The Unbreakable Miss Lovely: How the Church of Scientology tried to destroy Paulette Cooper

by Tony Ortega, Tony Ortega (Read by)

Overview

In 1971 Paulette Cooper wrote a scathing book about the Church of Scientology. Desperate to shut the book down, Scientology unleashed on her one of the most sinister personal campaigns the free world has ever known.

The onslaught, which lasted years, ruined her life and drove her to the brink of suicide. The story of Paulette's terrifying ordeal is told in full for the first time in The Unbreakable Miss Lovely. It reveals the shocking details of the darkest chapter in Scientology's checkered history, which ended with senior members in prison and the organization's reputation permanently damaged.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781536667448
Publisher:	Brilliance Audio
Publication date:	01/31/2017
Edition description:	Unabridged
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 6.75(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Tony Ortega is executive editor of The Raw Story and former editor-in-chief of The Village Voice. He's been writing about Scientology throughout his career, and also operates his own website with breaking news about the church at www.tonyortega.org. He lives in New York City. The Unbreakable Miss Lovely is his first book.

Editorial Reviews

2016-01-08
Ortega, in his nonfiction debut, describes a journalist's decadeslong battle against the Church of Scientology. There have been assertions of horror stories involving the Church of Scientology in a plethora of books, articles, documentaries, and interviews with ex-members. This new account focuses on Paulette Cooper, one of the first journalists to investigate what many see as the questionable moral practices of L. Ron Hubbard's religion—and one of the first people, he says, to become a target of its vengeance. In a 1969 article in Queen magazine and later in a 1971 book, The Scandal of Scientology, Cooper offered a damning exploration of the church and its practices. "More than previous writers," notes Ortega, "Paulette focused on the harassment of those who dared to speak up about Scientology, whether they'd been in the church or not." In response to her words, Ortega says, the church set out to destroy her life with an unprecedented yearslong campaign of litigation, defamation, intimidation, and harassment that pushed the journalist nearly to the point of suicide. In Cooper, Ortega finds the perfect foil to what he portrays as the secretive, suppressive machinations of Scientology: she's a nearly archetypical newshound, savvy and scoop-obsessed, with a colorful history of committing fully to her work. For example, Ortega shares one anecdote of Cooper stowing away on a cruise ship for the sake of a travel piece, hiding in plain sight and stashing a change of clothes in a barroom piano. This book is far from just another look into the familiar, if terrifying, alleged tactics of the Church of Scientology; it's a profile of a fascinating reporter making her bones and taking her lumps in the fickle world of 1970s magazine journalism. Plucky, self-possessed, and fearless in the face of the many threats—legal and otherwise—against her reputation and person, Cooper is a figure whose name is worth knowing. A thrilling account of a reporter's duel with a controversial church.

Kirkus Reviews