Gawker.com, where the author is employed as a staff writer, declined to publish this story. Did the Church of Scientology use a Vanity Fair contributing editor to infiltrate and gather intelligence on the cult's enemies in the media? John Connolly is a well-known, and well-liked, character in New York media circles. He's a former NYPD detective and stock broker who landed a third career as an investigative reporter for Vanity Fair, where he is a contributing editor, Radar, the Daily Beast, ...

On August 19, 2009, Tommy Davis, the chief spokesperson for the Church of Scientology International, received a letter from the film director and screenwriter Paul Haggis. “For ten months now I have been writing to ask you to make a public statement denouncing the actions of the Church of Scientology of San Diego,” Haggis wrote. Before the 2008 elections, a staff member at Scientology’s San Diego church had signed its name to an online petition supporting Proposition 8, which asserted that ...

[Picture / Caption: Scientology leader David Miscavige (l.) is being accused of gossiping about Lisa Marie Presley and Michael Jackson after snooping in her confidential confessional file.] The Church of Scientology is bringing down the hammer on a renegade member who alleges leader David Miscavige loves to gossip about his star parishioners. Former high-ranking member Amy Scobee claims in her just-out book, "Scientology: Abuse at the Top," that Miscavige and other officials "snooped" in confidential confessional files - a charge vehemently ...

CLEARWATER, Fla. — Raised as Scientologists, Christie King Collbran and her husband, Chris, were recruited as teenagers to work for the elite corps of staff members who keep the Church of Scientology running, known as the Sea Organization, or Sea Org. They signed a contract for a billion years — in keeping with the church’s belief that Scientologists are immortal. They worked seven days a week, often on little sleep, for sporadic paychecks of $50 a week, at most. But after ...

Ex-members say leader David Miscavige hit subordinates; church denies accusations. Some call it a manipulative cult. Others say it's a well-established religion that helps people reach their potential. Since its inception in the 1950s, the Church of Scientology has rarely been far from controversy. And now the Church is under attack again. Former senior insiders claim the Church's current leader, David Miscavige, has created and encouraged a climate of violence within senior staff and was frequently violent himself. Marty Rathbun was ...

It was a twisted scheme playing on a broken dad's unbearable grief. A blackmailing medic and his brazen lawyer threatened to tell the world John Travolta "intentionally killed" his son unless they got $25 million in hush money, the star's lawyer testified Thursday. Paramedic Tarino Lightbourne planned to make public a routine waiver Travolta signed initially refusing local medical treatment after his autistic son, Jett, 16, suffered a massive seizure in the family's Bahamas resort villa. The actor had considered flying ...

Tom Cruise rolled into Manhattan under extraordinary security last night for a Hollywood-style fund-raiser to benefit his controversial project to help 9/11 responders. The diminutive Scientologist, accompanied by his wife, Katie Holmes, pressed the flesh with supporters inside a $6,250-a-ticket benefit in Chelsea. Reporters were barred from the West 18th Street fund-raiser, which resembled a Hollywood premiere, with scores of security men and paparazzi. "He said how grateful he was to everyone for supporting the project," said Pat Bahnken, a party ...

Movie star Tom Cruise has won the support of hundreds of emergency workers in New York, after he hosted a $6,250-a-ticket benefit in the city Thursday night to raise funds for his controversial Sept. 11 detoxification program. The New York Rescue Workers Detoxification Project, which was co-founded by Cruise, is based on principals developed by Scientology leader L. Ron Hubbard. The free treatment involves large doses of vitamins, dietary adjustments and stints in a sauna. Among attendees at the high-profile event ...

[Picture]Tom Cruise and his wife Katie Holmes arrive at the Altman Building for his Detox Center Benefit. [Picture]Michael Pena and his girlfriend, Breen Schaefer, were among the attendees at the Detox Center Benefit. Superstar actor and Scientology pusher Tom Cruise headlined a Chelsea soiree with all the excitement of a movie premiere last night to raise money for his controversial effort to "detox" Ground Zero workers. "It is an injustice that after six years people who were down there are still ...

John Travolta and Tom Cruise have forcefully denied allegations that they turned to Scientology to "cure" them of their supposedly gay urges. But critics continue to claim the religion is rife with homophobia. Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard wrote in his 1950 best seller, "Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health," that gays were "sexual perverts" and "very ill physically." That apparently went for Hubbard's son, Quentin, who was said to have been confused about his own sexual orientation. "[Ron] thought ...

In September 2002, the New York Rescue Workers Detox Project began to offer free "detoxification treatment" to firefighters, police officers, and others exposed to high levels of toxic debris in the aftermath of the World Trade Center's collapse. The detox program—based on the teachings of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard and detailed in his book Clear Body, Clear Mind—purports to "flush" poisons from the body's fat stores using an intensive regimen of jogging, oil ingestion, sauna, and high doses of vitamins, ...

Tom Cruise, the well-known actor, has consistently pledged his support to the many rescue workers who are suffering the effects of the toxic assault on the nervous system, and lungs associated with the cleanup of Ground Zero as a result of the aftermath of the terrorist attack on September 11 on the World Trade Center. Cruise, working with many of the doctors involved in the project, and along with firefigher Joe Higgins, opened a facility in New York that utilizes one ...

LOS ANGELES, March 21— A trial is to begin here on Wednesday morning to determine whether a Jewish couple can deduct the cost of religious education for their five children, a tax benefit they say the federal government has granted to members of just one religion, the Church of Scientology. The potential ramifications are huge, for a ruling in favor of the couple could affect the millions of Americans who send their children to religious schools of all types. At stake ...

READ THE ARTICLE (Thanks to nytimes.com for access to their archives.): Scientology's Puzzling Journey From Tax Rebel to Tax Exempt New York Times March 9, 1997 By Douglas Frantz The Church of Scientology was founded in 1954 by a writer named L. Ron Hubbard. For years Scientology sought to persuade the Internal Revenue Service that it was a religion and deserved the same tax deduction given to traditional religious groups. Scientology took in hundreds of millions of dollars, and for decades ...

On Oct. 8, 1993, 10,000 cheering Scientologists thronged the Los Angeles Sports Arena to celebrate the most important milestone in the church's recent history: victory in its all-out war against the Internal Revenue Service. For 25 years, I.R.S. agents had branded Scientology a commercial enterprise and refused to give it the tax exemption granted to churches. The refusals had been upheld in every court. But that night the crowd learned of an astonishing turnaround. The I.R.S. had granted tax exemptions to ...

A Federal appeals court has ruled that a publisher is not required to delete material from a coming biography of L. Ron Hubbard, founder of the Church of Scientology. The ruling, issued Thursday, overturned a lower court's decision, and barring the unlikely chance of a rehearing or a quick reversal by the Supreme Court, the biography will be published in its original form next month. Michael Lee Hertzberg, who argued the case against the publisher, said the plaintiff had not decided ...

A brutal bio of L. Ron Hubbard, founder of the Church of Scientology, will get to see the light. Again. The News' Alex Michellini reports that New Era Publications, a Danish corporation related to the church, tried to enjoin the distribution of Russel Miller's "Bare-Faced: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard." New Era charged that the book and its publisher, Henry Holt & Co. infringed on certain copyrighted material. Maybe it does, just a little, said Federal Judge Pierre Leval. ...

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 23 — The wife of the founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard, has filed a $5 million suit against Mr. Hubbard's son, charging "massive fraud" in his 1982 effort to have his father declared legally dead or mentally incompetent. The suit was filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court Monday by Mr. Hubbard's third wife, Mary Sue Hubbard, the stepmother of Mr. Hubbard's oldest son, Ronald DeWolf. The suit charges that Mr. DeWolf and his Massachussetts attorney, Michael ...

LOS ANGELES — Michael J. Flynn, a Boston lawyer, was piloting a light aircraft toward South Bend, Ind., in October 1979 when its engine quit mysteriously at 8,500 feet. After making an emergency landing, he said he found several quarts of water in the fuel tank. Since then, Mr. Flynn, who has led a legal battle against the Church of Scientology, a group that has long been the subject of Government investigations, says he has been followed by as many as ...

Is it the beginning of the end for the Church of Scientology? In the past senior church officials have refused to discuss the inner workings of L. Ron Hubbard's empire, but according to a recent story in the New York Times, disillusionment with Hubbard and a power struggle within the organization have prompted several church officials to meet with police investigators and testify against Scientology in a number of court cases. At a trial that just ended in Los Angeles County ...

Former officials of the Church of Scientology say they helped L. Ron Hubbard, the reclusive founder of the cult-like organization, to secretly divert more than $100 million from the church into foreign bank accounts he controlled. The organization, long a subject of investigations in this country, Britain, France, Australia, South Africa, Spain and elsewhere, has maintained that Mr. Hubbard cut his ties to it in the mid-1970's, that he has received only a token consulting fee of $35,000 annually since then ...

A best-selling adventure novel by a controversial figure who has not been seen in public for years has become the focus of concern among some book sellers. The book sellers said they belleve that "Battlefield Earth" by L. Ron Hubbard is being bought in large numbers in their stores by members of the Church of Scientology, founded by the reclusive Hubbard, as part of an effort to boost it onto the country's best-seller lists. Some book sellers and critics of Hubbard ...