Former top Scientology official Mike Rinder, who afterwards disbanded and became one of the organization’s most outspoken critics, passed away on Sunday, May 5 in Palm Harbor from esophageal cancer. He was 69.
Rinder, who previously worked closely with temple president David Miscavige, eventually went on to win two Emmys for his work on the docuseries” Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath”.
Rinder was born in Australia and raised as a Scientologist. His kids learned about the religion from a cousin who had gone to a chat by Scientology’s leader, L. Ron Hubbard. According to Rander, he began constantly going to a nearby Scientology center when he was a young child.
Rinder was given a scholarship to attend the University of Adelaide, but his parents otherwise pressured him to visit the Sea Organization, an elite team that lived and traveled with Hubbard on his ship.
” Actually, my life was preordained into Scientology”, he wrote in his 2022 publication,” A Billion Times”.
Sea life in the ocean nonprofit
Rinder married a brother Sea Org member while also serving in the church, and they had two children, despite the fact that he had much time to see them in his book. His main concern was advancing to the best levels of Scientology. Leading the Office of Special Affairs, he became one of the party’s most popular representatives.
Afterward, he would discuss how his position required him to slander church critics and collaborate with prominent figures, including actor Tom Cruise. In a letter omitted from Scientology, Rinder attacked people who spoke up.
” My days were limitless, crammed with keeping track of Scientology’s rivals, conducting plans to destroy them, putting out fires on the internet, and dealing with the constant star problems”, Rinder wrote.
Karen de la Carriere, a former Scientologist, described Rinder as attractive and endearing with an American accent.
” Also if a writer was violent, they had kind of be a little touch seduced”, said de la Carriere, who became friends with Rinder in the 1970s. ” Writers can be very hard-nosed, but they’d began off violent and be more delicate with Mike Rinder”.
De la Carriere said Rinder suffered for Scientology, enduring beatings and rhetorical floggings from the group’s president.
” Whenever you were tight with David Miscavige, sooner or later you’re going to drop in severe punishment”, she said. ” There’s no such thing as making a mistake. If there is an error, you are deemed a fugitive.
In the future, Rinder will reveal how he endured centuries of torture, eating leftover food, and sleeping in” The Hole,” a detention facility in California. Inder wrote about being omitted from the stage by Miscavige to speak with investigators.
Mark Bunker, a former Clearwater City Council member and a long-time Scientology writer, recalls seeing Rinder in Clearwater after his moment in the Hole.
” He had become so white and haggard and thin”, Bunker said. Your logic has to be reshaped so much that you have to endure being in the Hole for two decades before you eventually break.
Rinder’s avoid
In June 2007, at age 52, Rinder left the church. He described how he “only a backpack containing my card, a few papers, a finger travel, and two mobile devices” led to his escape during a trip to London. He snuck apart to Central Florida, next Virginia and therefore Colorado. He received assistance from homeless people who had moved to his place of residence.
They cut Rinder down, a practice known in the church as “disconnecting,” despite his expectation that his wife and children may accompany him.
Rinder was discovered by Joe Childs and Tom Tobin, both of whom are writers for the Tampa Bay Times. First, he declined to get interviewed about his experience. Therefore Scientology tracked down Rinder, to.
Rinder claimed that the firm threatened him with legal action and that he had been contacted by private investigators to monitor his movements.
” They rented an apartment across from me, in Westminster, Colorado, to see me 24/7 through the skylights with high-powered devices and night-vision optics”, Rinder wrote in his guide. ” They even took my filth and followed me around for$ 10, 000 per year”.
After this, Rinder reported a resolve to reveal his experience in what would become , The Truth Rundown line, a Tampa Bay Times research in 2009. He described the abuse he endured in the Hole as well as the physical and mental abuse he endured.
Rinder after relocated to Florida, where he continued to speak out against the church in conversations with the internet and worked for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The problems on him even continued.
GPS tracker were installed by secret prosecutors in his vehicles. I was told by church members that they should write me awful letters that would lead to my own death. According to Rinder, Rinder said,” as long as the event was no resolved, lawyers overseeing it may require regularly updated financial information from me to see who was supporting me.” The temple drew out his marriage to his first wife.
” I knew every shift in the Hubbard Fair Game playbook”, he wrote. ” It’s a brain game. If they didn’t succeed in getting into my mind, I had win”.
Spreading the word
When the HBO video” Going Clear” premiered in 2015, Rinder’s status increased even more. Past Scientologists, elected officers, and celebrities like Leah Remini and Lisa Marie Presley were among the speakers.
Remini requested him to assist her in producing a play that exposed the abuse she had endured in the temple. Rinder became her co-host.
” People torn asunder. Kids victimized. People forced to include pregnancies. Folks defrauded. A precise trial of dying and destruction”, Rinder wrote. ” Several told us for the first time that we had personalized the crimes and put on true, credible eyes.”
Despite legal challenges and abuse,” Leah Remini: Scientology and the After” ran for three months and won two Oscars.
According to Tony Ortega, a columnist who runs the Scientology weblog The Underground Bunker,” It really changed the way the people perceived Scientology,” and it also “helped to inform the media on how to speak about it.” ” I think it surprised everyone how much Mike Rinder rose to fame as well.”
After returning from Scientology, Rinder said he appeared much happier and had made a pledge to assist another “people who had been abused.”
” I think that was the healthiest thing he could own done”, he said. Returning to the real world was a very important decision for him, and I believe he found harmony there.
Bunker recalled how Rinder taught regional authorities staff the strategies employed by Scientology.
For our town manager and capital lawyer, having someone with inside knowledge of how David Miscavige operates and why they would do that was really important, Bunker said.
And after years of attacking editors, Rinder became an alliance to them.
” They detective on my family. They detective on my family. To intimidate my family, they have sent a personal analyst. And one of the stuff was that they attempted to break up my wife,” Ortega said. ” When I told Mike, he was nice enough to write a letter, saying ‘ look, this is the kind of activity they do,’ and I was able to give that to my sister’s company”.
The importance of family
After leaving Scientology, Rinder married Christie Collbran. A fellow former Sea Org member, she understood what he’d been through. They lived in Palm Harbor — raising her son, Shane, and a child they had together, Jack.
Before he passed away, Rinder prepared a statement for his family to read after his passing.
” I have been lucky — living two lives in one lifetime” , , he said in his final blog post. The second of the most wonderful years anyone could hope for with all of you and my new family, according to BB&T!
Rinder sought refuge among others who had experienced the same suffering when he wasn’t working to expose abuse. One of them was fellow fugitive and whistleblower Claire Headley, who has known Rinder since 1991.
Like Rinder, she had been cut off by family members who stayed behind in Scientology. Rinder and Christie became her new siblings.
We have adopted our children as cousins in a family of choice because of his vision. We’ve vacationed almost yearly with them”, Headley said. Our children are all the best of friends, and having them and creating this community together is a wonderful thing.
In order to assist people who are trying to leave Scientology, Rinder co-founded the Aftermath Foundation in 2018.
” He was a board member, participating in grant review, helping people with attorney connections, helping people get their money back from Scientology”, said Headley, who now serves as the foundation’s president. It was a long list of advocacy efforts to assist those who had left Scientology and who had frequently been so isolated from the outside world.
Rinder remained conscious of the people he left behind forever.
He wrote a letter to his children Taryn and Benjamin, who are still active in the church, to begin his book.
I have been shouting back over the wall, throwing notes around stones, and skywriting to anyone who might look up, trying to convey the message that there is a big, wide world out there. I hope you can discover the real world for yourselves, too”, he wrote. ” No matter what you may think, it is never too late to start over”.
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