Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

a letter, dated 2 May, that she had received from his first wife in Bremerton. Polly had read about the
divorce in the newspapers and felt moved to offer her sympathy. 'Sara, if I can help in any way, I'd
like to,' she wrote. 'You must get Alexis in your custody. Ron is not normal. I had hoped you could
straighten him out. Your charges probably sound fantastic to the average person, but I've been
through it - the beatings, threats on my life, all the sadistic traits which you charge - 12 years of it.'
The newspapers were happy to report this further development in the domestic troubles of the
'mental-movement mogul', as Hubbard was described with laboured alliteration in the LA Times. In
Wichita, State Marshal Arthur W. Wermuth was surprised to read that Hubbard had 'fled to Cuba'
because he had just read of his arrival in Wichita in the Evening Eagle. Wermuth, who happened to
be a well-known local war hero, sent a message to Los Angeles acquainting the authorities with
Hubbard's whereabouts. Next day the newspapers reported that the 'missing mental-movement
mogul' had been 'discovered' in Wichita by the 'legendary one-man army of Bataan'.
Prompted by the news from Wichita, on 14 May Sara's attorney filed another petition asking for
Hubbard's assets in Los Angeles to be placed in receivership. The petition noted that Hubbard had
been found 'hiding' in Wichita 'but that he would probably leave town upon being detected'.
Coincidentally, on the same day Hubbard despatched a seven-page letter to the Department of
Justice in Washington, clearly seeking revenge against Sara. Even for Hubbard, the rambling,
venomous missive was a breathtaking concoction of lies, vituperation and wild allegations
rendered all the more dangerous by the rise of McCarthyism.
Describing himself as 'basically a scientist in the field of atomic and molecular phenomena', he
accused Communists of destroying his half-million dollar business, ruining his health and
withholding material of interest to the US Government. The architect of his misfortune was none
other than 'a woman known as Sara Elizabeth Northrup . . . whom I believed to be my wife, having
married her and then, after some mix-up about a divorce, believed to be my wife in common law'.
Sara, he stressed, was responsible for breaking up the 'American Institute of Advanced Therapy',
an organization he had established in 1949, and the following year she was the primary cause of
all the trouble at the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation, along with Art Ceppos, who was
'"formerly" a member of the Communist Party' and Joseph Winter, who 'seemed to have
Communist connections' and was a 'psycho-neurotic' who had been discharged from the US Army
Medical Corps.
Playing the role of fearfully browbeaten husband, he said his 'alleged wife' had caused him to
make out a will leaving her shares in the copyrights and Foundations. Later, when he was asleep
at his home in New Jersey he was 'slugged'. He had unwisely done nothing about it at the time as
he had no witnesses, but his health had been poor thereafter. Arriving in Los Angeles, his wife left
their baby unattended in a car and be was arrested for it - 'I could never understand why.'
Much worse was to come. 'On December 5, while asleep in my apartment on North Rossmore in
Los Angeles, I was again attacked and knocked out. When I woke I debated considerably about
going to the police but was again afraid of publicity for again I did not know who might have done
this. It never occurred to me to suspect that my wife had any part in this.
'I had become so ill by January 1st and was so long overdue in writing my second book that I went
to Palm Springs. I returned from Palm Springs in late February to find my wife apparently ill, in bad
mental condition, and my baby more or less forgotten in a back room of the Los Angeles
Foundation. I instantly took steps, what steps I could, to give my wife help. She seemed to recover.