HATE WATCH | MAY 13, 2026

Aaron Smith-Levin, Aftermath Founding Board Member, Convicted and Jailed for Assaulting a Scientologist

Aaron Smith-Levin, a violent misogynist who, for years, has engaged in unhinged bigotry against members of the Scientology religion, has been criminally convicted and jailed for assaulting a Church staff member.

ASL arrest mug shot and conviction documents

On April 14, after a swift trial, Smith-Levin was found guilty of first-degree battery after assaulting a Scientologist outside the Church’s Information Center in downtown Clearwater.

Smith-Levin, who now has a lifelong criminal record, was ordered to spend 30 days in jail, serve 12 months of probation, remain at least 500 feet from all Church of Scientology properties in downtown Clearwater, and pay $875 in costs and fees.

As Mike Rinder said of Smith-Levin, “He’s going to take us all down with him.”

Inside Courtroom 20 of the Pinellas County Justice Center, Smith-Levin’s hands visibly shook as he was fingerprinted and taken directly into custody.

The assault was no isolated outburst for Smith-Levin, who describes himself as an “intimidating big guy” notorious for “being a hothead and getting into physical altercations.”

His own account of another violent episode makes that clear.

In May 2023, Smith-Levin decided he “need[ed] to get rid of” a woman with whom he had been having an affair, as he later freely admitted on YouTube. At the corner of West 7th Street and Spring Street in Los Angeles, he threw her against a stone wall, watched her head slam into it and then fled the scene, leaving his victim bleeding on the sidewalk.

“I’m 220 pounds. I mean, she’s probably a 110 soaking wet,” he said. “I see her head hit one of the corners of this building, and my first thought was, oh f—k. That actually looked pretty bad. She has a bloody head.

“And my second thought was, this is my chance to get away.”

As Mike Rinder said of Smith-Levin, “He’s going to take us all down with him.”

Smith-Levin is best known as a board member and vice president of Leah Remini’s Aftermath Foundation, the hate-for-profit enterprise created by Remini, Rinder and Smith-Levin to incite attacks on Scientologists while profiting from anti-religious bigotry.

Smith-Levin’s conviction is the predictable consequence of the racket he helped build—one that traffics in dehumanization, intimidation and violence against members of a minority religion.

Leah Remini herself has openly promoted the harassment and targeting of Scientologists, even threatening to use the “information” she has “on all of you” and “your famil[ies],” while boasting, “We have come after people who have supported Scientology.”

The consequences of that incitement are documented in hundreds of threats and acts of violence against Scientologists, their children and their families, including threats that Scientologists “need to be eradicated from the face of the earth,” that “someone needs to murder” the religion’s ecclesiastical leader “ASAP,” and that every Scientology center should be torched or blown up.

“You should all kill yourselves. Or come to my neighborhood and let me do it for you,” one Remini follower wrote.

Nor have the consequences remained rhetorical. A twice-convicted criminal armed with ammunition and gun paraphernalia threatened to assassinate the religion’s ecclesiastical leader, later admitting to authorities that Remini had inspired his plot. A woman drove her car through the front doors of a Church in Austin, Texas, stopping just short of the nursery, after calling Remini “a true inspiration.” And a 24-year-old Scientologist was fatally stabbed outside the Church’s Australian headquarters after, according to the killer’s mother, he had been incited by Remini’s anti-Scientology propaganda.

Smith-Levin is no exception—he is the rule. As Remini’s protégé and Aftermath’s vice president, he spent years attacking Scientologists. Now, like other anti-Scientology extremists, he has been convicted, jailed and ordered to stay away from Church properties after assaulting one.

When you look past the fake moral crusade of the anti-Scientology industry, this is what you find: an elaborate hate-for-profit scam and the criminals it attracts.

People who sell bigotry as virtue. People who incite and profit from violence.

People like Leah Remini and her Aftermath lieutenant, Aaron Smith-Levin.

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