The Underground Bunker Podcast

We’ve had a lot of fun recently talking to great reporters who have covered Scientology like John Sweeney, Mark Ebner, and Steve Cannane. So of course we wanted to check in with our man in Paris, one of the very best journalists we know, Jonny Jacobsen. It was really fun to go back over his work to see how early he was to stories like David Miscavige beating his staff, and that his blog ‘ Infinite...

We’re such huge admirers of Sands Hall, a luminous writer and musician, whose memoir about her time in Scientology was first published in 2018 . It’s out in paperback now, and with a slightly different title. We talked about why that’s so, and how she continues to think about Scientology and the process of writing about it. Also, if you haven’t seen her 2019 piece for the Los Angeles Review of Boo...

Oh wow, what a treat it was to get to talk to both “Brothers Broken” — musicians and former Scientology Sea Org members Geoff and Robbie Levin — for our podcast this week. We’ve discussed their story before: They were the core members of the band People! that had a big 1968 hit, “I Love You,” but then were sucked into Scientology and helped Yvonne Gillham as she was creating the Hollywood Celebrit...

Karen Pressley is in Los Angeles to celebrate the 25th anniversary of her decision to leave the Church of Scientology, and she’s visiting other escapees, including her good friend Spanky Taylor. Spanky, of course, appeared in the 2015 HBO documentary ‘Going Clear,’ and she’s a longtime friend to the Underground Bunker. We had a lot to discuss with both of them, but we definitely wanted to sound th...

The highly anticipated new film Oppenheimer , directed by Christopher Nolan, hit theaters yesterday, and we had a crazy idea: Watch the film on opening day here in New York while former Scientology auditor Bruce Hines caught it in Denver, and then talk about it! Why Bruce? Well, not only has he been a great contributor to the Underground Bunker, writing really terrific narratives about his time in...

We didn’t really need an excuse to bring Mark Ebner back to the podcast, but what the hell, we figured Tom Cruise coming out with another movie was reason enough to call our old pal for his thoughts. What we didn’t realize is that Ebner was once a close friend to the man film reviewer Luke Y. Thompson called a “Cruise-Whisperer extraordinaire,” writer and director Chris McQuarrie. Mission: Impossi...

Luke Y. Thompson (AV Club) once again knocked us out with a great film review at the Underground Bunker, this time for the premiere of Tom Cruise’s new actioner, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One . Last year Luke made us laugh over his review of Cruise’s ‘Narcissistic Navy Jesus’ in Top Gun: Maverick . And our association with him goes back more than 20 years. So we figured it was abou...

Jon Atack’s piece for us this week about Charles Manson and Scientology was such a hit with our readers, we knew we had to get him on the podcast this week to chat with him about it further. Once again, choose your poison. You can listen to the audio podcast (above) or watch the video version at YouTube, which is embedded below. Also, as he mentions at the end, Jon now has an audiobook version of...

In another round of howling to the Tampa Bay Times, Scientology’s Clearwater spokesman Ben Shaw made numerous not very nice accusations about Vice Mayor Mark Bunker. So naturally we thought we’d ask Wise Beard Man about that, and we had lots of fun. Listen to the podcast or watch the video version, which we’ve posted at YouTube. Want to help? You can support the Underground Bunker with a Paypal co...

We had heard from some of you about our video interviews not going out on the usual podcast feed, so we think we have figured it out this week. Our interview with Christian Stolte will go out both as an audio version on the usual Podcast feeds (above and at Spotify, etc), but you can also watch the video version of it if you’d like, embedded below as a YouTube video. Christian is one our favorite...

We can’t believe it’s been 11 years since we put Kate Bornstein on the cover of the Village Voice . It’s one of our proudest moments during our five years at the Voice, and it was a real treat to spend time catching up. Kate’s an avid reader of our Danny Masterson retrial coverage, and now that we’ve finished with testimony in the case (closing arguments are scheduled to take placed on Tuesday), w...

We first wrote about Tory Christman in 2001, and 22 years later it’s still one of our favorite stories of all time — about a woman who went from one of Scientology’s most reliable foot soldiers to one of its most resilient critics. She was in the courtroom this week at the Danny Masterson retrial, and we were curious about how it compared to some of the trials she had attended as a church operativ...

With the Danny Masterson retrial starting tomorrow, we’re shifting gears and preparing for some hard work in the weeks ahead. So, in that spirit we thought we’d let the larger community in on something our subscribers have known about for a few months now: On Sundays, they receive a copy of our special podcast series we call “Group Therapy.” Each week, some of our longtime Underground Bunker favor...

In 2013 we began a very popular series at the Underground Bunker which lasted more than a year. We called it “Up the Bridge,” and with Claire Headley’s help we explained something about every step on Scientology’s “Bridge to Total Freedom,” from beginning to end, and tallying up the costs along the way. We wanted to give non-Scientologists some sense of what it was like to go all the way from begi...

When we took a photo of John Sweeney pouring a cup of tea on a visit to London, we didn’t know that in a few years he’d not only be a best-selling author of multiple books, but that he’d become known for reporting from the Battle of Kyiv in an orange wool cap . We’re fortunate that we caught the very busy former BBC journalist, and for a fun trip down memory lane about reporting on Scientology. We...

Louise Shekter has written some dynamite pieces for us at the Underground Bunker. She not only was in some amazing places to witness Scientology history during her tenure (1969-2000), but she’s a terrific writer of evocative prose. We thought it was time to bring her on the podcast, and we told her we had a special subject in mind. Louise is a member of a pretty select club: She worked closely, fo...

One of the people who reached out to us about the unfortunate news about Jenny Burpee was Clarissa Adams, who knew Jenny in the Sea Org. It’s been a while since we had talked to Clarissa, and so we were anxious to catch up with her, and then we invited her on the podcast to talk about the terrible example of Scientology disconnection that has ripped apart her family. Clarissa was a second-generati...

We hope you had a chance to see HBO’s excellent 2021 investigation into the origins of the QAnon phenomenon, Q Into the Storm , directed by Cullen Hoback. One of the surprising stars of the series was Fredrick Brennan, the young man who had founded 8chan, the imageboard that became the nursery for the QAnon movement, something Brennan came to regret. In the series, he helped Hoback unearth the his...

One of our favorite people in the whole world is Australian journalist Steve Cannane. We first became aware of Steve’s work because he was tearing it up at the ABC with story after story about Scientology in the land Down Under. In particular, he was the first reporter to interview Valeska Paris, who alleged that for more than ten years she had been a prisoner on Scientology’s cruise ship the Free...

Karen Pressley spent almost 20 years in Scientology, and then turned her experience into a terrific book, Escaping Scientology: My Journey with the Cult of Celebrity Spirituality, Greed & Power . We’ve posted an excerpt of it in the past , but we wanted to check in with Karen because of her experience working at the Hollywood Celebrity Centre. This week, Scientology really took it in the shorts wh...

Way back at the turn of the century, your Proprietor and Mark Ebner were both slaving away for a newspaper that no longer exists that was called New Times Los Angeles. We both took on Scientology as a subject, and we’ve been good friends ever since, with Ebner contributing some unusual and hilarious items for us here at the Bunker over the years. (Remember Gay Ribisi’s Scientology plaques , for ex...

Bonus material! We have for you another excerpt from our podcast for subscribers, which we call Group Therapy. Each week we bring together four of our Underground Bunker regulars, Andrea 'i-Betty' Garner, Lynette 'Observer' Waggoner, Phil Jones, and the enigmatic Pan. We spend an hour talking about the Scientology news of the week, and we have a lot of fun. To give you a sense of it, this week we'...

We were very happy we got the chance to catch up with Mark Plummer this week. Mark has been a friend to the Underground Bunker for many years, supplying us with killer documents that he took out of the Church of Scientology when he left it in the early 1980s. We met him in person for the first time in Austin on our book tour in 2015. And we’ve been grateful for his friendship and his deep knowledg...

Over the last few days, you’ve probably noticed some breathless tabloid claims that Scientology’s leader David Miscavige has gone “missing.” This is a mischaracterization of a story that we’ve been covering for more than three years now — that Miscavige has gone to extreme lengths to evade process servers in a few different lawsuits that are attempting to name him as a defendant. In other words, a...

Well, we did it once again this week. We got into some newsy stuff on our new podcast that we created for our subscribers, which we call Group Therapy. We've brought together four of our Underground Bunker regulars, Andrea 'i-Betty' Garner, Lynette 'Observer' Waggoner, Phil Jones, and the enigmatic Pan. We spend an hour talking about the Scientology news of the week, and we have a lot of fun. This...