Paul Haggis’ Defense Team Calls ‘Scientology And The Aftermath’ Co-Host Mike Rinder As First Witness In Rape Trial
29.10.2022 - 04:13
/ deadline.com
A former high-ranking official in the Church of Scientology said Friday that the organization never forgets its enemies “until they are destroyed,” and he said that filmmaker Paul Haggis, who quit Scientology, remains one of its biggest targets.
Mike Rinder, an Australian who was Scientology’s top enforcer and who co-hosted the Emmy-winning docuseries Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath, was was the first witness for the defense in the New York sexual civil assault trial of Haggis.
The Oscar-winning screenwriter of Crash and a major figure in a 2015 documentary exposé about Scientology, Going Clear, Haggis is being sued by Haleigh Breest, a publicist in New York who claims that he raped her in his Soho apartment in 2013. Haggis says the sex was consensual and, on the trial’s eighth day, his defense began with a sometimes chaotic turn in the witness box for a fellow ex-Scientologist, Rinder, who said the two men are friends.
Rinder told jurors that he “escaped” Scientology in 2007 after more than 40 years in its ranks, and chunks of his testimony were shot down as hearsay because, as the judge, Sabrina Kraus, noted, “The witness has testified he was no longer affiliated with the church” after 2007.
But over numerous objections from a lawyer for Breest, Rinder was allowed to implicitly connect Haggis’ exit from Scientology to the multiple sexual assault allegations against Haggis being aired in this trial. Four women from Canada who worked in film and television have testified alongside Breest that they, too, were assaulted by Haggis in separate incidents between 1996 and 2015.
Rinder said that when he ran the organization’s so-called Office of Special Affairs, its role was to silence critics and opponents —