By Cassidy Lee · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, January 2013
In early January 2013, FishbowlLA covered Tony Ortega’s response to two excerpts of Lawrence Wright’s forthcoming Scientology book, published in The Hollywood Reporter. The original framing tracked a small node in the dense, interlinked Scientology-journalism ecosystem of the moment.
Then
Days before the publication of Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief, The Hollywood Reporter ran two excerpts — one centered on Tom Cruise, one on John Travolta.
FishbowlLA’s item tracked the response of Tony Ortega: the veteran Scientology-beat journalist and former Village Voice editor whose blog had become the central clearinghouse for Scientology coverage. Ortega broke down the excerpts and highlighted a notable piece of reporting — that Wright had gotten Travolta’s former Church personal assistant, Spanky Taylor, to speak on the record for the first time. The Travolta excerpt recounted, among other things, an anecdote about an early-career audition and a Scientology course.
The piece was a small, characteristic FishbowlLA artifact: a trade magazine’s book excerpts, a beat blogger’s analysis of them, and a media blog tracking both — the layered, recursive way media culture covered itself.
Now
Going Clear became one of the most consequential books ever written about Scientology — a National Book Award finalist — and was adapted by Alex Gibney into the acclaimed 2015 HBO documentary of the same name, which brought Wright’s reporting to a mass audience and substantially intensified public scrutiny of the church.
Tony Ortega continued as the most prominent independent Scientology-watchdog journalist, publishing the long-running blog “The Underground Bunker” and a book of his own. Scientology coverage broadened further later in the decade with Leah Remini’s A&E series. The interlinked ecosystem the 2013 item captured — book, excerpts, beat blogger, media blog — was an early version of how a major investigative subject would be covered from many angles at once.
The 2013 piece reads now as a small documented moment just before the Wright book, and the documentary that followed, reshaped the public conversation about Scientology and Hollywood.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.