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VieBleu ago

This reporting adds weight to the Scientology connection and Duncan's reports of Scientology involvement. Apparently, the Vanity Fair piece wasn't written by the person it was credited to. It was written by a known Scientology "media informant" who has a background as a NYPD detective - name of Connelly.

Almost everyone interviewed for this story brought up a minor mystery connected to the authorship of "The Golden Suicides," which the SoMA review first addressed in a post that was picked up by New York magazine's Vulture blog. In it, SoMA's editor Spalding wrote that he was contacted by someone who was familiar with the reporting on the story and who said that she "was stunned to read that Nancy Jo Sales had the byline."

As it turns out, that person was LA Weekly's Kate Coe, who maintains that she always believed Vanity Fair contributing editor John Connolly to be the "author of record" and who shared some of her research with him when he first took on the assignment. Robin, who spoke to both Connolly and Sales, concurred that Connolly was the first to interview him.

Connolly, too, insists that the assignment was initially his and said that he had asked to be taken off the story after Sales became involved, because he felt her relationship with Morales was "too complicated." After Sales completed the story, Connolly had the option of taking an "additional reporting" byline but declined to do so.

John Connolly, as Gawker's own John Cook reported in a 2011 New York Observer story called "Was a Vanity Fair Editor Secretly Working for the Church of Scientology?", has his own bizarre connections to the church. (A Vanity Fair spokeswoman named Beth Kseniak confirmed to Cook that Connolly contributed to "The Golden Suicides.")

From the Observer:

The accusation comes from Marty Rathbun, who ranked so high in the organization before he left that he served as Tom Cruise's "auditor," or confessor, and Mike Rinder, Scientology's former chief spokesman. Both men have defected from the church and accuse its current leader, David Miscavige, of ruling through violence and terror. On February 15, Rathbun posted to his blog a lengthy internal church memo, purportedly written by Linda Hamel, chief of the church's faux-CIA "Office of Special Affairs," revealing Connolly to have secretly supplied intelligence to the church on the preparation of Andrew Morton's 2008 biography of Tom Cruise. According to the memo, Connolly approached Morton in 2006 under the pretense of writing "an article for Vanity Fair about the books Morton has done on celebrities including the one he is writing on Tom Cruise." He proceeded, the memo says, to pump Morton for information about his book and report it back to the church.

And while we have our tinfoil hats on, isn't it interesting that P.T. Anderson—who worked with Blake on Punch Drunk Love, remember, and introduced the artist to Beck—made a movie about Scientology in 2012?

"Never heard of these people," a representative of the Church said when Sales asked about the alleged harassment for her Vanity Fair article. "This is completely untrue."

http://blackbag.gawker.com/the-scientology-conspiracy-theory-about-two-artists-go-1691694049

confirmed here

http://observer.com/2011/03/was-a-emvanity-fairem-editor-secretly-working-for-the-church-of-scientology/

If the church is working this hard to run and spin the reporting on Duncan's suicide, her fears before her death are a lot more justified, and the suicide itself, possibly of both her and her boyfriend are called into question. And what does this say about Vanity Fair? Yet another media outlet infiltrated by forces that wish to publish controlled narratives to shape public opinion - another way to say "fake news".