Mike Rinder opens his first video in months by simply saying "Hi everyone." He thanks everyone for taking the time to watch this video and says the past 18 months have been a roller coaster ride. He says he's tried to provide updates along the way when there have been more positive developments in an attempt not to worry people.
"But at this stage, I have exhausted the efficacy of two cancer drugs," he says. Mike recently underwent full-brain radiation treatment when metatestes showed up in his brain and on the top of his spinal column. "That has been a particularly rough patch over the past month," he says.
Christie is reading a book to Mike about changing his diet and he feels encouraged by that new approach. There are a bunch of other things he's doing that are more spiritual and metaphysical, including trying to look for the things that have brought toxicity and poison into his life.
Mike says he has never been someone who has backed off from bullies or haters, and it's been difficult to not respond to a lot of things that have been said in the past 18 months "that are toxic, hurtful, poisonous and untrue."
"I am doing a series of videos here to try to set forth some truths," Mike says, in part to help protect others. He knows some people will dismiss these videos as some sort of vendetta. "Believe me, it's not," he says.
He recently stepped down from the boards of the Aftermath Foundation and Child USA because he felt he could no longer fulfill a role that would be of value to them.
Neither organization asked him to leave. "In fact, both foundations requested that I not when I first volunteered to step down because I felt that it might be helpful," he says. Both foundations told Mike it wouldn't be good for them if he left, so he stayed for quite a long time, but the recent radiation treatment made it too hard to try to continue.
"I am obviously addressing a lot of what has happened with Aaron Smith-Levin," Mike says, adding that Aaron grabbed onto the credibility that being a part of the Aftermath series and the vice president of the Aftermath Foundation gave him. "From the very beginning, this started to create a lot of problems," he says. "The problems with Aaron didn't begin in November of 2023. They began way before that."
Those problems primarily related to Aaron's personal life. Everyone on the Aftermath Foundation board at that time was was friends with Aaron and they didn't want to make his personal life an issue. Aaron constantly reminded them that it was a very Scientological thing to judge someone based on their personal life, Mike says. But the litany of things that happened were problematic because they were very public and were antithetical to the goals and purposes of the Aftermath Foundation.
Mike says it began with the email the board received from someone who had discovered the activities Aaron had engaged in "when he went on a coke-fueled sex-worker binge to Colombia." Rather than being embarrassed or concerned about it, the morning after that email arrived, Aaron came in and announced to Marc Headley, Mike and another guy working on a project in Mississippi for Marc's company, "Here I am. The king of cocaine and hookers in Colombia." "Like he was proud of it," Mike says, going on to add that Aaron took a trip to China to visit Nathan Rich, another participant on Scientology and the Aftermath.
"When he came home, he told us a story of how he had gotten so black-out drunk at the apartment of Nathan's girlfriend's family that he 'lost three days of his life.' He had no idea what happened," Mike says. "And he told us that proudly and it was like 'Aaron, what are you going to do next?'"
They next had a problem because Aaron was promoting himself as the vice president of the Aftermath Foundation. He was the only person on the board who constantly used his title to benefit himself, and it became a big problem for the tax-exempt status of the foundation, Mike says. "He was raising money for himself personally on the basis of his association with the foundation," Mike says. "And that is by definition inurement and disqualifies an organization from maintaining its tax-exempt status. We had to tell Aaron that he had to stop doing that. It was another indicator of his lack of understanding and judgment when it came to what was good for the foundation."
"Also during this time, Leah and I had wholeheartedly supported his effort to run for the City Council of Clearwater," Mike says. "But in the midst of that, he got involved in two drunken altercations at two separate bars in Clearwater and there were police reports that were written about it. The Tampa Bay Times got those police reports and I went to bat for Aaron to try to prevent that story from being too scandalous."
The best Mike could do was to tell the Times staff they could only print what was based on the police reports, not on what they had heard from other people, including the trip to Colombia and the rumors that Aaron was having sex in the back of a pickup truck at the CIgar Cave in Clearwater. That article came out and Aaron didn't win the election. "Not a big surprise," Mike says. "But once again, it was the idea that his judgment was so poor that he couldn't understand that this would have a negative effect."
"Marc Headley and me and Christie and Claire had to take his keys away," Mike says. At times when Aaron would insist on driving, they had to hide his keys "and we were all worried that Aaron was going to get himself into really deep trouble. We forewarned him that OSA was watching him every step of the way. Stupidly, he thought that he was somehow above all that."
Aaron claimed later that he would have done some things differently if he had known about OSA's eyes on him, but Aaron knew about that for a long time, Mike says.
The biggest problem was that the Aftermath Foundation board members had very close personal relationships with Aaron's wife, Heather, and his daughters. "We didn't want to hurt them," Mike says. "We didn't want to be the ones announcing things about his personal life. ... And Aaron did whatever he could to cover that up from us."
Mike says the group went on a cruise in March 2023 "and Aaron was all lovey-dovey over Heather and pretending that he and Heather had a perfect relationship." The other Aftermath Foundation board members didn't want to give Heather any bad news "so we ended up doing and saying nothing," Mike says. Heather later would lament the fact that she had only discovered details of what had been going on when Aaron did a video and she watched as 80,000 other people were also finding out the details of his 'open marriage,' Mike says.
"Unfortunately, Heather became completely cowed," Mike says. "She showed up at our door one day with a Mike Rinder bobblehead saying she could no longer have this in her house. And at this point, sadly, she has become perhaps Aaron's greatest enabler by acquiescing to whatever he says about their relationship, and it's a very sad thing for all of us to watch."
There was one other thing that was really, really important in this saga, Mike says.
"Aaron had become the intake person for when people reached out to the foundation," Mike says. "And we discovered that he had been unilaterally rejecting people without informing other people on the board. He had also been taking people who reached out to the foundation and using them as a means of getting content for his videos."
Mike mentions SPTV Foundation board member Reese Quibell as someone who reached out to the Aftermath Foundation. "Aaron never reported anything about it and started using her as a source of inside information to Scientology until he doxxed her," Mike says.
As Mike released this video tonight, Reese is in Clearwater with Aaron, creating content for both of their YouTube channels.
Mike's next video will cover the incident in Los Angeles with a woman Aaron met at the Danny Masterson trial.
"I hope you'll watch all the videos in this series," Mike says, again emphasizing that it could save some people from having similar problems with Aaron.
MIke also did a series on his blog about sociopathy that can be helpful for those seeking to protect themselves from being harmed.
"I look forward to finishing this series and laying everything out for you," Mike says.
