To smear her former faith, Leah Remini goes back nearly three decades to find a woman no one remembers. As she continues scraping the bottom of the barrel for dubious subjects looking for fame in exchange for spreading hate on her reality TV show, Leah Remini once again resorts to what amounts to ancient history.
This time her “unvetted” source is Karen Pressley whose brief stint at Celebrity Centre ended nearly three decades ago, in March 1989. Pressley is known only as the former wife of a talented, Grammy-nominated musician, composer and proud Scientologist. Pressley regaled Remini with an embellished tale of her position in the Church, when the truth is her tenure was at best short and uneventful. In fact, virtually no one in the Church outside of her former husband even remembers her, let alone anything she accomplished.
But never let integrity get in the way of Leah Remini and her co-host Mike Rinder, who each week dig up yet another “unvetted” source…
But never let integrity get in the way of Leah Remini and her co-host Mike Rinder, who each week dig up yet another “unvetted” source to disparage the Church. Remini even admitted to The Hollywood Reporter that she doesn’t care about vetting her sources, and that A&E’s attorneys are more than happy to let her get away with it. So far, this season Remini’s lineup of “unvetted” sources has included, among others, an admitted pervert, an admitted animal torturer, and a woman who pontificated about a former childhood acquaintance she hadn’t seen in more than a decade and whose entire “expertise” about her came from Facebook. So, a celebrity-obsessed former cocktail waitress like Pressley who hasn’t been inside a Church in nearly three decades fits right in with all the other discredited subjects.
Today, Karen Pressley claims that she is a former senior Scientologist who had connections with numerous celebrities. In fact, records show that at most she worked a few uneventful months during the late 1980s at the Church’s Celebrity Centre. Her real and only claim to fame was marrying and divorcing Peter Schless, who has worked with some of the top artists in the music industry and is best known for his signature song, “On the Wings of Love,” that singer Jeffrey Osborne turned into a worldwide hit.
According to Peter, he met Pressley at a club in Houston where she was waiting tables in a skimpy outfit. After they were married, her bizarre behavior emerged, including her claim that her first husband used to nail himself to a cross believing he was Jesus. Peter also found out that Pressley had failed at virtually all of her past jobs. In fact, she once described in writing her view of work as: “The philosophy of work was to do the least amount of work for the most amount of money in the shortest amount of time. I prided myself on having developed this theory.”
Pressley had failed at virtually all of her past jobs.
Peter moved to Los Angeles to join a band and soon was hanging out with rock stars at the Rainbow Room and recording at the iconic Record Plant. Like a groupie, Karen wanted to hang out with the celebrities Peter was working with. In 1982, he met Jeffrey Osborne, wrote his megahit song and began to earn a very good living.
“At that point, my career rocketed and Karen then decided she was going to be my ‘manager,’” Peter recalls. “I started touring with Melissa Manchester, and Karen and I got into a huge argument, she insisting I take her on an Australian concert tour (which was a vacation for her while I worked). Not long after this, I found out that she had been having an affair with her tennis instructor.”
As Peter recalls, “Essentially, she wasn’t doing anything while I was making the income—she was spending it on expensive clothes which were paid for from my song royalties. It was at that time that she insisted we rent a castle on the top of Coldwater Canyon at a cost of approximately $4,000 per month (the water bill was $800 per month).”
Per Peter, what Karen did mostly was to use her stature as his wife to try to hobnob with celebrities while spending wildly with their credit cards until two cards were revoked.
Like her other jobs, she failed during her brief tenure at Celebrity Centre due to incompetence.
Like her other jobs, she failed during her brief tenure at Celebrity Centre due to incompetence.
“She failed on any job she had and when I was invited to join the Sea Org (the Church’s religious order) at Golden Era Productions, Karen was brought with me,” Peter recalls. “She never amounted to much of anything, all the while I continued to excel in my music. At one point, having been utterly useless at producing on her own, she decided to leave secretly taking my BMW (which I had just made the last payment on) while I was performing at a Gala.”
In a moment of self-reflection, Pressley wrote of her shortcomings while working for the Church: “I had no presence and was not a leader and could not communicate and was being a pretense, was embarrassed… I felt lowly and incompetent… I felt like an idiot… I walked around in a daze… I was being a nut at the time.”
Pressley became a gardener at Golden Era before leaving. Pressley left the Church in 1998.
Pressley became a gardener in the greenhouse at Golden Era before leaving. Pressley left the Church in 1998, with Peter’s divorce from her becoming final a year later. She then became a born-again Christian who continued to try to capitalize on her husband’s success by naming her online ministry “Wings of Love.”
“This was her pathetic means of trying to hang on to what she never could be/do/have herself since she is a complete failure at financially supporting herself,” Peter said. “She then apparently claimed that she was a co-writer of the song, which is a disgrace and a complete lie. Karen had nothing to do with writing the song ‘On the Wings of Love.’ She was in the kitchen making coffee when the song was written. But for over 19 years, she has lived off my royalties and the amount is sizable.”
Karen is now remarried to Gregory Pressley. Records show that in 1995 he was charged with battery and criminal trespass after grabbing his former wife by the throat and holding her until she couldn’t breathe, then throwing her on the bed and biting her hand. The two try to make ends meet in real estate. But Pressley’s quest for celebrity—and presumably income—continues as Leah Remini uses her decades-old, tenuous connection to the Church to further spread hate and bigotry.
