Does L.A. have an 'addiction to cults and cultists'? Sure seems like it

PATT MORRISON COLUMNIST
Los Angeles Times
JUNE 14, 2022

When powerful, professed men and women of God come to grief, they almost always do so over two transgressions older than the Commandments: sex and money.

The leader of the Mexico-based international La Luz del Mundo church pleaded guilty this month in Los Angeles to sexual felonies with underage girls in his church community. The judge who sentenced him remarked, “I’ll never cease to be amazed at what some people do [in the name of] religion.”

The church leader joins the sullied company of the Catholic priests who molested boys and girls in their charge; the accused and convicted sexual abusers on the Southern Baptists’ list of offenders in their own ranks; and the pastors and preachers, low and high, taken to court for making off with anything from thousands to millions of dollars rightfully belonging to God and to their congregants.

These foibles and pitfalls can entice not just orthodox, IRS-blessed religions but also the self-made leaders of spiritual, self-help, self-fulfillment and human potential bodies that have grown here in Southern California as nowhere else. With wonder and delight, the social critic and author Carey McWilliams often pointed out our “fabled addiction to cults and cultists.”

In 1895, an indignant Pasadena lady who gloried in the triple-decker name of Mrs. Charles Stewart Baggett wrote, “I am told that the millennium has already begun in Pasadena, and that even now there are more sanctified cranks to the acre than in any other town in America.”

My dear Mrs. Baggett, it all got a start here at least 50 years before that.

In 1841, a Scotsman named William Money — Hispanicized into Mo-NAY, from his years in Mexico, arguing Catholic padres into exhaustion over matters of faith — blew into town and promptly earned $126 repairing the plaza church.

Soon, L.A. learned that menial labor was beneath a man of his prodigious talents, which — just ask him — included astronomy, medicine, law, book publishing, philosophy, the sounds of a conch shell and the habits of muskrats. A man of his destiny, born, as Money said, an infant prodigy, “with four teeth and the likeness of a rainbow in my right eye,” was soon practicing medicine of a sort, which extended to treating patients in an 1860s smallpox epidemic. At the end of his life, he boasted that he had tallied 5,000 patients, of whom only four had died.

He had the distinction of founding the region’s first religious sect, Reform of the New Testament Church, styling himself as Bishop Money, as well as Doctor and Professor Money. He published what is apparently the first English-language publication in L.A.: the exceedingly rare, 22-page “Reform of the New Testament Church,” also produced in Spanish. And he managed to get into official city records an illustration of his “discovery,” a vast subterranean ocean that would one day swallow up San Francisco — and L.A., too, if it kept dissing him.

The townspeople indulged and needled him. When he bragged that he could raise the dead, some pueblo jackanapes stuffed him in a box, lowered it into the ground and began shoveling earth upon it until Bishop Doctor Professor Money hollered, “For the love of God, let me out!” His torrent of letters to the editor of the Los Angeles Star fulminating against anyone who didn’t believe in all things Moneyan got so tiresome that the paper finally stopped publishing anything he wrote.

He ended his days in 1881 in San Gabriel, at the Moneyan Institute, an oval house with a bed of tenderly cultivated tulips in front and, beyond that, a pair of large, octagonal wood-and-adobe gateposts, the gates inscribed with Latin, Hebrew and Greek phrases. Some of his faithful had maintained the Money Society as a social and benevolent organization. For all of his epic anti-Catholic rants, Money’s deathbed had the figure of the Virgin Mary at its head and a skeleton carved into its footboard. The black granite gravestone in San Gabriel Cemetery describes him as “physician theologian philosopher writer naturalist historian.” He probably would have found that inadequate.

There was no stopping L.A. after that. People who uproot themselves and look here for the church or faith they’d left behind, or decide to break from it completely, have no trouble finding something among the endless sects that seem tailor-made for their restive new L.A. lives and new outlooks: New Age and old-time religions; ministers and priests; gurus and prophets; God-spieling grifters; spiritualists and spellbinders, sacred and profane.

As The Times wrote years ago, “No other community on the face of the globe has given rise to half as many mystic, philosophical, psychological, occult, consciousness-raising, therapeutic and alternative creeds as 20th century L.A.”

New sects could repackage and market themselves out of ingredients from older ones, like tweaking a recipe: a pinch of that Eastern religion, a sprinkling of this psychology (or pop psychology), an immodest dash of the divine, a soupçon of the occult, a helping of Christianity and ... bon appetit.

It bears pointing out that for all the crackpot credos that flourished here, Los Angeles also opened millions of minds to earnest spiritual questing, the sagacities of Eastern religions and philosophies and vegetarianism and healthy living.

As for the ones that went off the rails, I’ll have to limit myself to just a sampling, or we’ll both be here all day.
Mount Helios

In 1912, Edith Maida Lessing wrote the lyrics to a lachrymose ballad about the sinking of the Titanic. Nine years later, she had bobbed her hair — and let it down. Police busted her in the Glassell Park compound she named Mount Helios, for the Greek god of the sun, atop which she flew a red flag lettered with “Love.”

The newspapers luridly called her a “priestess of a strange love cult” who supposedly bragged that she controlled a thousand men. The anarchist squad — the LAPD had such a thing — turned up placards printed with the word “Revolution” and exhorting readers to become libertines.

Lessing argued for free love, the end of civil marriage, free child care, profit-sharing, free public transportation for working people and free trade.

She invited a federal rap upon herself by mailing to The Times and the postal inspector yellow-printed pamphlets described as “lewd and lascivious.” This wasn’t porn in the sense that we know it but likely information about birth control, as well as what reporters called her “radical” political views. With World War I ending and women about to get the vote, women had been demanding such information, but it was illegal. In 1916, Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, was arrested for giving women contraception information, and Marie Stopes’ discreet 1918 sex manual “Married Love” was radically helpful for women brought up in ignorance about their own sex.

Lessing was sentenced to time in a “female reformatory” in Missouri, where she occupied herself teaching her insights to incarcerated ladies of the evening.
Mazdaznan

In 1906, Ernst Otto Haenisch, calling himself Otoman Zar-Adusht Hanish, visited here from Chicago to lecture about his sun worship faith, Mazdaznan. He spoke to a Times reporter in the royal “we” and explained the virtues of fasting.

A snippet from his literature: “Mazdaznan denies not the existence of matter and its consequent process through the four dimensions of space, but holds the latter to be dependent upon our mental perception, recognizing in the variation of manifestation a complex whole.” (There will be a test.)

Breathing exercises and vegetarianism were among Mazdaznan’s more sensible practices.

Hanish’s legal troubles began when relatives inquired about the welfare of a boy who was being fed white grapes and beer, and whose mother was a rich widow and Mazdaznan follower.

Mazdaznan’s criminal and civil cases kept L.A. courtrooms busy from the end of World War I to the eve of World War II, when a 19-year-old sued the sect and a member for $1 million, saying she had been sexually attacked at a meeting when she was 11. (She lost.)

Ten years before that, a former imperial German army officer sued Hanish for luring his wife away from him. And about 10 years before that, a judge acquitted Hanish of molesting a 14-year-old girl. Hanish was also accused of “criminal offenses” against other children and of practicing medicine without a license.

The newspapers relished details of men, women and children performing breathing rituals in their skivvies in “morning dew baths” on the lawn. Hanish’s temple was a Greek Revival building that still stands in Arlington Heights.
Blackburn cult

Short of the Manson gang, the Blackburn cult may rank as L.A.’s creepiest.

The Divine Order of the Royal Arms of the Great Eleven, inspired by a passage in the Book of Revelation, invested prophetic power in a mother and daughter who did not scruple to use sex, gullibility and greed.

May Otis Blackburn was a 60-year-old clairvoyant when the archangels Michael and Gabriel appeared to her and her daughter Ruth, the “girl of many loves,” as the press delighted in calling her. The women were divinely ordered to write a book called the “Great Sixth Seal,” supported in this work by Ruth enticing loans from her beaux. More crassly, the archangels promised to give the women the “lost measurements” to finding oil and gold deposits across the world. That was enough for the nephew of a local oil magnate to join the cult and fork over $40,000 in cash and 164 acres in Simi Valley, in exchange for those “lost measurements.”

The mother-daughter team set up their compound there, making pronouncements from a gilded throne and snapping up the paychecks of their acolytes’ work in a tomato-packing plant. Some nights, the two purple-gowned women — why is it always purple with such people? — would summon their followers to a hillside to witness the ritual slaughter of mules, which the women called “the jaws of death.”

A rich couple and their daughter Willa joined the cult. When Willa died from a tooth infection on New Year’s Day 1925, the prophets packed her in a bathtub of ice garnished with salt and spices. Willa was a priestess, they told her parents, and would return to life in 1,260 days.

Her parents buried her metal-lined coffin under the floorboards of their Venice home. Four years passed. Willa was still dead. The oilman’s nephew sued for fraud. Former believers went to court with their own claims. The cops came looking for missing cult members, and in 1930, even though Gabriel assured Blackburn she’d be acquitted, she was convicted of grand theft.

But California’s Supreme Court found that Blackburn was wrongly convicted.

“It is not actionable to the court if the defendant made certain representations as to being divine.”
The Great I AM

The Great I AM began when its founder, Guy Ballard, was hiking on Mt. Shasta and met St. Germain, a fellow in a jeweled robe, an “Ascended Master of the Great White Brotherhood.” He gave Ballard a cup of “pure electronic essence” and carried him airborne to see the treasure cities of the world.

Ballard accumulated more than a million followers who answered his alarming mass mailings about the end of the world and about what comfort could be found in joining I AM and consigning their bank accounts to its leaders’ care. “Love gifts” and the sale of such I AM-branded products as rings, engravings and “New Age cold cream” made millions.

Ballard’s radio broadcasts preached a prosperity credo, and his channeled “thoughts” of St. Germain and Jesus are sold on Amazon to this day. They were also the subject of a copyright lawsuit by the authors of “A Dweller on Two Planets.”

In 1940, a year after Ballard died, his widow and son were tried for mail fraud over their $3-million “take.” The defense proclaimed that the nation’s safety depended on Ballard’s divine power and that before he died, he had invoked an invisible force to sink a flotilla of Japanese submarines no one had ever seen. This jury couldn’t reach a verdict, but a later trial convicted the widow Ballard and her son. The Supreme Court tossed it out. The jury, it ruled, shouldn’t have been allowed to decide whether the defendants actually believed what they were saying.

Justice Robert Jackson, soon to be chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg Nazi war crimes trials, wrote that there is “wide variety in American religious taste. The Ballards are not alone in catering to it with a pretty dubious product … [but] I would dismiss the indictment and have done with this business of judicially examining other people’s faiths.”

The judge in the first trial agreed to wear a light-colored business suit rather than a black robe because the defendants “honestly believe that light and bright colors have a favorable effect on their soul’s welfare … if the situation warranted it, I could function as well in a bathing suit.”

The St. Germain figure also makes an appearance in the credos of Elizabeth Clare Prophet, the “Guru Ma” of the Church Universal and Triumphant movement, which moved from Pasadena to the Santa Monica Mountains and then, in 1981, decamped to Montana.
Thelema

Remember the decorously offended Victorian lady from Pasadena? How she would have recoiled to know that devotees of the faith called Thelema lived after World War II among the grand mansions of Pasadena’s Millionaire’s Row.

Thelema originated with the British occultist, magician and writer Aleister Crowley, who said its precepts were dictated to him by the voice of a being named Alwass. Crowley blended Thelema and an older creed called OTO, Ordo Templi Orientis.

The head of the local branch of Thelema was Jack Parsons, a brilliant rocket scientist whose work was foundational to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and modern rocketry. It was at his place on Millionaire’s Row that members sometimes met and lived.

The late Times reporter Nieson Himmel told me he lived in Parsons’ house for a while, as did an acquaintance, the writer L. Ron Hubbard, who would go on to found the Church of Scientology. Himmel said that Parsons “believed all these weird things, and all this science too. … A couple of times I came downstairs [and saw] people wearing black robes.” He also talked to an old Englishman living in the carriage house, who “gave me all this about the role of evil — he was very happy about it.” It was, as Himmel described it, a kind of fluid, free-love/occult/scientific communal-living setup.

Then, in June 1952, Parsons, a world-acknowledged expert in explosives, was blown to pieces outside the carriage house. He evidently dropped fulminate of mercury that he was loading into his car, and boom.

The theories of what went on in that house, and about Parsons’ end, have engrossed writers and filmmakers for decades. Accident? Suicide? Murder?

Years ago, I interviewed a couple of Pasadena policemen about what they saw. Ernie Hovard got to the scene not long after the explosion. He knew the house, he told me, because his mother had once worked as a maid there.

“I remember thinking [Parsons] was messing around with two chemicals that didn’t blend together and blew his hands off.”

Officer Bob Orman spent three days at the crime scene. He was stunned to see the mansion, with “outlines, silhouettes of big, giant bats painted on the walls in black, with candlestick holders where the tips of the wings would be” and nude photos in the bedrooms of one of the women living there. Orman told me he remembered coming across Parsons’ severed foot. The combat Marine who survived the Inchon landing recognized the shoe as a Marine Corps “boondocker” boot.
Synanon

When CBS News’ equable anchor Walter Cronkite uses the phrase “bizarre cult” and your name in the same sentence, you’ve lost the plot.

Synanon, originally a drug-and-booze rehab program, began in 1958 in a rundown Ocean Park storefront. A recovering boozer named Charles Dederich used his $33-a-week relief check to start a rigorous residential program that pretty soon was getting praise because its confrontational group-therapy technique, called “the Game,” seemed to work.

Dederich taught a Berkeley extension course about it. Synanon went national and soon welcomed people who weren’t addicts.

But then, as the story arc goes, things got dark. Women members were ordered to shave their heads. Married members were told to divorce and find new partners. The way some former insiders described it, Synanon was a kind of Hotel California — you could check out, but you could never leave.

Critics and investigative journalists found themselves harassed and threatened. Synanon began styling itself the Church of Synanon.

And then came the rattlesnake-in-the-mailbox incident.

In 1978, an L.A. attorney who’d bested Synanon in child custody cases was bitten by a large, derattled rattlesnake someone had hidden inside his mailbox. He spent six days in the hospital.

Investigators found tapes of Dederich calling down violence on his foes’ heads: “Our new religious posture is this: Don’t mess with us. You can get killed dead. Physically dead.” If the public hadn’t paid close attention before, it did now.

Eventually, Dederich and two of Synanon’s “imperial marines” pleaded no contest to the attempted killing. Dederich had to forfeit control of Synanon. The Justice Department called out Synanon as a front to enrich its leaders to the tune of millions. The IRS yanked the group’s nonprofit status, and in 1991, burdened by tax debt, Synanon went belly-up. Dederich died six years later.

A gutsy little Marin County weekly paper, the Point Reyes Light, won the Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for its exposés on Synanon.

Yet over nearly 200 years of occasionally unhinged kookiness, we have not fulfilled the hideous terror invoked by Woody Allen’s character in “Annie Hall,” dragged out of New York for a Los Angeles scene and hyperventilating over the city’s “ritual, religious cult murders! There’s wheat-germ killers out here!”



https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-06-14/does-l-a-have-an-addiction-to-cults-and-cultists-sure-seems-like-it

ICSA Annual Conference

Leader of polygamous Jerusalem cult found dead in prison cell

Prisons service to examine death of Daniel Ambash, who was serving 26 years for what has been described as one of the most shocking abuse cases in Israel’s history

The Times of Israel
June 10, 2022

A polygamous cult leader was found dead in his cell at the Ayalon Prison in Ramle on Friday morning, the Israel Prisons Service said.

Paramedics that were rushed to the scene declared Daniel Ambash dead after resuscitation efforts had failed.

The prisons service says Ambash’s family was informed of his death and that the circumstances would be examined.

In 2013, Ambash was sentenced to 26 years in prison on 18 charges ranging from sexual offenses, abuse of minors, incarceration and sadistic violence in what has been described as one of the most shocking abuse cases in the country’s history.

He was slated to be freed in 2037. According to Channel 12 news, the parole board had been due to convene next week to deliberate Ambash’s request for an early release.

A Bratslav ultra-Orthodox Jew, Ambash headed what came to be known as the “Jerusalem cult.” He was married to six wives and had 14 children, who were all kept by Ambash and his assistants in slavery conditions, forcibly confined and routinely punished with rape, electric shocks and beatings.

According to the court ruling, on one occasion, Ambash took one of his wives outside the house, naked, in the middle of the night, and splashed water on her and dragged her by the hair. In another incident, he shoved the head of one of his wives into the toilet and flushed it as she suffocated.

He also raped his daughter on another occasion in front of his whole family, including several children, claiming it was “part of her duty in family life.”

The case was exposed in 2011 after one of Ambash’s wives spoke out about what was happening in the cult.

But most of his wives have never renounced Ambash. They still live together, view themselves as his wives and revere him, claiming the entire case against him was fabricated.

In 2018, four of them demanded that Israel grant them conjugal visits, claiming it was their “basic right” to meet Ambash and have more kids with him.

The request was largely denied, with the prisons service noting that the women are considered victims of an offense by the law and that their request was therefore invalid, according to the Walla news site. Ambash had appealed the decision.

The Israel Prisons Service also charged that Ambash was “taking advantage of his rights as a prisoner and maintaining control of his cult via phone calls.”

In 2019, the four wives officially registered as a political party to run in that year’s September elections, running on a political platform that advocated for individual freedom.

“We believe that if the Torah gives people the ability to choose their own life, the state has no place to intervene and prevent that. And we will fight for that right,” Ayelet Ambash, one of the four wives, said at the time, in an apparent reference to polygamous marriage.

Their party, Kama, which aimed to prevent government intervention in Israelis’ private lives, fell well short of the minimum vote total required to enter the Knesset.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/leader-of-polygamous-jerusalem-cult-found-dead-in-prison-cell/

ICSA Annual Conference - Virtual

ICSA Annual Conference - Virtual
June 24-26, 2022, 11:00 am - 5:00 pm EST

70 Speakers, 60+ Talks/sessions, 5 Workshops, 4 Tracks

Talks are available on the Whova platform for 30-days after the conference - you may also continue to interact with speakers and attendees.

• Registration: $125

• Student Registration:  $50

• Scholarships are available.

Sample of conference sessions:

• Cultic Gaslighting (William Goldberg)

• Coercive Control and Sexual Exploitation (Carrie McManus, Andrea Silverstone, Linda Dubrow-Marshall, Rod Dubrow-Marshall)

• Drugs as a Tool for Coercive Control (Robin Boyle)

• Visioning the Invisible: The Traumatized Bodies of Racialized Cult Members and Survivors (Evvie Ormon)

• What do SGAs Want to Cover in Counseling? (Cyndi Matthews)

• Synergy Between Cults and Terror Groups (Darin Challacombe)

• Cults and Media Stereotypes: Does Media Coverage of Current and Former Cult Members Hinder Victims’ Recovery? (Dhyana Levey)

• Discussion Group for Former Members Who Were Parents in the Cult (Lorna Goldberg, Doni Whitsett)

• Catholic Cults in our Midst? Catholic orders and movements accused of being cult-like (J. Paul Lennon)

• Legal Aspects of Harm and Victimization in Cultic Groups (Linda Demaine)

• The Evolution of Cult Intervention (Patrick Ryan, Joseph Kelly, Doni Whitsett, Rachel Bernstein)

• Award ceremonies

• Conference Information

• Agenda

• Conference Registration

• Scholarships (Joan Capellini Scholarship Fund)

The Follower

When he was 19 Jeff Gross fell under the sway of the charismatic, fifty-one-year-old Mildred Gordon and spent more than half his life in an "intentional community" they built together. It turned out to be much, much more than that.

Esquire
David Gauvey Herbert
June 7, 2022

On the night of May 29, 2006, after seeing the documentary An Inconvenient Truth in Manhattan, Jeff Gross drove home from the Staten Island ferry to Ganas, a communal-living experiment he'd spent decades building.

He climbed the steep steps up to the group's cluster of houses scattered among leafy walkways and squinted his way through uncut shrubs and poor lighting. As Jeff approached his porch, a figure stepped from the shadows and raised a handgun.

"What do you want?" Jeff shouted, and then, "No, no, don't do it!"

Shots pop-pop-popped as the shooter unloaded six rounds into his hip, stomach, arm, and neck. Jeff fell to the ground, blood pumping from his wounds. His assailant stepped over him and fled. A neighbor who heard the shooting knelt beside Jeff and shouted for towels to stanch the bleeding.

Many moments had delivered Jeff to this one. Since 1980, Ganas had been a community that embraced all manner of new-agey life. But his relationship with the group—particularly with its charismatic and often abusive leader, Mildred Gordon—had become unrecognizable since their early days. He'd signed over a small fortune, endured thousands of hours of "feedback" sessions, and entered a four-way marriage. And now he was bleeding out in the back of an ambulance.

How had Jeff gotten into this mess? And why had he stayed?

When we met in November 2021, decades after he hooked up with Mildred, I asked him that very question, only to hear his deeply unsatisfying conclusion. "To me, I know you're writing your story, but I tried to tell you before you ever came out here that, in my opinion, it's just like any situation," he said of his nightmare at Ganas. Families, relationships, jobs, all of them can go bad. "But we're talking about so many people in this situation, it seems even more complex and layered because of our lifestyle."

The lifestyle Jeff and his coresidents lived until he was shot has a lot of names, though he still can't bring himself to use the c-word. 
Jeff is now sixty-seven. It would be easy to look at his life these days—one in which he lives in hiding, afraid for his life, with a five-inch scar up his belly, lingering PTSD that once left him unable to tell waking life from dreams, and an outstanding $1.3 million judgment against his shooter—and think, Well, that's what happens when you belong to one of the longest-running cults in New York City. But the closer I got to Jeff's story, the more I came to 

see that he and other former members were right: This was a more complicated cult story than the ones I thought I knew, and an entirely more unsettling one.

It all started half a century ago, on a hot day when Jeff decided to go to the pool.


At Arizona State in the fall of 1973, everyone seemed to have life figured out except for Jeff Gross. He was nineteen, tall and lanky, with a melon scoop of kinky hair, almost handsome but hopelessly sheltered. It was a party school, and Jeff did not know how to party.

Jeff had grown up in Denver, the likable middle child in a middle-class Jewish home. "Oh, my brother, he was the smart one," he said recently. "I was the one good with people." His parents expected him to get married and take over his dad's auto-parts company. "He may have gotten a message that 'you're going to be part of the family business,' " said David Gross, Jeff's older brother. " 'You're not smart enough to be your own person.' "

But in a small act of rebellion, Jeff set his sights on the deserts of Arizona for college. As a sophomore, he moved into an apartment complex with a pool and a young crowd. His roommate was in school to get a tan, get drunk, and get laid. But Jeff wanted something bigger for his life—not that he could have defined it.

Jeff was a virgin and alone, until one day he decided to go to the pool with the crowd. On the deck, he spotted a tall and lithe brunette. Patty, sixteen, was beautiful, and she'd been shipped out west by her mother and stepfather, who were en route, too, in just a few weeks.

To Jeff's shock, Patty was into him. She soon took his virginity. And the stories she told him! Back in New York, her mother, Mildred Gordon, was a rock star of the so-called human-potential movement—a catchall term for group therapy that ranged from yoga to chanting to hypnosis and silent retreats. Mildred and her husband Ed Smith had run Group Relations Ongoing Workshop, or GROW, out of a brownstone on the Upper West Side.

Jeff didn't know that Mildred was leaving GROW and Manhattan under a cloud—that a year earlier, in 1972, the state attorney general had investigated her and her husband and alleged that they had misrepresented themselves with phony degrees and were running a diploma mill, charging up to $5,000 in fees for certificates not recognized by any state agency.

Soon after she arrived, Mildred invited Jeff over for dinner and guided him in art-therapy sessions. Later, she spotted him flinging a Frisbee and called him a Greek god in her rich Lower East Side accent. "She couldn't believe that we had met," Jeff said. " 'What a miracle,' that was her whole thing."

Meanwhile, Patty moved into Jeff's apartment to get space from Mildred. She was blunt. "Stay away from my mother," she told him one day. But Jeff didn't. "I suddenly had my own personal life expert/mentor/sex counselor to help me," he later wrote in a diary.

After graduation, Jeff followed Mildred to San Francisco. They set up a group apartment on Haight Street, and Jeff escorted her to meet men for sex. She winged for him at bars after Patty dumped him. They began collecting new friends. There was Bruno Krauchthaler, a twenty-year-old Swiss military deserter, handsome and troubled, with a case of agoraphobia and an abusive father. Jorge "George" Caneda was a Spanish dwarf who, as a boy, had perfected the art of playing people off each other in an effort to deflect from his disability. Susan Grossman was a leftist medical student who was still finding herself. (Both George and Susan declined to speak to me.)

Mildred nudged Jeff and Susan together. Mildred and Ed divorced, and she fixated on Bruno, often staying up until 3:00 a.m. talking to him about his life. It was intoxicating, Bruno recalled recently: "I wasn't that interested in my life." It wasn't long before they were in bed together.

Jeff worked on a master's degree in social work, and his eventual thesis—a study of the apartment on Haight Street—imagined a vast network of cooperative businesses using "feedback learning," Mildred's proprietary technique of helping her charges effect personal change through constant appraisal of their actions, motives, and character. It was a tricky practice to define—in Jeff's thesis, he spent eight tortured pages trying to explain the method, finally concluding of the process, "Neither the learner, the teacher, or anyone else at this point in time really understand how it happens."

In 1979, Mildred and the group moved to New York City, to an apartment on East Sixth Street. They traveled in a pack and huddled around Mildred as she dispensed wisdom. They were so broke that the five of them would share an ice cream cone. ("Of course, Mildred got the biggest licks," Jeff said.)

They needed more space to grow and looked across the water to an unlikely refuge: the cop-and-firefighter, ruby-red-Republican stronghold of Staten Island.


The home at 139 Corson Avenue sat atop a concrete retaining wall, where its height provided a sense of safety. In 1980, a crime wave was ravaging New York City, and Tompkinsville, a working-class neighborhood on the North Shore, wasn't exempt. Here, with the city twinkling in the distance, the group began a new life together. Jeff, Bruno, Susan, and George were all in their twenties, drinking and exploring dreamwork, yoga, hypnosis, and sex. Initially, Mildred was just part of the crew, albeit three decades older and eager to play therapist to her young roommates. But within a few years, she moved to establish order.

A clique called the Core Group, for the most committed members, emerged and heightened the financial stakes of the operation: They pooled their savings and income and made spending decisions by consensus. They opened secondhand-furniture-and-clothing businesses to employ the growing flock.



Every morning, Jeff and the other residents, now nearly a dozen strong, met downstairs for breakfast and several hours of feedback learning. "Ultimately, my purpose is to brainwash you," Mildred said to Bruno during a representative taped session. "To change your thinking to my thinking."

In 1982, with Mildred's strong encouragement, Jeff and Susan got married. Jeff's father, elated that his son had married a Jewish doctor, was happy to finance a new home: another house on Corson Avenue for the group for $133,000. As soon as houses nearby went on the market, the group bought those, too, adding ten members with each new home. (Jeff said he would eventually sink more than $400,000 into the group.) The waiting list to join was such that they filled bedrooms as fast as Bruno, in charge of construction, could finish them.

"There was a magical feeling between us," Jeff later wrote in his diary of those boom years. "The weird chemistry of the emerging, forested enclave on a Staten Island hillside with Manhattan off in the distance, and us, a group coming together to construct its own world."


In 1986, Mildred, Bruno, Susan, and Jeff drove Mildred's convertible north to a conference in Ontario for "intentional communities," the term they were using for their cohabitational experiment. There Mildred met Rebekah "Becky" Johnson, twenty-three, awkward and shy, and invited her to join them at Ganas, the name they'd chosen for the group, from the Spanish word for desire. Jeff had a bad feeling immediately—a sense that Becky might not be able to withstand feedback learning. But Mildred insisted.

Ganas's constructed world was growing fast, and members were clear about their reasons for joining: a novel sense of community, personal growth, and lots of sex. Videotape from this era shows Ganasians, young and hopeful, skin packed with collagen, joking with one another at the ferry terminal and talking by candlelight late at night. Ganasians carried around "problem books" in which to record daily events and their reactions to them. The booklets came with a twenty-three-page instruction manual that outlined the baroque codes to be used: de for defensive, cl for clitoris, MSdp for dire predictions of doom, and so on. Bruno sometimes blazed through ten a month. (Impotence and sad appeared regularly in his "emotions" column.)

Mildred coached members on foreplay and taught tricks for maintaining erections. She pushed reluctant members into bed, reasoning that having sex with someone you weren't attracted to could be a learning experience. Bruno alone was consigned to monogamy; Mildred forbade him from sleeping with anyone but her. Intercourse was mostly vanilla. The edgiest practice was just how openly everyone talked about crushes, performance issues, and jealousies at morning planning sessions.

Mildred's theories about sexual freedom could turn dark in practice. She pressured Alfonso, a Spanish graduate student in his early thirties, who asked to be identified only by his first name, into sleeping with new member Becky, whom she viewed as young and inexperienced. He now regrets doing so. "It was very difficult to say no, let's put it that way," Alfonso said recently. "[Mildred] had a lot of control over the whole situation." Soon after, Becky seemed to sour on life at Ganas. The group eventually asked her to leave.

Work wasn't all it was cracked up to be, either. The group dreamed its secondhand stores could be laboratories for cooperative work. But employees were discouraged from talking—except to track customers over an intercom. Neighbors gossiped about the creepy PA system. The stores' primary accomplishment was keeping everyone busy and bone-tired.

And while sex was encouraged, children were out of the question. Susan longed for a baby, but Mildred discouraged her. "Mildred's point was: Our baby is this," Jeff said, referring to Ganas.

But as others' enthusiasm for the circumscribed life on Corson Avenue dimmed, Jeff just wanted more Mildred. He followed her around with a clipboard, taking up a detailed collection of his own shortcomings as she saw them, waiting for a personal breakthrough that always seemed close. He wrote in his problem books and filled his hours with chores Mildred asked of him, including foot massages.

Jeff looked forward to his birthday. Every year, he was given an entire day—sometimes two!—of feedback. The group would gather for brunch, turn on a video camera, and spend hours dissecting what exactly was wrong with him. It was the same year after year: The group found Jeff beyond repair, and then, toward the end of the marathon session, Mildred would suddenly find a glimmer of hope. "It's sort of like a puppy looking forward to the treat," Bruno said of Jeff and his birthdays. "And what he got was the same routine." Every year, Jeff filed away the VHS tape of his grilling as a keepsake.

In 1989, Jorge Calvo, another Spaniard, whom George had recruited, announced he was leaving after nearly a decade at Ganas. "Everybody freaked out," he said recently from his home in Spain. "I was the Antichrist in just one dinner."

Alfonso realized that he, too, was feeling "less and less of a person, less and less capable to think" and wanted out. He moved in with Jorge in Manhattan after taking a measly $25,000 from the Core Group for eight years of work and sweat equity in Ganas. The pair visited museums and went barhopping before returning to Spain for good. "I think I saw more of Manhattan and New York in the last two months," Alfonso said, "than in the rest of the eight years."


In the summer of 1995, dozens of Ganasians sat in the backyard on Corson Avenue, waiting for a wedding to begin. Of the two grooms, Jeff was the more nervous. He sat stiffly in a plastic chair, wearing a too-tight tuxedo, skimming the vows he would say in a few minutes. Mildred had written parts of them, in preparation for Jeff's four-way marriage ceremony to Susan and two other members, another idea of hers.

Jeff was forty years old by then, and his springy hair had receded. His face was becoming drawn. He had no children, no career to speak of. He hadn't even really chosen his partners that day. He no longer had endless years ahead, but at least he had this.

The foursome took turns reading their vows. When it was Jeff's turn, he choked out, in a halting cadence, "Marriage is a sexual contract into the foreseeable future," completely unable to envision his.

Life at Ganas was making Jeff increasingly miserable. He'd once loved feedback sessions, alive with the feeling that all this could turn him into a greater version of himself, but they had somehow done the opposite. Lately, Mildred belittled him, calling Jeff a wannabe alpha male. He wrote to her, complaining that he wasn't making progress. "I don't really know how to reassure you," she replied in a fourteen-page letter. "Anyway maybe you are right, and I am doing damage to you."

There comes a moment in every story like Jeff's when a door appears, one the protagonist could walk through, but his feet don't move. For Jeff, there were two.

The first out came when he began to consider that life in the world he'd left behind decades earlier might have some answers. In the early 1990s, he started a street festival near the ferry terminal, and it was a minor hit. But he could never fully separate the work from Ganas; when a Staten Island business group wanted to honor Jeff for his civic efforts, Mildred suggested he deliver a rambling speech at the luncheon, denouncing capitalism. "Like a fool I went along with it," he said. The Core Group eventually convinced him to quit working on the festival entirely.

The second came in the form of Jeff's brother, David.

The Gross family was determined to hang on to a semblance of a relationship with Jeff. In September 1996, David asked Jeff to take a road trip from Boston to Shreveport, where he was now a molecular-biology professor at Louisiana State. On the drive, David pressed Jeff to at least consider having children. "For hours and hours I would try to convince him that he was missing out on something very important," David told me. (Jeff remembered this differently: He really did want kids, he said, but Mildred's constant harping on his obsession with being an "alpha male" convinced Susan he would be an unfit father.)

But the group had prepped Jeff, advising him to be wary of advice from his overbearing older sibling. It worked. "It was clear he was so brainwashed and mesmerized by Mildred and others who were running the show there," David said. "It was like talking to a brick wall." Other times, when David visited Ganas, members descended on him with their trademark style of interrogation, berating him about bullying Jeff when they were kids.

Life at Ganas got bleaker. Every morning, from a massive easy chair, Mildred increasingly focused on Jeff and Bruno. Jeff mumbled "right" and "okay" as other Ganasians, enjoying their cereal, looked on.

Ganas was attracting more individuals simply looking for free therapy. In 1994, Becky Johnson, the ex-member Jeff had been suspicious about from the start, begged Ganas to allow her to return. Jeff and others objected, but Mildred overruled them. (Becky's tenure didn't last long. City marshals evicted her two years later after she failed to pay rent.) Jeff opposed another applicant, a middle-aged veteran. Mildred overruled him again. The new resident was later found in a Ganas kitchen defecating in a blender.

Mildred forbade Bruno from reading. He once bought an introduction-to-macroeconomics textbook, and Susan screamed at him until he returned it. But for Bruno, it was a turning point. He photocopied books at the library on his lunch break and hid the pages in his toolbox. "One thing education does is it lets you see options, and I didn't see options," he said recently. "I was literally trapped in this view of the world."

By the late 1990s, Bruno wanted to leave Mildred. Their relationship had been on the slide for years. Bruno alleged that Mildred once tried to hit him—and when he dodged her smacks, she wailed that the strain of swinging and missing could very well kill her. At night, he withheld sex until she agreed to watch VHS tapes of their feedback sessions and admit that she was increasingly dominating the group.

Part of what kept him from leaving was money: Ganas had all of his. Bruno was owed hundreds of thousands of dollars, based on the group's own formula, established after the Spaniards' messy exit. He feared that if he left too suddenly, he'd end up with nothing.

"Nobody really changed," Bruno said. "Nothing really happened. It was like a nightmare."


As the new millennium approached, the past came back to haunt Ganas. In 1999, Becky, now twice booted from Ganas, sued the group for $3 million. Her lawsuit called feedback learning an "unrecognized, unorthodox method of behavior modification that employs deceptive, coercive, and dangerous manipulative techniques similar to brainwashing." She alleged that Mildred emotionally abused her and that she'd been raped. (She later dropped the suit.)

Bruno and Mildred separated, and she prohibited anyone at Ganas from sleeping with him until she had a new partner. Within months, she was pressuring Dave Greenson, a young Brown grad with a lush head of hair, with the same guilt trips she'd used on Bruno two decades earlier. "You can't believe how happy I was," said Bruno, who was now free to walk away. "And sad for David."

Around 2001, Dave and Mildred married, despite their forty-six-year age difference, and they decamped to a Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, apartment purchased by the Core Group. Mildred drew a $40,000 salary from Ganas and returned several times a week to run feedback sessions.


Indeed, with Mildred gone, the original members of the Core Group began snapping out of the trance they'd been in and grabbing what they wanted from life. Bruno took a six-figure payout, toured Europe, and moved upstate. Susan traveled to Kazakhstan to adopt a child, years after Mildred had convinced her not to have one. And then there was George. He had always set himself apart from the group, resisting Mildred's pull. He set up a shadow group in another house and quietly tended the books. George borrowed $175,000 from the Core Group to buy a home in Spain; the group also gave a five-figure loan to George's sister for another property purchase.

Even Jeff branched out, launching a new street festival. He thought he might be ready to leave—he was dating a new woman outside Ganas, enjoying his project, and thinking about starting a family. But after thirty years with Mildred, Jeff was bad with money, and even now, as he expanded his horizons, he couldn't see much farther than the ferry terminal.

Then one afternoon in 2004, as Jeff announced a musical act onstage, he heard a voice in the crowd call out, "Hey, Jeff!"

"I thought it was a bag lady," he told me. "Then she took my picture."


Over a quarter century, thousands of people had passed through Ganas as renters, short-term visitors, and dinner guests. In the blur of feedback sessions, hard work, and sleep deprivation, many of those names faded into obscurity. In Jeff's mind, Becky Johnson, the troubled, twice-evicted tenant, was one of those forgotten faces. Until she wasn't.

It started with the photo at the waterfront. Then, on Thanksgiving Day, big blue letters appeared in graffiti on the compound's retaining wall: rapist + pimp = jeff gross.

A few weeks later, Jeff was jogging home from the gym when he realized a car was following him. It crept alongside him for a few blocks, then sped ahead. Out jumped Becky wielding a silver object. Jeff thrust his hands out, thinking it was a knife. It was a camera, which captured a photo of Jeff looking oddly menacing.

Flyers with that photo began appearing in Tompkinsville: "He is a CAREER RAPIST and a PIMP . . . DO YOU WANT THIS CREEP IN YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD?" Becky was soon publishing a website with similar sentiments.

Jeff was confused. Becky had named him in her civil suit five years earlier—she alleged that he stood outside her door while a Bulgarian tenant raped her, allegations Jeff categorically denied. But Mildred and Julie Greve, George's wife, had been the main targets of that legal action.

(Becky did have some legitimate gripes with Mildred, who had promised attention and care and held herself out as a therapist despite not being licensed. Becky later sought evaluations from three separate mental-health providers in the late 1990s. She did not respond to my request for comment.)

Rattled, Jeff obtained a restraining order. But the Core Group seemed unconcerned. He suspected Becky was reading Ganas's online newsletter, a potpourri of birthday announcements, poetry, and light admonishments. ("Are you a net turner-on-er of lights, or a net turner-off-er?") But when he asked them to remove details of his personal schedule, they declined.

Jeff requested a few security measures at Ganas, including better lighting around the homes. In an August 2005 email from Spain, George refused, adding in a postscript that there was a landline phone by his pool, should anyone need to reach him. Some Ganasians tut-tutted, telling Jeff that he was not only overreacting but actually proving the point that Mildred had made about him for a quarter century: He was too concerned about other people's opinions.

The obvious thing to do would be to get the hell out. Today, Jeff says the Core Group's refusal to pay him what he felt he was owed is why he didn't leave. But there was another reason, too. The way Jeff tried to leave was the same way he had stayed, by talking in endless circles, as if he needed their permission. He wanted the group's feedback on his plan, even though feedback was part of what he wanted to escape.

Then came the night he was shot.


In the ambulance on the way to the hospital, as EMTs worked to stop the bleeding, Jeff identified his shooter: Becky. From a bed in the ICU, he laughed at the tabloid headlines—dippy hippie bang bang, screamed the Daily News front page—but his euphoria was short-lived. Police advised him to stay away from Ganas, as Becky was still on the lam. After a three-week hospital stay, he decided to fly home to Denver and the family he'd distanced himself from for decades. He felt ashamed. "My condition confirmed all of my family's fears about what I had been doing," he said.

Jeff moved in with his mother and endured grueling physical-therapy sessions so intense that he once woke up in an emergency room after suffering a bout of transient global amnesia. A high school classmate took him to a range and taught him how to shoot. He bought two handguns.

America's Most Wanted aired multiple episodes about the shooting. Jeff published a letter in the Daily News, imploring Becky to "put an end to this nightmare." He hired a private investigator to help kick-start the NYPD's manhunt for her. That summer, Julie Greve was at home when Becky called, read out a bank account number, and demanded $1 million in cash.

In June 2007, Becky was arrested in Philadelphia after registering a car in her own name. At her apartment, police found an AK-47, one thousand rounds of ammunition, hair dye, eleven license plates, and bullet-riddled human-silhouette shooting targets.

Jeff wanted to hire a lawyer to pressure the district attorney to go to trial rather than cut a plea deal with less potential prison time for Becky. But when he wrote to the Core Group asking for help, they were cool on the idea of spending more money. Mildred herself felt no responsibility: "I guess, if anyone could be to blame, it would be me, both for taking her in, and then for kicking her out," she wrote to Jeff. "But I don't feel guilty. I tried to help her and failed."

Jeff discovered that his name was on a little-used Ganas credit card, and he took a cash advance to hire a lawyer, who lobbied the district attorney. For her part, Becky hired a shrewd local attorney who presented a simple defense: Becky didn't pull the trigger—but if she did, Jeff and his parasitic cult of ex-hippies and sex weirdos deserved it.

Jeff had been letting other people make decisions for him for decades, and to terrible effect. Now, with his physical safety in the hands of a jury, it was fitting that the streak continued. After deliberating for four and a half hours, a Staten Island jury acquitted Becky of all charges.

Jeff limped away from the scene. "I'm stunned," he said to a reporter. "That's about it."

Now that he was functionally kicked out of the Core Group, Jeff decided to start looking out for Jeff. In 2008, he sued for his share of Ganas's assets, and then filed a second suit alleging that they had failed to implement security measures before the shooting. His estranged wife Susan and the rest of the Core Group, his so-called self-selected family for a quarter century, stopped speaking to him.

Jeff also sued Becky in civil court. A lawyer friend warned that he would likely never see a dime, but he pressed on. Compelling Ganas members to be deposed felt like an act of accountability for the whole group. "In my mind it's: You got to face the music," he said recently. Jeff and the group eventually settled for an undisclosed amount. In 2014, a civil jury found Becky responsible for shooting Jeff, as well as defaming and harassing him, and awarded him $1.3 million in damages. (He has received no money to date.)

A year later, in an unrelated case, Missouri police arrested Becky for stalking a former classmate.

[...]

We love cult stories in part because they offer reassurance: Who would be stupid enough to get involved with all that? Not you. In the TV version of Jeff's story, he would leave Ganas to take control of his destiny. Mildred's spell now broken, we would welcome this pitiable creature back into the fold. Peppy music, roll credits.

But Jeff's break wasn't clean. In fact, it was hardly a break at all. Through the lawsuits and recriminations, he never really stopped talking to Mildred. They exchanged letters, and Jeff visited her Brighton Beach apartment for dinner. He wanted the woman who had sent his life careening off course to explain how he could get it back on track. "I still think maybe I was trying to make some sense of things, holding on to the belief still that she . . . would shed some light on things that I was struggling with," he said recently.

Mildred eventually moved back into the Ganas compound, where she slipped into dementia, and died, in January 2015, at the age of ninety-two. Her memorial was at the Bowery Poetry Club; more than two hundred Ganasians and friends from her GROW days showed up to celebrate her life. Jeff desperately wanted to go to the funeral, but he stayed home—Dave, her widower, had cautioned against it, insisting there was too much bad blood. But Bruno did attend. He remembered just one person that day who said anything negative about Mildred: her daughter Patty, who had warned Jeff about her mother all those years ago.

After Mildred's death, Jeff yearned to make sense of his time at Ganas, but Susan, George, and the rest of the Core Group refused to speak to him. Instead, he reached out to former members.

Jeff noticed a pattern. Men whose confidence Mildred picked apart had actually done quite well for themselves outside Ganas's walls. Jorge Calvo has a thriving career in film postproduction and is married with two daughters. Alfonso recently retired as an executive with a Spanish oil company and is also married, with three daughters of his own. Bruno is working on a bachelor's degree and sells his paintings through Saatchi. He's married, too. As a rule, the sooner they left, the better off they ended up.

Other former members are eager to downplay their involvement. Dave Greenson runs an anti-racism consulting firm and declined to speak on the record. George Caneda declined to comment, too. He lives in Spain, where he tweets about cryptocurrency and his skepticism of the efficacy of vaccines and Covid mandates.

Susan Grossman now leads Ganas, and she hosts regular informational sessions for prospective members, holding them via Zoom since the pandemic started. In December 2021, she tersely ejected a reporter from the meeting.

One former member who declined to speak on the record cautioned me: The keyhole through which you view this story wildly affects the telling. Some ex-members had a wonderful time on Corson Avenue. And many of those who fled Ganas have since made new, rich lives. Cults, like society at large, dole out joy and misery in unequal servings, both during the party and afterward.

Which brings us to Jeff. These days, he loves taking his nieces and nephews on hiking trips and deeply regrets not having kids of his own. His bullet--riddled left arm still aches in the cold.

"I would say Mildred is the worst thing that ever happened to Jeff," said Bruno, who is still in touch with him. "He needed a normal life."

Jeff remains baffled by his own life story. He often leans on bromides. He'd forgiven Mildred and Becky, he said, and "now I need to forgive myself." He told me that "cultlike things" had happened to him, a phrase he'd clearly been workshopping in his head to make sense of those years on Corson Avenue. He was trapped in the circular analysis of his condition that he'd been using since the days of Mildred's problem books.

As we got to know each other, he often wanted me to explain what the hell had happened to him. "I don't know, you tell me!" was his refrain.

So I told Jeff what I saw. After all these years, couldn't he see that he might have been taken for a ride? That Mildred wasn't all that wise, that perhaps she was just a washed-up Svengali who found him in the Arizona desert: the first recruit for her second act. But he couldn't condemn her; he even wondered if she was a victim herself.

"There had to be some kind of virus going around that space that infected all of us, including Mildred," Jeff said. "Maybe she was the spreader of it, but she got infected somehow. Right? I don't know." After a relationship with her that spanned more than four decades, "I don't know" was the best he could muster.

When we parted ways on the sidewalk, I turned back just in time to see Jeff disappear into the cold night air. I felt a twinge in my stomach that felt like hunger and then sank into a nervous energy.

At a nearby sports bar, I started typing up my notes. The room hummed with the white noise of commercials and banter that soothes the quiet desperation of men. Floating on the aroma of draft beer was the sour truth: I'd been desperate to convince Jeff that he'd joined a cult, as if naming it would lend respectability to the thwarted lives of men who had not joined one. He had played along and accidentally revealed something far darker: His whole life, he'd been locked in a prison of self-doubt and indecision. Mildred hadn't put him there. She'd merely taken away the keys. What separated Jeff from the man who won't leave a bad marriage or a soul-killing job was the bad luck to have met her. He was still sitting in that cell, waiting to be let out by a warden who was never coming back.

But there was a lockpick. Jeff had tucked it up his sleeve so many years ago he'd forgotten it was there. Deep in his master's thesis, that naive blueprint for the ruinous three decades of his life that would follow, was a quote he'd cited from the essayist Wendell Berry: "We have come, or we are coming fast, to the end of what we were given. The good possibilities that may lie ahead are only those that we will make ourselves, by a wiser and more generous and more exacting use of what we have left."

Jeff Gross could keep processing the past. Or he could stop talking and start searching. The last real choice he made was to go to the pool in 1973. Wherever that nineteen-year-old was, Jeff needed to find him, stare into those pale, virgin eyes, and tell him what to do next.



https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a40105747/the-follower-staten-island-1980s-cult/

At least 50 killed in massacre at Catholic church in southwest Nigeria

Fikayo Owoeye

Reuters

June 6, 2022

LAGOS, June 5 (Reuters) - Gunmen attacked a Catholic church in southwest Nigeria during mass on Sunday, killing at least 50 people including women and children, according to a hospital doctor and media reports.

The gunmen shot at people outside and inside the church building, killing and injuries worshippers, said Funmilayo Ibukun Odunlami, police spokesperson for Ondo state.

She did not say how many people were killed or injured at St Francis Catholic Church in the town of Owo but added police were investigating the cause of the attack.

Ondo state Governor Arakunrin Oluwarotimi Akeredolu, who visited the scene of the attack and injured persons in hospital, described Sunday's incident as "a great massacre" that should not be allowed to happen again.

The identity and motive of the attackers was not immediately clear.

Security men guard Ondo State Governor Rotimi Akeredolu as he visits the victims of a bomb attack at St. Francis Catholic church, in Owo

Relatives of churchgoers who were attacked by gunmen during Sunday's church service gather as health workers attend to victims after the attack at St. Francis Catholic Church

Victims of the bomb attack during a Catholic mass at St. Francis Catholic church receive treatment at St. Louis Catholic Hospital, in Owo

"It is so sad that while the Holy Mass was going on, unknown gunmen attacked St Francis Catholic Church...leaving many feared dead and many others injured and the Church violated," said Catholic Church spokesman in Nigeria, Reverend Augustine Ikwu.

Ikwu said the bishop and priests from the parish had survived the attack unharmed.

A doctor at a hospital in Owo told Reuters that at least 50 bodies had been brought into two hospitals in the town from the attack. The doctor, who declined to be named because he is not authorised to speak to the press, also said there was a need for blood donations to treat the injured.

President Muhammadu Buhari condemned the attack, calling it "heinous", and the Vatican said Pope Francis was praying for the victims who had been "painfully stricken in a moment of celebration".

Nigeria is battling an Islamist insurgency in the northeast and armed gangs who carry out attacks and kidnappings for ransom, mostly in the northwest.

In the southwest, attacks such as this are rare.

https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/gunmen-kill-worshippers-during-church-service-nigeria-media-2022-06-05/

Attorney General Bonta Secures Conviction Against Megachurch Leader Naasón Joaquín García

Calfifornia Department of Justice - Office of the Attorney General

ROB BONTA

Attorney General

Attorney General Bonta Secures Conviction Against Megachurch Leader Naasón Joaquín García

Press Release Attorney General Bonta Secures Conviction Against Megachurch…

Friday, June 3, 2022

Contact: (916) 210-6000, agpressoffice@doj.ca.gov

OAKLAND – California Attorney General Rob Bonta today announced securing a guilty plea and conviction against Naasón Joaquín García, the leader of La Luz del Mundo, for multiple felony counts of sexual assault involving three separate minors. The conviction comes just days ahead of trial, which was set to begin on Monday. Sentencing is currently scheduled for Wednesday, June 8 at 8:30 a.m. 

“Today’s conviction sends a clear message that sexual exploitation is never acceptable in California. We will hold you accountable if you break the law,” said Attorney General Bonta. “As the leader of La Luz del Mundo, Naasón Joaquín García used his power to take advantage of children. He relied on those around him to groom congregants for the purposes of sexual assault. Today’s conviction can never undo the harm, but it will help protect future generations. I am incredibly grateful to our team at the California Department of Justice for their dedication to securing justice and fighting abuse on behalf of the people of California. We will always stand with Californians against injustice.”

Today’s conviction is the result of a multiyear investigation and prosecution led by the California Department of Justice. The investigation, which was launched in 2018, culminated in the arrest of García, Susana Medina Oaxaca, and Alondra Ocampo in 2019 for conduct that occurred over several years in Los Angeles County dating back to at least 2015. García and Oaxaca were arrested at the Los Angeles International Airport upon arrival into the United States and Ocampo was also arrested separately in Los Angeles County. All three individuals are associated with La Luz del Mundo. Over the course of the investigation and prosecution, prosecutors demonstrated that García’s criminal conduct was enabled by the individuals surrounding him and that García used his position of trust and authority as the leader of La Luz del Mundo to sexually abuse children.

As a result of today’s guilty plea, García has been convicted of two counts of forcible oral copulation involving minors and one count of a lewd act upon a child who was 15 years old. Oaxaca also pleaded guilty today in court and was convicted of assault likely to cause great bodily injury. In 2020, Ocampo pleaded guilty to three felony counts of contact with a minor for the purposes of committing a sexual offense and one count of forcible sexual penetration. Ocampo will be sentenced at a later date. García and Ocampo remain in custody. A fourth individual, Azalea Rangel Melendez, currently remains at large. The California Department of Justice’s investigation was supported by several law enforcement agencies, including Homeland Security Investigations, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and the Los Angeles Airport Police. The case was prosecuted by the California Department of Justice’s Special Prosecutions Section with assistance from the Appeals, Writs, and Trials Section.

A copy of the charging document is available here. Garcia pleaded guilty to counts 1, 7, and 9. Ocampo pleaded guilty in 2020 to counts 19, 20, 21, and 33.

https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bonta-secures-conviction-against-megachurch-leader-naas%C3%B3n

Docu-series on Swami Nithyananda, My Daughter Joined a Cult, is now streaming on Discovery+

IndiaToday.in

India Today Web Desk 

Mumbai

June 3, 2022

My Daughter Joined a Cult, a docu-series about self-proclaimed godman, Swami Nithyananda, is available on Discovery+.

Discovery+ announced the premiere of the new original My Daughter Joined a Cult, a docu-series about self-proclaimed godman, Swami Nithyananda. Produced by VICE Studios, the series began streaming on the OTT platform from June 2. Documenting claims made by ex-devotees and much more, Discovery+'s My Daughter Joined a Cult follows the life of the fugitive godman and rape-accused Swami Nithyananda, whilst giving a voice to individuals who were at the epicenter of it all. It is available in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, English, Kannada, and Malayalam.

DOCU-SERIES ON SWAMI NITHYANANDA IS OUT!

The three-episode series captures the exposure of Swami Nithyananda, the self-styled Godman, who allegedly deceived his believers by luring them into joining his ashram and gurukul trust Nithyananda Dhyanapeetam, and then later allegedly abused them.

https://www.indiatoday.in/binge-watch/story/docu-series-on-swami-nithyananda-my-daughter-joined-a-cult-is-now-streaming-on-discovery-1957938-2022-06-03

Father, son previously involved with Langlade Co. church accused of sexually assaulting children

Ben Zitouni

WXPR

June 2, 2022

The Langlade County Sheriff's Office has released updated information on a sexual assault investigation involving a father and son. 

They say Travis and Scott Huse are both facing multiple felony charges. 

Both are former pastors of the United Pentecostal Church. Travis has been charged with 31 felony counts, and Scott charged with 12 felony counts that stem from sexual assault allegations of child-related incidents that happened when they were involved with the Apostolic Worship Center and the former Evergreen Christian Academy in Elton, Wisconsin. 

Both are being held at the Langlade County Jail, Travis has a bond of $1 million. Scott is being held on $250,000 cash bond. 

The sheriff's office says the investigation remains ongoing and active, and investigators continue to look for any information or possible victims who may have had any contact with the men in the past. 

If you have information, you can contact Detective Sergeant Justin Grones at 715-627-6419

https://www.wxpr.org/crime-courts/2022-06-02/father-son-previously-involved-with-langlade-co-church-accused-of-sexually-assaulting-children

La Luz del Mundo church leader pleads guilty to sex abuse charges

LIBOR JANY, MATTHEW ORMSETH, LEILA MILLER

LA Times

June 3, 2022

Just days before his long-awaited trial was set to start, La Luz del Mundo leader Naason Joaquin Garcia pleaded guilty Friday to sexually abusing girls from his congregation, a stunning reversal for a man who followers believe is an “apostle” appointed by God.

Originally facing 36 charges, Garcia at the last minute took a plea deal that called for him to admit to three counts, the state attorney general’s office announced Friday: two counts of forcible oral copulation involving minors and one count of a lewd act upon a child who was 15 years old.

“Today’s conviction sends a clear message that sexual exploitation is never acceptable in California. We will hold you accountable if you break the law,” Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said in a news release issued late Friday afternoon.

Garcia, he said, abused his authority to “take advantage of children,” while relying on his underlings “to groom congregants for the purposes of sexual assault.”

“Today’s conviction can never undo the harm,” Bonta declared, “but it will help protect future generations.”

Garcia, 53, had publicly maintained his innocence for years. His unexpected plea change came during an unannounced hearing Friday, which was only disclosed after the fact in a news release.

Garcia’s lawyers didn’t immediately return requests for comment; a church spokesman had no immediate comment.

Garcia has been in jail for nearly three years awaiting trial, since state prosecutors charged him with abusing girls who belonged to his Mexico-based megachurch. They also alleged the church was involved in a lengthy cover-up of the sexual misconduct.

Despite the vast publicity and lurid charges, Garcia had maintained almost universal support within the church. When he was arrested, many of the faithful flocked to churches in the denomination’s hometown of Guadalajara, but also in Los Angeles and other cities.

They prayed, they talked to journalists, they protested their leader’s innocence. Said parishioner Robert Pelegreen at the time: “When David was going to fight Goliath, it looked like he was going to lose. God has his plan.”

After several delays, Garcia’s trial was supposed to start with jury selection Monday before Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Ronald S. Coen. After Friday’s unexpected plea, he will instead face sentencing Wednesday.

The California attorney general’s office, which is handling the case, also had accused Garcia of coercing underlings to recruit young girls for him to sexually abuse. Three female church members also have been charged with various offenses. One remains on the run, while another has agreed to testify against Garcia, saying she herself was abused.

Church member Alondra Ocampo was expected to testify against him. She has pleaded guilty to four counts as part of a deal in 2020. She will be sentenced at a later date. She was accused of grooming teenage girls for Garcia’s sexual pleasure.

Her attorney previously told The Times that Ocampo herself suffered years of sexual abuse in the church when she was a minor.

Another codefendant, Susana Medina Oaxaca, who was Garcia’s former assistant, pleaded guilty Friday to a charge of assault likely to cause great bodily injury, Bonta’s office said.

Authorities have yet to locate the third woman, Azalea Rangel Melendez.

The alleged crimes committed by Garcia occurred between 2015 and 2019. The case against him came as a result of a tip in 2018 to a U.S. Justice Department website that was created to help people report abuse by clergy.

It is unclear what his guilty admission will mean for the megachurch with international reach, and whether it will force the kind of larger reckoning over abuse and decades-long cover-ups that has swept the Catholic Church.

Many news outlets in Mexico featured Garcia’s guilty plea on their homepages Friday evening, including the online website Animal Politico and newspaper El Universal.

Claudia Eunice Hernandez, a former member of the church who is in her early 30s and lives in Mexico City, said Garcia’s arrest in 2019 led some people to leave the church. She said she expects more will decide to leave because of the guilty plea.

But she also thinks many church members — including her 85-year-old grandmother — will continue to believe in Garcia’s innocence.

“I know how hard it is for them to see Naason like a normal person that also does bad things,” she said. “For them, he’s a saint that does everything well.”

Renee de la Torre is a researcher in Guadalajara for the Center of Research and Graduate Studies in Social Anthropology and has studied La Luz del Mundo. She said she does not think the plea deal will result “in a total crisis for the institution.”

She pointed to how the church has consistently held that Garcia was innocent and has spent the last few years trying to build a positive image of the institution, claiming its membership has stayed strong.

De la Torre said she believes the church will continue to present Garcia as a victim of a conspiracy and that many of its members will keep backing him.

“I wouldn’t doubt that they’ll continue with the same logic, because we’ve already seen it,” she said, pointing to sexual abuse allegations that Garcia’s father and grandfather, both of whom led the church, also faced.

Had it proceeded, the trial might have offered a rare glimpse into the insular world of La Luz del Mundo — Light of the World — which boasts more than 5 million members. It is Mexico’s largest evangelical church and has branches in 50 countries, including churches in East and West Los Angeles.

The church was founded in 1926 by Garcia’s grandfather, who was succeeded by Garcia’s father, Samuel Joaquin Flores. Flores died in 2014 and passed the mantle of apostle on to Garcia.

Both father and son have been accused of using the church’s young members as sexual servants, of leading lavish lifestyles on the backs of their followers and of intimidating church members into silence and submission.

While Flores was never charged with a crime, Garcia’s arrest and the subsequent charges against him made international headlines.

Garcia is said to have coerced girls in his congregation to engage in various sex acts over the years. They allegedly were told that if they went against Garcia’s desires they were going against God.

Held in jail on $90-million bail, Garcia faced charges ranging from human trafficking and rape to forcible oral copulation of a minor and possession of child pornography.

After Garcia’s guilty plea, the church’s normally active Facebook page was dormant.

The news of the impending plea deal garnered a mixed reaction from a Reddit group that has become a refuge for former church members, some of whom have said they were abused.

One commenter speculated about whether the terms of the plea deal might call for Garcia to out other alleged abusers in the church.

Another poster wrote, “In light of this disturbing news, we are calling on ALL the victims who are still out there who have been abused by this sick monster to please come forward.”

“We know there are many, many out there. And NOW is the time to stand up and fight.”

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-06-03/as-sex-abuse-trial-starts-proceedings-could-pull-back-curtain-on-la-luz-del-mundo-church

QAnon Queen of Canada Now Claims to Be Queen of the World

The QAnon "leader", who's been touring Canada relentlessly, is increasingly demanding her followers force her many decrees upon the world.

Mack Lamoureux
VICE
TORONTO, CA
June 2, 2022


A QAnon influencer some people believe to be the true Queen of Canada took a quick break from her monthslong tour of the country to announce her intentions to go global.

“The entire team was privileged to hear Queen Romana speak to the United States Commander and Chief via telephone and hear the intel disclosed. Wait for it…. ” Romana Didulo’s press secretary told followers before taking a dramatic pause.

“Queen Romana is the leader of the world!”

Speaking in a Quebec campground parking lot on May 24, in front of a massive purple Queen Romana decal (which features a sword bifurcating a maple leaf) on Didulo’s new RV, the press secretary said this was a big development for the burgeoning leader, one that would bring them legitimacy, and she urged those who follow Didulo to stand up for their queen.

“Queen Romana has done all of the heavy lifting, and now it is up to ‘we the people’ to stand in our authority and put these decrees into place,” she told her followers. ”The only visible leader on this planet is her royal majesty Queen Romana, period, and that’s a mic drop.”

Didulo grew out of the online QAnon movement—which believes there is a secret war being fought against the elites—and has garnered a not-insignificant following by actually inserting herself in the real world created by this conspiracy. For months now, Didulo and a rotating cast of characters have been crisscrossing the country in a convoy—which they call their “mobile government”—building her community offline by meeting followers at almost every stop they make. They’re on the tail end of their second loop of the second-largest country in the world, as gas prices have reached record highs.

Didulo has issued, as of this week, 79 decrees. For the most part, the decrees have had little real-world impact, such as declaring Victoria, British Columbia (where she resides when not in the RV) the capital of Canada, and raising the age of consent to 24, although some followers bristled at that.

However, some of these decrees take a darker tone, especially concerning since many followers appear to take them quite seriously. One of them involves clearing out all refugees and immigrants at a crossing in Quebec that’s a hot-button issue for the far-right (Didulo just visited the crossing in her RV) or that “publishing slanderous articles concerning Queen Romana Didulo of the Kingdom” will result in an immediate 30-year prison sentence. Didulo has also in the past urged her followers to take violent action against those facilitating vaccines for children. While she has recently softened her tone, Didulo's past rhetoric veered into the realm of violence.

"We're not putting up with this garbage anymore," wrote one excited follower on a Telegram channel devoted to Didulo. "Queen Romana did the heavy lifting and we have to take over and finish this!"

When Didulo speaks, many of her followers listen. One follower was arrested after posting a threat against his daughter's school for giving out vaccines after Didulo said it was time to take action. Experts have told VICE World News a select few of her followers may go to extremes to further their beliefs. Some of her followers appear to be unwell and post frequently about how they believe they are actually in a war with the elites.

Didulo’s followers suffer for their allegiance to their queen. Some stopped paying their utility bills after she announced the bills were unethical and instructed them to pull all utility companies off their online banking payee lists. Those who listened to her now say they’re being hounded by debt collectors, and in some extreme cases, are having their power or water shut off. Some, blaming the capitalist system for their woes, are begging Didulo for help in turning their power back on or making people believe.

“Queen Romana. It is time you show your authority to the MSM NOW," wrote one. "I agree that it is time to enforce your decrees Canada-wide and take out the fake Trudeau from his office. We the people are trying to enforce the decrees with little success.”

Things have gotten to the point in the community where they are circulating a generic letter to send to utility companies to demand they turn their power, water, or internet back on. One woman, who pushes others to follow Didulo’s decrees, posted an image from a bank showing she had racked up $47,000 on a personal credit line and is frustrated they won’t listen to the Didulo videos she sends them. Other followers have posted they’ve suffered in other ways for their devotion to their Queen. One woman, who said she walked away from her partner and comfortable life is about to move into her car, shared an email she was sent from her brother.

“Please think this through. What happens when your back pain becomes unbearable and you have no meds? Promise me you won't turn to street drugs,” it reads. “(Your partner) misses you but felt he needed to break up because you are listening to some phoney cult online."

Are you a follower or a former follower, or do you have a loved one who follows Romana Didulo? We would love to hear your story. You can get in touch with Mack Lamoureux at mack.lamoureux@vice.com.

One thing that Didulo does believe her followers need to pay for, however, is her new RV she has dubbed QR1. The RV reportedly cost $65,000 and Didulo and her entourage are insisting her followers pay it off. So far, Didulo's press secretary said they’ve been able to raise $12,000. As always, some of her followers jumped at the opportunity to help their queen. Followers have posted images of them sending money to the person on Didulo’s “staff” who handles finances .Didulo herself posted a screenshot from one follower who sent her $3,500 US for the RV.

“Accepted... and done,” one follower replied to a call for donations. “I wish I could donate more but have been out of work since Nov. 2021.”



https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7n8aw/queen-of-canada-roman-didulo-qanon-global

Message from ICSA's President - May Letter

Dear ICSA Colleagues and Friends,

Every season brings change, and spring in the Tennessee Valley, surrounded by the Smoky Mountains, is one of my favorite times. The rainbow colors of flowers, greens of trees, and warm, starlit evenings signal new beginnings and always give me a reason to hope. I find myself with a long list of hopeful wishes on this day.  

Our organization has such a diverse group of people with varying perspectives, needs, feelings, expectations, goals, beliefs, and desires. Despite our differences, we share common ground. We recognize that the exploitative manipulation found in cultic groups and relationships is unethical and morally wrong, that those adversely affected by cultic dynamics deserve and need help, that researchers who study the phenomenon must be encouraged and supported, and that society at large must continually be educated about cults and cultic dynamics. 

I hope we all can be safe, healthy, happy, supported, and free to pursue our dreams. As we work together, may we learn from each other and develop stronger bonds of cooperation.

 

ICSA is in what I will call a new “spring.” There has been discussion among our supporters of how we can and need to change to meet today’s and tomorrow’s world.  We have listened.  The Board of Directors recently completed a thorough revision of our Bylaws.  You can see our new Bylaws here.  We are now embarked on making the ensuing organizational changes.  We are updating our policies and procedures to ensure that they are consistent and clear. As we move forward, I will be communicating these changes so that you can gain a clear understanding of how our organization works and how you might want to be involved. 

Change can be bittersweet: The Board of Directors of ICSA has announced the retirement of Executive Director Michael Langone, effective July 31, 2022. Michael was present at the beginning of ICSA, and has led this organization for more than 41 years. His legacy is significant. We will soon post a detailed job description for a new executive director. And with gratitude and sadness, we announce the departure of Ashlen Hilliard, Director of Events. We are thankful for her contributions to ICSA and its mission. We wish her well in her future endeavors.

 

Our online conference on June 24-26, 2022 will feature workshops and presentations on a wide variety of subjects, with speakers of diverse backgrounds from many countries. To view the agenda and register, visit the conference page.

We are planning a variety of webinars for fall/spring 2022-23, about which I will share details later in the summer. 

Finally, ICSA has published a new book, Wounded Faith: Understanding and Healing from Spiritual Abuse, which is available on Amazon in print ($14.99) and Kindle ($9.99) editions. If you have read the book, you might consider writing a brief review on Amazon.

I appreciate your support in every form – as a donor, volunteer, member, or friend. I look forward to more opportunities to engage as we embrace this season of change.

Best,

Debby

*|International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA)|*

PO Box 2265

Bonita Springs, FL 34133   USA

*mail@icsamail.com*

www.icsahome.com

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