News anchor claims he was fired after Scientology complaints

TV anchor and New York City native Dodge Landesman thought he had a thick skin after a stint as a 15-year-old freestyler rapper on the VH-1 reality show “Ice-T’s Rap School” and a failed run for a NYC council seat when he was only 18.

But, he alleges, he was no match against the Church of Scientology.

Landesman, the son of longtime Broadway impresario Rocco Landesman, told The Post he was fired from his $30,000-a-year job as a morning anchor at KYMA in Yuma, Arizona, last month. The 32-year-old claims he got the boot after a Scientology spokeswoman complained about a story he did involving the late Lisa Marie Presley, the church and Danny Masterson.

“Everything had been smooth sailing,” Landesman said of his two months in Yuma, which he came to after going to grad school for journalism and working at several other small stations around the country. “I’d gotten really good feedback and not a single reprimand. I felt good and I respected my co-workers and news director.”

Landesman said he wrote the script for the 1 minute, 45 second piece — which he presented on air Jan. 16 and also wrote for the station’s website, but which now has been taken down — because he felt Presley should be remembered for standing up to Scientology.

Presley, who is said to have joined Scientology at age 10 at the behest of her mother, Priscilla, reportedly left the church around 2012.

Landesman’s piece, which he admitted was not vetted by KYMA bosses although he said the rarely checked what he said on air beforehand, was titled “Lisa Marie Presley was planning Scientology takedown before her death.”

Presley was allegedly preparing to testify for the prosecution in the original rape case against Masterson — allegedly to say that she’d been pressured by Scientology to convince one of Masterson’s accusers not to report him to the police — but when the judge limited the scope of her planned testimony, prosecutors decided not to call her. The case ended with a hung jury on November 30. She died Jan. 12, two days after the LA District Attorney announced plans to re-try Masterson.

Masterson, 46, a lifelong Scientologist, had been charged with three counts of forcible rape over incidents that occurred between 2001 to 2003 and involve three accusers, all Scientology members at the time. Masterson has denied the charges and insisted that any sexual encounters were consensual. 

“It’s important to dig a little deeper into the death of Lisa Marie Presley,” Landesman wrote. going on to explain that Presley and Masterson had at one point been friends but then she left the church around 2014 and seemed ready to reverse course “to show up and testify in support of her friend [who was one of Masterson’s alleged victims].”

Veteran Scientology reporter Tony Ortega called the piece “essentially correct.”

He added, however:  “Look, Landesman’s piece wasn’t great. It didn’t really get the details right about Presley’s involvement in the Masterson matter. But essentially, it was correct that she was, at one point, planning on exposing Scientology’s wrongdoing after having been involved in it for many years.”

Landesman said that longtime Scientology spokeswoman Karin Pouw phoned him the afternoon after the piece aired and asked him to remove it. He said he told her he would look into it but did not take it down. Pouw called two hours later and left a voice message that Landesman shared with The Post, in which she asked him again to delete the piece.

Pouw called the following day as well, and then Landesman was called in by his bosses, the news director and the general manager.

“They said it looks really bad and sloppy and they asked for my sources,” Landesman told The Post. “I told them I got the information from Variety and other reliable sources. They said they were going to fight for me to keep my job with corporate and I thanked them.”

But a few days later Landesman said his bosses told him he was too reckless and opinionated — and fired him.

“They also said corporate was afraid of a lawsuit,” Landesman said. “It was because they got scared of Scientology. They decided to cower to a paper tiger worth billions of dollars.”

Scientology has not sued a media outlet since they lost a major libel lawsuit against Time magazine for its 1991 cover story, “Scientology: The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power.”

News director Ernesto Romero said in an email to The Post that the station doesn’t comment on personnel matters and that the editor’s note that replaced Landesman’s story online speaks for itself.

The note reads: “In an exercise of editorial discretion, NPG of Yuma-El Centro Broadcasting, LLC has elected to unpublish this piece. After careful review, and given information that came to light after the piece was published, NPG of Yuma-El Centro Broadcasting, LLC has determined that it can no longer stand behind the piece because, among other things, it contained aspects of opinion by the author.”

Landesman sounded philosophical about his sudden unemployment.

After several years of bouncing around small stations as an anchor and reporter — making between $18,000 and $29,000 at stations in Caspar, Wyoming; Salisbury, Maryland; and Midland, Texas — Landesman said he’s done with “mainstream” media and hopes to strike out on Youtube and TikTok as an independent journalist.

“TV news is falling apart,” he said. “Nobody under 65 watches it and you can see why. Everything we did had to be cut and pasted from the networks and they didn’t want anything original. It’s a sad state of affairs. I want to go out there and tell the truth.”

The Church of Scientology did not respond to a call and email from The Post.