In “Troublemaker,” Leah Remini’s expose of life in the cult of Scientology, you will find many crazy episodes and passages.
Here’s one. Read it very carefully. She and her sister Nicole signed “billion year contracts” with the cult. Yes, that’s right. Billion year contracts.
“After we signed our billion-year contracts, Nicole and I were put on the EPF, or Estates Project Force, part of the basic Sea Org training for new recruits. It was a lot like boot camp. All EPFers spent twelve hours a day doing hard labor, like pulling up tree roots with our bare hands, working heavy machinery on the grounds of the Fort Harrison and the Sandcastle, or cleaning bathrooms and hotel rooms.
Then for two and a half hours each day, we would do the basic courses for the EPF, in which you learned the Sea Org policies and rules and what it meant to be a member. We were all given detailed check sheets, which listed all the actions we needed to take in order to complete each course. The first course being how to study Scientology.”
Remini also goes into new details about Tom Cruise’s fake girlfriend, Nazanin Boniadi, who was handpicked for the actor and then dispensed with when she wasn’t needed.
This is what happened to Boniadi when Cruise and crew were done with her:
“Tommy [Davis, celebrity wrangler and son of actress Anne Archer] told Naz that he briefed Tom and told him that Naz was being handled. She was then quickly demoted to living in a cheaper motel, away from Cruise’s environment, and subjected to doing four months of menial labor, including tasks such as digging ditches and cleaning public toilets with a toothbrush.
Eventually she was promoted to selling Dianetics books on the streets of Tampa. Better, but still humiliating. All the while she was being deprogrammed with security checks and the PTS/ SP course. She wasn’t allowed to talk to anyone, particularly her Scientology friends, since she was considered a traitor. She was not allowed to go anywhere alone unless escorted by either church security, ethics staff, or a representative of Flag’s President’s Office. And if you ask the church, they will deny that these practices exist or that people are punished at all.
And if you ask the church, they will deny that these practices exist or that people are punished at all. One day, while being escorted to do amends, Naz saw a friend and fellow actress, Marisol Nichols. Naz smiled and said hello, but Marisol turned her back to Naz and walked off. Naz asked her escort why she would do something like that, and the woman’s response was “Why wouldn’t she? You just got done scrubbing toilets. What makes you think you have anything to talk about with a successful Scientologist like that? You have nothing in common.”
Naz had started to believe that perhaps she was as evil as they were suggesting. After all, this was her religion and they were telling her she had committed the ultimate sin of betraying Tom. Naz found her faith being tested because she couldn’t reconcile any of any of these practices her church had appeared to be behind.
But she mainly complied because her mother was still a Scientologist at the time and would have been forced to disconnect if she didn’t remain in good standing with the church. Naz’s mom, like many Scientologists, said to her daughter, “Naz, please just do what they ask and get through your punishment.” Naz’s house, as well as her mother’s house, were visited by church officials and anything Tom had ever given her— pictures of the two of them together, gifts given to her by Bella and Connor, anything of their lives together— was removed.”
