The inside account of the story that almost killed me.

looking
r
oover
veer my
shoulder
by Paulette Cooper
The inside
account of
the story
that almost
killed me.
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ou may not believe this, but
you can write something that
someone doesn’t approve of
and then—with the help of the
government—be bankrupted
and have a quarter of your life almost ruined. And you don’t have to live in China
or Russia. It can happen right here in New
York. I know because it happened to me.
I haven’t previously written about
this from beginning to end because it’s
still painful, but here goes.
In 1968, I was a struggling New York
freelance writer, searching for an investigative story that would make a difference. By choosing to expose a then
relatively unknown organization called
Scientology (and Scientology’s companion, Dianetics), I ended up facing fifteen
years in jail, had nineteen lawsuits filed
against me, did fifty days of depositions, was the almost victim of a murder, the subject of five anonymous
smear letters and endured almost constant and continual harassment for
Y
more than a dozen years.
It all started after I wrote an article,
“The Scandal of Scientology,” for Queen
magazine in the U.K. I had a master’s degree in psychology and had studied comparative religion at Harvard for a
summer and what I learned during my
research about the group founded by L.
Ron Hubbard was both fascinating and
frightening. The story cried out to be told.
I received one death threat after the article was published, but decided nonetheless to write a book on the subject. I
knew the Scientologists wouldn’t like
what I said but I was naïve and had no
idea of the horrors that lay in store for me
over the next two decades.
The Scandal of Scientology was released
by a small publisher, Tower Publications,
in 1971. After fighting five lawsuits
brought against them (and me) by the
Church of Scientology, the publisher
signed an apology and recalled the book.
However, I refused to be silenced and
the suits were soon directed at me, along
The author, in 1967. Little did she realize the
the turn her life was about to take.
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with death threats, pretexting and harassing calls. So why were they so
concerned about what a
young New York writer
had to say? No hard-hitting
exposé had ever been written about Scientology.
Among other things, I stated
that the crux of Scientology—
their e-meter, a machine that acts
like a lie detector—produced questionable results; that Hubbard had
lied about his background; that
Charles Manson had been a student
of Scientology (which was later proven
but which they didn’t want known);
and that some auditors had behaved
improperly. I also heavily quoted an
out-of-print “Report of the Board of
Enquiry into Scientology,” a devastating and detailed document published
by the Australian government in 1965.
Before long, strange people were trying to gain access to my apartment.
Around this same time, in the basement
of the building, I discovered alligator
clips on my phone wires—likely the remnants of a phone tap. Then my cousin—
who was also short and slim like me, was
there alone when a man arrived with a
“flower delivery.” When she opened the
door, the intruder pulled a gun out of the
flowers and put it to her temple. Fortunately, the gun jammed, misfired or was
empty. The man then began to choke her,
and when she pulled away and
I was named as a
likely suspect and
the next thing I
knew I was called
to appear before a
federal grand jury
in New York.
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The paperback cost less than a dollar. But
the price the author paid—both in torment
and in legal fees—was immensely more.
screamed, he ran off. The police said afterward that they were mystified, because there appeared to be no motive.
I immediately moved to a doorman
building. Not long after, some 300 of my
neighbors were sent an anonymous
smear letter about me. Among other
things, the letter outrageously described
me as a part-time prostitute and said
that I had once sexually molested a 2year old baby girl.
A few weeks later, in early 1973, I received a visit from an FBI agent named
Bruce Brotman. He said the spokesman
for the Church of Scientology in New
York, James Meisler, claimed to have received anonymous bomb threats and
named me as a likely suspect. The next
thing I knew, I was being called to appear
before a federal grand jury in New York.
Pulling together all the funds from my
freelance writing, I hired a lawyer and
paid him a retainer of $5,000. Little could I
have realized that the firm I hired, headed
by Charles Stillman, would ultimately
charge me $28,000 for their services—and
then sue me after the case was over for
even more money!
During the grand jury process, the
prosecutor, John D. Gordon III,
explained to me that I was
facing five years in jail for
each of the two letters that I
had supposedly sent, plus five
years if I perjured myself, plus
$15,000 in fines.
Then Gordon dropped the real
bomb. After I truthfully testified
that I had never touched or even
seen the semi-literate letters that he
presented before the grand jury
(dated December 8 and December 13,
1972), he asked me: “Then how did
your fingerprint get on one of them?”
I was so shocked I think I momentarily lost consciousness, because the
room turned upside down. I (rightly) explained that the bomb threats could
have been written on a blank piece of
paper that I had touched, and threats
typed afterwards by others.
But Gordon was unconvinced. On
May 9th, 1973, I was indicted on three
counts (two of sending two bomb
threats through the mail and one for
perjury for denying sending the threats)
by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the
Southern District of New York.
Ten days later I was arrested—even
more humiliating—released on my own
recognizance and barred from leaving
the state without permission “Who’d
want to go to New Jersey anyway?” I
joked with my friends. But inside, I wasn’t laughing.
I went into a perpetual pit-of-thestomach panic state. I could barely write,
and my bills, especially the legal ones,
kept mounting. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t
sleep. I smoked four packs of cigarettes a
day, popped Valium like M&Ms, and
drank way too much vodka.
Mostly, I worried obsessively about
jail. About fines. About my career. Up
to that point, I had been doing pretty
well. I had four books out or soon to
come out: The Medical Detectives, a book
on forensic medicine that today would
probably have been a best-seller; a children’s book; and a book on Puerto Ricans in New York.
But once the story of my trial came
out, what editor would give an assignment to a writer accused of sending
bomb threats to the people she wrote
about? I had wanted to be a writer since
I was eight years old, which is why it
was so painful when it appeared that
my career was about to be over.
I was also very concerned about my
parents. They had adopted me from an
orphanage in Belgium when I was six,
and I had always tried to make them
proud. However, I feared that soon
they would be humiliated by the allegations made during the trial.
I knew the prosecutors would stop at
nothing to dig up potentially embarrassing details of my private
life and I imagined that I’d be
fodder for the tabloids during the
trial, which was predicted to last
three weeks. I volunteered to
take lie-detector tests to prove
my innocence. But they returned
contradictory and inconclusive
results. Not surprisingly, the
tests also showed me to be highly
stressed.
My depression became so
bad that the man I had planned
to marry, a lawyer named Bob
Straus, left me early that summer. Most of my friends also
stopped calling. Fortunately, an
editor friend at the New York
Times stuck by me and kept me
on the phone for hours to stop me
from continuing to take the entire
bottle of Valium I had started the
night of my thirtieth birthday.
Another loyal friend was a
new one, an understanding
young man named Jerry Levin,
who moved in with me late that
summer.
Since I was too depressed to
go out much, he did my errands
and walked my dog while I compulsively watched the Watergate hearings.
Occasionally, he would get me to go up
to the rooftop pool with him at night
when no one was there. He would leap
up to the ledge surrounding the pool and
try to get me to join him.
“You have to be brave if you’re going
to take on those bastards,” he’d say. But
I huddled below, a shadow of my former adventurous self. I even became
suspicious of him, and when I questioned him, Jerry turned on me, saying I
had become so totally paranoid that I
could no longer even trust my closest
friend. I knew he was right, but it didn’t
help the hurt when he walked out of my
life, leaving me alone to face the trial.
I hired a private investigator, Anthony Pelicano—the same one currently being held in federal detention
in Los Angeles while he awaits trial for
racketeering and conspiracy. Not surprisingly, back then, he accomplished
nothing on my behalf. Meanwhile, the
court date, October 31, 1973, was drawing near.
Shortly beforehand, a university pro-
The ledge surrounding the rooftop pool of
Cooper’s apartment building: the perfect
spot for an “accident”?
fessor and researcher from Scotland, a
man by the name of Dr. Roy Wallis came
to interview me as part of a book he was
writing on Scientology. Prior to meeting
with me, he had interviewed L. Ron
Hubbard, Jr. During their meeting, Junior boastfully showed Wallis a copy of
a letter he had written to his father, L.
Ron Hubbard Sr., right before my frameup, saying that with one stroke, he could
“bring the enemy to their [sic] knees.”
Wallis, who’d been unaware of my
impending trial when he came to see me
brought this letter and more to the U.S.
Attorney’s office, which had a growing
file on Scientology’s “fair game law”:
that an “‘enemy’ of Scientology”—such
as me—”May be…injured by any means
by any Scientologist…May be tricked,
sued or lied to or destroyed.”
Despite this pile of evidence, once the
government arrests someone, it doesn’t
tend to back off. Nor do prosecutors like
to miss out on high-publicity
cases. So, in a last-ditch effort, I
started searching for a doctor to
give me a truth-serum test.
At a mere 83 pounds—fifteen
pounds lighter than my already
low normal weight and with my
health horribly off kilter—I was
told that I could die from the
anesthesia. But it was my only
hope. I honestly planned to kill
myself before the trial rather
than humiliate myself and my
parents once the news stories
came out. (Up to this point, the
press had not caught wind of
the upcoming trial, so there had
been no advance publicity.)
Finally, neurologist Dr. David
Coddon, of Mount Sinai Hospital
in New York, agreed to administer the serum. After several hours
of questioning me while I was
out, he was so convinced I was
innocent, that he said not only
would he testify for me, but that
he would chain himself to the
courthouse steps if they proceeded with this case. (Just what
needed; more publicity!)
On Halloween day, 1973, the
government canceled the trial. Between
the expert advice of Coddon, an affidavit from Wallis and the information
we had supplied on “fair game,” the
government apparently decided that a
victory for the prosecution was far
from guaranteed. The federal attorneys
agreed to file a nolle prosequi, on the
condition that I undergo a year of mental-health treatment, which I did. And
on September 16, 1975, the nolle prosequi was filed.
But this story was hardly over.
During the next four years, I remained broke and bitter, writing articles
for the National Enquirer to get out of
debt. In July 1977, I was thrilled—and
shocked—to read front-page stories in
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the Washington Post, the Boston Globe and
others, that indicated the truth might finally be about to come out.
Acting on an inside tip, the FBI had
raided three Scientology offices and
seized internal memos and “dirty trick”
papers. I rejoiced that the truth—my innocence—would at last be known. But it
took me four frustrating years (during
which time I wrangled with more
lawyers and unscrupulous private investigators than I care to count) before I
finally saw those documents. Scientology fought tooth and nail to prevent the
documents from being seen by the public. They knew that such an outcome
would be devastating publicity-wise
and lawsuit-wise
But my tenacity paid off. And when I
finally reviewed the documents, as I later
told Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes: “Scien-
By 1972, the author wears the stress of her
ordeal in her pained visage.
tology turned out to be worse than anything I ever said or even imagined.”
The seized papers contained hundreds of dirty tricks, plots and details of
infiltration, wiretapping and pretexting
by Scientologists against government
agencies (FBI, IRS, and so on) who had
angered them.
There were also details of attacks
against general critics (including Clearwater, Florida, mayor Gabriel Cazares, who
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had dared to speak out); the press (The St.
Petersburg Times especially) and of
course me, since I was the most outspoken critic of Scientology in America.
The most bizarre documents referred
to “Operation Freakout.” Its goal, they
wrote, was to “get P.C., [me] incarcerated
in a mental institution or jail or at least to
hit her so hard that she drops her attacks.”
It appeared that after the first frameup had failed to silence me or land me in
prison, they plotted again to make it
look like I was making bomb threats
against Scientology and others. Sounding eerily like the ‘72 letters, these new
missives were going to go out to Scientology, to Henry Kissinger, to Arab embassies (because I’m Jewish) and also to
a Laundromat! Go figure.
Other pages in the documents also
brought back unhappy memories. There
was a strange diary of what I did each day
during the “frame-up” period, and how
close I was to suicide. “Wouldn’t that be
great for Scientology?” the person wrote.
And then I realized the writer could
only have been Jerry Levin. He had to
have been a Scientologist, someone
who infiltrated my life specifically to
spy on me and help Scientology set me
up. He and his friends had been in and
out of my old apartment back during
that time period and had access to
paper on which someone could have
obtained my fingerprint and then
typed the threats.
Furthermore, I’ve always wondered
why he wanted me to go up on that
ledge with him, thirty-three stories
above the ground. Did he plan to push
me off? If he had, everyone would have
simply assumed that—in my depressed
state of mind—I had committed suicide.
Operation Freakout indeed.
As the ‘70s came to a close, a grand
jury in New York spent three years investigating my frame-up. Although I cooperated with the FBI, the case went
nowhere because the Scientologists
steadfastly refused to talk. Bizarrely,
they pleaded the First—not the Fifth—
Amendment, claiming freedom of religion. One Scientologist, Charles Batdorf,
was jailed for refusal to speak about my
frame-up.
But a simultaneous Washington, D.C.,
grand jury (and trial) ultimately led to
jail sentences for eleven Scientologists
who were involved in wiretapping, infil-
Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger,
seen here with the late Gerald R. Ford, was
to have been the target of a threat that Scientologists considered making and pinning
on Cooper as part of “Operation Freakout.”
tration and theft of government documents. Some of those who were jailed
had also been involved in the plots and
actions against me.
In 1981, I initiated my own action
against Scientology, for their frame-up
of me and for their years of harassment.
In 1985, Scientology and I reached an
“amicable” settlement of all lawsuits. It
was engineered by Albert Podell, a brilliant New York lawyer. Through him, I
became reacquainted with Paul Noble, a
New York TV producer, whom I had
dated when I was in my twenties, long
before any of this had happened.
Paul and I have been very happily
married for nineteen years now. I have
written eleven more books do some
travel writing as well as a newspaper
column on pets. While it’s not as “glamorous” as investigative reporting, it’s a
nice change of pace. Dogs don’t harass
and cats don’t sue.
I also quit smoking, barely drink, and
try to forget what happened. Try. But
when I turn on the news and hear of stories such as the pretexting scandal at
Hewlett-Packard, I’m reminded of the
years of subterfuge I endured. Or I’ll
come across more evidence, such as the
affidavit I recently received from
Margery Wakefield, a former member,
describing her years in Scientology.
“The second murder that I heard
planned was of Paulette Cooper, who
had written a book critical of Scientology,
and they were planning to shoot her…”
Other names keep bringing me back
as well. My useless private investigator
Anthony Pellicano, of course, is all over
the news. My former attorney Charles
Stillman defends big-name clients, including the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. Bob
Straus, the boyfriend who left me, went
on to head a large New York organization for judicial misconduct. Albert
Podell is still my family lawyer. John D.
Gordon III is with Morgan Lewis. Dr.
David Coddon died in 2002.
L. Ron Hubbard Jr., who died in
1991, ultimately saw his late father’s organization for what it was (though he
later recanted some of his outspoken
comments against the church). Bruce
Brotman retired from the FBI and made
negative news stories in 2002 when, as
the incoming director of security at
Louisville International Airport, he refused to go through the airport’s security system, reportedly saying, “I make
the rules.” Dr. Roy Wallis died in 1990.
And while I’ve never heard further of
James Meisler or Charles Batdorf, I
heard that Jerry Levin—which was definitely not his real name—is still a Scientologist and living in England.
One of the last major exposés on Scientology was a Time magazine cover
story, in 1991. Scientology sued and lost,
though it reportedly cost the publisher
Cooper says her life is back on track, and
that she is enjoying some well-earned time
away from the Pandora’s box she opened
nearly forty years ago.
seven million dollars to successfully defend the case, which Scientology pursued
on and off for a decade before finally resting when the U.S. Supreme Court refused, in 2001, to reinstate the case. Before
and after the trial, the writer, extraordinary investigative reporter Richard
Behar, was also miserably harassed.
Unfortunately, my experiences and
those of people like Behar, have had a
chilling effect on press coverage of Scientology. (Would you write an exposé of
Scientology after reading this?) That
may be why they don’t seem to mind
that people can read portions of my
story on the Internet.
I do get a lot of e-mails and I have
no doubt that some of the people who
e-mail me are Scientologists trying to
find out what I’m doing concerning
them. But since I haven’t been writing
about Scientology, they’ve pretty much
left me alone.
Am I worried that they’ll start up
against me as a result of this article? Yes.
But thanks to the Internet, it’s harder for
them to get away with that sort of harassment—with me or with anyone else.
I would still advise journalists to
speak out if they have knowledge of
something that can help other people,
but first to weigh the costs against how
many people they can actually help. I
am often contacted by individuals who
want to write about Scientology for a
small audience, like a college class, or a
local weekly newspaper. And when they
ask if they should, I usually discourage
them. I tell them I don’t think it’s worth
what they might go through to reach a
handful of people, few of whom are
likely to need their assistance.
As for me, I often wish I had never
ever heard the word “Scientology.” But
given the same situation, I would still
do it all over again. I would not have
been capable of remaining quiet, because I learned too many scary things
and talked to too many people who
were being hurt.
However, I do wish I had remained
quiet in another way—and not talked
with others about what I was doing
to fight Scientology. I shouldn’t have
let anyone near me or into my apartment unless I knew them well. My
mistake was being too trusting and
too talkative.
I sometimes get discouraged because
Given the same
situation, I would
still do it all over
again. I would not
have been capable
of remaining quiet.
Scientology gets so much assistance
and publicity from people like Tom
Cruise and John Travolta. At these
times, I wonder whether it was worth
wrecking my life when Scientology
seems so powerful again. But then I remind myself that I did reach and help a
lot of people. My book sold 154,000
copies (with the exception of a small
advance, I never received a dime from
it) and each copy appears to have been
read by many people. In addition, it’s
now available free on the Internet and
in several languages.
Some of the people that I helped have
contacted me, and that gives me satisfaction. About once a week I receive an email from someone who read my book,
or read on the Internet how I stood up to
Scientology and the person will write to
tell me that I helped them.
My favorite was the man in his
fifties who wanted me to know that
years ago, after learning the truth
about Scientology from my work, he
left the organization, married, has four
children (two are twins) and runs a
computer company employing forty
people. He feels that I am responsible
for the happiness he now enjoys.
That reminded me of why I did what
I did and why journalists do what they
do: we try to tell the truth so that we can
help others.
Unfortunately, we sometimes pay a
terrible price for it.
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