Former Scientology member "The King of Queens" actress Leah Remini shares her tell-all story from her former church in her "20/20" interview last Friday with Dan Harris. According to US Weekly, the former co-host of "The Talk" speaks about the her experiences she had from the church, scandals, and Tom Cruise' influence on the religion.
One thing that Remini talked about from the interview is how she became involved in Scientology and opened up that she came to know of the church through her mother, Vicki Marshall, who joined Scientology when she was five.
According to the article, Remini's mother became a part of the religion after she divorced Remini's father. Her mother was also the one who let Remini and her sister became volunteers for the organization of the church called Sea Org.
Remini who served the church for 30 years also said that Scientology played a major part on her career as an actor.
"There's tools that are very, very helpful to you in your life, that are helpful to you as an actor," Remini said to Harris according to US Weekly. "I walked into a room where some people might cower in front of a casting director - I wasn't."
Apart from this, she also shared how Tom Cruise was a very important person in the church, so important that if you go against him, the church will treat you as a "villain" in return.
"I would refer to him even in my own sessions, I was like, 'you're doing this for a frigging actor?' It was so beneath what was truly important. He's just an actor."
"You then become guilty," told Remini in the article of USA Today. "Being critical of Tom Cruise is being critical of Scientology itself. ... You are a person who is anti-the aims and goals of Scientology. You are evil."
Remini also recalled how she was said to be the "enemy" of the church by exposing and filing a report that Shelly Miscavige who is the wife of the leader of the church David Miscavige is "missing."
And said that she knew things would go against her after that expose saying, "Anybody who criticizes the Church is - to cry that everybody's a bigot toward their religion and this is religious bigotry. ... I was in the same position, I said similar things about people like me."
Though Remini has had her bad share of experiences from the church, she says that she "doesn't regret" anything from the former religion. And she even values everything she learned from it moving forward.
"At the end, I mean I don't regret what I've been through," Remini said from USA Today. "I don't regret spending my life there, because it really did teach me a lot ... and because we've all survived it, we're all surviving it and living life and it's kind of like we have a gift of second chance of life."
