Screenshot via Eric Wemple.

The Atlantic has issued an apology for the pro-Scientology sponsored content that ran on their site yesterday. The advertorial, which has since been pulled from the Atlantic site, drew Internet criticism.

"David Miscavige Leads Scientology to Milestone Year," the headline read. The promotional piece appeared to be an article on the site but for the unabashed pro-Scientology tone and the yellow slug alerting the reader that the post was, indeed, sponsored content.  

"2012 was a milestone year for Scientology, with the religion expanding to more than 10,000 Churches, Missions and affiliated groups, spanning 167 nations — figures that represent a growth rate 20 times that of a decade ago," the post read. The comments were no less biased.

"We now realize that as we explored new forms of digital advertising, we failed to update the policies that must govern the decisions we make along the way," The Atlantic posted today. "It's safe to say that we are thinking a lot more about these policies after running this ad than we did beforehand. In the meantime, we have decided to withdraw the ad until we figure all of this out."

The post has sparked a debate--not just at The Atlantic but also over Twitter and the blogosphere--about the nature of sponsored posts.

The Atlantic's full apology:

Regarding an advertisement from the Church of Scientology that appeared on TheAtlantic.com on January 14:

We screwed up. It shouldn't have taken a wave of constructive criticism — but it has — to alert us that we've made a mistake, possibly several mistakes. We now realize that as we explored new forms of digital advertising, we failed to update the policies that must govern the decisions we make along the way.  It's safe to say that we are thinking a lot more about these policies after running this ad than we did beforehand. In the meantime, we have decided to withdraw the ad until we figure all of this out.  We remain committed to and enthusiastic about innovation in digital advertising, but acknowledge—sheepishly—that we got ahead of ourselves.  We are sorry, and we're working very hard to put things right.

Their love is stronger than all the thetans!

– Tom Cruise is ready to throw his religion overboard in the name of love! Well, either that, or he finally got around to reading that Vanity Fair cover story from August.

– And in continuing, fascinating Lindsay Lohan news, her mother thinks LiLo needs to get a restraining order against her father, Michael Lohan. Despite the fact that just last week, the mother and daughter pair needed the cops to intervene when they started fighting in front of Mama Lohan's Long Island home. Could it be because her slightly-less-than-Golden Goose turned to her ex-con daddy after their blowout and called her a coke addict?

– Fun fact: Scarlett Johansson has left her boob-Tumblring ad exec boyfriend Nate Naylor and is now currently on the market!

– As one would expect, Gizmodo and CNET both issued responses to the portrayal of their Apple-hating writers on Saturday Night Live this weekend. We're waiting on you, Wired.com!

William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins, will publish Jenna Miscavige Hill’s “Beyond Belief: My Secret Life inside Scientology and My Harrowing Escape” in January. As the title suggests, the memoir is about growing up in—and leaving—the religion and will include “strange and disturbing” details about the church and a “first hand” account of Scientology’s “upper ranks.”

Writing about Scientology is practically becoming its own industry. Maybe one that’s not as profitable as the religion itself, but an industry nonetheless.

Lady Gaga's maternity wear (Getty Images)

— The Church of Scientology has written a strongly-worded letter to Vanity Fair about Maureen Orth's cover story on Tom Cruise and the woman auditioned to be his girlfriend, Nazanin Boniadi. It's eight pages long. In it, the church threatens, "If Vanity Fair goes forward with publication of such defamatory allegations, now that it is on notice that the story is false, the stain on its reputation will last long after any reader even remembers the article. The sting of the jury verdict will last longer still; far longer than any pleasure from racing to publish a poorly researched and sourced story."

— Gossip Girl’s Blake Lively is eating more food than she normally eats, and you know what that means ... healthier body images for women on television! Just kidding. The only explanation is that she's hiding a secret pregnancy with a shotgun wedding to Ryan Reynolds.

— Lady Gaga is also pregnant, according to reliable source Kelly Osbourne. She's going off the fact that Gaga stopped bleaching her hair and wore a burka to Fashion Week, but she totally forgot the fact that the singer smoked weed on stage in Amsterdam Tuesday. Lady Gaga says she's just fat.

— Fiona Apple is in jail in Sierra Blanca, Texas, for having hash on her tour bus.

— Amanda Bynes continues to go toe-to-toe with Lindsay Lohan for the title of world's biggest train wreck. She also happens to be the most histrionic train wreck, believing that Ms. Lohan's recent car crash was "karma" for the Mean Girl’s mean tweet about her.

Anderson and Phoenix.

I never cease to be amused by the pile of unmitigated crap that gets shoveled off onto the moviegoing public by pretentious critics. They’re at it again with The Master, a load of film-festival tripe that was booed in Venice and greeted with massive walkouts in Toronto but is now being defended in an organized rescue mission that hopes to develop a minor cult following in New York before the whole thing mercifully vanishes in a puff of twaddle. With an embarrassing, overwrought performance by the dependably creeped-out Joaquin Phoenix that has to be the most hysterically misguided overacting since Dennis Hopper played Napoleon and Harpo Marx played Sir Isaac Newton in The Story of Mankind, I’m tempted to call it the worst thing I have seen this year, but there are two more coming up—Terrence Malick’s dystopic To the Wonder and a diabolically demented time-travel farce called Cloud Atlas—that are even worse. I will also refrain from labeling The Master “the worst movie I’ve ever seen!” because like the proverbial boy who cried wolf, I’ve blurted that cry of despair so many times, who would believe me?It might not even be the worst movie ever made, depending on how you feel about such hollow, juvenile and superficial trash as I  ♥ Huckabees, Brewster McCloud, Punch-Drunk Love, Mulholland Drive, The Royal Tenenbaums, Lost Highway, Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses and ... well, as they said in Hollywood during the McCarthy witch hunts, “the list goes on.” 

With so many amateurs who run what’s left of the once-great movie industry making bad movies that pander to an easy-to-satisfy youth market that doesn’t care what it’s watching as long as the projectors keep running, and with so many bogus producers who used to be parking lot attendants at the Brown Derby always miraculously raising the money to make more, one thing is certain: no matter how rotten the movie is that you just suffered through, there’s always another one on its way that is 10 times worse. Paul Thomas Anderson, the egomaniacal writer-director of The Master, is a member of the new group of anarchists that includes Wes Anderson, Spike Jonze, David O. Russell, freaky Todd Solondz and the dismally overrated, no-talent Charlie Kaufman, who wins critical praise for writing incoherent movies about why he can’t write coherent movies. Abominations like the neo-Kafka burlesque Synedoche, New York are algebraic extensions of all of them put together—eccentric but brainless. And now The Master, which follows in a perfect line—all style and no content—and therefore offers no fresh equation of its own.

Since it doesn’t make one bit of sense—and probably isn’t supposed to—there’s not much to say about it except ... why? It begins with Joaquin Phoenix masturbating and goes steadily downhill from there. With agonized silences interrupted by operatic rages, he plays a lost, unfocused sailor stationed in the Pacific during World War II named Freddie Quell, who creates the image of a woman out of sand on a beach and humps it unmercifully. Subject to black depressions, unprovoked violence and crying jags, he’s an obvious mental case. He’s also such a hopeless alcoholic that he even drinks airplane gasoline and cleaning fluid. After the war, Freddie somehow manages to talk his way out of a veterans hospital where he is being observed and studied by a band of bewildered Navy psychiatrists, and wafts from scene to scene—itinerant farm worker, department store photographer and drunken stowaway on a yacht from San Francisco to New York, where his gullibility lands him in the clutches of another nutcase, writer-philosopher-scientist Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who has invented a new cult religion called “The Cause.” Early hype promised an exposé of Scientology, with Hoffman as a thinly veiled L. Ron Hubbard, but as it turns out, The Master has nothing to do with either—or much of anything else.

Anyway, these two wackos hit it off on contact, mainly because Freddie is a tortured soul desperately looking for a surrogate father to lead him into the light, and Dodd is a cryptic phony and ersatz Ayn Rand clone who loves his new convert’s cocktails of peach juice mixed with paint thinner. Between nonsensical interrogations called “The Process” (“Are you one of the Hidden Rulers, or a Communist?”), they sometimes drink Lysol. What little there is of a plot: a religious manipulator who rules his flock by perfecting the art of brainwashing (they think he can trace their previous lives through hypnosis) and claims he can cure cancer finally meets up with a perfect candidate for mind control, who proves unsalvageable. The result is a love affair consummated in the pulpit of Hell. The acolytes include Amy Adams as Hoffman’s pregnant wife, Jesse Plemons as his son, Ambyr Childers and Rami Malek as his daughter and her new husband, and Laura Dern, a Philadelphia heiress who contributes to The Cause if not the film in what amounts to little more than a walk-on. It is rare to see a union of such accomplished folks so desperate to form some kind of emotional connection with material that is essentially unplayable in a film fueled by chaos. Farcical dream sequences fill in the gaps where a narrative should be, like a party where all the female converts cavort full-frontally naked while the men sip champagne and ogle them in a drooling frenzy—a scene stolen, I might add, right out of Stanley Kubrick’s dreadful 1999 Tom Cruise-Nicole Kidman fiasco Eyes Wide Shut. As the movie drags on interminably, Freddie becomes his master’s henchman, defending him against all skeptics and detractors, violently attacking the police who come to arrest Dodd for extortion. Freddie is too stupid to think for himself, even after Dodd’s own son Val tells him that his father just makes up the rules of the cult as he goes along. Freddie abandons The Cause to find his own salvation, tracks down his wartime sweetheart and finds her married, then goes on a binge that makes The Lost Weekend look like a Disney cartoon. It all ends up in England, where Dodd the Zealot has relocated his operations to avoid arrest and taxes. One last stab at rehabilitating Freddie fails, and the movie just peters away to zero.

There’s a lot of excessive acting going on here, but none of it comes to anything. Since no character is ever properly developed, the cast is left to create stick figures out of some kind of neurotic haze. As much as I admire the charismatic Philip Seymour Hoffman, he’s just shadowboxing here. As a toxic messiah who charms, cheats and seduces his subjects, he huffs and puffs and tries to blow the house down, but the superficial dialogue does him in. Even accomplished actors need guidance, and director Anderson fails to display the remotest knowledge of tempo or pacing. Hoffman’s “Processing Session,” during which he forces Freddie to repeat his actions again and again, goes on for a good 20 minutes. As for Joaquin Phoenix, his idea of conveying brain damage is to walk around with a bone protruding from his shoulder blade, hunched over in a loping position, like a pretzel-shaped orangutan. Is he auditioning for The Elephant Man?Grotesquely mannered for no reason, his facial expressions range from gross distortions to blank novocained stares. They call this acting, but it’s acting from the Sacha Baron Cohen School of Dramatic Art. No director who knows anything about real acting would allow this much self-indulgence to plod on ad infinitum. I’ve got news for Mr. Phoenix, Mr. Anderson and company: on-screen schizophrenia wears out its welcome real fast.There is no dramatic arc in The Master, just 137 minutes of truncated images that provoke but do not add up to a satisfying whole. Plus, the visuals are a deadly bore. Despite the undeserved praise some critics have lavished on the director for filming the whole thing in 65-millimeter, the expensive process is wasted on an endless parade of debilitating and annoying close-ups. 137 minutes of Joaquin Phoenix’s nose hairs is not my idea of appetizing.

Call The Master whatever you want, but lobotomized catatonia from what I call the New Hacks can never take the place of well-made narrative films about real people that tell profound stories for a broader and more sophisticated audience. Fads come and go, but as Walter Kerr used to say, “I’ll yell tripe whenever tripe is served.”

rreed@observer.com

THE MASTER

Running Time 137 minutes

Written and Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

Starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Joaquin Phoenix and Amy Adams

1/4

The many wives of Conan. (TBS)

We finally took a moment to dive into Maureen Orth's Vanity Fair exposé about Nazanin Boniadi and her relationship with Tom Cruise and Scientology. That was completely wacky, right? Follow-up question: Did the idea of auditioning spouses make you sort of want to join the church of Scientology? No reason, we're just asking. Hey look! Conan did a segment about how he met his wife!

http://youtu.be/-Uhkq42jkEk

We were always under the impression that CoCo was married to more than one woman, Big Love-style. But maybe that was just wishful thinking.

The October 2012 issue of Vanity Fair.

Tom Cruise's vigilant lawyer Bert Fields has issued a statement on Maureen Orth's not-yet-released piece about the Church of Scientology's long-term "audition process" that yielded bride Katie Holmes.

Vanity Fair's story is essentially a rehash of tired old lies previously run in the supermarket tabloids, quoting the same bogus 'sources.' It's long, boring and false.

We'll reserve judgment on the media-criticism aspect of Mr. Fields's statement until we read the piece--one that Scientology apostate Paul Haggis has said is true. But it's interesting that no mention of legal action is made here; Tom Cruise has historically been a litigious star, filing a $100 million lawsuit against a gay porn star who claimed to have dated the Mission: Impossible actor.

Rupert Murdoch

News Corp. owner Rupert Murdoch sometimes thinks "out loud" on his Twitter feed, pondering recent news and issuing his own opinions. Today, while musing on the split between Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, Mr. Murdoch dropped this doozy:

Watch Katie Holmes and Scientology story develop. Something creepy, maybe even evil, about these people.

— Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) July 1, 2012

Twitter wits were driven from their heat-wave-induced torpor, assailing Mr. Murdoch for pointing out "the obvious" as well as implying the emperor of News Corp. was ignoring the phone-hacking elephant in the room.

Business Insider suggests an off-the-cuff, potentially provocative observation such as this from Mr. Murdoch is one of the best things about Twitter. Henry Blodget observes, "Never before have celebrities and media stars been able to show this side of themselves to so many people--in real time--without media intermediaries in the middle." We are inclined to agree. Anything that takes us away from panting through an apocalyptic heat wave for a moment.

UPDATE

Village Voice editor Tony Ortega, who has been on the Scientology beat for years, points out Mr. Murdoch was doubling down in his "creepy, maybe even evil" tweet on an earlier Sunday morning observation made about Mr. Hubbard's peculiar institution:

Scientology back in news.Very weird cult, but big, big money involved with Tom Cruise either number two or three in hiearchy.

— Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) July 1, 2012

Did the Church of Scientology use a Vanity Fair contributing editor to infiltrate and gather intelligence on the cult's enemies in the media?

John Connolly is a well-known, and well-liked, character in New York media circles. He's a former NYPD detective and stock broker who landed a third career as an investigative reporter for Vanity Fair, where he is a contributing editor, Radar, the Daily Beast, Gawker, and other outlets. Connolly is an investigator of the old school, employed more for his ability to run a license plate number than his facility with prose. In 1990, while freelancing for Forbes, he was accused by a federal judge of using his old NYPD badge to obtain sealed court documents. According to USA Today, his stint as a stockbroker ended in the 1980s with a $100,000 civil penalty and lifetime ban from the Securities and Exchange Commission. He's a mischievous tipster, an inveterate gossip, and an information broker of the highest order. He speaks with a cartoonish New York accent and knows literally everybody. And according to the two highest ranking Scientology officials to ever leave the church, he's been a paid informant for the cult for two decades.

The accusation comes from Marty Rathbun, who ranked so high in the organization before he left that he served as Tom Cruise's "auditor," or confessor, and Mike Rinder, Scientology's former chief spokesman. Both men have defected from the church and accuse its current leader, David Miscavige, of ruling through violence and terror. On February 15, Rathbun posted to his blog a lengthy internal church memo, purportedly written by Linda Hamel, chief of the church's faux-CIA "Office of Special Affairs," revealing Connolly to have secretly supplied intelligence to the church on the preparation of Andrew Morton's 2008 biography of Tom Cruise. According to the memo, Connolly approached Morton in 2006 under the pretense of writing "an article for Vanity Fair about the books Morton has done on celebrities including the one he is writing on Tom Cruise." He proceeded, the memo says, to pump Morton for information about his book and report it back to the church:

Connolly was here in LA working on the Pellicano story ["Talk of the Town," Vanity Fair, June 2006] and contacted Morton and met with him on the basis of gaining his cooperation to be interviewed for an article for Vanity Fair about the books Morton has done on celebrities including the one he is writing on Tom Cruise. Connolly wanted to see what Morton was like and get any information about where Morton is currently at with regard to writing the book and to see if Morton would agree to be interviewed for an article. Based on the meeting, Connolly said that Morton seems to have finished his research already and is busy writing the book.

Connolly told Morton that it would not be a puff piece and would show both sides including what would be said about Morton. (Connolly will use the article to investigate Morton's past treatment of other celebrities, use of sleazy sources, etc. that would undermine Morton's credibility). Morton said he would check with St. Martin's Press to get their take on cooperating for the story. Morton seems to be interested in generating publicity for the book.

Connolly's impression of Morton is that he is a serious writer and is a focused person but enjoyable to talk to. He knows how to use his charm to get people to talk. Morton also told him that it only took him five weeks to write the Monica Lewinsky book - so he is capable of churning out a lot in a short period of time.

Morton said that he thought that Tom Cruise was a good story and that is why he wanted to write the book. The reporter got the impression from talking with Morton that Morton has collected a lot of information about the Church and that this will be well covered in the book. Morton also mentioned that he has an assistant who is working for him.

[snip]

Connolly's impression is that Morton is a formidable adversary who is not going to back down. He thinks that Morton has made up his mind already as to the angle of the book but did not specifically say what it was.

[snip]

In the US Connolly, wants to do an investigative story and put a piece together on Morton and his use of sleazy sources in the books he has done about celebrities such as Madonna, the Beckhams and Tom Cruise. This would attack Morton on his reputation questioning the credibility of his sources.

The memo proves, in Rathbun's words, that "Connolly has been a Church of Scientology Office of Special Affairs informant for nearly two decades." In a phone interview, Rathbun told me that Connolly's work for the church was extensive. He was an operative, Rathbun says, of a Los Angeles cop-turned-private-investigator named Gene Ingram who was well known as a hired spook for Scientology. "I hired Ingram," says Rathbun. "And I remember distinctly that he would talk about his pal John Connolly. For years I periodically saw his name in programs and reports as an active source of information and stories." Rathbun cited examples: Connolly was involved, he says, in gathering intelligence on a 1993 Premiere story on Tom Cruise that the church was particularly concerned about. The details are hazy, Rathbun says, "but I remember Connolly getting intel on that story." Rathbun also says Connolly was involved in "trying to influence" vocal ex-Scientologist Chuck Beatty in 2006.

Rinder, who was responsible for, in church parlance, "handling" the news media, corroborates Rathbun's account. "Connolly was a resource to deal with media problems," he told me. "Ingram used to tout Connolly's virtues pretty often--'Connolly can handle this; he'll find out what's going on and he's got lines into all media.' That was something I heard many, many times. Ingram even met with Connolly at the Celebrity Center in Los Angeles." Like Rathbun, Rinder recalled vaguely that Connolly was involved in reconnoitering the Premiere story. He also said Connolly "was used to gather information" on Wensley Clarkson, a British reporter who wrote an unauthorized biography of Tom Cruise in 1998.

Both Rinder and Rathbun say Connolly was paid for his services. "Absolutely," said Rinder. "No one ever does work like that for free. Not for the church." Likewise, Rathbun said, "I assume he was paid. That's the way Ingram operated." Neither man claimed to have direct knowledge of payments. Ingram didn't respond to repeated phone calls. Neither did the church.

SEEING RATHBUN'S POST, and the purported memo, came as a shock to me. I know John Connolly. He wrote an item for Gawker just a few weeks ago. We worked together for months at Radar, where I was a senior reporter and he was on contract as a tipster, fixer, and all around über-source. We worked closely together on a feature story about the Los Angeles paparazzi. And he'd helped me out on a lengthy 2008 feature about Anonymous' war on Scientology. Connolly had received an inquiry from a member of Anonymous, which he handed off to me, and gave me the names and numbers of two helpful former Scientologists.

While I was working on that story, Connolly told me casually that he was friendly with some private investigators who work for the church. There was nothing particularly nefarious about that--Connolly's friendships with various private eyes is one of the reasons he's useful to places like Radar and Vanity Fair. The fact that some of them counted the church as clients, and that he freely admitted that, struck me as innocuous enough. And when he told me that one of those friends actually called him to ask who I was and what I was reporting on, I was more happy to know that my reporting had struck a nerve than worried about what Connolly might tell him. I trusted him.

Then a strange thing happened. Connolly called me up, out of the blue, and asked, "You live in Brooklyn, right?" Yes, I replied. "What neighborhood? I was just there visiting family, and it's so great." I told him that I lived in Park Slope, which isn't strictly true: I live in Windsor Terrace, an adjacent neighborhood. It's often easier to say Park Slope, which people know. But I was also immediately suspicious of why Connolly would want to know, so I decided to shade my answer a little bit in case he was helping a Scientology operative figure out which of the 62 public listings for a "John Cook" in Brooklyn was mine. I never suffered any Scientology harassment at my home, and I never confronted Connolly about why he needed to know where I lived. We continued to stay in touch, and he would occasionally tip me to stories.

When I read Rathbun's accusations, that call suddenly loomed large in my mind.

I called Connolly. He told me that he wasn't feeling well, and that he'd been "shot up with so many drugs" after a recent surgical procedure to correct a heart arrhythmia. He'd already seen Rathbun's post. "I've gotta tell you, it's bullshit," he said. How would the church know about his meetings with Morton? "Maybe they were tapping my phones," he said. "Maybe it's a forgery." Connolly admitted that he knew Ingram, but said the information flowed the other way in their relationship: "Ingram drank too much one night and told me what they were doing to Rich Behar," he told me. "I'm the one who called Behar and told him what the church was up to." Behar was a reporter for Time who wrote a detailed expose on the church in 1991 and was rewarded with a $416 million lawsuit and exhaustive investigation into his personal life by the church that included obtaining his phone records and credit reports. (Behar corroborated Connolly's account, telling me that Connolly contacted Time's legal department in the early 1990s with a tip "that an agent for the church had told John over drinks that he [the agent] was proud of a particular thing he had done to gather information about a family member of mine," and that Behar was "highly appreciative of what he did in this effort to help us.")

Connolly did approach Morton in 2006, as the Hamel memo states. Patricia Greenway was Morton's assistant on the Cruise book. She told me that Connolly introduced himself as a writer for Vanity Fair who was working on a book about Anthony Pellicano, and was interested in trying to connect Pellicano to Scientology. "He was asking me to tell him what I knew about Scientology," Greenway says. "He was pumping me for information. I spoke to him because Andrew asked me to." Contrary to the memo, however, Greenway says Connolly never told her that he was working on a story about Morton--just that he was a Vanity Fair writer working on a Pellicano book.

As far as I can tell, Connolly has never written a word about Scientology. Vanity Fair has never devoted a feature to the cult, though it has turned up tangentially in several stories. Beth Kseniak, a spokeswoman for the magazine, says Connolly has never been assigned to write about Scientology aside from contributing reporting to a 2008 Nancy Jo Sales story about two people who believed, falsely, that they were being harassed by the church. Radar and Spy, two other publications he's been associated with, covered it extensively, but never under Connolly's byline. He has claimed in the past that he's helped out behind the scenes on coverage of the church. When Andrew Morton e-mailed him to ask for an explanation of the Hamel memo, Connolly replied, among other things, that "I have worked on a number of anti-Scientology stories without getting a byline-my choice." One of those "anti-Scientology" stories is my 2008 Radar piece. I've been told by two former Scientologists that Connolly has claimed credit for some or all of that story, despite the fact that his participation consisted simply of referring me to three sources. In 2005, Radar published a damning story about Tom Cruise's relationship to the church; its author Kim Master says Connolly didn't play a role in it.

Which makes it odd that Connolly has repeatedly, almost obsessively, called a variety of prominent ex-Scientologists for years to keep up with them, all under the pretense of developing stories for Vanity Fair. "He called me hundreds of times," says Chuck Beatty, a former Scientologist who frequently helps reporters covering the cult. "He'd say, 'If there's any new defectors, let me know.' He asked me lots about Cruise. He asked me lots and lots about Paul Haggis." Haggis and his angry departure from the church were the subjects of a recent devastating story by the New Yorker's Lawrence Wright. "He was real heavy to find out who Blown for Good was." Blown for Good was the screen name of an anonymous former highly placed Scientologist who was active in a number of anti-Scientology message boards. He was later revealed to be Marc Headley, a church volunteer who spent 15 years on its Southern California desert compound. "He was repeatedly asking who Blown for Good was," Beatty says.

Connolly also maintained extremely close contact with vocal defector named Larry Brennan. "He's probably called me over 50 or more times," Brennan told me. "Sometimes twice or more a week. He was definitely checking up on me. We'd talk about our daughters. Sometimes I'd wonder--you're calling me once or twice a week, week in and week out, but never writing a story? He told me he was trying to find an angle."

Another high-profile Scientology dissident Connolly kept in touch with is Jason Beghe, a film and television actor who publicized his defection from the church in a series of YouTube videos calling it "very dangerous for your spiritual health." Connolly began calling after his break in 2008, Beghe says, and kept coming back. "I've been talking to him for a couple years at least," Beghe says. "He was always just interested in what was going on, or he just wanted to shoot the shit. He would try to blow smoke up my ass--'I like the cut of your jib, Jason.'" Beghe says he always suspected that Connolly wasn't keeping in touch for journalistic purposes. "I was waiting for the church to try something on me," he says. "And when Connolly first came on my radar, I was suspicious. So I'd always give him foggy data, because I believed I was talking to the church. And then a couple years ago, Marty told me, 'Yeah, I think that guy did undercover work for the church.'"

Connolly's contacts with these anti-Scientology figures certainly don't prove anything. In fact, they're exactly what you'd expect from a reporter covering the church. Trouble is, there doesn't seem to be any evidence that Connolly actually ever covered the church. And there is evidence, in the form of Rathbun's memo, that he worked for it. "He would definitely ask me about the kind of stuff that a Scientology spy would ask you about," says Brennan. "But it's also the stuff a reporter and friend would ask you about."

It was a recent call from Connolly to Beghe that sparked Rathbun to publish the memo. Wright's New Yorker story had just come out, and Connolly called Beghe to pump him for information about it. And he started in on a line of questioning accusing Rathbun and Rinder of plotting to take over Scientology. "He said, 'Marty and Mike, they're trying to take over the church,'" Beghe told me. "Connolly was trying to plant internecine turmoil between people the church regards as enemies." If anti-Scientologist activists came to believe that Rinder and Rathbun wanted to depose Miscavige and take over leadership of the church rather than destroy it, a schism could be exploited. Beghe called Rathbun to tell him about the conversation, and Rathbun decided to expose Connolly. "He was not only a data collector," Rathbun says. "He was an agent provocateur, and he was running an operation on Jason."

Connolly freely admits that he accused Rathbun and Rinder of trying to take over the church. When I first called him to ask about the memo, he said, "They got spooked because I was asking about the schism. You and I should do a story on it together." He explained to Morton that "I have been poking around and trying to get a publication to do a story about the possible takeover/schism of Scientology which apparently has made some people nervous."

IF CONNOLLY WERE a paid agent of the church used to run interference on stories the church was worried about, one would expect to see his fingerprints on Wright's New Yorker piece, which was highly anticipated. He never contacted Wright or tried to gather intel on the story, but Wright says Connolly's name came up during his reporting. "I was alert to surveillance and that sort of thing," Wright said. "I didn't feel like it was happening. But I did hear the name. It was during one of many 'they're gonna get you' conversations I had with various ex-church people. The conversation had to do with, 'There will be an article about you, they'll try to smear you. And John Connolly's name came up. In the welter of names that had been thrown at me, his was one."

Rolling Stone contributing editor Janet Reitman spent the last five years working on her book Inside Scientology, which will be released later this year. It's based on a critical 2006 Rolling Stone article, and would likewise be a prime target for someone operating as a media informant. Reitman told me she's never met Connolly and that he never attempted to contact her. But she was surprised when Brennan, one of her sources for the book, called her a year or so ago to tell her that Connolly had been talking about her. "He certainly knew a lot about me and about my book, when it was coming out," she said. "And he told Brennan how much he liked my writing."

I could find no evidence that Connolly was involved in any of the specific operations that Rinder and Rathbun mentioned to me. Beatty said he spoke to Connolly all the time, but couldn't recall any specific instances of Connolly trying to influence him, as Rathbun claimed. John Richardson, the author of the 1993 Premiere story that Rinder and Rathbun recall Connolly gathering intelligence on, says Connolly never contacted him during his reporting. "We certainly did have a lot of trouble with the church during that story," he said. "I went to interview Rathbun and Rinder [who were at that time still in the church] with an editor of mine. They'd only known for two days that he'd be joining me, and in that time they learned that he was gay and had worked for Rolling Stone as an assistant, neither of which were public. So they definitely had someone working on us. Someone inside the media must have done it."

Richardson did have a run-in with Connolly not long after, though. He had been working on a subsequent story on Heidi Fleiss, the Hollywood Madam, that was killed for a variety of reasons. Richardson says that a year later, Connolly, writing either for Spy or New York, began reporting a story based on the premise that Richardson dropped the Fleiss story in exchange for a bribe. "We had to send a cease and desist order, and he stopped," Richardson says. "I don't know if that was a Scientology revenge plot or just an honest mistake."

Wensley Clarkson, the author of the unauthorized Cruise biography that Rinder says Connolly gathered information on, says he's never met him and is unfamiliar with the name.

When I called various former colleagues of Connolly's to run Rathbun's accusations by them, few were truly surprised. But rather than condemn him as a Scientology rat, they shrugged and said: "He's playing both sides. That's Connolly." Indeed, for someone who trades in gossip and information, being regarded by the church as an asset could be exceedingly useful. Who knows what valuable secrets Connolly could extract from Ingram, or other church members, in exchange for using his credentials to keep tabs on a few harmless critics of the church, or check up on a reporter now and again? Reporters trade information with sources all the time. Moreover, if Rathbun's accusations are true and his memo genuine, who's to say Connolly passed on accurate information? If he was meeting with Ingram at the church's Celebrity Center in Los Angeles--an invitation I wouldn't turn down--the potential upsides in terms of inside information about Hollywood could be huge. The downside, of course, would be lying to and spying on your colleagues and sources.

I spoke to Connolly briefly on the phone after I first read Rathbun's memo. After speaking to Rathbun, Rinder, and others mentioned in this post, I repeatedly tried to reach him again to seek further explanation and clarification. He declined to return my phone calls or e-mails. My inquiry to Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter was forwarded to spokeswoman Beth Kseniak, who told me that the memo's claim that Connolly used his Vanity Fair credentials to get close to Morton is false. "As far as we're concerned, the claim that he approached Andrew Morton as a Vanity Fair reporter is unfounded." When I asked her for Carter's response to the claim that Connolly had been feeding intel to the church for 20 years, she said, "You're going to have to go to Connolly on that."

editorial@observer.com

Says the release, a little clumsily: “The Church of Scientology has always considered the Internet a resource for disseminating accurate information about the religion, concentrating on using the Internet to promote its message and mission in the world.”

Already available for playback are 82 “broadcast-quality videos”—clocking in at almost 3 hours of content—that have previously been shown at recruitment events and “Scientology exhibitions around the world.”

If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em?

Here's the full release:

Church of Scientology, New York, 227 West 46^th Street – New York, New York 10036

17 March 2008

For more information, contact:

Rev. John Carmichael

Church of Scientology, New York

Cell 646-509-1857

Church of Scientology Video Channel

Launches at Scientology.org

The Scientology Video Channel launches today to provide an overview of the basic Scientology beliefs and practices of the religion, as well as information on the many humanitarian programs sponsored by the Church.

The Church of Scientology has launched a new video channel on its official website (www.Scientology.org). The Scientology Video Channel provides a comprehensive overview of the basic beliefs and practices of the religion while answering the question 'What is Scientology?', as well as information on the many humanitarian programs sponsored by the Church – programs addressing drug abuse, illiteracy, human rights and disaster relief.

The video channel contains 82 broadcast-quality videos, comprising almost 3 hours of content. These videos have previously been available for viewing by the general public in Church exhibitions around the world.

By making the Scientology Video Channel available on the Church's website, the Church is able to provide far more expansive and enlightening information to those who have questions about the religion. Visitors to the Scientology Video Channel wondering just 'what is Scientology?' can request a free book entitled "A Description of the Scientology Religion" or obtain other basic books about Scientology or Dianetics.

As Scientologists number in the millions and come from all walks of life, included in the online content are statements from Scientology parishioners themselves expressing why Scientology is their chosen faith.

The Church of Scientology has always considered the Internet a resource for disseminating accurate information about the religion, concentrating on using the Internet to promote its message and mission in the world. Since 1996, Church sites have provided hundreds of thousands of individual pages of material and images on the religion. These sites are available in most major languages and are visited by tens of millions each year.

The Church firmly believes that understanding is achieved through knowledge and information. It is in this spirit that the Church is putting this special video channel online designed to answer the question most often asked: What is Scientology? The Church of Scientology encourages anyone desiring information about the Scientology religion to visit the Church Video Channel at www.Scientology.org