by Tony Ortega
On their way back to the U.S., they received word on the ship in a radiogram that de Foy had died.
This was also the cruise that had a Marine major-general trying to pursue Paulette and it was the time she had engaged in heavy petting with an opera singer named Roberto Smittini.
Only weeks after the end of that cruise, she was starting her freshman year at Brandeis University, and she was experiencing a potent brew of emotions. Her trip to Belgium had still left her with complex feelings about her parents – living and dead. She was also intimidated by the environment at Brandeis, where so many smart women were planning to become writers. Paulette worried that she wouldn’t be able to compete with them. She also experienced a brief fling with a flashy grad student who drove a yellow Corvette, which was as disorienting as it was fun.
And besides, she was a psych major, and figured it made sense to be in therapy. Everyone seemed to be doing it. So that fall, she sought out counseling and was referred to a man named Dr. Stanley Cath.
Over the next three years, during her Brandeis career, she continued to get therapy with Cath. She talked to him about her feelings about her parents (she found them too controlling), her worries about the future (would she make it as a writer?) her anguish over her early past, and about the events going on around her – including the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which happened during her third year of school.
After she graduated, she continued to stay in touch with Cath, sending him Christmas cards well into the 1970s. She considered him a friend, and repeatedly consulted him for advice about doctors for her physical complaints, and about her career.
She sent him copies of her books, and she dedicated her second book – Growing up Puerto Rican – to him. And when her life began to fall apart, she turned to Cath for help. He gave her referrals to people in New York she could talk to. But he couldn’t really give her what she wanted – real help with her criminal case, which had nearly convinced her to kill herself in July 1973.
But after that low point, the lowest of her life, things slowly began to change.
In August, just a few days after Paulette’s disastrous 31st birthday, a man named Roy Wallis arrived in New York to see her. He was of average height, he had curly hair and sideburns, and he wore dark specs. “Quiet” was the word that came to Paulette when she got to know him. He could sit in a group and say almost nothing during an evening, just listening to what others had to say.
Paulette eventually got out of him that he’d worked as a factory hand, a bartender, and even a gas station attendant before he’d made it to graduate school and dedicated himself to the study of Scientology at the University of Stirling in Scotland, where he was a lecturer. He’d written about Scientology as early as 1964, when he was just 19. He had then written his doctoral thesis on Hubbard’s organization, and was working to expand it into a book for publication.
And like Paulette and Kaufman, he was learning the downside of writing about Scientology. Just a couple of months before his trip to New York, Wallis had written about the strange campaign of harassment he had endured since he published a paper called “The Sectarianism of Scientology,” which had been based on material in his dissertation.
Wallis was a social scientist who worked as objectively as possible, so he had sent the article before publication to the church at its UK headquarters in East Grinstead, England, asking for comments that he could incorporate into it. Soon after that, a mysterious young man showed up at his university, claiming to be a student wanting to get to know Wallis. But days later Wallis found out the young man had tried to get into his house while he was away, and then he learned that none of the man’s references checked out. Wallis was then subjected to a systematic smear campaign as letters were sent to university administrators claiming that Wallis was involved in a drug scandal. Other letters, clumsily forged, were supposed to be from Wallis himself, describing a homosexual affair.
“I was the subject of a concerted attempt at harassment designed to ‘frighten me off’ Scientology, to undermine my credibility as a commentator on their activities, or to keep me so busy handling these matters that I had little time for research,” he wrote in an article that came out just before his visit to New York.
He told Paulette that he was still determined to remain as objective as possible about Scientology as he continued to gather material for his book. As she told him about her own experiences over the previous two years, he was in a better position than most to understand what she’d been through. Her indictment deeply disturbed him.
After seeing Paulette and Robert Kaufman in New York, Wallis traveled to California. He wanted to talk with Nibs – L. Ron Hubbard, Jr. – and he had no idea that Nibs had changed his mind about helping expose his father.
About a week later, Wallis returned to New York, and told Paulette that he was shocked by what Nibs had turned out to be like. He was nothing like the man who had worked with Paulette over the summer of 1972, eager to expose Scientology and hold it up to ridicule in television and radio appearances. Wallis said that Nibs had even hinted that he’d helped his father take care of his publicity problems, and over the course of their conversation, Wallis convinced Nibs to show him a couple of letters that explained what he meant. One was written by Bob Thomas, a top executive in Scientology. In his letter, Thomas rejected Nibs’ plan of “double agent entrapment” of the church’s “enemies.” Wallis and Paulette doubted that Thomas would really reject a plan to harm Scientology’s enemies, and they figured it was a letter written to cover his tracks.
Wallis showed Paulette other letters, from Nibs to his father, in which he boasted to Hubbard that he could “with one fell swoop” take care of his father’s “enemies.” Paulette had told Wallis that she suspected Nibs had something to do with the bomb threats. The letters that Nibs had shown Wallis didn’t mention them, but they did suggest that he’d been part of some sort of campaign to neutralize someone who sounded a lot like Paulette.
Wallis told Paulette that he intended to take the letters to John Gordon, her prosecutor. He would impress on Gordon that he was a sociologist, an academic, an objective observer who had no involvement in the case. Nibs’ letters, and what Nibs had said in his interview, Wallis felt would sway Gordon that Paulette was telling the truth, and that she’d been the subject of a concerted harassment campaign – one that might even get her put in prison for a crime she didn’t commit.
Wallis said he’d even fly back to New York, on his own expense, to testify at trial.
After two inconclusive polygraph examinations, Paulette turned to another lawyer for help—F. Lee Bailey. The famous defense attorney was actually disbarred at the time, but she didn’t know who else to go to for help. So Paulette set aside a day to take a train up to Boston to Bailey’s offices.
Waiting for her to arrive at the Back Bay Station was a young woman named Nancy Many. Nancy had joined Scientology a few years before, and while she was waiting to go to Florida to join the Sea Organization—the church’s dedicated core of workers who signed billion-year contracts—she was asked to do some work for the local Guardian’s Office.
Nancy’s first assignment had been to infiltrate a mental health facility so she could secretly copy records of the doctors who worked in the area and deliver them to her GO superiors. She knew that similar operations were gathering information at other offices, including the Massachusetts state attorney general’s office, the American Red Cross, American Cancer Society, the YMCA, and the Better Business Bureau. That way, if someone made a complaint about Scientology to the BBB, for example, the church would know about it right away.
Nancy was told that Paulette Cooper was coming to town, and she was asked to tail Paulette to Bailey’s office. Nancy didn’t know how the GO’s office knew Paulette was coming to Boston the next day, or how they even knew what she would be wearing – a tailored yellow suit, cream blouse, and peach scarf. But that’s exactly what Paulette had on when she stepped off the train from New Yor
k.
Nancy tried to tail her without being seen, and she panicked when she suddenly lost sight of Paulette. She went into a nearby hotel to find a phone booth, but then by sheer luck Paulette also walked into the place. She then followed the petite writer to Bailey’s office. Nancy never really understood why it was important to follow Paulette if the GO already knew where she was going.
Once at her destination, Paulette sat down in a large conference room, and curled up into a ball on a chair in a corner. When Frederic Joshua Barnett saw that, he decided she was innocent. If she had been guilty, he thought, she would have come right to him and started telling him how innocent she was. He sat down close to her, and began asking her about her case.
Barnett was an attorney in Bailey’s firm who specialized in polygraph examinations. He believed in them deeply, and had spent years trying to get judges and courts to accept them as evidence. The summer before, in July 1972, he had testified in Washington DC, convincing the courts there to allow polygraph evidence, but an appeals court had overturned it.
Barnett had even trained to become a polygraph examiner himself so he could tell which practitioners were using the best methods. And few were as bad, he believed, as Nat Lorendi. The police department examiner wore a gun during his sessions, for example, which was supposed to be forbidden. And more than once, Lorendi had admitted to him, in front of witnesses, that he thought of a polygraph as his “rubber hose.” It was so intimidating to suspects, Lorendi said, he often wouldn’t even turn it on.
Barnett had once successfully testified against Lorendi in court – and he told Paulette he relished the prospect of taking him apart again.
Barnett got copies of Lorendi’s charts of Paulette’s examination and looked at them with the help of another expert. They were stunned to see how hard Lorendi’s charts were to read. They weren’t even sure what they indicated.
The data seemed to indicate, for example, that Paulette was being deceptive when she was accused of things she could not have done, things that had nothing to do with the bomb threats. Such questions can be asked to establish a subject’s reaction when they must be telling the truth. In Paulette’s case, she appeared to feel guilt for things she could not have done.
Barnett suspected that Paulette was a rare person that he called a “guilt reactor”—someone who responds as if she’s responsible for something she had nothing to do with. He knew her background, and wondered if it had something to do with her childhood and surviving the Holocaust. Survivors are among those more likely to be guilt reactors, he explained to her. It was important that she get another examination, this time with a real expert who could account for her predispositions.
Her father, Ted, however, complained to Paulette when he found out she’d gone to Bailey’s firm. Ted believed that only guilty (and usually wealthy) clients went to F. Lee Bailey to get them off on technicalities. If she hired him, jurors would assume she had committed a crime, Ted told her. So she dropped the firm, and Barnett with it. He had nothing else to do with the case.
It only ended up adding to her stress. Barnett clearly believed that she was innocent, and she liked him personally. But since her parents were paying her legal bills – Paulette had long since run out of money and couldn’t continue to write much that paid in her mental state – she had to go along with their insistence that she stick with the Stillman firm, whom she was increasingly frustrated with.
Paulette heard again from Roy Wallis who, while searching through Scientology documents, came upon a 1967 policy letter written by L. Ron Hubbard. It described penalties for people that the church considered to be in “lower conditions.” At the bottom of that list were people the church considered to be the “enemy.” In that case, Hubbard considered them “Fair Game,” and they were subject to ruination: “May be deprived of property or injured by any means by any Scientologist without any discipline of the Scientologist. May be tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed.”
Paulette was stunned. She hadn’t seen the document before, but it seemed to explain what was happening to her and others – Nan McLean, and Robert Kaufman, and the Greens, for example. Here it was in black and white: Hubbard had instructed his followers to use any means necessary to destroy people the church considered “enemies.”
Paulette took the document to her attorneys.
She was also encouraged when it turned out the two threat letters had some important differences. The first one contained the actual reference to an explosive device – “I’ll bomb you!” – but the letter had no identifying information at all. It named no one as its target, and had no information about its sender. It also didn’t have a fingerprint.
It was the second letter that had a fingerprint from Paulette on its back. But that second letter’s threat was more vague – that Scientology would be “an exploding volcano.” (And Paulette pointed out to her attorney Jay Zelermyer she was well aware that volcanoes erupt, not explode, and she wouldn’t have written it that way.)
There was something else strange about the second letter: It had never been mailed.
Someone had apparently hand-delivered the second letter to the Scientology org, and technically, it hadn’t been sent through the federal mail system, which put some question on Gordon’s jurisdiction over it.
The first letter had been mailed, but it had no fingerprints on it.
Those details, and the discovery of the Hubbard policy which suggested that Paulette was undergoing a coordinated campaign of harassment, and the letters from Nibs that Roy Wallis had found, all added up to evidence Paulette wanted to believe that Gordon couldn’t ignore.
But there were still the inconclusive polygraph examinations.
With only a couple of months to go before the scheduled trial, she and her attorneys began to talk about another risky strategy. A sodium pentothal examination – a “truth serum” test – might be enough to counter the polygraph exams. Was Paulette willing to undergo one?
She said she was, but she soon found out that it might kill her.
9
A deal offered
Encouraged that she might be building a good case, Paulette continued to search her own records and documents, looking for anything that might help as the trial neared—it was now late September, and there was only a month to go.
Paulette thought back to when the FBI had first showed up at her apartment on East 80th Street the previous December. What had been going on then? She searched through her records, looking for anything that might help refresh her memory. She went through her checkbook, skimming it until she hit December, and looked at her expenses.
And that’s when she noticed it.
December 6, a check for the United Farm Workers.
That was two days before the first bomb threat letter had been received at the org.
Looking at the check stub, her dim memories of that day came rushing back. She grabbed her telephone, and dialed her cousin Joy. Did she remember the day that woman – what was her name? Margie something? – came to the apartment with a petition?
Margie Shepherd, that was it.
The two women talked it over, and for the first time, they revealed that they had each noticed strange things about that short visit. Margie never took her coat or her gloves off while she was in the warm apartment, they remembered.
Could Margie have been working for Scientology? Could she have somehow lifted a piece of Joy’s lightweight stationery, or in some other way obtained Paulette’s fingerprint on a document?
Paulette called her attorneys, and they agreed it was a promising lead. They asked her to go through as many Scientology publications as she could, looking for Margie’s name. If they could prove that someone connected to the New York org had been in her apartment just days before the bomb threats were mailed, it could be a major break.
Paulette knew where she could find a large stack of Scientology publications—at John Seffern’s, the attorney for the Greens. She had gone to see him several times, valuing h
is advice, and she knew he had piles of church documents. He was happy to let her pore through them, and she scanned newsletters and magazines and other documents, looking for the name Margie Shepherd.
But it was another name she found that gave her a shock.
Paulette went back to the Churchill, armed with a copy of a Scientology magazine. She went to Barbara’s apartment to show it to her. Then, after talking it over, the two of them went to Paulette’s place.
They went in, and Paulette asked her roommate, Jerry Levin, to speak with them.
“What’s up?” He asked.
Jerry had moved into the apartment in May, four months earglier. He had taken care of Tiki, Paulette’s Yorkie, when Paulette was having trouble just getting herself out of bed in the morning. He had tried to get Paulette up on the sundeck on the roof for some fresh air. He had helped prepare meals. He had become a companion after Paulette’s relationship with Bob Straus had ended. Unlike Bob, Jerry had been willing – even anxious – to listen to her obsessive talk about what she was going through. And what she didn’t tell him directly, Barbara filled him in on.
And Jerry had been in on the long conversations with Barbara and Paulette about her legal case. Now Paulette held out the magazine to him, to show him where the name “Jerry Levin” appeared in the Scientology magazine.
“What are you saying?” He asked. “You think I’m a Scientologist because some guy has the same name?”
“Well, are you?” Paulette asked.