MEDIA WATCH | THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

Hollywood Reporter Caught with Puff Piece for Bigot Leah Remini

Leah Remini’s hatred has spawned over 500 death threats, bomb threats, and acts of violence. Perpetrators were prosecuted and jail terms were served. Her hate speech caused children to be bullied at schools, employees to be harassed at work, property to be destroyed, and people to be scared. That is her legacy. Is that to be yours?

July 7, 2017

The Hollywood Reporter
Los Angeles, CA 90036
Mr. Belloni,

Your latest puff piece written on behalf of Leah Remini serves only to further add to the harm she has brought, through her vile and hateful lies, to the many thousands of L.A. Scientologists and others.

Were you to publish those same statements about Jews, Muslims, Christians, Hindus or Buddhists you would be pilloried, and correctly so. If you were to make the same bigoted statements against members of the LGBTQ community, or the African American community, you would rightly be held in contempt. Yet you continue to do so against Scientologists.

You have no justifiable reason to make such discriminatory statements against Scientology or Scientologists.

Is that to be yours?

The father of someone who committed one of those hate crimes wrote to the Church, stating, in part:

This is a letter of apology for the threatening post that appeared on the Church’s Facebook page…My son and his friend got riled up after watching the Leah Remini program that appeared on A&E about the Church of Scientology and vented their feelings by making the threatening post…”

To our knowledge Remini has not brought one single family together. Her A&E series only served to fracture people, their families and groups by converting harmony into hatred. That is what you support. That is your contribution, as a mouthpiece, to her hate campaign.

Compare that to Scientology where we do bring families together every day—of ALL religions. As an example of how we help communities, I give you what the Financial Times of June 23, 2017 wrote:

A Christian, a Muslim and a Scientologist—all strangers—are riding through west London in a yellow van… it was a glimpse of the way tragedy can upend our usual realities.

Apollis had awoken to news of the devastating fire in nearby Grenfell Tower. Although suffering from a chronic skin disease, he set off with a vague notion of helping. Like other would-be volunteers, he was turned away by the churches. There was no one from the local council to be found.

“Then I saw this yellow van pull up,” he recalled. “They were the Church of Scientology, and they asked if I wanted to help.”

The next thing he knew he was donning a Scientology T-shirt—“even though I don’t believe in it”.

He and his new comrades were delivering water when, soon enough, a man jumped in front of the van, waving his arms. He had food to donate if they could give him a ride.

“We said, ‘yes, jump in!’ ” recalled Apollis, 43, an opera singer. “He was a Muslim guy and he took us to this restaurant in Holland Park.” There they loaded the van with kafte, rice, hummus and pita bread and brought it back to Grenfell. They took special care to feed the police patrolling the neighbourhood, as the Muslim man had requested. “It was just amazing,” Apollis said. “We were just working together.”

That is a single example of the reality of Scientology.

You would do your readers a far better service by reporting the truth about Scientology, not the skewed, false reality of a bitter ex-member.

Joel Phillips
Los Angeles, Calif.