TRANSCRIPT:
So, they do an Ask Me Anything thing about “journalists.” And, you know, again, there’s no journalists. They have three guys that show up for the show—Mark Bunker, Tony Ortega and John Sweeney—none of whom are journalists, at least with respect to Scientology.
Tony Ortega hasn’t had a reporting job in a number of years, since he was laid off from the Village Voice for being obsessed with Scientology and for taking actions that they perceived was going to wind them all up in jail for their human trafficking sexual slave activities.
Mark Bunker says on camera that he’s not a journalist.
And John Sweeney is really—if you know the guy, I’ve worked with him—he’s an entertainer more than he is a journalist. He does news-type things but he’s a personality in the UK—an entertainer. And when it comes to Scientology, which they’re talking about here, Sweeney told me himself, his producer told me herself, that their interest in Scientology, from the outset in 2007 up to the present, has been solely to troll Scientology. They did an entire show in 2007—that’s how they got involved, where they had no story—they were pursuing no story, they had no story in mind. The only story they had in mind was, “Let’s be the biggest pains in the asses we could possibly be and record Scientology’s response to it.” It was literally the definition of trolling.
Which is interesting, because, you know, that’s the only thing that Tony Ortega, John Sweeney and Mark Bunker have in common. You could go on the Internet and see, there’s hours and hours of footage of Mark Bunker taking great pains to try to crash Scientologists’ events, trying to crash Scientologists in events that have nothing to do with Scientology, saying the most demeaning, denigrating things they can, and embarrassing things they can to them on camera, with an ambush camera. I mean literally physical trolling.
Tony Ortega trolls day in and day out on his blog. That’s all he does. So, from the beginning, the whole thing’s a sham. The episode is about harassment of journalists—there’s no journalists.
Remini begins the segment by saying, “The word critical means enemy in Scientology.” She just made that up, literally made it up. You cannot find that in the 55 million words of Scientology. It’s not there. She invented it for this series.
Again, her and Rinder go back and forth on this sort of mutual pile-on and in the middle of it Remini says, “Questioning anything in Scientology means you are an enemy.” Again, it’s almost like—it’s almost like that kind of brainwashing they used to do, with the subliminals. You know, there’s all this noise and stuff and then she throws in this flash, she just throws in these datums. That datum doesn’t exist in Scientology—she literally just invented the datum for the purposes of creating this segment to make aggressors look like victims.
Then they have Mike Rinder presented as the guy who runs the ops factory—you know, the operation, who once ran the operation factory of the Church of Scientology—who says, you know, it was his job to silence critics and he’s very sorry, and he’s almost weeping, about how remiss he feels for having been on that side. It’s “been,” it’s not “do.” Because Mike Rinder never, ever talks about anything that he ever did, with his paws.
So, they position it as if this is this great, interesting revelation because Mike Rinder is seeking forgiveness and reconciliation with those who he targeted. But they never give any particular because Mike Rinder never cops to any particular, okay. So, it’s just all assumed that these guys were harassed, and yet the guy who would know about any harassment doesn’t have any particulars to give about any harassment. So the whole thing’s, again, it’s this big elaborate act that’s put on.
There is one exception that I do know about. I do know that operations were not run against Mark Bunker. And I know that there was no PI operations against Mark Bunker because I was around when Mark Bunker was trolling Scientology actively. The one thing I do know, that they showed on the show did happen, was his home got picketed when Bunker kept picketing Churches of Scientology. One morning, Mike Rinder organized a bunch of Scientologists to go and picket Mark Bunker’s home. But you would never know that in the show, because Mike Rinder never cops to it. And I also know Mike Rinder got in a tremendous amount of trouble because it was such an outlandish thing to do at the time he did it, 15, 20 years ago.
