Actress and reality television star Leah Remini is about to drop a bomb on the Church of Scientology, in the form of a “no-holds-barred memoir”.
The former The King of Queens star parted ways with Scientology years ago – with the help of her friend Jennifer Lopez – but on November 3 her memoir, Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology will include “an eye opening insider account of her tumultuous and heart-wrenching thirty-year-plus association with the Church of Scientology.”
“The decision to leave is your giving up everything you’ve worked for your whole life,” Remini, 45 told ABC News. “I feel that people need to understand this has been my whole life.”
But, in a new clip for her interview with 20/20, the star has revealed she wants her fans to “understand how it happens.”
“As time goes on, you start to lose touch with the real world. The mindset becomes us against them,” Remini said.
“Being critical of Tom Cruise is being critical of Scientology itself,” she claimed in the clip. “You are evil.”
“I don’t think people know the amount of dedication it takes to be in this organization,” she said during an interview earlier this year. “It was every day, three and a half hours minimum, seven days a week usually.”
Tom Cruise, John Travolta and Kirstie Alley are all famous names likely to be exposed in the book with Alley hitting out at Remini, calling her a “bigot”.
“When you leave, you can leave quietly,” Remini told People magazine in 2013.
“But if you make a stink in the public world, they call you a Suppressive Person, which means the church has put a stamp on you that says you are bad.
“No one is going to tell me how I need to think, no one is going to tell me who I can, and cannot talk to.”
The actress documented part of her experience post-Scientology in her reality television show, talking about the church’s attempts to separate her from her family.
Remini was just seven-years-old when she was brought into the Church of Scientology by her mother.
“We stand united, my family and I, and I think that says a lot about who we are and what we’re about,” Remini said in the reality series.
“We didn’t have a choice and there are pretty hard repercussions to leave it,” Remini stated in a video clip from her own TLC reality series, Leah Remini: It’s All Relative.
“If you are raised in it as a child, you don’t have loyalty to your family. The church does come first to you and that is what we would be teaching.
“I didn’t want to raise my daughter in the church because from what I experienced and what I saw, the church becomes everything, your mother, your father, your everything. You are dependent on the church.
“In 10 years, if I didn’t want to be connected to the church anymore, my own daughter [Sophia] would be taught to disconnect from me. I didn’t want to create that. I didn’t think that would be healthy for her.”
The Church of Scientology has responded to Remini’s memoir, according to The Daily Mail, dubbing the actress “obsessed with shamelessly exploiting her former religion in a pathetic attempt to get publicity”.
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