Elfman naively jumped on Reddit to promote her new ABC comedy, Imaginary Mary. The Dharma & Greg actress is also a Scientologist. It should have been an easy and relatively painless hour or so of Elfman’s likely limited time. Instead she was bombarded with trolling questions about Scientology, from questions asking if she was safe doing this interview:
To whether or not she would allow her kids to join Sea Org:
And if she knew where David Miscavige’s wife was, a reference to a disturbing revelation in Leah Remini‘s docu-series:
In a moment of impressive self-aware trolling, Elfman was even asked why her AMA thread was so savage. The fake questions became so bad, they started affecting legitimate ones. The thread’s moderators, who were downvoting planted questions allegedly sent by Scientologists, starting downvoting questions that looked planted and were from day-old accounts. The most upvoted comment in the thread alludes to this, asking “Jenna, why did all the new accounts leave at the same time you did? Are y’all having a fire drill on the boat?” That comment has now been upvoted over 400 times.
Right now, the thread is filled with so many Scientology insults disguised as questions, you can’t see any of Elfman’s actual responses. However, the actress did get to respond to a handful of questions, mostly about general AMA topics such as her favorite movies and bands and her family. If you wade through the never-ending string of Scientology trolls, it’s a pretty good interview. For her part, Elfman ignored all of the Scientology digs.
It’s not entirely surprising that Reddit would respond this way, and not just because the site has a history of trolling celebrities. When Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath was airing new episodes, recaps and discussions of new information dominated Reddit, particularly the sub r/television. Remini actually did an AMA on the site, which was upvoted more than 97,000 times. Long story short, Reddit doesn’t take Scientology seriously, and Elfman’s agent should have probably done some research before setting this thing up.