Nancy Many appeared on a KNOP radio show today from Washington state to promote her new book, My Billion Year Contract. She talks about her experiences in Scientology as an aide to L. Ron Hubbard, being sent to the RPF by Hubbard where she was locked in the garage of the Fort Harrison Hotel in Clearwater when she was five months pregnant, escaping from Scientology with her husband, disconnection and much more.

Images of Britain's wartime leader are being used in recruiting posters Fight them on the beaches if you will. But the descendants of Sir Winston Churchill have decided that a more effective way to prevent the Church of Scientology from hijacking the memory of Britain's wartime leader involves stern cease-and-desist letters and the threat of a costly PR battle. In an unlikely dispute that pits Sir Winston's grandchildren against followers of the late L Ron Hubbard – the science-fiction writer who ...

What led Crash director Paul Haggis to leave the church after 35 years? Kim Masters reports on how Scientology aided his career—and then tried to milk his success. Maybe Church of Scientology leader David Miscavige had a premonition. Or maybe he’s not much of a talent spotter. But a few years back, Miscavige apparently wasn’t keen on using writer-director Paul Haggis for a series of films based on treatments by the late Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. This was before Haggis, ...

Five years after Tom Cruise called Nicolas Sarkozy a “wonderful guy,” a French court convicted his church of fraud. Eric Pape on Scientology’s latest crisis. Scientology isn’t a religion, it’s a dangerous sect overseen by convicted criminals—at least as far as France is concerned. There is no doubt that the last week has brought a flurry of bad news for Scientology. There was the vocal defection of respected film director Paul Haggis, as well as fresh indications that John Travolta, one ...

A Murfreesboro man has filed a $6 million lawsuit against the Church of Scientology's Nashville celebrity center claiming that guards hired by the church assaulted him while he was staging a protest. Thomas A. Parker and other members of an anti-Scientology group called Anonymous planned to protest the center's grand opening on April 25. Parker and others were walking down Eighth Avenue South, when two off-duty Spring Hill police officers, hired as security guards by the church, confronted them, the suit ...

A French court has convicted the Church of Scientology of fraud, but stopped short of banning the group from operating in France. Two branches of the group's operations and several of its leaders in France have been fined. The case came after complaints from two women, one of whom said she was manipulated into paying more than 20,000 euros (£18,100) in the 1990s. A Scientology spokesman told the BBC the verdict was "all bark and no bite". France regards Scientology as ...

Two flagship branches of the Church of Scientology in France have been sentenced to pay fines of over €600,000 (£550,000) after being convicted of "fraud in an organised gang" today by a court in Paris. The judgment against the Scientology Celebrity Centre and a related bookshop in Paris is one of the most important to involve the controversial organisation in recent years. The judges stopped short of the total ban the prosecution had called for, so the church will be allowed ...

In his first detailed interview since walking off Nightline last week, church spokesman Tommy Davis talks to Kim Masters about Monday's startling public defection by Paul Haggis, addresses drug allegations—and explains his relationship with Tom Cruise. Plus, his former colleague speaks out. Tommy Davis has been busy lately. In the past week, the spokesman for the Church of Scientology tore off his lapel microphone and stormed out of an interview when Nightline correspondent Martin Bashir tried to question him about whether ...

"Crash" director Paul Haggis has severed his ties with the Church of Scientology, in part because of what he alleged as the organization's stance against gay marriage. Haggis wrote a letter addressed to Tommy Davis, the head of Scientology's Celebrity Centre. In it, Haggis said he was disappointed by the church's tacit denial of gay rights in the debate over California's gay marriage ban. The 56-year-old Haggis, who won an Oscar in 2005 for co-writing "Crash," said he was quitting the ...

Scientology is a body of beliefs and related practices created by science fiction writer and fleeting Aleister Crowley subordinate L. Ron Hubbard (1911–1986) founded in 1952 as a successor to his earlier self-help system, Dianetics. Hubbard characterized Scientology as a religion, and in 1953 incorporated the Church of Scientology in New Jersey. Scientologists believe that anyone who disagrees with their teachings is infected, whether knowingly or not, by evil aliens known as Marcabians. This belief system or “tech” inspires a high ...

[Reproduced here with express permission of author Paul Krassner. Thank you!] What I really wanted to do was publish something that would top “The Parts Left Out of the Kennedy Book.” I had observed a disturbing element being imposed upon the counterculture — various groups all trying to rip off the search for consciousness — and I felt challenged to write a satirical piece about this phenomenon. Scientology was one of the scariest of these organizations, if only because its ...

The Church of Scientology was founded in the early 1950s by pulp science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, and it's been run by his successor, David Miscavige, since 1987. But for the past year or so the public face of Scientology has been a man named Tommy Davis. Son of Hollywood actress (and longtime Scientologist) Anne Archer, Davis has a stylish mop coif and boyish (not to say Tom Cruise-ish) good looks that have been put before the media's cameras every time ...

THE celebrity-studded Church of Scientology in Australia wants negative media reports about the controversial religion outlawed. Scientology, which boasts members including Tom Cruise, said it wanted a law "to prevent the dissemination of anti-religious propaganda in the media, which is based on unfounded hearsay and either known or reasonably known to be untruthful". Churches and individuals who have been "defamed" should be able to sue for damages, the religious organisation said in a submission to the Australian Human Rights Commission. Scientology ...

It claims to be one of the world's fastest-growing new religions but a battery of legal cases threaten its very existence in this secular country In a small Normandy village, surrounded by wheat fields, Gwen Le Berre keeps a Scientology "electrometer" machine in his bedroom. He opens the large green briefcase and peers at the machine inside. It looks like a lie-detector from an old TV cop show and Le Berre doesn't really understand how it works — he just knows ...