Leah Remini Shares The Truth About The Hardest Year Of Her Life

But my mom thought she was doing something good; she thought she was helping the planet. That’s what the Church tells you.”

Now where have we heard that phrase before? Read on,,,
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“I don’t want to be known as this bitter, ex-Scientologist,” Leah Remini told BuzzFeed over a recent lunch at the luxe Sunset Tower hotel in Los Angeles. “I’m not trying to bash anybody and I’m not trying to be controversial. I just want people to know the truth.”

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Remini’s then-friend and Church member Kirstie Alley called her “repulsive” and “a bigot” during an interview on Howard Stern’s show, and the 43-year-old actress spent much of what she refers to as a “devastating” time, hysterically crying as friend after friend abandoned her for doing what she considered “the right thing.”

Remini has since learned, albeit the hard way, that honesty isn’t always the best policy in Hollywood, a place she’s called home since 1983 when her pregnant mother, Vicki, could no longer stand the living conditions her daughters endured at The Church of Scientology’s Clearwater, Florida location.

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“I started thinking of my own childhood and how I grew up resenting my mother because she was never home,” Remini explained. “It’s funny; somehow my father, the guy who left his kids and never paid child support, was excluded from my resentment and I grew up resenting my mother for not being home to make food, like all my friends’ moms were. But my mom thought she was doing something good; she thought she was helping the planet. That’s what the Church tells you.”

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Remini soon began to speak to her friends within the Church, many of whom she’d known for nearly three decades, about implementing changes, yet she was only met with opposition.

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As she’d done after every other major chapter in her life came to a close, Remini mourned. She mourned the friends she lost upon exiting the Church and she mourned the life she was leaving behind after more than 30 years. But she simultaneously gained a newfound clarity into the prejudices she’d inadvertently adopted as a result of her affiliation with Scientology.

“In the Church, you’re taught that everybody is lost,” Remini explained. “They say they’re loving, caring, non-judgmental people, but secretly, they were judging the world for not believing what they believed. To me, that is not a spiritual person. That’s a judgmental person and that is the person that I was. I was a hypocrite, and the worst thing you can be in this world is a hypocrite.”

Leah Remini Shares The Truth About The Hardest Year Of Her Life