CultNEWS101 Articles: 8/18/2025

United Nation of Islam, Legal, Clergy Sexual Abuse, Book Review, QAnon, Research, Trauma 

Department of Justice: Six Former Cult Members Sentenced for Years-Long Forced Labor Conspiracy to Compel the Labor of Multiple Minor Victims

" ... As established at trial, all six defendants were former high-ranking members of the United Nation of Islam (UNOI) who assisted UNOI's late founder Royall Jenkins in managing UNOI operations. Defendant Peach was also one of Jenkins's wives. Jenkins represented himself as Allah, contrary to principles of the Islamic faith, and demanded compliance with strict UNOI rules. UNOI operated multiple businesses including restaurants, bakeries, gas stations, a laboratory, and a clothing factory.

For over 12 years from October 2000 through November 2012, the defendants conspired to enforce rules that required UNOI members to perform unpaid labor, using beatings, threats, punishments, isolation, and coercion to compel the unpaid labor of over a dozen victims, including multiple minors, some as young as eight years old. The defendants required the victims to work up to 16 hours a day performing unpaid labor in UNOI-owned and operated businesses in Kansas City, Kansas; New York, New York; Newark, New Jersey; Cincinnati, Ohio; Dayton, Ohio; Atlanta, Georgia, and elsewhere. The defendants also required the victims to perform unpaid childcare and domestic service in the defendants' homes. The evidence showed that the defendants lived comfortably while housing the victims in overcrowded, unsanitary conditions along with restricting their food and water.

As proven at trial, the defendants used false promises of education, life skills training, and job training to induce parents to send their children to Kansas. After isolating the victims from their families and making them wholly dependent on UNOI, the defendants required the victims to attend UNOI's unlicensed, unaccredited school and used strict rules, isolation, punishments, humiliation, threats, and coercion to compel the victims' unpaid labor. This included restricting and monitoring the victims' communications with others along with their whereabouts."

ICSA Reviews: The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family. By Jesselyn Cook. Crown. 2019. 272 pages. Reviewed by Doug Duncan

" ... [T]hese stories were emotionally difficult [to read]. One of them involved a woman who had raised three children as a single mother after her husband, a physician, committed suicide. She was an admirable and courageous person, and after her husband killed himself, she went back to school and was able to get a law degree and become an attorney. She was a champion for people and tended toward liberal views to the extent that she was political, but after her children had embarked on adult lives of their own, she was drawn into QAnon. She ends up completely alienating her adult children and has no family to help her when she later encounters health issues.

Another story involves two Black sisters who are closely bonded to each other after growing up with a single mother in economically and socially challenging circumstances, struggling against poverty and racism, until one of them gets totally sucked into QAnon. After years of closeness, they drift apart, and the QAnon believer, Kendra, blames her sister, Tayshia, for the death of Tayshia's husband by heart attack due to them having obtained COVID-19 vaccinations.

Some of the recruits get out, and some of them do not, so each case does not have a happy ending. A couple of them manage to get out but are unable to repair the damage done to their relationships, so they are left with lasting consequences. All the stories are quite sad, but they are all interesting. Cook is an investigative reporter with a master's degree in journalism from New York University, and she was selected as a 2025 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. She is a talented writer, and the book is beneficial in helping to humanize the people and families who are affected by this terrible cult.

As somebody who ascribes to the thought reform view of cults that is expounded by Robert Jay Lifton, Margaret Thaler Singer, and others, I find the whole topic of conspiracy theories to be fascinating. In some ways, the process by which somebody is indoctrinated into a set of dubious beliefs, such as those of QAnon, is the quintessence of thought reform. This is made even more effective because the recruits manage to use the techniques of thought reform on themselves. They are given information and told to conduct their own research. They are exhorted to be free-thinking skeptics and not to simply accept the establishment narrative. In the name of avoiding propaganda, they walk themselves, step by step, into groupthink. They are even more convinced because they think they have arrived at their conclusions on their own. All the hours spent watching the videos, discussing the clues on the forums, and searching for confirmations in the news become a sunk cost.

Having worked so diligently to arrive at their beliefs, they are reluctant to let go of them. Furthermore, spending so much time watching videos and looking for clues from "Q"—the government insider who is supposedly privy to the on-going behind-the-scenes war between the true patriots and the Deep State—parallels what happens in more traditionally organized cults, where members may spend most of their waking hours attending Bible studies or lectures, practicing meditation, or participating in struggle sessions of some kind. At the very least, one becomes consumed with whatever the cult is doing and disconnected from other people and one's previous daily activities.

In the afterword, Cook discusses what can be done about QAnon. The problem is enormous. By some estimates, "[b]y late 2023, as many as one in four Americans were in agreement that 'Satan-worshipping pedophiles' controlled the government and the media" (p. 232). Even if these estimates are high, it is nevertheless undeniable that we are talking about millions of people who have adopted at least some portion of the QAnon belief system. To some degree or another, they all hold beliefs that are substantially out of the mainstream, such as the notion that the COVID-19 vaccines were a ruse so that Bill Gates could implant microchips in everyone. There were real societal harms that resulted from this. The United States fared significantly worse during the pandemic than did other advanced countries, and the vaccine reluctance that grew out of QAnon contributed to that. Some people in this country died because of these strange beliefs."

Emerging From a Cult – Rorschach Indications of Traumatic Damage to the Self

"This case concerns a 22-year-old White nonbinary British person who sought a consultation following an abusive childhood. The family belonged to a religious cult that required strict conformity to traditional gender stereotypes. The patient's attempts at rebellion were met by the family's determination to cast their child as mentally ill, thereby invalidating their identity. Diagnosis was used as a weapon of control and humiliation to discredit the patient's own independent thinking. The patient had left the cult in which they were brought up. They wanted recommendations for how to adapt to adult life outside of the cult. The Group Psychological Abuse Scale, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 (MMPI–2), the Trauma Symptom Inventory-2 (TSI–2) and the Rorschach were administered. Judith Herman proposed the concept of complex posttraumatic stress disorder in 1992, which is applicable to this case. Some of the research literature with ex-cult members who grew up in a cult is reviewed to place the test data in context. Results from the three self-report measures are presented. The Rorschach results are then discussed in detail. The combination of morbid, reflection, and vista responses demonstrates the impact of the abusive system on the patient's sense of self and it provides some pointers for therapeutic intervention."

News, Education, Intervention, Recovery