Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

concur and Hubbard's letter was tucked into his file and ignored, no doubt after the filing clerks had
had a good laugh.
At the end of May, Barbara Kaye arrived in Wichita, having decided that she would marry Ron. 'If love
can break men's hearts it can restore them too,' she had written to him. 'Yours shall be regenerated
with my love and it will grow stronger.'
She found a hand-written note from Ron waiting for her at the Broadview Hotel: 'Hello! I am happy
you are here! I love you! Ron.'
Its cheery tone encouraged her greatly and she was thus doubly shocked by Hubbard's
appearance when he showed up at the hotel soon after she had checked in.
'He had visibly deteriorated both physically and mentally. He was extremely unkempt, like a street
person. His fingernails were uncut and his hair was long and stringy; he looked like Howard
Hughes in his last days. He talked in a monotone all the time and seemed on the verge of tears; he
was obviously clinically depressed. He told me he had borrowed $50 from Purcell to pay for my
room but no one was to know I was in Wichita because Purcell had opposed me coming.'
Hubbard took her out to a jewellery store to buy her an engagement ring, but she was already
having second thoughts. 'I felt extremely distanced from him because he was so strange, he was
like a different person. I began to think I could never marry this man; I was frightened of him.' Next
morning, Barbara hurriedly returned to Los Angeles, leaving Hubbard a note saying she didn't want
to come between him and his patron.
As the prospective third Mrs Hubbard swept out of town, Sara arrived to parley for the return of
Alexis. 'She got the baby back', said Richard de Mille, who had by then joined Hubbard in Wichita,
'by agreeing to let him divorce her and by not saying anything bad about him.'[7]
On 9 June 1951, Sara signed a handwritten statement scrawled on the notepaper of The Hubbard
Dianetic Foundation Inc of Wichita agreeing to cancel her receivership action and divorce suit in
California in return for a divorce 'guaranteed by L. Ron Hubbard' in mid-June.
Two days later she signed a typed statement categorically retracting the allegations she had made
against her husband:
I, Sara Northrup Hubbard, do hereby state that the things I have said about L. Ron Hubbard in courts and the public
prints have been grossly exaggerated or entirely false.
I have not at any time believed otherwise than that L. Ron Hubbard is a fine and brilliant man.
I make this statement of my own free will for I have begun to realize that what I have done may have injured the
science of Dianetics, which in my studied opinion may be the only hope of sanity in future generations.
I was under enormous stress and my advisers insisted it was necessary for me to carry through an action as I have
done.
There is no other reason for this statement than my own wish to make atonement for the damage I may have done.
In the future I wish to lead a quiet and orderly existence with my little girl far away from the enturbulating influences
which have ruined my marriage.
Sara Northrup Hubbard.
The statement bore all the hallmarks of having been written by Hubbard, even down to the use of