2004: Scientologist Jenna Elfman with Sea Org Executive Kurt Weiland and US Congressman Xavier Becerra at the annual Scientology Celebrity Centre Gala.
As California voters go to the polls in the June 2 gubernatorial primary, Xavier Becerra has spent the closing weeks of his campaign answering for something he had managed to keep quiet across thirty-five years in public office: a documented record of lending the prestige of elected office to the Church of Scientology and the financial apparatus it operates behind its “social betterment” facade.
The credit for surfacing that record belongs to two journalists. Tony Ortega, at his Underground Bunker, assembled the chronology after a Yashar Ali tweet in April prodded readers to ask what Becerra’s history with Scientology actually was.
Xavier Becerra, the man who protected Scientology for years?
The man who was so trusted by David Miscavige that he would reference him in private conversations as someone to reach out to when the organization needed something?
That guy? https://t.co/2DsRl2WpGX
— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) April 11, 2026
Jennifer Wadsworth of The San Francisco Standard then took Ortega’s findings to the campaign and pried loose the first on-the-record disavowal Becerra has ever offered.
What follows is built on their reporting.
In November 1997, then-Representative Becerra spoke on the House floor in support of House Concurrent Resolution 22, a measure rebuking Germany for its treatment of Scientologists.
To make the case, he cited the asylum granted by a Tampa immigration judge to a German Scientologist named Antje Victore — a case that Stern magazine later exposed as a fabrication, with the supporting letters forged by fellow Scientologists. A former Office of Special Affairs officer, Klaus Büchele, confirmed to Ortega in 2024 that the Victore matter was a deliberate stunt run to embarrass the German government.
In 2000, Becerra helped dedicate the new international headquarters of the Association for Better Living and Education on Hollywood Boulevard, telling the assembled Scientologists, per the church’s own Freedom magazine, “You revive Hollywood… This is just the beginning.” He was introduced that day by ABLE president Rena Weinberg.
In 2003, he appeared as a featured speaker at the Hollywood Celebrity Centre’s anniversary gala, photographed laughing with actress Jenna Elfman and Scientology executive Kurt Wieland, and telling the room to “keep the flame of freedom burning brightly.” Scientology’s Freedom magazine, characteristically indifferent to detail, identified the Democrat as “Xavier Becerra (R-CA).”
In 2016, his congressional office sent representatives to a Capitol Hill ceremony for Youth for Human Rights, another Scientology front group. Scientology’s PR release said of the event, “Representatives from the offices of Congressmen (sic) Xavier Becerra of California and Congressman David Jolly of Florida presented the volunteers with 2016 President’s Service Awards.” Photo from the PR release:
These facts are not in dispute. The campaign has not denied any of them. What it has disputed is what they mean.
Scientology’s Association for Better Living and Education (ABLE) and What Becerra was Actually Dedicating
Here is what the conventional coverage misses. ABLE is not a charity that Becerra happened to commend. It is the licensing and reputation-laundering shell that sits atop Scientology’s network of front groups — Narconon, the drug-rehabilitation operation; Applied Scholastics, the curriculum-licensing arm; Criminon; and The Way to Happiness Foundation, which distributes L. Ron Hubbard’s moral code. ABLE is staffed by Sea Org members who sign billion-year contracts and are paid, when they are paid at all, on the order of fifty dollars a week. Its institutional purpose, as former executives have described it for years, is to package Hubbard as a humanitarian and to prepare the broader culture to receive Scientology.
The brutal chain-smoking cult leader L. Ron Hubbard was publicly praised by Xavier Becerra. Why did Becerra, who served as California’s Attorney General, fail to do even a basic legal and background investigation into Hubbard, Miscavige, and Scientology? Photo AI enhanced and colorized by the Scientology Money Project.
When Becerra dedicated the ABLE building “to Mr. Hubbard,” he was not blessing a soup kitchen. He was attaching a sitting congressman’s imprimatur to the public-facing layer of a revenue and influence machine — the layer specifically engineered to convert Hubbard’s name into licensing fees, rehab placements, and the political goodwill that protects all of it.
That goodwill is the product. Scientology does not gladhand elected officials by accident; it does so as a matter of written policy. The return on a few minutes at a podium is precisely what Becerra delivered: a photograph, a quotable line, and the impression — broadcast to the membership in *Freedom* magazine — that the organization has friends in high places. For an outfit whose entire financial model depends on appearing legitimate, a congressman’s praise is not a courtesy. It is an asset, and a cheap one.
Becerra Deserted His Sworn Duties to Protect Victims of Abuse when he was the Attorney General of California
From January 2017 to March 2021, Xavier Becerra served as Attorney General of California. During this time, complaints were made to his office about the forced abortions in Scientology’s Sea Org; the trafficking of children into the Sea Org and the subsequent suffering they endured which included a lack of medical and dental care, a lack of education, and long hours of forced labor. AG Becerra did nothing to investigate the complaints made to his office about Scientology, human trafficking, children, or even the unsafe living conditions in Sea Org berthing.
As CA AG, Becerra’s office included oversight of the California Registry of Charitable Trusts — the state’s primary regulator of nonprofit and charitable organizations, including Scientology’s California-registered corporate entities and the ABLE front groups he had once helped dedicate.
This was not a passive office in his hands. The record shows an Attorney General who took charitable enforcement seriously: he sued a San Diego trustee in 2019 for misappropriating more than two million dollars in charitable funds, reached a seven-million-dollar self-dealing settlement against a foundation in 2020, and issued public alerts warning Californians to scrutinize how charities actually spend their money before donating.
That makes the silence conspicuous. There is no known instance of Attorney General Becerra’s office examining the financial conduct of Scientology’s California charitable entities — the same network whose flagship he had personally dedicated to its founder. Absence of a public action is not proof of favoritism, and this article does not allege one. But it is a fair and unanswered question: the man now promising, through his campaign, to “go after powerful institutions that prey on Californians” once held the exact regulatory authority to do so, and there is no evidence he ever used it on the institution he had publicly celebrated.
The Reckoning, and the Test
Confronted by Wadsworth with the full record, the Becerra campaign abandoned its earlier brush-off and produced a notably hard line. Spokesman Jonathan Underland told The Standard that the Church of Scientology is “facing the reckoning it deserves for decades of deception, abuse, and coercion,” argued that it is unfair to judge decisions made before the abuses were public record, and pledged that Becerra would “go after powerful institutions that prey on Californians.”
The historical claim is shaky. Anyone who came of age in California, as Becerra did, lived through the Los Angeles Times’ landmark 1990 series and Time magazine’s 1991 cover story, Scientology: The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power knew about Scientology.
Scientology’s abuses were not a secret revealed by Leah Remini in 2016; they were front-page news in Becerra’s own state before he ever took a podium for ABLE.
But the more useful question is forward-looking and financial. A statement issued through a spokesman to a local outlet on the weekend before an election costs nothing.
The real test of whether Scientology “won’t have a friend in Sacramento,” as Ortega put it, is whether a Governor Becerra would direct the instruments of the state — the Registry of Charitable Trusts, the Department of Justice, the regulatory machinery he already commanded once — at the financial architecture that makes the whole enterprise run. Words are aimed at a news cycle. The balance sheet is the thing that would actually feel a reckoning.
For now, Becerra has said the right words at the last possible moment. Whether they survive contact with the office he is seeking is a question the voters are answering today, and one the Scientology Money Project will keep asking long after the ballots are counted.
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