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Scientology's biggest weapon is that it kind of has a peer pressure/bully approach to everything. If your whole family is in the church, and all your friends, what's a good way to deal with you if you choose to leave? Maybe cut you off forever from contact with literally everyone you know. The church says they don't do this, but, oddly, literally every person ever who has left the church says otherwise. So probably yeah, they do that.

When you leave the church, you're considered a "suppressive person." That's L. Ron talk for dick waffle. As a dick waffle, you get ostracized. Remini has spoken openly about it, Haggis talked about it, Samantha and Placido Domingo Jr. have talked about it. If you left the church and have given an interview, you've talked about it. It's as real as Tom Cruise's public insanity. Sorry if that came across sounding glib.

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"Well, if it isn't Glibby Glibberton."

Fortunately for our celebrity friends, when they leave Scientology, it's newsworthy. It's a big event. This is bad news for an organization that famously broke into 136 agencies, government or otherwise, in 30 different countries to destroy records that said anything bad about the church or L. Ron Hubbard. They don't want you to think they're bad people, despite organizing massive criminal conspiracies. So when you leave them in a public way, they can't really do massive criminal things to you or else that will get noticed, too. I'm not suggesting that the church would break into Remini's home in the middle of the night, wrap her in a wet carpet, drive her to the nearest active volcano, and toss her in before filing numerous lawsuits against anyone who even suggests that that's what happened if they thought they could get away with it; I'm just saying it took me all of 30 seconds to think that up, and the church has been coming up with kooky bullshit since the 1960s.