So, who was the first person to have the video after it was leaked from Scientology? Who started the ball rolling on the video? It's funny how silly Tom Cruise, goofy Scientology celebrity, became the unintentional lightening rod. Maybe he should get another medal. While this event alerted a lot of people, the already existing data base revealing Scientology's nuttiness and nastiness is what made the biggest difference. It was there for the recently alerted to examine. For that I say thank you to many others, not named here. Thank you, guys, old guard, and old old guard.
If he's a lightening rod, maybe Krustie Alley should be in touch? She could use a few taps. Best AD&D manual typo: Minionions of Set.
Mark Ebner's take: https://www.facebook.com/groups/325...k/502042253197477/?comment_id=502205436514492 "Patty Moher Love you, but your "real story" as posted on WWP is slightly inaccurate. Here's the way it went down: Late in the evening (around midnight PT) before the Cruise Crazy Tape went viral via Gawker, Bunker tipped me to a protected web site (It wasn't YouTube) where he was nervously hosting the video. He basically told me to do what I wanted with it. I emailed Nick Denton at Gawker, urging him to take a look. He got back to me within minutes after viewing, asking if he could post the video on Gawker, and I said "sure." There was no "working through the night" editing with Barb because she didn't show up in LA until later the next day. However, when she arrived, we did start editing, and, much to Barb's credit, she did translate a lot of Cruise's gibberish which I used for a Tom Cruise is Crazy mnemonic posted on my website, HollywoodInterrupted.com. But, like I've been saying all along - by then, the video had already gone viral soon after Nick Denton ganked the video off the internet at something-in-the-drunken morning." http://gawker.com/5002216/we-are-the-way-to-happiness
Thanks, Mark. I appreciate the further details. The video was actually on YouTube on a channel I created expressly for the Cruise tape. The account was TomCruiseBook. The videos were then embedded on a blog I created that would have commented on the release of the Tom Cruise book, correcting some of the press mistatements prior to the book's release. The page on the blog featuring the video was password protected and that password was given to folks like Mark and Patty to to share with the media so they could access the video and download it for themselves. I naively thought a new YouTube channel with no subscribers might not show up in many search results so it could stay relatively hidden till the press got the video. Well, I guess I was wrong.
Took these assholes almost two years to say Pooks has it wrong? IMO it's too late to spray piss to mark your territory.
WBM posted on ITT two years ago: https://whyweprotest.net/community/...m-cruise-video-leak.93170/page-3#post-1875660
The only reason for this thread in the first place is because Bunker told me he was going to take credit for releasing the Tom Cruise Video. I knew that it was lie and decided to post what I knew. I and other OG critics got the video released and Bunker caused much angst because he chickened out. Ebner tends to get the facts wrong for some reason. This is a long term problem with Ebner and his reporting.
Bunker (and Ebner's) take is that Bunker uploaded the video, and then took it down, and then tried to upload it privately again, but he "woke up a few hours later to discover that the one chapter that had Cruise's monologue was accidentally not set to "private." It had been viewed about 20,000 times while I slept and was downloaded and mirrored multiple times on multiple accounts by people who had read the Gawker and Radar stories and other coverage of the video."
I was pretty happy about staying anon and keeping the story anon. But it really bothered me that Bunker and Ebner were taking credit when in fact they were part of a group effort. No one person is responsible. It was a bunch of people all working at the same to get it out. The fact that Bunker and or Ebner want to take credit really disgusts me.
Alright, Pooks. I didn't know you were mad at me about it all. Sorry to have offended you. I don't think I have lied about any of this. I tried to fill in blanks. Mark Ebner dd the same. The tale of the tape has been told.
Did someone say evil queen? My kind of gal. or Gals. and as for this: C'mon tell us another great bedtime story...!
I was attending the SP party last year when Larry Wright came up to talk to pooks and I was standing there. He was asking her, if I believe I understood, for the cd of the video. This was at the end of the night, I finally had pooks all to myself and we were both pretty toasted. She was "do I have to get it nooow?" And I was like" its late and stuff" She was all "I'm not even sure I can find it right now, its in my office and " and I was all like wait, that is Larry Wright. He's much better looking in person. Is there any more of that trifle? My little part of history with the Cruise vid. I win.
Ya I was mad because I don't think any one person should take credit for it. It was a group thing. We all worked anonymously to get it out except of course for Ebner who couldn't wait to take credit.
The trifle was good but i could only eat a little bit of it, even when I gorged myself, I only ate a trifle
Maybe my memory fails me, but kinda remember it that way. Of course I could have been distracted by the little disembodied puppet head of the DM effigy.
Pooksie, a disembodied puppet head of DM is a terribly fucked up thing to do to people who are imbibing.
Well, you've got to take into consideration that you're not an egomaniac who is going to need to promote a movie. Right?
Gawker goes dark, but its impact on Scientology — and Tom Cruise — will never be forgotten By Tony Ortega, August 19, 2016 Quote: We learned yesterday that next week, Gawker will shut down. For some of us who toiled in the trenches of New York journalism of a certain era, the news is hard to believe. Gawker had a big effect on the way online journalism is done (not all of it positive, some will tell you), and it certainly changed the way we think about writing and reporting. You will no doubt be seeing a lot of obituaries written about Gawker over the next week now that Univision is shutting it down after buying all of Gawker Media’s websites in a fire sale. You can read plenty more about how Gawker’s fate was sealed when a billionaire, Peter Thiel, took revenge for being outed by the site by funding Terry “Hulk Hogan” Bollea’s lawsuit against Gawker over a sex tape. You probably already know the tale, and we won’t go into it except to say, as someone who has been targeted by a couple of different billionaires we’ve written about, it’s a really fucked up hazard of the occupation. Anyway, relevant to our interests here at the Underground Bunker we wanted to commemorate one Gawker achievement in particular that forever changed the way Scientology is perceived by the public. We’re talking about the shock to the system when a 9-minute interview of Tom Cruise appeared online early in 2008, and Gawker, more than any other website, made sure that the interview remained public for all to see. You probably know what interview we’re talking about. It was actually a small part of a larger celebration of Tom Cruise that occurred at the 20th anniversary celebration of the International Association of Scientologists in October 2004. The quick backstory, which even Gawker didn’t know at the time, is that Scientology leader David Miscavige wanted to make a big deal of the fact that he’d managed to lure Tom Cruise back into the fold after Cruise had all but dropped out of Scientology for several years. Cruise had gotten involved in Scientology through actress Mimi Rogers in 1986, just a few months after founder L. Ron Hubbard had died. Tom and Mimi were then married on Dianetics Day, May 9, 1987, and, as we explained in our lengthy story revealing for the first time what really happened to bust up that marriage, Miscavige managed to use Tom’s growing interest in Nicole Kidman to lure him away from Rogers. But then, after Tom married Nicole and she initially got involved in Scientology, by 1992 she had grown disaffected and the two of them pulled away from Scientology for the next nine years, when they broke up. And that’s when Miscavige made it job one to get Tom back into the fold. With the help of his top lieutenant at the time, Marty Rathbun, they were very successful, and by 2004 Cruise was the most enthusiastic L. Ron Hubbard fanatic ever. So that’s why Miscavige, at the 2004 IAS celebration, decided to reward Cruise not with a Freedom Medal, which had been the usual high award given at those events, but to bestow on Cruise a special Freedom Medal of Valor. And before he handed the tchotchke to Cruise, Miscavige amped up the crowd in East Grinstead, England with a 35-minute recorded tribute to Cruise, which was interspersed with a 9-minute interview of the actor, in a black turtleneck, talking about how much he loved being a Scientologist. But here’s what Miscavige may not have been counting on: The video and the medal ceremony actually backfired. Scientologists who had dedicated their lives to the “Sea Org,” and had signed billion-year contracts and worked for pennies an hour around the clock, considered it a slap in the face to hear from Miscavige that Cruise, a friggin’ actor, was “the most dedicated Scientologist I know.” We’ve talked to numerous former Scientologists who were in the audience that night, and they all tell us they carried resentment over it for years. And that’s probably why, in 2007, an anonymous Scientologist decided to smuggle out a recording of that night’s event to a woman in Connecticut named Patty Moher. Patty has told, at length, what subsequently happened with the DVD, and we’ll just pull out a few highlights. She had actually been in attendance at the 2004 event, and in 2007 when she received the DVD recording, she remembered it as an event she had personally experienced. She’s admitted that she didn’t really have any idea what a pile of dynamite she had in her hands as she began forwarding copies of the event to some of her close friends. She even showed it at a party at her house, swearing everyone to secrecy. (By 2007, Patty was out of Scientology but not publicly, and she was still considered in good standing by the organization itself.) One of the people she shared the DVD with, Patricia Greenway, was working with writer Andrew Morton on his unauthorized biography of Cruise, which was scheduled to be released on January 15, 2008, and NBC was going to be promoting the book. Greenway told Patty it would help Morton if NBC had the footage of Cruise, which would help prove what Morton was saying about him. But NBC said it didn’t want anything to do with a DVD that had been smuggled out of the church. That was a lawsuit waiting to happen. What it could use, however, was video that had already been posted online. Patty had no idea how to do that, but she knew that Mark Bunker, a longtime critic in Los Angeles who ran “Xenu TV,” was well aware of how to upload video to the Internet. She sent him the DVD and asked him to post it as a downloadable file so the people at NBC could grab it. Instead, on January 14, 2008, Bunker posted it to YouTube. Bunker has said he was away from his computer for some time, and when he looked at it again, to his horror he saw that the video was proliferating like crazy. Tens of thousands of views in only a short time. Panicked by the thought of what legal action might come from the church, he yanked it down. Going to Plan B, and still thinking they needed the video posted the next day for NBC’s use, Patty turned to a friend in San Diego who goes by the handle Xenubarb. She raced up to Los Angeles on her motorcycle with a copy of the DVD to meet with journalist Mark Ebner, who was well known for his 1996 expose of Scientology in Spy Magazine, and who had also worked on the epic 2005 South Park episode that poked fun at Scientology’s “Xenu” story. Xenubarb and Ebner worked rapidly to pull out an uploadable edit of the 9-minute interview from the DVD, and then Ebner looked for a place to send it. “I was blogging for ‘fratire’ progenitor Tucker Max’s ill-advised (and ill-fated) Rudius Media,” Ebner tells us. “When Tucker Max idiotically forbade me from posting the video on HollywoodInterrupted.com, I hit up Nick Denton at Gawker in the wee hours, and he was all over it. I gleefully gave it to him for fun and for free, and the rest is viral history. In hindsight, I probably should have charged him for it, and tossed Mark Bunker some cash for the tip. Oh well. Between the Tom Cruise tape and the South Park ‘Trapped in the Closet’ episode I consulted on, I feel great about my part in taking down Scientology’s number two guy. Twice!” Denton posted the video to Gawker at 10:18 am on January 15, 2008. He pointed out that the video had been uploaded the day before, briefly, to YouTube (by Bunker), and had been picked up by Radar and Defamer — but that each of those copies had been taken down as Scientology’s legal team jumped into action. “Gawker is now hosting a copy of the video; it’s newsworthy; and we will not be removing it,” Denton wrote. The video was a disaster for Cruise. After the actor had been recovered to the church by 2004, the next year he made a catastrophic attempt to become a more open ambassador for it in 2005, with his bizarre antics on Oprah Winfrey’s couch, for example, and his combative interview on the Today show with Matt Lauer. But soon after it became obvious that the new strategy was blowing up on him, he went silent again. Now, three years later, with the release of the black turtleneck interview that had been taped in 2004, the public for the first time got to see Tom in full Scientology mode — in a video that was never meant for outsiders to see. Continued here: http://tonyortega.org/2016/08/19/ga...ology-and-tom-cruise-will-never-be-forgotten/
The Vimeo version of the video can't be embedded here, but you can watch it at vimeo.com/38249534 This thread provides some background on what happened to Gawker: https://whyweprotest.net/threads/gawker-implodes.129510/
