Peter Mansell on Mike Rinder

My name’s Peter Mansell, and I’ve worked with Mike Rinder in the past.

He has a reputation for being lazy and being sleepy. And there are things that I’ve experienced in that area that I think paint a little bit of a picture of his character. And one of them was a project we were all working on. It was a writing project, we were writing articles for a magazine. And Mike would disappear and then come back and disappear and come back and we all pretty, you know, much felt that Mike was going off to have a nap while we worked, you know. That was just an assumption and I think it was a pretty fair assumption. And then one night he came in really late, and I didn’t see this, but I heard outside there was one guy in the room next to me and Mike came in and he walked past and he said, “Hi, Richard. Working hard or hardly working?” And it was just like a sarcastic comment to somebody that was working hard while Mike’s been off sleeping.

One of the stories that I guess, to me, portrays who Mike Rinder is happened in April 2010. And I was working in the Church here in Clearwater, and this was after Mike had left the Church. And I got a phone call from somebody at the Fort Harrison, which is one of our facilities. And they said, “Mike Rinder’s outside the Fort Harrison with a gang of people and they’re trying to force their way into the building.” On the way, somebody told me that he was trying to get in because he was claiming that he wanted to see his son, Ben, who works in the Church.

And Ben’s reaction was like, “I don’t want to see him.” Because long before Mike left the Church, their relationship was very bad anyway.

Mike was a—I mean, I’ve talked to Ben about this—Mike was a terrible father. Mike would work in Los Angeles. He would come here to visit Clearwater to do business or work or whatever and wouldn’t even go and say hello to his son while he was here. It was sort of like a weird relationship. So, Ben said, “No, I’m not interested.” And there were police outside, so Ben explained to the officer a little bit about why he doesn’t want to talk him. Like, you know, “It’s my—he’s my dad, but the whole family grew up in the Church of Scientology and now my dad has become, basically, you know, a hostile attacker who’s lying to people, lying on the media. Why would I want to talk to him?”

He wasn’t here to see his son or to—he was here to use his son as a sort of a gimmick to put this event on with cameras. If he wanted to see his son, why would he turn up with a bunch of hooligans, basically. One of them had a toothpick in his mouth like a gangster. You know what I mean? Why would you do that with cameras rolling, saying, “I want to see my son.”

If you’re a member of an organization or group or a team or anything, and you decide to leave, okay. That’s one thing. Leave. Go away. But to then use your son, your family member as a sort of a gimmick to attack that, which to me means that Mike sees his betrayal and antipathy toward Scientology as more important than his own son, which to me is disgusting.

So in a summary, that’s my portrayal of Mike. He’s disgusting.