Disconnection is the severance of all ties between a Scientologist and a friend, colleague, or family member deemed to be antagonistic towards Scientology. The practice of disconnection is a form of shunning. Among Scientologists, disconnection is viewed as an important method of removing obstacles to one's spiritual growth. In some circumstances, disconnection has ended marriages and separated children from their parents.
Followers of the Scientology movement maintain a wide variety of beliefs and practices. The core belief holds that a human is an immortal, spiritual being (thetan) that is resident in a physical body. The thetan has had innumerable past lives, some of which, preceding the thetan's arrival on Earth, were lived in extraterrestrial cultures. Based on case studies at advanced levels, it is predicted that any Scientologist undergoing auditing will eventually come across and recount a common series of past-life events.
David Miscavige is an American Scientologist who is serving as the second and current leader of the Church of Scientology. His official title within the organization is Chairman of the Board of the Religious Technology Center. RTC is a corporation that controls the trademarks and copyrights of Dianetics and Scientology. He is also referred to within the Scientology organization as "DM", "COB", and "Captain of the Sea Org".
Paul Edward Haggis is a Canadian screenwriter, film producer, and director of film and television. He is best known as screenwriter and producer for consecutive Best Picture Oscar winners Million Dollar Baby (2004) and Crash (2005), the latter of which he also directed. Haggis also co-wrote the war film Flags of Our Fathers (2006) and the James Bond films Casino Royale (2006) and Quantum of Solace (2008). He is the creator of the television series Due South (1994–1999) and co-creator of Walker, Texas Ranger (1993–2001), among others. Haggis is a two-time Academy Award winner, two-time Emmy Award winner, and seven-time Gemini Award winner. He also assisted in the making of "We Are the World 25 for Haiti". In November 2022, he was found liable in a civil trial which alleged he raped publicist Haleigh Breest, and was required to pay $10 million in damages.
Jessica Feshbach, also known as Jessica Feshbach Rodriguez and Jessica Davis, is an American former official within the Church of Scientology organization. The daughter of a family with a long tradition in Scientology, she attended The Delphian School in Yamhill County, Oregon, a Scientology school.
Mark Ware Isham is an American musician and composer. A trumpeter and keyboardist, Isham works in a variety of genres, including jazz and electronic. He is also a prolific and acclaimed composer of film scores, and has scored over 200 film and television productions since his debut in 1983.
Church of Scientology Celebrity Centres are Churches of Scientology that are open to the general public but are intended for "artists, politicians, leaders of industry, and sports figures".
The Church of Scientology has recruited celebrities for their endorsement of Scientology as a public relations strategy. The organization has had a written program governing celebrity recruitment since at least 1955, when L. Ron Hubbard created "Project Celebrity", offering rewards to Scientologists who recruited targeted celebrities. Early interested parties included former silent-screen star Gloria Swanson and jazz pianist Dave Brubeck. The Scientology organization has a particular interest in international focus on wealthy businesspeople and influencers to help promote its ideals. A Scientology policy letter of 1976 states that "rehabilitation of celebrities who are just beyond or just approaching their prime" enables the "rapid dissemination" of Scientology.
The Advice and Reform Committee or Advice and Reformation Committee (ARC) was the British office of what is now called al-Qaeda from 1994 until the arrest of Khalid al-Fawwaz in 1998. A U.S. grand jury indictment of Osama bin Laden, al-Fawwaz, and 19 others reads in part
On or about July 11, 1994, the defendant OSAMA BIN LADEN created the London office of al Qaeda, naming it the “Advice and Reformation Committee” and placing the defendant KHALID AL FAWWAZ in charge;
Mamdouh Mahmud Salim is a Kurdish co-founder of the Islamist terrorist network al-Qaeda. He was arrested on 16 September 1998 near Munich. On 20 December 1998, he was extradited to the United States, where he was charged with participating in the 1998 United States embassy bombings.
The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 is a 2006 non-fiction book by Lawrence Wright, a journalist for The New Yorker. Wright examines the origins of the militant organization Al-Qaeda, the background for various terrorist attacks and how they were investigated, and the events that led to the September 11 attacks.
Thomas William Davis is an American financial executive. From 2005 to 2011, Davis was the head of external affairs and chief spokesperson of the Church of Scientology International and Senior Vice President at the Church of Scientology Celebrity Centre International from the early 1990s. Between 2011 and 2013, Davis did not make any media public appearances. In June 2013, it was revealed Davis and his wife had relocated from Gold Base in Riverside County, California, to Austin, Texas. He currently resides in Los Angeles.
Ali H. Soufan is a Lebanese-American former FBI agent who was involved in a number of high-profile anti-terrorism cases both in the United States and around the world. A 2006 New Yorker article described Soufan as coming closer than anyone to preventing the September 11 attacks and implied that he would have succeeded had the CIA been willing to share information with him. He resigned from the FBI in 2005 after publicly chastising the CIA for not sharing intelligence with him which could have prevented the attacks.
Jill Lepore is an American historian and journalist. She is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she has contributed since 2005. She writes about American history, law, literature, and politics.
Château Élysée is a 1920s replica of a 17th-century French-Normandy chateau in Hollywood, California. Owned by the Church of Scientology, it is the home of Celebrity Centre International and the Manor Hotel. It is located at 5930 Franklin Avenue in the Franklin Village section of Los Angeles, California.
Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief is a 2013 non-fiction book about Scientology written by Lawrence Wright.
Michele Diane Miscavige is an American Scientologist. She is a member of the Church of Scientology's Sea Org who married Scientology leader David Miscavige. She was last seen in public in August 2007. Since her disappearance, she has been the subject of speculation and inquiries regarding her whereabouts and wellbeing.
The Egyptian Islamic Jihad, formerly called simply Islamic Jihad and the Liberation Army for Holy Sites, originally referred to as al-Jihad, and then the Jihad Group, or the Jihad Organization, was an Egyptian Islamist group active from the late 1970's until its 2001 merger with Al-Qaeda. It was long considered an affiliate of Al-Qaeda and under worldwide embargo by the United Nations. It was also banned by several individual governments worldwide. The group is a proscribed terrorist group organization in the United Kingdom under the Terrorism Act 2000.
Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief is a 2015 documentary film about Scientology. Directed by Alex Gibney and produced by HBO, it is based on Lawrence Wright's book Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief (2013). The film premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. It received widespread praise from critics and was nominated for seven Emmy Awards, winning three, including Best Documentary. It also received a 2015 Peabody Award and won the award for Best Documentary Screenplay from the Writers Guild of America.
Nabila al-Zawahiri is the daughter of Al-Qaeda co-founder Ayman al-Zawahiri and the wife of the group's external communications chief, Abd al-Rahman al-Maghrebi.
