Rebecca Minkoff’s RHONY flop may have helped her brand, but didn’t help Scientology
We got around to watching Rebecca Minkoff’s final appearance on this season’s Real Housewives of New York, which was the second half of the reunion episode that aired on Bravo earlier this week.
It was grim.
We understand that the point of the series is to have wealthy women pick fights with each other for entertainment, but it was quite clear from Minkoff’s short segment that her time as a “friend” to the regular cast had pretty much been a disaster.
The others accused her of being solely interested in promoting her brand, of refusing to open up about Scientology, and the worst criticism of all, that she was boring.
The reunion show gave host and producer Andy Cohen one last time to bring up Scientology, and you may have seen reporting on how poorly it went.
Andy Cohen: We got a big reaction online to you coming on the show. Scrapeze on Twitter said, 'No thanks, stop normalizing cults.' What's your reaction to the use of the word 'cult'?
Rebecca Minkoff: That is a bigoted term.
Cohen: OK.
Minkoff: So, it's hate speech to, like, keep calling a religion a cult.
Cohen: OK.
Minkoff: And you wouldn't be asking me these questions about Christianity, Muslim, Judaism.
Cohen: OK.
Minkoff: I'm tired of the attacks, and it's suddenly OK for this religion. It is not.
Cohen: Got it. Rebecca, Roz from New York City said, 'Did you really expect to come on a reality show as a well-known Scientologist and not talk about it at all?
Minkoff: You know what, I'm happy to talk about it if I feel like I'm in a place where I can have an honest conversation. This also isn't something that you can answer. We spent an hour talking about it and there was probably still more time to go.
Cohen: Yeah.
Minkoff: Do you have an hour? No. This is not necessarily the format to discuss this.
Brynn Whitfield: It's the XL format and platform.
Cohen: Well, you had tons of hours, you were on a trip to Puerto Rico….
It was back in 2017 that we noticed how willing Rebecca Minkoff was to put herself in a spotlight about her Scientology upbringing, when we saw her helping to promote one of the church’s sneakier front groups, Foundation for a Drug Free World.
And in particular, a branch of Drug Free World being led by Queens dentist Bernard Fialkoff and his daughter, Meghan, which had infiltrated New York City schools with the help of the NYPD in order to spread Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard’s claptrap about drugs to schoolchildren.
It surprised us to see Minkoff be so public about her involvement with such an effort, but we were grateful to Quailynn McDaniel (the Scientology celebrity whisperer) for some insight about the Minkoff family…
“Rebecca’s involvement has increased over the years,” Quailynn tells us. “She wasn’t active until she got famous. Now the church has her deep in their pocket, but she didn’t start that way. Her brother Uri Minkoff came on as her CEO. He’s been a long time spy for OSA, trying to make up the damage his dad caused the church,” she says, referring to the Office of Special Affairs, the intelligence wing of the church.
The “damage” caused by Uri and Rebecca’s father, quack physician Dr. David Minkoff, is well known: He lost his medical license for a year and had to pay a $10,000 fine after it was found that he had prescribed sedatives to Lisa McPherson without actually examining her during the fateful 17 days when Lisa was held in an “Introspection Rundown” at the Fort Harrison Hotel, which resulted in her death. McPherson’s abuse and sad end was one of Scientology’s biggest public relations disasters of all time.
Is that what also motivated Rebecca to be so visible in promoting Scientology, was she trying to make up the damage done by her father?
The two of them showed up in a 2019 issue of Impact magazine, posing with a trophy which indicated that they had reached “Diamond Meritorious” as $5 million donors to the IAS.
There’s simply no question that Rebecca Minkoff has been an important and consistent celebrity supporter of Scientology for many years, that she understands what is really going on in the organization, and that she has reason to try and undo some of the damage done by the bad publicity brought on the church by her father’s involvement in the Lisa McPherson saga.
But what made the timing of her RHONY involvement so interesting was that at the same time this show was airing, her father is involved in yet another death of a Scientologist, this time the horrific and tragic 2022 suicide of Whitney Mills. Whitney’s mother is suing Scientology and David Minkoff, saying that Whitney, 40, was undergoing severe mental health problems, but Scientology’s anti-psychiatry stance not only prevented her from getting proper care, she was also misdiagnosed by Minkoff, which led directly to her suicide.
None of that was brought up during this season of Real Housewives. Nothing about her donations. Nothing about her involvement with Scientology’s quack drug ideas. Nothing about her father’s quack medical practices or his involvement in the McPherson matter or the Whitney Mills case.
Rebecca did reveal that her main motivation for going on the show was that her handbag brand has been in the toilet since the pandemic hit. And she has said that the publicity of this season’s show has been a boon for her handbag business. So in that respect, it may have been a good decision for her to be a part of it.
On the other hand, she never really connected on the show, she was clearly unhappy about being asked about Scientology repeatedly, and right after the final reunion show this week she announced on Instagram that she wouldn’t be coming back for another season.
That certainly made sense if you saw Tuesday night’s episode. It was brutal. Look, these women all get crosswise with each other, that’s the point of the show. But it was quite obvious how uncomfortable the rest of the cast were with Rebecca, not only for her reluctance to talk about Scientology, but also for the lame stunt she’d tried to pull lying about being pregnant for some kind of prank.
What a barrel of laughs this woman was.
If there’s a bright side to all of this for us, it’s that the press coverage of the show has been consistently good, with lots of good questions asked about Minkoff and her Scientology involvement throughout the season.
Here are just a couple of the reactions we saw this week in the media.
Jennifer O’Brien, Reality Tea: While I can understand Bex’s trepidation since the RHONY ladies definitely mocked her beliefs a tiny bit in their confessionals, she didn’t exactly help herself. Multiple times, Bravo cameras caught the women trying to ask genuine questions. Even though she often claimed she was “totally open” about her faith, that just didn’t seem to be the case. Even though Rebecca often tried to shout from the rooftop that Scientology is “a world-recognized religion. There’s nothing secret,” the group has come under fire for acting cult-like. The religion has also been accused of covering up crimes committed by its members.
Claudia Smith, Daily Mail: Rebecca's ties to Scientology were addressed throughout the season as she is part of one of Scientology's most powerful and controversial families and is a devout member of the religion herself.
Minkoff, along with her entrepreneur brother Uri, their father Dr. David Minkoff, and mother Sue have shelled out millions to the church and were even awarded 'Diamond Meritorious' status for hitting $5 million in donations, according to anti-Scientology blog The Underground Bunker.
In the '90s, the fashionista's father Dr. Minkoff was involved in a wrongful death lawsuit that could have cost the church its tax-exempt status, and he was recently named in a medical malpractice suit over the death of high-level Scientologist Whitney Mills.
The mom-of-four was also friends with actor Danny Masterson — who is currently serving a 30-year[s-to-life] prison sentence for [two forcible] rape[s].
Well, maybe Scientology should be glad that RHONY won’t have Rebecca to kick around anymore.
Perhaps in a second season they would have figured out how to ask her some real questions about it.
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I can't think of two things that don't mix more than SCN at a high level and Reality TV at a high level. This was never going to work and if I was Rebecca's agent I would have gotten her a show where new designers make handbags in different challenges and one wins a lot of money in the end. She would have gotten the publicity she wanted and no one would have been allowed to ask her pointed questions about SCN.
People at INT or Upper Management know very little about pop culture. They are not supposed to be watching TV and will never be as proficient at it as we are. They were full-on cheering Laura Prepon for her role on Orange is the New Black and I am sure less than 1% understood she played a lesbian, drug dealer.
As far as Rebecca Minkoff, you need more than a famous bag brand to make it on the Housewives franchise. The women on the show would be equivalent to the Navy Seals in the reality TV world. They know how to dump their husband, change gender, lose a fortune (or never have one) have a kid in jail, and never discuss one bit of that. They are experts in finding the most generic, safe storyline and riding that puppy until even the editor is like"Again with this BS? The viewers are getting restless." while not saying a word about their actual life.
Stories about women who are or may be pregnant and are past childbearing age seem popular.
Anything Rebecca said about SCN was going to be wrong. The Church wanted publicity but not real Housewives brand of publicity. She knew that and chose to say nothing.
I think her heart wasn't really in it, she was too pretty to be on this show with these women who are fighting aging like a boss. She didn't want these women to be her buddies or even fake buddies and as I said she should have gone the handbag contest route.
Just my take.
The cult argument, only OSA (edited by Miscavige's top editing) spends time with the bigot counter argument.
Average non Scientologists don't buy that argument for a second.
Average under articulate persons all through history have needed their own word to show their disapproval of a group whom the average public has heard enough bad news about, and "cult" kind of is the population's word.
Official Scientology over emphasizes some of L. Ron Hubbard's worst ideas, to the detriment of the official Scientology followers.
Those instances of excessive application of extremist Hubbard's statements, end up backfiring all the time, in Scientology, due to the ignorance of the official Scientology staffers who go fanatical on each other.
Cult isn't a "legal" word, it's about as much attention that average people wish to give a label to a group that behaves fanatically with bad results.
The media has laid out thousands of the bad results which backfire on official Scientology due to the extremist application of Hubbard's Scientology regulations. Official Scientology's history has led the way in the "Cult" damage debris trail which official Scientology has left.
If any religion or group enforces their rules to the detriment of the followers, there's a tipping point, and then that group becomes a cult. Especially if the group cannot break out of their fanatical interpretation which continues to cause their followers much woe and suffering.
Cult as argued over is a popular word, it's a stopgap word, which when average people get fed up enough about a group which over and over does backfiring detrimental things in following their group's "founder's" regulations on themselves, then that group rises up to being simply thought of as a cult.
Official Scientology could "un-cult" themselves pretty easily. They'd just have to look at the Ron's Org's setups.
The problem, is Miscavige. He's interpreted Hubbard's regulations extremistly and allowed horrendous fanatical applications of Hubbard's writings.
Here's the questions I'd ask all the official Scientology celebs:
"Did you know that some of the splinter Scientology groups which still do the L. Ron Hubbard auditing and exorcism, those groups don't declare their followers SP and they don't have an OSA branch?"
"Did you hear of the beatings which official Scientology leader David Miscavige did and encouraged for years?"
"Why is official Scientology so much more fanatical than the splinter Scientology groups?"
"Don't you even know anything about the milder "Ron's Orgs" groups of splinter Scientologists?"
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My first goals when I became a critic, were to hopefully push the study of Scientology sufficiently so that the new religious movement academics could differentiate between official Scientology and the splinter Scientology practitioners.
Why? Main answer, the splinter Scientologists act mainly less fanatical. They act LESS "cult" like.
That is a major point to make, and it has not caught on to keep noticing this point.
Official Scientology is more orthodoxly fanatical about applying the full backfiring sets of regulations and writings of Hubbard.
Splinter Scientology cut short and dispense with massive sets of the backfiring Hubbard regulations and writings.
-----------------------------------------
It just frustrated me that you can't get discussion of these important points like the above, which relate to whether the world could call a group a "cult" or not.
"Cult" calling is the right of anyone, it's free speech, and it's a popular word, not an academic word.
If Rebecca Minkoff could sit through an hour of discussion, I'd start with this above point I'm making, as the entry point.
THEN I'd get into the "Truth Rundown" newspaper story.
Then I'd get personal, and ask her why she hasn't joined Sea Org, and risen up to the "top management" ranks of Scientology. And I'd ask why haven't other super capable Scientologists risen up to the top management ranks of Scientology, and deal with the issues which the media has been reporting about Scientology's SP policies backfiring.
Freezone/Ron's Org splinter Scientologists simply don't have the problems official Scientology does, and haven't any of the prominent Scientologists even educated themselves enough of how to reform themselves enough to STOP being the fanatical "cult" group that Scientology continues to be year in year out?
All official Scientology would have to do is get new leadership, and go more lenient like the splinter Scientology groups.
They'd have to shed the fanatical interpretations of Hubbard's backfiring regulations and writings and it's been done, already, by the splinter Scientologists.
Rebecca Minkoff, and all official Scientologists are hours and hours away from studying up enough about their "religion" to even understand the above.
Oh well.
The simplicity of being in a "cult" is just follow orders of the fanatical interpreters in one's orthodox fake religion.
Official Scientology's "think for yourself" is absurdly pre-emptively backfiring.
Rebecca Minkoff ought to come here, and respond to my comment.
It's not a "legal" word, unless the lawyers and judges likewise adopt this popular meaning of the word cult.
There's no one in credible relevant groups, like linguists, who even know enough about the massive intertwining regulations and penalties and the history of interpreting Hubbard's regulations to the detriment of the Scientology followers, to even lay out the full argument sensibly, and be a cornerstone societal 'expert' and make the word "cult" the people's word meaning that IS a reality in the world.
Cult is bad, I wouldn't call the Ron's Org's a cult. I talk with some of the highest level Ron's Org people, and we can talk body-thetans even.
No way do Ron's Org Scientologists even for a second wish to regulate each other's lives and disconnect and call each other SP like do the official Rebecca Minkoff Scientology "church" does.
Also even the Ron's Org isn't even