Losing a friend they knew in Scientology: A tribute to a remarkable woman

[Phil and Willie Jones]

[Today’s guest post is by Phil Jones]

In the realm of life, there are individuals who leave an indelible mark on the hearts and minds of those fortunate enough to cross their paths. Willie and I had the fortune to know one of those individuals. It was one of those rare positive things that came out of our stint in Scientology.

It was the early '90s when we met Julie Moss, when she and her husband started work at a company where I was employed. Over the next 30 years our lives intertwined through social connections, various companies we all worked for, and of course Scientology.

Julie was a truly remarkable woman, whose presence illuminated the world around her. Everyone liked her. She was a ray of sunshine always and never spoke ill of anyone. Her father Ron Moss was a music producer, who in earlier days had managed Chick Corea.

Born with a radiant spirit and an unwavering determination, this extraordinary woman approached life with unwavering grace and resilience.

For a time Willie and Julie owned a flower shop together in the area just north of Clearwater. I have to say they produced some beautiful work and were well-received in the community.

But beyond that, it was Julie’s role as a mother, a sister, a daughter, and a friend that truly defined her. She poured her heart and soul into nurturing her loved ones, offering unwavering love, guidance, and wisdom. Her family and children were the center of her universe, and she devoted herself to their well-being and happiness, leaving an enduring legacy of love and strength.

It was a shock to hear of her passing. A sad day for sure. Willie and I felt like we'd lost a sister.

I'm not sure if Julie's younger half sister Elisabeth Moss will make a comment publicly, but I'm sure she must be hurting as well.

For Julie, we mourn her loss, but we also celebrate the immeasurable gift she was to each and every one of us who were fortunate enough to know her. We'll cherish the good memories.

— Phil Jones

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Tonyortega.org site back up and we hope to keep it that way

We want to thank you for your patience after our original Underground Bunker website went down Wednesday night and stayed down for nearly 24 hours.

We are grateful to Scott Pilutik, our attorney, who hounded GoDaddy for its horrendous handling of this event, which could have been handled in minutes.

At issue is that as we cover Scientology as a news subject, we use images from their own publications and websites as “fair use” illustrations of stories. And we have done so for more than ten years without any issues.

Just recently, however, Scientology sent its attorney Gary Soter to try and get us in hot water with our hosting services (Substack here and GoDaddy at the other site).

Soter is submitting takedown requests on images primarily of L. Ron Hubbard and David Miscavige, as well as some short promotional videos we had posted.

As one dude with a laptop, we simply don’t have the resources to fight these requests, even though we believe we have legitimate “fair use” reasons for posting what we do. So, if Soter complains about an image, we take it down.

In Substack’s case, however, they have a really bad policy of pulling down the entire post, not simply the image that’s the issue. (To deal with this, you have seen us repost a story later with a Chad Essley cartoon in place of the image we had to pull down.)

And in GoDaddy’s case, when some images we had pulled down from stories at the original site (tonyortega.org) still turned out to be on the server we use, they interpreted this as us not complying with the takedown requests and pulled down our entire site for no apparent reason. (And to be clear, the original takedown requests forwarded by GoDaddy made no mention of the images on the server, and these images were not visible to the public. They took a few minutes to remove once GoDaddy finally gave us access to the site again last night.)

These are bad practices, especially when we’re trying to deal with a bad actor like Scientology.

We don’t expect to have much influence personally on either company, so in the meantime we are working to limit our exposure to this problem in the future. What that means for you is that when you go back in our archives, you may find that some stories are missing images, or the images have been replaced with something from the public domain.

We hope you understand, and continue to back this website. We have great stuff coming!

— The Proprietor

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Want to help?

You can support the Underground Bunker with a Paypal contribution to bunkerfund@tonyortega.org, an account administered by the Bunker’s attorney, Scott Pilutik. And by request, this is our Venmo link, and for Zelle, please use (tonyo94 AT gmail).

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Thank you for reading today’s story here at Substack. For the full picture of what’s happening today in the world of Scientology, please join the conversation at tonyortega.org, where we’ve been reporting daily on David Miscavige’s cabal since 2012. There you’ll find additional stories, and our popular regular daily features:

Source Code: Actual things founder L. Ron Hubbard said on this date in history

Avast, Ye Mateys: Snapshots from Scientology’s years at sea

Overheard in the Freezone: Indie Hubbardism, one thought at a time

Past is Prologue: From this week in history at alt.religion.scientology

Random Howdy: Your daily dose of the Captain

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