Cults: From Tom Cruise To Adolf Hitler |Rick Alan Ross

Pre Roll

Adolf Hitler was definitely a cult leader they weren't saying Heil Germany they were saying Heil Hitler the leader of North Korea Kim is a cult leader if Scientology had said to Tom Cruise in the very beginning what they fully believe I think he would have said God you guys have got to screw loose have you seen any overlap recently in affiliation with political parties and cult-like behavior well this episode is sponsored by nordvpn if you followed the show for a while then you've probably heard me complain about how bad Canadian Netflix is it was bad as a teenager it was it was annoying to go to America and see how good Netflix was a few Americans don't know is bad I mean Netflix has been bad recently in America too I suppose but at least it has variety here I used nordvpn to watch the best shows on Netflix and online anywhere in the world from Canada now that I live in Miami I don't use nordvpn to watch good Netflix shows but no matter where I go I like to safeguard my online activity nordvpn's state-of-the-art encryption protects you from third parties who want to watch what you're doing online it also protects you from hackers malware and malicious people who might want to track your online activity with their incredibly fast coverage some vpns are so slow nordvpn is a simple way to guarantee your privacy and keep you safe online super easy to start using and it protects you from anyone knowing what websites you've been visiting and I think given the political atmosphere right now it's worth doing just in case the government gets weird who knows grab your exclusive nordvpn deal by going to nordvpn.com tmpp to get a huge discount off your nordvpn plan plus four months for free it's completely risk-free with nord's 30-day money-back guarantee so you can go there see how fast it is forget you're using a VPN be protected sign up for nordvpn and enjoy this episode Rick Ross welcome to my podcast thank you it's nice to be here Michaela yeah this should be a fun conversation I decided to have you on because apparently you're at cult expert so before we get started can you give a brief background about what it is you do and who you are okay I started my work in 1982. I am the founder and executive director of The Cult Education Institute which is a an educational non-profit with a huge Library Online about destructive groups called Cults and other controversial groups uh you can find it at culteducation.com I also do interventions to help people leave Cults and I've done over 500 across the United States and internationally and I testify as a court expert witness in cases involving controversial groups such as groups that have been called Cults I've been qualified and testified in 11 States including United States Federal Court wow okay so why did you decide to spend your life doing this looking into Cults and understanding them I well as started Michaela as a personal thing a weird group infiltrated a nursing home where my grandmother lived and they were targeting the Elder and quite frankly it kind of pissed me off and so I wanted to protect my grandmother I wanted to protect the other people there and then I guess I became an anti-cult activist slash Community organizer and then I was on one committee after another committee and then I worked for a social service agency and then started doing interventions privately in the 80s and so it grew out of a personal interest because it affected my family and I could see that it was a negative thing and as I continued I realized how dark and and very negative the world of destructive cults uh is and and just how terrible it can be for example Keith renery the leader of this group called Nexium that I that I uh exposed uh very early on in uh around 2001-2002 renery is now serving 120 years in prison for uh for tax fraud for sex trafficking for racketeering uh he is the man that that created this kind of sex cult where women were actually physically branded with his initials with a quadrant oh my gosh there were many women that were tortured in this way and so I helped Catherine Oxenberg uh an actress whose daughter India Oxenberg was in the group and then I also helped many families and I helped many people to leave Nexium uh Keith Ranieri sued me for 14 18 years because I published these papers by two doctors a psychiatrist and a clinical psychologist that were analyzing what was wrong with these training seminars that were under the umbrella of Nexium that they were causing people to have meltdowns be hospitalized and the doctors explained why and when I published those papers online at culteducation.com Keith renery sued me and that lawsuit went on for 14 years and was dismissed shortly before his arrest I also wrote the book Cults inside out which is the first book about cults to include Keith rainieri and Nexium wow okay okay well I have I have a bunch of questions I think let's start at the beginning here what's the difference between a cult and and a religion well a religion does not have typically an absolute totalitarian leader here that becomes the defining element and driving force of the group and that leader really becomes an object of worship so what you have typically is a Founder who has absolute power there are no checks and balances whatever he says is right is right whatever he says is wrong is wrong and then the leader uh uses identifiable thought reform and influence techniques to coercively you know break people down change the way they think and then lock them in in a kind of group environment that the leader controls and then finally if it's going to be called a destructive cult uh you you would look to see how is the group hurting people because if the group is perhaps a benign call and they don't hurt anyone they have a leader they have a mindset but they're not really hurting anyone then really it's not something that would draw my attention so what I'm looking for is are they hurting people and that could that varies by degree from group to group uh Nexium Keith rainieri would be a very extreme example of destructive Behavior but there are many groups that they just want your money they want free Labor uh and then it can escalate to sexual exploitation and abuse physical abuse and criminality uh for example the cult om shinrikio in Japan where the leader shoka Sahara in 1995 ordered his people to release poison sarin gas in the Tokyo subway system thousands of people were hospitalized many people died because of what he did and so he ended up being executed other members of the group were in prison and this is an example of probably on a one to ten one being you know a cranky but least destructive cult and then 10 being the worst I think asahara would be a 10. wow okay so you've kind of been in a battle for when did you start doing this 40 years ago so I've been doing my work for 40 years sounds like a somewhat stressful way to live yeah I've been under the protection of the justice department uh Homeland Security and the FBI because of threats on my life Keith rainieri who I mentioned had me under surveillance uh penetrated my private banking records and phone records and you know just harassed me for more than a decade and there have been other groups uh that also have sued me and harassed me and uh stalked me and threatened my life over the years when I testified against rhaenery in federal court I was under the protection of the Homeland Security Department so it you know it's it can be dangerous it can be stressful but I think uh I can't think of anything that I've done in my life that is not is equally rewarding as seeing people who have been victimized by Cults for read and seeing just horrible I I would say evil cult leaders put away and and Keith rainieri is now in a lockdown uh kind of isolated protective custody place where sex criminals go and he raped children he raped a 12 year old he raped a 14 year old and so recently another sex offender who didn't rape children uh punched him out beat him up and he complained about it but even in prison there's a kind of code and somebody who rapes children they're at the very bottom and that's where Keith Renee is now and I I'm happy to say I helped to put in that have you seen an overlap in personality between all these cult leaders yeah absolutely I mean I remember one time talking to the psychologist and cult expert Margaret Singer who really was probably the leading cult expert of the 20th century and I asked her I had dealt with a cult leader by the name of David koresh who was the leader of a group called The Waco Davidians and I'd help people leave the Davidians help the number of families I was working with the batf and the FBI and doing analysis for CBS News and someone said that they could deprogram uh David korash and I said how can you deprogram him he he's not uh uh he's not programmed in the first place he's a psychopath and that person said to me well I don't think he's a psychopath and so I asked Margaret Singer what do you think and she said Rick they're all Psychopaths and I think the the uh the basic threshold requirements to be a cult leader is number one be at least a sociopath with no sense of right or wrong no conscience you don't care who you hurt what a cult leader cares about is what's in it for me what's good for me is good and what's bad for me is bad and they have no innate kind of morals or ethics or anything like that and then typically they're just uh intensely narcissistic I would describe them as malignant narcissists very extreme they have little if any empathy they seem to only have sympathy for themselves and uh they're they're very uh pathological in their pattern of lying and misrepresenting themselves so I've met a number of cult leaders over the years you know I've testified against them in court I've met them face to face and uh for example Keith reneri and to me they they're all the same they're almost all the same and I feel like I'm meeting the same person with a different skin suit over and over again I mean because they just they behave the same so these aren't people that maybe start thinking that they want to change the world for the better you think these are just bad people to begin with or do they have this grandiose idea that they're going to improve things and it just devolves into chaos I think it's possible for them to have good intentions though it's been argued that that they usually are born pretty much bad some of them seem to be hardwired that way reneri was harassing little girls when he was 10 and he was recognized as a predator um Charlie Manson you know the Manson family the Tate Le Bianca murders uh in the in 1970 1969 that family was active and you know Manson was definitely a psychopath but you could argue that because of his very unhappy childhood and the fact that he was raised basically within juvenile facilities and prisons that that he was he was influenced to be bad but um there in my opinion they are very often innately bad uh there was a leader Charles Diedrich who started a intentional community of for drug rehabilitation called synonym which was very popular in California in in oh oh synonym would be going back to the 80s and eventually Dietrich would be prosecuted for criminal offenses and the group would be taken down but I think originally it seemed like there were good intentions that is to get people off drugs to get yeah live a sober clean life but it just went off the rails because in my experience when you don't have checks and balances and transparency in the hierarchical structure of a group you know absolute power corrupts I mean people become corrupted by not having anyone to answer to and I think Diedrich got worse and worse until he was arrested and I think that many cult leaders seem to have started out not so bad and and the situation escalates uh Jim Jones would be another other example Jim Jones was very popular within a Democratic party circles he was very good friends with Governor Jerry Brown a state assemblyman Willie Brown with Rosalind Carter visited San Francisco she did a photo op with Jim Jones he would later be responsible for the murder of a thousand people including over 200 children in what was called the Jonestown murder suicide uh he but at one time he was the head of a very big church in the Bay Area and they had a branch in LA and there were thousands and thousands of people that thought he was he was fantastic he was a liberal mover and Shaker who basically created programs to feed the elderly drug rehabilitation uh the church was very multi-racial Multicultural and he was seen as kind of an icon of change in the 70s but in 1978 he ended up with a thousand of his die-hard followers in English-speaking Guyana and after he murdered a United States Congressman that came to investigate what was going on in that Community which was isolated in the jungle where where Jim Jones controlled everything uh he reckoned that the authorities were coming for him they were and so they mixed what what was referred to as Kool-Aid with poison Cyanide and uh phenobarbital and sleeping you know pills and the end result was a thousand people dead and Jim Jones as well and that's where we get the phrase oh you drank the Kool-Aid that's an allusion to Jonestown uh though the Kool-Aid company wants us to know it really wasn't cool it was it was Flavor Aid it wasn't their Kool-Aid it was a different one but uh that was a big shocker for everybody in 78 I think and people said who are these Cults what are they doing a thousand people are dead 200 children their bodies are being moved out of Guyana what is this how could they be there where did they come come from they're Americans what what are they doing in a compound in the middle of the Jungle and so that was the beginning of uh cult awareness and in my book Cults inside out I really get into that history and I show the uh evolving of of you know Cults beginning in the 70s too today is this something that was like were Cults very I guess not popular but were there were there more Cults in the 70s than there are now is this something that was more frequent back then or did people just find out about them then um Michaela it's a growth industry okay okay social media and we have PayPal and we have ways that people can be recruited online and then extracted money from them and so on there are all kinds of Cults that proliferate online uh I'll give you just one example uh there's a group called carbon nation and this this is led by an African-American by the name of eligio Bishop he also went by uh what what he Nature Boy was at one time his nickname and so he would recruit on Facebook on Twitter on social media and then he rented an Airbnb online in Costa Rica and some people would give him money online and then some people were pulled into the Airbnb and it became a little cult compound the Costa Ricans kicked him out the panamanians later kicked him out the Mexicans kicked him out he ended up back in Atlanta where he was from and he's now in jail facing charges of uh sexual abuse and and you know criminal exploitation of people in the group but the group wasn't that big there were maybe 30 40 people in the community at the at the most uh and he could make money and pay for the Airbnb D and everything online and so you have groups that are streaming online that there are certain leaders that may even have hundreds of thousands of followers online um there's a Woman by the name of Teal Swan who's quite popular she's been called a cult leader uh she would say I'm not I'm just uh holding forth online and she has hundreds of thousands of people who follow her online and these people become very wealthy and then they extract some people from their online following to become their Inner Circle or Community Teal Swan has that uh Dr Phil and I at one point exposed a Woman by the name of Amy Carlson and she headed a group called love has won and you may have read about her she probably had no more than 30 or 40 followers but at the time of her death she had a half a million in cash about an million in real estate paid for and people were vying for who's going to control the assets of this group and they couldn't accept Amy Carlson's death they called her mother God so they took the body and they decorated it with glitter and lights and they basically worshiped it until the authorities knocked down the door and and arrested people for essentially violating a dead body wow okay so I've got a few questions then what's the average type of person that ends up in a cult is there an overlap there there is a kind of narrative thread that you could pull through a lot of people but it could be anybody they could be any race any socio-economic level that could be rich they could be poor they could be young they could be old they could be highly educated or uneducated uh but what I've seen if I were gonna pull a consistent thread through many of the cases that I've dealt with it would be somebody who's not happy at a particular point in their life and they're feeling like I'm just really unhappy with my life I'm depressed and at that point they have the bad luck that someone they know could be a family member friend co-worker they approach them and say hey you want to come to this meeting you want to go play volleyball with these friends of mine I mean it could be very innocuous it could seem very innocent because the group is not going to tell you what their agenda is or does close anything I might put you off so a lot of it's about deceptive Recruitment and just flat out lying some of these groups have multiple names you don't even know who you're being recruited by you find out later oh it's that cult that I read about but now they're using a new front organizational name that I didn't know about so many of the people that I work with are just amazing people really smart for example not long ago I was working with a young woman who had recently graduated with honors from Harvard University uh I also work with a young man who was attending Penn the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia on full scholarship graduated from his classes of valedictorian went on to MIT and is now a civil engineer but at one point he was lured into a cult on the campus of Penn a lot of these groups do recruit on college campuses because I'd say their main target group is 18 to 26. but five of the people that I have worked with are medic we're our medical doctors I I helped to deprogram and bring out of a cult an orthopedic surgeon an anesthesiologist a gastrointestinal specialist these people were not dumb they weren't illiterate they were sophisticated well-educated people so I think if we think that we're not vulnerable we're not we're not really being honest with ourselves anyone can be had given the right set of circumstances and timing and and that's why I think it's so important to be aware that these groups exist so that you know what to look for and you can be prepared and if the group approaches you you can say hey you know what you seem kind of weird you seem like some kind of cult group and you you do your due diligence and you drill down and find out more and you realize hey this is a cult Okay so I guess we could start with how do people identify when it's occult what are the signs well you go to the meeting and you see a big portrait of the leader on the wall that's that's a real real red flag and everybody is talking over and over again about how great the leader is and and the leader says this and the leader says that and you realize that the leader is what it's all about and that they worship the leader and that the leader is the core defining element of the group and then you realize that everyone uh only views the leader through a positive lens they're not critical no one ever disagrees with the leader and you also realize that there's no accountability in the organization for example um a democratically elected board uh Financial transparency through published budgets distributed to all contributors things like that you know you go to guidestar you know uh or or another website online and you find out boy this is kind of shady they're not really showing me where the money goes and you you feel like there's no legitimate reason to leave and that anybody who leaves is characterized in a negative light uh and and you also recognize that people are becoming isolated socially isolated and they're kind of cocooning in this group and they're not really uh in touch with maybe their family uh their old friends things like that and um and when you begin to see these warning signs over and over again you begin to put together a picture of a very authoritarian group everything is black and white nothing in Shades of Gray and people are just agreeing cons instantly with whatever is said and you might be there thinking God you know they just said something that's really weird why is everybody like nodding their head what is this a bunch of head Bobbers or what you know I mean is anybody thinking here and so the group kind of created a environment where everything the leader says is reinforced and nothing is ever questioned okay that sounds pretty stereotypical but that that sounds good you spoke a bit about thought reform and influence techniques could you describe what kind of influence techniques cult leaders use um I I write about this on a chapter in my book called cult brainwashing and probably the the seminal book on influence techniques is the book influenced by the uh Professor uh from ASU Robert cialdini and I'll give you a few of them one would be liking liking we're more we're more apt to go along with somebody that we like than somebody we don't like which is the key to celebrity endorsements I'm gonna buy that car because uh that athlete or That Celebrity is pitching it so that's why they have celebrities do that is because if you like that celebrity it will influence you you buy the product so in a cult you you experience what's called like love bombing which means you get into the group and this is another warning sign and everybody's just loving on you they're all just going oh oh wow it's so great to meet you you're oh wow you know uh we were you know they're just saying a lot of effusive praising things and it's because they want you to like them and they want you to feel kind of reluctant to to not embrace them because they are so nice so the principle is liking another one would be social proof which is a big one so you look around you to see what other people are doing and then you determine what you're going to do when you're at the airport going into lines going through uh TSA or whatever you're looking are they taking off their shoes or what you know I mean do I need to take off my shoes so that is what we call social proof so if a group can cocoon you in in a uh what I would call a false social proof where everything is really controlled and you're getting this feedback that everything is normal even though it's not you feel that your doubts your misgivings are misplaced and so you kind of go well nobody else is acting like this is bad so I'll act like it's okay as well so social proof would be another one and another one would be Authority so you're more likely to be compliant with someone who represents Authority than someone who doesn't so if a uniformed police officer approaches you and says uh let's I want to talk to you about the situation here you're going to be more attentive than it's some guy in cutoffs and a t-shirt you know so if the group projects Authority and they may do that by for example in invoking God invoking the Bible saying everything I say to you is in this book the Bible when in reality they're they're very likely twisting scriptures out of context for their own purposes but but if they can invoke the authority of the Bible that's a big one in the U.S and and Western Europe so you say I I'm not speaking for myself but Jesus said the Bible says you know Moses said so then you're gonna kind of thinking well I have to go along with this because of the authority of scripture because of who they are quoting and so on and that could be manipulated in many different ways so before I jumped on the podcast I was doing a bit of reading and I looked up the most popular cults in America right now and it looked like a huge percentage of them like maybe 80 percent had something to do with like somebody's version of the Bible which shocked me that a lot of them uh were considered Cults so that was interesting I didn't know that are Cults more prevalent in America or is this something that really occurs worldwide it occurs worldwide um my book was translated into Chinese and Italian and I've lectured abroad as well as across the U.S uh and and really uh in the U.S though because of the First Amendment separation of church and state and because of the relative ease in which a group can say look we're a religious group give us 501c3 non-profit religious status which which really gives them kind of almost a license to steal at times because they don't have to pay taxes they don't pay property taxes and and religious organizations in our history in the U.S are given more protection than let's say another non-profit like an educational non-profit so the religious uh uh cult or or some type of spiritually based cult will say well look you know we're religion and if you criticize anything our leader does if you criticize what we're doing even if it's former members that are saying they were ripped off or they were hurt they were exploited that's persecution so you better be careful because we're protected by the First Amendment so I think a lot of groups come from overseas quite a few and they set up shop or they set up a branch in the U.S because this is where they like to have their money this is where they might make some Investments uh because of the protection that our country affords uh people through the first amendment separation of church and state do you know what the cult is around currently that has the most members is or in the past the largest cult I would say one of the largest groups that was called a cult would be a group called The International Church of Christ which was founded by a guy by the name of Kip McKean in fact Kip is still out there doing his thing but the group has fallen on kind of hard times but at their Peak they went from 12 members in 1978 to about I would say about 250 000. by 1998 and then a number of scandals occurred and Kip McKean kind of fell from Grace uh it was a bible-based group and it was a break off from the Independent Churches of Christ though the first people to blow the whistle on Kip McCain was in fact the independent Churches of Christ they said this guy is not good he used to kind of be with us and he broke away and they were very critical of him and he is still out there I mean he's like now what is Kip he must be in his 70s and he's still preaching he's he's probably down to maybe he's just got maybe 5 000 or less actual followers at this point and of course people often think that Scientology which has been called a cult is uh really big and the scientologists will always say oh we have millions we have millions probably based on what I know they probably have less than 50 000 members globally oh and that they've been kind of losing members over a period of time uh the founder L Ron Hubbard died in 1986 and his successor was his former secretary a man by the name of David miscavige whose best buddies with Tom Cruise uh in fact he was Tom Cruise's best man when Tom Cruise married Katie Holmes uh I don't I don't think he I don't think he was at the divorce settlement though but any anyway David miskevige is now the absolute leader of Scientology and what I think is significant about scientology is how much money they have uh between their real estate and their and their cash it's been estimated that Scientology is now worth more than three billion dollars and it's been said by some Inner Circle people that left that they have a billion just in cash and so if you go to Clearwater Florida they own a chunk of downtown if you go to Hollywood in Los Angeles you're going to see a lot of buildings controlled by Scientology so their real estate portfolio is awesome I mean it's a very very full of these properties that they don't pay taxes on by and large because they get religious non-profit status is the government after these people like mad no you know I think it's it boils down to you you if they're doing weird things if they're indoctrinating people and people are believing in science fiction stories or whatever which is the case with Scientology it's just an issue of criminality you know so so for example Danny Masterson uh you know from That 70s Show he's facing rape charges and the allegations are that he took advantage of scientologists women and that because they were all in Scientology they were essentially kept from uh speaking out they were you know they they were dealt with internally by Scientology and that Danny Masterson got away with things because he was you know a Scientology celebrity and now Masterson is facing trial in in the coming months for what he did so if a group doesn't do something criminal if they don't actually break the law then the authorities are not going to go after them so it could be tax fraud it could be money laundering it could be sex trafficking it could be racketeering in some way or it could be something like for example violation of copyright uh there was one leader his name was Keith Hamm and he built a huge temple in Virginia and it was like the Krishna Temple The Hare krishnas and ham also liked to sell counterfeit Disney paraphernalia and one of the things that he was busted on was counterfeit counterfeiting Goods later it was he also was involved in a murder conspiracy because there were people that were leaving the Hare Krishna movement that were very critical of this guy and he wanted them taken out and so there were people that were killed so if the cult doesn't do anything illegal if all they do is believe in weird stuff and uh that you can't really you know you can't prosecute them for that and sadly if they break up marriages they break up families they isolate people they compromise their education their career none of that is Criminal I mean because the cult will just say well you know this is what we uh we all shared this and this person made this choice on their own but I would argue that they were under undue influence and that that's why they made choices that were not in their best interest what does cult deprogramming look like oh uh it looks like a surprise to start off yeah because you don't like send somebody an invitation and say uh gee you know would you please attend this uh deprogramming because they're going to they're going to immediately text their their leader their Associates in the group or they're going to email them or call them and they're going to say what should I do and they're going to tell them no way so first of all it's like a drug or alcohol intervention it's a total surprise and so the person typically they they they're with their family for a visit they're on vacation uh and the F or the family may come to their home it could be the adult children uh having an intervention for their parents it could be the parents more typically doing an intervention with regarding an adult child uh so or it could be a spouse so you start off it's a surprise the person who is the focus of the intervention is probably kind of pissed and they're saying you know why are you doing this you you know you like blindsided me so you have to kind of work through that and say look we're here because your family's very worried about you they're concerned about you and then you begin this discussion with the family or the loved ones present and you're talking really about four things during the Intervention number one defining what is a destructive cult or a destructive authoritarian group what are its core elements does it match up with the group you're involved in number two what is coercive persuasion what are these influence techniques that you think uh have been used to gain undue influence over me and then you discuss all of the particulars the criteria of what constitutes coercive persuasion or thought reform and then third why is my family worried about me and so the family is going to say well you know you're not taking your insulin because you think the group can cure your diabetes I've been involved in three interventions like that where people almost died uh because they believed that the group had a cure for diabetes which they did not and they they were in and out of the hospital trying to cure so so that would be uh one concern of the family their physical well-being their health or it could be their financial well-being that they're giving everything to the group or that they're not not paying attention to their children that they're neglecting their family uh that they're becoming increasingly isolated and so for so the family is now saying this is why we're here this is why we brought this guy Rick to come and sit with us and talk about this stuff and then the next thing would be what is it that the group is hiding from you is the group hiding anything from you do you know everything about this group so then comes out the research did you know that the leader uh was arrested for spousal abuse did you know the leader has a secret getaway that a million dollars was the price tag uh did you know that the leader is basically enriching himself and his family from the money from the group which is supposed to be a charitable non-profit you know you you want to bring out all that and then the person ultimately is going to make their own choice uh the intervention might take three days so you're gonna agree to meet again the next day the next day you might talk for five six eight hours a day with the family and uh and the person that's involved and then ultimately though it's up to them do they want to leave the group do they want to take a break do they just want to say forget it I'm going back about seven uh out of ten people that I sit down with will decide to take a break or leave the group at the end but about 30 percent will say I'm leaving in the first day because I don't like what you're talking about I don't like it and that is their choice so you basically go in there and try and untangle people from a narrative yeah well does this narrative make more sense and then they have to think about it if they're willing to I think I think what you're doing is you are explaining to them how they got to where they're at that they've become basically upon for the group in most situations yeah and they have subordinated their value judgments their thinking to the leaders in the group so to the extent that that it's negatively impacting their life so what you want to do is rewind the entire recruitment process the indoctrination process and say how did you get from where you were you were an independent functioning person to where you are now where you're so dependent upon the group uh and the leader to make decisions for you I mean uh for example what give me an example of something that you disagree with the group about I mean typically people can say oh I don't like uh this about my church or I don't like this about the club that I'm in or the fraternity or sorority that I'm in I think that person's a jerk this is kind of ridiculous that they do you know and I'm not up for that but cult members are more like locked in and they can't think of anything significant that they disagree with the group about so you want to ask them how did you get here let's look at the recruitment process that brought you through let's look at the indoctrination process that nailed you down and were you tricked and kind of Trapped in this group or do you think that the group was fully transparent and honest with you so what you're really doing is rewinding that process so that they can uh slow motion it and and freeze it at different points and examine it and then decide is this what I really signed up for I mean is it I in my experience most people that are in Cults if they knew what they were getting involved in from the beginning they would not have gotten involved I mean if Scientology had had said to Tom Cruise in the very beginning what they fully believed you know regarding uh their Origins you know which is a science fiction story written by L Ron Hubbard about a a Galactic Overlord named Xenu who sent uh overpopulated beings to this planet and then they were they were killed and their their uh Spirits are still residing in in our environment and they attach themselves to you and they would say Michaela you have body fatens on you and the only technology that can get those BTS off is Scientology if they had told that to Tom Cruise from day one when Mimi Rogers his girlfriend then wife kind of brought him into Scientology I think he would have said God you guys have got a screw loose I'm not I'm not interested in that sci-fi stuff but they came to him and they said look you've got dyslexia we have study technology we're self-improvement uh organization uh we're here to help you realize your potential and they painted a different picture now he's pushing 60 he's three for three three marriage just three divorces and I would argue that every one of them was a direct result of Scientology Mimi Rogers her parents left she was raised in Scientology and she wanted to continue with them because scientologists routinely disconnect or cut off a family member who leaves Scientology they're labeled what Scientology calls a suppressive person an SP and so Mimi Rogers I think though she's never really talked publicly about this in any depth that she wanted to continue to be part of her family and her parents and so she left Scientology and that made her an SP or at a bare minimum what Scientology would call potential trouble Source a pts so Tom Cruise divorces her he marries Nicole Kidman Nicole Kidman for a while I think he really loved her and she really loved him and she tried to kind of wean him off of Scientology and it backfired and Scientology sent in one of their enforcers a guy named Marty Rathbun who basically broke up that marriage and uh and and it was about scientology and then Katie Holmes I think really loved Tom Cruise and I think he really loved her I believe him when he was jumping on the couch and saying at Oprah's show and saying I love this woman I think he really did and they had a beautiful child that he hasn't seen for years his daughter Serena and it it why because Katie Holmes I would say did not want to have her daughter raised in Scientology and she did not want to be in Scientology so here's this guy that's gone through decades with Scientology three divorces he's a really smart guy I mean look at his career amazing rare So how do you figure it I I figure it that he was in my opinion tricked and trapped in Scientology and that he can't imagine a life outside of Scientology though now he doesn't talk about it very much yeah because he doesn't want to um put a negative uh you know element in his rollout of his movie projects and I think that's smart but um he's really been damaged I think in my opinion by Scientology yeah I I'd say say so his credibility for sure have you dealt with a lot of people who were trapped in Cults so when you did an intervention they said okay you're right but I can't leave because I don't know they're blackmailing me or something like that I dealt with a really sad situation once with a man who had left the mainstream Mormon church and he had become a member of a polygamist uh cult the one that we all have heard about the flds led by Warren Jeffs who's now in prison for molesting and raping children uh so this man became involved he was uh deeply involved he had four wives uh by the time I met him but he was becoming very disillusioned as many of the people in the flds have have become uh and many have left uh this uh cult at one time controlled the towns of Hilldale Utah and Colorado City Arizona the police force city government schools everything it was like a cult town and so this man became disillusioned but he has all these children he has four wives I met with him I talked with them because his sister who was a mainstream Mormon felt sorry for him he was visiting with her and he was very sad and she said why don't you talk to this guy who knows about groups like this and maybe you can see a way to resolve this and I would love for you to leave and and come back into the fold with our family which you've been isolated from from for years and at the end you could see that there was just no way because he had all these wives all these kids I don't know how many kids he had probably a 15 20. and it's a family unit that he built over a period of decades and he could not see walking away from that and that that keeps a lot of cult members anchored and and I write about that in my book it's I would call it exit costs what are the exit costs yeah of leaving the group are you going to lose your job are you going to lose your family are are you going to feel that after years of devotion that you have nowhere really to go with your life that maybe you're too old you've been in a group for a really long time I once worked with a man who joined Scientology when he was 22. and he left when he was almost 50. and the family did an intervention he had been in Scientology for 27 years from the age of 22 to 49. and I write about him in my book and he had a terrible time coming out of Scientology he did and the way that I think he could do that was because his wife wasn't really that involved she she and he loved her and they'd been married many years he had two adult children going to college and they weren't really involved so he had a family to be with that loved him but all of his friends were scientologists every single one of them practically and for him to leave that kind of subculture and start over again it was tough but he did he managed to do it but it that is one of the reasons that people stay they just can't imagine a life after Decades of being in a group and peop some people will leave a group called a cult very relatively soon like in the first year to five years but there are many people who stay for 10 years 15 years 20 years for example Allison Mack the actress that was in Smallville you know that series about Superman growing up you know she had a great career she was very well liked by many people in the entertainment industry and she ended up with Keith renery and Nexium for I guess 20 years pretty much and and and by the time it was over she had lost most of her money her career her reputation and as we speak she's in prison she's going to be serving out a three and a half year prison term and she sacrificed it all and uh very very sad very sad that that that happened to her but she was involved in this torturing of women uh she was directly and physically involved and so they had to send her to prison uh but I think if she were talking to you right now she'd probably say she has some serious regrets about how long she stayed in Nexium is Nexium the most brutal cult that you've studied no I think the Waco Davidians that was a pretty brutal group I mean David koresh raped children uh some of them bore him children when they were children uh the one girl I met he raped when she was 10 uh the group was heavily armed they were militaristic uh they were violent uh I think that was a really bad group I think that I'm shinrikio uh shoko asahara who had members of his group that were physicists that were working on weapons of mass destruction they were testing the poison gas on the Tokyo subway system as a Prelude they were also hoping to to build a nuclear device I think shoko asaharanam shinrika were a terrible group and uh there have been oh uh various groups like Jim Jones Jonestown the 1000 people that died there definitely worse than Nexium there was a group in Africa movement for the restoration of the Ten Commandments led by a man by the name of Joseph kibwitare and that group kibutary predicted the end of the world in the year 2000 and when it didn't happen and people were starting to want to leave and rejoin their families this was going on in Uganda Terry just started killing them by the time he was done there were 750 bodies recovered that was a really bad group and I don't know if you remember Heaven's Gate that was a small group led by a man named Marshall Applewhite 39 people were found found dead including Apple White in a mansion they leased between Los Angeles and San Diego in the general area of La Jolla that was in 1995 and then there was also a group in Europe called the solar Temple and that group uh ended in mass murder suicide about 80 90 people died along with their leader Luke cheray who was from Canada and they ended up in in Chalets in Switzerland and France where where they died in deliberately set fires so there have been just many many groups like this and and I would want to point out also groups that do not believe in medical care there are a number of groups in the United States uh for example General Assembly Church of the firstborn um and uh Christ followers or excuse me followers of Christ that do not believe in any kind of medical care so members in those groups routinely die many of them children and only recently have the courts begin to strike down religious uh exemptions for parents who don't want to take their children to a doctor so a number of them have been prosecuted they've been sentenced to prison and children have been saved by court order but many children have died there was one group Faith Assembly led by Hobart Freeman in Indiana where there just were so many children that died in that group because they they could have been taken to a doctor and about 80 percent of them could have survived I mean only a small percentage were incurable it could be something as simple as the use of antibiotics so children died they died in pain from these uh Faith healing groups is what they're often called and of course uh there are quite a few of them in the United States and then of course we have the polygamous communities and the abuse of children uh in those communities there are about fifty thousand people in North America that are involved in polygamist groups this is wild I think the Cults that I'd heard of I'd heard of Jonestown right that's what that was called I'd heard of that um and Scientology of course what about the Moonies can you describe who they were and are they still around they are still around uh Reverend Moon started what back in the 50s the 60s and he created what was called the unification Church and he built it originally in South Korea and then he started building branches in Japan in North America and they were known as the Moonies because they worshiped Reverend Moon as the Messiah Reverend Moon would teach them that he alone uh would redeem the world and that basically Jesus had flunked and that he was going to fulfill what needed to be done and they would recruit young people on college campuses and then they would persuade them to go to these Retreats these camps that were scattered around the United States where they would be intensely indoctrinated and isolated for periods of weeks many people would call this being brainwashed and then the Moonies would go on the streets this happened in the 70s and the 80s and they would just be oftentimes deceptively Shilling for donations they would give different different names they would not identify themselves correctly and they even fake being disabled to get money and so Reverend moon at one point had thousands of people in the United States hitting the streets daily Shilling for him and the average Mooney would make about 200 bucks a day and they'd bring it back to Reverend moon on that basis he built a financial Empire that is now valued at over one billion dollars uh Reverend Moon died at the age of I think 92 a few years back his family now runs the group at one point they own one-third of the American fishing fleet and they they were accountable for I think as much as 50 percent at one point of the wholesale Sushi market so in big cities like New York and Chicago the unification Church would pretty much control roll the sushi business and Reverend moon created a real estate Empire the family still controls the New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan and they bought land in South America their Mansions I mean it was a very successful group and most recently when you read in the news about the prime minister of Japan Abby who they just buried him in a state funeral he was the Prime Minister of Japan he was assassinated by a young man uh 41 years old who was unhappy with Abe because of his connection to Reverend moon and the unification Church what the young man's mother in Japan was built out of 750 000 and it decimated the family bankrupted them and the young man suffered his family suffered and he and he blamed Abe because Abe was influenced by the unification church he he he would you know go along with things help them in different ways uh he would be a speaker at some of their activities and so uh so the man made a gun and shot the former prime minister of Japan who was recently buried and it really caused all the Japanese is to come forward that were hurt by the unification Church many of them and they would say yes this happened to me and different cult experts in Japan would also come forward and say yeah this is really a problem and the group is still very much alive and well in Japan and they have quite a following in the U.S wow okay I didn't realize they were still around what's your view on Q Anon is that a cult I think of it as a cult but it's a very unusual cult um the the leader is anonymous so who is q is Q an individual is q a collective we don't know I don't think Q is actually a high-ranking person uh in the established uh you know intelligence Community as as portrayed and then there are factions within the Q Anon uh movement that are classic Cults there's one woman she calls herself the queen of Canada and she leads a faction of Q Anon people and she's an object of worship and there was another man uh with a group of followers not long ago in Dallas Texas who also is a charismatic leader of a faction and they were waiting for JFK to make himself uh JFK Jr I think to make himself known in Dallas and of course nothing happened but in a sense the Q Anon group is classic because they they're very they're kind of cocooned online and they're very kind of socially isolated and no matter how many times Q's predictions fail they just hang in there and that's what's called cognitive dissonance in destructive cult volts that is if you believe something like I believe what Q told me and then it doesn't happen and then the group spins it they say well it didn't happen because of this that and the other and then you being cocooned online and all of your social interactions are with other Q Anon people to a large extent whatever the spin is it's reinforced by the group and so you then reconcile the conflict between what you have been told to believe and what actually occurs and that's a very eerie kind of cult-like feature of Q Anon is that there's kind of an alternate reality going on with those folks and no matter how many times there are these failed predictions they just keep hanging in there do Cults always take money like if you have a relative that you and they join something and you're like is that person in a cult it's kind of getting culty Vibes over there can you identify it by the Cults asking for money or are there Cults that ask for something else well they they typically want something I mean because the leaders that I've dealt with are are not a very um anti-materialistic kind of folks yeah they want a nice car they want this they want that and they feel they're entitled and they want all the members to help them so it could be labor that the leader makes money off of groups that have lawn services made services and the leader provides cheap housing no health insurance very little money and the leader then builds it out by the hour for these services and makes a very substantial profit so it could be free labor it could could be just cash I've seen leaders that have cheated people out of Real Estate One intervention I did with the so-called psychic group led by this psychic woman she was working with a doctor who by the time the children of the doctor brought me in she had given 650 000 that they knew of by by bank records to the leader so typically yeah they're out to get something they're out to enrich themselves uh and of course there's a cult-like aspect I think to multi-level marketing so that's when you sign up for something like Amway or Herbalife or lulero or or whatever and you probably are not going to make much money and you're probably maybe likely going to lose money and yet you have you see this group of people that are like a community and they're all yeah yeah it's we're we're gonna yeah the product you know and really it's it's kind of a process of indoctrination to believe in the dream that the group proposes will be your life you know you're going to be rich like this distributor oh look at her more money than God you know we just we just bought her a pink Cadillac so the group really is not so much selling a product as their recruiting Distributors who then buy the product and then also pay up in a multi-level scheme and there's a very small group of people at the top that actually make a lot of money and so how do you get people to do that I would propose that in my opinion you gain undue influence over them by isolating them socially within your community and you just hit them with this false social proof and all of this liking and authority and whatever and the end result is they're they're they become Deployable they become your pawn and they lose money and that's how the people at the top make money and I I think that many people in multi-level marketing seem like they're they've been had they've been conned and that the real currency of the multi-level marketing scheme is how do I gain undue influence over these people so I can exploit them so they have training seminars Community Gatherings all kinds of things uh you know they're they're uh they're online they're they're getting together online and they're following each other on Facebook on Twitter on Tick Tock and they're streaming I mean this is what's going on with multi-level marketing right now and so I think people get caught up in it and that the currency of multi-level marketing in my opinion is the the technology of being able to break people down and change the way they think so that you can take advantage of them I wonder if it also gives people a community like lonely people right people who are already isolated and they're then they think oh there's this group and they're my friends I'll help them out and then even if there's a part of you that knows you're being taken advantage of well you have this group of people and they look like they care for you right I assume they get a lot of isolated people involved in those kind of schemes it's sad that would be a vulnerability I mean someone who really never fit in who who is looking for a community acceptance maybe they have family issues where they they don't feel loved and then these people love them or so they think what I often tell people is ask yourself this if you said I don't want anything to do with this scheme this group this leader would they still love you and if they won't is that what what kind of love is that I think that's highly conditional love is that what you really want because that's kind of fake is that what you want and there are people that will say you know I am so lonely so depressed yes I I will take that I remember one young woman telling me that I I don't care about what what you've told me I agree with what you told me the group is a cult but it's the first time I've ever felt accepted the first time I've ever felt loved and and I said well yeah but that's highly conditional it's predicated on your compliance with the group and obedience to the leader and she said I don't care I want to be with them they are my family they are my community and this was a very socially awkward young woman who had never really had a boyfriend never really had good friends and felt always odd person out and this group they loved on her big time and she was willing to take that so but usually people will say no if it's not genuine if they really don't care about me then I'm going to leave because I don't need that kind of fake stuff I'd rather go out and find something real yeah have you seen any overlap recently in affiliation with political parties and cult-like behavior well I'm gonna tell you that I think that the word cult is being overly politicized so you've got people on the on the left saying oh you know Donald Trump is a cult leader he is not a cult leader he is a elected president of the United States who won an election and he was president and he then went through a process as president where he was accountable to the courts he was accountable to the United States Congress the Senate they would confirm his appointments this there were checks and balances and Donald Trump did not brainwash anybody the people that follow him that believe in him they were predisposed to to be in agreement with him and he knew that when he came out and he said do you care about these issues and he would tick them off you know immigration uh you know uh China taking advantage of the United States and trade or maybe you're not a fan of NATO and you feel like our NATO partners aren't paying enough or whatever there was already an audience for that there was already a group of people very large group about 70 million that said you know we really like what this guy is saying and he is you know he's charismatic he's he's a a very glib speaker and he won them over on the flip side I don't think you can say that uh black lives matters or antifa are Cults because I can identify that absolute authoritarian leader that is the defining element and driving force of those groups that's an object of worship so I think it's really important for people on the right and on the left to not uh vilify and use the word cult as an invective to tear down somebody because it has very specific meaning and when I testify as an expert in in court that's always tested and I have to withstand cross-examination and so if I use the word destruct the words destructive cult I'm going to be very clear about why that group is defined in that way or destructive authoritarian group and I I don't think that we should politicize the word and I think it is being thrown around in a way now that is not uh helpful and also I would say it diminishes the genuine suffering of cult victims because there are people that have been brainwashed that have been victimized and hurt very badly by destructive Cults and I think when we just glibly say oh you know this guy's a cult leader uh the Maga people are called the the uh Bernie Bros are called uh Bernie Bernie Sanders is a cult leader not really not like any cult leader I've dealt with so I think we should just chill chill it out there and just kind of dial it down and not get into that not point fingers and call people a cult leader when they're not that was a fantastic response how often are cult leaders women versus men because you've mentioned a number of female cult leaders and I'm surprised I think mostly I've heard about male call leaders well it's mostly a man a man's job it's mostly men but there have been some very uh very famous uh cult leaders that were women uh Elizabeth Claire Prophet who led the group Church Universal and triumphant she's now dead but at one point she bought a ranch in um uh I think it's in uh Wyoming Prime primarily uh in in perhaps partially in Montana from Malcolm Forbes the the owner of Forbes Magazine and this was a huge Ranch it was a huge compound and she was a very formidable leader with thousands of followers and millions and millions of dollars and assets and at one point she was predicting the end of the world I think she her prediction was around 1990 and so all these people started moving into the compound and they actually had uh underground bunkers yeah waiting for the end and it didn't happen surprise and so some of them left and Elizabeth Claire Prophet eventually died then there's a woman in uh Spindale North Carolina her name is Jane Whaley and she has presided over a group called Word of Faith Fellowship for many years and uh she is has been called a cult leader and um then there let me think well we talked about Amy Carlson uh then there was a a Woman by the name of Renee julison uh Renee's and her husband but she was the real leader ran a group called Victory Church in Grand Forks North Dakota and I did an Oprah Winfrey Show uh back in 1992 exposing the group and bringing out former members that actually had tape recordings of Renee julison abusing them on the phone and they were played on Oprah and that was the beginning of Victory Church which had hundreds of members including three medical doctors two of whom I worked with personally to get them out of Victory Church but at one point it was one of the biggest churches in Grand Forks North Dakota and it was a big story because Oprah Winfrey ex exposed them in fact they threatened her with a lawsuit they said we're we're gonna sue you and and you can't play those tapes they're confidential you can't play them yeah said watch me and she had her lawyers and she played them on the air and boy they were very bad for the leader Renee jewelerson she ended up in Orlando Florida leading a Bible study in a condominium condominium Clubhouse again then her I think she split from her husband and now they they died in obscurity but at one point they ruled over a very large Church in Grand Forks wow that's wild okay that that's very interesting it's very interesting how there are people who kind of take off of Christianity because you said after the cult kind of fell apart she started leading a Bible study group in Florida it's interesting how you get people who are reading the Bible and then creating their own churches to take people's money well to not not categorize everything as Christian based there is a group called Summa Ching Hai and you can find them online big group and it's led by this woman who's originally from Vietnam she now lives I think most of the time in California and she leads a group of thousands she would say much more she has um a television show she has podcasts she streams and she's now 70. she's been doing this for years and she owns the largest largest chain of vegetarian restaurants I think in the world there are hundreds of them they're called Loving Hut and she insists that she is supreme Master Suma Ching Hai and that she leads a group that is based kind of on Buddhism and meditation and they're intensely vegetarian vegans and that's a group that really doesn't identify as Christian led by a woman that that is pretty big hmm there it is Loving Hut is a chain of vegan restaurants wow that's so weird okay so if you if you start making friends with people and someone is calling them themselves supreme leader that's a sign that that would be a giveaway oh my group is just like a regular group we get to together but the name of our leader is supreme Master though the members would say we have Supreme master in us all but then what I would say is yeah but your leader uses it as a title so why does she use it as a title and then I will ask members uh I recently was involved in an intervention I'll say can you think of anyone else that would be the equivalent of Suman Ching Hai as a supreme master and it's like no I can't you know because no one is her equal on the planet yeah you know and so people buy her jewelry they buy uh paintings of her they typically might have a large painting of her that they paid a lot of money for hanging over their living room couch you know and that's a giveaway you know when people are that caught up in the leader that you know they're basically memorializing the leader as an icon in their living room but uh most groups are not that obvious then would you have put just out of curiosity would you have put somebody like Stalin in the group of cult leader in other words there are a lot of Art there's a lot of Stalin going around I would say the leader of North Korea Kim is a cult leader I would regret that as a quasi-religious political call uh that was started by his grandfather and then his father and now him I would say that Adolf Hitler was definitely a cult leader they weren't saying Heil Germany they were saying Heil Hitler and they talked about him as the father of the Fatherland the fuhrer you know I was just watching uh um a movie with Tom Cruise Valkyrie in which it it it follows the attempted assassination of Adolf Hitler by a man by the name of stauffenberg and the way that you see the people uh you know worshiping you know photos of Hitler portraits of Hitler the fear the palpable fear that they have of him as if he were Supernatural That's a cult it's not just a political party it's a cult and I would say Stalin yes I would say so I would say also that Lenin became a kind of charismatic cult leader I mean look they've got his body embalmed and and people go to Red Square to see his body and to some extent you know Chairman Mao was also uh it could be called a political cult leader uh they also have his body enshrined in tenement Square and then I think we could also oh we could we could look at um Ayatollah khumani who at one time was I think worshiped in Iran in a way that no other religious leader was his equivalent I can remember when he died uh they there were people literally throwing themselves against the coffin as they were going through the funeral service so I think he became an object of worship so I think at times a political leader can be a cult leader but um I think we must be very very careful of how we use that because these leaders that I've just described were all dictators with absolute power they had they they have no and had no accountability and they were literally an object of worship and I think if we don't see that kind of extreme expressed in a political group we shouldn't label it a cult I think that's fair it's the same thing as throwing people into the Nazi category just casual or or comparing everything to the Holocaust I mean the Holocaust was millions of people dying and over 2 million children many of them infants that were murdered so I think when we compare something to the Holocaust we better choose our words carefully and when we call somebody a Nazi which was behind the Holocaust and and the apparatus for genocide in Germany and Europe we need to really think about that because that's a very harsh label can you let listeners know who are interested in learning more what they should read and where they should go online to find you if you have a presence online yes they can follow me on Twitter rickallen Ross and they'll see breaking stories about cults in my Twitter feed same thing with Facebook they can find the institutional Facebook page for the cult Education Institute there's a YouTube channel they can find that through culteducation.com there's a mess Message Board a public message board very big one attached to the cult Education Institute that they can also find through culteducation.com and then if they really want to dig in and drill into uh the subject of Cults uh they can they can read my book Cults inside out which is available in paperback they can download it through Kindle on Amazon or they can get the audible version and it's a very comprehensive book that not only has the history of modern Cults but really delves into what makes them tick with over a thousand research footnotes and an 18-page bibliography awesome okay thank you very much for coming on and talking about all this thank you Michaela [Music] thank you

Intro & Background]

Exposing Keith Raniere and the NXIVM cult

The Difference Between a Cult and A Religion

The Dangers That Come With Exposing Cults

Personality of Cult Leaders

Where The Phrase “You Drank The Cool Aid” Came From

The Growth Of Cults Online

What Type Of Person Ends Up In A Cult?

Recognizing A Cult & Influence Techniques

The Most Popular Cults In America

The Truth About Scientology

Cult Deprogramming

The “Exit Cost” Of Leaving A Cult

The Most Destructive Cults

Different Specific Types of Cults

Is QAnon A Cult?

Cult Like Characteristics Of MLM Companies

Political Associations and Cult like Behaviour

Female Cult Leaders

Historic Cult Leaders