50 True Stories Of People Who Fell Victim To Cults

Me.

I was born into Jehovah’s Witnesses and lost everything when my lifetime of doubts were proved rational and I got out. Wife, kids, dog, job, and home all in nine months.

My living situation is improved (it’s been seven years) but that’s still seven years without the above. Two of my kids talk to me, but they live 900 miles away and the distance has k****d my mental health. I long to die of natural causes. I’m only 51.

I’ll be six years sober on the 14th, if I make it that far. Six more days….

EDIT: my mom abandoned me too, by certified mail with highlighted scriptural notes and in her immaculate handwriting the week I moved out.

She wanted to reconcile before she died of ovarian cancer. You don’t think I want to see her again, only in spirit?

My friend in highschool fell in love with a Jehovah Witness guy. Suddenly we couldn't be friends because I was a sinner for being bisexual. She spent every hour of the day reading about her new religion and telling everyone else that they were going to h**l. She tried to convert, but apparently you can fail somehow? She then found out she was pregnant with his child, but when he found out he moved to another province. She stole her parents car to chase him, but was obviously caught and returned home. She had her baby while still in highschool. I found out she k****d herself several years later.

edit: I don't remember her actually saying h**l, just that we wouldn't get to live peacefully with everyone who believes. See my more detailed response in the response to a comment below.

There was a girl in our study group in college who had recently become Pentecostal. She invited us to join one of the services, and I came along put of morbid curiosity. S**t was wild. They had a priest speaking in a fake language made vaguely to sound like Latin and he came around pressing a (almost certainly drugged) copperhead snake's head to the wrists of the audience. Didn't feel the need to go back after that.

She quickly started developing a bunch of wild beliefs, many of which were just spiritually repackaged racism and abelism. Stuff like black people not having souls and denying the h*******t because "God wouldn't allow that to happen."

Only a couple years later, she got out. Started dating a Mormon guy and converted to Mormonism. Sure it was trading one cult for another, but it was still a noticeable improvement from before.

The real kicker is that she somehow had the highest GPA in our study group. And she was legit very good at the assignments we worked on together. I cannot understand how someone that smart could also be that wildly out of touch with reality.

I know a few people that escaped Scientology, one was in my class at school. She used to work directly for David Miscaviage. They hounded her & her family. She was born into it though.

Me. i did. it was a new age yoga cult and me and my friends used to jokingly call it a cult because we weren’t aware of how much bad stuff was happening.

short version is i grew up in it, it was a big part of my life until i was 17, i left for a while, came back in my late 20’s and less than a year later the people closest to the leader came out and exposed his a***e and corruption which started a tidal wave of people speaking out.

They helped elect trump.

Yes, it was pretty sad. Began with some family alienation, and dude was rudderless for a few years, feeling lonely - and that's when cults appeal the most. Hey! We'll give you some love, some acceptance, some instant friends, some connection, some community, some sense of being needed!! What's not to love!!

and pretty quickly after that, getting them out is like pulling a tick from between a hound dog's toes. Not pretty! Very noisy! Lots of fighting! Limited success!

A friend got sucked into Ethical Altruism. It was popular among the Silicon Valley set. Blogs like Slate Star Codex, Less Wrong, More Right, etc were where a lot of it was hashed out. From the outside it sounds benign enough: using data and rationality to influence public policy.

This friend invited me into his discussion and "think tank" groups, but the language they used was very dense. Since they were all FAANG leetcoders, I figured my math illiterate a*s was too dumb to understand. Nope, it was just a cult using jargon to enforce groupthink. In the end I backed away because they were very up their own a*s. This friend ended up becoming a "rational anti-vaxxer" during COVID.

As time went on, these groups became convinced that their brand of rationality was the One True Way. This led to batshit offshoots like Eliezer Yudkowsky's AI apocalypse rantings, and techno-fascists like Curtis Yarvin and Peter Thiel. It's scary seeing this stuff influence our government now, considering I saw it's genesis.

My mom got sucked into Landmark Education. It’s an offshoot of Scientology. Same brainwashing techniques, weekend retreats, classes, etc but without any religious aspect or super sci-fi crazy s**t you hear from Scientology. She’s convinced it’s strengthened our relationship but what actually strengthened our relationship was her taking steps back from it.

Yes, it makes me very sad thinking about it actually.

Beautiful human being that I adored....full of life, free spirited gal, great singer.....took a bus across the US and back, and somewhere on her way home she got brainwashed into joining some kind of cult. I don't remember what the cult was, but its premise went pretty far against her lifestyle, so it never made sense to me.

They allowed her a few phone calls. She called me and a few other people to explain that it was "her choice to join" whatever that group was, and we never ever saw her again.
She was only about 22 at the time, which was nearly 30 years ago.

I hold out hope that she's found her way out of it. Or if she's still in it, that she's at least happy. If she called me today and asked me to drive 3000 miles to help her out of it, I would jump in the car and go get her. I have missed her greatly this whole time.

We call ourselves veterans, and the biggest cult members in our group are Marines.

My uncle is in the same cult as the Duggar family, and is very high up in it as well.

He and his wife fell into it in 2006 ish. They are both surgeons (one plastic, the other orthopedic) so they had plenty of money to throw at it every year. Because of their money they were tasked with hosting conventions, accommodating cult celebrities, and providing money to places like the creation museum. (Which they helped finance their Noah’s Ark expansion a couple years ago, and are partial owners.)

Growing up I was often dragged to these conventions, or to these parties where the extremely conservative celebrities were. I’ve had many dinners with Ken Ham, met Jim Bob and Michelle Dugger several times, and my uncle is best friends with Kirk Cameron. He often visits him. I can say none of those people are good people, and the cult has definitely lost it presence within the past 10 years.

My aunt is slowly pulling out of it to the point that she hardly stays home with my uncle, and his children don’t really speak with him because of the way they grew up. I can’t say I blame them, I only got a piece of what they experienced every day. It was horrible.

My father fell into the Bhagwan Shree Ragneesh (osho) cult full on the in 80s. Wild stuff.
Watch the documentary called Wild Wild Country on Netflix Unbelievable story. It helped me to forgive my dad by watching. He was brainwashed no doubt. 🙏🏼.

If you know someone who voted for Trump, you know someone who has fallen victim to a cult.

Had a family friend get brainwashed by a very conservative church, fox news, etc. Not really a cult but he went from a laid back guy who told PG-13 dirty jokes to a homophobic and racist person. Got fried from 6 jobs in an year due to him not shutting up about his views and skipping work and now moved to a southern state since he claims the state he lives in is too Liberal for him. He also got paranoid that me and my brother was out to get him when all I did was block him on facebook and told him that I don't want anything to do with him.

My mother in law. She fell into TM (transcendental meditation), and they spent decades controlling her, manipulating her to avoid her close relationships and taking a ton of her cash for classes (levitation was a highlight) , supplements and fees… she died separated from family, without any close relationships.

TM appears pretty benign from the outside, but the longer you’re involved, the more toxic and damaging it gets.

I was in a group therapy cult run by an extended family member related to Richard Gere. So was a friend and a friend of a friend in the same group, but my friend quit before I joined. The therapist was elderly, wore a jacket and had a goatee, and glasses, had a fancy name and an office in a central location. It was therapy, group therapy, talking about your feeling, being honest, getting life lessons, and learning about relationships and emotions.

The guy was a con artist and disordered person himself who did a great job hiding it. Instead of an actual legitimate therapy, he passed off his own disordered ways as the therapy.

For example, due to being a short unattractive guy, but having a big ego, he said he tried asking out one of the hot 'Swedish blondes' in college. They rejected him. Instead of accepting that he was climbing up the wrong tree and shooting way out of his league, he concluded that the girl won't date him because she is not Italian.

The group therapy life lesson he gave us that session was 'Italians date Italians, and Jews date Jews. That Chinese girl at work is perfect for you because you are both Chinese.'

Patients in his group idolized him and nobody contradicted or challenged him because he would get mad. People got used to thinking that everything he said was right or would just let it go.

One day, he encouraged someone to talk freely, then turned to them in an impulsive and unprofessional way and snapped at them, 'Oh, X, don't be snarky!' with disdain.

It struck as inappropriate and unprofessional so I left without doing the encouraged 8 week warning and mandatory good bye session.

Over the 3 years, he instructed us to do a series of bizarre socially harmful stuff to each other, to accept it from him, and to do it to others.

He told one guy in the group to tell his dying grandma with dementia that quote, 'She is scary and unpleasant', - which directly violates MA State Mandated Dementia Training and constitutes elder emotional a***e.

But he tied it to group therapy principles of being open and honest which he insisted would make the world a better place if everyone did it.

Coincidentally he called his group the 'perfect place' to work on things, but then also called his patients 'Pathetic' and 'Adult Day Care clients with nothing better going in their lives.'

He told use there was a girl with some serious mental disorders who quit his group 'without doing the work or being ready.' He looked down at her for being misguided and a quitter. A person in his group told us that this girl was going around and speaking at churches about her experience in life and in his group and how his group was a*****e and harmful to her. We thought it wasn't a big deal at the time, but now I see that he guided his patients toward social-emotional destruction of self and their support network by copying his harmful behaviors and doing what he taught like it is a healthy thing to do when it is not.

If you read the guidelines and learn to run an Attack Confrontation Group (which he covertly did), it is very easy to run a cult. You get all the key phrases such as love bombing and validating your clients, overcoming objections and resistance, bonding them, promising them things, etc.

My mother and her best friend fell in with a modern evangelical church back when I was in middle school. That meant us kids got dragged along for the ride. My moms friend felt pretty iffy about them quickly but it was popular in the community like every one in the development was going so they kept going but my mom fell in hard.

This was the type of place to sing rock Christian songs but also make the girls wear white dresses every Sunday and swear themselves to Jesus until they enter their husbands home. I get excommunicated for calling the teen your pastor a hypocrite. Dude taught abstinence and no sinful thoughts but kept the bible study room so cold girls in so cal during summer felt the need to wear hoodies to keep their nipples from showing. Dude would always give the girls shoulder massages while walking around the group, never touched a dude. My mom got baptized while all that was going on. Her friend nopped out and it was just her for a few months. I ended up getting labeled as the devil and kids girls especially told to stay away from me. Funny thing we moved to a different county my final year of middle school. One of the girls in my chemistry class recognized me from the once a month mass services, they held those at a public park I doubt they ever got permits, ended up getting my first HJ cause she wanted to see what the devil was like.

A version of the church still exists locally. They've gone through a few fractures and re-brands. The latest iteration got hit with a scandal when the current leader and his wive were charged s*x trafficking and r**e for having underage s*x slaves some of them started as fosters.

I dated a guy back in high school and whenever I would go to his house, the energy was always very very heavy. My friends and family members would come over and comment on it without me ever having said a word about it, so I knew I wasn’t crazy for it. My father and I are very intuitive and would have many conversations about how we think SA is happening but I never witnessed it. That is, until we broke up and I removed myself from the situation, and realized that SA is not blatant.

First and foremost, my ex was OBSESSED with his sister in a controlling, almost boyfriend-like way. At the time I understood because she was 14, sleeping around, and didn’t have a father figure in her life. I thought he was being a big brother until I later found out that when I left his house, he was SA’ing her. They were part of a church that always seemed to carry this same heavy, scary energy. The pastor seemed to be the sweetest, most gentle man, but he gave me weird vibes that I couldn’t articulate at the time. He would take battered, broken women in and “make” them call each other sisters. They’d be forced to sleep with each other and have drunken/d**g fueled orgies. All their kids had been SA’d and were SA’ing each other (my ex and his siblings). My ex’s mom was obsessed with the pastor, whom she called dad, and would constantly talk about how she owed him something and that a woman’s “job” is to make sure a man is pleased. The pastor’s wife had cancer and during treatment, my ex’s mom played wifey. The pastor would pick her up, drive somewhere, and she would come back with a dark cloud over she. She went “missing” for days and after coaxing it out of her, she was “trapped” in the basement of this church. She cried about how she pissed off the pastor and somehow got trapped, but couldn’t remember how.

She was also SA’ing her kids. I can remember times where my ex would want me to be as f*****g loud as possible so that everyone knew we were having s*x. We would fight if I wasn’t loud enough. He made me perform oral while his mom was laying in bed with us and she would giggle “while sleeping” and start rubbing herself “while sleeping.” She asked me how big he was, if he made sure I finished, gave me s*x advice.. all kinds of weird s**t.

So.. that being said. I believe they were involved in some weird s*x cult and I narrowly escaped. I’m a people pleaser through and through but d**n it if my dad didn’t teach me about listening to my intuition and not giving into overly religious b******t.

*editing to add because I somehow forgot about this- that guy later became a youth pastor and has preached about our relationship when discussing “the one.” I’ve had hundreds of people tell me this. HE. IS. MARRIED.

Me!

I was between my freshman and sophomore years in college (2004), taking summer classes because I found out the hard way that what I learned in high school was extremely limited (I was in a private school on a super-Christian homeschool curriculum).

I decided to quit going to church but my mom threatened to take my car away if I did that. So I asked an acquaintance if she knew of a church I could go to in the afternoon and there was one that met at 2pm on Sundays.

Long story short, I was in the International Churches of Christ for 17 years (if you watch The Way Down doc on HBO, that is basically my church, MINUS THE LADY WITH THE HAIR. That lady is an anomaly and I do not know her). I left in 2020. This network of churches controlled every part of my life: what I studied in school, who I dated and befriended, where I lived, who I married (fortunately I liked him anyway and we left together, we have 3 kids), my work schedule, my money, etc. and the crazy thing is, they never actually forced me to do any of it with legalistic language or anything like that, it was a lot of “I prayed about it and God said,” “did you seek advice (aka ask leadership for permission)?” “You’re spending a lot of time ____, seems idolatrous, here’s some scripture on why you should quit” like all this “guidance” to obey leadership but they said it was obeying God.

The many times I considered leaving I couldn’t, because they set it up in a way that I had isolated myself from my family, I had no friends outside the church, I had no money saved to move, no networking or social skills because my friends and jobs were basically curated for me…when we finally left all we had was each other and our kids. 5 years later I’m still very lonely but I’m making my way out of it.

We still run into people that are still in the church, and it’s really awkward because they’re instructed to shun us and not interact but you can see that they want to. Some people ignore that rule and keep in touch with us anyway but we can see that they only do so to try to get us back in the church.