Christopher Smith on Mike Rinder

My name is Christopher Smith, I am a writer. I’ve worked for the Church of Scientology since about 1996.

The work ethic that I experienced from Mike was a disregard for work. He definitely didn’t care about the project that I was working on with him at all. And he arrived, which is about as much as he actually did. Contribute, you know, make a change, collaborate, none of those things applied.

So while we’re working, he’s sort of dictating to me the script for this video. So, and I was sort of taking down the things that he was saying. And then he would just close his eyes, like while we were talking, close his eyes and I’m sitting there sort of like, “Okay, like, well, what happens next?”

The thought of someone falling asleep in front of you while you’re working with them, this is beyond the beyond, especially because the work that we were doing was exciting. And so to have that sort of response from someone else who so couldn’t care about it, forget about not caring about me, but whose purpose was so nonexistent, that he could actually doze off in the middle of working with me, and—I just don’t get it.

Throughout the years, I’ve had the opportunity to work with many people who worked with Mike and found out that he had little or nothing to do with the products that he was attached to or claimed to have been a part of. And mostly had other people do work that he then took the credit for.

Everything Mike Rinder did in his world was for Mike Rinder. So to that degree, he was self-serving. I’ve never had somebody who was so uninterested in other people and so disdainful of other people. And that summed up Mike Rinder for me.