"When Lolita Met Xenu": Scientology's Surveillance and Harassment Techniques

Here's an illuminating excerpt from Chris Owen's 9-15-25 Underground Bunker article entitled "When Lolita Met Xenu: How Scientology Targeted Nabokov’s Publisher," which details the complex surveillance and harassment campaign the Church of Scientology mounted against Maurice Girodias, the publisher of Robert Kaufman's 1972 book, Inside Scientology:

[A]ccording to [L. Ron] Hubbard’s estranged son L. Ron Hubbard Jr – better known as Nibs – [Maurice] Girodias had only bought the rights to the book [Inside Scientology] because he had heard that “Scientology had a great deal of money and they didn’t like anything published about them.” Nibs claimed in a September 1972 letter to the US Internal Revenue Service that the publisher saw the books as leverage to obtain money from the church that would resolve his financial difficulties in the UK and US.

According to Nibs, Scientology learned of the book – likely from Girodias himself – and it offered him $25,000 to delete particular passages or not publish it at all. This was too low for Girodias, who made an unsuccessful counter-offer of $200,000. He went ahead and published the book, though “only… as a last resort,” in Nibs' account.

The decision to publish Inside Scientology proved catastrophic for Girodias and Olympia. Although Girodias had plenty of experience in dealing with outraged moralists, unpaid authors, and censorious authorities, he had never faced – and almost certainly never anticipated – dealing with a self-styled intelligence agency that pursued its enemies with relentless malice and flagrant disregard for the law. He had numerous vulnerabilities in his business and personal affairs that the GO [Guardian's Office] ruthlessly exploited, ranging from his indebtedness to the controversial nature of his business and his shaky immigration status in the US.

When the forthcoming publication was trailed in a publishers’ trade newspaper, Kaufman found himself confronted by James Meisler, a New York GO staffer, who demanded a copy of his manuscript so that Scientology could make ‘corrections.’ Kaufman refused, whereupon Meisler told him: “It’s your neck. We’ve got you covered on all fronts.” Kaufman soon found out what Meisler meant. Soon afterwards, Girodias informed him that proofs of the book had been stolen from Olympia’s printer in Connecticut. A man posing as an Olympia editor from New York had bluffed his way past the night watchman and took the proofs with him. The GO did not attempt to hide its involvement. Soon afterwards, copies of the stolen pages were sent back to Olympia from Scientology’s Los Angeles headquarters, annotated with ‘corrections.’

Girodias’s own office was also infiltrated. Visiting the company’s New York offices, [Robert] Kaufman was startled to recognise a new receptionist as a young female Scientologist whom he had previously met. Girodias was insouciant, telling Kaufman that “any self-respecting place of business has to have at least one Scientology spy,” but soon afterwards the receptionist disappeared along with Girodias’ file on Kaufman’s book and several hundred dust jackets. Soon afterwards, the US State Department received an anonymous letter from “A Patriot” tipping them off about Girodias’s plans to publish a satirical work of erotica caricaturing Henry Kissinger [...].

Olympia’s printers, Oxley Press Ltd, were convinced that their offices in Soho were regularly being broken into. Girodias issued a statement saying, “Someone or something is trying to force Olympia into bankruptcy. The persons responsible for this unprecedented conspiracy are powerful and well organised. They have gained access to our files, they are out to destroy us, and they have plenty of money to achieve that result.” Suspicion naturally fell on Scientology, which denied any involvement. The GO’s head of PR, David Gaiman, claimed that Olympia’s troubles were merely “the greatest publicity stunt for a non-selling book this century.”

To read the entire article, click HERE. 

If you have any interest in this subject at all, I highly recommend reading my 2019 short story "The Detective with the Glass Gun" (originally published in BLACK DANDY #3) which you can find in my debut short story collection entitled CRYPTOPOLIS & OTHER STORIES... signed copies of which are now on sale directly from Cryptoscatology.com!!!