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 this final instalment of our two-part series of excerpts from her book ‘The Perils of Paulette’, Cooper explains her theory on how they got a hold of her finger prints and the impact of the trial on her mental health. You can read part one here.
By April, I was in a terrible state. But something that did help me a bit around then was that I took in a roommate. Jerry Levin was a short, stocky redhead with a warm smile that made you instantly like him. He had been renting a place in the Churchill, and we had become platonically friendly.
When his lease came up, he had an interesting suggestion. “Why don’t I become your roommate?” he suggested. “I’ll pay half your rent and walk Tiki for you.” It was a tempting offer. Besides needing the rent money, walking Tiki was becoming a Herculean task for me. Even getting out of my increasingly faded pink bathrobe was becoming difficult.
I realized that having someone around to talk to would help me. Other than Barbara, most of my other friends had pretty much abandoned me, tired of hearing about the same subject. I couldn’t blame them. What can you say to a friend who’s just been indicted? As for my parents, they were so upset seeing how upset I was, that I couldn’t even mention anything to them about what was going on, except to regularly ask for more money to pay more bills.
Jerry was a great listener, which was exactly what I needed. I talked to him for hours, mostly about what was happening with my case, which was all I cared about, anyway. He didn’t contribute much to the conversation, but he was always there for me. Except on weekends, when he left for his job transporting cars, and briefly each evening, when he made a nightly visit to our rooftop pool for some air.
“Why don’t you come up with me?” he suggested a few times. “The pool is closed, so you won’t bump into any of your neighbors,” he promised. I actually did agree to accompany him a couple of times. He was a gutsy guy, a former helicopter pilot in Vietnam, and I watched him bravely leap up to the precipitously narrow ledge 33 floors from the ground.
“Come on up, Paulette; I’ll take care of you,” he called out to me, extending his hand down to pull me up from the chaise where I was huddled below.
I vigorously shook my head ‘No.’
He tried again. “Come on up. You’ve got to be brave if you’re going to beat those bastards in court,” he shouted down, as he tried to coax me to join him. I didn’t budge. I wasn’t just afraid of heights, which I had been before all this.
Now, I was too frightened of everything to join him.
I was chain-smoking four packs of Marlboros a day, and popping Valiums as if they were M&Ms. I was so anxious I couldn’t fall asleep. When I would finally pass out at 2, or 3, or 4, for about an hour or two after all the alcohol and Valium, I would wake up a few hours later, tasting the bile rising in my throat while an icy fear was spreading throughout my body.
The constant pit-in-my-stomach panic made me so nauseous I stopped eating. I lost 15 pounds, going down to 83 pounds. I stopped getting my periods, something that happens to many women when they’re in a state of shock.
By July, I was near collapse. So was my relationship with my boyfriend Bob, especially since I no longer had any interest in making love. It didn’t help that I also didn’t want to smoke grass with him, because the marijuana made me paranoid, and frightened of my increasingly bleak future.
I didn’t want to go out, preferring to stay home and wrap myself in my security blanket robe, which was becoming increasingly ratty-looking. Mostly, I was home alone, except for Jerry. I couldn’t focus to read. Same with TV, with one exception: the Watergate Hearings.
I was mesmerized by the unfolding revelations, which confirmed my increasingly negative feelings about our government because of what they were doing to me. Prosecuting an innocent person. Once, I had been so happy to be a naturalized American citizen. But that was before “The United States of America vs Paulette Marcia Cooper.”
At first, Bob was sympathetic to my ordeal. But he had to go to a family wedding alone, and when he returned, he mentioned a woman he’d met there. I wasn’t surprised when he began seeing me less and less, telling me that I “wasn’t any fun anymore.” I’ll say. All I could talk about or think about was the trial – and suicide.
My obsession with killing myself had begun to grow. One day, after a spate of particularly bad news, my desire to end it all had become so strong that if I’d had a gun, I wouldn’t have hesitated to put it to my temple and pull the trigger.
I knew the only person who might save me was the Boston psychiatrist I had gone to when I was at Brandeis, Dr. Stanley Cath. He was a well-known psychoanalyst in his 40s, with a slight gap between his front teeth, who puffed on the proverbial therapeutic pipe. But I couldn’t go to Boston to see Dr. Cath at his office without the court’s permission. I’ll be dead if I have to wait for them to give it to me, I thought.
Fortunately, when I called Dr. Cath, he had some good news for me. “I’m coming to the Waldorf for a psychiatric convention this week,” he said. “I’m fully booked, but I’ll arrange to meet you between sessions.”
He did, and he managed to calm me down enough for the desire for suicide to pass. For now.
The worst day of all was July 26th, 1973. It was my 31st birthday. My fourth book, The Medical Detectives, the first book for the layman about a then almost unknown field of forensic medicine,now known as CSI ,had just been released. The first review came out that morning, which was disappointing, auguring poorly for future sales. Although it would later go on to win a prestigious Special Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America, people initially were turned off by forensics, thinking it was about death rather than detection.
The day kept getting worse. More bad news kept coming in about my forthcoming trial, and my advancing age added to my despair. So did being alone that night on my birthday. Bob had canceled our date, and I suspected he wanted to be with his new wedding friend instead. I knew that the relationship was ending, which depressed me even more.
Later that afternoon, I began to drink even more hungrily than had become my norm during that period. I was also taking more Valium, although it hardly seemed to work for me anymore. I hated to deplete my stock of pills. I was trying to save them in case I decided to take all of them the night before the trial. That was just three months away.
On that night, I decided not to wait. I was already starting to wash down the Valium with alcohol when a friend called to wish me a happy birthday. I poured out my story, telling her of the horrors that were happening in my life. When I began talking suicide, she kept me on the phone for over an hour, until finally, I was so tired, I fell asleep.
By early September, things were looking pretty hopeless. But then, I was visited by a sociology professor, from the University of Belfast, Dr. Roy Wallis. Roy, short with curly black hair and a taciturn manner, was writing a sociological analysis of Scientology. He came to New York to interview me. He didn’t open up until the last day when he told me about his marital problems with a wife he adored, but who was seemingly tired of him. I, on the other hand, told him about all my legal problems the moment he came through the door.
He was upset by my predicament. He knew enough about Scientology to know they did it. And he told me something else. “There’s a British bloke who exposed Scientology in an article for one of the Sunday heavies,” he told me. “When he went to Spain for a holiday, he was arrested, after customs found drugs in his baggage. He didn’t take drugs, and he hadn’t put them there.”
Neither of us had any doubt who did.
After my interview, Roy left me to go to California to interview Nibs. While he was with Nibs, he admitted to Roy that he had turned, for money. He also hinted to Roy about his role in my indictment for Scientology. He even boastfully showed Roy a letter he had written to his father, obliquely offering to do me in. He used phrases like “double-agent entrapment” and statements like: “With one blow, I will bring your enemy to their knees…”
The letter was dated after his visits to me in Mamaroneck, and before the first bomb threat was sent. Furthermore, after I’d been indicted, Nibs, always in impecunious peril, somehow came into enough money to buy a house.
Roy wrote an affidavit on my behalf. He also promised to come back to America for my trial, if I needed him to testify to what Nibs had told him.
Roy’s testimony would be helpful, but I needed more. I decided the best way to counter Laurendi’s lie detector test at the trial was to present a positive truth serum test. But I couldn’t find a reputable doctor who would give me the test. I had lost so much weight I was almost anorexic, and my health had deteriorated from the incredible stress, lack of food, and sleep. “You could die from the anesthesia,” I was told more than once. I didn’t care. I was willing to do anything – even die – in order to prove my innocence and prevent a trial.
We finally found a prestigious doctor from Mt. Sinai Hospital, Dr. David Coddon, to administer the test. Since I was unconscious throughout, I never learned the details of what I said. But I was told that he was totally convinced by what I said; that I had nothing to do with the bomb threats.
He was also furious about what was being done to me, and how it was torturing me. He told my lawyers that if the government continued to go along with their plans to try me, “I will chain myself to the steps of the courtroom to stop this trial,” he promised.
Gordon was removed from my case. The government seemed to be backing off, probably no longer confident they could prevail against me. Nonetheless, I had to assume there would be a trial, which was estimated to last two to three weeks.
I was determined to keep my parents from attending to spare them the stress — and disgust – over what would inevitably come out about me. I loved them, but they were old-fashioned, and our lifestyles and values were quite different. I shuddered when I thought of how my prudish mother would react to anything that might come out regarding me and sex.
As for “drugs,” someone taking even a puff of marijuana was no different to her than if the person smoked crack cocaine while shooting heroin in an opium den. She furthermore viewed anyone drinking anything more than four sips – not even glasses – of Manischewitz once a year at Passover as an incipient alcoholic.
I didn’t want my parents to read anything about the trial in the newspapers. I was horrified when my lawyers, always a font of bad news, told me, “We have to put your mother and father in the front row. A jury will find you more sympathetic when they see you’re close to your adoptive parents.” They added that some sympathy would also accrue to me when the jurors learned that I was a Holocaust survivor, brought up in orphanages as a child.
They were probably right. But I feared that any sympathy I might receive would be dissipated by the jurors’ distaste of me when they heard about my lifestyle. This was 1973, in the middle of the “sexual revolution,” the motto being “sex, drugs, and Rock & Roll.” And besides the sex, not to mention the alcohol and pot, I doubted that sanctimonious jurors would like a 32-year-old woman who put down a Church, wasn’t married, didn’t live at home with her parents, wasn’t a virgin, and produced books instead of children.
Even if I had lived an exemplary life, which I certainly hadn’t, I knew that everything I had ever said or done would be turned and twisted against me. When I was interviewed for The Medical Detectives by the New York Post, I made an ill-advised joke, saying “Ideally in life, I should have been a criminologist, a criminal lawyer, or a criminal.” That was likely to be used against me. Even my stowing away would probably be introduced as proof that I didn’t mind breaking the law—or lying about it to get away with it.
I needed some character witnesses I could call who might leave jurors with a more positive impression of me. Barbara was out because she had once written a book titled The Sexual Power of Marijuana. I then asked Jerry. “Would you agree to be a character witness for me at the trial?”
“Sure. Would love to,” he said enthusiastically.
But then I spoiled everything. “Hey, you’re not a Scientologist, are you?” I kidded.
He was furious. “How could you think such a dreadful thing about me?” he asked angrily. Then, he accused me of being ungrateful after all he had done for me, of becoming hopelessly paranoid, and of finally going off the deep end.
I knew he was right. But that didn’t soften the blow when he left for his job that weekend and never came back, leaving me alone to face the trial by myself.
By early October, the trial was only one month away. I decided that if I was still alive to go through it, I had better take care of some neglected backlogged paperwork. Like taxes, in case I’d be going to jail for a while. I had put everything in my life off for months, too emotionally paralyzed to focus on much more than my case.
I began by sorting out my past 1972 checks. And then, when I looked carefully at one of them, I was so shocked I almost dropped the paper. In my hand was a small check I had written to the United Farm Workers.
It was dated December 6th, 1972.
Two days before the first bomb threat was mailed.
Things had been so frantic that month, with all the harassment and my books coming out. Plus, the whole incident had taken less than five minutes. But now that I saw that it was during the period when Scientology had sent the bomb threats, it all came back to me.
I recalled that a young woman who called herself Margie Shepherd had knocked on the door to my old apartment on E 80th Street. I’d let her in. “Would you sign a petition to help the United Farm Workers?” she asked as she thrust a brown clipboard in front of me. “And if you could also chip in a few dollars for those poor downtrodden farmworkers, it would help.”
I wrote out a check and signed the petition she put in front of me, which was secured by metal at the top.
Now, I began wondering about that clipboard she was holding. Could the bomb threat have been pasted underneath it? Or could there have been a blank piece of paper under the clipboard, and the bomb threats written later?
My fingerprint, which had been found on one threat, had been a partial print from the third finger of my left hand. That’s exactly where my finger would have been when I held Margie’s clipboard with my left hand, and signed it with my right.
Now, as the picture of Margie’s brief visit came back into my memory, I remembered two more things that were critical. First, although my apartment was always hot, Margie never took her green pea coat – or her gloves – off.
Secondly, she had asked me for a glass of water. I had left her alone for a moment. While she was alone, could she have swiped some paper that I had touched, and that’s how Scientology got my fingerprint?
I wondered again about that mysterious thin paper one of the threats had been typed on. Could it have belonged to my cousin Joy, who used airmail stationery to write to her mother in California each day? Joy often kept her papers on my living room cocktail table. I often cleared the area after she left each day to go to her boyfriend’s. Margie could have easily swiped some paper when she was alone.
Fifty years later, I think Margie’s visit, with her clipboard, and her gloves, presents the most likely explanation of how Scientology acquired my fingerprint. The bomb threats were probably under the clipboard, either prewritten or typed later. The second bomb threat that was typed on thin paper could have belonged to Joy, who had been swiped by Margie when she was alone.
But I still don’t know exactly how it all went down, and who “Margie” was. And I will always wonder about that.
With this latest development, the government realized that getting a conviction of me at the trial was far from guaranteed. But they didn’t quite back down. All I had wanted was to be proven innocent – without a trial – but that’s not what happened. My lawyers made a deal in which I would admit no guilt, which was not the same as being proven innocent. The government would postpone the trial for one year, and I would see a psychiatrist during that time. While I definitely needed one after my ordeal, it was humiliating, because they were sort of saying, “If you did it, get it out of your system.” Whatever. If there were no further bomb threats in that following year, they would file a nolle prosequi.
Which they did on September 16, 1975.
My nightmare was finally over.
And then the harassment began again.
July 10, 1977. It had been four years since the frame-up. Since I was still working against Scientology, the harassment and lawsuits against me continued unabated. The bad news constantly coming at me was relentless – lawsuits, subpoenas, summons letters, legal bills, more legal bills, even more legal bills, depositions, interrogatories, threats.
I tried to get away from it all by taking as many travel writing assignments as I could get. On one occasion, I was flying home from Africa after a press trip to Senegal, mainly to research a story on Gorée Island.
I picked up a copy of the International Herald Tribune, which they used to distribute free to passengers on foreign flights. I immediately spotted a small story that almost made me fly out of my seat in excitement.
“Federal Agents Raid Scientology Church” was the headline. I continued reading, practically gulping in the news. The story stated that over 100 FBI agents had raided the California and Washington, D.C. Scientology churches two days before, seizing some of their internal documents.
Would they include some information about what Scientology did to me, I wondered? Was anything found in the files that would finally prove I was innocent of the bomb threats four years earlier?
And then finally, in May 1978, a year and a half after the papers had been seized, there was another Washington Post newswire story. I gasped when I read the words I had waited all those years to see.
“Seized Scientology documents seem to indicate writer was framed.”
Writer was framed. I had just “officially” been shown to be innocent. I cried. Happy, relieved, thank-God-its-over tears.
[The FBI seized thousands of documents from Scientology and they were released years later. I went down to Washington D.C., to go through them, hoping to find something that would prove I was innocent].
And there it was. The definitive proof written by the Scientologists themselves that they had framed me. It was part of a list of the “ops” the GO had successfully conducted against their enemies.
And now, at last, they were admitting that one of them was getting me arrested.
“Conspired to entrap Mrs. Lovely into being arrested for a crime she did not commit,” it read, before adding, “She was arraigned for the crime.”
I had waited six long years to see this. After I read it, I was so high with happiness that I had to get up off my chair and walk around the room for a few calming minutes, before I could resume ferreting through the rest of the documents.
The next day I had a similarly heady reaction when I found even more to exonerate me. It was a small footnote in a United States Government Sentencing Memorandum against the Scientologists for their criminal activities that had led up to the FBI raid.
The footnote stated that the Church of Scientology had “criminally framed Paulette Cooper with fake bomb threats.” That the government was finally saying that Scientology did it – meaning they now apparently viewed me as innocent of their charges against me – made me almost as happy as the earlier GO document boasting that Scientology did it.
But the document I found most intriguing, and also incriminating, was an “op” they plotted against me. They gave it the bizarre name of “Operation Freakout.” As I had feared, for years, when Scientology failed to put me in jail by framing me in the early ‘70s, they planned to repeat something similar a few years later.
The plot was outlined in a six-page eerie “covert op” dated April 1, 1976, three years after the original frame-up.
The top page stated that the goal of “Operation Freakout” was to get me “incarcerated in a mental institution or jail, or at least hit her so hard that she drops her attacks.”
To accomplish my eradication, they suggested various “channels,” in which Scientologists would impersonate me while making bomb threats. Some of the threats were to be done in person, some by phone, and some by mail again.
They even suggested ways to get my fingerprint on a piece of paper again.
This time, instead of sending the letters to themselves, as they had originally done to me, some of the threats were to go to then-Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. Others were to go to Arab embassies to make it seem like a Jewish person had written the letters, and also to a local laundromat. Go figure.
Scientology was confident that Operation Freakout would be successful because, as one Scientologist wrote in the last and most incriminating of the smoking gun documents I found in the files: “This…should really have her put away. Worked with all the other[s]…The FBI already think[sic] she did the bomb threats on the C of S [Church of Scientology.]”
EPILOGUE
Here’s what happened to a few people involved in my frame-up.
Nibs, L Ron Hubbard Jr., aka Ronald Edward DeWolf, died in 1991 of Diabetes, although it should have been of perfidy. With the way he flip-flopped working with and against Scientology, I hope they nailed his body into the casket so he couldn’t turn again.
The Scottish reporter, Roy Wallis, who had interviewed me and Nibs while I was under indictment, committed suicide in 1990. He blew his brains out at the age of 45 when his estranged wife refused to take him back.
Tony Pellicano, the private investigator who was supposed to help me during the frame-up, was later arrested for racketeering, conspiracy, and wire fraud. He was sentenced to five years in jail.
The lie detector examiner who put me in such legal jeopardy, Natale Laurendi, died of leukemia in 1999, at the age of 75.
Then there was Bruce Brotman, the pompous FBI agent who brilliantly decided that the Scientologists were innocent and that I had sent the bomb threats. After he left the FBI, he went to work in security at an airport. I also learned something else about him, which infuriated me. Right after he worked at the FBI on my case, he received a letter of commendation for “solving” it.
“Jerry Levin” also went under the name of Don Alverzo in Scientology and his real name is Jeff Marino. He lives in Long Island, and no one knows if he’s still a Scientologist. Tony Ortega tried to interview him for his book “The Unbreakable Miss Lovely” but Jerry-Don-Jeff hung up on him.
Most of the Scientologists involved in my frame-up seem to still be believers, even though Scientology claims they kicked them out of the Church. The complainant against me, James Meisler’s, name not only still appears in their current internal documents, but so does the name of someone who is probably his daughter.
Some of the higher-ups involved in my frame-up, who would know the details of what was done to me, are dead. Or, they have been “incarcerated” for years in what Scientology calls the “RPF” for “rehabilitation.” Those who have gotten out describe it as basically a prison, in which people remain for years.
They will probably never get out. Or talk. That’s why I don’t think I will ever find out more about who the woman was who came to my apartment – who was “Margie Shepherd”?– and handed me the clipboard. I’ll never know exactly how they got my fingerprint although Margie’s visit is the best bet.
But I will continue to wonder for the rest of my life how it all went down.
.
