Mike Rinder, a former spokesman for the Church of Scientology who became one of its fiercest and most high-profile critics, detailing alleged church abuses in interviews, podcasts and an Emmy-winning documentary series he hosted with actress Leah Remini, died Jan. 5 at a hospice center in Palm Harbor, Florida. He was 69.
The cause was esophageal cancer, said his wife, Christie Collbran Rinder.
Until June 2007, when he hurried out of the church’s London office with a briefcase and a couple hundred dollars in cash, Rinder had been part of the Church of Scientology for almost his entire life. He was 52, walking out on every friend and family member he had.
While hoping he might eventually persuade his wife and two children to join him in leaving the church, he began what he described as his “second life,” one devoted to calling out the violence and harassment he said he had witnessed as a senior church leader, and in helping other defectors adjust to life outside the organization.
“I was as dedicated to the cause of scientology as anyone could ever be,” he recalled in a 2022 memoir, “A Billion Years: My Escape From a Life in the Highest Ranks of Scientology,” explaining how he had once believed that the church served to protect members from a world “full of bogeymen, death, and destruction.”
“Since I escaped,” he added, “I have been shouting back over the wall, throwing notes tied around stones, and skywriting to anyone who may look up – attempting to get the message through that there is a big, wide, beautiful world out there.”
Rinder, an Australian native who grew up skateboarding and surfing off the coast of Adelaide, was about 5 when his parents began taking him to a local Scientology center, inspired by a neighbor who had attended lectures by the church’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard.
By age 18, he had signed a “billion-year” pledge of service, following the church’s belief that the spirit is immortal, and joined the church’s senior staff, known as the Sea Org. After starting out as a lowly deckhand, swabbing the decks of Hubbard’s yacht Apollo, he rose in the 1980s to become the head of the church’s legal and public relations wing, the Office of Special Affairs, a position that effectively made him the chief spokesman for Scientology.
“He was a very aggressive communicator. He could be extremely charming and funny, and he was very smart,” said Lawrence Wright, who interviewed Rinder for his 2013 nonfiction book “Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief.” “He could have been the leader of a Fortune 500 company or something like that. But he was mentally enslaved to this religious organization.”
Rinder said he worked closely with David Miscavige, who succeeded Hubbard as the church’s leader; engaged with some of the faith’s most high-profile followers, including Lisa Marie Presley, John Travolta and Tom Cruise; and targeted “attackers” who threatened to discredit the church, including by enlisting private investigators to dig up dirt on critics.
“You blackmail the person into silence,” he said in 2022, testifying as a defense witness in a civil case involving screenwriter and former Scientology member Paul Haggis.
In time, Rinder came to describe the church as “a mind prison,” one where dissent was stifled through physical and emotional abuse. He said he was beaten by Miscavige some 50 times and left the church after spending about two years in and out of “the Hole,” a set of double-wide trailers that served as a makeshift prison. At times, he said, he joined in the beatings, attacking other church members while trying to prove his loyalty.
“I don’t want people to continue to be hurt and tricked and lied to,” he told the St. Petersburg Times in 2009, speaking out for the first time alongside another former high-ranking Scientology staffer, Marty Rathbun. “I was unsuccessful in changing anything through my own lack of courage when I was inside the church. But I believe these abuses need to end.”
The church denied the abuse allegations, saying Miscavige had never struck a staffer. As Rinder’s public profile rose – he started a blog and was featured in director Alex Gibney’s “Going Clear,” a 2015 HBO documentary based on Wright’s book – church officials launched a website questioning Rinder’s credibility, describing him as “a serial liar and harasser” who had been expelled for malfeasance.
“He was the most important defector that the church had had,” Wright said in a phone interview, adding that Rinder and Rathbun, who left around the same time, “became the duo that rattled the cage,” sparking increased scrutiny of church practices even as they faced harassment and surveillance.
Rinder said that private investigators rifled through his garbage, and he recalled discovering that a video camera had been placed in a neighbor’s birdhouse, positioned to keep watch on his home. He said he lost contact with his wife and their children, which he attributed to a practice known as “disconnection,” in which church members renounce friends and family who are critical of the church.
Rinder continued to highlight alleged church abuses, notably as a co-host and co-executive producer of “Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath,” which premiered on A&E in 2016 and ran for three seasons. The show won two Emmy Awards, in 2017 and 2020. Rinder and Remini, a former church member known for starring in the CBS sitcom “The King of Queens,” later reunited to launch a Scientology podcast, “Fair Game.”
“When I left Scientology, Mike was one of the first people I turned to. From that moment, he became my lifeline,” Remini wrote Tuesday in a tribute on Facebook.
Rinder “saved my life and the life of my daughter,” she continued, adding that “in his post-Scientology life, Mike was a man transformed. He worked tirelessly to right the wrongs of his past and beyond. He owed no one anything. Mike was offered a lot of money to stay silent about Scientology’s criminal activities, and he refused and did the work.”
The oldest of three children, Michael John Rinder was born in Adelaide on April 10, 1955. His father was an entrepreneur who variously owned “restaurants, an Angora goat farm, a travel agency, and a wholesale grocery business,” Rinder wrote in his memoir. His mother helped with some of the business ventures and looked after the home.
By the time Rinder was 10, Scientology had been outlawed in the Australian state of Victoria. He and his family kept their involvement in the church secret, hiding Scientology books in his parents’ bedroom closet, and in 1967 they traveled to England to study at Saint Hill, Hubbard’s estate outside London, where Rinder found himself playing darts with the church leader’s youngest daughter.
Rinder said he came to view Hubbard almost as a god. “What was most incredible about being with him,” he told Rolling Stone in 2006, before leaving the church, “was that he made you feel that you were important. He didn’t in any way promote himself or his own self-importance. He was very, very loving and had the widest range of knowledge and experience that you could possibly imagine – he’d studied everything.”
Rinder’s first marriage, to Cathy Bernardini, ended in divorce. He married Christie Collbran, a fellow church defector, in 2013. They had a son, Jack Rinder.
Interviewed by the Guardian in 2022, Rinder said that his memoir was “a book for an audience of two,” written as a way to reconnect with his older children, Benjamin Rinder and Taryn Teutsch. But he assumed that church officials would block them from receiving a copy and would denounce its contents. Benjamin and Taryn issued a public letter disowning him.
In addition to his wife and their son, survivors include his older children and a stepson, Shane Collbran.
“I have been lucky – living two lives in one lifetime,” Rinder wrote in his final blog post, which appeared online the day he died.
“My only real regret is not having achieved what I said I wanted to – ending the abuses of Scientology, especially disconnection and seeing Jack into adulthood,” he added. “If you are in any way fighting to end those abuses please keep the flag flying – never give up.”