LEAH REMINI: SCIENTOLOGY KEPT ME DUMB
TV queen finally getting education she always craved
PLUCKY Leah Remini is getting something she says she wasn’t allowed to have while growing up in the Scientology community — an education!
The former King of Queens vixen, who has spent much of her adult career exposing the darkest secrets of the sci-fi cult religion she fled in 2013, is grinding her way through New York University in defiance of what she claims were Scientology’s prohibitions on earthly knowledge!
“For the last 38 years of my life, I have been living and working with an eighthgrade education,” reveals the 51-year-old actress.
She says the sect’s controversial founder, L. Ron Hubbard, had a “deep disdain for conventional education,” so she turned to acting at age 16 as a “salvation” to help support her family and make them look good in the eyes of the church.
Now, she says, it’s time to feed her brain!
“This is one of the last chunks of my life that I am taking back for myself from Scientology,” she has said — despite her fear “that I was not smart enough, not worthy enough, not able to do the work that will be required.”
Leah was raised in the Church of Scientology from the time she was nine years old.
But two years after she left it, her memoir Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology burned bridges and helped her take on the feared and mysterious institution in the awardwinning A&E documentary series Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath, which ran for three years.
In response to Leah’s claims, church officials told Remini to “get a life” and insisted her “lack of education is of her own doing.”