Mark Rathbun on Mike Rinder’s Financial Motivation to Harm the Church

TRANSCRIPT:

So at one point Leah Remini told me she had—she, after two years of careful work through her publicist and Rinder and Ortega—had successfully come up with unlimited financial backing to go after Scientology and she was going to create a production to do so. And she told me that she was so well-backed that I could write my own ticket to participate as a producer. And so I asked her, you know, “What are you looking at producing?” And she told me, essentially, it was going to be a regurgitation of everything that’s been publicized about Scientology over the last seven years, about things that have happened over the last 40 years, allegedly, and she would sort of resurrect the players who were saying things about Scientology seven years—as somehow new and current.

To which my reaction was, “I have no interest whatsoever. If you want to do something”—I’ve had this conversation over two years. “If you want to do something that’s educational, that is somewhat objective, that could lead to people getting on in life better, that gave some new perspective,” that was the only basis upon which I ever told her I would ever participate in any of her stuff, right. I said, “And that still stands. But what you’re proposing is a—is essentially a cheap, tabloidesque pile-on, and I’m not interested.” Okay?

And I thought that would be the last I’d ever hear of her, because, I mean, she—that was the end of the conversation. She just, you know—she was like a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs; it was like Ralph Kramden, “Hubedahubedahubeda.” And it was the end of the conversation; she had nothing to say, you see. And so I did think that would be the end of it. I told her what my position was. But, it wasn’t, but I’ll get back to that. Because I’m on this subject of financial motivation.

Her partner, Mike Rinder, since he’s left the Church of Scientology, has never had a job, or never had an employment, or never lifted a finger to do anything that wasn’t related to anti-Scientology work, that wasn’t paid for by people that were interested in seeing Scientology’s oxes gored.

And I know that because his first three or four engagements, he specifically asked me to help him get into a position where he could have such backers and I put him in that position. And so from 2009, it’s just been a series of sugar daddies for him, one right after the other. You know, venture capitalist, former trader—well actually, a number of people that are in that kind of business. An old woman, with, you know, a ton of money, who just is obsessed on the subject. It’s just been one chain, one after the other. And so, in essence, he’s followed the same philosophy as—oh, and now Leah Remini. You know, who, when I rejected her offer, she went straight to Mike Rinder, and he took her up happily.