Louise Callaghan
The Sunday Times
February 13 2022
Late on a Tuesday night in 2018 I was sitting in a TV studio in Istanbul looking up at an empty stage, waiting for Turkey’s most bizarre — and most powerful — cult leader to arrive. Around me in the audience were at least a dozen perky young men in suits. They were followers of Adnan Oktar, a Muslim preacher who had grown in fame through his TV channel, on which his female followers — known as “kittens” — would dance for him in minidresses after he had lectured them on Islamic theology.
I had asked to interview him that morning in response to serious allegations made by a defector from the cult, who claimed that behind the gaudy façade was a horrifying den of abuse and criminal activity. The cult had denied everything.
To my surprise one of the kittens replied to my interview request straight away, telling me to come to the studio at the cult’s headquarters at midnight. Two hours later I was getting bored. But the men in the audience looked as though there was nowhere they’d rather be. They were polite, engaging and good looking, but with a strange blank intensity: all things that I would in time recognise as hallmarks of Oktar’s followers.
Then Oktar stepped out on to the stage. He was in his sixties, with his beard and hair dyed blue-black and the face of a matinee idol gone to seed. A huge hernia stuck out from his stomach and visibly hung down his leg, making him limp in his double-breasted suit. The TV cameras were off but you wouldn’t know it from the host’s performance.
Over the next half-hour he ranted at me about conspiracy theories, including his belief that a murderous cabal he called the British Deep State was trying to control the world. I asked him about accusations that he had abused and exploited his followers. He said they were all just “friends” who felt a “deep love” for each other. It all made such little sense that my editors didn’t run the story.
Three months later Oktar and more than 200 of his followers were arrested on charges ranging from child abuse to kidnapping and torture. Dragos, the hilltop compound in Istanbul where I’d interviewed him, was raided by police. Some of the women who had lived there claimed it had been like a prison.
In January 2021 Oktar was sentenced to 1,075 years and three months in jail. The strange televangelist with the scantily clad followers (as most people in Turkey knew him) was, according to the Turkish justice system, one of the most serious criminals in the country’s history.
I decided to investigate what had been going on inside this cult, and ended up turning it into a podcast series for Stories of our times. What I found was more shocking than anything I had imagined — and led to me being forced to leave my home in Turkey for months after threats related to my reporting.
Before he became a cult leader, Oktar was a small-time preacher from Ankara, Turkey’s capital. Born in 1956, he moved to Istanbul in his early twenties with his mother after what some of his former followers have said was a troubled childhood at the hands of an abusive father. He began gathering followers, holding meetings in his small house near the Bosphorus. From the beginning he looked for a particular type of person: the sons and daughters of prominent families, highly educated, multilingual, well-connected, wealthy and beautiful.
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Among them was Seda Isildar, then 15 years old and at secondary school in Istanbul. She was introduced to Oktar and his group through school friends in the mid-1980s, though she had first seen him on the cover of the respected news magazine Nokta, which reported on the privately educated students drawn to his new religious community.
Oktar’s group didn’t have a name and its members didn’t see themselves as a cult — more as a circle of like-minded people.
“They tell you you’re special. You are different from the rest of the herd. You’re 15 years and you just don’t want to ruin it for everybody else,” Isildar, now 50, tells me on a video call from her home in Canada. “You’re part of that group. And they isolate you … it’s like a toxic relationship.”
At the time many in Turkey’s upper middle classes saw religion as a relic of the past. After the foundation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, its leader, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, had strived to create a secular, modern nation and banish religion from public life. Later religious, conservative politicians such as the current president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, would be seen as modernising forces that were shaking off the prejudices of the old elite — repealing the ban on headscarves in public places and arguing that Turkey could be an Islamic democracy.
For Isildar and her friends Oktar represented a new way of looking at things — a modernised version of Islam that seemed progressive and exciting. It was, she tells me, like a thrilling secret. But soon everything changed. Oktar began to sexually abuse Isildar — coercing her into marrying him when she was a schoolgirl and he was in his early thirties. When she was 20 he forced her to have a nose job without a general anaesthetic.
“It was horrible. Horrible. I can still remember the hammer,” she says. “I was counting how many times they were hitting the hammer and the chisel to my nose.”
After eight years under Oktar’s control Isildar managed to escape. Not long afterwards she moved to Canada. Speaking to her I’m struck by how insightful she is about her time in the cult. Before I started working on this story I had believed that cults preyed only on the very vulnerable. But I soon realised that a lot of the people I was talking to didn’t fit that bill. Many were smart, successful and highly educated.
“You have to understand that cults want productive people,” says Dr Alexandra Stein, an honorary research fellow at South Bank University in London — and a former cult member. “They don’t want drains on the system. They want people who are going to add value. Education and wealth just don’t protect you.”
Yet there were still so many things I didn’t understand. When we had met for the interview, Oktar seemed to have little ideology short of a garbled version of Islam, a messiah complex and his theory about the British Deep State. What was it that had drawn people to him?
One person who knew was Ceylan Ozgul, the former “kitten” whose allegations had made me contact Oktar for an interview. She had spent years in the group, becoming one of its most prominent members. Sometimes she would appear on Oktar’s TV channel, where he would conduct discussions about Islamic theology with the kittens and “lions” — male followers — before the women would break into dance. They would beam adoringly at him, laugh at his attempted jokes, nod along with his convoluted theories and praise him constantly.
When she was on TV, Ozgul would do the same. But really, she says, the cult was a prison.
“The only image in people’s minds about Adnan Oktar was girls in bikinis or revealing clothes and dancing,” she says. “Unfortunately this makes the subject really light. But it is not a subject to be taken lightly. It is actually about how to enslave young women and young men.”
Ozgul was 24 and in her third year at Istanbul University when she was introduced to the cult — though they presented themselves as just a group of friends. The members drew her in slowly, separating her from her ordinary life. At that point, around 2006, there were no girls in bikinis, no TV channel and Oktar didn’t only ramble on about conspiracy theories.
“He was, you know, quite fun to have a chat with. He’s like an older guy who will take you seriously and talk about history, physics, medicine. I liked spending time with him,” she tells me.
Ozgul grew closer to the group and began working for them, helping build their profile in Turkey and internationally. Their ideology was hard to pin down. In earlier years Oktar had spouted conspiracy theories about Jews and Freemasons controlling the world. Later he focused more on Islamic creationism — denying evolution and trying to “debunk” fossils — and had courted Jewish and evangelical Christian communities, positioning himself as an interlocutor between different faiths. This was prescient. Following the 9/11 attacks and the war on terror, Islam was mistrusted by many in the West. Oktar, with his glamorous followers and public embrace of Christians and Jews, was — for some — the kind of Muslim leader they could get along with.
Ozgul worked with other followers to arrange talks at a US military base and at prestigious institutions, including University College London. But she was also trapped. Her movements were severely limited and her communications monitored. She and other cult members were under constant heavy guard, she says, with dozens of security cameras inside the compound tracking their every move.
“It didn’t happen overnight. It happened over like a year. Even the stupid things started to suddenly make sense to you after a year, because you are thinking it’s normal, everyone around you is doing it,” she says.
In 2011 Oktar established a satellite channel, A9 TV, to expand his audience. The schedule included documentaries based on his beliefs and talk shows with Oktar as the flamboyant host. These evolved into a bizarre blend of televangelism and glitzy daytime TV, with an entourage of blonde, scantily clad women hanging on their leader’s every word.
Although Islam advocates modest dress for women, Oktar argued that its teachings had been misinterpreted: instead of covering up, women should project their “inner beauty” through their physical appearance. Many Turkish people viewed the tacky spectacle as bit of a joke. Others thought he had a point but took it too far.
While Ozgul helped to expand Oktar’s reach, other cult members were engaged in something far darker: grooming girls and young women to join the group.
Sahin was a teenager when he first heard about Oktar. Unlike many of the other members he wasn’t rich, multilingual or blue-blooded. He came from a working-class family in Istanbul. But he was young and malleable — so when some of his close friends started following Oktar, he did too.
Once inside he was introduced to a new world of money and power. As Oktar paid attention to him, Sahin changed. He started to wear expensive suits and watches and drive sports cars. Within a couple of years he had transformed himself into a Prince Charming. It was all part of Oktar’s plan. Sahin was bait. The white teeth, toned abs and easy smile were all engineered towards luring women into the cult.
It worked like this: Sahin — or other “lions” like him — would hang out at cafés and malls in expensive parts of the city. When he saw a pretty girl he’d approach her, telling her he was from a modelling agency or that he was looking for new salespeople for his company. He was always polite, solicitous and professional.
Once the girl had called him, he would worm his way into her life.
“The trick is to get close and become her boyfriend. They advised us to show ourselves as a decent, rich person. Kind of like a dream prince in her life,” Sahin tells me when I visit him at his flat in Istanbul along with my Turkish producer, Beril Eski.
He would make the girl dependent on him. Then slowly he would change the stakes of their relationship, making her cut contact with her friends and cajoling her into performing degrading sex acts, which he would film and use to blackmail her. By the time he handed her over to Oktar, she would already be broken.
“It’s like a race, like you always set a new target and she’s trying to catch up with the targets,” he says. “And then at the end of the race you introduce her to Adnan Oktar … at that point Oktar knows what to do.” He would take the women aside and sexually abuse them. Then their lives as captives of the cult would begin.
They called it the turnstile system — and they had it down to a fine art. Over the years hundreds of girls and young women were brought into the cult this way, though some, like Ozgul, were recruited through other channels and not sexually abused.
Sahin says he brought about 200 women into the cult. When I ask why he did it, he says that he had been so brainwashed that he believed he was doing the right thing. “I saw that as a religious practice at the time. You can picture it like this: there’s a fire in the building and there’s a girl inside the fire and she doesn’t want to get out. And you do everything to take her out.”
Eventually, Sahin grew disenchanted with the cult and turned against it. With a handful of other former members he provided information to the police and prosecutors that led to the cult’s demise. In the trial he was given immunity from prosecution for his crimes.
Three years after he turned against the cult, Sahin is no longer recognisable as the manipulative lothario who ruined so many women’s lives. Now 37, overweight and dressed in a tracksuit, he has dark shadows under his eyes. Just as I am about to leave, he says something that sticks in my mind: “I’ve seen a lot of girls who were really smart and really beautiful who joined this cult. It could have happened to you as well, no matter how smart you are.”
It seemed a good point. But the next day it rang differently. Sahin’s friend Ozkan Mamati, another former cult member who was also given immunity from prosecution after co-operating with prosecutors, contacted Beril to tell her he was going to denounce me to the authorities for an unspecified crime. Unsure of what we might be facing, my lawyer advised me to leave the country for a while.
I returned to Turkey determined to finish the story. It was this culture of threats and coercion that had allowed the cult to survive for so long. They attacked journalists who wrote about them, trolling them online and filing bogus lawsuits against them. They also cultivated top politicians in Turkey: Oktar and his followers have been linked to a number of Erdogan’s allies, and Oktar often praised the president on his TV channel.
According to testimony from former cult members, cash was flowing in from a range of businesses across the world and from the personal wealth of the cult’s supporters.
The cult seemed impenetrable. But in the end it was taken down from the inside. Ozgul, who had once been one of its most recognisable female faces, was at the centre. By 2018 she had spent more than a decade with Oktar. In public she appeared devoted to him. But for years she had been looking to escape.
It wasn’t easy. Her “outspokenness” constantly landed her in hot water with Oktar, which led to her freedoms being restricted. She had no phone, no laptop that wasn’t monitored. On the rare occasions when she left Dragos she was dogged by other cult members — some of whom, she says, were armed.
The cult had forced her to break contact with her family but in the summer of 2018 she found a way back to them — and to freedom. She used a smart TV in her room at Dragos to contact her father. Despite all the years of separation, he was ready to help. One morning Ozgul said that she wanted to go to the doctor. Then she walked out of the door and jumped into her father’s car. All she had with her was her identity card. She went straight to the authorities. Three months after she escaped, teams of police from the city’s financial crimes unit raided Dragos and other properties belonging to the cult across the country.
In the autumn of 2020 Oktar and his followers went on trial at Caglayan courthouse in Istanbul and a few months later they were sentenced. Ozgul, Mamati and Sahin’s testimonies played a vital role in taking Oktar down. Despite the convictions, a significant number of people — including some women — remain devoted to Oktar. They say that he and his supporters were mistreated during the trial and their imprisonment, and that their human rights were violated. Soon, they believe, Oktar will be released and return to his rightful place among them.
It sounds like wishful thinking by brainwashed people. But several very senior Turkish lawyers familiar with the case told me they believed that Oktar could be released within the next few years. They said that disputes over the trial procedures, or with the collection of evidence, could be used to try to overturn many convictions.
Even being sent to prison for more than 1,000 years might not be enough to stop him.
It is not known whether the unidentified women in the photographs that accompany this article were abused. Additional reporting by Beril Eski
The Messiah and his Kittens
Louise Callaghan hosts this four-part series on Adnan Oktar and his cult. Out now and every Friday on the Stories of our times podcast feed.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-tv-preacher-and-his-cult-of-abuse-2qdm0g8xl
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