We want to thank the reader who pointed us to a new sighting of that ever-popular figure here at the Underground Bunker, former Scientology spokesman Tommy Davis.
It actually took place in November, but Tommy’s appearance at a film event apparently didn’t get picked up by the entertainment media. At least we haven’t been able to find any coverage of it.
The occasion was a screening of a documentary which first premiered this summer, America’s Burning, directed by David Smick and narrated by Michael Douglas.
The movie seemed to get little notice, and the reviews we looked up were not kind. They chided Smick for peddling political bothsidesism at a time when that isn’t very insightful or helpful. But whatever, for our purposes we’re interested in who showed up when Smick and Douglas held a screening of their documentary in November at a Silver Lake private home and hosted by actors Ed Begley, Jr. and Colleen Camp.
You might remember Colleen from Apocalypse Now, or more recently we remember her as a sort of sidekick to Roseanne Barr. (Ah, those LipTV days. Long gone now.) But Colleen is also a longtime (if not very outspoken) Scientologist.
We’re not sure how significant that is, but we are interested that a number of other Scientologists also showed up to the event.
Namely, Anne Archer, who was reunited with Douglas, her co-star in 1987’s Fatal Attraction.
Anne’s a big Scientology celebrity, of course, and she brought along her Scientologist husband, retired television executive Terry Jastrow, and her son, Tommy Davis, who was there with his newest and third wife, Egyptian actress Maie Ibrahim.
We’ve been following developments about Davis for many years, and we are often asked about him. Tommy made quite an impression when he was Scientology’s most visible spokesman from around 2005 to 2011. But besides being a spokesman, Davis was also an enforcer for church leader David Miscavige, something that has been documented numerous times. In 2011 at the Village Voice, we published a series of secretly taped audio recordings that captured Davis playing the heavy in order to intimidate a Scientologist about facing his family being ripped apart if he didn’t cut off contact with an enemy of the church. (In 2021, we republished that story at our own website.)
Mike Rinder, in his book A Billion Years, also documents how Davis was used as an enforcer by Miscavige, notably when the two of them in 2007 were tasked with following BBC journalist John Sweeney, an operation that resulted in Sweeney having an epic meltdown over Davis’s interference. Davis, as Scientology spokesman, had other notable collisions with such media figures as CNN’s John Roberts and ABC’s Martin Bashir before he finally collided in 2011 with Lawrence Wright of the New Yorker.
That February, the magazine published Wright’s profile of Paul Haggis, “The Apostate,” and we found evidence that Davis lost his spokesman position soon after that article came out. Suddenly, after February 2011, Tommy was nowhere to be seen.
Davis then turned up in Austin, where his then-wife Jessica Feshbach’s family had some property, and in 2013 Davis testified in a court deposition that he was still a Scientologist but “on leave” from the Sea Org.
The next year, in 2014, the Davises moved to Los Angeles as Tommy found work at billionaire real estate investor Tom Barrack’s Colony Capital. (Tommy’s father, William Davis, a wealthy real estate investor who died in 2015, was a close friend to Barrack). But then in February 2016 Tommy left his job working for Barrack and became “general manager North America” for Australian billionaire James Packer, helping to run Packer’s Hollywood studio, RatPac Entertainment.
From David Miscavige’s enforcer, to billionaire Tom Barrack’s PR man, to mogul of a Hollywood mini-studio for James Packer: Tommy had a way of falling upwards.
Davis and Packer had known each other from Scientology. Packer was brought into the church around the year 2001 by his friend Tom Cruise, and according to Steve Cannane’s excellent book on Australian Scientology, Fair Game, Packer left the church around the year 2006. A decade later, he hired Davis to help him run his movie studio. But then 2016 turned into a nightmare year for Packer as he had setbacks to his gambling empire, broke up with fiancée Mariah Carey, and his studio took a bath on a Ben Affleck flop. Packer ended up bailing out of RatPac, and in that chaos Tommy left his job and went back to work for Barrack.
In May 2017, Tommy filed for divorce from Jessica, with whom he had two young daughters. Two years later he married Egyptian actress Maie Ibrahim in an elaborate ceremony in Morocco, and they subsequently welcomed a baby boy to the family.
In 2022, Tom Barrack was indicted for illegal lobbying for the United Arab Emirates, and Tommy showed up on a witness list.
But Barrack was acquitted in trial. Tommy, meanwhile, had formed his own company, Davis Advisors LLC, and works for Barrack as a consultant.
Then, just a couple of days after Barrack was acquitted and that trial ended, Tommy did something really bizarre on November 8, 2022: He accosted Paul Haggis’s ex-wife Deborah Rennard and Haggis’s daughter Alissa on a Soho street, who had both testified during Haggis’s civil trial in New York.
Tommy had apparently become unhinged because during the trial a deposition by a woman named Shawna Brakefield had been read into the record. The deposition suggested that Davis had encouraged Brakefield to illegally access Screen Actors Guild files to gather blackmail material on Haggis after the director publicly left the church in 2009.
It wasn’t the first time that this information becoming public had enraged Tommy. Three years earlier, Davis threatened to sue the Seven Network in Australia for including information about the Brakefield deposition in a special series by Bryan Seymour that the network had killed under pressure. We managed to find copies of the series and embedded them here at the Bunker, and Davis threatened to sue Seven Network, which then sent its attorneys after us.
We had no choice but to take down the video embeds, but you can still read a transcript of the show that Tommy found so offensive here.
Things have been pretty quiet since Tommy’s bizarre Soho street encounter with Deborah Rennard in 2022. He’s still running Davis Advisors LLC and apparently lives in Los Angeles, working for Barrack in PR.
Barrack is a longtime friend and huge financial supporter to Donald Trump, who just named him ambassador to Turkey as the January 20 inaugural approaches for Trump’s second term as president.
Will Tommy Davis go to Turkey with Barrack? Will he stay back in LA and once again try his luck in Hollywood?
Like so many of our readers who find this guy fascinating, we can’t wait for the next sighting.
Bonus items from our tipsters
We’ve been talking about Scientology’s slick new ads here in the US, which are fairly sophisticated and designed to make the uninitiated curious.
In Ireland, meanwhile…
As one commenter pointed out, going after the poolside population in Ireland is maybe not the best strategic decision.
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Source Code: Actual things founder L. Ron Hubbard said on this date in history
Avast, Ye Mateys: Snapshots from Scientology’s years at sea
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Good God. It's so incredibly sad and bad. I knew Tommy when he was going to Columbia and we were on course at CCNY. I had a crush on him - he was always so sweet. He joined the SO and told me to come with him but I said I had my purpose as an artist. Then he turned into a lunatic rabid animal, which is what Scion does to people. It's simply sad. Shawna was married to Tait Ruppert, whom I was involved with for 4 years in my 20s. He's the "T" in diffiCult to leave who was "Tater hot." Such a brilliant actor and I pray he has left the Cult. Truly brilliant actor. It's all so sad to me.
Tommy Davis... Another Lyintology loser... Ad campaign... too little, too late. The cat is already out of the internet bag!