He stole from his wife on their wedding day and went on to physically abuse her—along with multiple colleagues. He squandered $10 million of Church funds and, as a side gig, hid stolen confidential information. Together with Mike Rinder, he conspired to misdirect a police investigation—a federal felony—and managed to keep the crime, which could have landed them both in jail, hidden for over a decade.

That’s Tom DeVocht—a former Church construction manager who was exposed as a violent, abusive bully with no relationship to the truth. As he once summed up his personal creed:

“Lying to the most important people on earth was not [wrong] unless I was caught out and couldn’t lie my way out of it. I would never even consider I was doing wrong unless I was caught out and then my only sorrow was for being caught.”

In that philosophy, he was one with co-hosts Leah Remini and Mike Rinder, for whom truth is the enemy. In “Reality” TV—or, more accurately, in Aftermath’s case: Propaganda TV—truth is the third rail.

So when Aftermath needed to cast DeVocht, it wasn’t his track record that mattered—it was his willingness to play the victim. He was never “caught out,” as he puts it, by the show’s carefully curated puff piece. But despite the scripted sentimentality designed to rebrand him as a lifelong casualty, DeVocht couldn’t erase the record he built over decades: one of criminality and abuse.

Just take the single example in testimony of DeVocht’s ex-wife, Jennifer Linson:

“He didn’t like what Ι said. And he grabbed me by the hair and dragged me down the hallway. As Ι was screaming, of course, other people jumped in, friends of mine, and stopped him. But that just showed you how he could just snap.”

DeVocht’s violence extended well beyond his marriage. On more than one occasion, he physically assaulted other Church staff members. He threw one man to the ground, then began kicking him in the side before he was pulled away from his victim.

In another incident, he lunged at a man, driving him to the ground and landing with such force that he broke the man’s ribs.

In a written statement, DeVocht admitted to “beating up people”:

“I jumped across the table in front of everyone… and beat him physically. … There were others who got jumped on. [Mike] Rinder got beaten. …

“I drove fear into people with my physical handling of people.”

An eyewitness of DeVocht beating Rinder said: “Tom DeVocht attacked Mike Rinder one night, so violently, it was sickening. He grabbed him and threw him into a bush and as he was falling, Rinder grabbed hold of DeVocht and he stumbled. That really upset De Vocht. He started kicking like a soccer hooligan, kicking Rinder while he was on the ground, in the ribs and in the side, until we pulled him back. People were telling him to stop.”

Reckless disregard was DeVocht’s modus operandi—both professionally and personally. Jennifer Linson’s 20-year relationship with him was a front-row seat to that disregard, starting on their wedding day:

“We got tons of gifts when we got married and were given lots of money.”

“One thing Ι didn’t find out till much later is that on our wedding day, he snuck out in the middle of the wedding … and dug into the cash that we had just been given and took a chunk of it and gave it to a friend of his who he had owed money to from years prior.”

And what was the debt for?

“I later found out that he had a friend who he owed money to for a previous girlfriend’s engagement ring that he had bought her.”

It was a sign of things to come. During their marriage, DeVocht twice sold his wife’s cars without her knowledge while she was out of town. He squandered over $100,000 of her inheritance from her grandmother, and, on one occasion, emptied their joint bank account.

In 2004, he was removed from his role as a Church construction manager after being exposed for dishonesty, fraud, cover-ups, and gross mismanagement of Church finances—not to mention his repeated acts of violence against Church staff.

His lies and mishandling of major building projects culminated in unmitigated disaster. During an internal investigation into his financial misconduct, DeVocht tried to cover up $10 million in losses before being ousted.

The list of financial wrongdoings by DeVocht is extensive.

In a notorious case, he brought in a convicted felon to broker a Church property acquisition and even arranged for the Church to loan $2.7 million to the ex-convict. He did so despite being alerted by the legal department to the man’s criminal history. DeVocht, enticed by kickbacks that included free football tickets, went ahead with the deal. DeVocht admitted in writing not long after losing the deal: “I made a deal (illegally) and ended up losing the Church $1,000,000.”

On one construction project alone, DeVocht issued 224 last-minute change orders—each the result of poor or nonexistent planning on his part—which inflated the project’s cost by over $4 million. He kept his superiors and Church financial officers in the dark until the contractor could no longer delay submitting invoices. Only then was his scheme uncovered, leaving others to clean up the financial mess and fulfill the commitments he had recklessly made.

When caught, DeVocht admitted:

“I operated insanely, spending money with no responsibility. … [I] committed financial crimes by signing work orders and committing expenses without any authority. I signed such work orders and sent the bills to Finance—I used no standard lines, got no finance approvals and did this without info or any indication to my senior of my actions. I operated individually knowing that such expenses would be turned down. This operating basis was criminal and uncalled for.”

In every case, DeVocht compounded the damage by covering up his wrongdoing. When asked how much he had cost the Church, DeVocht pegged the waste and losses at $10 million.

But squandering millions in Church funds wasn’t the end of DeVocht’s criminal conduct.

In fact, what came next was even more brazen.

Despite once begging for mercy at DeVocht’s feet, Mike Rinder stayed close to him. After abandoning both his family and the Church, Rinder turned to DeVocht for a place to stay. As later uncovered, their relationship had deeper roots than loyalty or convenience: DeVocht and Rinder had been engaged in an illegal, covert conspiracy—one they kept hidden from the Church and the authorities alike.

The two men coached witnesses to lie to police in an investigation in which the Church was blameless. Consequently, they embroiled the Church in a protracted criminal case that took years to resolve, with the Church fully exonerated.

The depth of their criminal conspiracy was finally revealed by a third co-conspirator, Mark Rathbun, in 2009—years after all three had been expelled and the statute of limitations on their felony had run out.

But DeVocht’s taste for criminality did not stop there.

In September 2010, he played a central role in the theft of proprietary and confidential data from the Church’s publishing arm, Bridge Publications Inc. (BPI), in Los Angeles. The theft was carried out by an employee who planned to steal electronic files before abruptly leaving the Church. But before doing so, he contacted DeVocht—who assured him of a place to stay and the promise of work.

Days later, after downloading the stolen data, the man disappeared without so much as a word to his wife or colleagues. Less than 48 hours after vanishing, he arrived at DeVocht’s home in Palm Harbor, Florida, with the stolen files.

The man later confessed to detectives from the Los Angeles Police Department and identified where inside DeVocht’s home the electronic storage devices were hidden. The LAPD asked for assistance from Florida police, who went to DeVocht’s home where he turned over the devices and their content. DeVocht gave police the ludicrous cover story that he believed they contained the man’s “entertainment” files.

Within a few years, DeVocht engaged in a stint as a self-styled “deprogrammer” intent upon coercing individuals from their religion. In a 2013 incident, a young Scientologist was taken under false pretenses by her brother and ex-boyfriend to a home in the Hollywood Hills. Together with DeVocht and several other anti-Scientologists, they held her against her will and verbally abused her.

“If you were my sister, I would tie you up right now,” DeVocht told her as she tried to leave. Finally her brother relented and helped her escape.

In December 2016, Mike Rinder and Leah Remini brought Tom DeVocht onto Aftermath. The show’s goal was clear: cast DeVocht as a lifelong victim. But the truth, long established by testimony and his own written confessions, is that DeVocht was never the victim. He was the aggressor, the criminal, and the con man—now repackaged for cable TV.

Not everyone bought the act.

In 2017, DeVocht’s former co-conspirator, Mark Rathbun, exposed him in a YouTube video as a fraud. Rathbun recounted how, when he began pushing back on demonstrably false claims being circulated about Scientology, DeVocht dismissed it all as meaningless—a performance.

“I’m pointing this out as hypocrisy. … He’s frothing at the mouth about how ‘Scientology’s the most destructive thing, and we got to do something about this,’ right? And the second I push back, a little bit, he’s like, ‘Hey, it’s a joke. The whole thing’s a joke. It’s just entertainment. Don’t you get it?’

“That’s why I say it’s all about the lulz [amusement]. It’s all about trolling.”

DeVocht’s reasons for trolling and pushing his false claims and propaganda became apparent in a revelation his father made to DeVocht’s sister, Nancy:

“Tom told my father that he is going to continue to attack the Church, and he will not stop for any reason until the Church pays him off. That’s extortion, that’s blackmail. And factually that makes him a criminal, but that is what he is trying to do.”

But this kind of shakedown was nothing new to Aftermath’s Leah Remini either—who, before launching her show, attempted to extort the Church into paying her $1.5 million and halting the exposure of her own false reports and harassment campaigns.

It was a familiar pattern: manufacture attacks, then demand payment to stop. And when it came time to build a cast of so-called “contributors” for Aftermath, truth was never the qualifier—willingness to lie was.

So when Aftermath needed someone willing to deliver the show’s most extreme and defamatory claims, Rinder and Remini didn’t need to look far. They simply turned to the one person who could be counted on to say anything, spin anything, and believe nothing: Rinder’s partner-in-crime, Tom DeVocht.

After all, as DeVocht avowed: “I would never even consider I was doing wrong unless I was caught out.”