Trial to begin Monday for leader of New Mexico paramilitary cult

KOB.com Web Staff
September 16, 2018

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – The trial for one of the alleged leaders of a paramilitary religious cult is set to begin Monday.

Deborah Green was arrested in August of 2017 by Cibola County deputies. Authorities said the aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps in Fence Lake, New Mexico deliberately hid children from the state. They didn't even have birth certificates.

Green is facing several charges, including child abuse, sexual penetration of a minor and failure to report a birth.

https://www.kob.com/albuquerque-news/trial-to-begin-monday-for-leader-of-new-mexico-paramilitary-cult/5072888/

How Cults Take Hold in Hollywood: The Myth of Manson and Beyond

NATALIE FINN
E! Online
September 17, 2018

The thing about cults is... no one who's in a cult is going to admit they're in a cult.

They're being enlightened and empowered, they've been shown the way, a better way to live. The hole that's always been there has been filled. They've finally found their people.

Their people, however, are generally being led by one guy (it's almost always a guy, though women can be master manipulators, too) and his ostensibly empowered minions, some of whom inevitably end up being women—because women are used to make other women comfortable.

All of this would appear recognizably insane to an outsider.

But when you're in it... outsiders just don't understand.

"No 'why.' We never asked why," Sandra Good, a member of Charles Manson's "family," says in a decades-old interview with a filmmaker shown for the first time in Inside the Manson Cult: The Lost Tapes, premiering tonight on Fox. Good later spent 10 years in prison for making death threats against corporate executives on radio and TV.

"Whatever we had to do," adds Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, one of Manson's most devoted acolytes, who spent almost 34 years in prison for attempting to assassinate President Gerald Ford and was paroled in 2009. "We leave our house open, to the soul. Leave our mind open."

"Charlie is love," was the gist of their beliefs, according to Vincent Bugliosi's 1974 book Helter Skelter, the definitive account of the Tate-LaBianca murder trial.

That's the thing. If you're in the cult, you're the one with the open mind, while the poor saps on the outside are busy living their small little lives.

Listening to that sort of talk can't help but bring to mind Smallville star Allison Mack, who so far appears to be standing by NXIVM founder Keith Raniere, a self-help guru who founded a leadership seminar program that's attracted a number of prominent students over the years—but who earlier this year was charged with sex trafficking, sex trafficking conspiracy and forced labor conspiracy. Mack has also been charged with those crimes; federal investigators allege that she, empowered by Raniere, recruited women to a group-within-the-group called DOS to be groomed as sex partners for Raniere. According to former members, including actress Sarah Edmondson, the women were branded with a symbol that incorporated Raniere's initials.

NXIVM's practices, even just as a business, had been under scrutiny for two decades. When women started to speak out about what came to be known as DOS last year, NXIVM directed NBC News to a statement declaring that the company "firmly opposes and condemns violence, victimhood, dishonor and abuse."

In response to Raniere's arrest in March, NXIVM said in a statement on its website that they looked forward to Raniere's innocence being proved.

"We strongly believe the justice system will prevail in bringing the truth to light," the company stated. "We are saddened by the reports perpetuated by the media and their apparent disregard for 'innocent until proven guilty,' yet we will continue to honor the same principles on which our company was founded. It is during the times of greatest adversity that integrity, humanity and compassion are hardest, and needed most."

"I think everyone needs a mentor. I don't think any of us really know the answers without a little bit of wisdom," Mack told FineMagazine last year. "If you aren't willing to be humble enough to seek wisdom from other people, I think you're missing a lot of really incredible opportunities to build a certain amount of depth and value in your life that you wouldn't have if you didn't have somebody to help guide you. I chose to have this mentor in my life, and I was talking to him about my struggle, confusion, and not knowing what to do. He said, 'Why don't you take some time and think about? Give yourself some space to figure out who you are now.' So that's what I did."

Mack told the New York Times Magazine earlier this year, before Raniere's arrest, that DOS was "about women coming together and pledging to one another a full-time commitment to become our most powerful and embodied selves by pushing on our greatest fears, by exposing our greatest vulnerabilities, by knowing that we would stand with each other no matter what, by holding our word, by overcoming pain."

Both she and Raniere have pleaded not guilty on all counts. Since their arrests, Seagram heiress Clare Bronfman—who along with sister Sara Bronfman has reportedly given Raniere millions of dollars over the years—has been charged with conspiracy to commit identity theft and racketeering conspiracy. A class-action lawsuit was filed against Sara on Sept. 4, the plaintiffs alleging she purposely misled them about Raniere's credentials and the promise of NXIVM's "Executive Success Program," and that their money ultimately went toward financing a criminal enterprise rather than bettering themselves.

"I think it's a cult," their father, Edgar Bronfman Sr., told Forbes in 2003. The spirits mogul, who died in 2013, said at the time that he hadn't spoken to his daughters in months.

A former NXIVM member sued the company last year, alleging in court documents, "This company is a cult preying on vulnerable men and women who are looking for a credible self help program. Unless forcible confinement, branding, sex with students, and taking people who disagree with the program to court is a bona fide business in New York then I suggest all fees and tuition collected are baseless and fraudulent."

"Nxivm operates largely in secrecy," the criminal complaint against Raniere states. "Nxians were often required to sign non-disclosure agreements and to make promises not to reveal certain things about Nxivm's teachings."

Manson's operation didn't involve NDAs or thousand-dollar seminars. He had his female followers begging in the streets. They scavenged in dumpsters and were in and out of jail for loitering and other petty offenses. One similar through-line is that Manson had sex with the women, and fathered at least one child during the several years the Family was together. And he used his female followers to make other women feel safe and to attract more men into the Family.

David Koresh also had sex with multiple women and underage girls who lived at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas—once they had "the light," they were told—before a fatal encounter with ATF and a disastrous FBI siege resulted in the deaths of more than 80 people, including 22 children. All was revisited this year in the limited series Waco; John Leguizamo is nominated for an Emmy for his role as an ATF agent who goes undercover as a regular-guy neighbor to better monitor their comings and goings.

Mack, who has been living with her parents while awaiting trial, which is scheduled to begin Oct. 1, hasn't made any public comment about NXIVM or DOS since her arrest.

Those who choose to leave the group are portrayed among members as being out to destroy NXIVM, the New York Times reported last October.

Former Dynasty actress Catherine Oxenberg's new book, Captive: A Mother's Crusade to Save Her Daughter from a Terrifying Cult, details her efforts over the past year to get her daughter, India Oxenberg, out of Raniere's alleged clutches. Only recently did India start spending time with her family again, after initially disputing anything was wrong and calling whatever she was going through "a character-building experience."

"I never gave up," Catherine told E! News last month. "I must be hard-wired as a mom, I'm not capable of giving up. Even in the hopeless moments I just kept persevering and trusting that it would turn around." She said India would speak about her experience in her own time and, until then, she vowed to protect her daughter's privacy.

During the ordeal, "I educated myself," Catherine explained. "And the experts I reached out to said there's nothing that I did that created some predisposition, that I didn't cause anything, that it wasn't my fault, that anybody can be susceptible." That was news to her, she revealed, that "anybody at certain points in their lives can be vulnerable to being influenced, manipulated and deceived by a group like this."

Mark Vicente, a former NXIVM higher-up who directed a flattering documentary about Raniere's work called Ignite the Heart, told the New York Times that his views started to change once his wife left the program and subsequently became persona non grata among members. He also heard rumors about a secret society.

"No one goes in looking to have their personality stripped away," Vicente said. "You just don't realize what is happening."

Dianne Lake, aka "Snake," who at 16 was a fully committed member of the Manson Family, ended up becoming a key prosecution witness at the Tate-LaBianca murder trial—though after nearly two years of regular LSD use and emotional and physical abuse, she needed some time to get her facts straight. After nine months at a psychiatric hospital, she was finally able to get Manson's voice out of her head. Enough to testify, anyway.

"There was one officer in particular that really treated me with respect and, like, a tenderness," she recalls in Inside the Manson Cult. "It made me feel safe enough to start telling the truth."

Not surprisingly, her former "family" thought she was the one who had been brainwashed.

"She's a very young girl, and by the time the D.A. had gotten through with her, she was speaking their language," Sandra Good explained in the filmmaker's interview. "She's just like a baby, she can be molded any way anyone chooses to mold her."

Despite their dedication, meanwhile, neither Good nor Fromme was called upon to commit murder on the nights of Aug. 9 and Aug. 10, 1969. Those are the nights, respectively, when seven people were brutally killed by Family members Charles "Tex" Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten.

Atkins died in prison and the rest all remain locked up after being denied parole multiple times. Manson, who was also convicted of first-degree murder for orchestrating the killings, died in prison on Nov. 19, 2017.

While Manson's deranged philosophy—that the Beatles' White Album contained hidden messages about an imminent race war between black and white people and it was Manson's job to trigger the chaos, the "Helter Skelter"—would have been the stuff of legend on its own, the fact that one of the victims was actress Sharon Tateboth terrified the rest of Hollywood in the moment and ensured that the Manson Family would have its own chapter in pop culture history (as well as countless treatments in print, music and onscreen, including Quentin Tarantino's upcoming Once Upon a Time in Hollywood).

Paul McCartney told NME recently that, naturally, what transpired stopped him from performing the song "Helter Skelter" for years. He's been closing sets with it lately, though.

"I thought, I'm not doing it, you know, because it was too close to that event, and immediately it would have seemed like I was, either I didn't care about all the carnage that had gone on or whatever, so I kept away from it for a long time," the former Beatle said. "But then in the end I thought, you know, that'd be good on stage, that'd be a nice one to do, so we brought it out of the bag and tried it and it works. It's a good one to rock with, you know."

Or as he said on Marc Maron's WTF podcast, "For years I wouldn't do that song. I felt like if I did it, it would be a victory for [Manson]. Then I thought, 'Wait a minute, I wrote it!'"

Moreover, Manson was crazy.

"I don't really remember it being impressed on me that we were going to start [the race war]," Lake recalled to E! News. "At one point I was left [at Barker Ranch, near Death Valley] with some other people, and this was the first time that i hadn't really been a part of the inner, original group...I felt abandoned and I had an opportunity to go back, and I did, and Charlie was furious with me."

When Lake returned to Spahn Ranch, where Manson was based when the murders took place, more than ever she got the sense that he was definitely preparing for...something. "It wasn't like the happy, smoking marijuana, listening-to-music kind of thing anymore," she said. "More energy was being put towards a survival mode in the desert." By then she had been with the Family for a little over a year.

Manson, who had been physically abusive to her, was still mad she had left Barker without his permission, so he, of all things, took her back to her parents. They too were hippies who had already exposed her to drugs and commune living by the time she was 13, and then didn't mind when she went to join Manson at 14.

"But I couldn't handle it," Lake said. "I only heard Charlie's voice in my head, and his songs...and at that point I had been with Charlie and his programming for too long, and I just couldn't survive, mentally, in the outside world." She returned after a few days; Manson continued to shuttle her around to different locations until, eventually, "he took me back."

Among the things she told investigators later: Tex Watson had told her that he stabbed Sharon Tate, because Charlie had ordered him to kill. Leslie Van Houten, who had only participated in the murders of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca on Aug. 10, 1969, had told her about stabbing someone who was already dead.

But Manson wasn't just some boogeyman lurking in the shadows. He was a frustrated musician who felt that his songs were the truth and it was only a matter of time before they were spinning on record players everywhere. And because he had the charisma of a cult leader—and it was a less cautious time, with more welcome mats and fewer security guards—he managed to weasel his way into the consciousness (and homes) of wealthy, successful and substance-enjoying types like Beach Boy Dennis Wilson.

In 1968, Wilson—who earlier in the year had hung out with the Beatles and the Maharishi in India—picked up two teenage girls hitchhiking, and brought them back to his Sunset Boulevard home.

"I told them about our involvement with the Maharishi and they told me they too had a guru, a guy named Charlie who'd recently come out of jail after 12 years," Wilson told the Record Mirror that year. "He drifted into crime, but when I met him I found he had great musical ideas. We're writing together now. He's dumb, in some ways, but I accept his approach and have learnt from him."

Wilson, who died in 1983, financed a studio session for Manson and introduced him to his bands mates, brothers Brian and Carl Wilson, Mike Love and Bruce Johnston. Neil Young remembered the aspiring artist in his 2013 memoir, Waging Heavy Peace, in which he wrote about meeting Manson at Wilson's house.

"After a while, a guy showed up, picked up my guitar, and started playing a lot of songs on it," Young wrote. "His name was Charlie. He was a friend of the girls and now of Dennis. His songs were off-the-cuff things he made up as he went along, and they were never the same twice in a row. Kind of like Dylan, but different because it was hard to glimpse a true message in them, but the songs were fascinating. He was quite good."

Eerily enough, the Beach Boys song "Never Learn Not to Love," off their 1969 album 20/20, is a reworked Manson song, originally called "Cease to Exist." That didn't go over well with Manson, who had his family start stealing items from Wilson's house, ultimately costing him a reported $100,000.

The original version of "Cease to Exist" can be found on an album Manson recorded between 1967 and 1968 called Lie: The Love and Terror Cult. It was released in 1970, after the murders.

Manson also met talent scout Gregg Jakobson, whose father-in-law at the time was comedy legend Lou Costello, at Wilson's house. According to Helter Skelter, Jakobson introduced Manson to producer Terry Melcher, Doris Day's son, who when he met Manson was living at 10050 Cielo Drive.

At Jakobson's urging, Manson played his music for Melcher, but Melcher passed. Talent manager Rudi Altobelli, the owner of 10050 Cielo Drive, also met Manson at Wilson's house, and he had dismissed his music as "nice" before going about his day. On March 23, 1969, Altobelli later recalled to Bugliosi, Manson showed up at the Cielo Drive property and said he was looking for Melcher, who had moved to Malibu with his then-girlfriend Candice Bergen. Altobelli had been showering in the guest house, because the main house was already being rented by Roman Polanski and his wife Sharon Tate, and it's possible Manson saw her and three other people who would end up dead that August before he was directed to the guest house.

So it turned out to be possible that Manson had Melcher, Altobelli or any of the above in mind when he sent Atkins, Krenwinkel, Watson and Linda Kasabian to go and kill whomever they found at 10050 Cielo Drive on Aug. 9, 1969. (Kasabian was picked to go because she was the only one who had a valid driver's license. She herself didn't commit any violence on either night in question and ended up being the prosecution's key witness at trial.)

Bugliosi—who as a Deputy District Attorney of Los Angeles County won guilty verdicts and death sentences (later converted to life sentences) for everyone charged with the Tate-LaBianca murders—learned that Jakobson had talked to Manson over a hundred times since meeting him, having found him "'intellectually stimulating.'" Jakobson, who had married into Hollywood royalty, didn't officially join the Family, but he made multiple visits to Spahn Ranch.

Charlie would say that "'he had a thousand faces and that he used them all—he told me that he had a mask for everyone,'" Jakobson said. He had masks "'so he could deal with everyone on their own level, from the ranch hand at Spahn, to the girls on the Sunset Strip, to me.'"

Bugliosi asked Jakobson if Manson had ever talked about Scientology or "The Process," aka the Church of the Final Judgment, whose members worshiped Satan and Jesus.

No, Jakobson said, Charlie mainly quoted the Beatles and the Bible.

No one in the Family seemed to mind, Bugliosi wrote, that Manson preached personal freedom and independence but made sure that his followers were dependent on him and he made all the decisions. During Family dinners, he'd sit on a rock and the rest would sit on the ground in a circle around him.

At the same time, "Charlie wanted to be a recording artist," Jakobson said. "Not so much as a means to making money as to get his word out to the public. He needed people to live with him, to make love, to liberate the white race."

Crackpot stuff, but as far as his followers were concerned, Charlie may as well have been Jesus Christ.

"I'm the luckiest guy in the world," Dennis Wilson later told Bugliosi, "because I got off only losing my money."

Inside the Manson Cult: The Lost Tapes airs Monday at 8 p.m. on Fox



https://www.eonline.com/news/968496/how-cults-take-hold-in-hollywood-the-myth-of-manson-and-beyond

Shocking video shows pastor beating followers of South Korean cult

Footage also appears to show family members forced to assault each other during Grace Road Church meetings

Kate Lyons
The Guardian
September 17, 2018

Accused South Korean cult leader filmed beating her followers – video

Shocking footage showing a South Korean pastor beating her followers and ordering them to beat one another has emerged as Korean police investigate claims that she ran a cult in Fiji, forcing people to work without pay and endure violent rituals.

The footage appears to show violent assaults on members of the South Korean Grace Road Church.

Pastor Shin Ok-ju was arrested last month along with three other church leaders when they landed at Incheon airport just outside of Seoul.

Roughly 400 of her followers had moved to Fiji since 2014 after Shin predicted a famine would come across the Korean peninsula and that Fiji was a promised land where they could survive.

However, once the group arrived, former members claim their passports were confiscated and they were made to work without pay and perform ritual beatings on each other, called “threshing floors”.

The footage, shared with the Guardian by South Korean police as they prepared to go to Fiji to continue investigations into the group, shows some of the beatings that took place in the Korean branch of the church. Followers say the assaults continued in Fiji.

The footage was originally broadcast in an episode of weekly South Korean television programme Unanswered Questions, on the Seoul Broadcasting System (SBS), in August.

In several videos, Shin is shown calling members of the church forward during her sermons and then hitting them on the face, pulling and cutting their hair and throwing them to the ground.

Shin Ok-ju speaking to her followers in South Korea. Photograph: YouTube/Grace Road

In one video, Shin is seen instructing a girl, who appears to be a teenager, to slap a woman, believed to be her mother. After the girl hits her softly, Shin admonishes her, saying “you’re hitting the cheeks of the enemy”. The girl goes on to hit the woman 25 times. Later, the woman is shown repeatedly hitting the girl and forcefully and pulling her hair.

In a lengthy statement, a spokesperson for the Grace Road Group did not deny beatings occurred. The spokesperson said Shin Ok-ju “has biblically rebuked people by publicly reproving them so that they would turn back and no longer sin”.

“Threshing floor is written throughout the whole Bible … Grace Road Church alone has carried out the perfectly biblical threshing floor,” said the spokesperson.

The footage also includes allegations from witnesses that a man in his 70s, who was a member of the church and had travelled to Fiji, was subject to a beating in which he was hit 600 to 700 times by a number of church members over several hours.

The programme alleged that when he went to work the next day he could barely walk and was covered in bruises. He later returned to South Korea and eventually saw a doctor who told the television programme that the man had suffered a subdural haematoma. The man died a year later.

Grace Road, which says it is not a cult, denies any connection between the man’s death and any alleged beating.

“If the man indeed died from being beaten hundreds of times, would his wife, his son, his daughter-in-law, and his grandchildren stay happily in the church that supposedly beat their husband and father?” the church said in a statement.

Arum Song, the son of the man who died, told the programme his father died from an unrelated illness and that while his father had participated in the threshing floor, he had merely slapped himself, and was not beaten by anyone else.

One of Arum Song’s friends in Australia, where Song had lived since he was a teenager, told the Guardian he had known Arum since the late 1980s but they had lost touch eight years ago.

“The family left the church that they’d been going for years and started going to meetings and gatherings. After that I heard they sold all their properties, the family sold everything they had in Sydney and basically went back to Korea to join this group, that’s when my alarm bell went off but I thought it’s too late,” the man said.

Do you know more? Contact kate.lyons@theguardian.com

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/17/shocking-video-shows-pastor-beating-followers-of-south-korean-cult

Inside the Manson Cult: The Lost Tapes

MONDAY, SEPT. 17 AT 8:00 PM

FOX TV – Inside the Manson Cult: The Lost Tapes


Special Reveals Chilling Film and Photos from Inside the Infamous Cult

Narrated by Emmy and Golden Globe Award Nominee Liev Schreiber; Produced by Naked Television

INSIDE THE MANSON CULT: THE LOST TAPES, a new two-hour true crime special about Charles Manson and his gang of blindly loyal followers, will air Monday, Sept. 17 (8:00-10:00 PM ET/PT) on FOX, it was announced today by Rob Wade, President, Alternative Entertainment and Specials, Fox Broadcasting Company. The special will be narrated by Emmy and Golden Globe Award nominee Liev Schreiber (“Ray Donovan”).

Culled from more than 100 hours of footage, the two-hour special goes inside Spahn’s Ranch, where the Manson cult lived, to offer an intimate and terrifying look into America’s most murderous group. Airing 10 months after Manson’s death, the special will feature new and archival interviews with former Manson cult members, such as Catherine “Gypsy” Share and Dianne “Snake” Lake, as well as key people involved in the history of the Manson case, including prosecutor Stephen Kay and FBI criminal profiler John Douglas. The special also features an exclusive interview with Bobby Beausoleil from prison, where he is serving a life sentence for a murder he committed in association with the Manson family.

Watch/share the all-new promo for the special here: https://youtu.be/UU6a7FCr9-g


“The Manson murders are some of history’s most shocking and grisly crimes,” said Wade. “THE LOST TAPES offers incredible insight into how such unsuspecting people fell under Manson’s demonic spell, and how so many of them committed such heinous acts.”


“Raw, candid and compelling, this extraordinary cache of material takes us right inside the Manson family home at the very time the crimes were committed,” said executive producer Simon Andreae. “The footage shows – in real time – how the cult members were brainwashed under Manson’s influence.”

Fifty years ago, Charles Manson assembled a group of young followers, setting up a commune in Southern California. Mirroring the energy of the era, Manson was an aspiring musician who preached messages of peace and love, attracting seemingly innocent people into his inner circle. No one would have suspected that his followers would commit the most infamous series of slayings in U.S. history. During this period, one young filmmaker was given exclusive access to the Manson cult. In October 2016, he died, leaving a vast collection of footage, interviews and photos. Now, INSIDE THE MANSON CULT: THE LOST TAPES presents the inside story of how a peace-loving commune turned into America’s most horrifying group of cold-blooded killers.

Liev Schreiber currently stars in “Ray Donovan.” He has received three Emmy Award nominations and five Golden Globe nominations for his work on the series. Schreiber also has starred in various films, such as Academy Award winner “Spotlight,” “The Butler” and “The Manchurian Candidate.” Additionally, he is a multiple Tony Award-nominated actor for his roles in “A View from the Bridge,” “Glengarry Glen Ross” and “Talk Radio.”

INSIDE THE MANSON CULT: THE LOST TAPES is produced by Naked Television. Simon Andreae, Hugh Ballantyne and Richard Dale serve as executive producers, along with Allan Gaba and Dean Egnater. Follow the special on Twitter @FOXTV and join the discussion using #MansonOnFox.

https://www.fox.com/inside-the-manson-cult-the-lost-tapes/article/inside-the-manson-cult-the-lost-tapes-a-new-two-hour-true-crime-special-on-fox-5b6c7baac6e92d001d320ab8/

'Guru' Mohanial Rajani jailed for touching breasts with feet

BBC
September 14, 2018

A self-proclaimed "guru" who repeatedly touched women's breasts with his feet while he was being massaged in a ritual has been jailed.

Mohanial Rajani, who was a prominent member of a Hindu sect, even claimed to be a god and said the women had to perform "devotions" for him.

He also touched their breasts with his hands on two occasions, claiming to be either "blessing" or "purifying" them.

The 76-year-old was given a three-and-a-half-year jail term.
At Leicester Crown Court, Judge Robert Brown described the sexual assaults as "a gross breach of trust".

"You had the trust and loyalty and devotion of these girls and you took advantage of this for your own sexual pleasure," he said.

"Not surprisingly, both have suffered psychological damage as a result of this abuse."
Rajani, previously of Silverdale Drive in Thurmaston, Leicestershire, had pleaded guilty to four counts of sexual assault.

He admitted touching both of the women's breasts ten times with his feet during massages, and touching both of the women's breasts once with his hands.

Esther Harrison, prosecuting, said Rajani did not claim to be a guru publically, even to his own family.

However, he told the two young women's relatives that they were "blessed" and that he would become their guru.

"Gradually that changed and he declared himself not only their guru but as a god to them," said Ms Harrison.

'Personal service'

The women had to meet him every week for a "small, intimate gathering", or "satsang", said Ms Harrison.

Here they would perform "seva" or "personal service" for him, but Ms Harrison said it was "more personal than it needed to be".

"When they attended he would be lying down upon a bed," she said.

"Everyone present, normally four or five, would massage part of his body, usually taking each limb in turn."

He had stipulated that the two young women should wear saris, which meant he could put his foot on their breasts under the folds of the garment.

When later challenged he claimed the sexual assaults were part of a "testing process" to show they had given their minds to their gods.

During the first assault he claimed he was "blessing" the woman.

The second happened when the other victim confessed to Rajani that she was having a sexual relationship with a man her own age.

"He made it plain that in order to become pure again she would have to perform these [sexual] acts upon him," said Ms Harrison.

He then touched her naked breasts for about a minute with both hands while "claiming to be purifying them".

Eleanor Laws QC, defending Rajani, said he had "always been a kind, loving and caring, father, grandfather, uncle and relative to all of his family".

She said he had resigned from his position when people within the community were made aware of what happened.

"He can't play any part within the community that he had cared so much about, genuinely, for decades," she said.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leicestershire-45525266

Dalai Lama meets alleged abuse victims

BBC
September 14, 2018

The Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama has met four victims of alleged sexual abuse in the Netherlands.

The group had requested the meeting to discuss abuse reportedly carried out by former or current Buddhist teachers in several countries.

"We found refuge in Buddhism with an open mind and heart, until we were violated in its name," they wrote.

A spokesperson said the Dalai Lama was "saddened" to hear about the abuse and "constantly condemned" such behaviour.
The Dalai Lama, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, is currently on a tour of Europe.

The three women and one man who attended the 20-minute meeting on Friday presented written testimonies from 12 alleged victims.

One of those present, Oane Bijlsma, told Efe news agency that it was "a very complicated meeting".

She said that at the beginning the Dalai Lama "didn't want to hear" about their cases, but added that after 10 minutes of conversation he became "more receptive".

"By the end he was closer, he stopped trying to convince us that it wasn't his fault and started to listen to what we were saying," Ms Bijlsma said.

The meeting comes a week after Rigpa, an international Buddhist organisation active in the West, apologised for alleged abuse carried out by its founder Sogyal Lakar, also known as Sogyal Rinpoche.

Mr Lakar is best known for his 1994 book The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, which sold over three million copies.

Last month, an independent investigation by a lawyer commissioned by Rigpa found that some members of Mr Lakar's "inner circle" were "subjected to serious physical, sexual and emotional abuse by him".

The report added that senior members of the organisation had knowledge of some of the issues and "failed to address them, leaving others at risk".
Mr Lakar, who has stepped down as the head of Rigpa, declined to be interviewed for the investigation due to health issues.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45521075

CONTROVERSIAL ‘CULT’ LEADER CLAIMS HE CAN CHANGE THE WEATHER

JOE ROBERTS@JROBERTSJOURNO
Barcroft TV

TROUBLING allegations have been made against a young ’spiritual leader’ who claims to have powers such as telekinesis and the ability to change the weather

VIDEOGRAPHER / DIRECTOR: MERT BEKEN
PRODUCER: JOE ROBERTS, RUBY COOTE
EDITOR: BETH ANGUS

30-year-old Bentinho Massaro has amassed an impressive following both in real life and online, with 24,000 Instagram followers and almost 300,000 Facebook likes.

But in the past year he has been accused of running an evolved form of cult and his career has been marred by accusations of verbal abuse, sleeping with students, and the suicide of one of his followers.

The Amsterdam-native told Barcroft Media: “I do not consider my group as a cult, if by cult you mean some dysfunctional group of people completely under the spell of a manipulative leader.

“But if you mean cult in terms of a culture, then yes, of course, because anything is a cult. Like politics is a cult. The people that attend a Michael Jackson concert are a cult. The people that talk about aliens are a cult. There are cults all over the place and we accept them all the time.”

Massaro has set up a sleek website for his “Trinfinity Academy” where new followers can access his teachings for free and, according to the banner on the site, “realise their freedom” and “master their life.”

Continue Reading ...

http://www.barcroft.tv/bentinho-massaro-tech-cult-spiritual-guru-sedona-arizona

Panacea Museum

The museum tells the story of the Panacea Society – a remarkable religious community formed in the early twentieth century.

For 90 years, members of the society quietly lived, worked and worshipped God in their community.

Although they took care to reveal little about themselves to outsiders, the society’s name became familiar to many people beyond Bedford through their national advertising campaign to open ‘Joanna Southcott’s Box’ a curious cultural icon of inter-war Britain.

During the 1920s and 1930s the community grew to more than 70 resident members living in and around Albany Road in Bedford, with about 2,000 members living elsewhere across the world. Over 130,000 people applied to receive the Society’s method of healing through water – its ‘panacea’ to cure all illnesses.

The Panacea Museum is in ‘Castleside’, a beautiful Victorian house that was part of the community’s headquarters. It tells the story of the Panacea Society and other similar religious groups.

The museum also incorporates several other buildings, set within the gardens, that formed the original community’s ‘campus’.

The museum has a small café which serves tea, coffee, soft drinks and a selection of cakes and snacks.

Discover the amazing story of the unique religious community that created its own Garden of Eden in the centre of Bedford.

This museum tells the story of the Panacea Society – a remarkable religious community formed in the early twentieth century.

The Panacea Museum is in ‘Castleside’, a beautiful Victorian house that was part of the community’s headquarters. It tells the story of the Panacea Society and other similar religious groups.

http://panaceamuseum.org/

About CenSAMM

CenSAMM

The purpose of The Centre for the Critical Study of Apocalyptic and Millenarian Movements (CenSAMM) is to develop and maintain a world centre of excellence in the critical study of apocalyptic and millenarian movements and to aid the public understanding of the legacies and future possibilities of these crucial, creative and often misunderstood forms of human culture.

The Centre is an initiative of the Panacea Charitable Trust in Bedford, UK created by Panacea trustees, Dr. Justin Meggitt, Dr. Naomi Hilton and Prof. Christopher Rowland. The Academic Director is Prof. James Crossley, and the Academic Co-Director is Dr. Alastair Lockhart.

Its vision is to ensure that anyone will have access to quality resources to enable education, and understanding about apocalyptic and millenarian movements. It will realise this vision by:

Developing and maintaining a world centre of excellence in the critical study of apocalyptic and millenarian movements and aid the public understanding of the legacies and future possibilities of these crucial, creative and often misunderstood forms of human culture.

CenSAMM exists in both the physical world in the form of symposia and interviews, and online as written, digitised and recorded resources.

https://censamm.org/

USCIRF Highly Concerned by Latest Chinese Government Abuses Against Religious Communities

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 11, 2018
 
USCIRF Highly Concerned by Latest Chinese Government Abuses Against Religious Communities

USCIRF is highly concerned by reports of Chinese authorities’ escalating religious freedom violations. On the same weekend as national media in the United States revealed the horrific detention of countless Uighur Muslims in extra-judicial “re-education camps,” the Chinese government also reportedly raided and shut down Zion Church in Beijing. These collective actions, coupled with abuses against other religious communities, such as Tibetan Buddhists and Falun Gong practitioners, signal an alarming escalation in persecution of citizens in China under Xi Jinping. USCIRF condemns the Chinese government’s ongoing brutal and systematic targeting of religious communities for their beliefs.
 
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The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) is an independent, bipartisan federal government entity established by the U.S. Congress to monitor, analyze and report on threats to religious freedom abroad. USCIRF makes foreign policy recommendations to the President, the Secretary of State and Congress intended to deter religious persecution and promote freedom of religion and belief. To interview a Commissioner, please contact USCIRF at Media@USCIRF.gov or Javier Peña at jpena@uscirf.gov or +1-202-674-2598.

https://www.uscirf.gov/news-room/press-releases-statements/uscirf-highly-concerned-latest-chinese-government-abuses-against

Asaram Sends Mercy Plea to Rajasthan Governor, Seeks Dilution of Sentence

Asaram has pleaded for dilution in his life sentence terming it to be a "gruelling" punishment and citing his age.

PTI
The Wire
September 11, 2p18

Jodhpur: Self-styled godman Asaram, who was convicted for raping a minor girl, has sent a mercy plea to the governor of Rajasthan seeking dilution of his life sentence.

On April 25, a Jodhpur court had sentenced Asaram to life in prison after finding him guilty of raping a teenage girl in his ashram five years ago.

Challenging the sentence, Asaram had moved high court on July 2 but the petition is yet to be listed for hearing.

Governor Kalyan Singh, who recently received Asaram’s mercy plea, sent it to the home department seeking a detailed report on the plea.

According to his mercy plea, Asaram has pleaded for dilution in his life sentence terming it to be a “gruelling” punishment and citing his age.

The department then forwarded the plea to the Jodhpur Central Jail administration, which, in turn, has sought a report from the district administration and police.

“We have received Asaram’s mercy plea. We have sought a report from the district administration and police on this mercy plea,” superintendent of Jodhpur Central Jail Kailash Trivedi said.

After receipt of this report, the jail administration will send it to the director general (jail) of Rajasthan.

The 16-year-old girl had said in her complaint that Asaram had called her to his ashram in the Manai area near Jodhpur and raped her on the night of August 15, 2013.

The teenager from Shahjahanpur in Uttar Pradesh was studying at Asaram’s ashram in Chhindwara in Madhya Pradesh.

https://thewire.in/politics/asaram-sends-mercy-plea-to-rajasthan-governor-seeks-dilution-of-sentence

How NXIVM Rippled Through Vancouver Actors' Friend Networks

Sarah Berman

VICE
September 12, 2018

WATCH VIDEO

“It was like being invited to an Oscar party.”

The story of Vancouver’s NXIVM chapter, which grew into one of the most active and star-studded centres on the planet, began with a chance meeting on a cruise ship. Nearly 15 years before the FBI alleged top members of the self-help group committed sex trafficking and a bunch of other crimes, actress Sarah Edmondson attended a floating spirituality-themed film festival with her director husband in 2005. That’s where she met What The Bleep Do We Know?filmmaker Mark Vicente, who was apparently still buzzing from his first 16-day NXIVM “intensive.”

As Edmondson recounted on a recent episode of the new CBC podcast Uncover: Escaping NXIVM, the cruise itself felt like an opportunity for the 27-year-old basement-dwelling actress to get her life on track. She was barely making ends meet stringing together voice acting and beer commercial gigs—work she said didn’t feel meaningful. While seated together at dinner, Edmondson was trying to hide what was probably a nasty cold virus, but her “seal bark” coughs were constantly interrupting things.

Between hacking fits Vicente took Edmondson aside and asked her a bizarre question she’d never heard before: what would you lose if you stopped coughing? As in: what would be the “downside” if Edmondson wasn’t always so sick. This is the kind of counter-intuitive question NXIVM uses to spark epiphanies, and it prompted a burst of self-reflection in Sarah. She realized her coughs were an attempt to get her husband’s attention—she had subconsciously believed that sickness would earn her the care and love she craved. “I remember thinking wow, whatever Mark from What the Bleep is up to, I wanna do,” Edmondson told CBC.

This new way of looking at her marriage was the first feel-good hook that would eventually set Edmondson on an unparalleled NXIVM recruiting streak. By the end of her first five-day training she thought all of her friends needed this, that she was ready to bring NXIVM to Canada. In particular Edmondson was thinking about her acting colleagues, who she thought needed personal development more than anyone.

One of those actors was Chad Krowchuk, who still remembers the curious way NXIVM rippled through his social network. He first heard good reviews from Edmondson and her husband over dinner one night, and then from his acting friends Kristin Kreuk and Mark Hildreth a few weeks later. But it was his longtime girlfriend, Smallville actress Allison Mack, who finally convinced him to attend his first five-day training with her in Albany.

Both Krowchuk and Mack were child actors who found each other in their early 20s, and built a steady live-in relationship around their busy schedules. Krowchuk was working at Starbucks and bussing tables at a local restaurant while taking acting gigs when they popped up. He wanted to find more time to develop his career as a visual artist, while she was on her way to becoming a household name as Superman’s best friend in a teen superhero show watched by millions.

Mack and Krowchuk were about three years into living together when NXIVM “became a thing” in their group of friends. Grace Park (Battlestar Galactica) was another big name. Though both of them were skeptical at first, it only took a couple months for the excitement to rub off on Mack. When she came home from a women’s weekend retreat in 2007, Krowchuk could tell she was absolutely thrilled, and now wanted to share that powerful experience with him.

“That was the part that scared me the most,” Krowchuk says of his girlfriend’s sudden shift in perspective. “Before we had conversations about it, and we both thought it seemed kind of weird and creepy. I don’t necessarily know if she thought it was creepy, but we agreed it seemed a little messed up.” Now Mack was 110 percent on board, but he still had reservations. Krowchuk wondered to himself, if the tools were really so powerful and the leaders were committed humanitarians, then why weren’t they giving away the teachings for free?

Mack was Krowchuk’s most important relationship at the time, so he sucked up all his discomforts and got on a plane to Albany to meet the NXIVM inner circle. He remembers the Socratic question and answer therapies being very Freudian. It seemed just about any life problem could be traced back to a few moments in childhood—the apparent root of everyone’s mommy or daddy issues.

By this time Vicente and Edmondson were co-founders of a downtown Vancouver teaching space that hosted regular trainings on Wednesday nights and weekends. “I would recruit people, meet people, and it was all word of mouth,” Edmondson told VICE last year. “I welcomed almost every single training. There was only one I missed in the whole 12 years. At the end when they got their sash I would put it around their neck and we'd all clap.”

Though the hand clapping and coloured sashes were weird, Krowchuk says he really liked people he met through NXIVM. They were generally impressive and kind. Sure, there was an unsettling mood in the room that reminded him of obnoxious acting classes, but he liked that coaches gave a name to things he didn’t have a vocabulary for yet.

Over time the self-help group really shifted Mack and Krowchuk’s social landscape. Some preferred to keep a blend of company—both people who knew about NXIVM and people who didn’t care for it—but others started to break away from their old lives in favour of surrounding themselves with likeminded people.

Having a dinner party with NXIVM friends meant constantly dissecting your fears and insecurities. If somebody said they didn’t like sharing the food on their plate, for example, other group members would chime in with probing questions in an effort to overcome the block. What would you lose if you stopped the behaviour? Is refusing to share holding you back? Needless to say, it wasn’t a welcome conversation style for everyone.

Krowchuk could see some of his friends overcoming their insecurities, like Smallville costar Kristin Kreuk, who battled career-stifling shyness. “I felt like I related more to Kristin than anyone there, I could see what the appeal is,” Krowchuk told VICE. But other acting friends grew more isolated, like Battlestar’s Nicki Clyne. “Nicki I know she was the first example of somebody who had a decent acting career, she was doing quite well, and then she took the courses and went fuck it, I want to do this thing instead.” At the time Krowchuk thought there must have been a greater good he couldn’t see, and decided to reserve his judgements.

Mack was invited into NXIVM’s inner circle very quickly, and Krowchuk was able to tag along in the beginning. But he soon realized that he didn’t have the money to go much further with the coursework. “Allison paid for a lot of my courses,” he told VICE. “I would slowly pick away at paying her back, but I couldn’t afford to do it. Most normal people couldn’t afford to do this.” All told, Krowchuk says he probably spent between 20 and 30 grand on NXIVM courses, and by then he and Mack were already on the outs. They both had very different ideas about where their lives were headed, and around 2009 they broke things off for good.

At the time Krowchuk wasn’t concerned for Mack’s wellbeing—he thought her environment was generally positive, and her only goal was bettering herself. This was nearly a decade before allegations of branding, blackmail, starvation and sex slaves would surface.

The courses taught that everyone was responsible for their own reactions to the outside word. But that meant a NXIVM coach could turn just about any bad situation around and blame the student for their flawed response. “If a course like this is in the hands of somebody who means well, it’s harmless,” he said. “But I always felt like it would be really shitty if it was used in a negative way… It gets dangerous when you start stripping away meaning from everything.”

Meanwhile, Mack was a go-getter who was constantly pitching the TV industry people around her, even on the Smallville set. Michael Rosenbaum, who played Lex Luthor on the show, recently recalled her talking about the dorky self-help organization she was involved in. “I remember she was a part of something... doing some self-help stuff,” he told Theo Von’s This Past Weekend podcast. “I remember thinking that sounds a little culty, maybe it’s not for me, but I never thought about it… When I was on the show Allison was the sweetest, most professional, just a great actress.”

By this time Sarah Edmondson was building up the Vancouver business like never before. She had personally recruited big names like Nicki Clyne and Grace Park, and their collective success in the film and TV industry was quickly becoming a draw for new actors wanting to connect with them. And as social media sites like Facebook and Twitter began to rise in popularity, the magic follower boost that comes with fame turned recruiting into an easy numbers game.

But unbeknownst to Edmondson, her biggest opportunity would come at the expense of the woman who taught her everything she knew. In 2009 Barbara Bouchey confronted leader Keith Raniere about his secret sexual relationships with both clients and board members, as well as other improper business practices. Eight other women left with Bouchey, which effectively closed down multiple training centres including the one in Seattle. So instead of Vancouverites commuting south of the border for coursework like they did in the early 2000s, American clients started coming to Edmondson’s thriving new centre.

Bouchey was about to meet a terrible fate involving harassment and lawsuits, but that meant the stage was set for Vancouver to outpace all the other North American centres—even Albany—in its saturation of a young, wealthy market of liberal creative types. This is why one actress and former member described her 2013 recruitment into NXIVM to me like this: “It was like being invited to an Oscar party.”

Sarah Berman is a senior editor at VICE Canada working on a book about the NXIVM sex trafficking trial with Penguin Canada. Follow her on Twitter.

https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/a38dzj/how-nxivm-rippled-through-vancouver-actors-friend-networks

Bitter Winter

Bitter Winter

A magazine on religious liberty and human rights in China

"In 2018, China was due to appear before the Human Rights Council of the United Nations in Geneva for the Universal Periodic Review, an assessment of the human rights situation all UN member states should submit to every five year. In the same year 2018, XI Jinping moved to consolidate his position as potential president for life in China, and new and more restrictive laws on religion came into force. 2018 is also the year when Bitter Winter starts being published as an online magazine devoted to religious liberty and human rights in China."

"Bitter Winter plans to report on how religions are allowed, or not allowed, to operate in China and how some are severely persecuted after they are labeled as “xie jiao,” or heterodox teachings. We plan to publish news difficult to find elsewhere, analyses, and debates."

"Placed under the editorship of Massimo Introvigne, one of the most well-known scholars of religion internationally, “Bitter Winter” is a cooperative enterprise by scholars, human rights activists, and members of religious organizations persecuted in China (some of them have elected, for obvious reasons, to remain anonymous). It is independent from any religious or political organization, serving an international audience, although gladly welcoming the cooperation of many, and the fruit of volunteer work by those who work on it , although donations are gladly accepted."

https://bitterwinter.org/

He Led Female Students On Trips Abroad. Then, He Introduced Sex 'Ceremonies.'

Alleged abuse and cult-like brainwashing. "Magic" crystals. And a self-proclaimed healer with unfettered access to young women for decades.

Dana Liebelson
Melissa Jeltsen

HuffPost

September 11, 2018

Laura Quinn, a rock climber with sober blue eyes, was writing the hardest letter of her life. It was 2016, and she was parked in her van overlooking Leavenworth, Washington, a tiny town nestled in steep, jutting mountains. She was 29 years old.

Her letter was addressed to Colin Garland, a man she’d met on an adventure trip abroad when she was a senior in high school. He was 25 years her senior, but regardless of their difference in age and life experience, they clicked. Garland headed a travel company in Massachusetts and took students on guided trips abroad, exposing them to nature and teaching them about wildlife conservation. He also fashioned himself as a kind of New Age shaman, and for years, Laura convinced herself he’d been a trusted spiritual mentor.

Though more than a decade had passed since she traveled to Costa Rica with Garland’s company, The Global Classroom, her memories of him were still vivid. Garland, who called himself “Medicine Owl,” was lanky and catlike, with an intense gaze and wavy graying hair. Funny and infectiously enthusiastic, he also had a talent for making ordinary interactions seem almost magical.

On the day he singled her out, she was 18, hammering nails into a new structure they were building as part of a trip project.

“Do you have any idea how strong you are?” he asked, his head surprisingly close to hers. Laura felt like he had recognized a hidden well of potential inside her, something special she hadn’t yet discovered.

Now, as she addressed him as a full-fledged adult, she did indeed feel strong ― but despite him, not because of him. “I was in need of a hug, some advice, maybe a hiking partner who could help me understand that I was a good, lovable and beautiful person,” she wrote. “Instead, you sexually, spiritually and emotionally abused me in ways that are too dark to divulge the details of.”

Laura gathered the courage to post her letter online not long after,linking to it on Garland’s Facebook page, then her own.

Soon after, she received a Facebook message from a stranger, a 27-year-old Massachusetts woman who grew up 60 miles from Laura’s hometown. “I know we don’t know each other, but I stumbled upon your website about Colin,” the woman wrote. “I was also victimized by him. Reading your letter was like reading about my own experience.”

Laura was stunned. Then she got a message from another woman. And another.

As of the publication of this article, Laura has counted more than three dozen women who shared their own stories with her; HuffPost has spoken with 18. Many of the women met Garland as high school or college students and traveled with him to isolated locations with the blessing of their schools. Looking back, many also now see his conduct as unprofessional, harmful and in some cases, abusive, even likening it to cult-like brainwashing.

Multiple women claim he used his power as a trip leader ― and a self-proclaimed mystic — to gain their trust, and later pursued sex once they reached the age of consent under the guise of spiritual mentorship.

In conversations with HuffPost over months, women described how they were initially enchanted by Garland’s energy and flattered by the sustained attention he lavished upon them. He made them feel special. They believed his intentions were pure: He wanted to help, not harm.

Until they got older, and the spell wore off.
Eagle feathers and sharing circles

Laura’s parents, Anita and Kevin, thought sending Laura to Costa Rica in 2005 would be a healthy learning experience. Garland’s company came recommended by people they trusted. They’d met with him, and the youngest of their three daughters, Liz, had already traveled with Garland to Mexico. She came back raving about the trip.

It was hard for HuffPost to verify much about Garland’s background, and he did not respond to multiple interview requests. What we do know is this: He grew up in western Massachusetts, and after graduating high school, he claims to have worked in a local factory ― many people described him as a gifted handyman ― which he eventually decided wasn’t for him. On an archived website, he claimed he attended a one-year outdoor leadership program and traveled extensively, backpacking through 32 countries on a budget of $800. In 1986, he founded Raven Adventures, an ecotourism company he described as “practicing minimum-impact travel while introducing people from all walks of life to the natural world.” A few years later, he started The Global Classroom, a nonprofit organization dedicated to conservation. He raised donations to preserve an initial 100 acres of land in Costa Rica.

Over the years, he was welcomed into Mohawk Trail Regional High School, where he gave presentations and recruited students for trips, and he also advertised in colleges around Massachusetts and New York.

That spring, when Laura arrived at the airport of Costa Rica’s capital, San Jose, she was overwhelmed by local taxi drivers calling out to her in Spanish, asking her where she was going. She spotted Garland and instantly felt safe.

Garland was soon guiding his new cohort on a wild adventure through a nature reserve, winning them over with fantastic stories about his far-flung travels. He appeared deeply at ease in the natural world and claimed he knew how to stay so still, wild cats would come right up to him. But despite his worldly experiences, he was endlessly curious about the inner lives of his students – what they thought about, the struggles they were experiencing, what it was really like to be a teen. Although he was so much older, to Laura, he felt more like a peer.

After days of exploring the cloud forest and volunteering, the students would gather for evening sharing circles. Garland, who claimed he had Native American grandparents,would wave an eagle feather, burn sage and cleanse the students with the smoke. Then he’d ask them to divulge their deepest, most secret fears.

“Three days into a trip, I have people sharing stuff that you would never believe,” Garland said in a video interview posted on Facebook in 2014. “It creates this environment of compassion and understanding and empathy, and maybe a young person saying, ‘Oh, my God, I’m not the only one that suffers this.’”

The circles felt like a nonjudgmental space, where students could express anything they were going through in their lives. “There was a lot of crying,” one boy on Laura’s trip said. Laura, too, opened up about her insecurities: worries about going to college, how she didn’t feel pretty enough. After one of the circles, Garland silently appeared on the mist-shrouded porch of the cabin and told her that her “share” had been very powerful, she recalled.

After the trip, Laura was surprised when Garland wanted to stay in touch with her over email. She even boasted about it to her younger sister, Liz.

Liz, who went on three trips with Garland, casually mentioned he’d emailed her too.

As Laura left home and began her freshman year at the University of Vermont, her email correspondence with Garland grew more intense, she said. (Laura did not have her emails for HuffPost to review.) He seemed wise, caring, in possession of secret spiritual knowledge. In a dorm, on the laptop her parents bought her for school, she confided in him regularly about low self-esteem and romantic jealousy — how she felt she’d never be with someone who believed she was beautiful. Having such a close confidant willing to talk with her about her most private feelings was addicting. Every time she logged on and had a new message from him, she got an electric charge.

Her parents didn’t know about the growing friendship. She didn’t tell her friends much either. Some of the content of the emails felt too personal. Garland would steer their conversations to explicitly sexual topics, she said, like whether she’d had an orgasm. But it didn’t feel weird. She thought of him as a healer who was asking personal questions as a kind of spiritual intake form, gathering information to help her. In other cultures, it was normal to talk about sex, he explained. America was uptight. And he said it was OK if she didn’t want to talk about it anymore, she recalled.

A lot of people weren’t ready for what he had to show them — the magic. Garland often promised that people who fully tapped into their power could be free of problems of the ego and do things that sounded incredible, like shapeshift into animals or even cure cancer.

He seemed to have all the answers.

I do want to be ready, Laura thought.
Labyrinth

In 2006, the summer after her freshman year, Laura, then 19, returned to her hometown.She was depressed and exhausted. School was hard. She worried that her college boyfriend found other women more attractive than her. She felt unnoticed, and that her freshman-year friends were cooler than she was, more artistically creative and smart. She was partying too much. In some ways, these were typical freshman concerns, but to Laura, they felt severe at the time. What she really needed, she suspects now, was a therapist.

She planned to spend the summer months lifeguarding at a local swimming pond ― a boring job she’d had for years ― but she also hoped to meet up with Garland.

Garland was staying on and off at The Center at Westwoods, a nonprofit spiritual education center that hosts yoga classes, psychic readings and reiki workshops south of Boston. He was helping to build a labyrinth and trails on the grounds, while also leading a student trip that summer to Siberia.

Laura was enthusiastic about the prospect of meeting up with her mentor again. In his emails to Laura, Garland had alluded to mysterious ceremonies, where he could draw up ancient energies to heal her problems, she said. He even had a term for them, she said: quodoushka, or “Q.” She imagined the ceremonies might be something like the sharing circles in Costa Rica, meditating and calling on ancestors.

One May evening,after receiving an invite from Garland,she said, she drove more than an hour from her parents’ home to Westwoods and arrived after dark. Once again, she found herself with Garland in what felt like a secluded and magical place: more than 70 acres of conservation land scattered with beautiful gardens, trails and prayer rooms.

When Garland opened the door, Laura was so relieved, she started crying. Finally, she was in a place where she could heal. “I want you to help me get better,” she recalled telling him.

Garland was crashing in the basement of the main 9,000-square-foot house on the grounds. She took his bed for the night and fell asleep alone, she said, but abruptly woke up later. As she recalls it, Garland was rubbing her body, telling her that “the Aboriginal elders” were communicating with him and they wanted to deliver some ancient power to her. Was this a ceremony like the kind Garland had always talked about?

She froze, her veins icy. Despite all their emailing, she never imagined that meant sexual activity with him, her trip leader, a man decades older, someone she thought wanted to help her. But she didn’t fight or run away.

“You don’t run from someone you trust,” she said.

He pushed her head down for oral sex, she recalled, and urged her to swallow his semen in order to receive the most energy. In that state of shock, “you [can] be forced to do things that you wouldn’t otherwise be forced into,” she said. It happened so fast, and she didn’t say a word.

The next day, Garland treated what had happened between them like it was a real ceremony that had laid the foundation for powerful healing to begin. Laura had done big work, she recalled him saying, and he assured her that her feelings of discomfort were normal.

But Laura wasn’t sure what to make of the incident. Had she experienced a genuine healing ceremony? Or had she been victimized by her trusted mentor? One of those options was just too painful to comprehend.

“If I can go back and learn more things from Colin about magic,” she told herself, “I’ll be OK.”
Grooming

Laura now believes her long email correspondence with Garland primed her to trust him. She wasn’t the only one. HuffPost reviewed dozens of emails and messages that Garland sent to seven other women ― the youngest starting when she was 14.

Several women HuffPost spoke with now consider Garland’s intensive emailing a form of grooming, a process used by sexual abusers to gain access to victims. They believe Garland leveraged his position of power as a mentor and confidant to achieve his real goal: sex with young women.

The messages reveal a pattern: Garland would shower women with attention, encouraging them to fully open up, before turning the conversations sexual.“You have an incredible body that can and will feel so, so much,” he wrote one college student, Elizabeth, whom he hadn’t yet met in person. “Sadly, much of it has been hurt and pain. It is time to start replacing those cellular memories with memories of joy, pleasure and light.” (Like most of the women in this story, Elizabeth asked HuffPost to withhold her last name to protect her privacy.)

Once he’d developed trust, he would begin asking sexually explicit questions and introduce the concept of healing ceremonies that involved sexual energy. Although he could be flirtatious, he suggested that his interest in the women’s sexual lives was for spiritual or teaching purposes ― to help them in their quest for self-growth ― rather than physical attraction on his part.

Laura’s younger sister, Liz, engaged in an emotionally charged correspondence with Garland for years. She emailed with Garland when she was 14, after she joined one of his student trips to Mexico. Their early messages were friendly, dealing with travel logistics. But over time, he grew affectionate. By the time Liz was 16 and 17, Garland was sprinkling his emails with pet names, calling her the “shining one,” “gorgeoususususususus,” and “my sweet,” and signing off with declarations of love.

When Liz, then 17, opened up about her struggles with self-confidence, he hinted at knowing secret ways to heal her, though he said she was too young. “Because it would be a dangerous thing in this society for me to share ways to move that energy around with you in the sexual world, I do not,” he said. “If we lived in other cultures, you would already know all that stuff and it would be no big deal,” he added. “But, we live in messed up America and have to walk softly...Around sexual stuff anyway.”

A few months later, when she was still 17 and he was45, Garland sent Liz a sexually explicit email brimming with personal questions. “What about orgasms. Can you have them when you are getting oral? If so, was it possible at first.. Or did it take a while? ... What about giving oral? Do you? If so, do you like giving? Is that considered Ok and acceptable by your peers? And orgasm. Can you make him orgasm? ... Do you like it? Do you pull away or let him do it in your mouth? Do you swallow If not, Why?”

Garland emphasized that he was asking these questions for research purposes. In the fall of 2006, he and Liz talked about meeting up for a walk, where he said he would introduce her to a ceremony to help her with her self-confidence. She had previously told him she wasn’t comfortable with any ceremonies having to do with sex, and he reassured her that wasn’t what they were about.

“Don’t worry.. No blow up dolls and [huge] sex toys,” he wrote.

She can’t remember now if the timing didn’t line up ― or if her gut knew something was wrong. Either way, she decided not to go.
Elizabeth and Caitlin and Lauren and Michaela and, and ...

After Laura posted her letter in 2016, many of the women started looking at their own experiences with Garland in a new light. Now mature adults, they were struggling with how differently they perceived Garland when they were young, and how they now felt he’d taken advantage of them.

Elizabeth (not the same individual as Liz) met Garland in 2010, when she was a junior at Stony Brook University in New York. A friend connected them online when Elizabeth was going through a particularly tough year, she said. She eventually confided in him extensively over email, initially about spiritual matters. Their conversations turned to sexual ceremonies, which he said could help her.

“I hope you continue ... finding the light and power of your body, heart and spirit. And this means sexually too,” he wrote to Elizabeth in April 2010. “Even if we never meet, I would be so happy you are out there,” he added.

They did meet, on her 21st birthday. She knew she didn’t want to get drunk to celebrate the milestone like most people her age. Instead, she traveled to Garland’s home, a ferry and bus ride from her school, with the hopes of finding grounding and peace. In past conversations, he had made his property sound idyllic, almost like a place of rehabilitation. She was eager to check it out.

He did a reiki-like healing without touching her, she said, and they fell asleep in his bed. (He made it clear, she noted, that they could sleep on opposite sides.) She said she woke up to him sitting on top of her, positioning her body so she could perform oral sex on him. “There was no, ‘Yes, I want to do this,’” she said. “There was no sense of me being initiated into any kind of spiritual healing.”

Afterward, she felt ashamed and spun the experience into a positive one. She was fighting with her parents, so when Garland and a friend invited her to stay with them, she said, she accepted. She was searching for a spiritual home, as she felt disconnected from her Catholic roots and her family. The ceremonies Garland offered seemed like they might fill that void. But she described his behavior over the summer as controlling, in terms of what she ate, when she left the house and whether she contacted her parents. Her mother told HuffPost that she was concerned enough to call the police. Garland called the cops too, complaining in June 2010 that Elizabeth’s mother was harassing him, according to a police report.

Elizabeth said she internalized her time with Garland in a way that made her feel good about it. But seeing Laura’s letter prompted her to re-examine what happened through a more critical lens. She now feels that Garland is a “predator of insecure young women” who is sexually, not spiritually, motivated.

“What happened to me was not right,” she said.

Another woman, Caitlin, met Garland when she was a student at Binghamton University. Caitlin joined Garland on an informal trip to Baja, Mexico, through the winter of 2009-10, when she was 21. On that trip, he showed her a crystal skull that he claimed was magical, and encouraged her to imbue it with energy by masturbating with it. She did not. “I’m still not quite sure what to make of the crystal skull ― does it really have powers and energy or no? … I have no idea, but I’ll continue to keep an open mind,” she wrote in her journal at the time.

Later, in online chat messages after the trip, Garland encouraged Caitlin to send him naked photos, telling her it would help her come into her power.

“When you take those pictures, spread yourself open to show your pink,” he wrote, claiming that the practice was part of Aboriginal teachings. “How I would love to see that image to know where you sit on the medicine wheel.” She declined to send him photos. (Another woman, Isidra, who traveled with Garland as a college student at Binghamton, also told HuffPost that Garland had asked her for naked photos.)

When Caitlin learned of the other women’s stories, she reread her lengthy correspondence with Garland and was appalled. “I know logically that I was brainwashed by this man in a very calculated way ― the parallels between my own story and the stories of all the other women who have come forward are impossible to ignore ― but I can’t seem to overcome this feeling that if I had been sensible enough to realize that I was being manipulated, things could have been different,” she told HuffPost.

Yet another woman, Lauren, said that she went on group trips with Garland to South Africa and Namibia starting in 2011, when she was a 21-year-old student at Binghamton.While traveling, she said, she would go on walks with Garland that started out friendly, but eventually, he made sexually explicit comments. She recalled, for example, Garland giving her a Herkimer diamond and telling her to hold the diamond while she masturbated to draw out energies. She did not. She was initially intrigued by their conversations and tried to suppress any reservations, but soon felt uncomfortable, especially considering their respective roles: She was dependent on him in a foreign country. “You have no idea where you even are half the time,” she said. “I felt like I had to play nice.”

A woman named Michaela said she went over to Garland’s house in 2014 to learn more about his international trips, as she was interested in volunteering. After dinner,he offered to give her a massage and she agreed because she understood he was a healer. During the session, she said she was shocked when Garland groped her breasts under her shirt. She’d had many massages in the past, and that had never happened before. Later, she confronted him over email. He apologized, but noted that if it was a “trigger” to have a “full massage,” then it was her “responsibility to mention this right at the get go.” He added, “finding your voice is always a good thing.”
The myth-maker

By all accounts, Garland was a gifted storyteller who spun tales about his exhaustive travels around the world and the ancient teachings he said he encountered abroad.

While some of his stories seemed far-fetched, many of the women he confided in were open to believing them. They were themselves searching for meaning, in that transitional time between late teens and adulthood. When he spoke about how they could become more confident and harness their inner power as women, he seemed to be talking to their deepest desires and fears.

Some stories he told were more outlandish than others and played into harmful and offensive stereotypes about native people. Garland told multiple women that, during a trip to Australia, he was taken in by a clan of Aboriginal people who were isolated from the outside world. They knew he was coming, he said, and welcomed him in. It was Aboriginal people who taught him how to use sexual power for healing ceremonies, he claimed. In messages with women, Garland often used the word “abo,” a highly derogatory term, and said he drummed with Aboriginal people every full moon, in spirit.

There are no Aboriginal sexual healing ceremonies anywhere in Australia, as far as Dr. Richard Davis, the acting manager of anthropology for the Central Land Council, which represents Aboriginal people in Central Australia, was aware. When HuffPost asked Davis about Garland’s claims, he said that Garland sounded like “the latest in a long tradition of Westerners trading in a pretty disgusting idea of primitiveness and ... quite happy to disrespect Aboriginal people in his misrepresentation of them.”

Garland’s terminology for Aboriginal people “is so offensive, I can hardly begin to describe the parameters of this offensiveness,” Davis added, calling his claim of finding a clan with no contact with the outside world a “bizarre fantasy” that conveniently allowed him to claim sole access to the knowledge.

Garland said that his grandparents were Native American. He loved the book The Education of Little Tree, multiple women said, identifying with the protagonist, an orphan boy who is raised by his Cherokee grandparents. The book, which was originally presented as an autobiography, was later exposed to be a literary hoax, and the author was outed as a Klansman and high-profile pro-segregationist.

Similarly, “quodoushka,” the sexual practice Garland advocates in dozens of emails with women, has been falsely connected to the Cherokee Nation, but it’s not a legitimate Native American practice. Rather, it’s credited to a New-Age group called the Deer Tribe Medicine Society. Cherokees do not practice any such ceremonies, a spokesperson for the Cherokee Nation told HuffPost.

“He is misappropriating indigenous cultural traditions in order to lure young women to have sex with him,” said a former girlfriend of Garland’s who asked to remain anonymous.“I’m concerned about the impact of the ‘sexual ceremonies,’ if you want to call them that, on the women, and I feel horrible about not speaking up about it earlier.”
Dissociate and feel nothing at all

Over the course of the summer at Westwoods, Laura participated in many sex ceremonies that Garland claimed would help her heal spiritually, she said. They often happened quickly, she recalled, with a sense of missed opportunity if she didn’t immediately partake. For one ceremony, he asked her to masturbate with a vibrator while he watched, she said. She understood she had to orgasm for it to work ― which left her with a lot of anxiety and dysfunction around sex in subsequent relationships. On another night, she had sex with him in the labyrinth while holding a crystal.

When she expressed any reluctance, she said Garland would frame her apprehension as a spiritual shortcoming. She was too closed off, he told her. But when she participated, she said, she was commended for her personal growth.

A person who knew Garland and Laura at the time and wished to remain anonymous said that Laura seemed “impressionable, spiritually searching, and eager to please.” Garland “groomed Laura to the extent that she was unable to think for herself and unable to see the warning flags for what they were. Instead, Laura did whatever Colin asked of her and was rewarded with further manipulative praise.”

From the outside, it wouldn’t necessarily seem like anything was wrong. They went skydiving together, Laura said, and she did odd jobs around the center like mulching; she even attended a women’s group.

But as the summer wore on, she began to disassociate during sexual acts, she said, feeling as though she was detached from her body. Dissociation, often reported by sexual abuse victims, is a defense mechanism to survive a traumatic event. When she told Garland about leaving her body, he praised her for “shapeshifting,” she said. She hoped that the ceremonies were working. She had to be getting better, she told herself. She didn’t have low self-esteem anymore. She couldn’t feel anything at all.

There was a part of her that even wanted to tell her friends what was going on. But Garland warned her that she had to be careful who she confided in, because others might view their time at the healing center skeptically, she said, and doubt would drain the pool of magic.

One close friend of Laura’s, Patrice, was concerned about the changes she saw in Laura that summer, as well as all the time she was spending with Garland. Laura didn’t seem like herself and appeared disconnected from reality. She talked, for example, about Garland having out-of-body experiences. “You know that he wasn’t actually flying, right?” Patrice asked her. Laura clammed up.

Alarmed, Patrice secretly read Laura’s emails and told her own mother she feared Laura was involved in a cult. Patrice tried to gently raise her concerns to Laura, questioning whether she and Garland might be sexually involved. But to Laura, Patrice’s questions only confirmed what Garland had told her: No one would understand.

Laura’s parents believed she had spent her time at Westwoods making extra money and attending women’s groups. But when Laura’s father, Kevin, drove her back to school for her sophomore year in the fall, he sensed something was off. In the car, she asked him if he knew anything about shamans, he recalled. He tried to answer the question — explaining that shamans were a kind of healer — but he was puzzled about why she was asking.

“Laura might have been looking for something, and he tapped into it,” Kevin said. “When I was a kid, I was looking for that. You’re looking for the answers to the world.”
Operating with impunity

Garland did not respond to HuffPost’s repeated requests for comment over the course of six months.

He has claimed in messages to others that his relationships were consensual. In emails with one student, he insisted he would “NEVER” pressure anyone sexually. “The joke was that I missed out on a lot of good sex because I was way TOO considerate,” he wrote, adding he has the largest “self control and consideration of others in that area.”

Still, he seemed aware of how his interactions with young women, even if they were over 18, might be perceived. In 2013, he also told Laura he wasn’t “doing too much kiddy things” anymore, as he was burned out and focusing on research. “Keeps me from getting arrested,” he joked.

Laura and one other woman told HuffPost that they went to the police to discuss their interactions with Garland years after their encounters with him. No charges were filed.

States define sex crimes differently, weighing factors like age, force, consent, physical and mental capacity and impairment due to alcohol and drugs. Some states even look at whether there was “therapeutic” deception — like when a therapist abuses a patient. But even in cases where conduct may not rise to a criminal level, that “doesn’t make it any less traumatizing for the victim,” pointed out Jennifer Long, CEO of AEquitas: The Prosecutors’ Resource on Violence Against Women.

Running his own companies, Garland operated with few checks and balances. He thrived in spiritual communities and among open-minded people who may have been prone to trust his unusual claims with minimal skepticism.

The healing communities where Garland operated are now grappling with the allegations. A spokesperson for The Center At Westwoods, where Laura spent time over the summer, said the community supports “those who have spoken out against Colin Garland,” and “did not know of his alleged misconduct during his brief time at Westwoods.” The spokesperson added, “we were horrified to learn of it. Westwoods will continue its important mission as a place of healing and peace in spite of him.”

In the 90s, Garland also lived and worked out of Earthlands, an environmental community in Petersham, Massachusetts. After a programming partner at Earthlands complained about Garland having an inappropriate relationship with her 18-year-old daughter, he was asked to leave. “For nearly a decade, I have been puzzled by your personal relationship with others, particularly younger women,” the founder of Earthlands, Larry Buell, wrote in a letterto Garland in 2001 that he shared with HuffPost. “I would brush it off as ‘oh, that’s the way Colin is.’”

Now, looking back, Buell said he feels bad about not doing more. “Upon more reflection, I see how I should have been more responsible for the protection of women and the damage of those beyond the borders of Earthlands.”

As far as HuffPost was aware, no one complained to the schools Garland recruited from prior to the publication of Laura’s letter. In 2016, a former Mohawk Trail Regional High School student contacted superintendent Michael Buoniconti to voice her concern about Garland’s close contact with young students in the past. Buoniconti told her he contacted a local district attorney’s office to pass along the information. But it’s unclear whether there was any legal follow-up. “To my knowledge, Mr. Garland has not stepped foot in the Mohawk Trail Regional School for many many years,” Buoniconti told HuffPost in an email.

Some in the community still support Garland.

Jeanne Ciampa, a writer and musician who is a friend of Garland’s, said she thought the claims against him sounded like consensual sexual relationships that women now regretted. She worried about harm to Garland’s reputation and to his admirable conservation efforts. “He is absolutely not capable of hurting a soul,” she said, describing herself as a progressive liberal who supports the Me Too movement. “Imagine building your business and having some pissed-off girls ruin it.”

In more recent correspondence, Garland appears shaken by the accusations. In a 2016 Facebook message obtained by HuffPost, he wrote that Laura was “placing a lot of blame on me in some very dark and inaccurate ways.” But he acknowledged, “I fucked up bad and I know it and knew it for sometime now. I was so sure my teachings could help Laura and I sincerely with all my heart had the best of intentions.”

He added that he had nothing to hide or lie about.

“I was just as swept up in wanting to believe in other ways,” he wrote.
Awakenings

When HuffPost began to report this story in 2017, Garland’s company was still recruiting students online for overseas trips. During the course of reporting, the website was taken down; it’s unclear if he has stopped running trips. A search for Colin Garlandor Raven Adventures brings up Laura’s letter and Facebook page in the top results. In October 2017, a user posted on TripAdvisor asking if anyone had heard of Raven Adventures because their daughter had received information about a trip.

“Google threw up a name [and] shame Facebook page that makes some disturbing allegations against the owner,” a user responded. “And while name [and] shame on social media is an exceptionally bad decision-making tool, if I were a parent, I’d be concerned all the same.”

Laura is now 31 and lives in a vehicle that’s as old as she is, a 1986 Toyota van that she bought with only 57,000 miles on it. She’s been on the road since 2011, spending winters in El Paso, Texas, and summers in Colorado, Washington and California, rock climbing and working in gear shops.

On a sunny afternoon in May, she was parked in a clearing in Coconino National Forest, near Flagstaff, Arizona. Her rat terrier was curled up in the van. Laura looked like the climber she’s been for many years, fit and lightly sunburned. She was quick to laugh and came across as strikingly self-sufficient, casually rattling off the ways she fixed up the van, with a tongue-and-groove cedar ceiling, a catalytic heater, a sink that drains out the floor, and an early-1900s Griswold cast iron stove.

She finds solace in the outdoors, a coping skill she developed after her time with Garland. Hiking in Arizona, in a quiet canyon called Priest Draw, she nimbly sidestepped poison ivy and pointed out “problems,” or bouldering routes. She also noted stumps not far from the trail — trees intentionally cut down to prevent forest fires from spreading — and the blackened skeletons, where the fires had been.

“The big trees are left by the forest service because they can withstand wildfires,” she said. “They can be burned and still live.”

When she spoke about what happened that summer at Westwoods, she occasionally punctuated the story with knowing asides, like, “If I talked to him now, I’d be like, ‘You’re such a fucking creep.’” But she didn’t always feel so comfortable speaking out. For years, she didn’t process what had happened at Westwoods, she said, but had lingering trust and sexual dysfunction issues. Once she began having panic attacks, she entered therapy. She estimates she’s now spent thousands of dollars on it, which she couldn’t afford without her parents’ help. Not a day goes by where she doesn’t think about what happened with Garland.

Laura still tries to actively warn other women about Garland. She and the other women have already made it difficult for him to operate trips in the future without scrutiny.

There’s real power in knowing that she’s not alone, that what she experienced was also shared by others. But it’s also been a wound: Garland never thought she was special, she realizes now; she was just one of many women taken in by the same well-rehearsed story.

“The spell he casts, it makes you feel so unique,” she said. “It was really hard to let that go.”



A Note On Reporting: HuffPost was alerted to the allegations against Colin Garland because one of its reporters, Melissa Jeltsen, is Facebook friends with Laura Quinn. They attended the same high school until 2001. While Melissa was not friends with Laura, she was, and remains, friends with her older sister. Another HuffPost reporter, Dana Liebelson, conducted all interviews with Laura and her family members.



https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/he-led-students-on-trips-abroad-then-he-introduced-sex-ceremonies_us_5b8ea15be4b0162f472759c8