L. Ron Hubbard began Scientology’s “Project Celebrity” in 1955, offering a list of 63 high-profile targets and a “small plaque” as a reward to anyone who successfully brought the likes of Bob Hope and Ernest Hemingway into the church. “There are many to whom America and the world listens...” Scientology’s blustery…
King of Queens star and former co-host of The Talk Leah Remini has left the Church of Scientology after some 30 years over a falling out with Church leader David Miscavige.
New Yorker staff writer Lawrence Wright's long-awaited Scientology book, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief, will be released this Thursday, and the reviews are already coming in. Based in part on a 2011 profile of director and former Scientologist Paul Haggis, the book focuses primarily on…
If you ever wanted to watch Joaquin Phoenix fling himself from one side of a room to touch a wall and fling himself back to touch a window, describing how both feel in alternately concrete and abstract terms, over and over and over again, Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master is the movie for you.
Today's edition of The Independent offers a profile of Marty Rathbun, a member of the Church of Scientology for 27 years, now considered a "heretic." As a high-ranking official, Rathbun worked with high-profile Scientologists like Tom Cruise, John Travolta, Kirstie Alley, and Greta Van Susteren. Since he left the…
The one thing Scientology has always been missing, as far as dangerous cults go, is a good apocalyptic prophecy. It was always more about destroying enemies and controlling time, matter, and energy than heralding the end of days. But it turns out L. Ron Hubbard actually did predict the Earth's destruction.
Sure, Scientology may just be a front for slave-built motorcycles for celebrities, but it's got a positive side! For example, did you know that Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard was also a songwriter? Don't take our word for it! Watch actor/bon vivant Frank Stallone, clad in leather slacks, sing two of Hubbard's…
Visiting the Hollywood Scientology Celebrity Center, J.D. Shapiro just wanted to meet girls. Instead, he wound up writing Battlefield Earth. After winning the "Worst Picture of the Decade" Razzie, Shapiro is apologizing. He blames it all on his penis.
[This photograph of the Tungurahua Volcano in Ecuador looks like the L. Ron Hubbard book cover but in real life. Highly recommended: Clicking to enlarge. Image via Getty]
We have got hold of some of the original memos that L. Ron Hubbard passed down in the early days of Scientology — they are still revered today as a foundation for the cult. Today: L. Ron on sex!
Ostensibly fearing liver damage, John Travolta removed his teenaged son from the anti-seizure medication Depakote. Jett Travolta later succumbed to convulsions and died. Why wasn't he put on other medication?
The tragic death of John Travolta's teenage son Jett could spell the end of Scientology, sci-fi author L. Ron Hubbard's loopy, medicine-hating cult from the 1950s.
The cult of Scientology can't keep the pulp science fiction and quack psychology of founder L. Ron Hubbard in print merely through sheer force of will. Instead, it's with a state-of-the-art production facility in Commerce, Calif. featuring the latest printers from Hewlett-Packard. The plant is owned by the church…
L. Ron Hubbard's unearthed "goof the floof" explanation of Scientology's "Supreme Rulah" Xenu—remixed into something danceable. [YouTube]
Click to viewMost of what we know about Scientology's "supreme ruler" we learned from South Park: 75 million years ago, the evil alien brought humans to earth in a spaceship and killed them; the psychic trauma of the event has affected us ever since. The Church of Scientology, embarrassed by the story, has always …
What would a week at Defamer HQ be without a Scientology scandal? To wit: What do you get when you cross closet case Will Smith and an old high school in Calabasas? Try the New Village Academy, which the star reportedly underwrote this week with an $890,000, three-year lease of the former Indian Hills High School…
At least according to some anti-Scientology forum, where a user uploaded nine scanned pages but provided no backstory. But Boing Boing picked it up so now it's Certified Internet True. Who cares, it's not like Scientology was viewed as the Holy Writ before. So Hubbard remixed someone's work! He sampled! Which is…
Who knew L. Ron Hubbard was such a superhero? In this recently unearthed clip from Orientation: A Scientology Information Film, two robotically-pitched Scientology mouthpieces claim that LRH singlehandedly unmasked "the government's" system of "mind control" using nothing but his creative genius (saving millions of…
