Sunny Pereira, like a good Tribal member, instead of struggling to tell the truth about Scientology and all of her experiences in it, she’s working hard to give her anti-scientology tribe what it wants.
The problem with this is that – in the end – Sunny Pereira Scientology never tells the truth.
Some anonymous person asked me a question in response to this tweet I sent out earlier today:
Here’s a question I received in response to my tweet:
Here’s my answer to them:
Did I answer correctly? How do you think I should have answered it?
Hi Alanzo.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that your contention is that Sunny helped hide these things (sexual abuse) because she knew about them when she was in the church and didn’t do the right thing about it then.
What should she have done about it then, in your view, and is she not doing whatever that is now?
Sunny is doing now what she did then – saying what her tribe wants her to say and doing what they want her to do. She is not struggling to tell the truth about Scientology, both the good and the bad, she’s just throwing red meat.
If there were crimes covered up, what were they? If the goal is to get the government to act, then we need actual crimes. Mike Rinder and the people he worked with, like Sunny, are the ones who know about those crimes.
Why keep covering them up?
Ok.
I would think that if she knew about crimes of sexual abuse directly (as opposed to just repeating gossip) she could report it to authorities, file a police report, etc. Do you know if she has specifically done that since leaving the church?
If not, then yes, I suppose it would be acting to continue to cover up crimes on her part.
I don’t disagree with you re: your first paragraph,necessarily, but knowledge of a crime and not reporting it is not really the same thing as “throwing red meat”. I mean, they’re RELATED but what I want to know is what I asked about. Shorthand: Knew of sexual abuse crimes in the Church, didn’t report them to authorities; still knew of the same sexual abuse crimes out of the church and didn’t report them = no change in behavior, no change in intention to bring the perpetrators of sexual abuse to criminal justice.
In 1983, my children were kidnapped overnight in the Sea Org by David and Linda McGibbons McGivens (spelling?). Linda is now an “independent scientologist” and has never once contacted me to take any kind of responsibility for her role in those events, and putting me through the anguish I experienced that night – an example of how people leave but don’t really change.
Anyway, as soon as it was close to time that I knew someone would be “on post” in the morning, I called up the “secret” back-line (which I knew from my job in the Sea Org) of the Clearwater Guardian office and told them they had 15 minutes to find my children and make arrangements to bring them back to me, or I would be calling the police and pressing charges for kidnapping, I would be contacting the media, and my soon-to-be ex husband’s Attorney General of Colorado’s father who absolutely hated scientology.
Needless to say, they “found” them.
My point in telling this is the same as I think one of yours is.
Not ALL people who were in the Sea Org or in Scientology are automatically (or became “because of” scientology) cringing, subordinate creatures who just let illegal shit go on without standing up and fighting back.
That is on THEIR head that they became that way, THEIR decision. I am living proof of that they didn’t have to.
Note: None of this in any way relieves any scientologists for doing what they did to try and make someone have that decision, but the fact is, the buck stopped with the person who didn’t take action by their own decision.
I don’t think it is a coincidence that as state and federal investigations of Backpage continue heating up, the pressure on Tony Ortega must be mountings significantly as most of his blog posts lately have been shorter than usual and/or written by “guest” authors who help ramp up his cult of personality as the preeminent “Scientology expert” on the Internet.
This thing about James Barbour is a good example of Ortega making a mountain out of a molehill. I don’t know him very well, but I’ve had a number of interactions with him at CC events like the Gala and Barbour is definitely an asshole and I’ve no idea why the hell Dear Leader would allow this POS in any org, let alone Flag and the Freewinds, while barring 99% of decent, law-abiding, non statch-raping Scientologists from services there.
Barbour is notorious among his auditors and Public MAAs for continually rock slamming during sessions and routine sec checks. He has been out-ruds after late night boozing and whoring so many times prior to session that the HGC at CC basically gave up sending his stupid ass down to Ethics. I’ve only seen him at events over the past couple years or so. Maybe they made him do PTS/SP in the Academy a few times which even once around felt like a form of mental torture because of the sheer banality and simplistic binary dichotomy LRH imposes throughout.
So even in spite of his complicity in Backpage sex trafficking, I believe his criticism here is legit. But as usual, he goes off the rails and basically makes Barbour out to be a serial rapist when it was a single isolated statutory rape incident with no penetration. At CC the explanation I was given is that they “like to give people a second chance” and that he’s done his fair share of “amends” projects, which I have no idea what those are other than maybe singing at various low-level CC and PAC events.
It’s stuff like this that to me gives further credence to rumors that Bob Duggan has walked away from Scientology and hooked up with one his executives, also a Scientologist and possibly no longer active. Since being separated from his wife, which I guess he tried to keep very private even within Scientology circles, none of the senior execs I’ve had to deal with since last year want to talk about him or even outright refusing to respond, just staring at me like weirdos (a behavior which we all know doesn’t help convince outsiders that Scientology really isn’t the weirdo cult Ortega and friends make it out to be.) To each their own, I suppose.
One of Duggan’s sons, who not surprisingly didn’t know a lot of details about what was going between his parents, told me that Duggan had become very tired and exhausted because he was being constantly regged by his wife every morning and night — his own wife! — to donate to the IAS. Hanging out with Grant Cardone and this other asshole Tom Cummins (hist last name tells you all you need to know about what this MF is all about) a number of times also did not apparently enlighten him. Cardone is an OT VIII, right? Just the fact that someone with his head so far up his ass like Cardone is an OT VIII speaks volumes about the nature of that “product.” $500K+ just to go Clear, gain ever more expensive IAS status, and then spend even more to finish all the OT levels, plus all the additional fundraising for Ideal Orgs and Super Power, and the end result of all this is that Grant Cardone is still the same ignorant, misogynistic asshat he’s always been since his days as an alcoholic and speed freak. Guess that’s why he couldn’t afford to live in the West Hollywood hills on Oriole anymore and moved to Miami. You know why Miami rather than Clearwater or anywhere else in Tampa Bay? Because his wife’s mother and most of her family are based there and had to live with them rent and mortgage-free until the Oriole house was sold, which I’m not sure if it ever did because the asking price was way too high. Prior to moving to Miami a few years back, Cardone held an “auction” at his Oriole house to sell off all his “invaluable” works of art and antiques. Didn’t go so well because most of the art was stuff he’d bought from Scientologist artists like Milton Katselas as well as limited edition paintings and prints as “blue chip art investments” issued by ASI which cost thousands of dollars each but are now totally worthless. Funny how Ortega never jumped on that story when I first offered him all the pictures and video I took there. That was either just before or a few weeks after his forced resignation from the Village Voice. He never even connected the fact that Cardone owns a whole bunch of Katselas’s art (pretty ugly stuff) and wasn’t able to sell any of them off at a profit (not even close to breaking even) with his antagonism toward Milton personally and of course spamming a whole bunch fo Scientologists accusing Milton of being a pervert, apostate, etc supposedly under orders from Dear Leader in order to get approval to arrive on the ship for OT VIII. I’m not sure I believe that though. That’s too stupid even for Miscavige.
It was the same with Gottfried Helnwein and his family, Arthur Hubbard (not a Scientologist anymore, has zero interest in doing any Scientology ever, but hangs out with Scientologists because almost all his friends are Scientologists in good standing), Giovanni Ribisi and Beck… Ortega is very selective about which Scientologists (whether celebrity or rank-and-file) he posts controversies about, but more often than not, especially when presented with material evidence, he backs off or goes with unsubstantiated rumors that can’t be proved, like the claim Lisa Marie Presley publicly leaving Scientology in 2016 became Dear Leader’s “worst nightmare.” WTF? How exactly? By the time she got fed up with the constant bullshit and incompetence at CC and was complaining loudly, they’d already written her off like they did Leah Remini and just let them offload themselves. I don’t think Lisa Marie was ever dedicated to begin with, and she was never a fanatic nor ever exhibited stereotypical Scientologist mannerisms, e.g. she didn’t go around calling people wogs and DBs, didn’t file KRs any time she over heard someone make a joke about LRH or read anti-Scn material, etc. Basically the polar opposite of Jenna and Bodhi Elfman who probably write a couple dozen KRs every month, mostly against CC staff for verbal tech or smelling like BO. And so it goes.
Getting back to Duggan, according to the CC rumor mill His wife was once diagnosed by a psych (long time ago, and before she got involved with Scientology) as having OCD and/or ADHD and prescribed her a bunch of pills. Since she ended up doing Scientology not long after, I assume either the drugs didn’t work or she didn’t want to do that and was looking for an alternative.
Problem with someone like that is that they are a regges wet dream and she was an open bar ATM for Dear Leader thanks to the generosity and humanitarianism of her husband. If she hadn’t resorted to withholding marital favors to get him to donate tens of millions in cash, stocks and other publicly traded securities. Dear Leader loves complimentary stocks and bonds, as do most of the regges I’ve encountered, especially Gavin Potter and Jeff Mintz.
If Duggan hadn’t gone liquid thanks to Pharmacyclics, there’s a good chance he would’ve shared the same fate as Richie Acunto (Survival Insurance, remember the guy in the commercials?) and the Feshbachs. When he started buying up Pharmacyclics shares, this was back around 2008 or so, the recession was in full swing and his financial situation was deteriorating rapidly, so this move was, from his point of view, a zero sum do or die situation. He knew if his plan worked, he would win bigger than he could’ve imagined, and that conversely if it didn’t work, then he would lose to the point that he’d no longer be able to afford the luxury of being “PTS to the middle class.”
It’s actually kind of horrifying if you think about it. You donate all this money and effort to this organization that puts assholes like Grant Cardone and Tom Cummins on a pedestal and gives James Barbour free luxury accommodations on the first deck of the Freewinds. If I was Duggan, I’d never stop throwing up.