I’d like to say my family’s leaving Scientology was out of pure love for and solidarity with me, it wasn’t just that. They were disillusioned with the church as well.

  My mother had been on OT VII for twenty-five years, meaning that she was required to audit herself six times a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Additionally, my mother was asked to do more and more sec-checks, auditing, and trips to Flag (all of which, of course, cost more and more money), and finally she began to lose faith. Even someone like my mother, a woman who devoted her entire life and her family’s lives to Scientology, had the nagging feeling that she was going around in circles. But she had come so far (and spent so much money), to give up at that point would have been really depressing. “I just want to get through it,” she used to say. “I’ve been doing it this long; I just want to get through it.”

  After my mom achieved OT VIII, the highest level on the auditing side of the Bridge and became a class VI auditor, the highest-classed auditor that she could become as a parishioner, she admitted it wasn’t everything she’d thought it was going to be. All those missed birthdays, vacations, and anniversaries, only to find out that Scientology’s secret to the universe hadn’t been worth it for her. She couldn’t move objects with her mind or cure cancer by the force of her will. She was still just herself. So after I proved to her that everything I was saying about the church’s leadership was true—that they don’t apply policy and will do anything, including lie to the parishioners who pay their bills, to get their way—she was really done.

  I too was done, but as Sofia said, it takes longer to be done inside. You can take the girl out of Scientology, but it’s much, much harder to take the Scientology out of the girl.

  Chapter Eighteen

  SO WHILE THOSE IN THE church knew I had left Scientology, those outside the church found out courtesy of the front page of the New York Post. It was picked up by hundreds of news outlets around the world. The headline read:

  EXCLUSIVE: ACTRESS LEAH REMINI QUITS SCIENTOLOGY AFTER YEARS OF “INTERROGATIONS”

  As a response, in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter, I said, “I wish to share my sincere and heartfelt appreciation for the overwhelming positive response I have received from the media, my colleagues and fans from around the world. I am truly grateful and thankful for all your support.”

  And with that, it was confirmed that I had, indeed, left.

  Everywhere I look
ed I now realized that my world was not being helped by Scientology. Previously I had blinders on. Because I had to. If I didn’t, I would have had to make a decision that would affect not just me, but also my entire family.

  Unlike most people who grew up in the church, I always maintained friendships outside of the church. I guess in a way I was always disaffected. My Scientology friends didn’t really have non-Scientology friends. And if it appeared that they did, it was merely to eventually, over time, recruit them into the church.

  It was a good thing that I insisted on keeping friends outside the church, because once they found out I had left, they immediately reached out with their support and kindness.

  Kevin James called me and said, “How’s your family? Are you guys all intact?” He said he was proud of me, that we were brave, and told me whatever I needed he was there.

  Chelsea Handler texted me from out of the country when she heard the news. “Hey Twat, be home in a few days, hope you are okay and if you are not, let me know what you need and I will be there.”

  Michelle Visage, a friend I had met and grown close to during my King of Queens days, called me right away: “Are you home, I am coming over.” And she did. Michelle also publicly came to my defense, which is a lot, knowing how the church deals with anyone defending someone who attacks Scientology.

  My longtime friend Lucille from Brooklyn was crying when I picked up her phone call. She said, “Lee, do you have your family with you? I just need to know they left the church with you.”

  “Yes, Lu, they are with me,” I said, consoling her.

  My ex-boyfriend’s mother texted me: “Lee, I loved you before, but I don’t think I ever respected you and your family more than today.”