We’re back in court today as Leah Remini’s lawsuit faces early hurdles

We’ll be back in the courtroom this morning as Judge Randolph Hammock once again takes up some important early matters in Leah Remini’s lawsuit against the Church of Scientology.

He’ll be returning to the issues he wrestled with for three hours on Tuesday: Deciding which parts of Leah’s defamation claims should be struck because, Scientology argues, they are merely examples of opinion and protected free speech.

But first, Judge Hammock will be dealing this morning with a question about video recording the hearing, and whether today’s proceeding might be live-streamed.

We intend to be live-blogging the hearing as we did Tuesday, with our updates posted in the comments at today’s post at tonyortega.org. So please go there to see the very latest about what’s going on.

Besides resolving the issue about video recording, and then getting back to what he was discussing on Tuesday regarding Scientology’s motion to strike material from the lawsuit, Judge Hammock is also supposed to use today’s hearing to rule on Leah’s motion for a preliminary injunction. She’s asking the court to enjoin Scientology from harassment while the lawsuit is going on.

But on Tuesday, Judge Hammock indicated that he was leaning against granting the motion unless today Leah’s legal team could convince him that the need for the injunction is more obvious and immediate. So we are looking forward to what Leah’s legal team will say about that.

We’ll also be interested in how Leah’s team will deal with the attempt of the Religious Technology Center — Scientology’s nominally controlling entity that is run by David Miscavige — to get itself dropped from the lawsuit. On Tuesday RTC attorney Robert Mangels complained to the court that there is no connection named in the lawsuit between the harassment Leah alleges and RTC. Judge Hammock asked Leah’s attorney Linda Singer to point out such a connection in a declaration and she couldn’t. So we expect that Leah’s team has come up with something to show the judge today to keep RTC in.

Hey, that’s a lot of stuff, and we know it’s complex. Please hang out with us at the dot org site in the comments, and we’ll update you as fast as we can!

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

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