Scientology thinks it’s caught a reporter in a scandal. Has it?

[Salacious illo from the Stand League article]

Last month, Deadline broke the news that Rebecca Minkoff had been asked to join the filming of upcoming Real Housewives of New York episodes, and Page Six reminded readers that she was a Scientologist — and longtime friend of Danny Masterson.

So on the morning of Thursday, April 18, we put up a story filling in some of the details about Rebecca’s involvement in Scientology and also the dubious history of her Scientologist physician father, David Minkoff.

We’d been writing about the two of them for years, and that included a piece in 2019 about how they both had showed up in an issue of Impact magazine for donating $5 million to Scientology’s legal slush fund, the IAS.

Later that day, on April 18, the Daily Mail put out its own story about the Minkoffs, a very lengthy piece that went over much of this history and also included a link to the Underground Bunker and some credit thrown our way.

We appreciated that. But we want to make this very clear: We did not know the author of this particular Daily Mail piece, Jacques Peterson. He had not reached out to us before he did his story, and we have never communicated with him before or since.

His piece was very good and comprehensive, including an interview with Quailynn McDaniel, and it included even more photos of Rebecca Minkoff and Danny Masterson together than Page Six had published.

We bring this up because more recently we found out that Scientology was very unhappy with Peterson’s story and decided to subject him to the usual “religious bigot” accusations at its dubious “Stand League” website, which purports to be a “grassroots” organization of Scientologists but is plainly just an arm of its usual attack apparatus under the Office of Special Affairs.

It’s interesting to us that Scientology reacted this way, because Peterson’s story said almost nothing about the nature of Scientology itself, or its leader David Miscavige, which are the Stand League’s usual buttons.

In this case, it appears to be a situation of Scientology looking out for a celebrity member who has given a lot of money.

The Stand League announced that Peterson was “caught in an ethical scandal,” and then accused him of doing something bad over at Twitter.

What was it, exactly? Well, let’s take a look.

First, Scientology accused Peterson of maintaining a “secret” account at Twitter, @jarcadey, which had the username “JACQU3$.”

Was this an “ethical scandal”?

As far as we can tell, based on responses to the @jarcadey account that still exist on Twitter, there was nothing really “secret” about it. Like many other people, Peterson used Twitter under a username that didn’t hide who we was.

So what did “JACQU3$” do that was so unethical?

Here’s what the Stand League accuses him of:

After his article was published, Peterson then, from his “JACQU3$” account, reposted Daily Mail’s tweet promoting his bigoted content.

OK, so if we set aside Stand League’s frothing at the mouth for a second, what we see is that a reporter, using his personal account, retweeted an article he had written that his employer had published.

Ethical lapse? That’s bare-minimum self-promotion, is what that is.

Of course Peterson would retweet his employer in that situation. Who wouldn’t? Any editor would expect his reporters to do at least that much to help get word out about a just-published piece.

So what was the next part of Peterson’s unforgivable behavior? Here’s what the Stand League says…

Peterson then replied to his own repost with the Twitter username of the self-avowed anti-Scientologist he had been coordinating with on his bigoted coverage.

OK, again, we’ll set aside Scientology’s bloviations to take an objective look at what Peterson did here.

After retweeting his employer’s promotion of his story, Peterson then tagged Yashar Ali to let him know about it.

Yashar, of course, being the hugely influential social media journalist who has done some great coverage of Scientology as well as many other subjects. He has a huge following, and Peterson would have been derelict not to at least notify Yashar of the piece in the hopes that Yashar could retweet it and get the article even more eyeballs.

Honestly, folks, this is bog-standard self-promotion, and the mildest kind in an era of in-your-face and constant self-flogging that we are all subjected to.

Stand League then boasts that once it got in Peterson’s face about his tweets, the reporter made his account private.

When he made it public again, he had thumbed his nose at Scientology by posting an image of himself with an Australian porn star.

Well played, sir. Well played.

Peterson later took his account down, which Scientology called an “admission of guilt.” But guilty of what? Of telling the truth about one of Scientology’s wealthy celebs?

Not everyone wants to be targeted by Scientology’s Fair Game machine, and if a reporter turned his accounts private, who are we to criticize him for it?

But we are constantly amazed at how Scientology continues this kind of behavior, and with few consequences.

Its first attack on him was posted on May 1, and on Thursday it posted a new piece, this time reiterating all of the same accusations and hyperventilating that Peterson had not surrendered or something.

Did Jacques come clean on his flouting of journalistic ethics? Did he own up to the fact that he was underhandedly in cahoots with a certifiable nut, laughably bent on—by that nut’s own admission—“destroying” the Church of Scientology? Did Jacques do the decent thing—retract, recant and repent?

This time, Scientology was unhappy that Peterson had instead created another Twitter account under a slightly different name, as if that too were somehow unethical. Or something.

This was apparently worth an entire new post, which, at this point, is just open harassment.

Look, Jacques, you’re embarrassing yourself with all these “secret” identities. You should stop before you become an angry mob all by yourself. Time to rethink your life choices, buddy.

Possibly there’s a porn star out there who could use an Emotional Support Bigot?

As a final note, we’ll point out that these unhinged rants at Peterson were supposedly written for the Stand League by someone named “Martin Landon.”

Here’s “Martin’s” bio on the Stand League site: “Martin Landon is happy to say that at present he is not doing anything he doesn’t love. Using Scientology, he helps people daily, both one-on-one through life coaching, and globally, through his webinars. He has also authored books, movies, plays, TV shows, and comic strips and currently writes for STAND, which gives him great joy.”

We can’t, however, find any books, movies, TV shows or anything else written by a Martin Landon. Anyone have some idea of who’s actually writing these posts?

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