by Tony Ortega
In April, when he learned about the declaration, Armstrong knew what he was probably in for. Investigations, harassment, maybe even something worse. He trusted Garrison, and turned over boxes of the Hubbard documents to him. He then copied about 10,000 of the documents for himself, and turned them over for safekeeping to his attorney.
He’d hired Michael Flynn.
On August 2, 1982, Scientology and Mary Sue Hubbard filed suit against Armstrong, accusing him of theft, and asking for the return of the Hubbard archive. Armstrong argued that he’d had to take the records as a form of insurance to guarantee his safety. Without them, he was afraid for his life.
When Mary Sue filed the suit, she was still appealing her conviction in the Snow White Program prosecutions. But a few months later, those appeals ran out. On January 8, 1983, she was ordered to a federal prison in Kentucky to serve a 40-month sentence, but only a year later she was released.
In May 1984, the Armstrong lawsuit went to trial, and Judge Paul Breckenridge presided over four weeks of testimony. After deliberating for two weeks more, on June 22 he made one of the most devastating assessments of Scientology ever put to paper by a judge.
“The organization clearly is schizophrenic and paranoid, and the bizarre combination seems to be a reflection of its founder, L. Ron Hubbard. The evidence portrays a man who has been virtually a pathological liar when it comes to his history, background, and achievements. The writings and documents in evidence additionally reflect his egoism, greed, avarice, lust for power, and vindictiveness and aggressiveness against persons perceived by him to be disloyal or hostile. At the same time it appears that he is charismatic and highly capable of motivating, organizing, controlling, manipulating, and inspiring his adherents. He has been referred to during this trial as a ‘genius,’ a ‘revered person,’ a man who was ‘viewed by his followers with awe.’ Obviously, he is and has been a very complex person, and that complexity is further reflected in his alter ego, the Church of Scientology. Notwithstanding protestations to the contrary, this court is satisfied that LRH runs the Church in all ways through the Sea Organization, his role of Commodore, and the Commodore’s Messengers. He has, of course, chosen to go into ‘seclusion,’ but he maintains contact and control through the top messengers. Seclusion has its light and dark side too. It adds to his mystique, and yet shields him from accountability and subpoena or service of summons,” the judge wrote.
As for Mary Sue, Breckenridge called her a “pathetic individual” who wanted the court to believe that Armstrong’s possession of her husband’s documents constituted a “mental rape” of her. Breckenridge pointed out that as Scientology’s “Guardian,” she had personally directed members of the Guardian’s Office to cull damaging information about church members from their confessional files for “internal security.” She really wasn’t in a position to complain about collecting private information about other people. And besides, he continued, Hubbard had clearly given Armstrong and Garrison permission to use his documents for the proposed biography.
It was a total victory for Armstrong, and assured that eventually, journalists and authors would have access to the documents that spelled out the uncomfortable realities of L. Ron Hubbard’s life.
From London, meanwhile, there was more bad news for the church. A child custody suit there had resulted in another judge denouncing Scientology. The case involved a Scientologist couple who had split up and were fighting over custody of their two young children. The mother and her new husband had left the church, the father had not. The mother and stepfather introduced a huge amount of material about Scientology, in part with the help of a man named Jon Atack who had recently left the church himself. Their goal was to convince Sir John Latey, Justice of the Old Bailey, that Scientology and its policies were so damaging, the father should not be awarded custody. After hearing testimony, Justice Latey agreed with them, and awarded the mother her children.
“Scientology is both immoral and socially obnoxious,” Latey wrote in his decision. “In my judgment it is corrupt, sinister and dangerous. It is corrupt because it is based on lies and deceit and has as its real objective money and power for Mr. Hubbard, his wife and those close to him at the top. It is sinister because it indulges in infamous practices both to its adherents who do not toe the line unquestioningly, and to those who criticize or oppose it. It is dangerous because it is out to capture people, especially children and impressionable young people, and indoctrinate and brainwash them so that they become the unquestioning captives and tools of the cult, withdrawn from ordinary thought, living and relationships with others.”
Latey made his decision public on July 23, 1984. The next day, Scientology held its press conference in Los Angeles accusing Mike Flynn of masterminding a fraud scheme against L. Ron Hubbard. Flynn said the timing wasn’t accidental: The church was doing its best to distract attention from the Breckenridge and Latey decisions, which each found Scientology to be rotten to its core.
When the New York Times reported on the church’s claims about Flynn in a September 3, 1984 story, Paulette Cooper denounced the accusations against her attorney. “Now they’re trying to do the same thing they did to me to Michael Flynn,” she told the newspaper.
In fact, Scientology had been trying to ruin Flynn for years, not only with the Al Tamimi declaration, but with multiple bar complaints and investigations and lawsuits. But at the same time, Flynn had not only attracted clients like Paulette Cooper and Gerry Armstrong and Ron DeWolf (L. Ron Hubbard Jr.), but also several others.
With the stunning Armstrong decision, Flynn seemed to have Scientology on the ropes, increasing the chances that Paulette would also benefit as Flynn handled several of her lawsuits from California to Boston. But that’s not how things turned out, because Paulette was becoming increasingly tired of being one of Mike Flynn’s famous clients.
18
Breaking away
Mark Rathbun had been a Scientologist for almost a year before he was allowed to go “Over the Rainbow” for the first time, in 1978. Before he could be taken to where L. Ron Hubbard was living, the man who was going to drive him there, Steve Pfauth, told Rathbun that he needed to come up with a code name. (Pfauth’s was “Sarge.”)
At the time, the Marty Robbins song El Paso was playing on Pfauth’s car radio, and it resonated with Rathbun. He asked Pfauth, who agreed with his choice, and ever since, most people have known Rathbun as “Marty.”
Rathbun was taken to Hubbard’s La Quinta ranch, but he never met the man himself. The closest he came to meeting Hubbard was hearing the man’s booming voice through the walls of his house as Rathbun sat on a lawn chair outside, guarding the place. But within a couple of years, Rathbun had risen quickly through the ranks until he was among the most trusted of the new generation of Scientology executives who were beginning to take over after the prosecutions of the Guardian’s Office.
The GO was associated with Mary Sue and her conviction and imprisonment, along with the other top GO operatives, which doomed the spy operation. Hubbard began to turn Scientology’s most essential operations over to a group of younger followers he’d been grooming for years – his “messengers.”
The first “Commodore’s messengers” had been young girls on the Apollo, like Tonja Burden. But some of them were teenage boys, and one of them, a short kid from south Philly named David Miscavige, was quickly rising as one of Hubbard’s most favored aides. After the Snow White prosecutions, the Sea Org and its Commodore’s Messenger Organization (CMO) took over real power from the Guardian’s Office and assumed its own legal and spy operations with a division called the Office of Special Affairs.
By 1981, that power swap was just about complete. And that’s when Hubbard asked his new young team to accomplish a lofty goal.
Hubbard had been in total seclusion for a year by then. No one saw him, except for Pat and Annie Broeker (two young executives who had come up through the CMO), but Pat Broeker made regular secret drops with David Miscavige at
pre-arranged locations in the San Bernardino area to deliver Hubbard’s latest communications. Miscavige, in turn, delivered Hubbard’s orders to the rest of Scientology. And in 1981, those orders included what came to be called The All-Clear Signal.
Miscavige put Rathbun on it, and Marty spent the next five years working exclusively on the project: To defeat or settle every single lawsuit or criminal investigation facing the Church of Scientology so that Hubbard could come out of hiding once and for all.
Rathbun was only 24, but he found himself overseeing dozens of legal actions for the church over the next several years. And one of his biggest headaches, naturally, was Boston attorney Michael Flynn and all of the clients he represented, who were suing Scientology for hundreds of millions of dollars.
Collectively, and with Flynn pushing the litigation, the group of defendants was a nightmare for the church. Rathbun decided the best strategy would be to pull Flynn’s clients away from him, one by one, and get them each to settle on more modest terms. Flynn was being demonized with the press and public to only limited success but the public didn’t matter. If Scientology could create doubt in the minds of his clients, it would make them easier to pick off.
By late 1984, Paulette was wearying of the whole thing. Despite Gerry Armstrong’s huge victory in Los Angeles that year, she felt stuck with Flynn, who seemed like he was the only attorney in the country who dared to take on Scientology cases. And Armstrong’s victory actually worried her: With so many clients in Flynn’s stable, she guessed that her slice of whatever ultimate financial victory might happen was getting smaller and smaller.
She also knew that her credibility had taken a big hit after the Bast affair, and wondered if she still had a realistic chance to get the same kind of clear victory won by Armstrong. And if Flynn had won a couple of rounds against the church, Scientology seemed to be fighting more aggressively than ever. Now it was consumed by two new big fights that didn’t involve Flynn – the lawsuits of Lawrence Wollersheim in Los Angeles and Julie Christofferson Titchbourne in Portland, Oregon. Each of them were former church members who were claiming that Scientology’s counseling processes were harmful, and the church was pulling out all stops to defeat them. (In each of the two cases, courthouses were mobbed by Scientologists making a big show of opposition.)
Despite Flynn’s victory for Armstrong, Paulette thought that his chances of winning for her were slipping away with the church fighting so hard against Wollersheim and Christofferson. It was an indication of how tired Paulette had become of fighting Scientology in court by 1984.
After reviewing her records, she found that over the life of all of her lawsuits, she had endured 50 days of depositions, many of them in blocks of five days in a row. They usually featured multiple church attorneys peppering her with questions. In one of them, she had faced five Scientology lawyers at the same time. They were always men, and there were few bounds about what they could ask. “How long does your period last?” they asked at one point. Another time, she was asked to give a stool sample.
“If you want one, you’ll get it – on your head,” she told the nervy lawyer. They stopped asking for it after that.
Much of the time, she was trying not to give them names of people she had talked to, people she knew would be harassed or sued if she named them. She would say she didn’t remember, even when that wasn’t entirely true. But that wore her down. She knew there would only be more days of depositions, more avoiding telling the truth, and she didn’t like what it was doing to her moral compass.
More than 20 of her friends had also been deposed simply because they knew her. And what they might be asked about her added to her stress. But the worst was that her parents had been pulled into the litigation and had also been questioned. Paulette worried that her father might keel over and die during the brutal interrogating. And she believed that was exactly what Scientology was hoping for.
She worried less about her mother, who was indignant about being questioned. She told Paulette that when she found herself in an elevator with one of the church attorneys, she asked him, “How can you defend people so low that if you lifted up a rock, the lowest thing that would slither out from under it would be your clients, the Scientologists?”
He paused, and then answered, “Because they pay me.”
“Whores get paid too,” her mother said to the stunned lawyer.
Besides answering questions in live testimony, Paulette was also sent countless pages of interrogatory questions – she figured at one point that she’d had to respond to about 50,000 of them. Some required actual research to answer, and others seemed nonsensical, like the one that asked her to name which nights she had lost sleep because of Scientology, and how much sleep she had lost. It was all so ridiculous, and costly, and exhausting, and time-consuming, and it was keeping her from writing and making a living.
As Marty Rathbun tried to come up with a way to neutralize Paulette, he wasn’t aware that she was so close to being ready to stop fighting. He believed that Paulette would be among the toughest to pull away from Flynn. She was the only non-Scientologist among Flynn’s clients, and she’d fought Scientology for so long and so viciously, Rathbun and his cohorts thought of her as “the Wicked Witch of the East.” There was almost no chance, he thought, that she’d want to play ball.
He didn’t realize that by 1984, she felt she’d done enough. She would even think on occasion about how she’d still like to get married and live a calmer life. So, in the end, it didn’t take very much at all for Rathbun to lure her away from her attorney.
Paulette heard it from the Cramptons, the couple she had been sued with over the celebrity auction in Los Angeles. They had a connection inside the church who claimed Scientology wanted to settle Paulette’s lawsuits, and was willing to pay $10,000. But the church said it hadn’t heard from Michael Flynn, and assumed there would be no deal.
Ten thousand? That must be some kind of joke, Paulette thought.
Paulette decided that if Scientology was willing to pay a small amount, it might be willing to pay a much larger amount. She decided to negotiate on her own, and to hell with Michael Flynn. She would pay him from what she negotiated rather than the other way around.
Flynn’s focus on a grand scheme featuring multiple plaintiffs was becoming an obstacle, and she needed to get herself out of it. She told the Cramptons to let it be known that she was willing to meet with Scientology legal affairs officer Lynn Farney. Tell them she wanted to talk, she said.
Marty Rathbun was thrilled when he heard. He then prepared Farney, and walked him through the steps of how he wanted to settle with Paulette. Paulette had no idea, of course, that it was Rathbun’s plan all along to pull her away from Flynn and have her negotiate a deal with Farney. She didn’t know that Rathbun – who was overseeing all of Scientology’s major litigation – was informed of every step of their talks as she sat down with Farney to talk numbers.
They met at Aiello’s Pizza Emporium on 32nd Street and 2nd Avenue. (“Aiello” would become a code name for their negotiations.) Paulette ordered Buffalo wings, which was a new treat at the time.
Paulette wasn’t sure what to think of Farney. In the 1970s, he’d played bass for Tower of Power when the group was already past its prime. Now he was balding, wore glasses, and seemed anxious – he seemed like the last person who would take a stage in front of a crowd. Rathbun had worked to give Farney a harder edge, to make him seem less mousy and come off more unreasonable and intimidating. But Paulette wasn’t intimidated. And soon, she began to think she was getting the better of him.
After they had talked for a while, Farney reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out an envelope. He put it on the table and pushed it over to her. She opened it and saw that there was a certified check inside made out to her for $50,000.
They didn’t think they could buy her off that easily, did they?
But then she noticed something. Farney’s shirt was made of such cheap lightweight material, she could
see through the pocket where several more envelopes were inside. When he pulled out another envelope, with another $50,000 check in it, she could clearly see that there were more envelopes still in his pocket.
What an idiot, she thought.
Eventually, nine envelopes came out of Lynn Farney’s pocket and were put down next to Paulette’s plate of chicken wings.
And she told him, no deal.
That night, Paulette drank champagne at Michaelina Martel’s Park Avenue apartment. The Romanian model was well known in Europe, and had had an uncredited bit part in a 1969 film, Stiletto. The long, narrow corridor into her place was lined with magazine covers and other photos of her life in front of a camera.
Michaelina had finally regained her health following a year spent in hospital after she was hit by a taxicab while rushing for a dinner with Burt Bacharach’s mother. Now she had found love with her young, handsome boyfriend, Greg, who played guitar while they sang.
Paulette drank and felt lighter and happier than she had in years. She was going to get out of this thing with Scientology, she now knew. She had just turned down $450,000 and would soon start a real series of settlement negotiations that would recoup the small fortune she had spent in lawyers and court costs over the years.
(Sadly, not long after the party, while coming home from an amusement park in New Jersey, Martel was seriously injured in a car collision that put her back in the hospital for months. Her boyfriend Greg, who was driving, was killed.)
The day after the party, Paulette turned to her old friend and attorney Albert Podell, who agreed to handle settlement negotiations with Farney.
She called Mike Flynn to tell him the news, but he was not happy to hear that the client he had been representing for four years was about to go it alone. His strategy had been to hold together a large group of plaintiffs and go for a huge global settlement. When Paulette told him the story about Farney and his checks, he said the amounts they were talking about wouldn’t even cover his bill. Paulette was stunned. He’d let her take nothing after what she’d been through and what she’d spent? She no longer cared about his larger strategy and the millions he was shooting for. She had found a way out.
