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One Year After Paul Haggis Is Proclaimed a Rapist, Leah Remini Is Trapped in a Nightmare From Which She Can’t Awake
We’ve all experienced it. That awful dream where one finds oneself stark naked in a busy subway station or an airport or on a spotlit stage in front of thousands of people. There’s no escape, no place to hide, no cover. The only refuge is to wake up. So one does.
Leah Remini is in a waking nightmare. It began a year ago, November 7, 2022, when she took the stand in the trial of rapist Paul Haggis, declaring under oath that he, not the woman he attacked, was “the victim here.”
Remini knew all too well that she had committed career suicide—knew it the moment the conviction gavel came down on Haggis and any future she might have.
But she couldn’t foresee that the other “real victim here” was her own reputation and career, the final mortal thrust occurring three days later when Haggis was found liable and ordered to pay a judgment that would ultimately build—with punitive damages and his victim’s legal fees—to $12.8 million.
Remini knew what it meant that she had just paired her name with that of a convicted rapist, testifying in court as to his impeccable moral character. And she knew what it meant in Hollywood—a small town, after all—when word spread that she had betrayed her sisters—even victim shaming those abused by Haggis. She knew she had taken on the color of the enemy, and that she had been dumped into the entertainment industry’s trash heap: Box Office Poison.
Remini knew all too well that she had committed career suicide—knew it the moment the conviction gavel came down on Haggis and any future she might have. For that same day, she retched a 20-part bonkers anti-Scientology rant on social media.
But Remini, in full nightmare mode, was not so much dissing her former religion with her dyspeptic outbursts as she was screaming to anyone who might listen, “Not here! Don’t look at me! It’s over THERE! The real enemy is over there!”
It didn’t work. A cursory look at IMDb—Hollywood’s go-to up-to-the-minute compendium of the doings of anyone who’s anyone—reveals just one entry under “Leah Remini” for the whole of 2022: a stint as a game show host—the career graveyard for has-beens. And as for the first 10-plus months of 2023: crickets. The publicist Remini used to have listed there also seems to have mysteriously vanished.
And in true “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” fashion, four months later, when Haggis again made headlines with an additional $2.8 million awarded to his victim, Remini again responded the same day with another 20-part anti-Scientology rant. And again with the same result: zero.
Leah Remini can’t wake up. Her life is the nightmare—a nightmare of her own creation. And all she can do is flail and snarl at imagined enemies in the futile hope that someone—anyone—will toss her a lifesaver.
Her noisy twistings and writhings are those of one who is trapped with no escape.
As the prophet Isaiah—a holy man who lived three millennia ago—said, anticipating the nightmarish fate of haters like Remini, “The wicked are like the tossing sea, which cannot rest, whose waves cast up mire and mud.”
