Bare-Faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard is a posthumous biography of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard by British journalist Russell Miller. First published in the United Kingdom on 26 October 1987, the book takes a critical perspective, challenging the Church of Scientology's account of Hubbard's life and work. It quotes extensively from official documents acquired using the Freedom of Information Act and from Hubbard's personal papers, which were obtained via a defector from Scientology. It was also published in Australia, Canada and the United States.
Reviews of the book have been broadly positive — one calling it "the best and most comprehensive biography of L. Ron Hubbard" — and praise the quality and depth of Miller's research.
The Church of Scientology strongly opposed the book's publication. The organization was accused of organising a smear and harassment campaign against Miller and his publisher, though it strenuously denied this accusation, and a private investigator involved in the campaign denied that the organization was his client. However, a leak of internal Scientology documents to the press in 1990 disclosed many details of the campaign. The organization and related corporate entities attempted to prevent the book's publication in court, resulting in cases that reached the Supreme Court of the United States, the Court of Appeal of England and Wales and the Federal Court of Canada. The U.S. Supreme Court's decision to let a lower court's ruling stand, denying fair use protection for the book's use of unpublished sources, set a precedent favouring copyright protection of unpublished material over biographers' freedom of speech. Courts in the UK and Canada took an opposite view, allowing publication of Bare-Faced Messiah in the public interest.
Background and synopsis
Russell Miller had been an investigative journalist for the Sunday Times and had written well-received biographies of Hugh Hefner (Bunny, published in 1984) and J. Paul Getty (The House of Getty, 1985). These were the first two biographies of a trilogy on sex, money and religion, with the Hubbard book completing the trilogy. He spent two years researching the book, which followed a Sunday Times Magazine investigation of the Church of Scientology published in October 1984. In 1985, he suggested that the Sunday Times should try to find Hubbard, who had disappeared from public view several years earlier. If the project succeeded, it would be a worldwide scoop for the newspaper. Even if it did not find the reclusive Scientology leader, the continuing mystery would itself be a good story. Through contacts among ex-Scientologists in the U.S., Miller narrowed down the area where Hubbard was hiding to the vicinity of San Luis Obispo, California. However, Hubbard died in January 1986 before Miller could finish his project. He decided at this point to use his research as the basis of a full-fledged biography of Hubbard, in addition to writing the previously agreed series of articles for the Sunday Times.
Bare-Faced Messiah covers a period from 1911, when Hubbard was born, to his death in 1986, with some additional background on his family history. It describes his early life, his success as a science fiction writer in the 1930s and 1940s, his military career during the Second World War, the rise of Dianetics and Scientology in the 1950s, his journeys at sea with his followers in the 1960s and early 1970s and his legal problems and period as a recluse from the mid-1970s to 1986. The author draws on previously unpublished materials, such as Hubbard's teenage diaries and personal correspondence to colleagues, employers and the FBI, as well as government documents like Hubbard's military service record and FBI file. In an "author's note", Miller writes that the book would have been impossible without the Freedom of Information Act. Among the private papers quoted in the book are a letter written by Hubbard to the FBI denouncing his wife as a Soviet spy, another in which he tells his daughter Alexis that he is not really her father and an internal letter in which he suggests that Scientology should pursue religious status for business reasons. Other sources used by Miller include news articles and comments from interviews that he conducted with Hubbard's old acquaintances and family members.
Miller's research was assisted by a set of Hubbard's personal papers obtained by Gerry Armstrong, a former employee of the Church of Scientology. Armstrong had been preparing material for an official biography of Hubbard, but left the Scientology organization in 1981 after finding that Hubbard's claims about his life conflicted with independent sources. The Church of Scientology obtained an injunction in California to prevent Armstrong from further distributing the documents. However, English courts refused to enforce this order.
In the book's preface, Miller summarizes his view of Hubbard:
The book contrasts Hubbard's boasts with Miller's research. For example, Chapter 6, which is entitled "The Hero Who Never Was", begins by quoting the official church biography: "Commissioned before the war in 1941 by the US Navy ... serving in all five theaters of World War II and receiving 21 medals and palms ..." And it ends by countering: If his own account of his war experiences is to be believed, he certainly deserved the twenty-one medals and palms he was said to have received. Unfortunately, his US Navy record indicates he was awarded just four routine medals – the American Defense Service Medal, awarded to everyone serving at the time of Pearl Harbor, the American Campaign Medal, the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal and the World War Two Victory Medal, this last received by everyone serving on V-J Day.
For more detail on the debate surrounding Hubbard's military career, see the main article.
Harassment of author and publishers
The Church of Scientology refused all cooperation with Miller and sought to obstruct his research. He wrote in his "author's note" at the start of the book:
Miller had been warned before he began his work that he would face difficulties, but was unprepared for the level of harassment that he endured. While researching the book in the U.S., he was spied upon and was constantly followed. His friends and business associates also received hostile visits from Scientologists and private detectives trying to find "dirt" on him. In October 1987, Miller commented: "There are teams of private detectives in the U.S. and this country questioning my friends and trying to discredit me." Attempts were made to implicate him in the murder of a private detective in South London, a fire in a Wiltshire aircraft factory, and the murder of American singer Dean Reed. Reed had died the day before Miller arrived in East Berlin to interview him. Miller's family was approached by private detectives seeking to implicate him in Reed's death, although they would not say who their client was. Another private investigator interviewed Miller's friends and associates, claiming to be acting for Reed's family, though they denied employing him. A former Scientology insider told the Sunday Times that Miller "is kept under constant watch. Every time he goes abroad a two-man mission will be waiting for him at the airport when he arrives. They will monitor where he goes, who he sees, where he stays. This information will be added to his file, which is already more than 100 pages thick."
Senior executives at publishers Michael Joseph and at the Sunday Times, which serialised the book, received threatening phone calls and a visit from private investigator Eugene Ingram, who worked for the Church. Another private investigator, Jarl Grieve Einar Cynewulf, told Sunday Times journalists that he had been offered "large sums of money" to find a link between Miller and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), as the Church reportedly believed that the CIA was driving investigations into its tax affairs in the U.S. According to Cynewulf, Miller's mail and phones were intercepted and his home was under constant surveillance. The newspaper reported that Cynewulf had chased its reporter and photographer through the streets of Bristol, armed with a pistol which he fired at them, saying, "You'd better go now unless you want to end up in a wooden box. Do you want to be another Hungerford martyr?"
In 1990, nearly three years after the book's first publication, a defector from the Church of Scientology provided the Sunday Times with internal documents detailing the smear campaign against Miller. These records listed several private investigators who had been hired to keep Miller under surveillance and feed false information about him to neighbours and the police. A Scientology executive had flown from Los Angeles to a flat in London where he and a private detective co-ordinated the campaign. Rubbish from the publisher's offices was regularly emptied into the flat's bathtub to be picked through. According to the informant, the investigators used contacts with the British police to try to implicate him in unsolved crimes: "People were brought in from abroad posing as journalists to arrange interviews with Scotland Yard where they would drop innuendoes about Miller. Other investigators were used to smear his name with colleagues, friends and neighbours. They worked hard on the line that he was an undercover British intelligence man." A Church spokesman dismissed these allegations, saying, "anyone giving you this sort of information must be crazy or on drugs."
Litigation
The Church of Scientology and related entities sought injunctions against the book's publication, claiming copyright infringement of Hubbard's private documents. They threatened to sue in as many as 50 countries, adopting a strategy that the University of Pennsylvania's Professor Paul K. Saint-Amour has described as "an international parade of litigation" and "whack-a-mole legal proceedings". Much of the dispute centred on the plaintiffs' argument that the actions of former Scientology archivist Gerry Armstrong in providing Miller with unpublished materials (whether directly or indirectly) were a breach of his duty of confidence to the Church, and that the use of excerpts from this material violated copyrights owned by Hubbard's estate. Miller later noted that the plaintiffs did not attempt to dispute the facts of the book in court which, he said, was a pity as he had been looking forward to defending his meticulous research.
United Kingdom
The first lawsuit was heard in the UK in October 1987 by Justice Vinelott. The litigants, the Church of Scientology of California, failed to obtain an injunction against the publication of the book. In his decision of 9 October 1987, the judge said that it was "clear that the public interest far outweighed any duty of confidence that could conceivably be owed to Mr. Hubbard or his church." The unpublished materials were held to be "essential" if Hubbard's early career was to be "properly evaluated", and legal decisions against Armstrong in California could not bind an English court. The judge held that the Church had acted improperly in bringing its suit so late in the day. It had become aware in May of the plans to publish Bare-Faced Messiah, but had not brought suit until 29 September, less than a month before publication. The application for an injunction, he said, "was made at a time, whether calculated or not, when the greatest possible damage and inconvenience would be caused to Penguin Books". No satisfactory explanation had been made for the delay and, in the judge's view, the application "was oppressive, and was not brought to protect any legitimate interest."