Lately I've been thinking about Paulette Cooper, author of "The Scandal of Scientology". This summer marks the 30 year anniversary of Scientology's attempt to frame Paulette by sending a forged bomb threat in her name through the US mail. She was arrested on May 19, 1973.

Cooper became involved in extensive litigation with Scientology, and eventually, as part of a settlement agreement, signed over to them the copyright to her book. Scientology must have thought they had buried this book for good. But then the Internet happened.

Someone -- I don't know who -- OCR'ed or typed in the entire text of the book, and it began circulating on the net. Then, in 1997, Dean Benjamin here at Carnegie Mellon lovingly typeset the entire manuscript in HTML, correcting various errors along the way, and adding supplementary material about the author. You can see Dean's work here:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Library/Shelf/cooper

Cornelius Krasel compiled a page called "The Story of Paulette Cooper" that gave a timeline of her experiences with Scientology, and reproduced some of the documents about her obtained during the 1977 FBI raid of Scientology's offices. Paulette herself joined the conversation on alt.religion.scientology, reproducing and commenting on entries from her diary during those difficult years; these are also collected on Cornelius' page.

Unfortunately, Cornelius' web site is no longer up, but I have set up a mirror of some of his material. You can read "The Story of Paulette Cooper" here:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Krasel/cooper

Note: a number of web sites are mirroring Dean Benjamin's version of The Scandal of Scientology, but their mirrors contain links to the old "toxi.uni-wuerzburg" Krasel site. The owners of those mirrors should update their links to point to the new Krasel page above, or better yet, mirror the material themselves.

On this 30 year anniversary, it's inspiring to look back at how a bunch of people who never met managed to cooperatively resurrect -- and even enhance -- a book that L. Ron Hubbard thought he had destroyed forever.

No wonder Scientology hates the Internet.

-- Dave Touretzky, fighting link rot and preserving history. www.StudyTech.org www.ScientologyWatch.org

From: paulettec@aol.com (Paulettec)
Date: 16 Aug 2003 14:13:48 GMT
Subject: Re: honoring Paulette Cooper
Message-ID: <20030816101348.06062.00000042@mb-m19.aol.com>

Thank you all for your kind words. It's nice to be remembered -- even though some of these posts as I read them sounded as if I had died. Wouldn't that make Scientology happy!!?

And speaking of my non-demise, as I think back over the years to what they did to me -- something I don't like to do -- I become increasingly convinced that it *was* a murder attempt against me thwarted by a failed gun. Part of the reason is the attempted choking afterwards, but I've also since learned about other "mysterious" deaths of critics. I therefore no longer believe what I wanted to believe then, namely, that some of their members wouldn't resort to something like that. I now believe that they did attempt it then against me, believing that it was the only way to finally shut me up. Which was probably true at that time.

Paulette Cooper

From: frice@SkepticTank.ORG (Fredric L. Rice)
Subject: Re: honoring Paulette Cooper
Date: Sun, 17 Aug 2003 00:25:42 GMT
Organization: The Skeptic Tank
Message-ID: <vjtil06v7tia96@corp.supernews.com>

Xenu allowed paulettec@aol.com (Paulettec) to write:

>Thank you all for your kind words. It's nice to be remembered -- even though
>some of these posts as I read them sounded as if I had died. Wouldn't that make
>Scientology happy!!?

>And speaking of my non-demise, as I think back over the years to what they did
>to me -- something I don't like to do -- I become increasingly convinced that
>it *was* a murder attempt against me thwarted by a failed gun. Part of the
>reason is the attempted choking afterwards, but I've also since learned about
>other "mysterious" deaths of critics. I therefore no longer believe what I
>wanted to believe then, namely, that some of their members wouldn't resort to
>something like that. I now believe that they did attempt it then against me,
>believing that it was the only way to finally shut me up. Which was probably
>true at that time.

I would expect that the Scientology cult hired someone outside of their cult to murder you -- probably a Gambino Mafia lawyer or Gambino operator, if I had a guess. I don't think that any of the upper-crust criminals would dare to get their hands that dirty. Hubbard hired Heber, so the story goes, to provide an additional layer of isolation between his felonies and the law.

From: paulettec@aol.com (Paulettec)
Date: 17 Aug 2003 12:16:00 GMT
Subject: Re: honoring Paulette Cooper
Message-ID: <20030817081600.21270.00000165@mb-m10.aol.com>

I don't think guns of professionals are that likely to misfire, or that someone a Mafia member is choking would be able to break away and scream, and that the perpetrator would then run away -- which is what happened. I think it was an amateur job...

Paulette Cooper

Message-ID: <3F3F9C31.1090102@cox.net>
Date: Sun, 17 Aug 2003 08:16:01 -0700
From: barb
Subject: Re: honoring Paulette Cooper

Paulettec wrote: > I don't think guns of professionals are that likely to misfire, or that someone
> a Mafia member is choking would be able to break away and scream, and that the
> perpetrator would then run away -- which is what happened. I think it was an
> amateur job...
>
> Paulette Cooper

Having thought about it a while, I'm still torn between it being a real, albeit inept attempt at murder, or part of the seedy carnival show Arnie likens Scientology to. A misfire AND a bungled strangling attempt?

Remember, their goal was to try and drive you crazy back then. It could have been another attempt to drive you over the edge with fear. I guess we'll never know, unless that individual comes forward and speaks out about it.

-- barb Chaplain, ARS

"After over 50 years, what has Scientology given the world? Misery, hopelessness, broken families, desolation, death." -Shydavid

"I remember when my son said "Every day should be Mother's Day." But those were the days before L Ron Hubbard came into his life."

--Ida Camburn