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

  THE UNBREAKABLE MISS LOVELY

  HOW THE CHURCH OF SCIENTOLOGY TRIED TO DESTROY PAULETTE COOPER

  TONY ORTEGA

  SILVERTAIL BOOKS • London

  For Arielle, Benjamin, and Rebecca

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  Prologue

  1 The man who thought he was God

  2 ‘Have you ever practiced cannibalism?’

  3 The Scandal of Scientology

  4 Nibs

  5 Joy

  6 ‘you people are always watching me’

  7 Jerry

  8 Transport XXI

  9 A deal offered

  10 Don Alverzo

  11 Locked doors and fake IDs

  12 Operation Freakout

  13 The woman from the FBI

  14 The raid

  15 Fifteen Sixteen Uniform

  16 The tapes

  17 ‘You must be one hell of a woman’

  18 Breaking away

  19 Resurfacing

  20 A spy comes forward

  FOREWORD

  If you write about Scientology, one of the first names you hear is Paulette Cooper’s. As soon as people find out that you’re looking into the famously secretive and litigious organization, you’re asked, “Do you know what happens to people who investigate Scientology? Haven’t you heard about Paulette Cooper?” Her story is still spoken of with fear today, more than 40 years after her book, The Scandal of Scientology, was published.

  When I began writing about Scientology in 1995, I was aware in rough terms of what Paulette had been through. I knew that thanks to her book she had become the target of the most notorious campaign of harassment and retaliation ever carried out by a group well known for the lengths it will go to in order to bully the people it considers enemies. But I didn’t know the full story of her ordeal. At that time no one did, not even Paulette.

  A few years later, after I wrote a series of stories about the organization for a newspaper in Los Angeles, I started to receive emails encouraging me to stay on the subject from someone whose email address contained a familiar name – it was Paulette herself. She had settled the last of her lawsuits with the Church of Scientology in 1985, and had kept mostly under the radar since then. I was thrilled to receive her messages and at the same time a little perplexed about why she was secretly reaching out to an unknown writer on the other side of the country to give him a pat on the back. I supposed that in her way she was still fighting Scientology, which had targeted her so tenaciously in the past.

  For a few years I continued to receive those encouraging notes. Then, in 2008, when I’d moved to New York and was editing The Village Voice, Scientology exploded as a news story. Thanks to Tom Cruise, the Anonymous movement, and to a revealing video made by a character actor named Jason Beghe, there was a new and voracious public clamoring for fresh information about Scientology. Like me, Paulette was stunned at what was happening, and at the intensity of the interest in her from reporters who still cited her as the most notorious example of Scientology’s retaliatory “Fair Game” policy.

  In 2011, I proposed that we work together on a lengthy story that would revisit her ordeal. And that’s when I noticed that what existed online about it was a mess. There were contradictions and gaps in the record, and plenty of questions that had never been answered. Some sources, for example, claimed that Paulette had been born in the Auschwitz Nazi death camp, which wasn’t true. But at that point, even Paulette herself wasn’t sure what had happened in Belgium, where she’d actually been born, and how she had survived the Holocaust. It was one of the first things we set out to investigate together, and the results surprised us both.

  As with the other areas we began to explore, each supposedly settled fact turned out to be more complicated, and if anything more outrageous than we first thought. It was an encouraging sign as our project grew and we set out to learn the entire story of what Paulette had survived – not only from what she remembered, but by talking to other people who had been around her at the time, as well as through documents and other sources of information that brought the period into sharp focus.

  The passage of time tends to flatten things, and events that were actually separated by several years can look contemporaneous from a distance. In Paulette’s case, accounts of her harassment tend to conflate her bomb threat indictment with a later scheme that never really got going. But Paulette was actually subjected to a series of elaborate plots over many years, and she only gradually became aware of some of them as they were happening. (A couple of the schemes she never knew about at all until they came up in the writing of this book.) She was often in the dark about where the next attack was coming from, or who was going to slap her with a lawsuit. We’ve tried to convey that feeling in The Unbreakable Miss Lovely, telling the story as it unfolded in order to capture what it was like to be Paulette Cooper and become ensnared in Scientology’s traps time and again.

  Today, interest in Scientology has never been greater, thanks most recently to a documentary by Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney which set out, in part, to understand the appeal of Scientology to its members. In 1968, Paulette Cooper set out to do the same thing, taking a class at her local Scientology “org” in order to find out why people were joining. What she found almost immediately was that some of the people who had taken courses were being targeted for mistreatment. That interested Paulette much more than the distant possibility of going “Clear,” and so she set out to discover more about Scientology and the people who ran it for a magazine article and then a book.

  In the end she got far more than she bargained for.

  Tony Ortega

  New York, May 2015

  PROLOGUE

  Antwerp, 1942

  Ruchla Minkowski Bucholc couldn’t wait any longer. Several days had passed since her cousin last came with new supplies, and Ruchla had no way of knowing if the girl would ever come again. She might have been arrested, or worse. What she did know was that she and her own two little girls, one of them just three months old, urgently needed fresh food and milk. And with no one bringing her those things, she had no option other than to go into the street and buy them herself.

  Ruchla was painfully aware of how much of a risk that was. Since her husband was arrested more than two months before, she had been in hiding with the girls in an upstairs apartment, relying on family to bring them food and other necessities. If she was arrested too, she was terrified by what might happen to her children. But she had no choice. They needed to eat.

  Hungry and tired, but more worried about the state of her girls, Ruchla waited until the little ones had settled down for a nap before she got ready to leave. Before she left, she wrote them a short note in case she didn’t make it back and left it where it wouldn’t be missed. Then she put on her coat, the one with the yellow star. She went to the door, took one look back at her girls, and then walked down the stairs to the street.

  Some time later, on the streets of Antwerp, Ruchla was stopped and asked to produce papers that would prove that she was a Belgian Jew and not an immigrant. She didn’t have the papers they wanted to see, and so she was arrested.

  Ruchla and her husband Chaim Bucholc had arrived in Antwerp in the late 1920s, earlier than most of the Polish Jews who would come to Belgium, and then found themselves trapped when the small nation fell to the German Army in the spring of 1940 after just 18 days of fighting. Chaim was a talented leatherworker, and he had fallen in with a group of close friend
s – a journalist and a local bureaucrat among them. But they could do nothing for him as the Nazi occupiers tacked on indignity after indignity to the lives of the Jews living in the city.

  By 1942, leaving the house meant wearing clothing emblazoned with a yellow Star of David, and as summer came on, arrests picked up. Increasingly, soldiers were randomly rousting Antwerp’s Jews and demanding proof that they were Belgian citizens. If they couldn’t come up with any, they were taken away and not heard from again. Ruchla, meanwhile, was getting ready to deliver her second child. Sarah had come in 1940 and had turned two years old as Ruchla’s due date neared in July.

  Then, on July 22, 1942, Chaim was taken off a train and arrested. He was a Polish Jew living in Antwerp under occupation, and that was enough to seal his fate. Four days later, Ruchla gave birth. Her husband never laid eyes on his second daughter.

  After his arrest, Chaim was taken to the Breendonk concentration camp about halfway between Antwerp and Brussels, where a Nazi overseer known for his cruelty named Philip Schmitt was starving prisoners and subjecting them to daily beatings. Schmitt was also put in charge of a new transport center in the nearby town of Mechelen, where an old barracks was being turned into a holding center for Jews who would be put on trains bound for Poland. Chaim Bucholc was among the first set of prisoners moved from Breendonk into the new Mechelen transport center to await shipment to the east.

  In August, the Nazi soldiers in Antwerp moved from snatching a few foreign Jews to making mass arrests. They rounded up hundreds of people, and then demanded to see proof of citizenship. Those who couldn’t produce documentation were taken to the Mechelen center. At this point Belgian Jews were immune from being rounded up, but this would change a few months later.

  Ruchla went into hiding with her two girls. She couldn’t afford to be out on the street at all now. And she had no idea what had happened to her husband. She was unaware that on September 10, Chaim was rousted out of the Dossin barracks by Schmitt’s soldiers to be put on a train with 1,047 other passengers. Designated Transport VIII, the train moved out of Mechelen and arrived three days later at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Nazi-controlled Poland, where the men were separated from the women, children, and the infirm, who were gassed right away. Sometime later, Chaim Bucholc was led into the gas chambers himself. He was 38 years old.

  In October, nearly three months after Chaim had been arrested and her youngest was born, Ruchla was arrested. She was taken to Mechelen, where she was herded with the next group to be put on a train.

  Ruchla Minkowski Bucholc, prisoner 950, was put on Transport XIV, one of 995 Jews who left for Auschwitz on October 24, 1942 to their deaths. She was 31 years old.

  After Ruchla’s arrest, her daughters were cared for by Chaim’s family, and it was her brother who found the note Ruchla had scribbled to the girls before she was taken away. “Play and be happy,” it read. She had left behind a two-year-old daughter named Sarah, and an infant girl she had named Paula, but who was so small she would always be known as Paulette.

  ***

  New York, 1973

  The bottle of valium Paulette had been saving up for killing herself suddenly looked like her best option. Not, as she’d previously planned, to be taken in a few months’ time, but right now. Today. This horrible, awful, wretched evening of July 26, 1973. Her 31st birthday.

  If she could stand to drink more of the vodka she’d been pouring down her throat all day, Paulette figured she would have the courage to choke down enough of the pills for her to just bliss out and never wake up. Then, finally, it would be all over.

  Why wait, she asked herself. Why not right now, right here? She had nothing left to live for. Everyone she knew thought she was a liar. About everything. Even her best friends. Even her parents. Even her goddamned lawyers. Especially her goddamned lawyers.

  A year ago – just a year ago – her career was unstoppable. Three books out by the age of 30. Major articles showing up regularly in the biggest, most important publications in the world, from the London Sunday Times to the Washington Post to the New York Times.

  And even after all the trouble started, she was well into the best book of her life, the one about forensic crime scene investigations that her agent thought could turn into television shows and movies. It was the book that was going to pull her out of the nightmare that had taken over her life since last December.

  But then the first review had come out in that morning’s paper, and it was a pan. She’d felt sick as she realized that the new book wasn’t going to rescue her from the living hell that her life had become. And it was only going to get worse as October neared.

  October meant federal court. A trial chamber packed with reporters. THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA V. PAULETTE MARCIA COOPER. Having to explain again how she didn’t have anything to do with those bomb threats typed in illiterate phrases while no one believed her denials.

  Paulette’s hands trembled as she held the vodka and the bottle of valium. She was sick of arguing with herself over whether it was better to wait and see what happened or end it now. Why wait for October? Why not just do it now and save herself all that pain? Yes, she decided, she would do it now.

  And at that moment, her telephone rang.

  Almost as a reflex, Paulette picked up the phone. She recognized the voice at the other end of the line – it was an old college friend, calling to wish her a happy birthday. An old friend who had heard nothing about her troubles. Who had no idea what a wreck her life had become, or that she was facing a federal trial. An old friend who just wanted to catch up.

  For a moment, the haze of Paulette’s suicidal depression lifted, and she began to remember the good times with her friend, and then she thought of what had happened to bring her to this desperate point, the traumas she’d been through and how close she was to being totally destroyed.

  Paulette thought of how close she had come to ending her life, and she felt herself pull back from the brink. Something deep inside her said no, that will not happen now. I am not finished yet. I will fight on, because I am telling the truth.

  1

  The man who thought he was God

  New York, 1968

  Paulette thought Bill was strange. Maybe even dangerous. But she let him come over to her apartment anyway, even though she was unsure what he was so worked up about. She was still dealing with the news that Robert F. Kennedy had died in Los Angeles that morning, after being shot the day before, and she thought that might have upset Bill too.

  While she watched the TV reports in her Manhattan apartment, she thought about Jack Kennedy’s assassination five years earlier and couldn’t believe it had happened again. On Tuesday – June 4, 1968 – RFK had won the California Democratic presidential primary over Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy and then, just after midnight, he was shot while walking through a kitchen passageway at the Ambassador Hotel. He lived for a little more than a day after the shooting.

  Paulette felt shaky, like things were coming undone in the world. But then Bill had called out of the blue and said he wanted to see her. They had worked together a couple of years earlier as copywriters at BBDO, the giant advertising agency on Madison Avenue. Bill was strange then, too. He had been going through a breakup and he wrestled with depression, which was made worse by his heavy drinking. But he’d never forgotten that Paulette had befriended him when others kept their distance, and they’d kept in touch after she left the agency.

  Now he was at her door, carrying a flowerpot. In the soil of the flowerpot he had stuck a Eugene McCarthy button, his idea of a joke, she supposed. She asked him to sit down on her couch and poured him a drink.

  Paulette lived in a narrow five-story townhouse at 16 East 80th Street, off Fifth Avenue. Because her apartment was on the ground floor, she fought a constant battle with cockroaches and silverfish. This time, however, Bill was anxious to talk and didn’t give a thought to Paulette’s creative ideas about housecleaning. When she asked him what was so important, he asked her to s
it on his lap.

  They were friends, not lovers. But this was 1968, so she sat in his lap. Bill then told her that he had come to the realization that he was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. Trying not to look too surprised, Paulette asked him when he’d come to that conclusion. Since he had joined Scientology, Bill answered.

  Paulette had heard of it. In fact, she was hearing a lot about Scientology, because it seemed to be turning into something of a fad. She’d even read about its founder, L. Ron Hubbard, and knew that he claimed to produce superhuman followers he called “Clears.” But she didn’t know Hubbard could turn a man like Bill into a major deity.

  She told Bill he was too conservative for something as outlandish as Scientology. But he’d been helped by it, he said. Under Scientology processing, it was possible to go into the past and learn about your former lives. It had convinced him that he was the creator of the universe. His life had improved immensely, and it was all because of L. Ron Hubbard.

  Paulette scoffed, telling him that anything can be helpful, at least for a short time, as long as you believe in it strongly enough.

  “You’re wrong,” he said. “And just to prove to you that Scientology has really helped me, look how much I’ve changed. All I used to care about was making money. Now all I care about is helping people. I’ve given $700 away this week to people standing on the street corner who looked like they needed to be helped. Look,” he said, and pulled out a list of names on crumpled sheets of paper. He’d written down the telephone numbers and occupations of everyone he’d met lately on street corners in Greenwich Village.

  “What are you going to do with those?” Paulette asked.

  “Help them, too.”

  “How?”

  “By keeping the mafia away from them.”

  “But the mafia isn’t after them.”

  Bill smiled. “That’s because I wrote down their names.”