Masterson’s Ex-Stepdad Says His Kids Lied to Help Actor

Joe Reaiche told The Daily Beast he is considering suing his own children, claiming they perjured themselves in letters to a judge requesting leniency for their half-brother.

A day after Danny Masterson learned that he had been sentenced to 30 years to life in prison for forcibly raping two women, letters asking Judge Charlaine Olmedo for leniency on Masterson’s behalf became public.

Social media lit up with reactions to the letters written by Masterson’s former That ’70s Show cast members, Ashton Kutcher, Mila Kunis, Debra Jo Rupp, and Kurtwood Smith.

But Joe Reaiche, in Florida, was stunned by what he saw in the letters written by the actor’s younger siblings, Jordan and Alanna Masterson.

Jordan (Last Man Standing) and Alanna (The Walking Dead) are, like their older brother, actors, and they’ve used the Masterson name professionally throughout their careers. But they were born Jordan and Alanna Reaiche, and are half-siblings to Danny. They share a mother, Carol Masterson, but Jordan and Alanna are products of Carol’s second marriage, to Lebanese-Australian former professional rugby league player Reaiche (pronounced “reesh”).

Reaiche and his former wife met in Scientology in 1982 (Danny was 6, Christopher was 2), and they raised their children to be Scientologists as well.

In their letters to the court asking for leniency for their older brother, both Jordan and Alanna make it sound like their father abandoned them when they were very young, and Masterson stepped in to be their father figure.

The letters from Kutcher, Kunis, and Masterson’s siblings were written to the court after he was convicted on May 31 for the two rape charges. They acknowledge that Masterson is facing a harsh penalty, but they attempt to portray him as a thoughtful anti-drug warrior (something that is consistent with Masterson’s lifelong involvement in Scientology.)

It didn’t seem to faze his former cast mates that while Masterson may have preached drug abstinence to other actors, he was convicted of using drugs to incapacitate women whom he then violently raped.

Jordan and Alanna, however, have another version of their older brother. Rather than seeing him as an anti-drug preacher, they praise him as the father figure who stepped in when their actual dad, Reaiche, abandoned them at 6 and 4 years old.

“My son and daughter have very short memories about their dad,” Reaiche says. Reaiche has been telling his story about how Scientology excommunicated him and then his children “disconnected” from him for more than a decade now, initially on a national Australian television program.

“Carol filed for divorce in 1995 in Los Angeles. Jordan was born in 1986. He was 9, not 6. There’s the first incorrect thing,” Reaiche told The Daily Beast.

But more importantly, he says, is the outrageous suggestions by Jordan and Alanna which makes it sound like he had abandoned his children. The excommunication by Scientology (“declaring him a suppressive person”) didn’t happen until 2005, 10 years after the divorce, and in that decade Reaiche says he was still very much a part of his kids’ lives (including his stepchildren, Danny and Christopher), and was spending money on them.

“They make it sound like I walked out and abandoned them, and that Danny was the hero. They were actually making money, and I was giving them money. Carol was their manager,” he said.

In 1998, three years after the divorce, Masterson hit it big by landing his role in That ’70s Show, and he went house-shopping. He was dating a woman referred to in court as “Jane Doe 3” at the time, and Reaiche helped Masterson get his mortgage on the house on Hollyridge where the rapes would later occur between 2001 and 2003.

Reaiche says that throughout the period between the divorce in 1995 and Scientology’s banishment in 2005, he was a constant presence in his children’s lives.

“I paid for their summer school at that expensive Scientology school in Oregon, Delphi. That was $5,000 each. And I took them everywhere,” he said.

He estimates that he spent $300,000 on Jordan and Alanna in the ten years between the divorce and the excommunication.

“I slept on couches so the kids would be fine,” he said.

Jordan was 19, not 6, when Reaiche was banished by Scientology and his children cut off ties with him.

“Jordan seems to forget that in 2004, he was getting auditing at the Celebrity Centre and it was going badly. Carol asked me to do an ethics cycle on my son. So I did my thing, I straightened him out, and he did fantastic. So I was in his life in 2004, when he was 18. Danny even complimented me on it. I went to Christmas dinner with them at the house in Glendale that year, in 2004. Chris’ girlfriend, Laura Prepon, was there. I had dinner with them,” he says.

Then, in 2005, Scientology expelled Reaiche after holding a “committee of evidence,” which was something like a court martial dreamed up by its founder, former Navy lieutenant L. Ron Hubbard. When Reaiche tried to call his kids, he learned that they had been warned that he’d been declared a “suppressive person” by Scientology, and they wouldn’t take his calls. He has never heard from them since.

Jordan and Alanna and the rest of Masterson’s family, including his wife Bijou and his mother Carol, showed up in court day after day. Most of them are Scientologists. (An exception is their younger half-brother, Will Masterson.)

Scientology itself has notably refrained from saying anything at all about Masterson and the charges against him. Instead, the church has issued angry denunciations of Judge Olmedo for allowing testimony about Scientology in the two trials.

Specifically, the Jane Doe victims, who were Scientologists themselves at the time of the rapes in 2001 and 2003, say they had been raised to understand that Scientologists cannot turn each other in to law enforcement. Scientology has angrily denounced this as a lie in statements to the press, but a Scientology textbook that spells this policy out was introduced as evidence in the trial.

Reaiche believes that Scientology will continue to stand by the Masterson family despite the convictions. “They’re all about protecting their public relations,” he told The Daily Beast in a previous interview. “If they turn on Danny and they turn on the family now you’ve got Leah Remini times five.”

Still, he says, he was shocked to see how Jordan and Alanna, in their letters to the court, made it sound like he’d abandoned them in 1992, three years before the divorce.

“If they had said our parents divorced when we were 9 and 7, that would be one thing. But they say I left like I abandoned them. It’s bullshit,” he says. “They perjure themselves.”

And then, he said something that caught us by surprise. “I’m going to have to sue my children, unfortunately. That’s where this is going. It’s the only way I can clear my name.”

The Daily Beast asked for comment about Reaiche’s statements with the Church of Scientology and with representatives for Jordan and Alanna Masterson, but they did not respond.