Tony Ortega - The Unbreakable Miss Lovely: How the Church of Scientology Tried to Destroy Paulette Cooper

HOW THE CHURCH OF SCIENTOLOGY TRIED TO DESTROY PAULETTE COOPER

TONY ORTEGA

SILVERTAIL BOOKS London

For Arielle, Benjamin, and Rebecca

I f you write about Scientology, one of the first names you hear is Paulette Coopers. As soon as people find out that youre looking into the famously secretive and litigious organization, youre asked, Do you know what happens to people who investigate Scientology? Havent 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 didnt 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 Id 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 Scientologys retaliatory Fair Game policy.

In 2011, I proposed that we work together on a lengthy story that would revisit her ordeal. And thats 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 wasnt true. But at that point, even Paulette herself wasnt sure what had happened in Belgium, where shed 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 Paulettes 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. Weve 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 Scientologys 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

R uchla Minkowski Bucholc couldnt 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 didnt make it back and left it where it wouldnt 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 didnt 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 friends 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 Antwerps Jews and demanding proof that they were Belgian citizens. If they couldnt 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 Ruchlas 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.