going-clear-scientology-hollywood-and-the-prison-of-belief-by-lawrence-wright-2

Alexis bring substantial identication to prove who she was, but when she opened the
door, she drew a breath. It was as if Hubbard had been reincarnated as a freckled,
twenty-two-year-old woman. Alexis asked Cooper whether or not she was legitimate. In
her social circle, illegitimacy was a terrible stigma. Cooper was able to show her Ron
and Sara’s marriage certificate.
Alexis had been to Hawaii over the Christmas holidays to visit her mother. When she
returned to college, she learned that there was a man who had been waiting to see her
for four days. He identied himself as an FBI agent and said he had several pages of a
letter he was required to read aloud to her. The letter said that Alexis was illegitimate. It
was clearly written by Hubbard. “Your mother was with me as a secretary in Savannah
in late 1948,” the letter stated. He said he had to re Sara because she was a “streetwalker”
and a Nazi spy. “In July 1949 I was in Elizabeth, New Jersey, writing a movie,”
the letter continues. “She turned up destitute and pregnant.” Out of the goodness of his
heart, Hubbard said, he had taken Sara in, to see her “through her trouble.” Weirdly, the
letter was signed, “Your good friend, J. Edgar Hoover.”
After The Scandal of Scientology, Cooper’s life turned into a nightmare. She was
followed; her phone was tapped; she was sued nineteen times. Her name and telephone
number were written on the stalls in public men’s rooms. One day, when Cooper was
out of town, her cousin, who was staying in her New York apartment, opened the door
for a delivery from a orist. The deliveryman took a gun from the bouquet, put it to her
temple, and pulled the trigger. When the gun didn’t re, he attempted to strangle her.
Cooper’s cousin screamed and the assailant ed. Cooper then moved to an apartment
building with a doorman, but soon after that her three hundred neighbors received
letters saying that she was a prostitute with venereal disease who molested children. A
woman impersonating Cooper voiced threats against Secretary of State Henry Kissinger
and President Gerald Ford at a Laundromat, while a Scientologist who happened to be
present notied the FBI. Two members from the Guardian’s oce broke into Cooper’s
psychiatrist’s oce and stole her les, then sent copies to her adoptive parents. Cooper
was charged with mailing bomb threats to the Church of Scientology. In the courtroom,
the prosecutor produced a threatening letter with her ngerprint on it, and Cooper
fainted. (Later, she remembered signing a petition, which may have had a blank page
underneath it.) In May 1973, Cooper was indicted by the US Attorney’s oce for
mailing the threats and then lying about it before the grand jury.
IF THE RUMORS about Hubbard were true—that he had created a religion only in order to
get rich—he had long since accomplished that goal. One of his disaected lieutenants
later claimed that Hubbard had admitted to “an insatiable lust for power and money.”
He hectored his adherents on this subject. “MAKE MONEY,” he demanded in a 1972
policy letter. “MAKE MORE MONEY. MAKE OTHERS PRODUCE SO AS TO MAKE
MONEY.” In order to siphon money into Hubbard’s personal accounts, a number of front
organizations were established, including the Religious Research Foundation, which was
incorporated in Liberia. In the mid-seventies that single foundation had an account in