Jesus Army, UK, Spring Ridge Academy, Australia, Transcendental Meditation
"About 60 former members of the Jesus Army, a cult described as one of the most abusive in British history, have come forward with new allegations against the group, according to a lawyer representing claimants.
The cases range from allegations of sexual or domestic abuse to claims for unpaid work from women who served as "domestic sisters" in the cult, which at its peak in the mid-2000s had several thousand members, many of whom surrendered their assets to the leadership.
Married women living in the group's many communal houses were required to work long hours, unpaid, and some lawyers believe they were treated as modern slaves. Some of the claimants also allege they reported abuse to the Jesus Army's leadership, who failed to act."
"Molly Dickin had only been at an all-girls boarding school in Arizona for a few months when she and two other girls climbed over a barbed-wire fence and ran off into the desert.
It was around 8 p.m. in late April 2015, and Dickin was making her escape from Spring Ridge Academy, a now-closed, for-profit boarding school just over an hour north of Phoenix that housed up to 76 teen girls at a time to treat behavioral problems.
Dickin, now 28, told HuffPost she could no longer stomach the abuse she said she endured while there. Dickin said she was forced to participate in psychological games that included having to roleplay her own sexual assault in front of her peers, and faced punishments that included not being able to speak to anyone for weeks at a time.
"We were just very, very desperate to get away from SRA," said Dickin, who had turned 18 two months before her escape.
" ... Nine years later, in 2024, the school's controversial practices exploded into public view when the mother of a former student won a federal lawsuit after alleging that Spring Ridge was an abusive, cult-inspired program that used fraud and manipulation to "imprison students for an arbitrary and uncertain time period for money." She also claimed that the program was able to "sever" the relationship between her and her daughter.
Spring Ridge, and other boarding schools and boot camps like it, which together are known as the "troubled-teen industry," had started to come under scrutiny from media outlets and lawmakers. Last year, a jury awarded the mother more than $2.5 million in damages, an unprecedented amount that experts hoped would be a turning point toward reining in a multibillion-dollar industry they say preys on vulnerable teens and their families.
But the ruling was reversed earlier this year over allegations that a juror may have conducted their own research on the industry before the verdict was read, potentially biasing the outcome. A judge declared a mistrial and scheduled a new trial for January 2026."
A Victorian government inquiry into cults and fringe groups has heard evidence about how the groups operate outside of the public gaze.
Survivors are calling for cult-informed frontline workers and better protections for people living in or leaving cults or high-control groups.
More witnesses will give evidence to the inquiry before recommendations are delivered in September 2026.
Communal Echelons & Generational Wealth in Neighborhoods Built Concentrically Around the Maharishi International University & a Transcendental Meditation Movement Community in Fairfield."In the decade of 1970 to 1980, a million Americans learned Transcendental Meditation. At the time, this was about 1 in 300+ Americans.
In November 2024, a retired career professor of anthropology who lives on the East Coast visited Fairfield, Iowa. This professor had not really heard of Fairfield, Iowa, and knew very little about TM before coming to Fairfield.
At some point during their visit, I offered to give this anthropology professor a driving tour of the TM community in Fairfield.
I enjoy giving these tours of this utopian story to 'outsiders'. On this particular driving tour, a throughline thread shared within the tour for this 'anthropologist' was how meditators from their earliest arrival in Fairfield, initially to occupy a newly purchased college campus, settled into living in housing in concentric neighborhoods that developed in sequence over time through different decades of the last 50 years. The pattern reflects distinct waves of growth, socioeconomic, and cultural practices.
In 1974, upon arrival, the move of a university faculty, staff, and students from California to Fairfield focused on settling, occupying, and operationalizing an empty, recently purchased, bankrupt college campus.
In the first few years after initial settlement, a few individual homes were purchased by members of the meditating community in town, often in the nearby neighborhood south of campus.
In 1978, at a large assembly of meditators held at the University of Amherst, a call was made for meditators to move to Fairfield, Iowa, with the mission of holding large-scale daily group meditations.
From this Amherst Assembly invitation, two groups came more immediately to the call: First, those with so much wealth, this was another place to have a house. A second group who had no life obligations other than that could keep them from coming, and even more wealth came to them more immediately as well.
The Construction of two large golden domes to house the group meditation practice followed. Within a decade of the first arrival of meditators on campus at Fairfield, an off-campus socioeconomic middle-class began to surface, living in town and in the surrounding County area."
The selection of articles for CultNEWS101 does not imply that Patrick Ryan or Joseph Kelly endorse the content. We provide information from multiple perspectives to foster dialogue.
