Creepy Smear Campaigns

 

If you're a big shot [or think you are], there are many ways to deal with criticism: You can address it with counterarguments, you can use it to improve yourself, you can ignore it ... or you can spend inordinate amounts of time and/or money trying to nuke the reputation of your critics in the hopes that it will make people stop listening to them.

This is about the people who go for that last option. But sometimes they end up throwing so much shit in the wind that it flies right back in their faces. Like when ...

Church of Scientology Forged a Bomb Threat to Smear a Journalist

If you ever start feeling sorry for those poor Scientologists because everyone picks on them, just remember the time they had a journalist indicted on fake terrorism charges because she wrote a book that painted them in a bad light. If you think we're being unfair, well, let's run through the details.

Starting in 1969, journalist Paulette Cooper published a number of damning exposes on the church and its founder, sci-fi writer turned messiah L. Ron Hubbard, including a book called The Scandal of Scientology, which detailed the psychological methods used to keep the church's followers (and, more importantly, their money) in line. The church tried to sue Cooper to shut her up several times, but none of the lawsuits took off, mainly because they couldn't prove that she had just pulled her book out of her ass like they claimed.

So, they moved to the next step: "Operation Freakout," an organized campaign to have Cooper "incarcerated in a mental institution or jail, or at least to hit her so hard that she drops her attacks" (that's a direct quote from a real church document). Besides writing her phone number on bathroom walls and sending anonymous smear letters to her family members and neighbors, the Scientologists actually infiltrated Cooper's life by having agents pose as friends -- one supposed friend reported that Cooper was close to suicide after all the harassment, adding, "Wouldn't that be great for Scientology?"

But the lowest moment came when church members mailed themselves bomb threats and told the police that Cooper had sent them. Cooper agreed to have her fingerprints taken by the cops, not too worried by the laughably transparent attempt to have her arrested ... only to find out that her prints were actually on the threatening letters, and that the stationery had come from her house (courtesy of the infiltrators). This resulted in some very real federal charges for conspiracy to commit terrorism, which turned Cooper's life into a living hell until the charges were finally dismissed two years later.

Documents seized in an FBI raid of a Scientology office in 1977 revealed all of this and more: The Scientologists had also planned to frame Cooper for threatening President Ford and Henry Kissinger. Oh, and according to a former member, at one point they even planned to murder her. At which point presumably somebody stood up and said, "Whoa, we'd better not do that or else we'll look like assholes."

General Motors Laid Out Hooker Traps for Ralph Nader

After spending most of the 1930s killing the electric streetcar and conspiring to install a fascist dictatorship in America, by the 1960s General Motors had moved on to more constructive things -- like building criminally unsafe cars with total impunity. When some guy called Ralph Nader came along and ruined the party for GM, the company decided to dig up dirt on Nader to discredit him ... and when they couldn't find any shameful secrets in his past, they figured they'd help him create some. With hookers.

The higher-ups at General Motors found themselves facing a wave of scrutiny after Nader's most famous book, Unsafe at Any Speed, was published. The book is a scandalous look into the safety record of the automobile industry, and it exposed GM's 1960 Chevrolet Corvair as the murder machine that it was. Rather than take Nader's advice to heart and create cars that didn't unnecessarily kill people, GM came up with a solution that to them made a lot more sense: If they proved that Nader was a pervert or a homosexual, obviously everyone would forget about the whole "My car could kill me at any moment" thing and continue buying unsafe vehicles.

And so, GM hired private detectives to follow Nader around and catch him in some kind of unscrupulous act, only to discover that he was perfectly clean (17 detectives died of boredom during the stakeouts). Still, GM was determined to get something on the guy, even if they had to fabricate it. Nader was able to confirm, years after GM's crusade, that the company had greenlit a plan to hire comely prostitutes to throw themselves at him in the hopes that his raw animal lust would kick in and cause him to give himself over to them. Thankfully, his extreme dullness prevailed and the plan failed.

GM's plans were revealed when the taped conversations of one of the detectives with GM higher-ups became public. Eventually, the company's president was forced to apologize to Nader for the invasion of privacy. We kinda hope Nader becomes president one day just so he can harass them with an army of hookers. See if they like it.

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