New DocuseriesTribeca Festival Lineup Spotlights: The Little Cult That Could
Looking ahead to next week's c
The series tracks an active, insular doomsday group operating out of Michigan, led by Craig Stasio—an aging Detroit chiropractor and self-proclaimed prophet.
Filmmakers were granted eight years of unprecedented access to the small, fervent clan, which consists primarily of a handful of young women and a successful local dentist who surrendered their lives, finances, and faith to Stasio's apocalyptic predictions.
New Publications
What Now?: A Practical Guide to Life After a Cult is a compassionate, evidence-based book by Chris Shelton. It guides survivors of high-control groups through undoing indoctrination, overcoming trauma triggers, and rebuilding independent identities. Shelton's framework helps transition individuals from surviving to thriving.
For those navigating recovery, the book explores several core phases of leaving a high-control group:
Deconstructing Coercive Control: Understanding the loaded language, manipulation, and phobia induction used to bypass independent thinking.
Managing the Nervous System: Learning how to identify emotional and physical trauma triggers after prolonged periods of high stress or abuse.
The REM Model: Shelton introduces the Reason, Emotion, and Morality model as a unique way to understand and process the exploitation of these traits within a cultic environment.
Rebuilding Identity: Step-by-step guidance on establishing healthy boundaries, relearning critical thinking, and finding your path forward.
Where to Find It
The book is available in trade paperback, e-book, and audiobook formats. You can pick up a copy or read a sample through the following platforms:
New VideoNDTV: YouTube sermons, spiked milk: How IIT graduate built a cult to exploit women
The NDTV article details the arrest of 29-year-old Abhishek Mishra, an IIT Roorkee mechanical engineering graduate, who built a localized cult in Mathura, India, to manipulate and sexually exploit young women systematically.
Operating under the religious alias "Adikarta Narayan Das," Mishra blended digital savvy with traditional religious storytelling to target highly educated victims.
The mechanics of his operation and subsequent arrest highlight several critical points:
Recruitment and Cult Building
Digital Outreach: Mishra spent approximately four years in the Radhakunj area of Mathura, presenting himself as a Kathavachak (religious storyteller). He ran a YouTube channel called "Radha Kripa Amrita" to broadcast sermons in both Hindi and English, and even maintained a professional LinkedIn profile under his religious alias.
Targeting the Educated: He specifically used his online platforms to identify and groom young women, with a particular focus on those from engineering backgrounds.
Isolation: Through calculated manipulation, he convinced his followers to cut ties with their families and move into his residence. At its peak, about 24 young men and women were living communally with him.
2. Coercive Tactics and Abuse
Spiked "Prasad": Police allege that Mishra gave the women milk laced with intoxicants under the pretense of offering them Prasad (sacred ritual food) before sexually assaulting them.
Blackmail & Recording: He recorded the sexual assaults. Police recovered obscene photographs and videos from his mobile phone, which he reportedly used to blackmail the victims and extort money from their families.
Manipulative Marriage Claims: To legitimize the exploitation within the communal setting, he invoked Gandharva Vivah (a classical Hindu marriage concept based on mutual love and consent without formal rituals) as a pretext for abuse.
3. Institutional Collapse and Arrest
The Crackdown: The operation began to unravel when a young woman from Chhattisgarh lodged a formal complaint. The Mathura police arrested Mishra and registered a formal case of rape against him.
Prior Red Flags: Suspicion had been building for months. Six months prior to the arrest, one woman's family arrived to remove her from the house, causing a significant confrontation with Mishra and his remaining inner circle. Even Mishra's own mother, who initially lived at the residence, eventually left due to her son's conduct.
Current Status: Most of his followers had already left the compound before the arrest, after growing suspicious of his behavior. Law enforcement is currently investigating the full scale of the operation to determine exactly how many women fell victim to his exploitation.
Ongoing Focus
Ecstatic Integration: Psychedelics as story-producing drugs, Super-placebos and super-nocebos"Four years ago, a small group of us started the Challenging Psychedelic Experiences Project, an NGO dedicated to learning more about post-psychedelic difficulties and what helps people recover. They have published 11 articles, two pre-prints, with more papers on the way. When they started, psychedelic science and culture weren’t even prepared to admit there was such a thing as ‘post-psychedelic extended difficulties’; now it’s widely accepted, and many researchers are working on the topic, trying to find out what helps people recover.
AI Research Disclosure: To bring you the most relevant stories, parts of this newsletter utilize artificial intelligence (AI) tools to search the web, source articles, and assist with content curation. This content is for informational purposes only; we recommend verifying critical facts independently.
News, Education, Intervention, Recovery
Intervention101.com to help families and friends understand and effectively respond to the complexity of a loved one's cult involvement.
CultRecovery101.com assists group members and their families in making the sometimes difficult transition from coercion to renewed individual choice.
CultNEWS101.com news, links, resources about: cults, cultic groups, abusive relationships, movements, religions, political organizations, and related topics.
The selection of articles for CultNEWS101 does not imply that Patrick Ryan, Joseph Kelly, or Ashlen Hilliard endorse the content. We provide information from multiple perspectives to foster dialogue.
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