Penthouse interview with L. Ron Hubbard Jr.

“Scientology and all the other cults are one-dimensional, and we live in a three-dimensional world.
Cults are as dangerous as drugs. They commit the highest crime: the rape of the soul.”
L. Ron Hubbard Jr.

Penthouse, June 1983

I: Introduction

For more than twenty years L. Ron Hubbard, Jr., has been a man on the run. He has changed residences, occupations, and even his name in 1972 to Ron DeWolf to escape what he alleges to be the retribution and wrath of his father and his father’s organization, the Church of Scientology. His father, L. Ron Hubbard. Sr., founder and leader of Scientology, has been a figure of controversy and mystery, as has been his organization, for more than a generation. Its detractors have called it the “granddaddy” and the worst of all the religious cults that have sprung up over the last generation. Its advocates, and there are thousands, swear that the church is the avenue for human perfection and happiness. Millions of words have been written for and against Scientology. Just what is the truth?

L. Ron Hubbard, Sr., and the very few who have worked at the highest echelons of the organization have never spoken publicly about the workings and finances of the Church of Scientology. Firsthand allegations about coercion, black-mail, and just how billions of dollars the organization is said to possess have been accrued and spent is lacking: that is, until very recently. In an extraordinary petition brought November 10, 1982, in Superior Court in Riverside, Calif., by L. Ron Hubbard, Jr., to prove that his father is dead and that his heirs should receive the tens of millions of dollars being dissipated from his estate, some of the mystery about Scientology has begun to unravel. Some of the details are shocking.

L. Ron Hubbard, Jr., is a survivor. His appearance on earth, May 7, 1934, was the result of failed abortion rituals by his father, and Ron, after only six and a half months in the womb and at 2.2 pounds entered the world. His mother, Margeret (“Polly”) Grubb, was to have one more child, Catherine May, before her husband ditched her in 1946 to enter into a bigamous marnage with Sarah Northrup. A half sister, Alexis Valerie, survived that union. Soon after that, the founder of Scientology married Mary Sue Whipp, the current Mrs. L. Ron Hubbard, Sr., who at this writing is serving four years in federal prison for stealing government documents. There were four childrens: Diana and Quentin, who died under mysterious circumstances in 1976; Arthur, who has been missing for several years; and Suzette.

Ron Jr. says that he remembers much of his childhood. He claims to recall, at six years, a vivid scene of his father performing an abortion ritual on his mother with a coat hanger. He remembers that when he was ten years old, his father, in an attempt to get his son in tune with his black-magic worship, laced the young hubbard’s bubble gum with phenobarbital. Drugs were an important part of Ron Jr.’s growing up, as his father believed that they were the best way to get closer to Satan, the Antichrist of black magic.

Ron Jr. also recalls a hard-drinking, drug-abusing father who would mistreat his mother and other women, but who, when, under the influence, would delight in telling his son all of his exploits. Finally, Ron Jr. remembers his father as a “broke science-fiction writer” who espoused that the road to riches and glory lay in selling religion to the masses.

Nineteen fifty was a watershed year for the sixteen-year-old Ron Jr., when his father’s book Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health was published. While in the 1980s self-help books hold little novelty, Dianetics was a pioneer of that genre. Happiness in 1950 could be a reality, if only one practiced the strange amalgam of science fiction and psychoanalysis offered in the senior Hubbard’s best-seller. It was an unexpected success for Hubbard, then living in New Jersey, when the mailman would deliver daily sacks of letters from the unhappy and desperate who had read the book and wanted L. Ron Hubbard to take them to the promised land. It was a dream come true, a science-fiction writer who not only created a world of fantasy but packaged it and sold it as reality.

In 1950 L. Ron Hubbard opened a Dianetics clinic, where the hopeful and newly cenverted could come, for a fee, and their ills, from loneliness to cancer, would be cured. Dianetics was the new Scientific Revolution. and L. Ron Hubbard was its prophet.

Scientology is essentially a self-help therapy. It is based on one premise that by recalling negative experiences or “engrams,” a person can free himself from repressed feelings that cripple his life. This liberation process is assisted by a counselor called an “auditor” who charges up to hundreds of dollars a session. The auditor’s basic aid is the “E-meter”, a skin galvanometer that is said to help him ascertain the problems of his client.

Soon the New Jersey authorities and the American Medical Association challenged the veracity of the new faith. L. Ron Hubbard met the challenge by fleeing the state (not the last time this was to happen). A frequent memory of Ron Jr. is his father’s packing up shoe boxes with thousands of dollars to move on to greener and safer pastures.

Coming into manhood in the early fifties, Ron Jr. learned the virtues of flimflam and keeping one step ahead of the law and creditors. But he admits that he accepted his father’s teachings and example as correct. By the time his father started the modern Church of Scientology in Arizona and New Jersey in 1953, young Hubbard was not only a disciple but a willing organizer in the new movement. He was to be so throughout the 1950s.

While Ron Jr. may never have questioned his father and the mushrooming cult of Scientology, a growing uneasiness began to take hold of him. In 1953 he married Henrietta, whom he never allowed to join the church. They were to have six children , Deborah, Leif, Esther, Eric, Harry and Alex, age twelve, who suffers from Down’s Syndrome, plus six grandchildren, none or whom were ever members of Scientology. The importance of family life, especially in contrast to his own upbringing, caused Ron Jr. to question his life as a member of Scientology, albeit privately. Other factors also caused Ron Jr. to think about breaking away from the cult that was dominating his life. His father’s autocratic and arbitrary control of Scientology often led to violence, and the young Hubbard began to be disturbed by his own participation. Certain questionable transactions involving drug dealing and the transfer of large sums of money abroad by his father was another troubling factor. But, he says, the breaking point came over his father’s involvement with the Russians. Finally, in 1959, when his father was in Australia, Ron, his wife, and two children fled the Church of Scientology.

According to Ron Jr., life was to become a nightmarish existence. No matter, where the family went in the United States, it would not take long for a member of the organization to find them. Because he knew too much about Scientoiogy and its founder, Ron says, attempts were made to ensure his silence. For many years L. Ron Hubbard, Jr. kept a low profile.

Keeping silent did not end Ron’s terror of what his father and followers might do to him and his family. In 1976 his half brother Quentin died under mysterious circumstances that Ron is certain was murder. Quentin, a son of Scientology’s leader, was a drug abuser and an embarassment to his father. Whether all these questions were signs ot paranoia finally became less important to Ron than discovering, once and for all, the truth about his father. In 1980 Ron became convinced that his father was dead, and that his death was being kept a secret by the Church of Scientology, lest knowledge of his death cause chaos in the organization. He filed his petition and an open war was declared. Should he win the suit by proving that his father is either dead or incompetent, Ron and other family members will receive the millions of dollars believed to be part of L. Ron Hubbard’s estate.

For some thirty years, stories, rumors, and innuendo about the Church of Scientology have been whispered, and sometimes reported, internationally. Obviously, the final judgment of L. Ron Hubbard. Jr., and his allegations remains to be made. But because of his high-level involvement for such a long time with this controversial organization, he himself has become a newsworthy figure. To find out what this man at the center of an international firestorm is like. Penthouse sent contributing editor Allan Sonnenschein to Carson City, Nev, where he met Hubbard in the small three-bedroom apartment in which he lives (he manages the apartment complex). “DeWolf.” Sonnenschein told us, “is a stocky and ruddy-complexioned man, with thinning red hair. Despite his almost continuous involvement with lawyers of both sides of his case, DeWolf was very relaxed during the several hours. I spent with him. He seemed convinced that his desire to tell his story after all these years was of vital importance...and he spoke with a firmness and intensity befitting a person who claims to be risking his life by speaking out.”

Because of the seriousness of Mr. DeWolf’s charges and because his father has affected the lives of thousands, if not millions, of people, Penthouse will be launching an independent investigation of these charges. The results will be published in a forthcoming issue.