Dear HBO
Letters re: documentary sources

Each of these letters details the false allegations made by Alex Gibney’s sources in Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief documentary, their history of lying and hidden financial agendas. But Alex Gibney and HBO turned a deaf ear to any efforts by the Church to get a fair opportunity to respond. Check out the documented facts discrediting his sources.

March 12, 2015 Domestic Violence by Mike Rinder Sheila Nevins, the head of HBO documentaries, exhibits her “domestic violence double standard” by righteously condemning domestic abuse on the one hand, when it makes for good PR for her and HBO, but then glorifying a notorious wife and woman abuser, à la Mike Rinder, and granting him five-star luxury while parading him around to promote Gibney’s film. Hypocrisy should be exposéd.

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March 3, 2015 False Allegations from Mike Rinder On March 3, 2015, the Church wrote to Sheila Nevins to further illuminate the deceitfulness of Alex Gibney’s HBO film on the Church of Scientology. Predictably, one of the linchpins of the movie is Mike Rinder, a rabid anti-Scientologist removed from his Church position in disgrace more than a decade earlier for criminal acts, malfeasance and, most importantly, for repeatedly lying to the leader of the religion. However with this letter the Church was armed with further evidence from a legal deposition Rinder had recently been subject to. He had testified under oath to lying—which is exactly what the Church had said all along.

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February 25, 2015 False Allegations from Tom DeVocht On February 25, 2015, the Church wrote to Sheila Nevins to illustrate to her the falsity of tales told in Alex Gibney’s film by a handful of spiteful malcontents like Tom DeVocht. The Church also provided her with extensive information on DeVocht’s history of lying, deceit and malfeasance, showing what little interest Nevins had in inconvenient facts that would undermine the movie’s bigoted agenda.

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February 24, 2015 False Allegations from Marc Headley and his wife Claire On February 24, 2015, the Church wrote again to Sheila Nevins, this time to explain to her that the false underlying premise of both Wright’s book, and Gibney’s documentary based on it, was to promote the absurd “human trafficking” and “exploitation of labor” allegations against the Church, which had been utterly debunked by nothing less than the federal court system years earlier. Because their case was thrown out, the Headleys were ordered to pay the Church over $40,000 in court costs. Enclosed also is a white paper which totally undermines the credibility of Marc Headley and his wife: his thefts, violence, selling stories to the tabloids and their support of the cyber hate group Anonymous.

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February 20, 2015 False Allegations from Marty Rathbun On February 20, 2015, the Church was yet again forced to correspond with Sheila Nevins, this time on account of a new lie dreamed up by star source Marty Rathbun—that the Church had illegally “wiretapped” a celebrity. Wow! Normally, this would have been one giant red flag to any journalist as it should have been for HBO and Alex Gibney. By the numbers, Rathbun failed to mention this bogus allegation in no less than 1,300 vitriolic and dishonest blog posts, interviews with some 50 media outlets, in three self-published books, and in extensive interviews with film producer Lawrence Wright. Of course, Rathbun didn’t “forget” to mention it, because he made it up for Gibney—as a new titillating fact to drum up interest for his factless film.

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February 19, 2015 False Allegations from Sylvia Yvonne “Spanky” Taylor As HBO refused to meet with persons intimately familiar with facts concerning presumed allegations in Alex Gibney’s propaganda film, the Church was forced on February 19, 2015, to again write to Sheila Nevins to sort out facts. This time about one “Spanky” Taylor, an apostate who had left the Church 30 years earlier who had been removed from her position in the Church as long ago as 1978. She had later broken up her family with an affair. She had become involved in a now defunct deprogramming network and more.

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February 18, 2015 False Allegations from Sara Goldberg Necessitated by HBO and Alex Gibney’s refusal to meet in person, the Church was also forced to provide yet another detailed letter to Ms. Nevins to elucidate factual content about another noncredible source unearthed from iniquity—Sara Goldberg. This is the woman who sold her soul in favor of her deadbeat, drunk and drug-addicted son and against her upstanding daughter with an 8-year-old special needs child. Then again, she had experience with lying to the authorities, having lied in the 1970s to the FBI that was investigating her. The letter and its attached white paper provide full details.

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