Leave it to Leah Remini, A&E and Mike Rinder to use the “season finale” of their reality TV show to make excuses for a man who poses such a violent threat to the Church of Scientology and its leader that a judge issued a criminal protective order to ensure he stays at least 100 yards away.
As of the publication of this article, Leah Remini’s hate-filled reality TV show has triggered numerous incidents of anti-religious bigotry, threats and hate crimes directed at the Church. Remini used her “finale” to scramble to try to spin the case of Brandon Reisdorf. Incredibly, A&E allows Remini and fellow obsessed hatemonger Mike Rinder to actually try to blame the Church for the incident, making excuses for the arrest, prosecution and guilty plea of an adult who committed a felony.
Leave it to Leah Remini, A&E and Mike Rinder to use the “season finale” of their reality TV show to make excuses for a man who poses such a violent threat to the Church of Scientology and its leader that a judge issued a criminal protective order to ensure he stays at least 100 yards away.
Like Mother, Like Son
Brandon is the son of obsessed anti-Scientologists Lois and Gary Reisdorf who obviously passed down their hatred to him. Remini ignores the fact that Brandon’s vandalism and threats to the leader of the Church and his two aunts are fostered by the hatred instilled in him by Lois and Gary, with whom he lives. Now Lois, Gary and Brandon all post religious hate speech on the Internet.
Brandon Reisdorf was caught by a security camera shortly after 2 a.m. on April 23, 2016, using a hammer to smash the front window of the Church of Scientology of Los Angeles. He shattered the large front pane while cracking a second one before fleeing after being spotted by a security guard. Hours after the incident the vehicle he drove off in was identified through security camera footage as belonging to his parents. Brandon was convicted of felony vandalism of a church.
His mother, Lois Reisdorf, remains bitter for being removed for dishonesty from her position in the Church by the Founder himself. Her last job in the Church was as a room cleaner for parishioners in a religious retreat in 1982. Now she’s passed on her hatred of her former religion to Brandon. In addition to smashing windows, Brandon also sent out threatening emails directly to his aunts, including 93 in one day, and another in which, according to his aunts, he said he would be packing a gun.
In addition to smashing windows, Brandon also sent out threatening emails directly to his aunts, including one in which he said he would be packing a gun.
A day after his arrest Brandon was placed under psychiatric care. A Tarasoff Reporting Form was also issued to alert the Church to the threat he posed should he be released. The report stated that “Brandon Reisdorf has been threatening to harm Mr. [David] Miscavige.” Even though Brandon was released from jail at one point, his parents had him recommitted to a psychiatric hospital “for not taking his meds.”
Brandon spent 27 days in jail, is under a criminal protective order to stay away from Church facilities and the Church leader, and is on probation for three years.
Leah Remini Refuses to Condemn Threats and Violence
Leah Remini in her show bends over backward to avoid confronting the numerous incidents of hate speech, threats and even violence that have occurred in the wake of her anti-Scientology campaign. Instead, she tries to excuse hate and threats or use Mike Rinder as a mouthpiece to dismiss them, even though law enforcement takes them seriously.
Like any hate propaganda, Leah Remini’s reality TV show stirred up violent, unstable individuals who have sought to carry it a step further with violence and threats.
In Remini’s show, interview subjects have been compensated, which is against A&E’s own policy and the reason it cancelled the KKK Generation program.
While A&E published a statement that it opposes hate, it has failed to act to curb the hate speech generated by continuing to air Remini’s show. In Remini’s show, interview subjects have been compensated, which is against A&E’s own policy and the reason it cancelled the KKK Generation program.
After five weeks of Remini’s reality TV series, there have been more than 300 hate emails, postings, phone calls and tweets against the religion or its leader, denigrating Church members and many advocating acts of violence. Commonly found in the email threats, postings and tweets are the hashtags #scientologytheaftermath and #leahremini.
A caller after one of the episodes threatened to “rape” the Church receptionist who took the call, saying he would “f--- up your husband” and “burn your f---ing house.”
Another individual tweeted after one of the shows, “Drink some bleach and die f---ing scumbags.”
Yet another, in response to a photo on Facebook of young volunteers with the Church-sponsored The Way to Happiness program, posted, “I would shoot all 5 of them.” Others threatened the Church leader.
The hate postings and tweets contain the hashtag to Remini’s show and parrot her hate speech, when the only information these people have about the religion comes from statements on this reality show that they are obviously taking at face value. Since her show began, acts of vandalism have been perpetrated on Churches in Tampa and San Francisco.
Law enforcement is taking this seriously. Where there are criminal threats, police are recognizing these as hate crimes and building the evidence files for possible prosecution.
From journalists to merchants of hate
In keeping with her theme of hate, Remini also ended her “finale” of hate with a roundtable of whining by former journalists turned crazed anti-Scientologists who have been spewing religious hate toward the Church and harassing it for years.
They include:
John Sweeney
This former BBC reporter has morphed into a virulent anti-Scientologist. His obsessions and religious hate run so deep he was once reprimanded by the BBC for one of his anti-Scientology rants.
In 2007, when it became apparent that the Church was not going to get fair treatment from Sweeney, the Church turned its cameras on him, capturing Sweeney exploding in rage at a Church spokesperson.
A British university journalism ethics class analyzed the Sweeney program and tallied no less than 180 violations of BBC guidelines and official British Office of Communications media codes. That show included at least 10 unethical stunts and fictitious incidents.
The Church’s Freedom Magazine published this Special Report documenting Sweeny’s actions: www.freedommag.org/special-reports/bbc.html.
Tony Ortega
Tony Ortega is the primary shill for Leah Remini’s anti-Scientology reality TV show, flanking the show with daily rants denigrating members of the religion.
Ortega has a history of fabrications. In August 2002, New Times Los Angeles published a story written by an unknown writer named “Antoine Oman” that had Hollywood buzzing. Titled “Survive This! The two girls kidnapped and raped in the Antelope Valley are set to go to Hollywood,” the piece claimed a forthcoming NBC series pilot would star a pair of recently abducted and brutally raped teenagers as hosts of their own primetime reality show, which also would feature real-life paroled repeat sex offenders.
After some digging by The Hollywood Reporter, the article was exposed as a fraud written by Ortega, who wrote yet another phony piece claiming the fictional writer had been fired for his transgression. As The Daily Cannibal, a media watchdog website, wrote:
“Tony Ortega takes two teenagers, already brutally raped by thugs, and editorially sodomizes them by appropriating their identities, putting lies in their mouths, and pimping them as shameless opportunists who would do anything for a buck. Then he writes another fabrication claiming the fictional reporter was fired.”
Says the Daily Cannibal, a media watchdog website: “Tony Ortega takes two teenagers, already brutally raped by thugs, and editorially sodomizes them by appropriating their identities, putting lies in their mouths, and pimping them as shameless opportunists who would do anything for a buck.”
Three years later Ortega was at it again, this time during a stint as managing editor of the alternative newspaper The Pitch in Kansas City. There, he wrote yet another fabricated story, “Rebel Hell,” by the fictional “Cesar Oman.” Written as a serious news story, Oman/Ortega claimed city records showed a Confederate gravesite was found during the building of a new arena.
But like Ortega’s stunt involving the phony TV show starring raped teenagers, the gravesite story was also a sham. The press secretary for then-Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt told the Kansas City Star she was “extremely disappointed that a publication purporting to be a news outlet would print a satirical, fantastical article and not identify it as such.” Columbia Journalism Review then weighed in, blasting Ortega’s stunt as inexcusable and arrogant:
“Let us count the ways in which this is wrong. It was bad enough that the spoof took cheap shots at politicians, put words in their mouths, and betrayed readers’ trust at a time when the media’s credibility is at an ebb.”
Having laid waste to the reputations of two publications, Antoine Oman/Cesar Oman/Tony Ortega headed in 2007 to New York-based Village Voice, where he was made editor-in-chief. It was during this time that Ortega became chief apologist for Backpage.com, an online adult classified service owned then by the newspaper’s parent company Village Voice Media. Attorneys General in virtually every state considered Backpage.com the main cesspool of trafficking in prostitution, pimping and the exploitation of teenage girls and runaways that frequently led to violence. “Where Pimps Peddle their Goods” read the headline of a scathing column about Backpage written by Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof. He wrote:
“[Backpage] is now the premier web site for human trafficking in the United States. … [Alissa] said she was sold from one pimp to another several times, for roughly $10,000 each time. She was sold to johns seven days a week, 365 days a year. After a couple of years, she fled, but a pimp tracked her down and … beat and stomped Alissa, breaking her jaw and several ribs.”
But leave it to Ortega to suck up to his bosses, ignoring the human tragedy to act as the Backpage attack dog. Ortega went after a reporter at CNN for her exposé of child prostitution on the website, accusing the network of “junk science” and “mass paranoia,” criticizing the broadcast as a “sensationalistic piece” that was “manipulative” and part of “a semireligious crusade.” Not mentioned by Ortega was the fact that the National Association of Attorneys General labeled Backpage.com the nation’s top website for human trafficking.
But leave it to Ortega to suck up to his bosses, ignoring the human tragedy to act as the Backpage attack dog.
On January 9, 2017, the operators of Backpage, Michael Lacey, Jim Larkin and Carl Ferrer, closed down its adult section. This shutdown happened right after the release of a U.S. Senate report accusing Backpage of hiding criminal activity, and on the eve of testimony by Lacey and Larkin before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs’ subcommittee on investigations.
The Los Angeles Times reported that the Senate Committee’s review of the company documents “found evidence that Backpage knowingly facilitated prostitution and child sex trafficking” and that Backpage was grossing $5.3 million in 2008 and $135 million in 2014.
A statement from Senators Rob Portman and Claire McCaskill who led the Senate investigation read: “We reported the evidence that Backpage has been far more complicit in online sex trafficking than anyone previously knew.”
Needless to say, Ortega never mentions or apologizes for his pimping of Backpage on behalf of his former bosses.
In discussing the reasons for Ortega’s 2012 departure from Village Voice, a former staffer at the newsweekly complained to the New York Observer that “[Ortega] was increasingly obsessed with Scientology and had neglected almost all of his editorial duties at the paper. Sometimes he wouldn’t even edit features.”
Likewise, Capitalnewyork.com called him “almost obsessive” about Scientology:
“Sources told Capital that both the newsroom and the sales side of the Voice had become increasingly uncomfortable with the volume of Scientology coverage Ortega was churning out. ’We thought it was destroying the Voice brand,’ said one former staffer.”
Bouncing from job to job since leaving the Voice, Ortega, like Leah Remini and Mike Rinder, is now trying to cash in as an anti-Scientologist.
Mark Bunker
Mark Bunker is a sparsely employed videographer whose anti-Scientology antics once earned him an anti-harassment injunction from a judge for shoving his video camera in people’s faces, filming children and other acts of harassment.
Bunker began his bullying tactics in 1998, thrusting his camera into people’s faces and trying to force his way into Church facilities.
Bunker operates a hate site on the Internet filled with anti-Scientology videos, and has anonymously posted videos stolen from the Church, in violation of copyright laws. In 2008, he became an advisor to the cyberterrorist group Anonymous.
Bunker, who once held down a steady job at a local news station, is such an obsessed anti-Scientology zealot that having torpedoed his career, he now begs for money on Facebook and through online fundraising to cover personal expenses. Even anti-Scientologists criticize him. As one wrote, “I think what’s particularly disturbing is the lack of integrity Bunker demonstrates on a regular basis by begging for money…”
