• A&E’s Recipe for Disaster is Serving up Stale Leftovers

    Leah Remini’s reality show is better known as a televised hate show. Numerous incidents of threats of violence and actual hate crimes directly link to Leah Remini and her show.

    So what does Paul Buccieri, head of A&E do? He serves A&E viewers the same recipe of overcooked lies from the same stale cast of characters.

    All of it starts with Mike Rinder—Leah Remini’s first paid-to-lie source—who can’t hide from his record of abusing women and walking out on his own family. Rinder’s credentials to justify his expertise include abandoning his wife and children while on a business trip, exhibiting no care when his son was stricken with life-threatening cancer, breaking his mother’s heart as she lay dying, and assaulting his former wife in front of his own daughter and crippling her for life.

    Then again, the only qualification to appear on Remini’s show is an uncanny ability to lie when cash is waved in front of one’s face. It is Rinder who pulls from his small coterie to put individuals on the air who are criminals—alleged rapist, drugged out psychopath, racist, animal abuser and anyone else who will lie for cash. Like Rinder, all hide from their pasts with a guarantee that Remini and her producers will cover up any context and unethical behavior an honest network would readily admit audiences need to know.


    Rinder knows how the game works for bigoted critics, as he bluntly stated: they agree on the same lie and narrative, then spread it so it looks like the fakery is corroborated. How much does Rinder lie? This is a man who, when questioned in deposition and under oath, had to admit he lied to the leader of the Church so many times he had lost count. That was after Rinder confessed in writing that he was corrupt and immoral: “Bottom line is that I had a totally criminal moral code and operated with a totally criminal mind attitude.”

    Rinder’s lies caught up with him when he was with the Church. He was kicked out 15 years ago. Rather than own up to his failings and take responsibility, he ditched his wife of more 30 years and his two children without saying a word to them. When Rinder’s ex-wife tried to see him one day to inform him that their son had been battling cancer, Rinder violently attacked her.

    Rinder tries to blame the victim or claims she’s exaggerating, even though medical and EMT reports confirm she sustained injuries.

    Rinder has never apologized. Like most domestic abusers, he tries to blame the victim or claims she’s exaggerating, even though medical and EMT reports confirm she sustained injuries in the confrontation with him. A&E and its corporate parents, Disney and Hearst, have no “zero tolerance” policy when it comes to domestic abuse. So far they have refused to investigate Rinder’s abuse of his ex-wife who required surgery and has permanent nerve damage. Any responsible television network would investigate and fire the perpetrator. But not Mike Rinder or his bosses at A&E, Disney and Hearst. They turn their backs on documented evidence of spousal abuse while spouting undocumented lies to keep the money rolling in. SEE THE LETTER FROM RINDER’S FORMER WIFE OF MORE THAN 30 YEARS TO PAUL BUCCIERI.

    Supporting Rinder is deadbeat loser and wife-beater Tom DeVocht, another Remini retread. DeVocht is a first-rate admitted liar who will say anything for cash. “Lying was not wrong unless I was caught out and couldn’t lie my way out of it.”—TOM DEVOCHT

    This five-time member of Leah’s “dream team” and proclaimed “sweetheart” has perfected the art of lying on command. In fact, he has shown by his conduct and statements that he won’t stop spewing lies until the Church pays him off.

    As his ex-wife stated, “Tom DeVocht’s personal moral code is to lie. He will say what somebody wants to hear in order to gain some advantage for himself. If there’s something he’s gonna get out of it, whether it be money, whether it be admiration, whether it be someone thinking he’s cool, whether it be some more power—he will say it, he will do it. The consequences don’t matter to him. The only thing that matters is he doesn’t want to be caught.”

    Both Rinder and DeVocht not only lie to cameras, they teamed up to coach people to lie in a legal case and hid it until years after they had left the Church. According to Leah Remini’s former mentor Marty Rathbun, DeVocht and Rinder were accomplices with him in suborning perjury in a legal case.

    As recently as this week Remini used social media to try to blame the Church for this case when all she had to do was look over to her sidekick and episode guest of her show to see the real culprits. Rinder and DeVocht conspired to commit the criminal act of suborning perjury, which remained covered up for more than a decade until Rathbun blew the whistle on them in a newspaper interview.


    Remini’s use of DeVocht to opine on marriage and family values is a joke. This is someone who stole cash from his bride’s grandmother on their wedding day. He sold two of his wife’s cars without her knowledge and spent the money on himself. DeVocht squandered $100,000 of his wife’s inheritance without bothering to mention it. He also is a violent man who once dragged his former wife down a hallway by the hair.

    As for children, the Seattle Police Department in 2015 reported that DeVocht called them concerned about his three-month-old daughter. The police report states that DeVocht said of his then-girlfriend and mother of his child that he “believed that she had been exposed to narcotics, specifically cocaine.” Of course, A&E and Leah Remini don’t want to admit such pertinent details.

    The real Tom DeVocht story is that he was caught wasting funds as construction supervisor, leading to his demotion and removal by the Church leader some 14 years ago. DeVocht had also sought to gain favor with a real estate broker to obtain football tickets by enlisting a convicted felon to broker a Church property acquisition. DeVocht then allowed himself to be conned into helping the felon secretly acquire a sister building he then defaulted on—losing both the building and $1 million when the broker walked away from it. Naturally, A&E will never disclose to viewers that DeVocht is a deadbeat looking for a payday by lying about his former Church and the person who removed him for malfeasance.

    Which leads us back to Leah Remini and one of the few things she said that was true: “I’m just a crappy, has-been actress who is trying to make a dollar off my church.”—LEAH REMINI

    Remini disclosed to her former confidant and guru, Marty Rathbun, that her reality show is not reality. It is planned and scripted. As Rathbun stated, Remini told him:

    “Listen, that’s how it works, honey, doll, that’s how you do it. It’s not reality. I plan out all these episodes and we figure it out beforehand who’s going to say what and who’s going to do what, and we, what do you think, I’m just going to put a camera on myself?”—LEAH REMINI


    Leah Remini of course has no firsthand knowledge. She just pays people such as Rinder and DeVocht to recycle their lies so she can generate more hate for a religion she embraced for over 30 years. Since Remini can’t cook up anything new to rant about, she serves stale leftovers. Together, they are just three money-hungry trolls trying to squeeze cash out of hate and bigotry aided by a network where integrity is always the missing ingredient.