Leah Remini’s new lawyer for Scientology lawsuit: The man who put Pellicano in prison
Leah Remini has a new lawyer for the lawsuit she filed last year against the Church of Scientology and its leader David Miscavige, and he’s a heavy hitter.
Daniel Saunders is a former Assistant US Attorney (1997-2011) who put private investigator Anthony Pellicano in prison for wiretapping various Hollywood figures in a trial that took place in 2008. Since 2011, Saunders has been in private practice.
Variety quoted him as saying, “In my private practice, I get no greater professional satisfaction than representing an individual David against a governmental or corporate Goliath, and bringing Goliath down.”
That may be just the attitude that Leah needs.
She filed her lawsuit in August last year, alleging that she has been the subject of a brutal years-long coordinated “Fair Game” campaign by Scientology to destroy her reputation with constant online smears as well as in-person attempts to interfere with her ability to make a living.
If you remember, when she was trying to serve Miscavige with the court papers, we pointed out that not only was she being represented by the same attorneys who were representing Jane Doe 1 in her forced-marriage lawsuit, but that the two of them were sharing process servers and submitting the same reports from those process servers in their attempts to hunt Miscavige down.
At some point, however, handling those two cases at the same time became problematic. In a filing last month, attorney Brad Edwards told the court that a conflict of interest had developed and his firm could no longer represent Jane Doe 1. Edwards and the other attorneys working on both cases also left Leah’s lawsuit.
In the meantime, Leah’s case was entering a strange new phase. If you remember, Judge Randolph Hammock had removed some of Leah’s defamation claims, saying that some of them were too old, and others were merely opinion and not statements of fact, but in a major ruling he had left in eight of Leah’s nine causes of action.
It turned out that both sides were unhappy with the ruling. Miscavige used a peremptory challenge to have Judge Hammock removed, and then both sides notified the court that they were going to appeal the ruling.
So that’s put the case on hold at the trial court level, and we’ll have to wait a year or more for the appeals to run their course. In the meantime, Leah has now hired a formidable attorney who can pick up where Brad Edwards left off.
Saunders appeared in last year’s FX/New York Times documentary about the Pellicano case, The Sin Eater: The Crimes of Anthony Pellicano.
Once Hollywood’s most notorious fixer, Pellicano initially went to prison after a 2002 search of his office turned up bomb-making materials, and he pleaded guilty to possession of dangerous materials. He was scheduled to be released from prison in 2006 when he was arrested on new indictments of racketeering and wiretapping. He was convicted in 2008 and was sentenced to 15 years in prison, and was released in 2019.
For Scientology watchers, probably the most interesting of the allegations against Pellicano was that he had illegally wiretapped Nicole Kidman during her divorce with Tom Cruise, who was one of Pellicano’s repeat clients.
For that reason alone, we figure that as Pellicano’s former prosecutor Saunders has at least a pretty good idea about what Scientology is capable of, and that he goes into this with a basic grasp of what “Fair Game” is all about.
Chris Shelton is going Straight Up and Vertical
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I give Leah credit for tackling the wild boar called Scientology. Because of her that dangerous animal has turned into a more predictable barnyard swine that lost its horns. And now most of the world sees Scientology for what it is. A fraudulent money grubbing scam; a carrier of the toxic “swine flu”.
Keep up the good work Leah you are a courageous human being in a sea of fear and inaction.
Saunders is going to take on Scientology in their anti-slapp they file against Leah. This we’ll be epic.