Behind the Bastards - Part Two: The 12 Tribes: The Worst Cult You've Never Heard Of

Sept. 7, 2023 - Behind the Bastards

01:20:14

Part Two: The 12 Tribes: The Worst Cult You've Never Heard Of

# religious extremism mary wiseman legal cover ups 12 tribes boj construction llc child abuse commonwealth services llc cult leadership curse of ham david drews eugene spriggs forced labor gene spriggs jeff leonard kimberly peck

Gene Spriggs led the 12 Tribes cult, a racist offshoot of the Jesus Movement that enforced biblical racism, anti-black theology, and extreme control over followers' lives. The group protected adult predators like Jeff Leonard while punishing children for minor infractions, ignoring abuse reports until former member Kimberly Peck exposed Leonard in 2007, leading to his conviction. Despite profitable construction ventures and state interventions in Germany, the cult survived through isolation and wealth until Spriggs' death in 2021, leaving behind a legacy of systemic abuse and dwindling membership. [Automatically generated summary]
[Read More]

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
Trust Your Girlfriends 00:02:00
	This is an iHeart podcast.
	Guaranteed human.
	When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
	I vowed I will be his last target.
	He is not going to get away with this.
	He's going to get what he deserves.
	We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
	Listen to the girlfriends.
	Trust me, babe.
	On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
	Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
	Check out my newest episode with Josh Grobin.
	You related to the Phantom at that point.
	Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
	That's so funny.
	Share each day with me each night, each morning.
	Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
	What's up, everyone?
	I'm Ego Mode.
	My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
	My dad gave me the best advice ever.
	He goes, just give it a shot.
	But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
	If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
	It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
	Yeah, it would not be.
	Right, it wouldn't be that.
	There's a lot of life.
	Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
	Oh, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the only podcast that is still legal under the Joe Biden junta.
	Robert, did you get something that I just texted you?
Writing Against Expectations 00:03:25
	What was what was?
	Is it a screenshot that says Robert Evans podcast host, manager Sophie Lichterman?
	Wow.
	Yeah, but it also says my location is virtual pissed.
	That specific standard time, you hack.
	This is virtual.
	It says I think I have to be.
	No, I think what it's saying, because it's like virtual pissed, comma, or, which probably means I have to be allowed to work virtually or I will get pissed.
	I mean, fair enough.
	I love that you have access to my work email.
	I haven't been able to log into it for months.
	Oh my God.
	Sorry, that was really personally fun for me.
	Hi, Alex.
	Hello.
	I just remembered a time.
	I don't even know if this is worth telling, but I just remembered a time that I was at a cafe in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and I overheard someone talking about listening to and loving Behind the Bastards, but that they weren't quite sure if they could trust the show anymore because of how rich podcasters are.
	There was once, Robert, what was that thing that there was like an article that said how much Robert's net worth was?
	How much was it?
	It was so much money.
	$64 million is what the internet estimated.
	I just was, I was just hoping I would have an opportunity to address that person.
	And this is the perfect time because they may be listening.
	Don't, guys, if you're, if you're worried, don't.
	Cause you'll know the instant I'm a multi-millionaire because you will not hear from me anymore.
	Like, yeah.
	I've never understood guys like Elon Musk.
	Like, you could be, you could be hiding in the mountains, you know, you know, hunting your fellow man for sport.
	Yeah, it just shows how deep like just psychosexual compulsion runs.
	Elon is this wealthy and needs to have all these ploys for attention every day.
	Same with fucking J.K. Rowling.
	Just shut the fuck up.
	Just shut up.
	Shut up, Castle.
	Why are you doing this?
	It just goes to show how deeply broken so many, so many people are.
	And I am also deeply broken, but not that kind of deeply broken.
	Because if we would, you would never hear from us again.
	You'd be like, absolutely not.
	You'd be like, hey, you remember those people?
	And they'd be like, hmm, did I dream that?
	It's like, exactly.
	Yeah, they got rich and they fucked off the way people who aren't out of their minds do.
	Yeah.
	It's like George R.R. Martin.
	What's George R.R. Martin up to?
	He lives in a fucking like lighthouse.
	He bought a lighthouse and now he doesn't go out in public anymore.
	He got so rich, he's like, I'm not going to complete the things that got me rich.
	That's admirable.
	And it is, it is quite a flex.
	Yeah.
	I love that.
	But also, please, could you please finish it, sir, respectfully.
	No, at this point, at this point, I just enjoy the standard he set for all authors.
	Like, once you sell your show to HBO, fuck off.
	Just go.
	Write something, write literally anything other than what people want from you.
	All right.
George R.R. Martin's Lighthouse 00:14:50
	Back to the episode at hand.
	So in part one, we went into significant detail about what Gene Spriggs had to say about child abuse.
	And it was a lot.
	This was not, as I noted, out of step with other Jesus movement churches.
	Where Gene really went off, though, was in the field of biblical racism.
	Now, the religious right always has a solid grounding in being racist as hell.
	The singular cause that it launched, like the religious right in the United States became a political entity as resistance to forced integration, right?
	It was the idea that religious schools would have to let black kids in.
	Like that is where the religious right comes from.
	This is not like debatable.
	Specifically, like, yeah.
	Anyway, the religious right comes after the Jesus movement, right?
	Which feeds into it, but also like chunks of the, again, this is not like a uniform set of beliefs because some of the churches that come out of the Jesus movement are extremely anti-racist, right?
	That is a chunk of like who comes out of this.
	And I should note, that doesn't mean they don't suck because a really good example of an anti-racist church that sucks ass is the Westboro Baptist Church.
	They were as hateful in their heyday, as hateful and abusive a church as has ever existed in this country.
	If you're not aware of them, if you ever saw people holding up those God hates, you know, slur signs outside of like funerals for gay people and stuff, that's the Westboro Baptist Church.
	They are terrible people, but not racist.
	Founder Fred Phelps, in fact, got his start as a civil rights attorney.
	He was like a very active and prominent lawyer fighting for equal civil rights for black people in the United States.
	He was an outrageous bigot and an extreme child abuser.
	It's just proof that you don't have to be racist in those things.
	Like, you know, I'm not saying this to praise the man.
	He was a monster.
	It's just to show you like different people, like the kind of splinters off of the Jesus movement are not uniform in their attitudes here.
	Likewise, Jim Jones's cult, right?
	Which is definitely a part of this conversation.
	Also founded as like a kind of a big part of what drew them together was like resistance to the racism of like American mainstream culture.
	A lot of members of his community were mixed race relationships.
	He really recruited heavily from black people and from like folks who were like ostracized and abused by mainstream American culture.
	That was a big thing of like what brought them together and why they eventually felt the need to go to Guiana.
	So the 12 tribes would seem to have a lot in common with Jones on the surface, but Gene Spriggs is the opposite.
	Like where some of these other sort of cult movements that form out of this Jesus movement are very much reacting to the civil rights era.
	And Gene is more on the side of, you know, what's going to become kind of the mainstream religious right thing where you're very, one way or the other, very kind of like coily being a bigot.
	Gene does not have any, like, he's not cloaking this in anything.
	He's not doing this like, oh, we're against integration because it's, you know, the state taking over from the church and like, what is a religious, you know, educational institution.
	He is just outright hateful of black people, right?
	Like that is the, that is the, the teachings of the 12 tribes.
	And as the tribes begin to spread out, first to Vermont and then to locations in the Carolinas and then overseas to Germany, France, and beyond, Gene begins preaching more vehement strains of hate.
	It starts with his lectures against homosexuality, which by the late 80s had evolved from AIDS as God's punishment to gay people need the death penalty.
	That's the official 12 tribes teaching here.
	He also increasingly clamps down on the freedom of his female followers.
	Women over the years are banned from using birth control and then banned from giving birth without painkillers.
	And his justification is women shouldn't be using painkillers to give birth because they have to atone for Eve's original sin.
	The only way for women to like, you know, make up to God the fact that they ate that apple is to not use medicine when they give birth.
	Wonder what Adam's atonement for original sin is.
	That's a great question.
	Does he get to take men get to take painkillers still?
	That's a great question.
	Well, Adam did, Adam didn't come.
	It's not Adam's fault.
	Like that's, I think that's, I truly, that's the rationale, right?
	Is that like Adam wouldn't have done it if Eve wasn't conniving and listening to the devil?
	So forever, like you can just do what you want.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, that makes sense.
	So the commonality between all of this stuff, all of these different kind of things that are really toxic about the 12 tribes, is Gene's obsession with obedience.
	Gay people, in his eyes, are refusing God's command, and so they have to be destroyed.
	That is the penalty for disobedience.
	Women, obviously, you can't destroy women because you need them to make more cult members, but they still have to pay for the sin of Eve's disobedience, right?
	Like it was such a crime that all women have to atone for it.
	Children who do something as mild as pull away when they're a baby being wiped also have to be beaten because any kind of disobedience to authority is the devil, right?
	This becomes Gene's favorite topic.
	He wrote often about Miriam, Moses' elder sister, and Aaron, Moses' brother, who had opposed Moses when he wanted to take an Ethiopian wife.
	God was livid at their disobedience and cursed Miriam with leprosy.
	And this is like one of Gene's favorite stories because it illustrates how it illustrates in his eyes how like sharp and immediate and violent the punishment for any kind of disobedience has to be.
	And Gene would often use the story of Miriam and Aaron when he would talk about the responsibility children have to obey without thought or question.
	Quote, this is him talking about Miriam and Aaron.
	They did not know her authority.
	They knew about it, but didn't know it.
	Since the knowledge of authority seals mouths and settles matters and many problems, doesn't it, children and youth?
	Though Miriam spoke against Moses, her words were restrained.
	Therefore, she could finally, after being lepros and sent outside the camp, find repentance and be restored.
	When Miriam turned white with leprosy, she was ostracized and took it as discipline.
	But some rebellious people were not restored to fellowship because they did not or could not repent.
	Now, the people he's talking about there, the rebellious folks who were not restored to fellowship because they refused to repent, are black people, particularly black people who refuse to submit to white masters.
	Now, like many racist denominations of Christianity, the scriptural justification for Gene's bigotry is a biblical character named Ham or Cham.
	Both names are correct, apparently.
	I'm not a Bible guy, but you can call it either way.
	So, the short version of the story is that Ham's son Canaan gets cursed by Noah, and people who suck have long interpreted this curse as the darkening of Canaan's skin.
	So they're like, this is how black people were created, right?
	This guy does a bad thing.
	He gets cursed by Noah, and that's where black folks come from.
	The curse of Ham is a frequent justification for the enslavement of black Africans.
	Probably the best known modern example of this is the LDS church, the Mormon Church, which since the time of Brigham Young has taught that black people were under the curse of Ham as well as the curse of Cain, which justified slavery and also meant they could not be members of the priesthood.
	The Mormon church banned black people from being members of the priesthood until 1978.
	So we are, we are not talking about like ancient history here.
	Yeah, it's like the other day.
	Yeah.
	Now, for reasons I don't, like, that's how old Ron DeSantis is.
	That's how long that the Mormons have been letting black people.
	That's when Superman 1 with Christopher Reeves came out in the theater.
	That's right.
	That's right.
	Maybe that's what made them do it.
	So for reasons I don't fully grasp, and again, are not important, Gene always uses the name Cham for Ham, which seems to be valid.
	Although in more recent articles, when members of the 12 tribes are interviewed about this, they always use the name Ham.
	I couldn't tell you why.
	The actual story as to why Noah cursed Ham's sons is incredibly funny, though.
	Like it leads to a lot of racism or it justifies a lot of racism, but it's very funny because the story is that Noah, if you remember your Bible, like when we like depict Noah in popular culture, he's always this like austere bearded wise man.
	He's a total fuck up in the Bible.
	Like that's kind of Noah's thing is he's fucking up all the time, you know?
	And so basically, as the story goes, he gets housed one night, just absolute blackout drunk, and he wakes up bareass naked.
	And like Cham walks in and like sees his dad with his fucking dick out.
	And the first thing that occurs to Cham because he's disobedient is like he runs to his brothers and he's like, guys, guys, you got to see this.
	Dad's like fucking hanging grain right now.
	So he tries to pull them in.
	And they're like, no, you know, it's not.
	You're not supposed to see your dad naked.
	That's disobedience.
	Gene writes about this moment, quote, Cham was insubordinate of heart, always expecting authority to fall.
	So he got his chance to show what was in him.
	He revealed his father's fault, and this proved that he was not at all in subjection to his father's authority.
	His subjection to his father was merely eye service or lip service.
	His submission was only half-hearted.
	So when the opportunity presented itself, he seized it to expose his father.
	There was a satanic principle working in him.
	So in Chan's in Cham's son, his offering was cursed to bond slavery and indentured servitude for this entire age, from the flood to the end of the age.
	Cham's descendants' only hope of recovery was through submitting to their masters from the heart, not just giving eye or lip service, but wholeheartedly serving.
	After the flood, our father gave hope to mankind to be obedient to the addition to the second covenant, that there would be no half-hearted submission to anyone in authority in the world.
	But Cham retained his sin of having a problem with authority, submitting outwardly, but still retaining his hidden rebellion.
	So afterward, Cham's descendants would be under the rod, and those who received it learned submission to authority and loved their masters and were prepared for the eternal age where many of them will be kings among the nations.
	So what he's saying here is that because of this sin of Cham, all of his descendants, black people, need to be slaves, right?
	Like it is their moral duty to be slaves and love it, right?
	That's what his argument is.
	That's what he believes.
	And that if they're good slaves, if they're totally obedient, then they'll get to be kings, you know, when Jesus comes back, right?
	Like that's the, that's the argument.
	Pretty shitty, pretty bad guy, right?
	Like that's, that's fucked up stuff.
	We don't really need to like belabor the point.
	Not ideal.
	Yeah.
	I didn't, I didn't know.
	I, I, I, I don't know any of that background that this is how folks have reverse engineered rationale for slavery being fine.
	Yeah, one of the ways.
	Yeah.
	That's why I'm yeah.
	So in Gene's theology, one of the things he writes is that slave masters are actually the most burdened because of the curse of ham, because it's, they have so much more response.
	All the slave has to do is be obedient and happy, right?
	The slave master has so much to keep caught like to deal with, you know, you got all these slaves to take care of, right?
	That's, that's the real difficult job, right?
	It's more cultivating, you're cultivating as they're saying as important obedience, which is the most important, the most godly thing to do.
	Yeah.
	And it's interesting because he talks about like the responsibility that a slave master has, but it's a responsibility to God.
	He has no responsibility to the human beings that he holds in bondage.
	Lincoln, Gene taught, was an evil emperor, damned by God for his refusal to accept the holy order of slavery.
	Again, cruel and incompetent Confederate slave masters had no responsibility for like the fact that they destroyed themselves.
	It's all Lincoln's fault because he's usurping this like rightful order of the world.
	Likewise, the apartheid government of South Africa bore no responsibility for its brutality and corruption.
	Instead, the black Africans who fought for civil rights have damned all black people to endless generations of suffering by removing apartheid.
	This is why they moved to Vermont.
	Like, I mean, Vermont New England's a white-ass place.
	I think that's part of why they pick it, but they move all over the place, right?
	Like they have, they're going to be in college, eventually like 20-something states.
	Right.
	Wow.
	So, yeah.
	I found a fascinating article published by the Cult News Network in 2021, the year Gene died, that gives us an idea of how his teachings continue to be carried on in the modern day.
	The author sat in on a worship session, which included a lecture on sham slash ham from a church teacher named Meveser.
	Quote, the 12 tribes teacher also explained that all of the slaves before the Civil War were happy and carefree and grateful to be under the tutelage of the white man.
	Meveser taught that even if a slave was being whipped by his or her master on some plantation, all of the other slaves were happy that this errant slave received discipline and grateful that their master had provided it.
	Meveser said once that the evil Lincoln set the slaves free.
	Poor Ham did not know what to do since he was no longer under the loving hand of Japheth.
	And so society in the United States turned into a total mess according to the 12 tribes because it deviated from this divine doctrine.
	So that's pretty cool.
	Nice, nice folks.
	Now, the study group here included one black woman, the only African-American member of that particular 12 tribes community.
	Bummer.
	I was like just thinking about her birthday in this situation.
	Oh boy.
	Well, so I know who this person is because of other articles I've read, but I do want to read this quote about her from this article because I find it like both very unsettling and sad and kind of worth discussing.
	Meveser then called the only female African-American member of the community our Mammy and praised her for being a humble Mammy servant.
	He stated his conviction that the only way in the world that Shem, Ham, and Japheth could truly live together in peace and harmony is in the body of the Messiah, aka the 12 tribes, not mixed up together in the satanic world where godly boundaries have been erased, where the races will only fight amongst themselves.
	Ultimately, according to this 12 tribes doctrine, Ham, left on his own, will only self-destruct unless he has Japheth to guide and protect him.
	That's white people.
	At the meeting, one African-American disciple in the room, 30 or 40 people were there, stood up and confessed hesitantly that he was feeling offended in his flesh.
	He said, we're always talking about welcoming Ham into the body of the Messiah, but most folks who are aware of the nation of Ham would be very offended by this teaching, he continued.
	Black folks were not happy about their situation, and they certainly did not enjoy being slaves.
The Ham Curse Explained 00:08:32
	And I don't want to leave this room with people thinking that it's true.
	So it's not like, especially now, and again, this is 2021, which I think may factor in why there was some resistance to this, but that's, that's the, they're still teaching the same things that Spriggs was writing, you know, in the early 80s about this stuff.
	It's, it's pretty fucked up.
	I have a hard time wrapping my head around like being like, everything else in this is cool, but their ideas of race aren't great.
	Like, I, and, and then to speak, and then to get up and speak about that seems like it would take like a particular kind of bravery.
	It's, it's strange, right?
	It is like, it is, I think about it a little bit like how you've got these guys, you know, every now and then you'll get a Republican who's, who's into all of the other shitty stuff that the right does, but like John McCain, they don't like torture, right?
	Because like they have, that is a personal thing they have experience with.
	So he's not going to be like, yeah, people, people are amazing.
	Our capacity for compartmentalization is utterly unmatched.
	I've gotten this far with a very well-honed ability to compartmentalize.
	Yeah.
	Truly remarkable.
	As the 12 tribes continued to buy property and create new communes around the United States and the world, child abuse continued to be a regular fact of life.
	In June of 1987, Patricia Jones, David Jones' wife, had her fifth child, a daughter named Shoah.
	Shua?
	Shua, I'm going to guess.
	She recalls this as being a particularly good time for the most part.
	You know, the cult was not yet as extreme as it would become.
	They were able to go like camping on the weekends.
	You know, their families would do swimming trips to the lake.
	You know, the discipline was severe, but you also still had something of a life.
	This gets clamped down on as the years grow on and Gene Spriggs gets older.
	He starts to restrict his followers from more and more pleasures.
	First, he bans holiday celebrations, then he bans birthdays.
	After several followers who had owned substantial property and loaned it to the church left, taking their property with them, he forbade members from owning any money or private property.
	From now on, as soon as you join, you are expected to sign over your house, your car, your basic appliances, you know, stuff like your refrigerators and stuff to the 12 tribes.
	The former member who wrote that article in the Chattanoogan, who I cited last episode, recalled how this process worked even for people who had very little to sign over.
	All I had was an old bashed up car and $70.
	I had no problem giving them my car, but I did not disclose the money I had because it was all that I had, which, you know, she does eventually get out.
	So that's this person does eventually get out.
	So that's good for them.
	But like, yeah, they'll take your like beat to shit old car.
	If you've got a house, they'll take that.
	If you've got a business, they'll certainly take that.
	Right.
	And it seems like a very, it's like very popular cult behavior to liquidate assets and then put it into your real estate portfolio.
	Yes.
	Because you said, what, they had $36 million in property?
	Yes, they've done quite well for themselves.
	Spriggs commanded ever more frequent punishments for his members.
	Shua recalls being spanked for pretending a rolled-up towel was a doll because this was this is both she had violated their prescriptions against private property because now she has a doll, but also you're not allowed to imagine things like it's a sin to imagine.
	So she gets beaten for pretending that a towel is a doll.
	She's also hit when she doesn't eat enough.
	She's hit when she's taking caught taking food from the refrigerator.
	She's hit from her parents and from other adults when she's not respectful enough at communal dinners.
	And this is the kind of thing where this Spriggs encourages parents to abuse their own and other people's children.
	And he also, every time there's a gathering, he will pressure the adults to hit their kids more.
	He'll tell them, quote, you should be proud of these wounds that your children bear.
	If you love your children, you will not be spared, be swayed by their screams, which is, I don't know, you could kind of sum up America that way, right?
	Like if you love your children, you will not be swayed by their screams.
	Very, very appropriate line for this country.
	But not all parents go along with the escalating violence.
	Mary Wiseman, wife of the second in command of the cult, grew increasingly unhappy after Spriggs paddled her six-year-old daughter.
	She threatened to take her kids and leave.
	Ultimately, she decides not to go.
	I think it's just because doing that would mean getting cut off financially and losing all of her family members, right?
	The whole everything she knows at this point.
	She's lived here so long, like you have to give up all of your connections if you leave, right?
	And so she doesn't take her kids away.
	Ultimately, Wiseman is going to die very young at age 39 of cervical cancer.
	She dies in part because Spriggs will not let her receive modern medical care.
	When she dies, he then tells his followers that her unconfessed sin of bucking authority was what had killed her.
	Quote, guilt and unconfessed sin is how you get sick.
	This is why people die young.
	Pretty, I have such a like my feelings towards people who are in a cult for a long time are complicated.
	Yeah.
	Because like largely because you're like, there is, there seems to be a point of no return for being able to get out in a real way.
	And then you have kids and you pass it on to them in one way or another.
	And you're just like, oh, like it's.
	Well, it's also why if you talk to, and it, the whole field of like cult deprogramming is complex and to a degree, pretty fucked up.
	But like one of the things that is really durably true, and really maybe the only good advice I would give someone who is like, I have a family member in a cult, is past a certain point, don't argue with them.
	Don't fight about it.
	Just tell them, hey, you know, if anytime you want to talk about anything, like I'm here, make sure they know they have a door open.
	Like, because you can't, you can't fight it out of them, right?
	That's great insights for almost everything.
	Yeah, that's great.
	It's just like, just be there.
	Yeah.
	Functionally, if you're able to be.
	Yeah.
	Don't fight them, you know, because again, past a certain point, I'm not saying like, if they're early in, don't try to warn someone.
	Don't try to be like, hey, I found this fucked up info.
	But like, if they are straight up in the cult, the most important thing is that they know they can talk to you.
	Right.
	Because then maybe they'll be able to get out.
	The stories, when you read about stories, people who escape from the 12 tribes, it's generally like they'll wind up at some family member's house who they, you know, hadn't talked to in years, but knew that they could, you know, count on.
	Yeah.
	And yeah, the people who never get out are generally the people who don't have that, right?
	Right.
	Because like you, if you leave, you know, I just can't imagine, in a lot of ways, a less forgiving society to be dumped off into.
	It's like you leave the cult, you have nothing, and now you're just in America with nothing.
	Yeah, exactly.
	It's a desperate situation.
	Yeah.
	So to be entirely, so Gene, you know, Wiseman becomes kind of this nexus of revenge against him, but luckily for Gene, she gets cancer.
	He stops her from getting medical care.
	And this is, I think there's a degree to which this was tactical for him.
	Like if she dies, he loses a problem.
	But he is going to quickly extend this rule across the entire flock, right?
	It is, it is pretty, from a pretty early stage, like you are not allowed to go to the doctor if you're in this organization, especially children.
	Part because he doesn't want children to go to doctors because doctors will report child abuse, right?
	The blue marks.
	Yeah.
	And the way he just, he's like, well, look, you don't need to go to the doctor if you're following God in your heart too.
	You can't just, it's not just enough to do the right things.
	You have to, if there's rebellion in your heart, then that's why you get sick.
	So if someone gets sick, you can just say they must have rebelled in their heart, right?
	They must not have.
	Yeah.
	Now, if you're wondering, did this policy cause any kids to die?
	Yes.
	It sure did.
	And I'm going to quote from Pacific Standard magazine here.
	Sorry, Sophie.
	We made it a long stretch without a bunch of dead kids.
	Last episode when you started mentioning certain things, I was like, okay.
	Yeah, said kids have died.
	Okay.
	But here, here it is.
	Yeah.
	No, Sophie, this is going to be a high body count episode here.
	Medium body count also.
	Take an ad break to prepare.
	Yeah.
	You know who won't force children to avoid life-saving medical care?
	God, I hope not.
Kids Died From Policy 00:02:50
	The sponsors of the, unless it's the Reagan coins people.
	There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
	Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
	You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
	And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
	We always say, trust your girlfriends.
	I'm Anna Sinfield.
	And in this new season of The Girlfriends.
	Oh my God, this is the same man.
	A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
	I felt like I got hit by a truck.
	I thought, how could this happen to me?
	The cops didn't seem to care.
	So they take matters into their own hands.
	They said, oh, hell no.
	I vowed I will be his last target.
	He's going to get what he deserves.
	Listen to the girlfriends.
	Trust me, babe.
	On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
	What's up, everyone?
	I'm Ago Modern.
	My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
	My dad gave me the best advice ever.
	I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
	I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
	I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place to come look for up and coming talent.
	He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
	Yeah.
	He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
	And he's like, just give it a shot.
	He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
	If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
	It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
	Yeah, it would not be.
	Right, it wouldn't be that.
	There's a lot of luck.
	Yeah.
	Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
	In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
	The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
	This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
	You doctored this particular test twice, Ms. Owens, correct?
	I doctored the test once.
	It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
	I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
	Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
	They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
	Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
	Greg Owespi and Michael Marancini.
Bestiality Outbreak Revealed 00:16:09
	My mind was blown.
	I'm Stephanie Young.
	This is Love Trap.
	Laura, Scottsdale Police.
	As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
	Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Amaricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
	This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
	Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
	We're back and we're talking about our four Reagan coins.
	Oh, sorry.
	Before we get into the brutality of this next phase, genuinely professionally curious, how do you two take care of your mental health and dealing with what you deal with every day?
	Like, I feel like you talk, you're really talking about some stuff.
	Like, do you, do you go on long walks or do you have a therapist on Retainer?
	I mean, I've been playing the Baldur's Gate, the new Baldur's Gate game recently.
	That's been great.
	We have animals and stuff.
	That helps.
	Animals.
	I work.
	Yeah, it's fine.
	That's all very good.
	I just want to make sure.
	I just want to make sure you have an outlet.
	I produced the opposite of the show, which was cool people who did cool stuff.
	Oh, that's a cool thing.
	That's like a claims.
	And I'm just fundamentally broken.
	Yeah, we're both fundamentally unwell all the time.
	Yeah.
	For people who can't see, Robert's just been lifting weights this entire time.
	So I think that that's probably how he gets through it.
	It's nice.
	Yeah.
	Like, you're not wrong.
	So, okay.
	Here we're back and we're going to talk about all these dead kids.
	Here's Pacific Standard magazine.
	During a whooping cough epidemic that swept the community in the late 1980s, Bruce Wittenberg grew alarmed when his 15-month-old became sick.
	He and more than a half dozen former and current members say he consulted the elders who told him, if God wants her to live, he'll save her.
	She died a few hours later.
	It was the worst thing that happened to us, said Wittenberg, who left the tribes in 2001.
	During her second pregnancy, another former member, Ruth Williams, developed placenta previa, a dangerous condition in which the placenta blocks the birth canal.
	She was told that if she prayed hard enough, God would move the placenta out of the way.
	Despite beseeching God on her hands and knees, Williams started hemorrhaging when she went into labor and lost consciousness, at which point she was driven to a hospital, she says, and dumped on the sidewalk outside the emergency room.
	She woke to the news that her son had been stillborn.
	Another woman who labored for days was only brought to a hospital after her first child died inside her.
	So pretty bad.
	Did the person who do we know if the person who was dumped on the sidewalk left in the cult or did she have to walk back?
	Did she have to go back to the cult?
	Yeah, I think this is how she left, right?
	Yeah.
	So Wiseman's brief spring of resistance had horrified Spriggs, right?
	So he clamps down, like she is generally seen as the dividing line between a lot of the more like abusive and restrictive things that he puts in for his cult.
	Like basically before Wiseman, you're kind of able to have some sort of a life, even though there's these very harsh rules about child abuse.
	And after Wiseman, he doesn't want people doing anything that can give them even a second of happiness because that's the root of disobedience, right?
	If you have anything in your life at all besides his teachings, you know, that's not going to work for him.
	I'm surprised in a way it ended up making it as long as it did because usually you have Something like something to like have people be able to have an outlet that goes against all of your other authoritarian tendencies.
	But this person just seems like top to bottom, the worst authoritarian.
	I think there are, for one thing, it's different communities are a little different.
	So they're not all as strict as they're supposed to be on paper.
	A lot of it is that the people who join, like I read one account of a dude who's like the father of a kid who gets pulled into the cult.
	And he's like, it's a cult.
	I know that they've done bad things.
	My kid is bipolar and troubled and was living on the streets before he found these people.
	So like, I'm not sure it was, I think, net, it's been a positive for him because now he has like a place in the structure.
	Like, I, again, I'm not like commenting on that.
	That's just what this guy said.
	And I do suspect, I think, based on interviews I've read, there are a number of people who are like, yeah, there's things that are bad or fucked up or like, you know, that you have to skirt around, but like, it is a community.
	We have a life, you know, you're not exposed to the vicissitudes of existing under capitalism as much.
	You get to kind of hide from the hard parts of life.
	Totally, like, this is the out, this is like one of the outcomes of having next to zero social safety net.
	Exactly.
	People step in.
	People step in and then it becomes an alternative.
	There's a lot that's bad about this, but what am I going to do?
	Like, find out how to make like rent and stuff on my own?
	I've been in this culture.
	I don't have like marketable skills.
	I don't feel a lot of people.
	You, I think that is kind of where this goes for them.
	So by the early 1990s, law enforcement in several states had tried and generally failed to investigate and act on allegations of abuse in the cult.
	The only realistic threat to Gene's control of these kids came from disaffected parents who had custody of their children.
	In the years that followed Mary's death, tribal elders started telling parents that they were not fit to raise their own kids.
	Children were sent away to other communes to be raised, and married couples were forced to split up.
	One example of this particular horror comes from a family at a 12 tribes community in 1992.
	Noah, Yoshi, and Ezra were three brothers, aged seven to 12.
	One day they were all playing in a tree when an elder's wife told them they had to stop.
	They made the mistake of telling her that their dad had given them permission.
	And according to Spriggs, this was an act of satanic rebellion.
	So the elder married to that woman came by and he grabbed them.
	He locked Noah in the furnace room of a house and told him to write down a comprehensive list of all of his sins.
	This took a full week.
	Since Noah was nine, he didn't have that many sins, right?
	So he's going to keep locked in there until the list is long enough.
	So he has to start making up sins, right?
	So he's like writing about stealing pennies and shit just to like fill paper while he's alone.
	And being, he's being like starved here, right?
	He's in a furnace room.
	He's shitting in a bucket.
	He's getting one meal a day while he like continues to expand this list of sins until it's long enough for the elder.
	But the elder is not willing to accept like this because this is like a little nine-year-old church kid's idea of sins and they're just not bad enough for this guy.
	So this guy's like, no, I know what you must have done.
	You must be having gay sex.
	And Noah, being a nine-year-old who has been homeschooled, is like, I don't know what that is.
	And so this elder then sits down and explains in like very pornographic detail.
	You get the feeling this is like a kink for this guy, right?
	Like, you get stories like this in these cults.
	We will be talking about more of them.
	So after this whole experience ends, all three boys are taken from their parents and sent to different homes.
	Noah goes on, like he's put in another commune in another state, and he's like paired up with other boys his age who are called his brothers.
	And their main job is to beat the shit out of him all the time because he's a corrupter, right?
	Because he's gay now, according to this one of the elders in the church.
	He's not allowed to rejoin his parents for more than a year.
	Spriggs was nearly as concerned with the possibility of sexual contact between heterosexual kids as he was with, you know, the other kind.
	Eventually, he forbade all physical contact between non-married and non-related males and females.
	If children were caught in the act of making any other kind of physical contact with other kids of the opposite sex, they would be beaten.
	If young adults or adults treated as such had any kind of sexual contact, which in the 12 tribes included holding hands and kissing, the punishment was marriage.
	Like, if you catch like a boy and a girl holding hands, they have to get married now, right?
	Do you know, do we know like what their org chart looks like?
	Like who is enforcing this stuff?
	Is there like a, is there like a mayor of the tribe or what is the each each commune has a group of elders who seems like make decisions in common.
	And then Spriggs is obviously Spriggs and his wife are the big overall leaders.
	Now, there is a degree to which the org chart is a little bit of a mystery still.
	I think in coming years, as more and more people leave and we get more detail, we might, we'll probably know more.
	That's what I can tell from the I know you said young young adults, but what's the, what, what, what is it, what is that considered here?
	Oh, great.
	I mean, it seems like 13 to 15 year olds are not uncommonly getting married off.
	So I would say when they say young adults, some of them are adults and some of them are what we would call children, right?
	Yeah, yeah.
	Now, sometimes they are being married to other kids their age, but like this is a, you know, it's not uncommon for the other kids.
	Hold hands.
	Yeah, exactly.
	I must be, I must, I, I also, I'm sorry if I'm getting ahead of us here, but are, are these kids working?
	Like, are they, yeah, yeah.
	As soon as like you, they'd only do a few years of school.
	You kick them out of that.
	Like, you don't even really need them to read for every job.
	Punish kids with marriage aren't also doing child labor, Alex.
	Yeah, no, yeah.
	I was, I was curious if this, if this had to do with adding to their real estate portfolio, as if these kids, these kids must be working for free, probably in a lot of situations.
	Absolutely.
	So in the early days, boys and girls could at least socialize to some extent during the homeschool educations that they received, but this also made Spriggs uncomfortable.
	And so he bans co-ed education, which coupled with the absolute lack of any sex ed for children, led to some peculiar behavior from the young men of the community.
	To be specific, they started fucking the farm animals.
	This is a problem in Germany, in the United States, in multiple different state communes.
	This is like, there's like this outbreak of bestiality.
	Now, Pacific Standard Mag just say that like, yeah, these kids start experimenting with bestiality.
	It is unclear to me if they actually did.
	For one thing, this cult defines two kids holding hands as sexual contact.
	Sure.
	Right.
	Or kissing or whatever.
	That's not sex, we can all say, right?
	Reasonable people could say, no, it's not sexual contact, like kiss another kid or whatever, or hold their hand.
	So I don't know if actually there's a lot of bestiality going on.
	I do want to know.
	I do want to know.
	This just came up the other day.
	I reread The Last Picture Show, which I hadn't read since high school by Larry McMurtry about kids in Texas.
	I was not prepared how much this like classic American novel had cow fucking in it.
	Like it was like pages, pages dedicated to fucking cows.
	And look, that's accurate.
	I come from Texas.
	I grew up on a cow farm.
	You know, that's just what people know.
	But we don't know if there's anything.
	I mean, maybe it is what they do, right?
	A group hysteria in which cows were.
	Yeah.
	I don't, yeah.
	And that's the thing.
	I don't know if there's actually a lot of kids having sex with animals or if this is like a moral panic because maybe they're like forcing kids to come up with new sins that they've done, right?
	Sure.
	And so some kid like, maybe that's how it starts.
	I don't know.
	It's not certainly not impossible.
	Like there are like that a bunch of confused kids would experiment with animals too.
	Like it could happen.
	Right.
	The main evidence that supports the idea that some abuse of animals took place is, although honestly, when kids are this abused, I don't know that I describe what they're doing to the animals as abuse.
	Like you've so fundamentally damaged these children.
	I wouldn't like want to morally condemn them from for the sheer confusion that must be growing up in this circumstance.
	But in 2006, Spriggs ordered the young men accused of bestiality to execute all of the animals they had allegedly molested.
	This includes 30 sheep, multiple cows, goats, and chicken.
	So, you know, if it was something that was made up, they went quite far in suppressing it.
	Now, it's valuable to contrast the severity with which Spriggs treated these allegations of bestiality to how he and his cult leaders handled allegations that adult members had molested children, right?
	Because a lot less seriously, as it actually turns out.
	Because, you know, fundamentally, it's not necessarily a sin in the same way in their eyes.
	Right.
	Is it only a sin just because it's sex and it's like extra maritime, not extramarital?
	Like, I'm sure it seems like having sex with children against them.
	Yeah, that's not sex.
	Like raping children is probably like only bad because of the carnal nature because kids don't seem like they're even humans in their eyes.
	Yeah, I don't.
	I think it also might be more that like there's this, the idea that a kid would be able to turn down or stop an adult from molesting them is kind of impossible within this belief system because children are, it cannot, cannot disobey an adult.
	So I think that, I think that there is this like weird, this situation created for Spriggs where there's a way in which they cannot take this as seriously, right?
	Because of this, this, this theology he's built of abuse.
	So one spring morning in 2002, cult member Kimberly Peck noticed her husband, Jeff Leonard, who she had recently married, heading into her daughter's tent early in the morning.
	Now, Peck had joined the 12 tribes as a single mother, right?
	She'd been married to Jeff after, like, he'd basically been picked for her, right?
	And they lived in, she had, she had a Kwonset-style hut with Jeff, and then her kids lived in another hut.
	And this is on a central Florida compound owned by the cult.
	After several mornings of watching Jeff leave early to fetch their daughters for the day, she decided to follow them.
	She got suspicious.
	And I'm going to quote now from an article in the Broward Palm Beach New Times.
	As Peck watched in fear, 45-year-old Leonard began caressing one of the girls, kissing his stepdaughter intimately and rubbing his hands over places he shouldn't, she told authorities later.
	When he was finished, he moved her over to her younger sister, Peck claims.
	Peck says that she would have tried to stop it if she weren't so alone in the woods.
	Soon, Peck would learn how alone she was.
	Peck spoke to her children, and all three of them, two daughters and a son, said that they had been molested by their stepfather.
	Peck went to the elders in 12 tribes.
	She wanted justice.
	Instead, the tribe elders, who claimed to be so strict about carnal relations that couples found holding hands are forced to marry, covered up the abuse and protected Leonard from the criminal charges.
	They hid him at another of the cult's properties in Georgia, Peck says, with the concurrence of prosecutors and police.
	So, you know, not an unexpected story entirely, very Catholic church vibes.
	In a lot of ways, like moving them to another parish, effectively, you know?
	Yeah, well, I feel like it's it seems like a logical outcome of treating children like they're inhuman and like they're only there to to serve you and to serve God.
	Ultimately, like you can't take it seriously because if you take it seriously, it reveals that it was inevitable due to like the structure of your organization anyway.
	So you ultimately have to hide it.
	Like that's why this keeps happening.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Um now it is like uh obviously it's hard to think of an environment more suited to predatory pedophilia than the one that Spriggs has created here, right?
	Pedophiles thrive in environments in which children are isolated from mainstream society so that there are not adults who might notice and report their behavior.
	They also thrive in cultures where children are punished for disrespect because then they're less likely to try and fight back.
	So that, you know, again, by the everything that Spriggs has done here has created like an ideal place for predators to thrive.
	Right.
Power Structures Silence Victims 00:03:28
	Well, and in this case where there is a concerned mother where that mother has like no power or recourse either.
	Oh, yeah.
	Like that's like the this whole other thing is that it's like you can do it.
	And if you get noticed, even if you get noticed, those people don't have recourse.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Absolutely.
	So Peck eventually left the cult because this was the only way she could press charges against Leonard.
	He was finally arrested and charged and convicted in 2007, but he was far from the only culprit of child abuse with it, of like child sexual abuse within the cult.
	Around the same time as all this was happening, another cult member, David Drews, was charged with fondling a girl at the Colt's West Palm Beach compound.
	Police and prosecutors in DeSoto County claim that cult leadership ignored reports against both men and took steps to impede their investigations.
	And there are numerous stories from similar behavior within cult communes around the country.
	The Denver Post reported on this case of abuse from 2011.
	Sometimes a man accused of sexual abuse will be kicked out of the cult, ex-members said, but sometimes he will be forgiven and allowed to stay.
	How a case is handled often depends on how much status the abuser has within the cult.
	Frequently, children who report sexual abuse are not believed.
	Some are punished and told the abuse was their fault.
	Anderson said that as a small girl, that she as a small girl told a woman she trusted about being sexually abused.
	That woman brought it to other adults, and Anderson was questioned by a male elder.
	She kept silent.
	Another elder's wife then took her aside and questioned her.
	She said, how do you have intercourse?
	And that's what threw me off.
	I said, what is intercourse?
	And why would I have it?
	And then she said, is it anal or vaginal?
	Anderson didn't know what those words meant.
	And the elder's wife concluded that she was lying about being abused in an attempt to get attention, Anderson said.
	It's like, make up your mind.
	Like, is this sinful to teach people?
	And thus they shouldn't be expected to answer questions about it?
	Or are they lying if they don't know what sex is?
	Like, what is it's, I don't know.
	I guess you don't have to be consistent if you're a fucking cult member, whatever.
	Yeah, well, I mean, I think that that's kind of like one of just, it's one of the ways that the power structure works is like not giving you the tools that you need in order to report and then using the fact that you don't have the tools against you.
	Yeah, this is like a big thing with a lot of like Republican governance too, right?
	Taking away people's tools to have any kind of resistance to a lot of these power structures.
	It is interesting to me that when they have been forced to comment on these cases, representatives of the 12 tribes tend to emphasize the importance of forgiveness in their faith, a kind of mercy.
	They rarely seem to extend to small children.
	Quote, the judge agreed to set a $250,000 bail for Leonard.
	Tribe Elder Nelson says members haven't decided whether to post the bail, since they would likely have to put up some of the tribe's property as collateral.
	As Nelson spoke, several members worked in the blazing afternoon sun building what looked like a drainage ditch to the goat pin, and a woman in an Amish-style dress brought them water in a bucket.
	Nelson said the tribe will help members like Leonard face their sin.
	He had come to the place where he had surrendered himself to God, Yeshua, and so we will always help him, Nelson said.
	It seemed that he, Leonard, was being very upfront and honest about his situation.
	So that's Nelson's this cult, the elder, and he's like, look, no, we'll support him through all of his legal trials because he feels bad for repeatedly molesting children, you know?
	Oh my God.
	That's all that matters.
	He's given himself up.
	Because again, it's not disobedient for an adult to molest a child because children have to be obedient to adults.
	And it's not as long as his disobedience was to God.
Building Ditches in Sunlight 00:02:40
	And as long as he's truly sorry about that, has repented to God, then yeah, then he's still one of us, right?
	You know who's still one of us?
	Podcasters, not child molesting cults.
	Here's ads.
	Wow.
	That was really bad.
	One of my better pivots, I feel.
	Thank you, Sophie.
	Here's ads.
	Yeah.
	There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
	Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
	If you play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
	And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
	We always say, trust your girlfriends.
	I'm Anna Sinfield.
	And in this new season of The Girlfriends...
	Oh my God, this is the same man.
	A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
	I felt like I got hit by a truck.
	I thought, how could this happen to me?
	The cops didn't seem to care.
	So they take matters into their own hands.
	I said, oh, hell no.
	I vowed I will be his last target.
	He's going to get what he deserves.
	Listen to the girlfriends.
	Trust me, babe.
	On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
	What's up, everyone?
	I'm Ago Modern.
	My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
	It's Will Farrell.
	My dad gave me the best advice ever.
	I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
	I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
	I'm working my way up through it.
	I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
	He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
	Yeah.
	He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
	And he's like, just give it a shot.
	He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
	If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
	It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
	Yeah, it would not be.
	Right, it wouldn't be that.
	There's a lot of luck.
	Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
	In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
Restaurants Fund Recruits 00:04:24
	The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
	This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
	You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
	I doctored the test once.
	It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
	I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
	Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
	They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
	Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
	Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
	My mind was blown.
	I'm Stephanie Young.
	This is Love Trap.
	Laura, Scottsdale Police.
	As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
	Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
	This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
	Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
	Oh, we're back.
	So by the early 2000s, the 12 tribes had at least 3,000 members, probably closer to 4,000.
	They operated communes in 22 states and several other countries, including England, Spain, Australia, and Germany.
	The latter state, Germany, is where they faced one of their most serious acts of state.
	I don't know, I wrote repression here, but like, I don't call it, it's not really like, it's one of the only times that a state actually acted against them, right?
	In a, in an effective way.
	Corporal punishment is illegal in Germany, right?
	So all of their teachings about hitting the shit out of kids, you, you actually can't teach that, right?
	Like you are breaking the law, not just by doing it, by but by like spreading this material.
	And so in 2013, a reporter for RTL TV infiltrates one of the 12 tribes communes in Germany.
	Now, getting into these communities is not hard.
	The cult recruits by inviting people in, right?
	A lot of journalists have gone to other meetings of theirs, right?
	You can come in, you can stay for a worship session.
	This journalist pretended that they were like interested in joining, right?
	That basically they were one of these disaffected people who's maybe looking for a cult.
	And this journalist stays in there for two days.
	And in that brief, like, and she's filming undercover, right?
	In two days, captures on video 50 individual incidents of child abuse.
	Holy shit.
	That's how frequent this case.
	Like two days.
	That's not a lot of time.
	It's hard to find 50 examples of anything in two days filming.
	Like, that's wild.
	Yeah.
	It's, it's quite, quite an intense number.
	In one case, a little girl is beaten for saying, I'm tired, because that's disobedient, right?
	So kudos, don't say this often on this show.
	Kudos to Germany here.
	They seize all 40 children and put them in foster care, right?
	They get those kids the fuck away from their parents.
	This sparks a police raid on another tribe's commune in France, where four children are taken after evidence of abuse is uncovered.
	These rare prosecutions and raids, while, you know, kudos to everyone involved in that in France and Germany, do not seriously harm the overall structure of the cult.
	The 12 tribes were supported primarily by the businesses they started in every new state and town where they bought property.
	The yellow deli was the model and restaurants were always a profitable endeavor.
	Well, were always a profitable endeavor in that they bring in people, right?
	Another yellow deli is started in Boulder, where it gets a reputation for serving really good food and continuing to draw in troubled, hungry youngsters.
	There's a lot of rail travel through Boulder, a lot of like train hopping kids and stuff in that town.
	Like it's a good place to recruit in this way.
	Yeah, for sure.
	You can get some, you can get some crust punks in your exactly on your scene.
	Yeah.
	They also ran a cafe called Matte Factor, Matt Factor, M-A-T-E Factor in Manitou Springs.
	And these are, again, the profit from these businesses is that they bring in recruits.
	Well, and that you can, and that your dishwashers and waiters, et cetera, are probably working for free.
	Yeah.
	Although, you know, even if you want to know how hard it is to run a restaurant, even when you have pure slave labor doing all of the work, their restaurants like don't really run a profit usually.
	Like it's a consistent loss leader for them, right?
	You have to subsidize the restaurant because it's just, it is fucking hard to make money with a restaurant.
Free Labor Runs Cults 00:15:00
	Like even if you're this cult, right?
	So these yellow delis are basically their loss leaders, right?
	While they make their real money, millions of it, through an industry that does not exactly fit with the crunchy Jesus-free kippie vibes that they put on in public.
	I'm going to quote from Pacific Standard magazine again here.
	Most of the Colorado community's money comes from construction companies, the ex-member said.
	One business, Commonwealth Services LLC, was formed in 2016 and registered to member Matthew Morgan at the group's Boulder County compound on Eldosorado Springs Drive.
	According to records from the Colorado Secretary of State's office, the business uses the trade name CWS Excavating.
	Its website says it's a family-owned and operated septic installation company.
	It's one of a number of construction companies the 12 Tribes has operated during the last five decades.
	A Massachusetts-based company, BOJ Construction LLC, pulled in several million dollars a year at its height in the early 2000s and drove the group's funding, ex-members said.
	Young men in the cult would travel the country for jobs, rent a little house for everybody, and work nearly around the clock without pay until the job was done.
	So that's how it's construction, right?
	They're like the fucking mob, right?
	They've got the gold standard of the cult job is the Heaven's Gate mid-90s web developer.
	Oh, absolutely.
	Push.
	Groundbreaking web design.
	Got to hand it to Heaven's Gate.
	They knew what they were doing.
	They had the best.
	It's hearing this that it's like, it's like uncompensated construction.
	Oh, it's terrible.
	Yeah, that's fucking nightmare.
	Yeah.
	Now, if you'll remember, these folks have a little bit of Judaism mixed in with their fundamentalist Christianity, right?
	So they're not supposed to work.
	But they're probably still anti-Semitic, right?
	Like, I haven't actually run into that allegation.
	I don't know.
	Like, I guess you're not.
	I imagine they're kind of like Christian Zionists who are like, we'll use the pieces that are important outwardly.
	Yeah.
	Like behind closed doors, we're still.
	You know, I will say one of the things that's interesting to me about them, because I've read, they have a website that I've been reading, and they do make a big point of being like, we're actually not one of those cults who believes everyone who's not a Christian goes to hell.
	They believe that there are the thing that they specify is there are righteous people who are obedient to their conscience, even if they're not Christians.
	And those people get to go to one of the heaven levels.
	They do kind of this Catholic thing where I think there's like a purgatory.
	I'm not an expert on their escort on their own, yeah, but like, yeah, I did.
	That is a little bit of a difference from some of the other things I found.
	Anyway, because there's this, you know, little sprig of Judaism mixed into everything, they're not supposed to work on the Sabbath, right?
	You know, that's right.
	So that and the fact that Spriggs, it's also mandatory to attend two prayer meetings every single day, that gets in the way of sweet lady capitalism, right?
	Like you're losing a lot of work time if you're doing two prayers a day and you're not working one day of the week.
	That's just unacceptable if you're running a business in Spriggs' eyes, right?
	So they have to find some way.
	How do you justify making people work on the Sabbath when like God was pretty clear?
	You know, if you're, if you're a Bible guy, this is not, there's not really like a lot of fucking around room here, you know?
	There's like 10 to 12 rules.
	Yeah, yeah, there's not a lot of them.
	Yeah.
	This is a big one, but it's rules.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	So Spriggs and other cult leadership were known to declare pushes.
	And a push is like an exemption, a temporary exemption for their working members from attending worship sessions or from taking off the Sabbath.
	One former leader told an interviewer, Gene would say, if it's for a good cause, God will forgive us for working all the time.
	What basically happened was everything became a push, right?
	They're just doing this all the time now because it's the money's so good, right?
	You increase your profits by so much.
	Businesses were held by the church or church elders via a dizzying series of interlocking LLCs, which ensured that no members actually owned property or the means to make a living for themselves.
	This means that there are a lot of cases of like former cult members who will like build a business that makes millions of dollars for the cult and then they'll leave because it's abusive and they've got nothing, right?
	Like absolutely nothing, you know?
	Wild.
	Yeah.
	And again, I should note here, it is illegal to have people work for free.
	It is illegal to even be like, oh, well, they're donating their time, right?
	This is like, like, you cannot do that.
	It is against the now people don't get punished for it, right?
	Because this is the kind of crime that rich people commit, right?
	And these are rich people now.
	Spriggs is wealthy.
	This is a multi-million dollar cult.
	So it never becomes a problem.
	And they also, there's also some exemptions of like, if you're a business owner, you can have your kids work to some extent.
	And like, there are like, but like, you can't make people work for free, which is what the cult does.
	They have been in violation of the law to a massive extent the whole time they've existed.
	This is like, I mean, you, you had said it in reference to the construction thing that it's like the mob, but like the other place where it feels like the mob is like, they had to have a lawyer help them set up those LLCs.
	For sure.
	Like, absolutely.
	They had to have a lawyer be like, here's how you keep your money safe within a network of LLCs.
	Cause you don't, one, a layman does not know that.
	No.
	So they had, they had like outside help in order to set up this structure to work in this way, which is wild.
	Bonkers.
	So yeah, this is very much illegal.
	Again, but it's also the kind of crime the government has very little interest in prosecuting because it's, it would be easy.
	I think part of why nothing happens is that it would be pretty easy for a Christian-themed cult like the 12 Tribes to cry religious persecution and pull in support from the mainstream evangelical right.
	That hasn't really happened, but I think it's because the government never prosecuted them for this kind of shit.
	You know, Pacific Standard magazine talked to one man who used his considerable skills to create a multi-million dollar construction business for the cult and ran it for years for a massive profit of the church.
	Quote, he ran a construction company that made three or four million in revenue annually, he said, which paid for about $10,000 in monthly expenses for the community he lived in at the time.
	He'd send whatever was left to Hiddenite, which is the cult headquarters.
	I started that business and ran it all, but I was having a hard time buying socks for my daughter.
	That's what I mean about not paying labor.
	You're eating millet for breakfast and you can't buy clothes for your kids.
	And one of the black box things about this cult that like, I just don't have a satisfying answer for you is like, are they fucking living it up?
	Is there like some leadership, right, in a separate location and they're like living the high life?
	There are rumors that Spriggs spent a significant portion of the aughts living in luxury in the Mediterranean.
	I have not seen hard evidence of this, though.
	He dies on in a, like on a cult compound, right?
	Or he's like brought to the hospital from a cult compound or something like that.
	So he's in the States near the end of his life.
	I don't know, like, is he, does this all turn into a financial con?
	Is this all about the money?
	A little bit unclear to me, but the money's going somewhere, right?
	Like a lot of money is being made.
	And that somewhere is the headquarters of the cult, right?
	They are getting everything.
	So well, in some cases, the money is just the power that allows you to do the thing that you get off on.
	And that's what, I mean, that's, I don't know, because I only have what you've told me to this point, but like that to me is what it sounds like.
	Like this guy sounds like a true believer who also is probably like really getting off on the power pieces that he's able to, he's able to facilitate by way of being in this position.
	And he's able to maintain that position to your point.
	Like if you have that much, if you have that much money in ultimately in real estate, no one can really touch you unless you're, unless you're robbing other people with money.
	Like that's when the government intervenes.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
	After Waco, the government doesn't really intervene in this sort of thing.
	No, I mean, I got that is one of the tough things when it's like, what do you do about this?
	Because obviously it's not okay to just let it happen, but also the government has a terrible track record of handling cults.
	I'm not sure that it's better for everyone, right?
	Especially talking about these kids.
	Are you saying sending the FBI in to rescue these kids is better?
	Well, that hasn't always worked in the past.
	Sometimes they all burn to death in a basement.
	So I don't know.
	I don't know how we fix this with the long arm of the law.
	Right.
	And honestly, the thing that is ultimately fixing it in the long run, like by some accounts, basically all of the children raised in this cult over the last 20 years have left.
	Like the vast, vast majority, like it is dying out, according to numerous reports, just as a result of how harsh it is.
	Like ultimately, the thing that always ends this kind of shit is not the cops.
	It's not the feds.
	It's former members and their support networks and family helping each other get out and move on.
	Like that's just how it is.
	Which is, which is absolutely the truth.
	And I agree.
	I mean, it's like the government doesn't have a great track record of intervening in these things.
	No, I know, know that well, but it's so disheartening because really the truth is, if you want to start an abusive cult and gain a lot of power and be sort of horrendously abusive to all of the people around you, you can do and get away with that for like a generation in this country.
	Yeah.
	There's no recourse.
	There's no way around it outside of just like it'll burn out eventually.
	And it's tough.
	Like, obviously, I think there's a lot that could and should be done in RE stuff.
	Like, I think it would be, there's a lot to do about like how what, like, there's probably presumably probably ways to like mandate more.
	I don't know.
	Yeah.
	Like, honestly, legally, I don't know how you fix this.
	Somebody else will have to solve that for me.
	Or if there is like realistically, can you have a society that has religious freedom in the way that we do and doesn't offer people a way to basically drop out of society with their kids?
	Right.
	Like, how do you?
	Well, because we simultaneously need a society that you do, there isn't such a strong and realistic urge to want to drop out of as well.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	And yeah, I, anyway.
	Life.
	So as kind of you get these stories about the later years, you start to hear some more mixed things about Gene, including the fact that like maybe he had stepped away from direct control and was just kind of living out his days.
	These are kind of mixed.
	Some former members will be like, no, he was like holding on right up until the end.
	I don't know who's right.
	A lot of the confusion comes from the fact that in 2008, Marcia Spriggs, Gene's wife, is caught having cheating on him like a bunch.
	Like she is, she is getting around that cult, which I got to say, trailblazer for women, right?
	Absolutely.
	The wife of the cult leader cheating on him a bunch.
	Right now, that's groundbreaking, you know?
	I love, I love that.
	We, we stand a feminist icon.
	Marcia sprays.
	How are you getting away?
	I mean, I understand she was caught, but like, I feel like some time would be hard to get away with.
	Some people will say she was running things.
	Right.
	That she was really the power, especially maybe Gene's getting kind of like sick and old.
	Yeah.
	I was waiting for you to be like, yeah, but like, she's the, she's, she's the real, she's the real villain.
	I mean, she may be.
	There's debate about this, like, different, like, and honestly, all of the formers, they're not, they don't tend to be of like high leadership.
	So I think it's, you know, you have a different perspective.
	If she wasn't the one calling the shots, how the fuck is she going to get away with it?
	Right.
	Absolutely.
	No, no, I agree.
	She's definitely powerful.
	There's no debate about that.
	It's a question of like, was she basically doing running it for Gene for a while?
	Aggressively horny.
	Yeah, apparently so.
	But a trailblazer nonetheless.
	So she gets caught.
	And this is earth shaking inside the cult.
	One former member later explained, it wasn't that she was human and had fallen into sin.
	It was that she had personally been involved in sending away a lot of other families for much less serious infractions.
	So people are pissed.
	And Jean, this might be some evidence that like she's the power behind the throne.
	Jean makes a big public statement about how she's been forgiven for her sins.
	And a lot of folks are unable to accept this.
	And so whole families.
	Who forgave her for her sins?
	He did.
	And thus did God.
	Oh, okay.
	I was like, how is this math mathing?
	Yeah.
	So this is the straw that breaks the camel's back for a lot of people.
	Whole families start to leave.
	And it becomes quickly clear that the tribe is in the process of losing.
	The tribes are losing most of the people who had been born and raised there.
	Gene responds by launching a raft of even more restrictive rules.
	He bans his followers from eating chocolate, from hiking, from going to the beach with their families, and from the only music they'd been allowed was traditional Irish music.
	Oh, man.
	But he bans them from this too.
	So you don't get any more fucking fucking fields of Atherny or whatever.
	I don't know how traditional they're getting.
	Yeah.
	Is the rule that they're only allowed to walk at a certain pace and definitely Noah Hill?
	Only allowed to like work and worship.
	That's it.
	Oh my God.
	I can't just impulse is so bad where it's like, we're losing everybody.
	Cut chocolate.
	We've got to be real pieces of music out.
	Yeah.
	Oh, God.
	I mean, again, the larger dynamics that play in our culture as the right loses power is like we have to make more and more restrictive laws.
	Depend on it.
	Yeah.
	So there's controversy between a number of formers as to how many of these new rules are Gene's will and how much of this is Marsha and maybe a council of other elites who are ruling in his stead.
	The next decade and change have been described as a total lockdown by one member.
	And the Denver Post reports that some followers claim Gene himself started to express soft frustration with the changes.
	Quote, in 2012, a year before Wiseman left the cult, he confessed to Spriggs, who used the name Yonek, that he drank beer with his wife against the cult's rules.
	He said, just don't talk about it, Wiseman said.
	The ex-member who left in his 30s said he met one-on-one with Eugene Spriggs as a teenager in the mid-90s and told the man about horrific childhood abuse he'd endured in the 12 tribes.
	He said the founder wept silently as he shared details of the abuse.
	But after just five minutes, Marsha Spriggs burst into the room and sent the member out.
	She spoke to her husband briefly, then cornered the member in the hallway.
	She comes out and says, if you ever tell Yonek anything like that again, I'll send you away that day.
	Like, make you leave the cult.
	So years later, that member sneaked out of a 12 tribes commune in the middle of the night with a duffel bag of his clothes.
	He waited in the bushes for a ride from a man who'd left the cult years before.
	And that night, he slept on his friend's floor and started his new life outside of the cult.
Escaping the Commune 00:06:50
	And that's what I mean when I talk about what is the solution to this.
	Well, the most durable one is formers help other people get out, right?
	That's what happens in this case.
	He makes contact with somebody who's already made it out.
	That guy takes him to let him crash in a friend's place.
	Like, these are the support networks that dismantle these cults.
	You know, it's maybe not as satisfying as imagining the feds rushing in and freeing everybody, but like that doesn't happen.
	It just doesn't realistically happen.
	You know, this is what actually happens.
	Eugene Spriggs dies on January 11th, or January 11th, 2021.
	He was 83 years old, according to a death certificate issued by the state of.
	He lived way too long.
	Based on his...
	Yeah, there's a lot.
	He's like, it's respiratory arrests that gets him based on like the exact list of contributing causes to his death.
	Yeah, they think it's probably COVID.
	He probably gets COVID.
	Oh.
	Oh, my God.
	I remember there was like there was like a race car driver from the town I grew up in who was like real against all of it, you know, who was like real against lockdowns and stuff.
	And he got that like convenient pneumonia in the middle of 2000.
	It's like a lot of people just got sneaky pneumonia.
	That made a lot of sense.
	That's what it sounds like here.
	Yep.
	Yep.
	I think that is the case.
	So there you go.
	At present, the 12 tribes continue to hold tens of millions of dollars in real estate and operate multiple businesses.
	It is unclear how many members remain, although the Denver Post suggests most of the youth have already left.
	More of the quotes that claim Gene is something other than a total dictatorial cult leader have come more recently, and part of me suspects they may be encouraged by some extent by the remaining leadership, who seem to want people to feel as if Gene himself is not the center of things.
	The truth of this will become clearer in time, especially as more scrutiny is dedicated to the group.
	For now, I want to end by finishing that story from the ex-member the Denver Post interviewed, who left in his 30s after enduring terrible childhood abuse within the cult.
	After spending the first free night of his life on his friend's floor, quote, in the morning he woke up, he drank a cup of coffee forbidden in the cult and realized he was, for the first time in his life, completely in charge of his own choices.
	I felt like I could float away, he said.
	That feeling, it's impossible to describe, that feeling of freedom.
	And honestly, I feel that on some level every day.
	Man, coffee must taste so good.
	Oh my God.
	Can you imagine that first cup of coffee out of the cult?
	That's a banger right there.
	Holding a hand, eating a piece of chocolate, drinking some coffee.
	Yeah, listening to all the Irish music you want.
	You could take this pipe and shove it up your ass.
	Yeah.
	I've got an Irish Rovers record on repeat.
	Just listening to the fucking unicorn song for days.
	Oh my God.
	Oh man.
	That's wild.
	That is, that was a journey.
	Yeah.
	Anyway, good cult.
	Pretty good cult.
	I gotta say.
	Yeah.
	I'm powerful.
	I haven't heard, and I've heard not one thing, even though they started, they did start the fire.
	They did start this fire.
	Yeah.
	I think there's still a degree to which that may still be being investigated, but at present, the state's like, we're not pursuing charges because like authorities signed off on the burn.
	Anyway, whatever.
	I do feel like they hit a lot of the like the pillars of being like, oh, that, no, that's a motherfucking cult.
	You're like, oh, yeah.
	Oh, yeah.
	Blames Jesus.
	Child abuse.
	Fire.
	Yeah.
	It's there.
	Just, yeah.
	Terrible.
	Yeah.
	A lot of money tied up in investments.
	Yeah.
	Sketchy businesses.
	Yeah.
	I don't know.
	Terrible.
	Yeah.
	But what's not as terrible as you, Alex?
	Do you have anything you'd like to plug here?
	I would love for people to listen to You Are Good a Feelings podcast about movies, where we talk about feelings and therapy-related stuff by talking about movies.
	Hell yeah.
	Hell yeah.
	Absolutely.
	Anyway, I have a novel.
	It's called After the Revolution.
	Buy it wherever books are sold or read it for free at ATRbook.com.
	It's all free.
	You don't have to buy it, but you can.
	You can also go to hell.
	I love you.
	We also have a series I'd like to plug that is out now.
	Depending on when this drops, it could be recently out or a couple weeks out, like Garrison Davis did on it.
	Could happen here, following up on the stopped cop city movement in Atlanta.
	Check that out.
	Excellent.
	Yeah.
	And again, go to hell.
	Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
	For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
	When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
	I vowed I will be his last target.
	He is not going to get away with this.
	He's going to get what he deserves.
	We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
	Listen to the girlfriends.
	Trust me, babe.
	On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
	Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
	Check out my newest episode with Josh Groban.
	You related to the Phantom at that point.
	Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
	That's so funny.
	Shall we stay with me each night, each morning?
	Listen to Nora Jones's Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
	What's up, everyone?
	I'm Ego Moda.
	My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
	Woo, woo, woo, woo.
	My dad gave me the best advice ever.
	He goes, just give it a shot.
	But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
	If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
	It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
	Yeah, it would not be.
	Right, it wouldn't be that.
	There's a lot of life.
	Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
	This is an iHeart Podcast.
	Guaranteed human.

Chapters

00:00:00 Trust Your Girlfriends
00:02:00 Writing Against Expectations
00:05:26 George R.R. Martin's Lighthouse
00:20:17 The Ham Curse Explained
00:28:50 Kids Died From Policy
00:31:40 Bestiality Outbreak Revealed
00:47:50 Power Structures Silence Victims
00:51:18 Building Ditches in Sunlight
00:53:58 Restaurants Fund Recruits
00:58:23 Free Labor Runs Cults
01:13:23 Escaping the Commune