Leah Remini and her A&E television series have been exposed as fake “reality” television, pandering false and exaggerated claims from “unvetted” subjects. The reality is this program is as far from a real picture of the Church of Scientology as one can get, designed solely to incite religious bigotry and hatred. These revelations come not from the Church, but from one of the very individuals Leah Remini sought to recruit for her production’s “dream team”— a cadre of anti-Scientologists who have made a career out of attacking the Church.
Leah Remini and her A&E television series have been exposed as fake “reality” television, pandering false and exaggerated claims from “unvetted” subjects.
This sought-after “dream team” member, the “kingpin” of the group, now publicly reveals how the entire Leah Remini Aftermath (actually After Money) show is a sham. His videos uncover a fake and morally corrupt production orchestrated by Leah Remini and Mike Rinder. The videos were posted by Mark (Marty) Rathbun, a former external affairs officer who left the Church in disgrace after a string of monumental legal disasters that magically disappeared following his departure. He became a “guru” to anti-Scientologists, including Leah Remini and Mike Rinder (who Rathbun called his best good buddy), all while waging a war, mostly in his mind, aimed at his past religion. Now he has posted YouTube videos that reveal the real motivation behind Leah Remini’s actions and just how fraudulent the entire Leah Remini and “Team Leah” story has been since day one. Rathbun provides a detailed account of how Leah’s show is a fabrication made to turn false attacks on Scientology into profit.
We have taken Rathbun’s videos and excerpted statements that illustrate just how dishonest this A&E show is and expose Leah’s rollout as a dishonest, orchestrated and planned publicity stunt for profit:
1) Leah Remini told Rathbun “I didn’t participate [in Going Clear] because they wouldn’t pay me,” and “I don’t do anything unless I’m paid. Nothing.”
2) Leah Remini said she was so well backed financially that Marty Rathbun could dictate his own terms for participating as a subject and producer on the show.
3) Leah Remini orchestrated and created the story of her leaving the Church.
4) Leah explained reality TV to Rathbun as follows: “Listen, that’s how it works, honey, doll, that’s how you do it. It’s not reality. I work it out, I plan out all these episodes and we figure it out beforehand who’s going to say what and who’s going to do what, and we, what do you think, I’m just going to put a camera on myself?” The Aftermath series takes reality TV to a whole new level of false impression.
The Aftermath series takes reality TV to a whole new level of false impression.
5) Leah spent an entire episode railing about the Church inspiring hate and yet she is the one generating hate. According to the videos, Mike Rinder, Remini’s co-producer, orchestrated Brandon Reisdorf’s disaffection and inspired him to hate Scientology to the point he was willing to maim and possibly kill. As a result, Reisdorf was arrested for a hate crime and ended up in jail.
None of this information comes as a surprise to the Church. We made these facts clear to A&E and the production company producing Leah’s reality program:
- The Church, its parishioners, clergy and leadership have been subjected to 500 documented instances of bigoted anti-religious hate including vandalism, threats and actual hate crimes as a result of the A&E program. A&E was warned of the Church’s concerns that this false and inflammatory programming would result in hate speech and violence. A&E has refused to make a responsible comment, much less take action. Click here to see a letter of apology from the father of a 12-year-old boy following a law enforcement investigation.
- Leah Remini shamelessly seeks to profit from her former association with the Church including attempting to extort the Church first for $500,000 and then for an additional $1,000,000 because the Church responded with the truth to a false police report she filed, which was determined to be “unfounded” within hours.
- Remini has been engaged in one long publicity stunt to attempt to salvage her otherwise flagging career. We told A&E and the press that we never said a word about her until she started attacking the Church publicly and playing the victim when it was all a scripted LIE. When we pointed out Leah’s money motivation, her first response was to say she “didn’t get a dime” for her attacks on Scientology, only to later reluctantly admit she is paid.
- Remini’s show is chock-full of subjects who have a history of lying, conspiring to suborn perjury, wife-beating and arrests. Astonishingly, when Remini was asked in a recent television roundtable about how much vetting is done of the people who are going to tell their stories on her show, Leah’s response: “There is no vetting. I take their word for it.”
- We have documented numerous lies in the series. A trailer was withdrawn after we pointed out A&E had produced two trailers of the same false incident with different voiceovers: One said “I was fourteen years old…” the other “I was sixteen years old…” When questioned, the production company claimed that was A&E’s responsibility, while A&E complained that the letter was sent just prior to the Thanksgiving holiday season. So much for broadcaster integrity.
We told A&E this show was no different from the KKK show that A&E was forced to cancel; on both shows subjects are paid to tell their “stories.”
It is beyond the pale that any network would not intervene to prevent continuation of the false and defamatory balderdash that is the Leah Remini Aftermath (After Money) series. Yet, despite an overwhelming amount of information, A&E ignores the facts so it can blindly—or blithely—profit from hate. This is not the least bit surprising considering A&E would have profited from a program using paid KKK members had outside individuals not forced A&E to quickly distance itself from the program it had commissioned. We told A&E this show was no different from the KKK show that A&E was forced to cancel; on both shows subjects are paid to tell their “stories.”
Now we have Mark (Marty) Rathbun, someone who Remini was recruiting to be part of “Team Leah”—one of them—exposing the sham of her entire sob story show.
In his first video, Rathbun describes a conversation with Remini: “She asked me if I got paid to participate in Going Clear and I said no, I never participate in—I never got paid for participating in any media or documentary and I never would out of principle. She said, ‘I don’t get that. I don’t understand your thinking.’ She said, ‘I didn’t participate because they wouldn’t pay me.’ She said, ‘I don’t do anything unless I’m paid. Nothing.’”
In Part 2, Rathbun says, “Leah’s departure from Scientology would be orchestrated, okay. And it would be reported in a way that they wanted it manipulated being reported, which was completely and utterly an act. It was a classic troll job.”
In Part 3, Rathbun describes Remini’s admission that her reality shows are scripted, citing an anti-Scientology episode in her previous show: Rathbun says, “‘Oh, no, no, no,’ she says, ‘you didn’t get, you didn’t get it at all.’ She said, ‘this wasn’t an actual therapy session, we, this whole thing was planned and scripted.’ We literally, I said, ‘you literally acted?’ ‘Yeah, we literally,’ she says, ‘listen, that’s how it works, honey, doll, that’s how you do it. It’s not reality. I work it out, I plan out all these episodes and we figure it out beforehand who’s going to say what and who’s going to do what, and we, what do you think, I’m just going to put a camera on myself?’”
In Part 4, Rathbun explains how “after I reject the producer role, where I can write my own ticket with Leah Remini, I don’t know, several months later, I don’t know exactly what it’s in reaction to, but several months later, she gets ahold of me, and …and she said, “no, no, no, it’s like, if you’re against them we’re together.” And I said, “You know, the problem is, you want me to join a group with people that I have experienced and been involved with who are demonstrably, obviously, far more unethical, far more disloyal, far more criminal, than any Scientologist I ever dealt with in 27 years I was within it. And yet, and yet, as much as you rail about it, you want to, you want to act in the very way—you want me to then act in the very way that you accuse Scientology of acting.” In other words, forget about all that stuff. If, if, if you’re agin ‘em, you’re with us. OK? It’s us versus them… I told her no, right? Do you know what her response was? … so when I won’t join her group, she literally disconnects from me.”
In Part 5, Rathbun says, “In the Aftermath, they compound the felony because they used the exact same technique except that the producer, director, talent, actor—Leah and Mike Rinder—are doing it throughout. They introduce a concept with a bunch of generalities, then they have somebody say something, then Rinder and Remini jump back in and interpret and throw out more generalities and it is completely and utterly altered, the reality of what the person’s experience was. In other words, the people who participate…will say whatever they are saying and as interpreted, as introduced by Leah and Mike and then interpreted afterwards and then bridged to their next comment, it all of a sudden becomes this nefarious, scary thing. And that is the technique that is used episode after episode.”
In Part 6, Rathbun further exposes Remini and Rinder’s lies in Episode 1: “What I’m telling you is, in this series it goes a whole step further. The talent, the guest—Amy—is literally telling a story that is 180 degrees and then it’s pumped and altered and changed and conflated by the producer-director talent Rinder and Remini. So by the end of it, it just bears no resemblance to reality.”
In Part 7, Rathbun exposes the lies in Episode 2 in which Mike Rinder is a paid subject for an entire episode devoted to “his story”: “So Rinder begins establishing his credibility by saying, “If the Church believed someone was an enemy and needed to be silenced, it was my job and I did it.” Okay? I challenge anyone to go find and cull where Rinder has disclosed in the 9 years that he’s been out, or the 7 years that he’s been out, the specific confession of his having silenced anybody. There’s not a single one. I was involved with the guy during his entire time over the Church’s external affairs bureau and was the guy that got him a job once he got out. I was the guy that got him job after job after job that allowed him to continue to go after Scientology without having to work. He’s never, he’s never—he’s never given a single specific or particular to back that up. And yet that’s how he establishes his credibility for episode 1. His second establishment is that he ultimately became, “ultimately” became the head of the Commodore’s Messenger organization, which is the highest management body within the Church of Scientology, and he said that, he was one of ‘8 people’ that was working for Hubbard. He literally manufactured that, it’s a complete lie.”
In Part 8, Rathbun speaks about profit motives: “Mike doesn’t have those rules. He’ll do or say whatever anybody wants him to, as long as there’s grease, right. So she’s been greasing him the whole time, and she famously makes it known to others that he cannot turn on her or say anything negative about her, pursuant to asc cult “rules,” because she’s his matron. And so, you know, the Aftermath, that’s the, that’s the premath, okay? The Aftermath, is him playing with his latest benefactor, Leah Remini, because I know for a fact she told me I could write my own ticket to take that place.”
In Part 10, Rathbun says that Remini invented things about Scientology for her series: “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 the series.”
In Part 13, Rathbun explains how Leah Remini’s series does propaganda by omission: “You know again, they do this propaganda by omission, in episode 4, with Tom De Vocht. As a matter of fact, it is not only by omission, it also is by putting words in people’s mouth. Mike Rinder starts off talking about what Tom De Vocht can say. Tom De Vocht never says it. Mike Rinder tells, he says Tom De Vocht has stories, okay. And so Mike Rinder starts telling a story about how he had to tear up the road and the entire sidewalk had to be torn up because of protesters coming to the Fort Harrison. Why is Mike Rinder telling us when they have, they sent a whole camera crew, including themselves for vacation in Seattle to see him? Why doesn’t he tell us?”
In Part 14, Rathbun speaks of how Leah Remini’s subjects degenerate: “But now we’re eight years down the road. This is what this stuff does to you. This brainwashing that they go through, that Leah Remini sits and looks at the camera, talking to former Scientologists and saying you’re a victim, you always were a victim and you always will be a victim…These people just degenerate over time into these ghoulish, creepy people, who will literally just, they’re so delusional, they will say things with all conviction and be filmed doing it, even though it contradicts stuff that they’ve said years before, that’s on film. It’s remarkable. These guys literally live in a delusory world.”
In Part 15, Rathbun exposes how Leah Remini does an entire episode on a story that was thrown out of court and upheld by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and Leah Remini and Mike Rinder just won’t say the truth of what happened: “And Rinder’s getting this from the outset because the Headleys, who are part of this episode, are telling the story and they brought a lawsuit which is based upon their narrative. And they were thrown out of court, and it was upheld by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and they were out of luck.”
Rathbun’s insider statements about Leah eviscerate this pretentious series as nothing more than reality TV at its worst, combined with religious hatred and discrimination.
Rathbun’s insider statements about Leah eviscerate this pretentious series as nothing more than reality TV at its worst, combined with religious hatred and discrimination.
As for Leah’s “co-producer” Mike Rinder, he now dismisses Rathbun as “delusional” and “in need of professional help,” apparently because Rathbun is no longer economically helpful to Rinder. Rinder must have forgotten that he was so close to Rathbun, he was the “minister” for Rathbun’s wedding, the first and only minister of Rathbun’s “failed independent experiment.” Rinder described Rathbun then as “perhaps the finest example I have ever met of someone who maintains the code of honor, personal integrity and care for other people.” So there’s Mike Rinder, vouching for the credibility of Mark (Marty) C. Rathbun. And that’s the real story of Leah Remini and her completely unreal “reality” program.
