Deprogramming

“On November 20, 1991, at 8:30 P.M., L.C.M. was violently abducted from her Boise, Idaho house. She had just put her four young boys to bed and changed into her nightgown. Then the doorbell rang. Peering through the front door peephole, she saw a person who appeared to be a pizza delivery man. Earlier that evening, she had ordered a pizza for dinner, but now she assumed the store had made a mistake by delivering a duplicate. She opened the door, she debated with the apparent delivery man that she had not ordered a second pizza, he showed her a forged receipt, then he abruptly grabbed her arm and pulled her towards a van at the curb. According to court documents, ‘L.C.M. yelled to her children to call the police. L.C.M.’s son R. tried to call the police, but was unable to because the deprogrammers had disconnected L.C.M.’s phone service.’ In front of her terrified children, L.C.M. was dragged out into the street and forced into a van by two men she did not know. She was thrown face-down on the floor, both men on top of her, with their hands over her mouth. Later court records showed she had bruises on her mouth, an arm, and a leg from her abductors’ rough treatment.” ¹

Who were those people? Murderers? Maniacs? Criminals of the child trafficking market? Numerous versions may appear in your head. However, it turned out to be much worse. Those were not just sadists and rapists, but also those who called themselves deprogramming experts and anticultists and actually committed terrible crimes under the guise of fighting cults and protecting people from dangerous sects.

A law-abiding US citizen, a mother of four children, was abducted and forcibly held in three different motels for a week by complete strangers just because of her “unacceptable” religious beliefs, as some self-appointed experts say. This horror beggars the imagination.

“The deprogrammers drove L.C.M. to a remote cabin, dragged her inside, and informed her that her mother had hired them to prevent her from taking her children to a Church Universal and Triumphant shelter in Montana. (It turned out that L.C.M. had no such intention; however, she had been contemplating a family move to Bozeman, Montana, almost ninety miles from the Church Universal and Triumphant headquarters).

At the cabin they were joined by a woman and another man. Then, the next day (with continued rough restraint) they took her to a motel. Here a second woman appeared, ostensibly to counsel her about her dangerous religious affiliation. Then it was another night drive to another motel, always with her face pinned down on the floor of the van so that she had no sense of where in Boise she was. Each day she was grilled about her religious beliefs in mocking terms, with only brief chances for meals or restroom breaks. Harangued, nervous for her safety and for her children, worn thin, and embittered that a middle-aged woman in the contemporary United States was being imprisoned for her religious beliefs by vigilantes, she still resisted. Then, on November 26, she was moved to yet another motel, continually resisting.

By November 27 the pseudo-therapists let her go. L.C.M. went to the police, several of the deprogrammers fled the state and only returned after government agents tracked them down in New Mexico; the kidnapping defendants tried to claim in court a “necessity” to abduct her for her own good, and they won an acquittal in a lower court. The prosecution appealed. Eventually the deprogrammers agreed to plead guilty to the felony of second-degree kidnapping after the Idaho Supreme Court overturned the acquittal. That was five years after L.C.M. had been kidnapped in front of her children.”

It is difficult to imagine the horror that this woman experienced. Before that, she had a calm and peaceful life with its joys and difficulties and a search for her personal innermost meaning. Professing her religion, finding solace and meaning in it, she sought to become a better person, to work on her flaws and develop in her personal relationship with God. In short, she was merely one of billions of believers worldwide, whatever religion she belonged to. However, anticultists perceived it differently.

Could she have thought that the way she prays or the way she likes to interpret the Bible would be a reason for maniacs to hold her hostage, subjecting her to psychological terror and physical violence for a week, while she didn’t know what was happening to her children, whether they were safe at home or kidnapped the same way she was? Did her mother order her grandchildren to be “deprogrammed” too? Would L.C.M. ever see them again?

Yet, it’s even scarier to imagine what the children themselves went through when they saw their mother being forcibly pushed into a van and taken away in an unknown direction. Stress, psychological shock and trauma are forever imprinted in the still fragile and susceptible psyche of a little child.

Returning to the excerpt from the article that we’ll repeatedly refer to, L.C.M.’s kidnappers were the so-called deprogrammers. Those were people who, for a certain amount of money (according to some sources, amounts vary from 2,000 to 27,000 USD) provided a service that the founders of deprogramming described as the “exit” of members from small religious associations or other groups branded by deprogrammers as “cults.”

A representative of any community, whether religious or secular, or just a person whose interests are displeasing to a “client,” is abducted, forcibly detained and repeatedly subjected to humiliation, insults, harassment, threats, physical violence, including beatings and rape by some individuals, usually at the expense of the person’s relatives, until the person eventually renounces his or her faith. ²

Given the dubious reputation of many deprogrammers, in order to disguise their criminal activities, they later adopted new euphemisms for their roles, such as “interventionists” and “exit counselors.” They used such a verbal wrapper because these terms can legitimately be applied to voluntary discussions between members of new religious movements (NRMs) and their families, conducted by a trained counselor, or can simply become a linguistic trick to cover the illegality of their activities.

Of course, in their sources anticultists do not say that the very “exit” from communities isn’t any kind of therapy or “heart-to-heart talk,” but actually a harsh torture of innocent people. The fact that this happens largely with the consent of family members is a separate moral issue. However, it was precisely anticultists who created a ground and conditions for people to take such inhumane measures against members of their own families. The main question is, how such a monstrous phenomenon as deprogramming, violating all norms of morality and laws, can even exist in a modern free democratic society?

To answer this question, it is necessary to understand how real sadistic maniacs, under the guise of protecting children and families from the allegedly harmful influence of religious groups they branded as cults, in front of the public and law enforcement, started carrying out their criminal activities. Let’s go back to the very beginning, namely, to the history of establishment of the official organization of deprogrammers.

USA, 1960s-1970s. The era of cultural change when society was undergoing significant transformations. Many young Americans started moving away from traditional religious institutions in search of new spiritual experiences. That time served as a ground for the emergence of many NRMs, both Christian and non-Christian. College students turned out to be particularly receptive to the new spiritual trends: like researchers, they sought to experience a variety of religious practices and ideas by joining alternative spiritual communities. ³ 

Unfortunately, not all parents of those teenagers and young people were ready to accept the new “non-traditional” views of their kids. ⁴ Many were unprepared for the fact that their children no longer professed religion that their families had practiced for generations. Neither were they prepared for the situation where their children no longer attended the same church they attended, while in conversations kids started using many unfamiliar words and terms more and more often. Parents were unhappy to find out that their children had joined popular spiritual groups which, in their opinion, engaged in strange ritual practices and criticized conventional social institutions. All of that gave rise to family conflicts, misunderstanding, and disagreements.

On that basis, along with the spreading rhetoric about “cults”, local so-called “anticult” parent groups began to be created, such as the Parents’ Committee to Free Our Children from the Children of God (FREECOG) ⁵, whose mission was to warn society about the dangers of “cults” and save young people from their “paws”, if necessary — by force. Eventually, those local groups established a national organization and formed the Citizens’ Freedom Foundation (CFF) that was later transformed into the Cult Awareness Network (CAN) . ⁶

In order to properly convey the scale of the crimes committed by this organization, first of all it is necessary to tell about the person who created it. Initially, FREECOG, which later transformed into CAN, was created by a man named Theodore Patrick. ⁷

Patrick who was called the “father of deprogramming” ⁸, a self-appointed “expert,” but in reality a semi-literate man with incomplete secondary education ⁹, a former truck driver, nightclub owner, participant in riots, and later an employee of public social services, became one of the most ardent American anticult activists and developed a solution, in his opinion, to the problem with American children, adolescents and youth and their participation in the so-called destructive cults. The anticultist proposed to replicate conditions similar to those in the Korean Communist POW camps and force people to change in the opposite direction through capture, control, disinformation, condemnation, and coercion. He called this “procedure” “deprogramming”! ¹⁰

We have managed to find a copy of CFF’s printed brochure, and here’s how they officially describe their activities: “Deprogramming and/or exit counseling is counseling a destructive cult member through conversations in a setting where he/she is given time to rest, relax and reflect on his/her objectives and goals. It should be followed by a period of rehabilitation.”

It’s hard to imagine how kidnapping a person, forcibly keeping them in closed rooms, beatings, psychological terror, insults and humiliation may be presented as counseling through conversations in a calm setting where they are given time to rest, relax and reflect!

Hiding behind such wordings, manipulating phrases and convincing people of its unfounded expertise, the organization put on a beautiful wrapper, and everything would have remained that way, but as they say, the Internet remembers everything. Yes, it’s not on the surface, but as it turned out, you can still find a lot of evidence of those who survived deprogramming, being incurably and deeply psychologically traumatized, while many even physically injured. These scars never heal, and no matter how much time passes, many of the victims remember the man, whom the media serving anticultism proudly call the father of deprogramming, as a sadist and maniac who once kidnapped them in broad daylight and took them away in a van to an unknown destination.

Going back to Ted Patrick, despite his lack of formal education and any professional training, hundreds of people hired him (usually parents of grown-up children) when they wanted to “deprogram” their family members. Patrick’s methods included abduction, physical restraint, confinement for days or weeks in constant presence with the victim, deprivation of food and sleep, prolonged verbal and emotional abuse, and desecration of the victim’s articles of faith. ⁸

Patrick justified his sadistic tendencies by the need to use brutal force to make people admit that they had indeed been brainwashed by so-called “cults” and to detain them until “they convince their overseers — sincerely or out of despair — that they have renounced their faith and have been ‘deprogrammed’.” ⁴

Such deprivation of grown-up children of their right to make their own choices in life entailed further spread of forced deprogramming, contrasting dominant parents with their adult offspring. Anticultists took advantage of relationships between parents and children, playing dirty on the family’s willingness to pay any money just to force their child to renounce his or her beliefs. Ted Patrick realized that this was his path and a “gold mine.” Framing his activities with a beautiful description, such as “counseling on how to exit destructive cults,” he organized a successful business of violent kidnappings that brought him sizable income, most of which, however, he later had to use for defending himself during countless litigations initiated by his victims.

Thus, having received criminal charges for his activities, Patrick turned his revenge against the “cults,” saving young “victims” on the order of anyone who could afford to pay his exorbitantly high fees. In 1976, Patrick claimed that he had personally participated in more than a thousand deprogramming cases. ¹⁴ By 1980, this number increased to over two thousand. ¹⁵

However, victims of the anticultist and his henchmen didn’t just include representatives of NRMs. In 1980, Patrick was paid 27,000 USD to deprogram Susan Wirth, a 35-year-old teacher living in San Francisco. He was hired by her parents who objected to her involvement with activist groups — the “Coalition to Fight the Death Penalty” and the “African People’s Solidarity Committee.” The process involved four deprogrammers (or “thugs” as Wirth called them) shoving her into a van and gagging her, after which she was handcuffed to a bed for two weeks, denied food and water, and repeatedly threatened. She was later released and after returning to San Francisco spoke out against deprogramming.

There was also another case of kidnapping on a non-religious basis. In October 1981, Stephanie Riethmiller was abducted by two men walking to her Cincinnati apartment with her roommate and significant other, Patty Thiemann, who was sprayed with mace. The two men made Stephanie enter a van where she encountered her father, William Riethmiller. Her parents sought to deprogram her from her lesbian relationship with Thiemann, which they believed was making their daughter more distant from them. 

Stephanie Riethmiller was driven to Cedar Bluff, Alabama, where she was held against her will and serially raped by James Anthony Roe, a friend of Patrick’s son whom Patrick referred to Riethmiller’s parents. Patrick also referred Naomi Faye Kelley Goss and a man solely identified as “Ray” to Riethmiller’s parents. In Cedar Bluff, Stephanie was held in a cabin where Goss “harangued” her about the evils of homosexuality. 

Authorities brought charges of assault, abduction, and sexual battery against Riethmiller’s parents, Patrick, Roe, and “Ray,” but all defendants either had their charges dropped or were found not guilty in April 1982. Allegedly, Stephanie’s parents paid Patrick 8,000 USD to organize Goss, Roe, and “Ray” to deprogram her. ^{18 19} 

In another case, several charges were brought against Patrick at once: second-degree kidnaping, unlawful imprisonment, conspiracy, and third-degree assault. The charges were brought in New York by a member of the New Testament Missionary Fellowship, who claimed he had been forced into a car while walking to a prayer meeting. Patrick asserted the fellowship member was “rescued.” ²⁰

A California woman called the police to report that Ted Patrick had tied her to a bed in a hotel room and left her blindfolded alone for two days as part of deprogramming. Her story was torture beyond anything previously blamed on deprogrammers. When the story hit the news, Ted Patrick’s already controversial reputation was dealt a blow from which he never recovered. People regarded him as an uneducated psychopath masquerading as a healer, no different from the alleged cult leaders he was fighting against. When yet another case came to court, Patrick lost a major lawsuit and his own freedom: the inventor of deprogramming was sent to prison for one year.

Unsurprisingly, Ted Patrick’s activities resulted in all sorts of criminal investigations against him, but he continued to fight off the cases that prosecutors opened against him. Even if he lost a case, he never intended to terminate his anticult activities. ²¹

Despite prosecutors’ allegations that he used illegal means such as kidnapping and locking followers of “cults” in closed premises, which is tantamount to violating religious freedom and a number of other democratic rights, after serving his sentences Patrick resumed his activities again and again and continued to forcibly deprogram people.

“I can see where he could do this once or twice and be told, ‘What you’re doing is wrong. Stop it’,” said Deputy District Attorney, William Bedsworth. “But he has been getting out of hand.”

After losing a crucial court appeal and expecting to spend nearly a year in prison, Patrick himself said the following: “There’s no use in me worrying about going on that little year’s ‘vacation.’ If I got to go, I got to go. I’ll be working in jail, too. I don’t intend to stop.”

Or here’s another quote from his interview for a newspaper: “I love the action. The hotter it gets, the better I like it.”

It is hard to imagine the degree of cruelty and inhumanity the man possesses, and what kind of so-called “noble goal” of saving people he pursues, to relentlessly continue earning money from kidnappings and bullying over and over again, despite numerous complaints, lawsuits, martyr tears of his victims, and their pleas to let them go free. Most likely, only psychiatrists would be able to answer these questions if they had a chance to examine him, since the activities of this anticultist and his agents went far beyond the generally accepted morality, ethics, laws and principles of humaneness. Would a sane person voluntarily support bullying and attacks on innocent people, thereby violating numerous laws? Only maniacs are capable of such things, who take delight in the very process of bullying and tormenting other people, at the same time receiving financial gain.

Despite continuous lawsuits against Patrick, under any circumstances it is absolutely insane that the man has committed more than two thousand kidnappings, while his punishment was only one year in prison. In fact, this happened in real life, quite recently, in a democratic country with democratic laws, which raises a number of questions: who was so successful in helping to lobby Patrick’s narrative that people are brainwashed by “dangerous cults,” and who benefited from his activities and the further spread of his network?

All trials against Ted Patrick and other deprogrammers merely ended with fines and a maximum prison term of one year. Meanwhile, for similar crimes committed not by deprogrammers, but by ordinary criminals who kidnapped people and inflicted violence on them, sentences are much longer.

Why did this phenomenon continue to exist for such a long time while Patrick was conducting his activities and the stories of victims who faced violence from deprogrammers were spreading, and why wasn’t it condemned at the national level?

There have been instances where Ted Patrick was also even supported by law enforcement sometimes while in the act of committing felonies. In Mia Donovan’s documentary “Deprogrammed” which chronicles the life of the serial kidnapper, Patrick recalls an incident where police were called to a hotel room after a neighbor had heard someone screaming for help. When the cops arrived, Patrick explained the situation, and despite the obvious false imprisonment going on with continued pleas for help coming from his subject, the officers sided with the deprogrammer and even tried to help him talk sense into his prisoner. ⁹

It is utterly paradoxical that an obvious sadistic criminal managed to build a business where he didn’t just receive huge amounts of money for abusing people, but also gained the support of law enforcement. However, this paradox ceased to be baffling once “The IMPACT” documentary revealed that anticult activists are not merely individuals obsessed with fighting small religious groups and various organizations. Instead, they represent a well-organized transnational criminal network. By employing manipulative methods to influence public consciousness, they recruit agents in mass media, law enforcement, and in many cases even in government bodies.

“Since their inception, these anticult organizations have repeatedly discredited themselves through anti-democratic and unlawful activities, which include deliberate spread of lies and slander, intentional incitement of violence, the use of destructive manipulative techniques, instigation of conflicts fueled by interreligious hatred, and targeted persecution of dissenting groups, sometimes even leading to physical assaults.” ²⁷

“This particular characteristic of the strategy employed by all anticult organizations reveals their actual goals and intentions. They do not aim for an objective analysis of religious organizations to identify potentially dangerous ones. Instead, they are focused on discrediting and shutting down any groups they choose as targets. They achieve this by violating basic rights and freedoms, employing a range of manipulative methods, smear rhetoric, and hate speech. Because their true goal is not the stigmatized groups they’ve discredited and persecuted, but the entire society that will be watching this public execution. Their goal is to carry out acts of information terrorism aimed at undermining society, destabilizing the situation in the country, and ultimately, destroying democracy.”

A clear evidence of this is the organization CAN founded by Ted Patrick, whose destructive activities led to harassment, suffering and abuse of innocent people, as well as persecution and even genocide of peaceful American citizens in Waco, Texas. Members of CAN were directly involved in this tragic event that left an indelible mark of grief and mourning in the hearts of Americans and the global community. The tragedy also marked the triumphant beginning of a broader plan to undermine democracy, not only in the United States, but worldwide.

Of course, a detailed account of CAN’s activities, its ties to the main ideological hub of anticultism — RACIRS (the Russian Association of Centers for the Study of Religions and Sects), as well as the role of its activists in brutal dehumanization and genocide of Chinese citizens, particularly followers of Falun Gong, require a separate article which we will soon publish on our website.

In conclusion, it is worth emphasizing the immense harm and sorrow inflicted on humanity by the phenomenon of deprogramming. This favored tool of those who disguise themselves under the banner of so-called anticult activity, but in reality operate as an international criminal network, has since spread across the globe, leaving its tragic mark on the lives of millions of people, many of whom, unfortunately, lost their lives.

The entire practice of deprogramming was born under slogans like “Let’s protect children!”, “Save kids from terrible dangerous cults!”, “Defend people from brainwashing!”, etc. Yet, in reality, anticultists themselves are the ones who abuse people and harm children. From the stories cited above, it becomes clear that for anticultists, “rescuing” means physical violence and humiliation, continuous psychological terror against children and adults, and ruined lives and families. It is hell on Earth, deliberately orchestrated by anticultists for their victims with cruel relish.

Today, their dehumanizing tactics target not only religious and secular groups, but also political figures. Their actions cause destabilization of the geopolitical situation worldwide and erosion of order in various countries. This is a matter of supranational security, and it demands intervention of the global community rather than isolated countries.

Tragically, the stories presented in this article are not the worst of what is happening. What’s even more alarming is that those sadists, child murderers and rapists are still at large. And not just at large. They are invited by TV channels, participate in popular talk shows, and their opinions are heeded as those of respected experts. 

How can law enforcement and the public keep allowing these individuals to speak and spread their deadly poison up to this day, after committing crimes against humanity on such a horrifying scale?

For you to grasp the sheer monstrosity of the situation, let us offer a vivid parallel: imagine witnessing a murder in a crowded square. Amid a throng of people, an innocent woman walking with her child is suddenly seized by a deranged maniac wearing a badge that reads “Deprogramming Expert, Fighter Against Dangerous Cults.” He is neatly dressed, groomed, and outwardly appears to be an educated professional. However, right before your eyes, this seemingly respectable maniac ties up the woman, brutally abuses her, rapes her, and all the while hurls insults at her with a spittle-flecked, rage-contorted face. He calls her a “cultist” and accuses her of having a “brainwashed mind,” screaming, “I’ll save you from this dangerous cult so it couldn’t manipulate you or drive you to suicide!” Or he yells, “Cults are a threat to our children!”

Then, after murdering his victim, he calmly puts the bloodied weapon into his pocket and walks away, ignoring the victim’s hysterically crying child. Meanwhile, the crowd and the patrolling police officers simply pass by, indifferent to the atrocity and failing to recognize that this horrific act is murder, terrorism, and genocide.

Through their inaction and silent complicity, the crowd and the authorities enable those maniacs to continue broadcasting their vile messages about the “dangers of cults” to wide audiences. We attentively listen, nodding respectfully at their so-called “expert” opinions, saving their videos to our podcasts and bookmarks, and sharing them with our friends and acquaintances. Meanwhile, we fail to realize that by doing so, we allow this deadly poison to spread in our society, killing us and our children.

Until recently, before the release of “The IMPACT” documentary, the unprecedented and absurd impunity of anticultists’ actions across the world was addressed by only a handful of people. There were isolated court cases, individual hearings, and lone fighters for freedom and human rights who stood up for those unlawfully branded as “cultists” and subjected to genocide. Society lacked the missing pieces of the puzzle that could finally expose the cruel, blood-stained truth about those who proudly hold their heads high, adjust their “expert glasses,” and call themselves anticultists.

Now, their crimes have been brought to light. Although legal accountability and punishment await every individual involved in anticultism, society and investigative authorities must summon patience because, unfortunately, we are yet to uncover many more tragic stories and horrifying facts about the atrocities committed by the anticult maniacs. Meanwhile, as independent journalists whose duty is to defend democracy and human freedom to the very end, we will continue our investigation. Piece by piece, we will unravel this tangled web so that society has a chance to know the truth.

Sources:

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