Russell Miller wrote Bare-Faced Messiah, the early seminal biography of L. Ron Hubbard in which the dozens of lies Hubbard told about his life were exposed. Many of Hubbard’s lies were outrageous: He claimed he was a nuclear physicist; was heavily wounded in WWII; had 27 combat medals for valor as a war hero; and so much more.

As a consequence of exposing Hubbard’s lies, Miller endured hellacious fair game from Scientology which included an allegation that he had committed a murder.

Russell Miller’s publisher was offered $1 million dollars by Scientology to purchase the rights to the book and refused it.

Russell reminisces with Karen about what it was like to write a book on Hubbard and the subsequent fair game and attempts by Scientology to destroy him.

In Bare-Faced Messiah, Russell Miller introduced my generation to a wonderfully jeweled  British word from his generation: Foudroyant:

In fact, 1963 was one of the few years in which Hubbard did not produce a single book. Instead, he chose to remain at Saint Hill issuing increasingly bizarre proclamations. On 13 March – his fifty-second birthday – he bestowed a general amnesty on his followers, in the fashion of some middle eastern potentate: ‘Any and all offences of any kind before this date, discovered or undiscovered, are fully and completely forgiven. Directed at Saint Hill, on March the thirteenth, 1963, in the 13th year of Dianetics and Scientology. L. Ron Hubbard.’

The amnesty was followed in May by the foudroyant revelation that Hubbard had twice visited heaven, 43 trillion and 42 trillion years earlier. In a four-page HCO Bulletin – dated 11 May AD 13 (meaning ‘After Dianetics’) – he claimed the first visit had taken place 43,891,832,611,177 years, 344 days, 10 hours, 20 minutes and 40 seconds from 10.02pm Daylight Greenwich Mean Time 9 May 1963. Nit-pickers might have pointed out that ‘Daylight Greenwich Mean Time’ was a term unknown in horology and that, in any case, at 10.02 pm on a May evening in Britain it would be dark, but this was a trifling matter compared with what was to come…