CultNEWS101 Articles: 5/28/2021

Re-evaluation Counseling, Youth On Board, Moral Re-Armament (MRA), Dove Outreach, Legal, NXIVM

MassLive: After students report being pressured to participate in 'weird, uncomfortable and cult-like' counseling sessions, Boston Public Schools end relationship with nonprofit

"Boston schools will not work with a nonprofit after an independent report found the director pressured students to participate in uncomfortable counseling sessions, among other accusations of misconduct.

The school district has ended its contract with Youth On Board, the nonprofit it paid to run a student advisory board for many years, Superintendent Brenda Cassellius said Monday.

An independent report found the nonprofit's director, Jenny Sazama, pressured students who were a part of the Boston Student Advisory Council to participate in "Re-evaluation Counseling" sessions with her. The counseling encourages people to relate difficult experiences and release emotions by crying, screaming, or laughing.

Students interviewed as part of the independent investigation said the counseling sessions, which Sazama had conducted in her basement before the pandemic, were 'weird, uncomfortable and cult-like.'"

The Times Herald: Glenn Close says growing up in cult is to blame for her 'unsuccessful relationships'

"Glenn Close says her traumatic experience of living inside a cult growing up is why she hasn't had "successful relationships".

The 74-year-old Hollywood star has opened up about the emotional distress she has suffered as a result of being part of the group Moral Re-Armament (MRA).
Appearing on Oprah Winfrey and Prince Harry's new docuseries 'The Me You Can't See', Glenn revealed the cult "basically dictated how you're supposed to live and what you're supposed to say and how you're supposed to feel."

She continued: "Because of how we were raised, anything you thought you'd do for yourself was considered selfish."

AP: Missing Athens County teen escapes reported sex abuse, 'cult'-like family

"When Serah Bellar ran away from her Amesville home in April 2020, few questioned her disappearance.

Serah, 16 at the time, was labeled by the Ohio Attorney General's Office as an "endangered runaway" in its database of missing people. Some members of her enormous family whispered about her absence in private. Beyond that, silence.

"Serah isn't dead, I'd know by now at (sic), she's smarter than people give her credit for, but she is gone, if she ever contacts dad and mom or any of us it will be on her terms," her eldest sibling Benjamin Bellar, who's incarcerated, wrote to a relative last year in a prison text messaging system, according to indictments from The Athens County Prosecutor's Office.

Her family, the Bellars, have 18 biological children and one who's adopted. Speaking to law enforcement, Serah's mother, Deborah Bellar, once said "God would give her all the children she was meant to have," according to court documents.

The Bellars were all forced by their parents, including Serah's father, Robert "Bob" Bellar, to attend the Waverly-based Dove Outreach "church" run by their uncle James "Jim" Bellar who preached that siblings are meant procreate with one another in the face of the apocalypse to repopulate the planet, documents show.

Jim, a self-proclaimed apostle, reportedly rewrote chapters of the Bible to fit his religious beliefs that were passed on to the Bellar kids. He was very selective about who he permitted at Dove Outreach, which some have described as a cult, documents said.

In an interview, Serah called the church a cult."

Variety: Allison Mack's Sentencing for Involvement With NXIVM Cult Set for June

"The sentencing for "Smallville" actor Allison Mack, who was indicted in 2018 on sex trafficking and conspiracy to commit forced labor charges for her involvement in Keith Raniere's NXIVM cult, has been scheduled for late June.

The hearing will take place on Wednesday, June 30, at 11 a.m., ordered by New York judge Nicholas G. Garaufis on Friday.

Mack was arrested by the FBI in April 2018 on charges of sex trafficking, sex trafficking conspiracy and forced labor conspiracy. According to prosecutors, she recruited women to join the NXIVM cult using blackmail to force them to engage in sexual activity with Raniere against their will. The organization posed as a women's self-help group, but involved branding the female members and psychologically manipulating and coercing them. Raniere allegedly paid Mack for her involvement and was second-in-command of NXIVM after Raniere himself."

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How Glenn Close’s Family Recovered from Years in a Cult-Like Religious Group

Watch the full episode of The Jess Cagle Interview: Glenn Close, streaming now on PeopleTV.com, or download the PeopleTV app on your favorite device.

JESS CAGLE
People
August 08, 2018

Prior to landing roles in Fatal Attraction, Damages and The Shield, Glenn Close spent her childhood as a member of a cult-like religious group called the Moral Re-Armament.

Her father, a Harvard grad who worked as a doctor in Congo, joined up and moved Close and her family to Switzerland to be raised near the group’s headquarters in Caux. Close then attended boarding school, and it wasn’t until she was in the midst of studying acting at the College of William & Mary at age 22 that she ended up leaving the group founded in the 1930s by Rev. Frank Buchman, known for his belief that the world could avoid war if people experienced a moral and spiritual awakening.

The Moral Re-Armament largely died out when Buchman passed away in 1961, and his successor Peter Howard four years later.

“Each of us had to go through that process of forgiveness,” Close, who stars in The Wife, tells PEOPLE’s Editor-in-Chief Jess Cagle in the latest episode of The Jess Cagle Interview (streaming now on PeopleTV) of her family’s life after the Moral Re-Armament. “It wasn’t easy for my parents to talk about, certainly my father. But I guess I’ve made my career figuring out the why’s of behavior, and I did the same thing with my parents.”

Though the actress admits there was a time when she resented her father deeply.

“There came a point where I got very, very angry at my father and I wrote him this letter where I was absolutely honest with [him],” she recalls. “I said, ‘You don’t deserve to be called our father.’ I mean, it was so harsh. In fact, I read it to my mother and I read it to my siblings and I said, ‘I’m just going to send this to dad,’ because he was a narcissist and he was brilliant, brilliant, but he definitely had a dollop of narcissism.”

Close also believes her mother had a role in her strained relationship with her dad growing up. “I think in many ways my mom enabled him,” the six-time Oscar nominee continues. “She never developed her, where she was brilliant, to the point where she said to me, near the end of her life, ‘I feel like I haven’t achieved anything.’ ”

Now, Close claims she understands how her parents became who they were at the time they entered the Moral Re-Armament.

More Articles about Moral Re-Armament:

https://www.cultnews101.com/search/label/Moral%20Re-Armament

https://people.com/movies/glenn-close-family-cult-religious-group/

Glenn Close says growing up in a cult motivated her to be a better parent

Fox News
October 19, 2017

Before Glenn Close became a Hollywood star, she was a member of a religious cult known as the Moral Re-Armament (MRA). But the 70-year-old insisted her traumatic childhood has helped her become a better parent to 29-year-old Annie Maude Starke.

“You’re totally pulled up from what your roots were, what you love and your family is pulled apart,” Close recalled to Closer Weekly Thursday. “It was very destructive.”

Close said her controversial past has made her determined to give her daughter a stable and loving upbringing.

“She’s wonderful and makes me incredibly proud,” explained Close. “I’m also proud that I have a great friendship with her father [producer John H. Starke], and when she turned seven she was living in the same house that she was taken home to when she was born, and we still have that house.”

Back in 2014, Close told The Hollywood Reporter she was just 7-years-old when her father, a Harvard-educated doctor, joined MRA, a group founded during the late 1930s. The publication added it was led by Rev. Frank Buchman, who was recognized as a “violently anti-intellectual and possibly homophobic evangelical fundamentalist.”

“You basically weren’t allowed to do anything, or you were made to feel guilty about any unnatural desire,” said Close at the time. “If you talk to anybody who was in a group that basically dictates how you’re supposed to live and what you’re supposed to say and how you’re supposed to feel, from the time you’re 7 till the time you’re 22, it has a profound impact on you. It’s something you have to [consciously overcome] because all of your trigger points are [wrong].”

Close wouldn’t reveal how she manage to leave MRA at age 22, but she did share how her memories impacted her over the years.

“I would have dreams because I didn’t go to any psychiatrist or anything,” she said. “I had these dreams, and they started with betrayal, a sense of betrayal, and then they developed into me being able to look at these people and say, ‘You’re wrong. You’re wrong.’ And then the final incarnation of those dreams was my being able to calmly get up and walk away. And then I didn’t have them anymore.”

http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2017/10/19/glenn-close-says-growing-up-in-cult-motivated-her-to-be-better-parent.html

Glenn Close Returns to Stage, Reveals Remarkable Childhood in Cult

Stephen Galloway
The Hollywood Reporter
October 15, 2014

Back on Broadway in Edward Albee's 'A Delicate Balance,' the three-time Tony winner opens up her larger-than-life father, William Taliaferro Close, a doctor who spent years in the Congo, battling Ebola and serving as Congolese leader Mobutu Sese Seko's personal physician; his decision to join religious group/cult the Moral Re-Armament; and why she holds no resentment: "Forgiveness is probably the most revolutionary concept there is right now in our world"

This story first appeared in the Oct. 24 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine.

Glenn Close scans the images on her smartphone, lost in memories.

There's a photo of her 26-year-old daughter, actress Annie Starke, with a beloved rescued Labrador (Close is fond of dogs and has blogged about them for the site FetchDog); multiple shots of one of her three homes, in Maine ("David's house," she calls it, referring to her husband, business and social entrepreneur David Shaw); pictures of Shaw beaming in Telluride, Colo., during a break from a 1,000-mile motorbike ride; and tons and tons of snapshots of flowers, spilling across gardens and sidewalks, over driveways and walls, filling every inch of Close's domain.

"I love peonies," she says. "I'm not a gardener, so I try to keep it as simple as possible with perennials so there's not a phalanx of gardeners going through the house."

I sit back in the corner of the subterranean Manhattan restaurant where we've been skating across an interview for the better part of an hour on this late September evening and try to figure her out. She's gracious and well-mannered but oh-so-hard to read — the type of book you ponder in your study rather than at the beach,E.L. Doctorow rather than EL James.

With her no-nonsense black blouse and short-cropped hair, Close, 67, is refined and reserved, without a trace of the flamboyant characters she has played in movies likeFatal Attraction and the FX series Damages. She makes effortless chitchat — about her garden; the books she's been reading (Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard, Edward O. Wilson's The Social Conquest of Earth); her concern for the environment ("I'm a lover of nature, and if my daughter ever has a child, that world is going to be so deeply different"); and her grandchildren on Shaw's side, one of whom interrupts us via Skype, eliciting an exquisite gurgle of delight.

"She's like royalty," says actor John Lithgow, who appeared with Close in 1982's The World According to Garp and now is her co-star in the upcoming Broadway production of Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance, which begins previews Oct. 20 at New York City's Golden Theatre. "There's something very regal to her, distinguished. She has a native blue-bloodedness. It seems to come from good breeding. There's a patrician elegance about her."

The play brings Lithgow and Close together for the first time onstage in a much-anticipated 18-week run that will push each to the limit in one of the most intellectually and emotionally daunting works of the repertoire. Albee's 1966 drama of domestic disintegration centers on a suburban, upper-class couple, Agnes and Tobias (Close and Lithgow), and follows them across one night and day as they deal with the intrusion of family and friends as well as their own troubled past.

Close has trouble believing it has been 20 years since her last theatrical production, when she won her third Tony, for playing silent screen star Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard.

"[Producer] Scott Rudin sent me piles of scripts — Noel Coward, everything," she says. "He thought rather than a 'star' vehicle, it would be best to come back in a really challenging ensemble. I liked that idea. We honed it down to A Delicate Balance because it's everything we wanted: an incredibly challenging play, where you have to have a seamless ensemble to pull it off. And it's about language. It's challenging and risky."

All this discussion of her role is polite and proper and very much what one might expect of an actress as poised and polished as Close. But hints of another, more complex woman begin to seep through.

They're there when she admits to being "kind of a recluse" who immerses herself in books, rarely watches television, and notes, "I wouldn't say I'm naturally social."

They're there when she talks about her sister Jessie, who grew up with mental health issues and plunged into a series of disastrous marriages before being diagnosed as bipolar in her 50s, which Jessie will discuss in a forthcoming memoir, Resilience: Two Sisters and a Story of Mental Illness (Grand Central Publishing).

They're there when she discusses the years she has spent in therapy herself. "I've had it over the years," she says. "And there's still somebody I talk to if I need to. It's very helpful."

And, most extraordinarily, they're there when she tells me about her larger-than-life father, William Taliaferro Close, who spent years in Congo, at one point as Congolese leader Mobutu Sese Seko's personal physician, and who swept his daughter and family into a right-wing religious cult that gobbled up their lives.

The cult's impact was so great, says Close, that for years "I wouldn't trust any of my instincts because [my beliefs] had all been dictated to me."

•••

Close was 7 years old when her dad, a Harvard-educated doctor from a long line of New England blue bloods, joined the religious group known as the Moral Re-Armament.

Founded during the late 1930s, the MRA held firmly to what it called "the four absolutes": honesty, purity, unselfishness and love. But these benevolent principles masked the all-consuming, all-controlling traits of any other cult — this particular one led by Rev. Frank Buchman, a violently anti-intellectual and possibly homophobic evangelical fundamentalist from Pennsylvania, who argued that only those with special guidance from God were without sin, and that they had a duty to change others. What began as an anti-war movement gradually turned into a possessive and exclusionary force.

It is unclear how many adherents the MRA had, though about 30,000 people gathered to hear Buchman speak at the Hollywood Bowl in the late 1930s, and the group was widely discussed in the press during and after World War II. Its post-war conferences were attended by several high-level diplomats and politicians — despite allegations that Buchman had been a Hitler supporter — and its cultlike nature appears to have emerged only slowly.

"I haven't made a study of groups like these," says Close, "but in order to have something like this coalesce, you have to have a leader. You have to have a leader who has some sort of ability to bring people together, and that's interesting to me because my memory of the man who founded it was this wizened old man with little glasses and a hooked nose, in a wheelchair."

When her family joined the cult, Close was removed from everything she held most dear — above all, life in the ivy-covered, stone cottage on her grandfather's Connecticut estate, where she ran wild over the rugged land with her Shetland pony, Brownie. While Dr. Close went to Congo as a surgeon, she lived with her brother and two sisters at the group's headquarters in Caux, Switzerland.

"They had a big hotel, a very glamorous, exclusive hotel called Mountain House, which I think is in one of Fitzgerald's novels," she recalls. "[They] made it into one of their world headquarters, and we stayed there for two years. When the mutiny broke out [Congolese soldiers rebelled in 1960, shortly after the country declared independence from Belgium], we didn't see our father for a whole year."

During the family's time in the MRA, "You basically weren't allowed to do anything, or you were made to feel guilty about any unnatural desire," she says. "If you talk to anybody who was in a group that basically dictates how you're supposed to live and what you're supposed to say and how you're supposed to feel, from the time you're 7 till the time you're 22, it has a profound impact on you. It's something you have to [consciously overcome] because all of your trigger points are [wrong]."

•••

While Close was ensconced in Mountain House, her father was trying to bring modern health care to the Congo. "He went to the Congo, the former Belgian Congo, when he was 36 and stayed for 16 years," says his daughter, who rarely visited.

Dr. Close was a natural leader whose skills proved vital in combating Congo's first major Ebola epidemic in 1976. The virus had its first known outbreak in a small village on the Ebola River; panic ensued as the disease spread, especially following the deaths of a dozen staff members at the local hospital. While Mobutu, a dictator who fleeced his country of billions, fled the Congo, Dr. Close, who had been a mentor to the health minister, persuaded the Congolese air force to fly supplies to the village at the heart of the epidemic and also to provide helicopters so that medics could reach the hundreds of other villages in the area, leading to a massive quarantine, which helped contain the epidemic, though nearly 300 people died.

During his years in Congo, he grew in stature and influence and even adopted a Congolese son, Glenn's brother Tambu Kisoki, who today lives in Sacramento, Calif. (Close's other siblings, Jessie, Tinaand Alexander, reside in Montana and Wyoming, not too far from their 90-year-old mother, Bettine.)

But Dr. Close increasingly became disillusioned with Mobutu, as the former military officer who had seized power in a military coup in 1965 succumbed to corruption. The actress remembers meeting him during one of her three long visits to the country.

"He was very charming early on — he was remarkable — and then he got corrupt," she says. "My dad always felt it was when Mobutu's mother died that he really gave in to all the forces around him. There was no one to hold him to his conscience. My dad — who had renovated the huge hospitals, started the maternity hospital and the hospital ship on the Congo River — stood up to a lot. But it came to a point where he thought it was dangerous to step in."

The elder Close returned to the U.S. in 1977 and resettled in Big Piney, Wyo., choosing the least populated county in the least populated state, where he remained as a country doctor until his death in 2009. In time, he moved away from the MRA, as did his daughter, who had left Switzerland and returned to America at age 15 to study at the elite Connecticut boarding school Choate Rosemary Hall.

It took her many years to reach the point where she could break free of the MRA, which began to founder in the 1970s and changed its name in 2001 to Initiatives of Change. For a while, she performed with an MRA offshoot, Up With People, an ultra-clean-cut singing group that was discreet about its links to the MRA and was almost omnipresent in the 1960s. She severed her ties in 1970. "Many things led me to leave," she says. "I had no toolbox to leave, but I did it."

She won't go into detail about how she left. "I'm not going to go into all of that," she says. "You can't in an interview."

At 22, Close enrolled at the College of William & Mary. But her youthful experiences haunted her. "I would have dreams because I didn't go to any psychiatrist or anything," she says. "I had these dreams, and they started with betrayal, a sense of betrayal, and then they developed into me being able to look at these people and say, 'You're wrong. You're wrong.' And then the final incarnation of those dreams was my being able to calmly get up and walk away. And then I didn't have them anymore."

The MRA never tried to lure her back. "They knew that was it," she says. "I had nothing to do with them from that point. And I wouldn't have anything to do with them."

Suddenly, she seems to regret having said so much. She levels her blue-green eyes on me, vulnerable and almost apologetic, and there's a warmth to her I haven't felt till now.

"I'm very gullible," she says.

I ask what she means.

She doesn't fully explain.

•••

It has been five years since William Close died at age 84 and 45 years since his daughter left the MRA, years that have seen her go from being an admired stage actress to an Oscar nominee for her first screen role as Robin Williams' mother in Garp and on through such films as Fatal Attraction, Dangerous Liaisons, Reversal of Fortune and Albert Nobbs.

She has had victories and defeats, fallow times and fertile — she didn't appear in a film until she was 35 and still smarts at alterations made to the ending of Fatal. "Changing [Alex Forrest] into a psychopath was never fair to her," she says. "But they were right in giving the audience what they wanted."

She has gone through two divorces and other significant romantic relationships; has had a daughter (with producer John Starke); and remains especially connected to her mother, "a remarkable woman. My mom would have made a great pioneer woman. She has an inner strength and this inquisitive mind: She's reading at least three books at once."

Close has come to terms with her sister's mental health issues. "We were ignorant or had no vocabulary for mental illness," she says, "so she was 'the irresponsible one,' the wild one: 'Pull up your socks, find a job.' " The two are tight, and were also tight growing up, at least "as much as one could be in the circumstance."

Professionally, the actress has added producing and writing to her résumé and would like to direct, too: She still plans to helm an adaptation of Friedrich Schiller's Mary Stuart, in which she would star opposite Meryl Streep.

She has lost some beloved friends, including Williams, though she cherishes the ones she has, including her best friend, actress Mary Beth Hurt. She remembers hearing about Williams' death while on the phone with designer Ann Roth. "It was the kind of friendship that, whenever we saw each other, it was just complete love," she says. "I didn't know he had Parkinson's. But I knew he had issues with depression and substance abuse. Very sad."

Amazingly, her career is still in the ascendant thanks to the afterglow of Damages and the buzz surrounding Balance. She regrets that Albee, 86, has not been at rehearsals, reportedly because he is somewhat frail. Will he come? "I hope so. It would be lovely."

She is developing a follow-up to her two 101 Dalmatians movies and says, "There's a movie I'd like to write and direct, way down the road." She has been back on movie screens with Guardians of the Galaxy, playing the leader of the Nova Corps charged with keeping the peace, and would like to appear in a sequel. "I'm contracted to it. It had a wonderful sense of humor."

She seems to enjoy the huge range of work she's tackled and says she loves acting as much as ever — the more difficult the material, the better.

And it's hard to get more difficult than Balance, whose language is the verbal equivalent of a Rubik's cube, and whose intense emotions spill out at unexpected times. Memorizing the lines alone has taken Close months — "I still have lines to learn and things to figure out," she says — and yet she almost glows with delight at the prospect.

"I'm compelled to do what I do," she says. "Just like my father was."

Looking back, she wishes she had known him better. "He was never taught how to express himself emotionally or was never around anyone who let him know that was OK," she reflects. "As children, you don't love naturally. You have a natural sense of survival, but love has to be taught."

In her 40s, she decided to write to him, putting everything she felt in a letter, "and I wrote him everything, everything I felt about our relationship, and it was extremely honest."

If ever she felt anger toward her father for plunging her into the MRA and for any harm that did to her, the anger is long gone.

"I always thought, the way life works, the burden of forgiveness is on the child," she says. "That's the way it goes. Forgiveness is probably the most revolutionary concept there is right now in our world. Because without forgiveness, you just perpetuate what has been before. You [have to] say, 'It's going to stop with me.' "

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/glenn-close-returns-stage-reveals-740633