Paul Haggis’ Defense Team Calls ‘Scientology And The Aftermath’ Co-Host Mike Rinder As First Witness In Rape Trial
deadline.comA former high-ranking official in the Church of Scientology said Friday that the organization never forgets its enemies “until they are destroyed,” and he said that filmmaker Paul Haggis, who quit Scientology, remains one of its biggest targets.
Mike Rinder, an Australian who was Scientology’s top enforcer and who co-hosted the Emmy-winning docuseries Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath, was was the first witness for the defense in the New York sexual civil assault trial of Haggis.
The Oscar-winning screenwriter of Crash and a major figure in a 2015 documentary exposé about Scientology, Going Clear, Haggis is being sued by Haleigh Breest, a publicist in New York who claims that he raped her in his Soho apartment in 2013.
Haggis says the sex was consensual and, on the trial’s eighth day, his defense began with a sometimes chaotic turn in the witness box for a fellow ex-Scientologist, Rinder, who said the two men are friends.
Read more on deadline.com
