Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology

Leah Remini's memoir opens with a preemptive confession. Before the Church of Scientology can discredit her, she catalogs her own flaws and those of her family members, disarming the church's likely attacks while raising a pointed question: If more than 30 years of study, close to $2 million spent on services, and roughly $3 million in donations did not fix these problems, perhaps the system itself does not work. She identifies Tom Cruise, the church's most prominent celebrity member, and David Miscavige, the church's leader, as the two people most responsible for the unraveling of her faith.

Remini grew up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, in the early 1980s, obsessed with television comedies and determined to perform. Her father, George, a Sicilian man with a volatile temper, terrified her with verbal abuse, though he could also be charming. Her mother, Vicki, a free-spirited woman orphaned young, kept few rules. After her parents separated, Vicki's new boyfriend Dennis, a warm Scientologist, drew the family into the church. Vicki explained the concept of "overts," or transgressions, and encouraged the girls to confess wrongdoing without punishment. Remini and her older sister, Nicole, began taking courses at the New York Org, the church's Manhattan center, where Training Routines taught them to endure provocations without reacting. The church treated both girls as "spiritual beings" rather than children, and Remini thrived on the respect. She wrote to Scientology's founder, L. Ron Hubbard (LRH), and received a signed letter back, convincing her she was special.

Sea Organization recruiters soon persuaded the family to relocate to Clearwater, Florida, the spiritual headquarters known as "Flag." The Sea Org is the church's most devoted order, whose members sign billion-year contracts. Recruiters promised Remini could act in Scientology films. Instead, they arrived to a dilapidated Quality Inn and grueling labor. Remini and Nicole entered the Estates Project Force (EPF), performing 12 hours of daily manual work plus coursework. When 13-year-old Remini rewarded her cleaning crew with pool time after finishing early, an EPF supervisor threw her overboard from a motorboat, following an LRH-sanctioned disciplinary practice. She also discovered her infant sister Shannon in a fly-infested nursery, crying in a urine-soaked crib. Dennis, who had stayed behind in Brooklyn, abandoned the family for another woman, leaving them with no home to return to.

The departure from the Sea Org came when a Knowledge Report, one of the church's tattling mechanisms, accused both girls of sexual misconduct. The Ethics Officer threatened to assign them to the Rehabilitation Project Force (RPF), a punitive program whose members lose virtually all liberties for months or years. Their mother refused and secured a fitness board, an internal review that allowed them to leave. The family remained committed to Scientology, moved to Los Angeles, and Remini and Nicole dropped out of school to work at Scientologist-owned businesses.

Remini's acting career unfolded through years of rejection. At 18, she won her first series, Living Dolls, an ABC spin-off of Who's the Boss?, after the Scientology community rallied around her with communication drills and Tone Scale exercises, practices based on Scientology's ranked scale of emotional states. When Living Dolls was canceled after 12 episodes, Scientology's logic dictated the failure was her fault. Years of canceled series and guest spots followed, including losing the role of Monica on Friends to Courteney Cox. Through it all, Remini spent hours daily on Scientology coursework and underwent regular auditing, a form of counseling using an E-Meter, an electronic device that claims to measure thought and emotion. She describes a growing disconnect between the euphoria of her sessions and her unchanged anger and insecurity in everyday life.

Remini fell for Angelo Pagán, a Cuban singer, only to learn he was still married. After a painful separation and church-directed couples counseling, Angelo contacted Remini to say the counseling had revealed irreconcilable differences with his wife. They reunited. In 1998, Remini landed the role of Carrie Heffernan on The King of Queens, a CBS sitcom alongside comedian Kevin James. The addition of Jerry Stiller as Carrie's father transformed the show into a hit that ran for nine seasons and 207 episodes. Remini kept her Scientology life hidden from colleagues. She married Angelo in July 2003 and gave birth to daughter Sofia in June 2004, resisting the church's demands for silent birth and refusing to raise Sofia using Scientology methods.

After donating $1 million to the International Association of Scientologists (IAS), the church's fundraising arm, Remini gained entry to Tom Cruise's inner circle, where she observed him berating his assistant over trivial matters. The November 2006 wedding of Tom and Katie Holmes in Rome became the turning point. Remini observed church officials violating Scientology's own policies, discovered baby Suri crying on a bathroom floor, and repeatedly asked where Miscavige's wife, Shelly, was, only to be told she did not "have the rank" to inquire. Upon returning home, she wrote Knowledge Reports on top officials, including Norman Starkey, the minister who had officiated the ceremony, and Miscavige himself. She expected a routine Ethics cycle, the church's standard disciplinary review. Instead, she was subjected to a Truth Rundown at Flag, a grueling interrogation lasting months. After weeks of 12-hour sessions costing $300,000, Remini cracked and retracted her complaints. Her progression to the next Operating Thetan (OT) level, one of Scientology's advanced spiritual stages, was blocked. She returned home emotionally broken.

Remini's skepticism deepened as she donated millions without receiving evidence of where the money went. In 2007, she was disturbed by the church's aggressive tactics against a BBC reporter investigating Scientology and refused to sign her release for the resulting documentary. When Katie Holmes filed for divorce from Tom Cruise in 2012, Remini broke Scientology's rules by contacting people the church had declared Suppressive Persons (SPs), people labeled threats whom members are ordered to shun. Among them was Mike Rinder, a former senior executive who described physical abuse by Miscavige at "the Hole," a confinement area at the church's Gold Base compound. She read former Flag captain Debbie Cook's viral email describing abuse and began searching the Internet for critical material.

Confrontations with leadership escalated. Remini challenged Miscavige on Tom Cruise's influence, the financial ruin of ordinary parishioners, and Shelly's whereabouts. The church solicited Knowledge Reports from her closest friends, who called one by one in tears to disconnect. To make her departure irrevocable, Remini filed a missing person report for Shelly Miscavige with the LAPD on August 5, 2013. The case was closed within days after police spoke to the church's lawyer rather than to Shelly.

Remini also recounts the story of Nazanin Boniadi, a young actress secretly groomed by church officials to be Tom Cruise's girlfriend. Boniadi was physically transformed and flown to New York for a staged meeting with Tom. After three months, she was abruptly separated from him and subjected to months of menial labor before leaving Scientology with her mother.

After the New York Post broke the news of her departure, Remini competed on Dancing with the Stars, where partner Tony Dovolani shielded her from church-related press questions. Her immediate family left Scientology without hesitation, a decision she calls extraordinary given the thousands of families torn apart by the church's disconnection policy. Remini began therapy for the first time, working to distinguish her own thoughts from decades of conditioning. In the afterword, she describes Troublemaker debuting at number one on the New York Times bestseller list and reflects that none of the dozens of friends who disconnected have reached out. The last ideology she must fight, she acknowledges, is the one still running in her own mind.