EXCLUSIVE — For the first time, Paulette Cooper tells her story in detail about how Scientology criminally framed her and almost put her in jail.
In 2018, Tony Ortega wrote a book about Paulette Cooper and Scientology’s various criminal activities titled ‘The Unbreakable Miss Lovely.‘ More recently, Paulette wrote a memoir about many aspects of her life titled ‘The Perils of Paulette: My Life a Stowaway, Tabloid Reporter, Travel Writer, Scientology-Basher, Holocaust Survivor & More‘. In it, she included 23 pages of her chilling story about how Scientology almost put her in jail (to retaliate against her for exposing Scientology and to try to shut her up) by writing themselves 2 bomb threats and calling the FBI and having her arrested.
Paulette has given us permission to publish some excerpts from her book in a two-part series on Scientology Business. Here, for the first time, is the first portion of the chapter from ‘The Perils of Paulette’ titled “Framed.”
In 1972, when I was 30 years old, I found myself facing 15 years in jail for something I did not do. The thought of spending even one night in jail terrified me, but there was something that worried me even more. Every man I had ever slept with, every joint I had ever smoked, everything bad I had ever done, was likely to be splashed in page-one newspaper stories in New York where I lived. My writing career would be destroyed. I would be embarrassed before all of my friends.
Worst of all, my adoptive parents, the Coopers, would be ashamed of me. All my life, I had tried to make them proud of me, so they would never regret having taken me out of a Belgian orphanage and bringing me to America. They had saved me after my birth parents had been killed in Auschwitz during World War II.
And now, they would be publicly humiliated over the daughter they were so proud of, and in front of the very friends they had so often boasted to about me. They would read shocking stories about me in the papers.
And some of them would be true.
One day, the FBI showed up unannounced in my new apartment. They had briefly visited me a few months earlier and during that earlier visit, a tall and thin agent kept wildly looking around as if he expected to find a dead body stuffed in my bookcase. The other agent, who I decided was a pompous jerk, was named Bruce Brotman.
Brotman informed me that the head of Scientology in New York, James Meisler, claimed he had received two bomb threats. He said Meisler had named me and the other anti-Scientology author, the one who had ended up in a mental institution, as the most likely suspects to have sent the threats.
I snorted. “That means they sent it to themselves,” I told him. I explained that if Meisler were truly fearful about receiving threats, he would have given the FBI the names of their real enemies among the many enraged former members. Not just two people whom they wanted to harass and get rid of.
Before they left, I agreed to be fingerprinted, which was a bit messy, but kind of fun.
I mentally dismissed Scientology sending the feds to visit me as just more harassment by them. I wasn’t even worried after I received a subpoena to appear before a federal Grand Jury in the Southern District of New York. Actually, I was kind of excited about it and merrily went off without an attorney, thinking I was being called as an expert witness on Scientology.
When I entered, I saw that on one side of the room, under a photo of Nixon, were a couple of dozen jurors. They were seated on a few levels, stadium-style, with two large American flags on opposite ends of the risers.
I looked up and smiled at them. No one smiled back.
There was a long empty table in the center of the room. Seated there was the Assistant DA in charge of the case, John D. Gordon III. He was a pale slim man with a habit of slightly shaking his leg when he seemed nervous.
He wasted no time after I sat down. “You are the target of this investigation of bomb threats sent to Scientology,” he immediately – and ominously – intoned.
I couldn’t believe what he was saying. I started shaking slightly, and a metallic taste started filling my mouth.
I barely had time to recover from that, when what he told me next frightened me even more. Besides the possibility that I would be fined $15,000 for sending the threats, he told me, “You face five years in jail for each of the bomb threat letters if there’s more than one. Plus, five additional years for perjury if you deny before the Grand Jury that you did it, and the jury decides you did.”
I didn’t know what to say. I was so stunned. I tried to appear normal, but my insides were churning, and I felt as if I was being sucked into a vortex. “What should I do?” I asked him, confused.
“I will arrange for you to return here after you obtain legal representation,” he replied as if he was doing me a favor.
I immediately had to hire criminal lawyers to defend me at a second Grand Jury appearance. Every firm I interviewed wanted a nonrefundable $5,000 retainer – the equivalent of $13,000 today – to represent me. And I learned that all these lawyers do is prepare you for your appearance. Your lawyer isn’t even allowed in the Grand Jury room with you.
Five thousand dollars was all I had left – money I had earned primarily from the articles I wrote about my stowing away. That little nest egg I had hoped would provide a cushion for me during lean writing times. Now, I had to use all of it to retain a criminal attorney firm.
Once I did, they immediately set out to learn what was going on. The lawyer I would end up working the most with was Gordon. He would only tell my lawyers that two bomb threats were involved and that the government had “serious evidence against your client.” But he wouldn’t say what it was.
I was enraged that I could be in danger of being indicted, based on evidence the government wouldn’t reveal to me, over two letters I hadn’t seen, and that had been mailed on dates I didn’t know. I was just starting to do some travel writing then, and I might have been out of town when the letters were mailed, and the whole matter moot. Plus, I would have saved $5,000.
I don’t know which was greater: my anger over losing all my money; my rage at the injustice; or my panic at the possible consequences.
Not to mention the terrifying possibility of my being locked up in jail. As a small and thin woman, I feared I would be an easy target for aggressive female prisoners.
The night before the second Grand Jury, Gordon sent the bomb threat letters, and the envelopes they came in, over to my lawyers. I breathed a sigh of relief when I read them. The letters were so illiterate, and the content so puerile, that no one could seriously think an intelligent writer would send out such Mickey Mouse crap like that.
“This is so obviously a frame-up attempt against me,” I said to my lawyer as I pointed out the references Scientology included to make it look like I had written it. Like “books,” and “Hitler,” and the pain from my operation the previous summer. I also pointed out that one of the letters, purporting to have been written by me, included that same incorrect statement supposedly about me: “My tongue is swollen.” I explained that whoever wrote those bomb threats wrote the smear letter to my building. And I had no doubt who that was.
“What evidence against me could they possibly have?” I asked my lawyer. We briefly considered but dismissed the possibility that my fingerprint could be on one of the letters. “Impossible,” I replied. “I’ve never seen those letters before you just showed them to me.”
We decided that the evidence was that the letters – one typed on thin paper that I didn’t recognize – were probably typed on my home typewriter. I was prepared to explain to the Grand Jury that I was pretty casual about who came into my apartment in those days. I was so trusting that I had even sent Nibs there a couple of times the previous summer to pick up some material we needed for the foreword I was ghostwriting.
While I was sitting outside the Grand Jury waiting to testify, I saw the ahem, Reverend James Meisler, the Scientology complainant, walking out of the jury room. He was wearing a long black clerical-looking garb, and a cross so large it reached halfway down his chest. He smiled at me evilly. Next, Bruce Brotman, the FBI agent, went in, and he avoided my eyes when he came out a few minutes later. Not a good sign, I thought to myself.
Then it was my turn. I found myself back in the same room as the earlier time. Same jurors. Same dank smell of too many people and too little ventilation. Same prosecutor. Gordon started by asking me several baseline questions: “What is your name?” “What is your address?” before moving on to a more alarming one:
“Are you under the influence of drugs or alcohol?” It was then that I saw that his Ieg was starting to shake a bit as he handed me the two cellophane-wrapped letters. “Have you ever seen these letters before yesterday?” he asked me:
“No,” I said.
“Have you ever touched these letters?” he asked.
“No.”
“Have you written these letters?”
“Definitely not.”
Then, with his leg shaking even more. he asked me: “If you’ve never written, seen, or touched these letters, then please explain to the jurors how your fingerprint got on one of them?”
I was so stunned – and horrified – that the room instantly went black. During those next few seconds of darkness, in which I either fainted sitting up or had a mini-stroke, my head spun down and around as if I were in a washing machine.
When the light came back on in my head, I quickly pulled myself together, knowing that the jurors were carefully monitoring my reaction. I managed to muster a slight raising of my lips in a simulated smile, but inside I was crying. And dying, because I knew then that my world would never be the same.
When I woke up the next morning, I was more sanguine. I told myself that since I had told the whole truth, and had been fully forthcoming when I testified before the jurors, everything would turn out all right. Gordon had to have believed me when I honestly said that I had never seen those letters before my lawyers showed them to me.
I was wrong. “Gordon thinks you lied before the Grand Jury,” my lawyer told me when I went to see him later that day.
I was so shocked that I started shaking. “Doesn’t he understand that this is just part of Scientology’s harassment of me?” I asked.
“Yes. But he thinks what they’ve been doing to you drove you over the edge,” he said.
“Did you tell him about the letter [an anonymous smear letter about me sent to the tenants in my building] also wrongly saying I had a ‘swollen tongue’? They had to be sent by the same people.”
“Yes, he thinks you sent both.”
“Whaaat?” I asked. “Why would I call myself a prostitute, and try to get myself kicked out of my own building?”
My lawyer sighed. “You must understand that the government assumes that people who send bomb threats are considered to be crazy. So there doesn’t have to be a rational explanation for anything you do.”
How could I fight that?
And what he told me next sent chills down my spine. “We have to prepare for you to be indicted,” he said somberly.
“Indicted!” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The word itself made me shiver. I knew that most people don’t know that an indictment just means you’ve been charged with a crime. They automatically assume that someone who has been indicted is guilty.
And I feared then that even if I wasn’t convicted, I would still have the dreaded word “indicted” over my head for the rest of my life.
Thus began the worst months of my adult life. I was in a fog of incapacitating and crippling anxiety. Even so, I tried to pull myself together enough to collect some evidence that would prove my innocence. I first tried hypnosis, hoping that I could remember more about what was going on in my life when I might have touched some paper so I could explain the fingerprint.
The doctor first tested me to see if I was hypnotizable. He stood behind me. “Fall backward,” he said. “I’ll catch you.” I couldn’t do it. He next ordered me to “Roll your eyes all the way up.” I couldn’t do that either. He explained that “Some people are not hypnotizable. You’re one of them.” That ended the five-minute session. I was billed in full.
I also hired document examiners to compare the bomb threats to my typewriter. Some said yes; some said no. I looked into DNA, hoping that maybe I could prove the saliva on the stamp wasn’t mine. But DNA was too early to be reliable, and it would take months for any results. Time was something I didn’t have if I was going to get the case dropped before I was indicted.
I made a deal with a then neophyte private investigator, Tony Pellicano, for him to try to gather evidence to prove my suspicion that Nibs was now working clandestinely with Scientology. For payment, I agreed to ghostwrite a book for him. Which I did, knocking out a quick book titled: Are You Bugged? How to Tell if You’re being Followed, Tapped, Trapped, or Sexually Entrapped. But Pellicano never contributed anything substantial to the book, so it went nowhere. As far as his “investigation” was concerned, he did nothing and found nothing.
Around April, Gordon asked my lawyers if I would agree to take a lie detector with one of their examiners, “Gordon said that if you pass, they’ll drop the case against you,” my lawyer said.
“Sure, I’ll take one,” I said quickly. But before I could say more, he added, “But if you fail, the government can introduce the negative results at your trial.”
I didn’t know then – most of the public still doesn’t know – that lie detectors aren’t much more accurate than flipping a coin. All they show is how stressed someone is, and people accused of crimes they didn’t commit, which could destroy and bankrupt them, would be plenty stressed. As I was.
While I recognized that a negative lie detector test could be devastating to my defense, I was willing to take any chances to get the charges against me dismissed. So, I agreed.
It was a dreadful decision. From the moment I walked into the office of Nat Laurendi from Brooklyn, he started shouting at me, accusing me of sending the bomb threats. “You’s guilty. Admit it,” he shouted.
Confused, I shook my head. “No” I insisted. “I didn’t do it.”
“Dat’s what dey all say,” he hissed. “Your fingerprints on de letters. You’s guilty.” He kept on like this for about 15 minutes, and I was unnerved. I learned later that some examiners hurl accusations at their subjects before they give the test to try to upset them enough to get them to admit their guilt even before they get on the machine. But all Laurendi’s shouted accusations did to me was to make me think I had done it.
Not surprisingly, after I took the test, Laurendi claimed the machine proved that I was guilty of sending the bomb threats.
And that he would so testify.
I failed the lie detector test. A fingerprint on a bomb threat. I must admit that I briefly wondered if I was indeed guilty. I had gone through a period of heavy drinking a few years earlier when I was working as an advertising copywriter at BBDO. Yes, the binge drinking in the ad biz was as bad as depicted in the TV show Mad Men. Sometimes, the next morning, I had only a vague recollection of what had happened during a boozy night before.
Could I have written the letters and not remembered it? I wondered. They certainly sounded like a drunk could have written them. But I knew that alcohol made me sleepy and mellow, not hostile. Plus, if I’d been that drunk and hadn’t passed out, I knew I would have had trouble finding my typewriter, much less type two letters, plus two envelopes, and then mailing those letters on two separate days.
Another way I knew that there was no way I had sent those letters was an odd one. The envelopes included the zip code of the New York Scientology “org,” as they called them. I never knew what their zip code was until I saw the bomb threat envelopes at my lawyer’s office.
Even so, the fact that I was a heavy drinker in those days was inevitably going to come out and be held against me by a jury. But there was something worse that would have come out that would have destroyed me even more.
I was a secret pot smoker.
In 1973, people’s lives were ruined if it was discovered that they had smoked even one joint. I had started smoking weed on weekends about a year earlier when I was dating an Assistant District Attorney named Bob. We were serious enough that we discussed marriage, and how many children we would have. (He wanted four; I reluctantly agreed to two.) On weekend evenings, Bob and I would listen to Roberta Flack, Bette Midler, and Lou Rawls records – and get stoned. Jurors would have convicted me on that alone. Especially since marijuana users were believed to be dangerous and crazy.
And dangerous nuts send bomb threats.
I began to be as scared about what would come out about me at the trial as I was of the trial itself. Papers like The New York Post and The Daily News salivated over bizarre cases like mine. I could see the likely headlines: “Woman who exposes Church accused of sending them bomb threats.”
The fact that I was attractive, photogenic, and a successful writer, would make them even more likely to follow the trial. The publicity would be the end of my writing career. What editor would give an assignment to someone accused of sending bomb threats to someone she’d written about? Especially a “druggie”?
Gordon next made an interesting offer, which my lawyer conveyed to me. “He said that if you will go back before the Grand Jury, and say you lied the first time and sent those threats, there will be no penalty. The government will seal the records, no one will ever find out about the case, and there will be no trial. Of course,” he added to my lawyers, “Paulette should only do that if it’s true, and she really sent the bomb threats.”
I was in such a state of anxiety, and terror, I would have done almost anything to make the case disappear. Including, perhaps, even lying before a Grand Jury. So, I’ll admit that I briefly considered Gordon’s offer. But my boyfriend Bob knew the criminal system well enough to warn me against it. “No matter what they say, records are never entirely sealed,” he explained to me. “I know you didn’t do it, but if you say you sent bomb threats before a Grand Jury, the FBI will be at your door for the rest of your life. They’ll be questioning you any time anyone receives a bomb threat.”
I suspected he was right. Yet the decision to fight on wasn’t entirely mine. My parents had been paying my mounting legal bills. If I wanted to continue to fight the impending charges, I would need a lot more money from them.
I called my father. “Gordon wants me to swear under oath that I sent the bomb threats,” I told him tearfully. “If I don’t, I will have to stand trial.”
My father was silent for a few seconds. “I think this is going to cost me a lot of dough. So, I’m curious, did you do it?”
“Dad, I’ve lied to you about a lot of small things,” I admitted to him. “Like what time I came back at night when I was living at home. But this is important.” I paused. “I didn’t do it, but the only way they’ll drop the case is if I swear under oath that I really did it.”
He didn’t hesitate. “Paulette, I wouldn’t want you to lie under oath just to save me some dough. And if we have to sell the house to raise the money for you to fight this, we’ll do it.”
Now that I knew that a trial was inevitable, I decided to change lawyers to ones I liked better. I first interviewed William Kunstler, who later became famous for defending the Chicago 7. He wanted to take my case, but his trial strategy was to put Scientology on trial. “We’ll pay the dough to defend you, but not to attack Scientology,” my father said to me.
He also pointed out that Kunstler’s reputation as a radical could make jurors associate me with bombs. “With him as your lawyer, a jury may decide that he was the one who sent those bomb threats,” my father joked.
I also interviewed an attorney from F. Lee Bailey’s firm named Fred Joshua Barnett. When I told him about Laurendi and my disastrous lie detector test, he said: “Laurendi? He was their lie detector expert in a trial I once did,” he recalled. “I demolished him on the stand.” I was so excited to hear that. I couldn’t wait to retain him so he could destroy Laurendi for me, too. But my parents felt it was risky walking into a trial as a client of F. Lee Bailey’s firm. It had become known as representing mostly guilty clients, as proven again years later with their involvement in the infamous OJ Simpson murder trial.
Unhappily, I stuck with my lawyers.
May 17th, 1973. My hands shook as I opened the envelope containing the three-count indictment against me. I looked at the top of the page. “The United States of America vs Paulette Marcia Cooper.” All those people against me, I wondered. How could a country I had once loved and had become a citizen of turn on me like that?
I knew my arrest would be coming next. “Please don’t let them arrest me in my building,” I begged my lawyers. “I was embarrassed enough with my neighbors since that smear letter. I don’t want them to see me in handcuffs now.”
My lawyers made an agreement that I would turn myself in, which I did.
I was taken to a basement area in the federal courthouse to be mugshot and fingerprinted once again. From there, I went to my arraignment in a cavernous room, which if I recall, had written on the wall in big letters: “In God We Trust.” But the T was missing, so it read, “In God We rust.”
Standing there, in a room filled with a lot of frightening-looking defendants – and some pretty scary-looking lawyers as well – I felt as if I was about one-foot tall. My lawyers had insisted my parents come with me to show that we were close and that I was unlikely to flee. But I was so embarrassed that they were there to see me at such a low moment that I couldn’t even look them in the eyes.
My case was called. “The United States of America vs. Paulette Cooper.” Trial was scheduled for October 31st, 1973. I was placed on probation and not allowed to leave the state. That was humiliating, although as a practical matter, I had rarely left my apartment for months anyway, except to visit my lawyers. But now, I couldn’t even go to New Jersey without the court’s permission. I tried to make a joke of it to myself: “Who would want to go to New Jersey, anyway?”
But I wasn’t really joking about anything anymore.
Continue reading part two here.
