Paul Haggis’ Defense Wins Battle to Call Ex-Scientology Actress Leah Remini

[Karen#1]

Excerpt:
ormer Scientologist Leah Remini is expected to testify on Monday at director Paul Haggis’ rape trial after a judge allowed his defense team to call her as a last-minute witness.

The actress, podcast host, and author of Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology, is expected to address the court on Monday via a live steam.

“That’s what I’m expecting,” Haggis’ lawyer Seth Zuckerman told The Daily Beast. “I can’t make any promises. Nothing’s definite.”

Shortly before 11 a.m. Friday, Judge Sabrina Kraus dismissed the jury to discuss the possibility of Remini testifying.


Haggis, a former Scientologist, who publicly defected from the religion in 2009 after 35 years as a church member, has argued the controversial religion conjured the civil rape case against him as part of a coordinated vendetta to defame him over his whistleblowing efforts.

In September, Kraus ruled Haggis could argue that the Church of Scientology had invented the sexual assault case.

“Leah Remini would testify principally about two topics,” Haggis’ lawyer Priya Chaudhry told Kraus. “She is, if not number one and number two, enemies of Scientology and things they’ve done to her and the way that Scientology has done these things—her personal experience with the various tactics used to destroy her.”

Paul Haggis’ Defense Wins Battle to Call Ex-Scientology Actress Leah Remini

A jury in the rape trial of Paul Haggis was dismissed briefly Friday as lawyers argued over whether or not actress Leah Remini could be called to testify.

www.thedailybeast.com

 

[Karen#1]

Deposition: Scientology’s targeting of Paul Haggis that isn’t speculation

By Tony Ortega | November 6, 2022

Open in app or online Deposition: Scientology’s targeting of Paul Haggis that isn’t speculation Tony Ortega Nov 6 ​ ​ ​ Save​ ▷ Listen​ ​ [Tommy Davis and Paul Haggis] We’ve been very busy with the Danny Masterson trial here in Los Angeles, so we’ve been unable to keep much of an eye on what’s going on back in New York, where a civil trial has been unfolding between Crash director Paul Haggis and a former publicist, Haleigh Breest, who is suing him because she alleges that Haggis raped her in his apartment after a movie premiere in 2013. There has been plenty of very good coverage of the trial in the press, especially from publications like Variety and the Daily Beast, and so we’ve been able gather what you probably have: that Haleigh Breest testified along with four other women, all Jane Does, to allegations that Haggis raped or attempted to rape them in incidents going back to 1996. Haggis himself testified last week, and denied that he’d raped the women, describing his encounter with Breest as a consensual one. But what’s made the case especially interesting to the media is that Haggis in 2009 became one of the most highly visible defectors from Scientology, and his attorneys are presenting a case that Scientology would have tried to destroy him for speaking out for a New Yorker piece by Lawrence Wright in 2011, and then in an HBO movie, Going Clear, in 2015. (Full disclosure, we also appeared in the film.) Mike Rinder testified, for example, that based on his history as a top Scientology executive, the organization would never give up in its attempts to destroy Paul for speaking out. And tomorrow, the defense plans to have Leah Remini testify via video link. Breest’s lawyers have characterized the defense’s presentation of Scientology’s enmity for Haggis as a distraction, pointing out that both sides have stipulated that Breest herself was never a Scientologist. And Haggis’s attorneys have presented no evidence that there is any connection between her lawsuit and the church. But we didn’t want it to be overlooked that there is real evidence that Scientology targeted Haggis after his 2009 defection, and it came in a video deposition, portions of which were played for the jury. We have now obtained a copy of that deposition, and we thought it was worth memorializing here at the Bunker. It involves a woman named Shawna Brakefield, a person Leah Remini first told us about at the Bunker in July 2020. Leah told us that she had left a chapter out of her 2015 book Troublemaker about Tom Cruise, and she generously gave us that material to publish at the Bunker. In it, she described the things Shawna had told her about what it was like to work for Tom Cruise, who was described as a cruel taskmaster who used Scientology concepts to guide every aspect of his work and life. But Shawna also told Leah about two disturbing incidents which involved former Scientology spokesman Tommy Davis. In one incident, Shawna told Leah that while she was working at the Screen Actors Guild, Davis had showed up one day in 2004 boasting about a “dirt file” of incriminating material he had put together about Tom Cruise’s legendary publicist, Pat Kingsley. With that dossier of blackmail material, Scientology was planning to push Kingsley out if she didn’t let Cruise speak up more about Scientology itself. And later in 2004, that’s exactly what happened: Kingsley was dropped by Cruise, and the Top Gun actor hired his own sister as his publicist and early in 2005 began a disastrous few months as Scientology’s very visible ambassador. The second incident Shawna related to Leah occurred a few years later, in 2009 or 2010, after she had left the Screen Actors Guild, when Davis called her up asking for help breaking into the SAG files of Paul Haggis in order to put together another “dirt file.” This was during the time that Lawrence Wright was working on his story about Haggis, which appeared in the New Yorker in February 2011, and a few years before Haggis’s encounter with Haleigh Breest, in 2013. When news broke of Breest’s lawsuit against Haggis in 2017, Shawna reached out to him and his ex-wife Deborah Rennard, telling them about the 2010 encounter she’d had with Tommy Davis. They asked her to memorialize it in a letter, which she did. As the lawsuit developed, Haggis’s attorneys then asked Shawna Brakefield to give a deposition about her encounters with Tommy Davis, and that’s what we’ve obtained. We’ve taken out for you the relevant parts, and removed objections by other attorneys for clarity.​

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[mimsey borogrove]

I think the problem is basically - she is roughly half Paul's age, and she felt grossed out that she banged a man old enough to be her father. Paul was an idiot to get in bed with her, but too late for that now. We all have regrets for the stupid things we have done, and saying it's someone else's fault is all too common, but this doesn't amount to much more than a he said, she said proposition.

There's an apt description for attractive ladies like her - trouble on legs