On Monday, the man who was married to Jim Carrey’s ex-girlfriend, the late Cathriona White, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the actor accusing him of illegally obtaining the painkillers White used to commit suicide. Now, according to The Underground Bunker, two friends of White’s have come forward with allegations that her marriage was a scam undertaken so that she could obtain a green card.
The husband, Mark Burton is a lifelong Scientologist who was raised in the church. His stepfather is Duke Snider, one of the organization’s most notorious spies, who pleaded guilty to his involvement in the 1970s “Snow White Program,” where Scientology operatives plotted to infiltrate federal agencies in order to undermine their investigations. Burton, a cameraman, was part of a clique of young Scientologists who courted White, a makeup artist, urging her to take more and more courses at the Hollywood Celebrity Centre. Former Village Voice editor-in-chief and dogged Scientology expert Tony Ortega reports:
After Carrey and Cat broke up in 2012, Cat was desperate to find someone who would marry her so she could stay in the country, and she approached multiple Scientologist friends about helping her out with fake marriages before she quietly went to Las Vegas in January 2013 to marry Burton. (When she died last year, Cat had been living for three months in a Sherman Oaks home, and Burton lived hundreds of miles away in Oregon.)
In fact, marrying a friend for immigration status was something Cat White had talked about for years, even before she began dating Carrey. In 2010, two years before she started up with the actor, Cat and her friends staged a fake wedding with one of her fellow Scientologists in order to produce wedding photos that could be used to fool immigration authorities. Cat ultimately didn’t go through with marrying that man, but a photo from the event exists, and we have a copy.
Carrey maintains that the medicine, which was prescribed under a pseudonym, had been stolen from him and says he sent White a text message three days after her death asking where the drugs were. In a statement, he implied that Burton and his lawyer, Michael Avenatti, had filed the lawsuit as a shakedown attempt. Avenatti dismissed it as “nonsense from the Carrey spin team” and wrote on Twitter that “we will also be requesting that the Los Angeles DA’s office launch an investigation” into Carrey’s alleged role in White’s death.
This is not Carrey’s first tangle with the infamously vindictive Church of Scientology, which reportedly sought to convert him—despite the fact that he had mocked the church in his comedy—after rumors emerged in the early aughts that he was interested in the organization’s “detoxification” program. Former Scientology executive Claire Headley, who escaped Scientology in 2005, told Ortega that she was informed of the church’s efforts to capture Carrey by Shelly Miscavige, wife of Scientology leader David Miscavige, herself. From The Underground Bunker:
We asked Claire if, based on Scientology’s efforts to bring Jim Carrey in more than a decade ago, the church might have considered using Cathriona White to make another attempt at landing him.
“Honestly, I wouldn’t put anything past them in that regards,” she says. “We know that they’re getting desperate, and one of the few things they can do is get some more celebrities in. That’s always been one of their massive hooks to get people in. They tried it in the past, and they would do it again,” she says.
Court filings in Burton’s lawsuit against Carrey indicate that he intends to as the court to seize Carrey’s assets, “including his Gulfstream V private jet,” in advance of what would be a considerable judgement.