The Unbreakable Miss Lovely: How the Church of Scientology tried to destroy Paulette Cooper

by Tony Ortega

  But her favorite topic was pets. “Dogs don’t sue you and cats don’t harass you,” she liked telling people.

  If the books that were published in the wake of L. Ron Hubbard’s death struggled to reach an audience because of Scientology’s legal tactics, the church was rocked even harder by newspaper and magazine investigations.

  A series five years in the making by Joel Sappell and Robert Welkos that appeared over several days in 1990 in the Los Angeles Times hit the church right where it was headquartered. It was one of the most thorough newspaper investigations ever done of the church, and introduced many people to the “Xenu” story and other strange Scientology beliefs.

  But it was a magazine story the next year that changed everything. Richard Behar’s 1991 article on the cover of TIME magazine – “The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power” – put Scientology in the national spotlight like nothing since the 60 Minutes broadcasts years earlier. Behar’s story contained a sidebar about his experiences with harassment while he was preparing the story, and it opened with a reference to what Paulette had been through.

  Behar’s ordeal was just beginning. Scientology chose to draw a line in the sand over the TIME story, and filed suit for $416 million, claiming that Behar’s story had defamed the church and was a pack of lies. Ultimately, the suit was dismissed, but not before TIME spent about $8 million defending itself. Behar suffered some of what Paulette had been through, sitting through 28 days of depositions.

  While TIME won its legal battle, Scientology’s aggressive legal tactics had never been more clearly on display, and the rest of the country’s news industry got the message. Some 15 years after the FBI raid and the subsequent publication of documents exposing Scientology’s brazen infiltration of government, the country’s media greatly reduced its examination of Scientology for fear of a legal catastrophe like TIME’s successful defense. Except for a few exceptions – like Richard Leiby at the Washington Post – America’s mainstream media shied away from Scientology stories for the next fifteen years.

  But at the same time, a new outlet for Scientology news was just beginning to grow. The same year Behar’s story was published in TIME, on an early Internet news service called Usenet, a man name Scott Goering started a newsgroup called “alt.religion.scientology.” ARS grew only gradually at first, but within a few years it became the most active place to get information about Hubbard and Scientology.

  In December 1994, someone posted information from Scientology’s highest-level teachings on ARS, information that the church jealously guarded (so that it could charge high prices for it, critics said). Scientology’s lawyers demanded that the material be pulled down, but by then a former church member named Dennis Erlich replied to the original postings, and his replies also contained the material the church claimed was copyrighted. Erlich refused to take down his posts.

  In January, Scientology attorney Helena Kobrin tried to have the entire newsgroup taken down by Usenet, but her attempt was met with derision and only made ARS more popular than ever. In February, the church convinced a federal magistrate that its trade secrets were being violated, and Dennis Erlich’s home was raided and his computer was hauled away. Other raids occurred, including some in Europe.

  Paulette Cooper didn’t know that such a major fight with Scientology was going on until a man named Ron Newman, a regular at ARS, called to see if she would object to the entire text of The Scandal of Scientology being posted online. She told him that anything that made Scientology unhappy would please her. But she also explained that she no longer owned the copyright to the book and so permission wasn’t hers to give—but she also wouldn’t object. As far as she was concerned, she said, she’d never spoken to him. She didn’t want the harassment starting up again, especially if this time it might be aimed at Paul, who was still doing so well at Lifetime. Newman took the hint and had someone post the book without reference to Paulette’s wishes.

  For Paulette, it was her first awareness that the battle of critics against Scientology was taking a new form. After talking to Newman, she began lurking at ARS, silently watching the battles taking place there. She couldn’t help feeling a thrill when she noticed people talking about her.

  “Paulette Cooper was a real hero,” one poster said, and Paulette couldn’t stay silent any longer. She posted a thanks under her real name, but it wasn’t uncommon at ARS for people to assume fake identities to make jokes online. Her post was ignored.

  On July 26, 1995 – her 53rd birthday – she finally announced her presence at ARS in a statement that left no doubt that it was really Paulette Cooper. It was her first public utterance about Scientology since her settlement a decade earlier.

  She said that she was promoting her newest book (277 Secrets Your Dog Wants You To Know), and that she only spent a few hours online each week through her AOL and Compuserve accounts. She explained that she planned to check in at ARS from time to time, to discuss what was happening with Scientology, “and why I think it’s futile to fight them now.”

  She felt that way because two years earlier, in 1993, Scientology had won its 26-year battle with the IRS to regain its tax-exempt status, sparing the church a billion-dollar tax bill that it had been unable to pay. With its status as a church recognized by the government, and the media chilled by the TIME lawsuit, Scientology seemed more invincible than ever, Paulette believed.

  In May 1996, she cleared up several ARS misconceptions about The Scandal of Scientology and some of the things that had happened to her. She also revealed that she’d been hearing from people who thought she ought to be doing more to publicize Scientology’s abuses. “I know some of you have expected me to do more, and some have written asking me to do more. But I feel that I did more than my share, and I want to continue to enjoy my harassment-free life,” she wrote.

  Reading and occasionally contributing to ARS appealed to Paulette because it seemed only quasi-public. It wasn’t the same as talking to the press about Scientology, and the number of people who were even aware of the information published at the newsgroup was relatively small. Paulette wasn’t looking for more publicity. What she craved was simply the companionship of other people who understood and wanted to talk about Scientology.

  But Paulette got more than she bargained for at ARS. Several of the newsgroup’s participants were known for their researching skills. The best way to publicize Scientology’s abuses, they believed, was to dig up original documents and cut through the layers of hearsay and gossip about what had really happened in church history.

  Two of those researchers, Diane Richardson and Keith Spurgeon, dug into Paulette’s story in a way that had never been done before. They soon found some of the discrepancies between the popular understanding of Paulette’s story and what records actually showed.

  They also dug up the 1976 settlement that Virgil Roberts had worked out for Paulette, went to Boston to pull the Bast tapes out of storage, and also found her 1985 affidavit that accused Michael Flynn of extorting the church.

  Placing material from each on ARS, sometimes without any context at all, it appeared to be a drumbeat against Paulette. Other posters seemed bewildered. Why target Paulette now, a decade after she’d stopped fighting Scientology?

  The truth was, Paulette Cooper had made some mistakes. She’d walked right into traps set for her multiple times. Long after she had written her book about Scientology as a journalist, she had become an outright foe to the church and talked like one. By the time Richard Bast secretly taped her in 1980, Paulette wasn’t even pretending to be an objective journalist anymore. She’d been harmed, and she wanted payback.

  By 1984 she also believed that Mike Flynn was no longer working in her best interest, and she had lost all respect for him when she worked out her own settlement in 1985. Partly, Paulette had a tendency to end up in disputes with the attorneys she hired. (She once totaled it up and she had worked with 40 lawyers on her 19 lawsuits. She remained friends only with Albert Podell and Fred Barnett, and had go
od things to say about Virgil Roberts and Paul Rheingold. The rest she would rather have forgotten.) But also, she never knew that she’d fallen for another Scientology operation when Marty Rathbun spread information that convinced her that Flynn was going to sabotage her.

  Concerned about the way Paulette was being portrayed on ARS, one participant, Shelley Thomson, asked her to go through some of the Bast tape transcripts and explain them for an interview. What did she mean, for example, when she was heard in 1980 talking about “comfortably lying” in depositions?

  Paulette explained that it was a reference to preparing in an intelligent way for a deposition – something John Seffern had taught her because he felt she was giving away too much in her previous testimony.

  In another line from the 1980 transcript, Paulette was heard describing a plot to have drugs planted in the DC church: “Let me make a few calls back in New York to a couple of my kookiest friends and see if we can’t get some LSD tablets also.”

  How did she account for that? Paulette explained that she was only telling Bast what he wanted to hear – the drug caper was his suggestion, she said. And she never really did anything about it.

  The Bast tape transcripts were brutal, and at times in her 1996 interview Paulette struggled to explain herself. Still, she stuck around on ARS. On August 1, Paulette announced that Robert Kaufman had died on July 29. He was 63. She had seen him play at a piano recital just the year before, but they had not been close for many years.

  In 1997, Paulette began putting accounts of her 1970s harassment online. But over time, she appeared less and less at places like ARS. She had mostly gone quiet again, at least online.

  She had found a surprising new avenue for her Scientology stories: She wrote a one-act play about her frame-up. Heavy on one-liners, “The Perils of Paulette” was staged in 1997 as a one-woman performance and won a Chicago Dramatist Award. Then she rewrote it for four players and in 1999 had it read at the New York chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences at an HBO screening room. Her script not only presented her story through comedy, but also developed its plot around the notion of a romance with Jerry Levin, the church’s spy.

  At one point in the play, Paulette has her exasperated, unnamed lawyer say, “Great. A jury’s really going to like a kinky 30-year-old woman who puts down a church, isn’t married, isn’t a virgin, doesn’t live at home with her parents, produces books instead of children, smokes pot, and travels all over the world alone.”

  Over the next several years, Paulette never got entirely away from Scientology. When journalists wrote about the controversies of the church as a new century dawned, they might get an encouraging e-mail from Paulette, urging them on. But she generally kept under the radar.

  In 2004, Paul and Paulette moved to Florida. Her parents had been living in Palm Beach for 20 years. She wanted to be close to them as they lived out their last years. Her relationship with her mother, so contentious for so many years, was now as warm as it had been when she was a small child.

  Stella admitted, for example, that she’d felt great pride when Paulette, along with TIME magazine writer Richard Behar, was given the ‘prestigious Conscience in Media’ award from the American Society of Journalists & Authors in 1992.

  Paulette had always craved the admiration of her parents, even into their old age. But she also had the admiration of many other people. James Randi told Paulette that Martin Gardner had said he applauded her for what she had done. The man who had written the first book she read that exposed L. Ron Hubbard as a charlatan said that? She beamed for days.

  Then, she began gradually to speak out again. In 2007, she wrote a lengthy article about her experiences for Byline magazine, the publication of the New York Press Club, and it got noticed. By then, media interest in Scientology was growing again, spurred largely by the strange behavior of Tom Cruise, its most famous celebrity member. In 2005, the actor had suddenly become outspoken about the church, and it backfired spectacularly as the press finally began to go after a subject that had been somewhat taboo since the TIME lawsuit years before.

  In 2006, a lengthy piece by Janet Reitman in Rolling Stone got a lot of attention. A BBC documentary in 2007 had also caught fire, in part because its presenter, John Sweeney, lost his cool in a titanic shouting match with Scientology’s spokesman, Tommy Davis.

  And then, in January 2008, all hell broke loose. A nine-minute interview of Tom Cruise that Scientology had filmed as part of a 2004 celebration of the actor was posted to YouTube by longtime church critic Mark Bunker. Bunker quickly took it down, but the video had already gone viral and spun out to other sites. The interview showed Cruise talking like an enthusiastic Scientologist – which, to outsiders, was incomprehensible and strange.

  Scientology knew what a disaster it was, and threw its customary litigation tactics into gear, threatening websites with lawsuits if they didn’t immediately remove the video. But that only angered Internet activists, who were very familiar with the church’s attempts to curb ARS with the raids on Dennis Erlich, Bob Penny at FACTnet, and others around the world in the 1990s.

  After Scientology tried to pull down the Cruise video, the Internet pushed back in the form of Anonymous, a leaderless movement largely made up of web users who channeled their rebellious streaks through posting graphic images and otherwise doing things in the name of hilarity. Now, they had a cause. For many, their first impulse took the form of harassment and vandalism, and Scientology found its websites overwhelmed. The church even received some threats of violence.

  Mark Bunker, the old time critic who was the first to put the leaked Tom Cruise video online, then posted a video of himself explaining to Anonymous that the new attention on Scientology was welcome, but that harassment was only making things worse. Nonviolent demonstration was the way to go, Bunker counseled, and he was soon dubbed “Wise Beard Man.” The next month, in February 2008, Anonymous began peaceful demonstrations at Scientology facilities around the world.

  And Paulette Cooper suddenly started getting a lot more calls.

  Her story was still the one writers cited most often when they wanted to refer to Scientology’s history of retaliation against journalists and other critics. Paulette was ecstatic about the rise of the anti-Scientology group within the Anonymous movement. She knew that Scientology would be overwhelmed by critics who were so numerous, unidentified, and spread around the world.

  In an interview she gave in 2008, she said she was still hopeful that some of the people who had victimized her would someday come forward. “I’ve always been surprised that the people who did some of the really serious things against me, the ones who really hurt me and my life badly, have never come out and apologized to me. I’m still waiting if you’re out there,” she said.

  In May 2011, Paulette heard that Tom Cruise was going to be given a humanitarian of the year award by the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. It enraged her.

  “Who will they award next? Mel Gibson for his anti-Semitic rants?” she said in a statement that was published by The Village Voice.

  The Voice then followed that up later in the year with a lengthy piece about Paulette’s frame-up and harassment. Another story in the Voice mentioned that even in 2011, Paulette and her sister Suzy were trying to put together the narrative of their childhood in Belgium. That article was noticed by European newspapers, which did their own stories about Paulette.

  After those stories appeared, Paulette received several e-mails from Europe. One of them asked if her father had been a Polish leatherworker.

  She dismissed it – she believed that her father had been a music lover and a tailor.

  But something about the e-mail stayed with her. She reread it that night. The sender had asked if her mother’s last name was originally Minkowski – a fact that very few people knew. She pulled up the news stories, which had been published in Belgium and the Netherlands, but none of them had the name “Minkowski” in them.

  She called her sis
ter the next morning. “Wasn’t our father a tailor?” she asked.

  “He worked in leather,” Suzy answered.

  A chill ran down her spine. Paulette realized that the e-mail sender knew things about her biological parents that even she didn’t know. She answered, and made contact with the family of Sijbren de Hoo. The family still had Sijbren’s things, knew his stories, and even had a leather article that Paulette’s father had made for him – a bookcover, which they sent to her.

  The Voice then, with the de Hoo family’s help, put together the first full telling of Paulette’s actual Holocaust experience. And for the first time, Paulette discovered that her father Chaim Bucholc had been arrested four days before she was actually born – he had never set eyes on her. The news devastated her.

  And if there were details that crucial to her story that had never before been fully explored, what else in Paulette’s story might still need to be set straight?

  How, for example, did her fingerprint end up on one of the bomb threat letters? And how were the letters typed on Paulette’s typewriter if she didn’t do it herself?

  Paulette had spent a lot of time wondering how her cousin Joy Heller’s stationery might have been stolen from her apartment. Joy kept a pile of it with her other things in Paulette’s living room and wrote letters to her mother often. When she wasn’t there, Joy would toss her stuff in a corner – and Paulette sometimes did that herself. It was possible that she could have left fingerprints on Joy’s stationery as a result.

  But the odds of Margie Shepherd or anyone else picking up a piece of Joy’s stationery that just happened to have Paulette’s fingerprint on it were exceedingly slim.

  Besides, trying to source the stationery used for the bomb threats was a red herring. What appeared to tie the second bomb threat letter to Paulette was not the paper it was written on, but the fingerprint that was on that paper. The stationery could have come from anywhere, and not necessarily from Paulette’s apartment.