Rick Allen Ross details his 40-year career dismantling destructive cults, exposing how narcissistic leaders like Keith Raniere, David Koresh, and Charles Manson utilize coercive persuasion to isolate victims. He contrasts benign groups with malignant ones defined by authoritarian control, illustrating the psychological mechanics behind tragedies from Jonestown to QAnon's digital echo chambers. Ross emphasizes that recovery requires understanding manipulation tactics rather than feeling betrayal, ultimately arguing that absolute power corrupts regardless of original ideology while promoting his resources for healing. [Automatically generated summary]
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Rick Allen Ross: Cult Deprogrammer00:04:10
Hello, world.
Rick Allen Ross is a cult deprogrammer who has been helping people escape cults since 1982.
He recently appeared on HBO's documentary called The Vow, which examines Nexium, a self help organization turned sex cult.
His book is called Cults Inside Out, which demonstrates many of the tactics the groups use for control and manipulation, and more importantly, some of the more effective methods he and other experts have used to reverse that programming.
This episode's a wild one.
We talk about mind control.
Nexium, Keith Ranieri, the Heaven's Gate cult, Scientology.
We talk about political cults, political ideologies, QAnon, and much, much more.
I hope you all enjoyed this episode as much as I did.
Please welcome the cult boss, Rick Ross.
Okay, Rick Ross, thank you for doing this, sir.
I greatly appreciate it.
Nice to join you.
Cults are a fascinating topic to not just myself and yourself, but to everybody, especially American culture.
Could you give me a brief background for our listeners and viewers specifically of yourself, how you got interested in cults, and basically your whole journey through cults?
This world.
It started for me in 1982.
My grandmother was a resident in a nursing home.
She was 83 at the time.
And this weird religious group covertly planted its members in the paid professional staff of the nursing home in an effort to target the elderly there.
And when my grandmother shared with me that she had been accosted by one of these people, I was pretty upset.
I was.
Upset enough to go to the director of the nursing home.
And that led to me becoming an anti cult activist and community organizer in Phoenix, Arizona.
And it was the beginning of something that happened very spontaneously.
First, I was involved in making sure that my grandmother and other people were safe in nursing homes, hospitals.
I was also very concerned about minor children.
Being recruited by various groups.
There was no parental notification or permission.
And I thought that was really a breach.
And the idea that people would be floating around hospitals and going in to see people when they were ill, when they were very vulnerable, that also made me feel that something needed to be done.
And so that led to a coalition of religious people in Phoenix that put out an educational pamphlet.
That was titled, What in God's Name is Going on in Arizona?
And we received endorsements from pretty much everyone, except for some of the evangelical churches who felt that they didn't want to participate.
But generally, the Catholic Church, the Episcopal Church, the Methodists, the Jewish congregations, everyone collectively could see that it was necessary to have some type of ethics in the area of proselytizing.
And that led to families approaching me about loved ones that were in various groups, some called cults.
And I eventually became a full time staff person at a social service agency in Phoenix and then an educational bureau.
And by the end of the 80s, I was doing intervention work as a private consultant, or I was called a cult deprogrammer.
And since then, I have done over 500 interventions.
The Face of a Cult Leader00:03:04
Across the United States, internationally.
I've worked in Australia, across Europe, in the Middle East.
And, you know, it's just been a very interesting journey.
I then wrote my book, Cults Inside Out, which is a compendium of information about how these groups exist and have existed historically, how they manipulate people, how to define them.
And then the process that I've used and others have used to help rescue people and get people out of destructive cults.
Why is it that all of these cult leaders are short, oddly proportioned men?
Well, not all of them.
There have been some cult leaders who are quite tall.
Yeah, I guess Heaven's Gate, that guy wasn't a short, weird look.
He was kind of weird looking, but he wasn't super short.
Well, there was one leader of a group that was in North Dakota.
And he was well over six feet tall.
And so, not all cult leaders are short, little guys.
Though David Miskevich, the leader of Scientology, is quite short.
And Keith Raneri, who I dealt with for 14 years, was a very short, kind of weird looking guy.
And so, yeah.
Charles Manson?
Oh, Charles Manson, very small guy.
And you could say that they were.
Compensating or whatever.
But in my experience, cult leaders most often are very narcissistic individuals, sociopathic, maybe most of them, I would say, are psychopaths, very destructive people, malevolent, malignant, not interested in other people and whether or not they're hurting them or how they're exploiting them.
And they just don't seem to have any conscience whatsoever.
I mean, in my work over almost 40 years, I have met so many different cult leaders, and yet I feel like I'm meeting the same person over and over and over again because they talk alike, they act alike, and they have that same kind of dead emotional response when they're dealing with people and their pain, their suffering, which they inflict.
It's fascinating trying to kind of.
Deconstruct these people's personalities, especially when it comes to people like Keith Ranieri, because he's such a quiet, you know, he's not like an overbearing, charismatic guy.
He's very quiet.
Keith Ranieri's Quiet Manipulation00:07:58
He projects himself as being extremely intelligent, which makes him so interesting.
What is it about that?
Like, what is the common, what is, what makes him like that?
Well, Ranieri was different in that regard.
You know, People like David Koresh, Charlie Manson are more charismatic, more magnetic.
Ranieri was this little weird guy who looked like a garden gnome.
And by the way, he was kind of smelly.
He wasn't very good on personal hygiene.
He claimed to be a genius.
He had all these ridiculous stories about his life, how he was a prodigy.
In reality, he really wasn't that intelligent.
But he was a savant when it came to manipulating people.
He could smell vulnerability.
He could drill down and just crack people open.
And he was a very sinister, evil person, even from his earliest childhood.
There were children that went to school with him that he terrorized when he was like 10, 11 years old.
And I was locked in litigation with him for 14 years.
So I had to go through court ordered mediation with Rennery.
I testified against him in his criminal trial, and I sat through a four hour deposition or, you know, many hours of him being questioned about his life as part of the lawsuit.
And what I saw was a man who was a pathological liar, who invented this history of himself, very grandiose.
And in reality, he was really nothing.
He had never really had a real career or a job.
Other than being like an Amway distributor and then conning people in his consumer byline multi level marketing scheme, which went under because of litigation and lawsuits that were pursued by attorney generals in numerous states.
And Raneri was just, he was somebody who could never get enough.
No matter how much money he got, he had to have more.
No matter how many women he had, he had to have more.
And they had to be submissive to him.
They had to be his slaves in the end.
And so he just kept going further and further.
And this is the story of many cult leaders.
They can never get enough power.
They can never get enough money.
They can never control people enough.
So they keep pushing it and pushing it.
And eventually they push it over the line and they get caught.
And in Renneri's situation, ironically, I think it's fair to say that he was.
A misogynist, that he had no real respect for women.
It was women in the end that took him down.
His old girlfriend, Toni Natale, India Oxenberg indirectly, but most of all, her mother, Catherine Oxenberg, who I worked with, who basically decided that if Renneri would not let her daughter go, that she was going to go after him and she was going to destroy the cult.
And that's exactly what she did.
And of course, Sarah Edmondson, who literally bared herself for the New York Times so that everyone could see what a heinous, horrible person he was, that they could see the scar from the brand that he required a number of women to bear.
With no anesthetic, they would be screaming in agony.
And there was a cauterizing iron that was used to engrave his initials on each of his victims.
Now, he has one of the most famous cults, I think, especially it's probably the most recent famous cult.
I just watched the HBO documentary about it, The Vow.
Could you give people just a brief background on his cult, Nexium?
Well, Nexium was a combination of things.
You know, Renneri ironically sued me for intellectual property rights, claiming that I had infringed on his exclusive intellectual property.
In reality, what Nexium was was copy.
From a number of sources.
There was nothing original about it.
It was mostly Scientology.
Raneri would even use the same jargon.
He would call people like me an SP, a suppressive person, because I was critical of Nexium.
And he would use what they called the exploration of meaning or EMs, which were really like a kind of auditing session in which people were.
Asked many questions, and they were expected to confess and empty themselves to the person that was helping them in an EM or a coach.
But what Nexium was philosophically, it was a combination of Ayn Rand, who wrote Atlas Shrugged and other, you know, Fountainhead and other books.
And it was Scientology.
And then there was the multi level structuring of the coaches and the teachers.
That was from Amway.
And then there was this structure of seminars in which people would go through grueling day after day after day of these intense seminars.
They were Literally called intensives.
They could go on for weeks.
And that was, I think, based largely on groups like Landmark Education or Earhart Seminars Training, where they do these large group awareness training sessions for over a weekend.
And Raneri could stretch this out for two weeks.
And so these people would pay for these supposedly Educational seminars that he was selling.
They would pay thousands of dollars and he would subject them to this training.
And then they would have coaches assigned to them.
And then, if they became very involved in Nexium, which was originally called Executive Success Programs or ESP, and the participants were called espions, then they would become part of this subculture that grew up around Raneri in Colony, New York, in the Albany, New York area.
There were probably hundreds of them that moved to the Albany, New York area to literally be near their guru, their leader, who they called Vanguard.
And then they called his co founder, Nancy Salzman, Precept.
And they reigned over this little empire of people from Mexico, from Europe, from all over the United States, many of them very wealthy, powerful people.
For example, the Seagram's heiresses, Claire and Sarah Bronfman.
Who reportedly gave Raneri somewhere in the area of 100 to 150 million dollars over a period of years.
And then there was Emiliano Salinas, who is the son of a past president of Mexico.
And there was a contingent group of people that were in Santa Cruz, that were in Guadalajara, Mexico City, that were very influential and powerful Mexican people that.
Emiliano Salinas and Elite Influence00:03:45
Would come to these seminars as well.
So it was a very largely an elite group of people.
The actress Allison Mack from Smallville, Kristen Kruk was involved for a while, also a star from Smallville and a television star.
But she eventually would leave the group.
But many of these people were very well educated, wealthy people that Ranieri was nevertheless able to.
Subdue their critical thinking, manipulate them, and control them.
There is a lot of, I couldn't help but think watching this thing and learning about Nexium and some of the programs that they had, there's a lot of really good, positive things that he was doing.
A lot of the ideas, a lot of the principles, you know, like being disciplined and, you know, thinking outside the box and a lot of the principles in there combined with, you know, his entrepreneurial spirit.
You got to respect him as an entrepreneur.
It's almost like when that kind of mixes with his deep inner sociopathic evil, whatever evil is in him from when he was a child, and he starts to gain more and more power, it kind of.
Do you think maybe it spiraled out of control at one point, or do you think his intent was evil in the beginning?
Well, I think his intent was basically to take advantage of people, that he was basically a con man, a grifter who took advantage of people all of his life.
He exploited girlfriends.
For example, I had a call from one of his college girlfriends who was terrified of him.
He had stalked her after she had.
Had spurned him.
And going all the way back to his grade school days, he was a very malevolent, controlling, manipulative person.
It was almost like he was like the bad seed and that he was hardwired to be a psychopath from his earliest recollections.
I mean, his family really wasn't a bad family.
He claimed that his mother wasn't a good mother.
He made all kinds of claims about having a bad childhood.
But from what I gathered over the years, his parents were basically pretty good people, and they tried to be good parents and raise him in a reasonable way.
But he was arguably just kind of a bad seed.
Some people think psychopaths are born.
I would argue that Keith Ranieri might be an example of that.
As he garnered more and more power, he became intoxicated with it, no question about that.
Influential people that gathered around him, the more he felt that he was omnipotent, that he was indestructible.
And with the Bronfman money, millions and millions of dollars, he was able to harass his critics.
For example, me, I had deprogrammed three people from the Nexium group on behalf of a family in New Jersey.
One of their children, I was unsuccessful.
With working with him.
But three of their adult children left Nexium as a direct result of my work.
And later, I was given through one of the children of the family the study notes for taking the Nexium courses.
Harassing Perceived Enemies00:03:33
And I gave those notes to a clinical psychologist and a forensic psychiatrist.
And they wrote papers, which are published at culteducation.com in this very large archive about Nexium.
That you can find there.
And these papers were then published around 2001, 2002.
And Raneri immediately went after me.
He went after me for copyright infringement, intellectual property, trade secret violation, defamation.
All told, according to my lawyers, he spent over $5 million suing me over a period of 14 years.
The lawsuit was finally dismissed just before he was arrested.
He also spent hundreds of thousands of dollars having me surveilled.
He hired a private investigation company, Interfor, on Madison Avenue in Manhattan.
And he gave them hundreds of thousands of dollars to stalk me, go into my bank account, my bank records illegally, my phone records illegally.
One of the reasons or one of the crimes that Nancy Salzman, his cohort, is going to be in prison for for over three years is hiding information.
That she should have disclosed in the lawsuit, the federal lawsuit against me in Discovery.
And when her home was raided, not only did they find $500,000 in cash, and by the way, Raneri had $9 million in one checking account that they found, but Salzman kept files on the perceived enemies of Nexium.
And when I testified at Raneri's criminal trial, which was eerie, seeing him in the courtroom like that.
A file was brought to me by the prosecutor and placed in front of me.
And she said, Did you have you ever seen this file?
And I said, No.
And there it was, my file, my SP file, or whatever you want to call it.
And there were documents in it that I have no idea how he got them or she got them, but it was evidence of their just relentless pursuit of their perceived enemies, their critics.
And so, if it wasn't for the fact that I had a pro bono law firm, Working to defend me for nothing, which was the law firm Lowenstein Sandler in New Jersey, Peter Skolnick, Michael Norwick, and also Douglas Brooks, an attorney from Massachusetts who had initially knew Ranieri because he had sued him when he had his multi level marketing scheme, Consumer Byline.
So it was with all these pro bono lawyers.
Including the Berkman Center at Harvard University, public citizen in Washington, D.C., that I was able to stand this withering barrage of litigation, an army of lawyers that Ranieri paid with Seagram's heiress's money and put after me.
And I was one of only, there were many other people that were pursued.
Some of them were sued into bankruptcy because they weren't as fortunate as me to have.
Pro bono legal help.
Breaking People in Groups00:09:48
Tony Natale suffered horribly.
A woman that turned against Raneri in Washington, Susan Dones, also went bankrupt.
And he would just keep hounding these people.
It was just unbelievable the kind of maliciousness that there was in this guy.
Yeah, when I first started the beginning of that documentary, I really, when I started to hear Nancy Salzman talk about things like NLP, The only person I've ever heard say that is Tony Robbins.
So I'm instantly thinking, okay, this is a lot like a Tony Robbins seminar.
That's what I thought of.
But then, so you're like, okay, this is a good thing.
Then you start to get to the dark slavery, branding, sex manipulation type shit.
And that's where it goes south fast.
So when it comes to meeting these people and deprogramming them, is there a sort of playbook that you use or is there a process?
To reverting these people out of this mindset or ideology?
Yes, there is.
And my book, Cults Inside Out, has chapters devoted to that.
There is a chapter on intervention, preparation for an intervention, and then there are case vignettes.
For example, a Scientology intervention, an abusive controlling relationship intervention.
Basically, a cult intervention takes three to four days, eight hours a day.
So we're talking about 24 to 32 hours of work.
Like a drug or alcohol intervention, the family's there.
And I'm going to cover four basic blocks during that intervention.
Number one, I'm going to talk with them about what defines a destructive cult or an abusive controlling relationship or a narcissistic personality profile.
What research is there to document that?
And how might it parallel that person's situation that they find themselves in?
Number two, how does coercive persuasion really work?
What we call brainwashing is really a synthesis of influence techniques, thought reform, and coercive persuasion.
So, we examine that the mechanics of that, the social isolation, the control of information, the demand for personal confession.
For example, the EMs, the exploration of meaning sessions in Ranieri's Nexium.
And then you ask the question is it coercive persuasion?
What is the indoctrination process really all about in this group or in the situation that you're involved in?
And then, three, what information has the group withheld from you?
What secrets are there that you don't know, but you should know if you're going to continue with this organization or with this leader?
And then finally, why did your family stage this intervention?
What do they see that maybe you don't see?
What are they worried about?
What problems have they experienced or estrangement do they feel has occurred as a result of your involvement with this group?
So, you go through those four blocks, and it's really an educational process and a dialogue, a discussion.
And the family is offering their firsthand accounts, their observations.
And what you're hoping is that you can have a kind of ignition point where the person's critical thinking comes into play and they literally think their way out of the group, of the situation.
Another big misconception when you talk about brainwashing is you think vulnerable people that have like a big hole, a hole in their life missing, or misfits or outcasts are the ones that are most susceptible to be brainwashed.
But in this case, this proves quite the opposite.
A lot of these people are well educated, very smart people, successful.
A lot of them, extremely successful, own businesses, have millions of dollars, famous actresses.
That was one of the biggest takeaways that I got from it.
Well, yeah, I think that that's kind of the attitude.
It's kind of a form of denial, really, to say, well, only stupid, damaged losers get involved in cults.
I've done interventions with five medical doctors to get them out of a cult situation.
One was an orthopedic surgeon, another was an anesthesiologist.
These were people that were very highly educated and very sophisticated, and they were.
They were tricked and trapped into a group.
And I think that what people don't understand is how subtle it can be.
Someone you trust, typically a friend, a co worker, someone that you know, tells you, Hey, I'm involved with this seminar training company.
I'm involved in this Bible study.
I'm involved in this philosophical theosophy group.
And I think you would really enjoy it.
Why don't you come and sit in on one of our activities and see what you think?
And based on your trust of that person, Who's acting as your recruiter, basically, and their earnestness because they really believe in the group and they think it's a good group and they think they're bringing you to something wonderful.
So, the combination of that and then maybe the added ingredient that at this particular point in your life, you're having some problem, some difficulty.
And we all go through difficult times in our life a divorce, a romantic breakup.
You lost your job, you're not doing well at school.
Someone in your family, your father, your mother has died, or a close friend.
And this puts you in a vulnerable state.
And how coercive persuasion works, according to a book written by Edgar Schein, is it's basically three stages.
There's the unfreezing stage, as Schein describes it.
I would call it breaking people down.
And then there's the changing.
Stage where you're manipulating them after they're broken.
And then you are refreezing or you are locking them in to that changed mindset.
And so, how that is done is these groups have a kind of process where they basically break people.
There can be this exploration of meaning, this intensive seminar, this cathartic group confession.
In which you are being beaten down, beaten down, beaten down in a controlled environment.
And eventually you succumb, you crack, you become vulnerable.
And at that point, the leader, the group comes in and they say, We have the answer.
We have the solution to your distress, to your problems.
And in that isolation, you're kind of like treading water.
And someone throws you a rope, they throw you a life preserver, and you grab it.
You don't really think, what is this all about?
Where are they going to take me ultimately?
What you're thinking is, I'm in distress.
I'm going to take this opportunity that they're offering me.
And so then you become involved, and then there's this kind of increment process in which you're never really being told everything that will be expected from you.
And you're being, it's kind of like a bait and switch con where you're being told, well, look, this is what we're offering you.
A better awareness of the world around you, success in business, success in your personal life, a sense of accomplishment.
And really, what they're doing is they're bringing you in deeper and deeper into something that you never really were advised about from the beginning.
So there's no informed consent and extensive manipulation.
And then once you are overwhelmed by this process, they then lock it in.
By creating a kind of bubble world around you, a subculture in which you're constantly with other people that are in the group, that are like minded.
These are the people that you confide in.
These are the people you come to trust because you all share and have the group and the group's philosophy in common.
And that becomes a locking mechanism that holds you in the group because you're not getting accurate feedback.
You're not getting any other perspective, just constant reinforcement that the leader is right, that the group's philosophy is perfect, and that you should basically go along with it.
So, you have no way of bouncing your misgivings, your doubts off of someone and getting genuine feedback.
Instead, you're being told, well, you shouldn't doubt.
Scientology Bubble Worlds00:15:14
Why are you doubting?
Why are you uneasy?
Everything's great because the group has become your world and that's who you confide in.
And this is a process of isolating you in the group.
And this is what people don't get about these groups.
And I can say honestly, no one knowingly joins a cult.
And the cult does not come to you and say, Yeah, you know, we're a cult and we expect you to surrender to us, to give us whatever we want.
That may be their ultimate goal, but they're not going to tell you that in the beginning.
Why don't you think Scientology has been taken down in the same way that Nexium has?
Well, when L. Ron Hubbard died in 1986, that we know of, he left an estate of $600 million.
And where do you think Keith Ranieri learned how to go after people?
With lawyers and be litigious.
He learned that from Scientology.
I mean, I know for a fact that he consulted with Scientology and that his private investigators relied on information provided by Scientology to go after me and other people.
Was he ever a part of Scientology?
No.
There was a member in Nexium that worked closely with Ranieri who was a former Scientologist.
And when I read the notes, That were given to me by the family member that I mentioned, I was just overwhelmed.
I said, This is Scientology.
This isn't original.
He copied Scientology.
And of course, Scientology never went after him.
In Scientology, someone who copies them and tries to start up another business is called a squirrel, meaning that they're taking the chestnuts from L. Ron Hubbard's creation and making their own.
Their own operation.
And Scientology can go after people like that, go after squirrels.
But in the case of Keith Ranieri, they never did.
And the reason that Scientology is so solid in everything is because of its history of harassment, the fear that people have when they leave, the sense that Keith Ranieri would gather what he called collateral.
On people, in particular women that he would turn into his slaves.
And they would confess their darkest secrets to him through the coaches, through the people that handled them.
In Scientology, when you go through auditing and you're sitting there with an auditor and you're holding these metal cans that are connected to what they call the E meter, which is really nothing more than a galvanic response measuring apparatus, which measures nervous tension.
Perspiration in your hands.
So, what Scientology auditors are able to do is they can see whenever you're getting nervous.
They see the needle move.
They know that that's an area that's making you nervous, those questions, that part of your life.
And then they drill down and they put all of this into what's called your pre clear folder.
So that information, whatever you've disclosed, becomes part of their personal property.
And you sign documents waiving your right to your file, waiving many of your civil rights.
I mean, that's a red flag, isn't it?
When a group In when you become involved in a group and they want you to relinquish some of your civil rights by signing waivers and documents as you become involved with them, to me, that's a huge red flag that I need to get out of here.
But at any rate, Scientology has information on all of its members, they've all gone through auditing, they've all gone through spiritual counseling, they've gone through courses, and so Scientology can use that as leverage.
In addition to that, they have what was once known as OSA, their Office of Special Affairs, and they go after people.
They target people.
Mike Rinder, Leah Remini, others that have challenged them that have left, have been relentlessly surveilled, pursued, harassed.
And in many cases, this comes at a high cost.
I mean, if you talk about Scientology after you leave, If you have family, you have friends in Scientology, they will use them against you.
They will turn them against you.
They will rip your family apart.
Those who are still Scientologists will literally go through what Scientology calls its disconnection policy or procedure, in which they will disconnect from you and you will no longer exist in their life.
In thought reform terms, Lifton would describe this as the dispensing of existence.
That if you are not in the group, you cease to have a right to exist.
And this is a horrible price that people pay when they leave Scientology, if they still have family in Scientology, and if they are critical or seen as a problem by Scientology.
Which is why it seems so crazy to me that people like Mike Render, Leah Remini, even Ron Miscavige, I had him on here, haven't been able to.
Take down Scientology the same way that Nexium was taken down.
Let's just do a little comparison.
Nexium, maybe at its high point, Rennery had a couple hundred million dollars under his control.
Maybe.
The Bronfmans, the heiresses together, maybe they had one billion dollars.
They might have each had 500 million.
And there were other people with money, but Rennery did not control.
Directly, all of it.
And so, what are we talking about when we're talking about Scientology?
We're talking about an organization that reportedly is now worth billions of dollars and that they own real estate.
One report is that they have a billion dollars in cash.
I heard they were the second biggest real estate owner in the country.
Well, I don't know about that.
I mean, there are many.
Maybe next to BlackRock.
I think.
I think the Mormon Church is a much wealthier organization by far than Scientology.
And certainly the Catholic Church.
There are many religious organizations that are richer and more powerful than Scientology, but they aren't as malevolent.
They aren't destructive in the way that Scientology has a history of being.
And I mean, there's no legitimate reason to leave.
The Mormons will, you know, treat you with some decency and respect if you decide to leave.
I mean, right now, David Archuleta is struggling, former American Idol runner up, and he's.
Navigating his way, it seems, out of the Mormon church.
But I don't think the Mormons are going to go after David Archuleta relentlessly, like Scientology has gone after Mike Rinder.
And I don't think that they would try to turn his family against him.
So, what you have with Scientology is this technology that was developed by L. Ron Hubbard, in my opinion, to break people down, manipulate them, and lock them in.
And it is Probably one of the most comprehensive and just precise processes that I have ever reviewed over the years.
I mean, all of the attention to detail, the course curriculums, the auditing sessions, the files that are kept on you, the supervision levels of everything.
It's a machine that L. Ron Hubbard devised and perfected through the 50s and 60s.
That David Miskevich now runs.
And I think arguably some people would think that David Miskevich is maybe a little nastier and meaner than L. Ron Hubbard.
I mean, Hubbard died in isolation.
Some people think it was Alzheimer's.
Some people think he just basically was disconnected from reality.
And he was kind of a Howard Hughes character, according to many accounts, long fingernails.
Long hair, living in isolation on a ranch in California, and that he had lost his mind, which is interesting because Scientology, if you look at it, really examine it, like all destructive cults or all groups that have been called destructive cults, the ultimate goal seems to be to make everyone a clone of the leader.
So what you have is L. Ron Hubbard as the presumptive.
Prototype, the person that we all want to be, that we aspire to be like L. Ron Hubbard, and that Hubbard created a technology to make people over in his own image.
And given the fact that he ended arguably insane and that he had lost his mind, what is Scientology bringing people to?
There are many people who go through Scientology, for example, Lisa McPherson, who basically had a complete breakdown.
After years of doing Scientology in Clearwater, Florida.
And then she died in a kind of lockdown that Scientology did, in which, according to the initial coroner's report, she died from dehydration.
Scientology got the coroner to change the report, arguably due to harassment.
So, again and again, what you see with Scientology is the use of their wealth.
The use of their power, the use of the information they have on individual members to enforce their will or Miscevige's will at this point on everyone.
And that's why I really admire Mike Render.
I admire Leah Remini because it took a lot of guts to do what they have done.
In the case of Leah Remini, she's been very fortunate that she got her family out intact and that she didn't have to go through any disconnection.
The way that Mike Rinder has.
From what I gather, he's been through hell, just an enormously painful ordeal of losing members of his family.
And of course, Ron Miscavige, who you had on.
To me, that's the saddest story.
He was completely shut out.
I mean, can you imagine?
He brought his son into Scientology, and then his son became the leader and he excommunicated his father.
Also, Miskevich, his wife, Shelly Miskevich, he apparently has decided to put her in an isolated Scientology facility in Northern California, where she's been for a number of years and not widely seen by the public.
I'm sure she's safe physically, but you know.
Are you sure?
Has anyone heard from her?
Is there any evidence that she's even alive?
Yeah, there have been some welfare checks done, and she is alive.
Though I would argue it's sad what happened to her.
She was a devoted wife, and she ends up being shelved and put in this facility because her husband just, I guess, doesn't want to deal with her anymore.
And of course, in Scientology, there's the rehabilitation project that is called RPF.
And this is basically like a kind of prison.
In which a number of Scientologists have been exiled.
Heber Jench, reportedly, the former president of Scientology, is in such a lockdown in Hemet, California, isolated.
And there have been a number of Scientologists who have gone through that.
For example, Debbie Cook, who was a high ranking Scientologist in Clearwater, Florida, she went through a horrible ordeal at RPF in isolation.
And she testified about it in court.
At one point.
And then suddenly Scientology worked out some kind of an arrangement with her where she stopped talking and went to the Caribbean, though I understand she's back in Texas now.
So Scientology has silenced people sometimes by paying them off, but more often by intimidation and threats.
And you could see it as a kind of extortion in which they threaten you with excommunication and disconnection from your family.
It's a brutal organization, in my opinion.
And I've been on the receiving end of it myself.
I've had their lawyers harass me, I've had their private investigators surveil me and harass my family.
So I know what it's like, not to the extent that I can say that I have gone through what Mike Rinder or Leah Remney have gone through, but I have been through the ringer with Scientology.
Have you ever had a discussion with somebody?
It's a part of a cult or a part of Scientology, whether it be like a deprogramming type session where the person just had an extremely rational explanation of why they decided to remain a part of it and you couldn't deprogram them.
Like, look, Rick, I like this.
It works for me.
Charismatic Indoctrination Tactics00:15:41
It's not hurting me.
And have you ever agreed to disagree with one of those people?
Well, yeah.
I mean, there have been situations where I was retained by a family.
And I sat down with the family and the person who supposedly was in a cult.
And when they explained to me what was really going on, I looked at the family and said, Why did you even retain me?
Why did you bring me here?
There's nothing bad going on here.
Your son, your daughter is not involved in a cult.
And you may have some personal family issues that you need to resolve, but that's not my job.
And really, I ended up leaving.
In other situations, I would say where the person really is involved.
In some type of destructive group, about seven out of 10 will ultimately leave at the end of the intervention.
But three out of 10 decide they don't want to leave.
And in fact, many of them will leave the intervention in the first day or the second day and say, I'm done.
And they may have contacted the group in this day and age.
They have texted people in the group, they've communicated with people in the group, and the group says, leave.
And they leave.
They may say, I've had this said to me.
I was on drugs.
I was a drug addict.
I was an alcoholic.
And I came into this group and they basically saved me.
They got me off drugs.
They got me off alcohol.
So I think that the group has been a very positive thing for me.
You don't seem to think so.
My parents don't think so, but that's what I think.
Kind of like a lesser of two evils type thing.
Yeah.
And I can appreciate that.
I can see that.
And I often will tell people, well, that's good.
And the group isn't all bad.
I'm not saying that everything they do is bad, but is it in your best interest to continue with them?
Or have you gotten the clarity, the good stuff from them that you could get, and that what's ahead for you may not be so good?
And so I wouldn't argue the point that there are good things that groups offer.
For example, the group Synonon, which was founded by Charles Diedrich, that was a drug rehabilitation group that became a cult.
They had an intentional community of addicts, former addicts, who gathered around this very charismatic leader, Charles Diedrich, who was the man who coined the phrase, let today be the first day of the rest of your life.
And for a long time, Diedrich was helping people, and it seemed like a positive thing.
And Synonon grew and grew.
The problem was financial transparency, meaningful accountability for the leadership and for Diedrich in particular.
And he became like a god ruling over the group.
And it became very destructive.
A friend of mine, an attorney who had represented former members that were suing the group for personal injuries, Diedrich had a rattlesnake put in his mailbox and he almost died.
From Venom.
And of course, Diedrich eventually would plead guilty to criminal offenses, and the synonym would be dismantled and would fade away.
But I think arguably there were many people, and there are people today who still email me, call me, and tell me Synonon saved me.
I was a drug addict.
I had a terrible problem with alcohol, drugs, and Synonon was the way that I got healed.
And so you're against Synonon, but I got a lot of good out of it.
And I won't argue that.
There were people that got good out of Synonon, but the ultimate End of Synonym was very destructive.
And I think that good groups can go bad and good leaders can become corrupted by their own power.
And that's the old axiom absolute power corrupts absolutely.
And so that is what happened, I think, to Charles Dietrich.
You could argue that he had good intentions in the beginning, but he lost his way.
What is the main difference between, I mean, there's obviously these cults that are started.
From a business perspective, or like based on multi level marketing or pyramid schemes, similar to Nexium, where there's just like some extremely motivated, successful entrepreneur who's made a lot of money and wants to teach you how to do the same thing and be like them.
What is the difference between those cults and then the cults where you have people participating in mass suicides?
Like, what's the alien one with Tien Do?
Oh, that's Heaven's Gate.
Heaven's Gate.
Heaven's Gate or the Order of the Solar Temple.
Or Jim Jones and things like that?
Well, first of all, let's kind of get the definition of what a destructive cult is, because I think that the word can be overused, the word cult.
And so when I think of a cult, I think of a destructive cult, a group that is hurting people, that is causing damage.
And that varies by degree from group to group.
But what they all share in common, besides their Their harmful behavior is that they have a charismatic leader that becomes an absolute authoritarian dictator.
And that leader, whatever he or she says is right, is right.
Whatever they say is wrong, is wrong.
And you cannot disagree with the leader.
And the leader becomes an object of worship.
You can see that in the reverence for L. Ron Hubbard, in the kind of reverence that Jim Jones.
Demanded and received from his followers in the People's Temple, and of course, Marshall Applewhite, who claimed to be an alien from outer space.
In a former life, he was Jesus.
You know, so the leader becomes an object of worship and is the defining element and driving force of the group.
And the leader has no accountability, no meaningful accountability, is a dictator.
And then, second, that when you look at the indoctrination process of the group, you can see.
That its purpose, whether it's, and it certainly won't be admitted by the group, but its purpose is to shut down your critical thinking, to stop you from being able to reflect, to think independently, and to instead engender dependency upon the group, the leader, to think for you.
And ultimately, to relinquish your autonomy and just become totally enmeshed.
In the group.
And then you can identify techniques of coercive persuasion, thought reform, influence techniques that are being used to shut down your ability to think.
And when you run into a group that has that kind of leader, that kind of indoctrination process, and that does harm to people, that is a destructive cult.
Now, there are some that are just after your money.
And then there are some that are after your money, free labor, sexual favors.
And it escalates.
And there are groups that are on a scale of one to 10, maybe they're a one or a two.
And then there are groups like Nexium, Jim Jones, that are a nine or a 10.
And then there are groups that start out as maybe a one or a two.
And then over the years, the leader becomes more and more demanding and it escalates to where they become a five, a six, an eight, and they go on.
So that is what.
What I think is important is not to use the word cult loosely and to understand that it has a very distinctive meaning, and that a destructive cult has three core characteristics that I write is the nucleus for a definition of a destructive cult.
And I based that on a paper written by Robert J. Lifton in the 80s, a psychiatrist who taught at Harvard Medical School.
And he wrote a paper called Cult Formation.
And he identified these three.
Consistent characteristics that all of these destructive cults have in common.
Interesting.
Are there any cults that aren't destructive today?
Yeah, there can be groups that have a charismatic leader, the leader basically indoctrinates people to have a mindset.
One group that I think is a good example is Arcosante.
This was an architectural.
Kind of philosophy called arcology that was originated by Paolo Soleri, an Italian architect who relocated in Arizona.
And he created a kind of experimental city called Arcosante, north of Phoenix.
And they made the Paolo Soleri or Arcosante bells, which are famous throughout the world.
They make these beautiful bronze bells and clay bells that people buy.
And Paolo Soleri was certainly.
An object of worship and reverence in his community.
But he didn't hurt people.
In fact, arguably, he helped people.
And there was permission or a legitimate reason to leave.
And people would stay in the community and then move on.
They'd have alumni gatherings.
It was, if you could see Arcosante as a cult, it would be a benign cult.
And I think that it is possible to have a benign leader.
But unfortunately, when leaders garner a great deal of power, again, it seems to corrupt them.
And though they may have started with good intentions, some of them, though I don't think most of them do, they become corrupted by their power, or they become more and more delusional as a result of being worshipped and having no criticism from anyone in this kind of bubble world that they create.
Have you ever been contacted by anyone or retained by anyone to help talk somebody out of a political ideology?
Only what I would call a political cult.
For example, the LaRouchies.
This is the group behind Lyndon LaRouche, who was the perennial presidential candidate.
And he created a kind of cult following, and the LaRouchies.
As they were known, were considered a destructive cult by many people.
And I would sit with and talk with people that were involved with LaRouche over the years.
And also, there was a political cult that was led by a man by the name of Nino Parente.
And it was a communist supposedly organization.
But again, what you look at is not what the group says it believes, but how it behaves.
How is it structured?
What is the nature of the leadership?
How do they indoctrinate people?
What is the net result of that indoctrination?
Are they hurting people?
Are they helping people?
What is going on?
So, you're looking at the structure of the group, the dynamics of the group, and if you will, the politics, if it's a political cult, and there have been a number of political cults over the years, that's simply a facade, that's the outer shell.
And what you find with all these groups, whether it's religion, pseudoscience, politics, or multi level marketing, whatever, that is the veneer.
And what's behind that is the mechanisms that I've talked about, the thought reform that can be identified by behavior, by the dynamics of the group.
And so, really, when I sit down with someone very quickly, I get away from what is the outer veneer of the group.
And drill down into well, how does this group really function?
How does it behave?
How does it affect you?
How is it affecting your life?
How is it affecting your family?
Is it a good thing?
Is it a bad thing?
Is the leader actually accountable to anyone?
How do you know that?
How do you know where the money goes?
Is there financial transparency?
So you're looking at the basic building blocks of the group, not its mask.
The facade that it presents to the world.
Because all groups will have some kind of facade, some kind of veneer in order to basically trick people into becoming involved.
And people who are politically active will join a political cult, or people that are very idealistic will join a supposed charity that is really a cult.
So you have to get beyond that outer layer or veneer.
And get into how the group really functions.
Find out who benefits from this.
So, you know, is there one person behind this that's reaping all the benefits of all the people and sort of the structure of, is there like a business structure behind it or what are the mechanisms involved to make this work and make this one person or small group of people benefit from it, right?
Right.
So, that's what you say the main difference is between a political cult or a political ideology.
Well, I would say a political ideology.
Does not necessitate having a dictatorial leader that is controlling everyone.
And it doesn't require you to give up your life to this leader in the way that a political cult would.
You know, so for example, the Symbionese Liberation Army that abducted the heiress Patty Hearst in the 70s.
I mean, this was a political organization, but in reality, it was a cult that was completely defined by its leader and ultimately did great harm to the people that were involved, many of whom died.
In confrontations with law enforcement.
Patty Hearst Abduction Story00:04:39
And of course, Patty Hearst, who was held captive, who was indoctrinated forcefully by the group, brutally mistreated, physically brutalized.
And ultimately, she just lost herself for a period of time.
Another example of this was Elizabeth Smart, who was kidnapped by Brian Mitchell, who regarded himself as a prophet.
And he broke her down over a period of time by sexually and physically abusing her.
And there were nine months of her life that she was under his control.
And there were times that she could have run away, but she didn't because she had lost her ability to function independently.
And Mitchell had co opted her through his process.
He had broken her down, changed her, and locked her in.
And it wasn't.
Until after nine months that she was separated from him by the police who found her with wandering with him outside of Salt Lake City, she was able to rejoin her family and begin to recover who she was and who she is now.
Patty Hurst, who I met once, we both appeared in succession on the Today Show when Elizabeth Smart was finally recovered.
And she was brought back to her family.
And Patty Hearst was one of the people that was interviewed because she could understand and relate to Elizabeth Smart.
And I think the Smart family consulted her because they wanted to talk to someone who had been through this experience and had come out the other end.
And Patty Hearst, you know, she said something to me that was very interesting.
She, for a time, was in federal prison.
And there were other.
Prisoners in this facility that had been in other political extremist groups, similar to the SLA.
And she was beginning to have doubts and she was questioning all of the indoctrination.
And she talked to one woman, and that woman also had been in a political group that was violent.
And she began to say to her, You know, I'm having doubts.
Do you ever have doubts?
Do you ever question what they taught you?
And what you did and who you hurt or may have hurt potentially.
And the woman just looked at Patty Hurst and started screaming and saying, You're counter revolutionary.
How dare you talk to me like that?
And Patty Hurst recognized that this was a woman who had killed people and would be in prison for the rest of her life.
And she basically wasn't going to change because, in order to change, she would have to recognize that she.
Had done these terrible things for nothing.
But Patty Hurst said to me, You know, I thought, well, you know, I'm here for a bank robbery.
I didn't kill anybody.
And she began to recover.
And she had a lot of help from counseling, from like the psychologist Margaret Singer.
And she had discussions with Robert J. Lifton.
And eventually, Patty Hearst fully recovered and went back to her normal life with deep insights as to how fragile the human mind is and how, under certain circumstances, we can all be changed.
Because when Patty Hearst was kidnapped, she was a 17 year old heiress who had no interest.
In politics.
She came from a family that was very entrenched in the establishment, and she had no interest in revolution.
So, what happened to her was a radical change that was brought about by this process of coercive persuasion, of thought reform, that ultimately changed her completely into this new persona.
They gave her a new name.
Tanya.
So I think that all of us would like to think that our minds are very strong and not susceptible to influence.
But I would say if that were true, there wouldn't be negative political ads.
Charlie Manson's Disturbed Mind00:15:11
There wouldn't be advertising because why bother?
We're all so firm in our beliefs.
We cannot be persuaded.
So what I would say is that destructive cults, they intensify.
These persuasion techniques in a laser like precision, in which they dismantle our ability to defend ourselves and ultimately break us down and change us to be dependent upon them to think for us.
And that's the process of indoctrination that I've witnessed over the years.
The Charles Manson story is a very unique one, specifically if you're familiar.
Are you familiar with?
The Project MKUltra and Midnight Climax, and the different LSD experiments with mind control, with Sidney Gottlieb, and all of that stuff?
Yeah, but I don't think that that connects with Charlie Manson or with Jim Jones.
And I've heard people say, well, you know, this somehow involves cults.
Not the cults that I've studied.
Charlie Manson was a psychopath.
Who honed his skills while he was basically living his life in prison?
He started as a juvenile in juvenile facilities.
He graduated to adult prison and he was raised by the system, by the prison system.
And being a very small man, he learned how to manipulate people psychologically and emotionally.
And when he came out of prison, that was, I think, the summer of love.
And Manson realized that there was this very malleable youth culture out there.
And he refashioned himself as a kind of hippie, free love individual, which he really was not like that.
It was all about control and manipulating people and having power over people.
And that's what he did.
And he did use drugs, he would have people take hallucinogenic drugs, and he would be their guide on their trip.
He would feign that he had taken the drugs when in reality he had not.
And that gave him tremendous power to guide them in their altered state of consciousness and to mold them and shape them.
And it's just unbelievable what he did, but he did it.
He weaponized his followers and he led them to commit murder.
And he was so successful that in the criminal trial in which Manson was tried, By the prosecutor in California, he was convicted of murder on the basis that he used his followers as the weapon of choice.
And what was interesting, though, is that those followers who were under his undue influence, who I don't believe would ever have done these violent crimes without his influence and his direction, were nevertheless sentenced to death.
And then eventually to life in prison.
And Leslie Van Houten, who I write about in my book, is an example of somebody who was completely changed by the influence of Manson and the way that he manipulated her.
She did terrible things under his control, which she deeply regrets today.
But I think there's a line that a cult member can cross, and Leslie Van Houten certainly did cross it.
Where the acts of terror, the violence, the murders, the Tate LaBianca murders, which were just horrible, in which they butchered people, that it cannot be forgiven.
And that Leslie Van Houten, though she's been a model prisoner, got her college degree.
I think she got a postgraduate degree, has helped other prisoners during the decades that she spent in prison in California.
She's never going to be let out.
The parole board has granted her parole over and over, and the governors of California will not sign off on it and allow her out of prison.
And, you know, I once got a call from someone that was a member of the LaBianca family.
And she said to me, I've seen interviews that you've done in which you talk about Leslie Van Houten in a sympathetic way.
And I want you to understand.
How she tore our family to shreds, what it was to lose those people, and the way that we lost them, and how horrible the crime was.
And I can understand you analyzing what happened to her, but I think that she should be in prison for the rest of her life.
She should never, ever be released because of what she did to my family.
And of course, Roman Polonski, the director, lost his wife, Sharon Tate, and his unborn child.
And Sharon Tate was horribly murdered and hung from a rafter.
And terrible things occurred there.
So I don't think that those people that are currently in prison, Leslie Van Houten, will ever be released.
Because even though they were under undue influence, the nature of their crimes was so horrible.
I don't think that they will ever be allowed parole and release.
Have you ever read Tom O'Neill's book, Chaos?
No.
Tom O'Neill, he started out as a reporter for an entertainment magazine, and he was assigned to do a piece on the anniversary of the Manson, the Tate LaBianca murders.
And I think it was the 10 year anniversary.
And it eventually led him down a 10 to 15 year rabbit hole where that's all he did was study that.
He interviewed every single one of Manson's probation officers.
He interviewed, he spent days and weeks with the prosecutor on Manson's trial.
And there's so many things that happened.
It's just, it's listening to him and the way he describes it.
And there's all these petty crimes that Manson kept getting in trouble for.
When he would get brought back in, he should have been in prison for 10 to 20 years, but he kept getting let out.
He kept getting let out.
His probation officer kept letting him out.
And why were they doing that?
And he goes really deep into the MKUltra midnight climax stuff with experiments with LSD and experiments with mind control.
And he goes beyond deep.
And it's fascinating just to listen to him and the things that he talks about.
Because, like you say, Manson was just a petty criminal, he would rob grocery stores and steal cars.
And how did he transform from that to being someone interested in controlling people's minds and wanting to commit murders?
And there's just so many theories.
He also goes into.
Um, his name's escaping me right now.
The prosecutor of that trial, Vincent Bugliosi, Vincent Bugliosi, yep.
And he, you know, he talks about he goes way into the history of Vincent and his family life and his sociopathic traits that he had.
Um, and and he gets into how Vincent Bugliosi hired a writer to sit in the courtroom during that whole thing so he could write the helter skelter.
Um, and there's just so many, it's one of the most fascinating books I've ever read.
And I highly recommend you check it out or talk to Tom.
Especially since this is your wheelhouse.
Well, I think Vincent Bugliosi was a brilliant prosecutor in that he convicted Manson on the basis that he weaponized his followers and they became his weapon of choice.
But at the same time, he convicted those victims of Manson's malevolence and his control, his manipulation, nevertheless.
So he had it both ways.
He convicted the followers.
And he convicted Manson, who wasn't really physically the murderer.
But he had that kind of control over his followers.
I think Charlie Manson was incredibly narcissistic, definitely a psychopath.
And what happened with him is he wanted to be famous, he wanted to have everyone know his name.
And first, he wanted to be a rock musician.
David Koresh, interestingly, also wanted to be a rock musician.
And he never achieved his goals.
He palled around with some of the Beach Boys, and he knew people in Hollywood, and they showed some interest in his music.
But ultimately, he didn't make it.
He didn't make the cut.
And in my opinion, he was incensed.
He was angry.
He had a sense of entitlement.
He felt that Hollywood and the music industry had done him wrong, and he wanted to retaliate.
And he invented this helter-skelter philosophy, you know, that was about a race war, the end of the world.
That became his narrative so that he could control and manipulate his followers.
It was a means to an end.
Broken down and indoctrinated to believe bizarre narratives.
But the consistent pattern of those narratives is the leader is all powerful.
The leader is right.
The leader is the supreme person with knowledge on the face of the earth who has all the answers.
And that's what Charlie Manson did.
And in the end, I would call it a malignant narcissistic rage that he had, in which he got even.
With all the people that he felt had done him wrong.
And so he went after celebrities, he went after wealthy people because he wanted them to feel destroyed.
He wanted them to feel his pain.
And in the end, he didn't kill himself like David Koresh or like Jim Jones, because I think he really enjoyed being interviewed in prison and being the.
The prisoner in the United States that received more mail than any other prisoner in the entire United States.
I mean, he literally had a fan following.
And he got married a few times, I think, while he was in prison.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, he had girlfriends, supposedly.
And, but, but the point is that he loved himself too much to kill himself and that he wanted to be a celebrity and he became a celebrity through the most horrible occult murders.
In criminal history in the United States, that we talk about over and over because of how grisly they were and how they involved people that didn't even know Manson, that had no connection to him.
The LaBianca's, they never met Charlie Manson.
He killed them because they were wealthy, they lived in a wealthy neighborhood, and he wanted to make people in Los Angeles feel like no one was safe and that you will know what it's like to live in fear.
And that was.
That was Charlie Manson.
I mean, he was an incredibly sick and disturbed personality.
And many of the cult leaders that I've dealt with over the years are like that.
And though, in the case of Jim Jones and David Koresh and Luke Giray of the Solar Temple or Marshall Applewhite of Heaven's Gate, when they decided to die, it was almost like they felt these people are mine.
They're mine.
I own them.
And they have no life outside of me.
And when I die, they will all die.
And so when they pulled the plug, they killed all of the people that were with them.
Jim Jones, over 200 children died at Jonestown.
David Koresh, most of the children that died in the fire that he ordered to be lit were his own children.
And he deliberately wanted them to die with him.
Luxure, it's kind of mixed.
We don't really know what happened with the solar temple.
But there are about 75, 85 people that died.
And of course, Heaven's Gate, 39 people died.
And what you can see in all of this is the formula for tragedy, which is when you have a group of people that are tethered to a cult leader who is a psychopath, and they depend on that cult leader to think for them, to make decisions for them, and they no longer make decisions independently in large part.
Falls apart and decides it's the end, he or she takes their followers with them.
Very often, this is the formula for occult tragedy.
So, do you think Marshall Applewhite of Heaven's Gate did he actually believe that they were all going to be beamed up into some sort of spaceship and transcend their human meat suits?
Or did he just know that this was the end and he knew that they were all just going to die?
Marshall Applewhite's Tragic End00:03:11
He was a deeply disturbed person.
He had checked himself in and out of mental institutions.
Bonnie Nettles, who was a nurse, I think that she might have been a somewhat stabilizing influence over him.
And then she died from cancer and he was alone.
He was getting older.
I think that he imagined that he was going to die soon and that he believed that.
That these people are my people and that I will take them with me.
No one can know absolutely for certain if he truly believed his own hype, but I would not be surprised if he did, that he did believe that somehow he was going to transcend his humanity and take his people with him.
Because you have to understand the world that Marshall Applewhite lived in for years.
It was this very controlled world where they were all living together.
They had No contact with the outside world, very limited.
And if a person left the group to get groceries or do some errand, they would be shadowed by another person.
They would not be alone, that they were isolated from their families, from their friends for years and years.
I talked to the adult child of one of the people that died at Heaven's Gate, and she said to me, For so long, we didn't know where my father was.
We had no clue.
He had been gone for many, many years.
And so I felt like I had lost him already.
And that when we identified his body and he was there, I thought, well, this is closure.
Now he's really gone.
And this happened with many of these people.
They were so encapsulated, they were so cut off from anyone on the outside.
And I think Marshall Applewhite himself.
Was so used to being deferred to, being worshiped like a god, being considered the ultimate mind, the ultimate intelligence on the planet, that he may have, in the end, believed it himself.
And that was probably the tragic end of the group, he believed that this was the end that they had counted on, that he had told them would occur.
And that it happened.
And Luc Jure was going through a difficult period with the Solar Temple where people were talking about leaving, where there were questions about the group's finances.
And the next thing you know, they're all dead.
Because basically, it seems to me that Luke Giray thought rather than relinquish power, I would rather die.
And if I die, I'm taking everyone with me.
Jim Jones and Solar Temple Deaths00:03:29
I am not going to be a celebrity in prison.
I am going to die.
And that's what Jim Jones did.
And Jones is a fascinating story because at one time he was quite a celebrity.
I mean, Governor Jerry Brown in the 70s.
Was friendly with Jim Jones.
You know, Willie Brown, state assemblyman, later mayor of San Francisco, also was friends with Jim Jones.
Mayor Moscone of San Francisco appointed him to a housing commission position.
Jim Jones was a political player.
He had thousands of followers that he could turn out, they could go door to door supporting a particular candidate.
And for years, people thought that the People's Temple, which was really kind of a mega church, In the Bay Area, that they were doing good things.
They were working with drug addicts, helping them to get off drugs.
They had a program to feed the elderly.
And Jim Jones did a very good job of hiding the evil, the sinister aspects of the group.
And then people started leaving because there was a great deal of abuse and exploitation in the group.
And they started to tell their stories to the press.
To the media.
And that's when Jim Jones decided to take his most devoted followers.
And he then went to Guyana.
They created what became known as Jonestown, this farming community.
And there he completely controlled everything all communication with the outside world, everything.
He had his own security force.
When Congressman Leo J. Ryan came down there with Jim Jones' blessings, He was there to basically address concerns of people in his district in California about the people that were family members, grandkids, nieces, nephews that were in Jonestown.
And people then approached Leo J. Ryan and said, Help us, help us to get out of here.
There are terrible things going on here, and we want to get out.
Will you take us out when you leave?
And so Ryan took some of them, and then Jones decided.
That he would not let them leave, and that he sent his security force and they murdered many people, including Leo J. Ryan.
And Jackie Speer, who later became a congresswoman from that same district, was on the staff of Leo J. Ryan, and she almost died.
She was shot multiple times and almost bled out at the place where the aircraft, the plane, was that was to take them out.
And so, what Jim Jones did in the end is he knew that it was over for him.
That the police were coming from Georgetown, that he was going to have to answer for what he did.
And rather than face that, he decided, like David Koresh and others, that he would kill himself, but he would take all of his followers with him.
And also, I think that Jones had this anger for the people that had persuaded Ryan to come down there.
Confronting Cult Leaders in Court00:06:27
And so he wanted to show them this is what you get your family members will be dead.
And you have lost.
I win.
They're mine.
And that is the kind of malignant narcissism that runs in the blood of a lot of cult leaders.
It's really chilling to deal with some of them.
I mean, when I met Keith Raneri, I remember I was in this meeting with him that was court ordered.
It was a settlement discussion, you know, that was a mediation ordered by the federal judge.
I had to attend, he had to attend.
Nancy Salzman was with him.
Oh, wow.
She was sitting opposite at a table with me, and Rennery, all these lawyers were there, and we were supposed to discuss possible settlement.
And I would propose something, and Rennery would look at me, and he would say, You don't understand.
And I would say, What?
And he would say, You don't understand.
And then he would start going into his philosophy that was known as rational inquiry, almost as if he was trying to indoctrinate.
Me and that I should be a true believer and confess that I had been wrong to criticize him or publish material online about him.
And I looked at him, you know, I just thought it was incredible that he was doing this.
And I looked at him and I said, Look, Keith, I don't care about your philosophy.
I don't care what you believe.
I'm here because you're suing me.
And I'm here because a federal judge ordered me to.
Sit at a table with you to try and work something out.
And I could see his lawyers going, Yeah, yeah, you know, that's why we're here.
And he would just, he kept going, he would keep going on, going on.
And I can tell you now that it was like here was this guy who was used to everyone always saying, Yes, Keith, yes, you're right, Vanguard, you're always right.
And now I was sitting there, not under his spell.
Just a regular person that had not gone through all that training and that breaking and that changing and all of the stuff that he put people through.
I was just there with the security of the lawyers in the court.
And I looked at him and said, I'm not interested in your philosophy.
I don't care what you believe.
I'm here to settle the lawsuit.
And he started to get visibly agitated.
And Nancy Salzman was kind of had this blank look.
And she would say something.
And then as soon as he would, Clear his throat, she would stop talking because that's how controlling he was.
And at one point, he kept doing this over and over.
We were in this room for, I don't know, a couple hours.
And finally, I looked at him and I said, Keith, here's what I think.
I think you're a cult leader.
I think you hurt people and you are a bad man.
But we're in a lawsuit.
So that's what I'm here for is to settle that lawsuit.
But as far as I'm concerned, I have said nothing critical of your group or you that was not true.
And he became really upset at that point.
And you could tell this was someone who was never challenged for years, no challenging.
And he became very agitated.
His face got red.
He wasn't this calm, you know, kind of all knowing guru.
You know, his Yoda pose was gone.
It was just old Keith Renner.
And from there, he went into a deposition.
I remember my lawyer, Peter Skolnick, coming up to me and saying, Well, the one good thing about mediation is now he's kind of upset and he's more agitated.
And when I question him in the deposition, it will be to our advantage.
Right.
And so it rattled him.
It rattled him.
And what rattled him is what rattles all cult leaders.
And I'll tell you, it's the magic word the magic word is no.
No, I'm not going to go along with you.
No, I'm not going to be branded.
No, I'm not going to have sex with you.
No, you can't have my money.
No, I don't believe you.
You say no, and the only acceptable answer to them is yes.
What do you want?
You want my money?
Here's my money.
You want me to do free labor for you?
I'll do it.
I'll work myself to the bone.
They cannot handle the word no.
And I've sat with hundreds of cult members over the years, talking with them about their involvement in a group.
And I'll say to them, Have you ever said no?
What happened when you said no?
What happened when you said, I don't believe you?
I mean, can they handle that?
You know, and I'll have cult members sometimes say to me, You know, I remember one time when I was resisting how angry people were.
And it was like I thought they were really nice and that they were sweet and kind.
But then, when I wouldn't go along with them, the mask dropped and I could see the wolf.
And so then I say, well, you know, there it is.
Anyone can be nice and very sweet to you if you're just giving them what they want, morning, noon, and night.
The test is when they don't get what they want, when they have to compromise, when they have to make some concession.
Are they willing to do that?
And also, is there a legitimate reason to leave the group?
Or is anyone who leaves wrong?
Punishing Those Who Leave00:15:33
They're bad.
They're a suppressive person.
You need to disconnect from them.
What kind of a group does not allow people to leave?
I mean, a typical church will say, oh, you're going?
Okay.
All the best for you.
I hope your family does well.
If you want to come back and see us sometime.
But in a destructive cult, there is no legitimate reason to leave.
And the leader sees it as betrayal, and the group sees it as betrayal.
And people who leave are vilified and made to seem like they're terrible.
Marshall Applewhite would say they were Luciferians.
There's some kind of negative connotation that dispenses with the existence of people who challenge the authority of the group or leave the group.
The Luciferians, that was also part of Nexium, where he would talk about that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, the irony of Keith Ranieri, the guy never came up with anything new.
He was a copyist.
I mean, here he's suing people for trade secret violation, and everything is copied from other sources.
He was a true con man.
Oh, totally.
Totally.
And, you know, there are people that just, it's sad.
I mean, the saddest victim of Keith Ranieri, in my opinion, amongst the women that were hurt, I mean, there were a number of women that were brutally hurt.
I mean, he raped children.
He raped children as young as 12 years old.
He raped a girl in Albany that was 12, who came forward at one point.
But, you know, Lauren Salzman, who, in my opinion, deserved the sentence that she got, which was time served.
She did not have to go to prison.
She was brought into this group when she was a very young woman.
I think she was.
Still a teenager when she met Keith Ranieri for the first time.
And he totally dominated her, exploited her, lied to her, just treated her horribly.
And when she testified in court against him, it was a very, very sad, sad thing.
I mean, she cried, she wept.
It was, I think, necessary for her to go through that recognition and that process.
And no doubt she hurt other people as his instrument that he used to manipulate others.
But I think the fact that she was brought in as almost a child by her mother, who, in my opinion, got off easy.
Nancy Salzman, in my opinion, got off easy.
She is only going to serve three years in prison.
Clara Bronfman is going to serve almost seven years.
And I think Nancy Salzman should serve more time than Clara Bronfman.
And Alison Mack, the actress whose career is destroyed, who lost a great deal of money, who is going to have to live with this for the rest of her life.
She's going to prison, I think, for about three years.
So, Lauren Salzman is an example of someone who was brought in by a parent into a destructive cult and suffered and initially had no choice.
I mean, there are so many people, young people that I meet, that I've worked with, that I've Helped that they were in a cult because they were born into it.
They were in a cult because they were brought into it as a child and they had no choice and they were consumed by the group.
They knew nothing else.
This was their reality.
The actor River Phoenix grew up.
Oh my God, that's one of the most sick stories.
Yeah, he grew up in the Phoenix family, Joaquin Phoenix, River Phoenix, they were in this group called the Children of God.
And in case your audience doesn't know, this is one of the most horrible cults in the history of the world.
I mean, Moses David Berg was a pedophile.
He raped his daughter, he raped his granddaughter, he raped children, and he encouraged his followers to sexually exploit children.
And when River Phoenix did an interview with Rolling Stone at one point, he said, I lost my virginity when I was four.
And so, this was a group that traumatized children, that sexually abused children.
There was one boy that grew up as the stepchild of Moses David Bird, Ricky Ramirez.
And he was relentlessly exploited sexually as a child.
And his abuser, this woman, continued with the group.
And Ricky Ramirez ultimately went after her, murdered her, and then killed himself.
And before he did, he did a video in which he explained why.
He did what he did and what his life was like.
It was just horrible.
And I've talked to so many former children of God, and they will tell me, I never had a choice.
I was brought into this group as a child.
I didn't know what to think.
They told me what to think.
And I believed them.
Why wouldn't I?
It was my mother, my father, my family.
And I grew up with this as my reality.
And because many times we think that what we see in a group, Is crazy.
And how can they submit themselves to that insanity?
And what we don't understand is that what we call crazy, they call normal.
And what we call normal, they call crazy.
And so this insanity within the bubble becomes an alternate reality.
And people are living it daily and it's being reinforced.
And so I would talk to former children of God and they would call me on the phone many, many times.
And say to me, Rick, I want to talk to you about what happened to me.
And they would start telling me about their life.
And then they would say, You know, I hate my father, but I love him, but I hate him.
And they would say, I'm so conflicted because I know that he was brainwashed.
But if it wasn't for him being a member of the group, I would not have been raped when I was a child.
And so I'm mad.
And I don't know, should I be mad at my father?
Should I hate my father?
Should I love my father?
And in many situations, the parent will eventually leave the group and then have to deal with what they did to their children and their family.
It's a mess, to say the least.
And I will say to these adult children from Children of God look, I'm not a mental health professional and I'm not equipped to counsel you.
And maybe you should see a psychologist, you should see a psychiatrist.
Someone who can help you.
And they'll say to me, you know what?
When I talk to people, they don't believe me.
They don't believe or understand what happened to me.
And the reason I called you is because at least you know that I'm not just making this stuff up, that this is real.
This is what happened to me.
This is how I lived my life for years.
And it was a horrible, traumatic childhood.
And so a lot of times, You know, I look at Joaquin Phoenix, who is one of the greatest actors in the world, and I wonder to myself, you know, how did it affect him?
What did he live through?
Because the whole Phoenix family was in the Children of God for a period of time.
And after they came out, they never really, in my opinion, sorted it out, which is another whole issue what do you do after you leave a cult?
Okay, you leave.
And a lot of people who leave, they leave thinking that they did something wrong.
They leave thinking, you know, I betrayed God.
I betrayed the group.
I became counter revolutionary.
I became a suppressive person, whatever.
I failed.
And they don't deal with or unpack their group experience.
They don't recognize that they were a victim and that it isn't their fault and that they didn't do anything wrong.
And that the group, in fact, hurt them, traumatized them.
And so, what people need to do when they leave these groups is a lot of reading, because there's an enormous amount of literature that you can read.
There's a chapter in my book on recovery, and there are chapters to help people get their head around the manipulation to understand it, to sort it out.
And I think that's very empowering.
If someone has left a cult group or an abusive controlling relationship, being able to unpack your experience and say, hey, I get it.
I see how they did what they did.
Because a lot of people live in fear.
You know, I remember one of.
Of the top people in Nexium that is in the vow, you know, called me up and said to me, I just want to talk to you about what happened to me in Nexium.
I've been reading your book and I've been trying to get my head around it.
And he said, Because, you know, I was in another cult before Nexium and then I was in Nexium and I'm feeling like I'm like a cult hopper.
I'm going from one cult to another to another and I want to stop.
I'm middle aged and I want to move on.
I don't want to be in any more cults.
I can't afford it.
I don't want to deal with it.
And he said, and when I was in the group, they said that you were like Satan.
You're like the devil.
And when I recognized that Keith Ranieri was really the devil, I thought maybe you're not that bad.
So help me.
And so I work with this guy over a period of months.
I met with him during the vow, we met on occasion, and I talk with him.
And I think for him, it was very important to understand the mechanics of how he was manipulated, how he was controlled, so that it would never happen to him again, so that he could see it coming and recognize it.
And I think that's the vaccine, if you will, for cult involvement.
If you want to protect yourself from an abusive, controlling relationship or a destructive cult, understanding who and what they are.
And how they trick people, how an abusive partner, you go through the honeymoon period, the partner gaslights you, they play with your head.
You know, understanding how that works is the best preventative vaccine that you can receive.
Yeah, to be able to sort of reverse engineer how you got here.
And a lot of them don't understand.
It's not like you just sign up for this great, empowering, Mission, and then the next thing you know, it's sex trafficking.
It's an inch.
They take an inch, an inch, an inch, and next thing you know, you're 10 miles down the road in the wrong direction, which makes it hard to say no.
Like you said no to Keith in that deposition.
It's not like that.
They've been gradually, incrementally going down this path.
To say no now means to sever a limb, in a sense.
Have you ever heard of QAnon?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
I've had many calls and Done and interviews about QAnon.
It's a very interesting group and it represents a phenomenon that we're now dealing with.
Keep in mind, I go back to the 80s, so I can remember when cults did quaint things like recruit on college campuses, and that was really their most fertile recruitment area.
Now, with the internet and social media, Instagram, YouTube, PayPal, you can recruit, sustain, and get money out of.
The people that follow you online.
You don't even have to meet them physically.
So, what we see in QAnon is exactly that.
It's all of these people that are kind of wound up in a tunnel together online.
They reinforce each other.
They converse online.
They follow each other online.
And they are like a village online.
And then you have Q, the anonymous leader who hasn't been seen, who hasn't been clearly identified, who can do a Q drop, and all of these people accept it.
And it's a very frightening phenomenon, especially coupled with the people from QAnon that participated in the January 6th riot in Washington.
I mean, that was very sobering.
But there are all these people that can be influenced online.
They're streaming with each other, they're listening to podcasts by the leader, they're sending money through online mechanisms like PayPal.
And Facebook has had to deal with this.
YouTube has had to deal with this.
I mean, I've had calls from people where they say, My husband works from home.
And I had no idea that he was recruited online and that he was being indoctrinated sitting in his home office at times when I was also in the house.
I had no idea how insidious these groups are.
That they can recruit people in that way.
And I deal with that increasingly.
It's interesting your experience with dealing with these sinister cults and us being in this politically charged time that we're in in this country.
And you deal with things like QAnon when it's so much different because there's not one person reaping these benefits directly manipulating people.
There's no, with QAnon, there's no real, as you described some of these other cults.
Targeting Vulnerable Populations00:14:59
Functional systems in place.
It's sort of just like chaos wrapped around people who are, again, unlike Nexium, they're not necessarily the brightest people.
Most people that were in QAnon are misfits, if you will.
They're missing some sort of purpose in life or they're looking for some sort of meaning.
This is everything I've gathered from watching Q Into the Storm by Colin Hoback on the HBO documentary.
And again, there are so many parallels like that you've discussed with being in echo chambers.
That's the way social media algorithms work.
They're designed to serve you more of what you interact with, more of what you, if they see you engaging with certain types of content, they're going to keep serving you that type of content, whether it be on Twitter, Instagram, or YouTube, which sort of keeps you in this ideological thought bubble instead of being exposed to outside ideas or conflicting ideas that sort of, Will make you question things.
Instead, no, they're stuck in these bubbles and they don't understand these algorithms, how they work.
That's one parallel.
Another parallel that I noticed was being able to dismiss people with alternate ideas by simply labeling them things, whether it be somebody who has, you think differently than me about gun control or about vaccine.
So that means you're a Trump supporter or that means you're an anti vaxxer or you are against this stuff.
So that means you're a woke liberal.
Like using, Those labels is a big problem.
And it's very much along the lines of some of these more sinister cults.
Well, that fits into what Robert J. Lifton would call thought reform.
And there's a book, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, which was published in 1961.
It's a seminal book that describes these techniques.
And my book incorporates a lot of this information from Lifton, from Margaret Singer, from Robert Cialdini, who wrote the book Influence, Edgar Schein, who wrote Coercive Persuasion.
And it's carefully footnoted in my book.
But what you're talking about are thought terminating techniques.
Cliches.
That's how Lifton would describe dismissing someone by labeling them and then cutting off any kind of consideration of what they're saying.
They are dispensed with.
And that is what Lifton would call the dispensing of existence, another one of the eight criteria of a thought reform program.
And then what you see, interestingly, with QAnon is you see cognitive dissonance, which is you believe something.
You see facts that or things occur that directly contradict what you believe.
But then the organization, the people that you're listening to, spin it.
They spin an explanation.
And then the people around you in the organization reinforce that spin.
And then you accept the spin and move on.
So that is how people that are in QAnon, there are predictions that have failed over and over and over and over again.
John F. Kennedy Jr. did not appear.
None of the predictions that QAnon has made have really materialized.
How do you deal with that failure or those repeated failures?
And the way to understand it is cognitive dissonance.
Another thing about QAnon that is interesting, and I've seen this with a number of groups, groups will target a particularly vulnerable population.
So, for example, David Koresh.
He targeted the Seventh day Adventist church because the branch Davidian movement, which preceded Korsh by many decades and was originated by Victor Howdeth, and then later led by his widow, and then by George Roden, and then by Lois Roden, his widow.
And eventually in the 80s, it would be taken over after Lois Roden's death by David Koresh.
It was filled with former Seventh day Adventists because that was a part of their belief system.
They were vegetarians.
They celebrated the Sabbath on Saturday, that the branch Davidians were a splinter group of Seventh day Adventism.
So Koresh would send people to Seventh day Adventist churches, targeting them because he felt that they were vulnerable, that they could be recruited.
And actually, the Seventh day Adventist church had a very strong reaction to David Koresh and really took him on before anyone else did to protect their.
Their members, their parishioners.
But in QAnon, what you see is Q preys upon people that are experiencing psychological and emotional distress.
A number of the people that were arrested on January 6th had a history of mental illness.
They had been diagnosed with depression, with bipolar illness.
In one way or another, they had a A mental illness history or a problem, a psychological problem.
So, what I see is a disproportionate amount of people that are in QAnon that may have had paranoid delusions before they were involved with QAnon.
Many of the families that I'll talk to that will call me, I will say, well, your family member who's in QAnon, have they never before embraced conspiracy theories?
Have they never before had delusional thinking and episodes where they felt that?
There was a conspiracy that they had to expose, you know, and so on and so on.
And the family members will say, well, no, this is who they are.
They have been this way for pretty much most of their life.
And QAnon is now the latest thing.
So, in a sense, I see QAnon as preying upon vulnerable people who are, if you will, closer to the breaking point.
And that's what you see with a number of cult groups, that they will find people that are.
Are vulnerable and they will prey upon them.
That's what David Koresh did.
That's what Keith Ranieri did.
He would find out what is your weakness?
What are you struggling with?
And then he would use that as his entry point to get inside of you and then begin to co opt your ability to think independently.
So, what I see with QAnon and with some of these conspiracy theory groups.
Is they are able to network people who may have a history of mental illness, some type of personality disorder, may have bipolar, depression, mania.
And they tap into those people as a particularly vulnerable audience and then pull them into the QAnon movement.
And it's so fascinating just because it all came from the internet, it was all anonymous forums and stuff.
Instead of people coming into a room in a seminar and signing up and wearing a sash, It was, you know, it just goes to show what the world's turning into with technology and, you know, artificial intelligence and algorithms and stuff like that.
It's scary.
Well, you know, the internet is a two edged sword.
I mean, the internet really hurts Scientology.
I mean, Scientology is built on secrets, and you have to pay to find out the secrets in increments.
Right, you know, they have operating theta levels, you know, operating theta level one, and then it goes up to eight, and then you go for superpowers or whatever.
I think Tom Cruise is an OT7, John Travolta is an OT7.
Uh, I think Jenna Elfman also is uh fairly high up, right?
If you were just getting into Scientology for day one, they tell you about Xenu, the intergalactic overlord, you're out of there, yeah, you're out of there.
I mean, there were reports that when Tom Cruise was first told about.
Xenu, which is this mythological being that L. Ron Hubbard, who was a science fiction writer, concocted as his base story that became the foundation of explaining the world.
That Xenu was a galactic overlord over a galactic federation, and that he sent alien beings and spaceships to Tegiak, which is now known as Earth, millions of years ago, and that these beings were killed, they were annihilated, and that their spiritual residue is now on our planet,
and it can attack you, it can latch onto you as a body fate.
That will influence your mind, influence who you are.
And Scientology is the only technology, according to L. Ron Hubbard, that can free you from the influence of body thetans and advance you up these operating thetan levels to greater and greater awareness at a greater and greater cost.
I mean, it can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars just to get to clear.
And then when you get to clear, you have to go to operating thetan level.
One, then level two, then at three, you're finally told about the incident.
So, a lot of times when you talk to a Scientologist and you talk about Xenu, they don't even know what you're talking about because they haven't reached OT3.
So, this is an example of a group that they say they're a religion, but imagine this you go into a Catholic church and you walk by the sanctuary and you look at the head of the Sanctuary, and you see Jesus hanging on the cross, and you say to a priest, Who is that?
and the priest looks at you and says, I can't tell you, we can't talk about that.
You're not ready to know that yet.
You have a lot of confession ahead of you, a lot of catechism training, and everything.
And someday, maybe we can explain to you who that guy is.
Now, see, that isn't the way.
Mainstream religion works.
I mean, you can argue against organized religion, but let's be honest.
When you go into the Catholic Church, they tell you who Jesus is and they give you their basic doctrine openly, freely.
They discuss it with you.
Same thing in Judaism, Islam, Buddhism.
They're not keeping secrets from you and they're not selling it to you.
They're not selling the revelation to you in bits and pieces.
And so, this is how L. Ron Hubbard constructed Scientology.
And this is how many groups are.
You don't really know what's behind the door, what's behind the curtain.
You find out in gradual increments.
And in that process, you are going deeper and deeper and becoming more and more enveloped by the group and the subculture of the group.
And everything else is being shut out.
And so, by the time they reveal the secret, Or they tell you something that's really would have been distressing to you in the beginning, you're so shut down your critical thinking and your ability to evaluate what they're telling you.
And you're so cocooned in the group that you accept it.
Right.
I mean, when Tom Cruise was told about Xenu, you would think that he would run for the hills and say, Xenu, come on, that's just nonsense.
But He had been in this organization for many years.
And at that point, he was enveloped by it, cocooned by it.
And he had no accurate feedback from anyone else outside that could pierce that cocoon.
And so he accepted it.
That's what I would surmise since he continued with Scientology and went to operating Phaeton level seven, at least.
You would think, I mean, one of the reasons that people like John Travolta and Tom Cruise don't come, you know, at least have some sort of epiphany and wake up one day and say, you know, Okay, this is a crazy cult, is because they have that sort of collateral on them, or they have done those auditing sessions where Scientology could have enough dirt on them to where it's just like, uh, okay, I won't say anything about it because it's not worth destroying my career.
Well, I think that plays a part in it, but I don't think that that is the gist of it, the core of it.
I think that John Travolta and Tom Cruise feel that Scientology is what it claims to be.
The ultimate science of the mind that John Travolta feels that it has done a great deal of good for him, that it has positively affected his career.
I'm sure Cruz thinks the same thing.
And they are so handled by Scientology.
I mean, there are so many people around them that are Scientologists, and their world is populated by those folks that they're not really getting another perspective.
And in Tom Cruise's case, What a mess.
I mean, his first wife, Mimi Rogers, who introduced him to Scientology, later left.
Scientology's Impact on Tom Cruise00:05:09
And that was divorce number one.
You know, then he marries Nicole Kidman.
They seem to be very happy together, care deeply for each other, adopt children.
And then I think her resistance to Scientology and the fact that her father, I think, was a psychologist.
That she never really got on board.
Eventually, divorce number two.
Then comes Katie Holmes, who he's jumping on a couch over, praising for Oprah.
But then Katie Holmes kind of wakes up.
And there are reports that she saw the way that the adopted children treated Nicole Kidman, their mother, and that they didn't have the kind of relationship with her that I think Katie Holmes imagined.
And Katie Holmes came from a very tight family.
From the Midwest.
And she started thinking outside of the box and talking to her father, a divorce attorney, and her old friends.
And before you know it, divorce number three.
And but she really got the upper hand.
She divorced him while he was away doing a movie.
And she was able to do it in New York.
And she was able to engineer really what turned out to be pretty much sole custody of her daughter, Suri.
And Tom Cruise, this is his biological child.
I mean, you look at Surrey Cruz, I know she looks a lot like Katie Holmes, but at times you look at her and she looks a lot like Tom Cruise as well.
And there must be some feeling in Tom Cruise for this biological daughter.
He must love her and care about her.
But I suspect that he sees her as a PTS, as a potential trouble source.
As per the loaded language, thought terminating cliches of Scientology.
And the reason she's a PTS is because she is with her mother, who I would suspect Scientology labels as an SP, a suppressive person.
And so Tom Cruise really doesn't seem to have much of a relationship, from what I have observed, with his daughter, Suri, which is a shame.
So here's a man who is brilliant in his acting, brilliant in his career.
He's one of the richest, most successful movie stars in the world.
And he sustained a career into his 50s, which is an accomplishment, a feat.
So, this guy is not really a dumb guy.
He's a smart guy.
And yet, look at what Scientology has done to his life three divorces, seemingly estranged from his child, Surrey.
Very sad.
But I think that he is a total believer.
He is all in, all in.
And in fact, I got into quite a bit of trouble.
With Scientology at one point, Tom Cruise was running around.
I don't know if you remember, he was running around New York, Manhattan, opening up these detox clinics.
And I helped to break the story that it was a front for Scientology, that it was connected to Scientology, and that what they were doing was a Scientology ritual called the Purification Rundown, which L. Ron Hubbard claimed could detox your body.
And of course, it's ridiculous because the theory that it operates on is that drugs, toxins in your body stay in your body indefinitely unless you do the purification rundown, which is scientifically absurd.
Toxins, drugs are dispelled by the body, and that's what science knows.
But according to Scientology, which ironically trades on the idea that it is scientific somehow, And, you know, though I would argue it's pseudoscientific.
Science fiction.
Yeah, science fiction, you know, or fiction science, however you want to describe it.
But anyway, Tom Cruise was promoting these clinics.
And I was having wives of firefighters, wives, family members of people that were first responders at Ground Zero who were struggling with.
Asbestos and toxins that they may have ingested, inhaled during their work at Ground Zero.
And they were being used by these detox clinics as examples of what they could do.
And eventually, the New York Fire Department medical director pretty much denounced these clinics, but it was a process.
Exposing Detox Clinic Scams00:10:15
And I was involved in the initial exposure of what was going on.
And Tom Cruise was involved.
And all of a sudden, I was the focus of what is called a noisy investigation, which is when Scientology sends out its PIs and they go to your neighborhood, they knock door to door, they go to people you know and ask really crazy questions.
Like, have you seen him with weapons in the middle of the night, walking around, lurking, maybe with a shotgun or a knife?
And the person they're asking, The question of was sitting there going, What does that mean?
This person is, they do things like that.
And the purpose of the investigation is to discredit you.
And they want the people that they talk to to call you and say, hey, somebody came by and they asked me questions about you, questions about your mental stability, questions about you being involved in violent crime.
What do you have to say about that?
Well, I had moved from Arizona to New Jersey.
And at the time that this went on, I was living in Jersey City, which is right on the Hudson opposite Manhattan.
And my old neighbors from the townhouse development that I lived in in Phoenix, one of them called me up on the phone and said, Rick, I think Scientology is investigating you.
Oh, my God.
I said, why?
And they said, well, you know, these investigators were going door to door in our development asking about you.
And I remember that you told me a long time ago, because I was on the board, that this might happen and that I should be aware of it.
And sure enough, it happened.
What are you doing in New York that has caused them to do this?
And I explained it to her, and she was laughing, but it really wasn't funny.
It was an example of how Scientology intimidates people.
And that was what they were doing.
And that was one of my last experiences with them, though a more recent experience.
Happened in Washington, D.C.
I was retained by a client who was involved in a relationship with a woman.
They had a child, they were not married.
The woman became involved in Scientology, and then she changed the visitation for my client, and he had very little access to his son.
And so I was hired to testify in hearings regarding the influence of Scientology.
And the fact that this was a negative influence for the son, and that it would explain in part why the father, who might have been labeled a PTS or an SP, was not being allowed to see his son.
And in fact, he had not seen his son for two years.
And so I was scheduled to testify in a court in DC, and I was in the courthouse.
And I said to the lawyer I was working with, I said, you know what?
I would not be surprised if Kendrick Moxon, the lead counsel for the Church of Scientology, did not parachute in on this hearing and give us some grief.
And he said, Oh, come on, Rick, you're being paranoid.
And I said, Really?
And within minutes, the door of the court opened and in comes Kendrick Moxon.
You talk about short.
I'm a short guy, but he's short.
Shorter than me.
I don't know how tall he is, but I would suspect not much taller, if at all, than David Miskevich, who is quite small.
So, anyway, he comes barreling into the courthouse with a paralegal in tow.
And he affiliated with opposing counsel, pro hoc vice.
And then he was there to give me the business.
So, I had to be qualified and accepted.
As an expert on Scientology, which I have been in court previously.
And so he berated me for hours.
I mean, until the court shut down and the judge was like eye rolling and going, When is this going to be over?
And he's like screaming at me and carrying on.
And also that I would not be qualified as an expert on Scientology.
Subsequently, I was qualified and accepted by the judge and I would have testified if we had gone into a court proceeding.
But Scientology decided suddenly.
Or, I should say, my client's former girlfriend, mother of his son, decided suddenly that she would give him whatever he wanted in visitation and everything.
Why do you think she did that?
Wow.
When the lawyer called me that I worked with, he said to me, Rick, you're not going to have to testify.
And we have had a settlement.
I said, Oh, wow.
And he said, No doubt the reason that they settled was they didn't want you to testify in court.
Having been qualified, you would then testify, become a matter of record, and they just didn't want you to be an expert on Scientology in a court proceeding.
And later, I would put on my CV, which is online, I would put online that I was qualified and accepted as an expert in Washington, D.C. Next thing I know, I get this email from Kendrick Moxon saying, You were not.
Qualified in Washington, D.C. You are a liar.
You were not qualified.
Take that off your CV.
And I thought, what is he talking about?
So I knew I had been qualified and accepted.
So I then called the law firm that I had worked with.
And they told me that after the settlement, Kendrick Moxon filed a motion with the court to vacate me being qualified and accepted.
Now, that doesn't mean I wasn't qualified and accepted.
That means It's just vacated.
And the judge granted the motion.
Oh, really?
Yeah, because he did not want to go through a whole scene with Scientology.
It's not a negative for me as an expert witness.
It's kind of like you're at the, you're, you're, you go back to zero in that venue.
I mean, you have not been qualified or accepted, but you have not been rejected as an expert.
And so what Moxon wanted was to erase his failure.
To keep me from being qualified and accepted as an expert.
And I just, when he was crossing me, cross examining me in Voidare, I could not believe how intense it was.
He was just very, very angry.
And I had once been involved in a court proceeding with Moxon before.
And he was at a hearing, and I was there, and I had found out.
That his daughter had died tragically.
She was a Sea Org member, which is a full timer in Scientology, which Moxon himself essentially is.
He doesn't live in Scientology housing, but his whole life is Scientology as a lawyer, as I think he's an operating Phaeton level eight.
So he's gone all the way to OTA.
So I remember his daughter had died in a tragic accident in Hemet.
She had been electrocuted to death.
And I think that there may have been something that could have been litigated about the way in which the facility was managed, that she would have been electrocuted.
But needless to say, Moxon would never sue Scientology, and no one sued Scientology, and his daughter died.
And he was in court shortly thereafter, and I saw him in court.
And I went up to him and I said, Kendrick, I'm very sorry for your loss.
And he looked at me like with these blank shark eyes, is what I would call them.
And there was no emotion, there was no grief, it was just blank.
And I thought to myself, wow, he's really gone.
And that's what I thought at the time.
But that's how people are when they're so.
Intensely indoctrinated in a destructive authoritarian group or what has often been called a cult, their emotions can be so shut down, their responses to family, to old friends, they're not in touch with their feelings.
And they've been diverted through the indoctrination and the machinations of the group, which is, it's almost like they take away your humanity.
Rick Ross and Intense Indoctrination00:05:56
Yeah, it's very, it's very strange.
And it's, it's especially me, I grew up in Clearwater, Florida.
So I'm surrounded by all of this stuff.
And, and, you know, all of the big Scientologists around here are all multi, multi millionaires with these crazy big mansions and driving Rolls Royces around here.
It's, it's, it's wild.
It really, it's really wild.
Well, Rick, I really appreciate your time.
I want to respect your time.
We've just gone two and a half hours.
Tell, tell everyone listening and watching where they can find your book.
And learn more about what you're doing.
Well, the name of my book title is Cults Inside Out How People Get In and Can Get Out.
It's for sale in Audible paperback and can be downloaded through Kindle at Amazon.com.
They also can find an enormous amount of information at the website culteducation.com.
Culteducation.com is a database that I launched in 1996, and it is constantly under construction.
There, you will find probably the largest repository of documents and information online about Nexium.
There's a huge archive about Scientology.
There are hundreds and hundreds of groups and thousands and thousands of documents, all very carefully organized in an archival database structure.
And that's free to anyone that would go online to culteducation.com.
There's Also, a Facebook page for the Cult Education Institute, and people can also find me on Twitter.
Rick Allen Ross, not to be confused with the rapper Rick Ross.
That's so funny.
My wife saw on our calendar that I had a podcast with Rick Ross.
She's like, What?
You didn't tell me that?
I'm like, different Rick Ross, honey.
Cool it.
Well, at one time, I owned the domain name rickross.com.
Oh, no way.
And I found so many people were coming to that.
Domain address because they were fans of the rapper, that I decided to liquidate that domain name.
And Rick Ross, the rapper, at one point made an offer for it.
Oh, yeah, he lowballed me.
So, yeah, I ended up selling it to somebody.
How much did you sell it for?
Did you mind telling me?
Well, not a lot, but more than the ten thousand dollars he offered.
You would think you would be able to get at least six figures for that.
Well, I did, and uh, I wish that were true.
I did not, but I had to unload it because the rapper.
Being so famous and being such a celebrity, everybody was there was so much traffic and email and everything over, hey, listen to my mixtape and yo, how you doing and everything.
And I'm like, wrong Rick Ross.
And to this day, I get so much laughter and fun out of that because many times when I go through airport security or I go through security.
At a studio, a network news studio, or whatever, and they look at my idea and they go, Rick Ross.
And I've even had people say, I want to pose for a picture with you.
And I'll say, This is the real Rick Ross.
That is hilarious.
That is my given name.
That's my real name.
And Rick Ross, the rapper, took that name on as a kind of gangster name.
I don't know what his real name is, but it's not Rick Ross.
And it's patterned after a A drug dealer from California, a freeway Ricky Ross.
Right.
Exactly.
That became Rick Ross, the rapper.
But yeah, you know, I keep up with him because we share the same name, you know.
Have you guys ever spoken?
No, no.
There was once an idea that we should do a show.
There was some kind of reality show where two people with the same name, but completely different lives, would exchange places with each other.
And Rick Ross the rapper would become Rick Ross the cult expert, and I would become Rick Ross the rapper.
That's a great idea for a show.
Yeah, and we would do it for like a week, and it was bounced off of me, but it never came to fruition.
But I followed his career, he's had a really great run, and he bought Evander Holyfield's mega mansion outside of Atlanta for hardly anything.
Yeah, and he now is the proud owner of, I believe, the largest swimming pool owned privately.
In our country.
Is that true?
Really?
Yeah.
Yeah.
This huge swimming pool that is adjacent to the Evander Holyfield mansion, which is a huge mansion.
Have you ever been to Wing Stop?
No, I haven't.
Wing Stop is kind of like a fast food version of Hooters, but it's basically all they sell is wings.
And he's the biggest owner of the Wing Stop franchise.
So you should go to, I bet you if you went to a Wing Stop, they'd give you food for free.
Or they'd give you a discount.
Hey, if I could get some free food, I might do it.
Cool.
Well, I appreciate your time, Rick.
It means a lot.
And I'll include all your links in the show notes below.