Martin Gardner's "Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science" (1952) has a chapter about orgone therapy. The next chapter is on dianetics, which Scientology originally was. MG noted that orgone believers were very indignant that the book associated orgone therapy with dianetics, and dianetics believers felt likewise about associating dianetics with orgone therapy.
Even fraudsters are offended by fraudsters. I'm sure that Trump would be outraged if anyone tried to pull a scam on him.
These are rank-and-file believers, not leaders.
Martin Gardner described his career in "Orgonomy" in "Fads and Fallacies".
Wilhelm Reich was a protégé of none other than Sigmund Freud himself, and he became a prominent Freudian, holding several teaching and administrative posts in Freudian organizations in Vienna, and writing for Freudian journals.
He started out in the Austrian Socialist Party, then when he moved to Berlin, he joined the Communist Party. Arthur Koestler, in his contribution to "The God That Failed" (Communism), wrote about WR. “Among other members of our cell,” writes Koestler, “I remember Dr. Wilhelm Reich, founder and director of the Sex-Pol (Institute for Sexual Politics). He was a Freudian Marxist; inspired by Malinowski, he had just published a book called "The Function of the Orgasm", in which he expounded the theory that the sexual frustration of the Proletariat caused a thwarting of its political consciousness; only through a full, uninhibited release of the sexual urge could the working-class realize its revolutionary potentialities and historic mission; the whole thing was less cock-eyed than it sounds.”
But the Soviet Communist Party dismissed his writings as "un-Marxist rubbish", and differences with Sigmund Freud and his followers led them to expel him from the International Psychoanalytical Association in 1934.
"Having written in 1933 a book attacking German fascism as the sadistic expression of sex-repressed neurotics, Reich was not looked upon kindly by the Nazis when they came to power."
He fled to Denmark, then to Sweden, then to Norway, where he discovered orgone. After a furious press campaign against his work there, he moved to the US in 1939. After teaching for two years in New York City, he left and founded an Orgone Institute in Long Island, later moving to an estate in Maine.
MG then proposes three interpretations for WR's later career.
(1) He became the world’s greatest biophysicist.
(2) He deteriorated from a competent psychiatrist into a self-deluded crank.
(3) He merely switched to fields in which his former incompetence became more visible.