Emily: Welcome to Trauma on Tap. Hi Andrea. I was told by one of our probably three listeners that we should do a little introduction so people can know whose voice is who. So this is Emily speaking right now. I am Emily. Welcome.
Andrea: and Emily says, welcome to trauma on tap.
Emily: I do.
Andrea: And then I say, I am Andrea. And I say, hi, Emily.
Emily: Okay.
Andrea: Okay. So I hope that helps. Anyone who is confused because I get it
Emily: What are we doing today? I know.
Andrea: I'm doing okay. I had a really chill day. Too chill. I forgot a medical appointment that I was so lucky to get scheduled. I called yesterday. They're like, we have an opening tomorrow. I wrote it down, but I forgot to put it in my freaking phone calendar. So they called me at, you know, 10 minutes after to tell me I missed my appointment. And that I had to reschedule. So I called to reschedule and they said they don't see any openings until April
Emily: Oh my god.
Andrea: So I was like well Okay, then i'll just go die
Emily: I did that yesterday. I was sitting on my couch, and I was engrossed in a audiobook, and I guess I lost all sense of reality. The next thing I know, my therapist is texting me, and she was like, are we still meeting today? And I literally jumped out of my skin. I was like, Oh my God, I'm so sorry.
Cause I, it was 30 minutes. I was 30 minutes late. Oh, whoops.
Andrea: Did you still do it?
Emily: Yeah. I signed on and we just talked for a little bit, but I felt so bad. Idiot.
Andrea: Yeah, I I felt so stupid because I know how incredibly lucky I was to get the spot the next day after I called and I and I messed it up. I ruined it.
Emily: Happens to the best of us.
Andrea: but other than that I am currently ADHD reading six books at once. I'm trying to stay on track for my weekly book reading goal. So hopefully I finish one of them by Saturday, so I can remain on track for the new year.
Emily: I’ll Say a silent prayer for you.
Andrea: Honestly, I think the audiobook is going to be the one that, that like actually is successful. But I also have two audiobooks going on right now.
Emily: Yeah. Well, as of Tuesday, I will be back in the world of Fourth Wing and reading Onyx Storm, so I can't wait.
Andrea: I put, um, Iron Flame on my list. I took it off the do not read because TikTok said it was really bad to Emily said it was good. So read it.
Emily: Yeah, and back to that, cause you had asked me last episode if I liked it as much as I liked Fourth Wing, and now I've finished it. I thought it was just as good as Fourth Wing. I don't know where all this hate's coming from. I don't know if it's like a bandwagon kind of thing, where one important creator said they didn't like it, and then everybody jumped on it.
But I didn't notice any drastic difference in the writing, and it was longer, but I don't know. I don't know where all the hate's coming from, I really don't like the ending. I did cry, but
Andrea: Girl, you sobbed. You posted it on Instagram and you sobbed.
Emily: I think I'm, I'm, I'm glad I waited to read it 'cause now I only had to wait like a week and a half for Onyx Storm.
If I had read it whenever it came out, I don't know when it was like last year, I would've been pissed.
Andrea: Yeah, it came out like last October or November because it, like, the first one came out in the spring and then six months later Iron Flame came out
Emily: mm-hmm
Andrea: Isn’t it supposed to have a fourth one?
Emily: Yeah. So knowing I only have to wait two weeks, um, I think there's supposed to be five,
Andrea: Ooh.
Emily: actually. So. But anyway.
Andrea: So one of the feedbacks from one of my listeners was that we should do a small intro for the case. But we've already started talking so we can tackle that on the next episode Sorry
Emily: Yeah. Oh well. What do you have on tap for the case?
Andrea: But real quick before before I get to my on tap Thank you for your feedback for our 28 listeners that downloaded off of pod bean, which was really nice
Emily: Oh yeah.
Andrea: I don't know how to look at numbers for our other platforms but we are now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and our original link of Podbean is still accessible
Emily: And our Instagram handle is traumaontap as well as on threads and you can find us on Facebook.
Andrea: Yay! We’re real boys and girls
Emily: I think that’s it. Right?
Emily: I know. We don't have any more social media. Right? Okay.
Andrea: Uh, no
Emily: I think that's it.
Andrea: Um,
Emily: And our email is traumaontap@gmail.com. So all pretty easy. Just all traumaontap.
Andrea: Yeah, which is so fortunate because it's a great name. I mean
Emily: I know.
Andrea: claps all around to us
Emily: We also decided that when we actually have listeners, we're going to call you guys our tots because that's the abbreviation of trauma on tap. So you guys are now our tots.
Andrea: Yeah, a fun fact for everybody is that I love potatoes So tater tots are actually, you know, a form of my favorite food a form of Samwise Gamgee's favorite food so Hello Tots
Emily: Your love language.
I also love potatoes, but like a normal amount.
All right. So what do you have on top for me? Sure you are.
Andrea: Um, alright, so this week on tap, I have the interesting and wild history of deprogramming. So
Emily: like a robot.
Andrea: It is in relation to cults.
Emily: Okay.
Andrea: So deprogramming people out of cult mentality. Deprogramming is a service of rescuing loved ones from the new religious movement groups that began to grow in visibility after the second world war. And new religious movements have been around for a long time, but there was a huge boom. And I think that also had to do with broadcast media and how easily accessible, different news sources made these large groups of people joining either Eastern religions or factions of Christianity. And the American population being able to see that was a lot easier versus, you know, in the 1800s, if someone started a new religion, you probably weren't gonna hear about it.
And you, you know, weren't going to lose your teenage daughter to run off to California to join it.
The increased visibility of New Wave Jesus slash Christian communes, which shunned the organized religion aspect of worship, shocked parents as much as the use of drugs, modern rock and roll music, and the rapidly changing world events. Deprogramming arrived in 1971 and seemed to be their children's saving grace. The act of deprogramming is categorized as confrontational therapy, which ranges from kidnapping, false imprisonment, physical restraints food and sleep deprivation, verbal, emotional abuse, and desecration of the abductees religious symbols, as well as, uh, violence for the sake of restoring individual mentality away from occult or court like organizations.
Emily: Wait, so, is this like evangelical?
Andrea: no,
Emily: okay,
Andrea: this is, um, think of like middle America, not overly religious people, parents
Emily: mhm,
Andrea: hiring kidnappers to kidnap their children out of their chosen religion, their new cult commune way of worship in order to beat the shit out of them and get them back into the quote unquote right mentality.
Emily: so, what were, do you have like some examples of those religions?
Andrea: Oh girl I got so many examples
Emily: Are you going to go into that? Oh, okay. Okay. Okay.
Andrea: We’re gonna cover a few different cults We're gonna cover a few of the different people that get abducted in our victims to the deep programmers We're also gonna hear the other side of the story And we're gonna mainly follow the person who started deprogramming and then we're just gonna go through the history from 1971 to now.
Emily: Okay.
Andrea: So, in an article by Jack McKinney, Jan Rogro, who recovered one of her two daughters from the New Testament Missionary Fellowship, says by the federal government trying to dodge this problem, Of proving in court that the organizations were persuading young adults to join by means of deception and flattery, the government is encouraging a lot of nice middle Americans to break the law. The American civil liberties union condemned deprogramming back in the seventies and eighties as a violation of the first amendment. But then we swing back the other way to the fact that many local authorities and actually the FBI did not interfere with these practices because the families were generally the ones that were hiring the deprogrammers. So, deprogramming and the methods employed raises the question, was the anti cult practice ever justified? In the documentary Deprogrammed, which is directed by Mia Donovan, she is a sister of one of Ted Patrick's victims, Matthew Donovan. Their father hired Ted Patrick to deprogram his son for the fear of his enjoyment of metal music and Satanic rituals and worship Ted Patrick
Emily: It almost sounds like, um, like, you know how when, years ago, when people would find out their kids were, like, gay or lesbian, they would, like, send them to, like, conversion camps or something? It almost sounds like that,
Andrea: So I never knew it was so dark I always I had heard of Ted Patrick before but in my mind He came off as someone that was doing the right thing Oh, but Holy shit. Like it gets, it gets intense in here.
Andrea: so Theodore Roosevelt Patrick Jr., known as Ted, was born in 1930 in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He is a high school dropout who only made it to the 10th grade. His only training is his knowledge of the Bible, and as he puts it, a PhD in common sense. He is known as the father of deprogramming and was nicknamed Black Lightning for his quickness. He is African American.
Emily: Okay.
Andrea: In the documentary, we see first hand video account of active deprogramming of a woman named Kathy Crampton in August of 1973, at which point Ted has been actively deprogramming people for about two years. His first deprogramming case had been in 1971 when Ms. Samuel Jackson reached out for help in finding her missing son, Billy. He had been involved with a group, the Children of God. This particular group was founded by David Berg in 1968 and had gone and has gone through many name changes. They have been deemed an authoritarian Christian cult in British court. And the court said that it allowed physical and sexual abuse of children and were known for targeting vulnerable people. Ted's son, Michael, and his nephew had also been contacted by the Children of God. They spent hours looking for these two teens. And when Ted realized that they had been detained in conversation by the Children of God, He realized that they were targeted on the beach in an attempt to convert them. They were minors. Ted describes the teens as psychologically intoxicated after the interaction. His son began to take interest in the Bible after the conversation, and that's when Ted knew something was amiss. So once Ms. Jackson reached out to Ted, Ted knew this was not a one and done. But that the cult did this to other youths, so he began to look into it into other new religion groups, doing research to the point that he decided on his own to join the cult for a few days. He stayed four days and three nights and said if he had stayed even a couple of days longer, he would not have left on his own.
Emily: Really?
Andrea: Oh, yeah. He's like, they were just so convincing.
Emily: In four days? That's crazy.
Andrea: So Ted began investigating and contacting other family members or families who had lost contact with their loved ones to the Children of God. From there, he began to formulate this method of deprogramming for which he will go on to become famous for. And to teach it to other deprogrammers in an organization that he later on goes to found. Shara Prokosh is a former member of the Christ family. she tells us that there is a Bible reference that was repeated to the children of God. If you are not ready to leave your father, mother, brother, sister for my sake, you are not ready for the kingdom of heaven. And my was Jesus. So they're using the Bible to convince these people to leave their family. So with that phrase in mind, believing that the second coming was upon them, many people began to cut off their elementary family. So their nuclear family. And they also, a lot of times, changed their name. And that did not help finding these people. You know, it did not make it any easier. So, in 1971, after his child was contacted on the beach, and after Ms.
Jackson asked for help, Ted founded Free Cogs, Parents Committee to Free Our Sons and Daughters from the Children of God. Free Cogs will go on to become CAN, the Cult Awareness Network, and the Cult Awareness Network provided information on groups that were considered cults, offered support and referrals for deprogrammers to which families could reach out. And by the mid 1980s, they were keeping tabs on over 200 groups that they considered cults that did mind control. The belief was that all members of these groups had been brainwashed. And from that starting point, their argument was that members could not possibly have chosen this way of life. So they have, at that point, no free will. And Ted says that, essentially, when the people joined the cults, they lost their ability to freely think and to use their constitutional rights. So the kidnappings and the deprogrammings were actually not a violation of rights. But instead, he was restoring their rights along with their freedom from the manipulation of the cults.
Emily: I don't, I don't like that you're making me like this guy right now because you already told me he's not doing something good.
Andrea: But can you see why I thought it was a good thing? I was like, oh yea, free people from cults!
Emily: Yeah, like, cause right, right now, all I can think is, wow, he sounds great. He's really helping and getting all these kids away from this terrible organization and what a great guy. Dun, dun dun
Andrea: Yeah. We're gonna, we're gonna bring it right back around, don’t you worry.
Emily: Okay.
Andrea: So, Mia, the director of the documentary, has seen firsthand the post traumatic stress effects on her brother from Ted's methods. Donovan's stepbrother bears the psychological scars of the five days he spent tied up in captivity in an effort to deprogram him from a cult that he was never in. Mia states in her interview with Elena Nicolaou, that as she grew up, she knew the deprogramming effort had occurred. But it wasn't until she read Ted's book Let Our Children Go, that she fully understand the deprogramming of her brother. As an adult, she can understand the methods. Had they been used for actual cults, but Matthew wasn't in a cult.
He was 14. Yes He was violent rage filled. He did drugs and he even admitted to having Abused animals to have killed some cats But he needed psychological, professional mental health intervention, not deprogramming. The abduction of Kathy Crampton that I mentioned earlier shows us video footage of this kidnapping. And we're going to follow Kathy Crampton's case throughout the documentary. So her mother joined the cult for a few days in an effort to establish contact and with the intention of luring her daughter into a car where Ted Patrick was awaiting. We see the forcible kidnapping. We even see her attempting to escape at a gas station two hours later, where she runs to the gas station attendant to tell them that she was kidnapped. She is then picked up and half carried back to the vehicle and shoved inside. Ted allows cameras to witness the interrogation that Kathy's mom and Ted subject her to. So at the 97 hour mark, Kathy requests Ted to talk about her civil liberties, given her position. With no physical way out and she asks if there's any action that she can take and it is at this point that Ted asks the camera crew to leave and then escalates to threats when the reporters tell him that they are there to see the entire process, but they will not intervene and that that had been their agreement. Kathy joins us in 2015, to let us know that after the reporters were kicked out of Ted's house, he took a knife to her throat and told her that she was not a spirit, but a human. And he would cut her, and if he cut her, she would bleed and die. And then proceeded to place her through an exorcism rite of seven to eight hours. Once again, this man has no training.
Emily: So he's just out here abusing people for fun, and being praised for it.
Andrea: he genuinely believes he's doing the right thing.
Emily: Yeah.
Andrea: Genuinely believes That these people have been brainwashed and that the only way is for him to essentially beat the sense back into them.
Emily: This man needs therapy.
Andrea: So during the exorcism, they would ask her to try and make herself vomit. In order to get rid of the demons inside of her She began to heave as instructed and then when she noticed that the room started to believe That the spirits had left. She was like, oh my gosh. Yeah, I think they did. They definitely left So
Emily: Was she like allowed to sleep at all during this time?
Andrea: I don't believe so because part of and they don't mention it for her specifically but in other cases they do talk about how they would just go and badger people and there would be multiple deprogrammers like in the case of Matthew Donovan, there'd be multiple deprogrammers that would come in and they would have slept, but then they would just shake him awake so he could not sleep and then after a few days days, they allowed him to sleep like an hour at a time.
Emily: so they're just straight up torturing these people.
Andrea: Yes, so like I said, Kathy is like, okay, these people are crazy. They think there's demons that have exited my body So I'm gonna go with it. Um, and you see
Emily: Performance of a lifetime.
Andrea: what?
Emily: I said, performance of a lifetime go.
Andrea: Like please stop torturing me
Emily: Yeah.
Andrea: You see her on the bed smiling and her mom is there this entire time her mother is there except for the time where Ted kicked the mom out as well as the cameras and held a knife to her daughter's throat, but the mom is there And she's so happy that the man that she hired has restored her daughter and she says you look so pretty Kathy, even though you're dead tired your eyes Oh my gosh, you look like Kathy again homegirl, Kathy escaped that night. She gone She earned their trust and the second she could She left
After escaping Kathy returned to Seattle and she sued Patrick .However, the judge ruled that her situation was comparable to that of a person rushing to save a child from oncoming traffic.
Emily: What?
Andrea: Yeah, she sued him and her mom her parents and he basically said no, you're not in your right mind. They had a right to do that.
Emily: And how old was she?
Andrea: Uh Shes, I don't remember but I
Emily: Was she a minor?
Andrea: 20
Emily: No.
Andrea: She was a legal adult
Emily: Oh, okay. She was an adult. Well, then she can sue them. She can definitely sue them.
Andrea: Yes in December of 73 Ted was acquitted of her kidnapping from the love family on the behest of her parents. And I actually I think earlier I said that she was part of the children of God. Sorry. She was part of the love family
Emily: Oh, that's a different cult?
Andrea: Yes.
Emily: Okay.
Andrea: And I'm about to tell you a little about the Love Family right now. So, now to put it in sort of a devil's advocate kind of position, because I, this whole time, I'm waffling between I like Ted and Ted's a fucking asshole. The Love Family was a religious group. A Christian commune that started in Seattle in 1968, that was known as the Church of Jesus Christ at Armageddon. The founder, Paul Erdmann, would go on to change their name to Love Israel, was the only husband in the community, and practiced group marriage. Kathy Crampton tells us that the first time she spoke to Love Israel, his voice reverberated inside her head, and inside her soul, the desire to be there was instant. She describes it as essentially love at first sight. When you meet the person you're going to spend the rest of your life with. Sexual relationships were not allowed without authorization from Love Israel, and neither was birth control. Women were expected to serve the men and bow when they entered a room in which there were men already present.
Emily: Oh my god, gag me,
Andrea: And they were not allowed to speak to unless they were spoken to.
Emily: I hate that.
Andrea: They would wake up members in the middle of the night to ask if God had spoken to them in their sleep. Which, as we mentioned before, sleep deprivation. In general, for cults, and we're gonna see this line up for both Ted's side and the cult's side. So just keep in mind some of these, group indoctrination methods. So in general for cults, they use some of the methods that we're going to mention, and even, you and I know, the military uses some of these methods. The main difference in my eyes from the military and the cults though, is that we are, we're there for the constitution, you know, we're there for the branch core values, uh, as the ultimate object of followership, not necessarily an individual. And while isolation does occur, it's not permanent. Like, you know, you're going for six to 13 weeks, depending on your branch. an article I came across that does a great job comparing the two, this article identifies 21 areas of overlap between the military and a cult. Um, it's written by a veteran, um, but he also goes on to touch on subjects such as multi level marketing schemes and like CrossFit. So there are a lot of different groups that use aspects of group indoctrination for their success. It doesn't necessarily make them a cult, but it does make them cult like. Um, and that article is, There are cult like aspects to life in the military, question mark, by veteran EA Sea. And C is spelled like the ocean. So the ultimate goal of behavior
Emily: Wait, what did she just say? Sea spelled like the ocean?
Andrea: yeah,
Emily: Wait, what?
Andrea: S E A. Sea.
Emily: Oh, oh my god, my brain just did not compute that. My brain was like, what the fuck did she just say? Okay, I'll shut up.
Andrea: So the ultimate goal of behavior control is to instill dependency on and obedience to the group ideology and the leadership. All major life decisions must be approved or dictated by the group or its leaders. Punishment and rewards are big in these organizations. A member who does not meet or get permission for major decisions will face punishment. Individualism is discouraged. And you must always put the group first. Rigid rules and regulations are mandated and enforced. Thoughts, feelings, activities for self or towards others are all reported towards superiors. So you're always watched. We also get into the physical alteration and visible compliance that makes it so quick to assess whether or not people are in parameters. So clothing, hair, housing, diet, are you fasting? Are you losing weight? Are you in need of something from us? Um, sexuality is also strictly controlled and regulated by leadership, sleep is withheld. Research shows that an adult should be sleeping 7 to 9 hours a night. Not one, Ted Patrick. Not one.
Emily: Yeah, definitely not one.
Andrea: Members are also financially exploited, manipulated, or made entirely dependent. Members are encouraged to work, and turn over all of their wages to the community. Or, if they already have money, they're encouraged to donate all of their money to this organization that they have joined. There's also a discrepancy between information and what level a member is, uh, in terms of, are they part of the inner circle? Are they a new recruit? So how involved is going to correlate with how much do they know and see?
I take that in lower level of involvement to be a vast majority of the people that did join these groups. Especially in like the 70s, because there's so many people flocking to California, to Oregon, to Washington, that there's no way that they were all top tier level and getting information directly from their leaders. The more people that got recruited, the further away they got from the leadership, the further away they got from information, and the more they were controlled in terms of easy to control things, such as, know, how do they look, what are they eating, where are they sleeping, and monetarily. Part of Ted's method was to expose the lies and manipulation methods and the trickery to which he believed people had been subjected. He would ask people simple questions like, why does God need you to write your leader a check from your bank account? Why does god need money? if the bible was to tell you to multiply, why can't people in your, in your religious group have sex? So he would invite the abductee to question the teachings that they were being told by their community in order to draw some sort of semblance of critical thinking from the kidnappee. Over the course of his deprogramming career, Ted was charged multiple times with various crimes. In 73, he was acquitted of assault charges pressed by Daniel Voll, who belonged to the New Testament Ministry Fellowship. In 74, he was sentenced to a seven day jail term and a $1,000 fine for the false imprisonment of Dina Jones and Kathy Marcus. Their parents hired them because they thought that they were in a Satanic cult. In 75Wendy Ledger alleged that for 14 hours straight, Patrick attempted to deprogram her after her parents tricked her into visiting and then handed her off to Patrick. She
Emily: Wait were those women? Were those women in a satanic cult?
Andrea: no.
Emily: Oh, okay.
Andrea: Mm-hmm. So this is also a lot of, there's no verification. Really? Because Ted doesn't have a background in religions. He didn't go to college to study theology. He just believes in Christianity and doesn't really take a time to learn or to look into Eastern religions. So a lot of it is just I don't agree with it and your parents hired me so you're gonna get kidnapped.
Emily: Oh my god.
Andrea: Um, so Wendy was only allowed her release after she signed a document where she authorized future forced removal if she ever went back to the unification church. Girl she went back. In May of the same year, Patrick was convicted of imprisoning a woman by the name of Joanna Bradley. She had been a member of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. He was sentenced to a year of prison for that case. And then he was also charged for false imprisonment of Richard and Alan Meze in, uh, 75. We’re not even halfway through his charges.
Emily: Oh my god.
Andrea: In 1978, Leslie Weiss pressed charges against Patrick and a man named Albert Turner, one of the enforcers that Ted knows, or knew, for assault, battery, and false imprisonment. The judge in that case, you'll never guess, found no wrongdoing on the behalf of Ted Patrick.
Emily: Like, wasn't this around the time where the satanic panic started?
Andrea: Yes.
Emily: Okay,
Andrea: But once again
Emily: that makes sense.
Andrea: these are not all related to satanic fear. Some of them were, but some of these are genuinely people who joined religious communes, whether or not they were or were not cults. Um, or have or have not turned out to be cults the future. You know, maybe they weren't then, maybe they evolved, but they were preaching Jesus. They were not preaching satan, like satanism. So
Emily: Yeah, that's true.
Andrea: you can’t even really use that as an excuse for what this man is doing.
Emily: I guess I meant more for the judge. Well, I was just trying to think of why would the judge like be willing to say that this, what he did is okay.
Andrea: Well, I think because a lot
Emily: But yeah.
Andrea: of these people were very young, they were college age students, like 18 to 24 years old is kind of the range of people that I saw with the exception of one woman in the, um, I'm going to bring her up later. She was 35. Um, but they were all really young, so
Emily: Okay.
Andrea: I think maybe that that could be a big part of why the judges were siding with the parents because the parents were doing it out of the well being for their children,
Emily: Or so they thought.
Andrea: or so they said. So this next case is one in particular that I find really fascinating. So his name is Daniel Eyink, he was kidnapped by Patrick, hired by the parents in 1979 to be deprogrammed. However, a judge later goes on to rule that Daniel was of sound mind and was exercising his free will by joining a religious community. He dismissed the order of custody that his parents had requested and had been granted by a different judge. They were also requesting a conservatorship of this man. He appears in the documentary. He talks us through his ashram's spiritual commune activities. tells us that most of the time at the commune, they're watching SNL.
They're doing meditations. He was working at a commune associated restaurant. He had a stable job. He had a girlfriend. For all intents and purposes, he was living a normal life. Except that he stopped going home for holidays and eventually he dropped out of college He feels that the main catalyst for the kidnapping was that his parents did not have the understanding That even though he was a high performing high schooler, he was a valedictorian of his high school class, just because he no longer wanted to lead that life in academics didn't mean that he was in a cult, he just kind of was burned out so
Emily: Yeah if, um, dropping out of college and not going home for the holidays was the requirements to be kidnapped, I feel like the entire millennial population would be kidnapped right now.
Andrea: A lot of people, I mean, Gen Z's has a strong, you know, leading of not going towards college and focusing more on trade schools because college has been so warped from,
Emily: that is such a, that is such a boomer thing to do. Like, my kid's not home for Christmas. We need to kidnap him.
Andrea: or, you know, this low value life, according to them, doesn't mesh with what we expected out of him. So he must be worshiping Satan.
Emily: Yeah,
Andrea: So he's in a cult.
Emily: boomers.
Andrea: So Daniel tried to escape after four days, but he was not successful. And he was physically assaulted. After that, he said that he played the game that Ted wanted him to play and went along with deprogramming. He was flown from Cincinnati to New York City to separate him from the ashram. And In order to help break him from his psychological kidnapping, they changed locations a lot as part of their M. O. for the deprogrammers. However, Daniel knew people in New York City, so after he had earned the trust of the deprogrammers, he asked to go outside for a cigarette break.
He was not supervised. He smoked a cigarette, and he left. He was like, I'm gonna go hang out with my friends in New York. I'm not gonna stay here for this bullshit. So then he left,
Emily: What? They just let him go smoke a cigarette?
Andrea: Yeah!
Emily: Oh my god, what kind of, what kind of
Andrea: They thought that he, he
Emily: kidnapper is this? It's the worst kidnapper ever!
Andrea: Well,
Emily: My
Andrea: you gotta
Emily: god.
Andrea: they're doing it for the sake of his mental stability, right? Because they think he's crazy and he seemed to be okay now. So
Emily: Oh my god. That's funny.
Andrea: They let him have a cigarette, nicotine is important, okay? Um,
Emily: It was back then.
Andrea: it was back then. But, okay. So he escapes. He goes back to the ashram. He is kidnapped again. But this time
Emily: Oh my god!
Andrea: yes,
Emily: Are you serious? Guy!
Andrea: he was held for 55 days.
Emily: Oh, why did you go and get kidnapped again?
Andrea: Um, so his parents were like really gung-ho about getting him back, really gung ho. I think he said that his dad, like, basically went and drove his business into bankruptcy for all the money that they were spending trying to get him to renounce the ashram.
Emily: That's insane.
Andrea: Because they’re paying Ted. They are paying him a ton of money to go break the law.
Emily: I can't believe I've never heard of this guy. I'm on his Wikipedia, but I just, I can't believe I've never heard of him. You know, he's still alive. He's 95.
Andrea: He is still alive
Emily: That's, that's crazy. Anyway,
Andrea: It’s during the 55 days of his second kidnapping where he makes some more attempts to escape he fails But he
Emily: no more cigarettes?
Andrea: I'm sorry,
Emily: I said no more cigarettes?
Andrea: zero cigarette breaks.
Emily: I shouldn't be laughing, but.
Andrea: You’re gonna get a patch motherfucker.
Emily: I know.
Andrea: So he said that it was during that second event where he felt that his connection to his parents was completely beyond repair. He knew at that moment that the ashram was his family because the ashram never hurt him. And today, he is part of a different ashram and he still goes and he meditates, he goes on retreats throughout the year, living a normal life.
Emily: I bet, I bet his parents are so mad. They're probably so pissed. If they're still here.
Andrea: Once again, like, the judge was like, get off his dick, you cannot have a conservatorship, he is not in your
Emily: Yeah.
Andrea: custody, he is not a child. So, 55 days goes by, right, his parents take him to court. And they're like, He’s gonna tell you about this ashram who kidnapped him, and has been hurting him, and has been exploiting him, and they have him doing free labor at this restaurant. And Dan gets up there and is like, yeah, my parents just kidnapped me, uh, twice. For like 60 days all together. They beat the shit out of me. I would just like to go worship Peacefully and fucking meditate and I have a girlfriend like I am living a normal life
Emily: Yeah.
Andrea: And the judge is like, yeah go do you boo like fuck your parents.
Emily: Well at least one judge has a good head on his shoulders.
Andrea: Yeah
Emily: Because my god.
Andrea: So that's Dan in 79. So in 1980 Ted was once again charged this time with his first felony for conspiracy kidnapping and false imprisonment. He was sentenced to a year and a $5,000 fine in connection to the deprogramming of Roberta McElfish. He remains adamant that he never even met this person, nor was he involved in this particular kidnapping. He claims he was in San Diego, in court actually, during the entire kidnapping, and to this day he believes that the kidnapping of Roberta was a conspiracy by certain cults, certain high powered, big money, still alive today cults, that forced to try and force him to stop. So he went into $100,000 in debt for that one case.
And,
Emily: Well if um, if he was in court can't they just easily prove that?
Andrea: yes and no.
Emily: Okay.
Andrea: Because as I said, he was charged for conspiracy. So what Ted and the Cult Awareness Network would do is they would get calls from parents and then they would farm those calls out to deprogram
Emily: Oh.
Andrea: across the country. So it was kind of like take out the big band, take, take down the organization mentality.
Emily: Yep.
Andrea: So
Emily: Because he was the ringleader. They were charging him for
Andrea: He’s the founder of the, of the network. Now the
Emily: Okay.
Andrea: Network ended up like kind of back from the deprogramming. And they said that they did not condone the practices of deprogramming. Um, But, on the downlo, you could still call them. You could still get your kid kidnapped. Like, they would freely give you out these people's information.
Emily: Oh my goodness.
Andrea: Yeah. So, he later violated his parole. Uh, for that case, and then was sentenced to three years in prison.
Ted was in and out of prison. And he will freely tell you in that documentary, with a smile on his face, he would get out of prison and immediately go work a case. Like, same day, he was gonna go save someone’s child.
Emily: Probably because he thought he was like a martyr or something. Like he thought he was this like hero.
Andrea: Yeah, and like, my thing is, once again, there are some really shitty organizations and actual, now that we look back in the 70s, actual cults that he was rescuing people from. And the majority of them did not go back. The majority of them stayed with their families. So like, am I happy that there were success cases?
Of course. But man. They, they got manhandled for their fucking freedom that they didn't even ask for.
Emily: Yeah, and I feel like uh, maybe they should've put a little bit more time into doing their research before they just kidnapped someone. Like, made sure they were actually in a cult, you know?
Andrea: So,
Emily: Instead of just listening to the parents.
Andrea: well, I mean, that kind of just goes against. who Ted Patrick is as a person, because his whole thing was strike fast, was the second you have anyone report that their kids were kidnapped or part of a cult or joined voluntarily, whatever, it didn't matter where they were, like you had to go and extract them, like he was running a paramilitary troop situation. Like there was no time to research in his mind because the longer the person was there, the deeper, you know, the grasp upon the clutches upon these people's souls and minds from that cult,
Emily: That's just crazy because, like, some of them weren't even in cults.
Andrea: some of them were not in cults,
Emily: Can you imagine?
Andrea: But there’s also some that were
Emily: Can you imagine you're just hanging out and someone comes and kidnaps you and accuses you of being in a cult and you're like, I have no idea what's going on. Oh, God.
Andrea: girl I am in constant fear of getting kidnapped as is like you and I are both tiny women
Emily: Same.
Andrea: Like
Emily: I know.
Andrea: If you kidnap me and then you also start yelling at me to tell me that i'm in a cult i'd be so fucking lost
Emily: I'd be like, I don't know what's going on. I just read my books.
Andrea: I swear I only like metal music. I don't worship it.
Emily: I would be like, do you mean Taylor Swift? I'll stop doing the heart hands, I promise.
Andrea: I'll stop watching my grainy live streams. I promise.
Emily: Oh, I miss them.
Andrea: No more Easter eggs. I promise. Um, by the 1980s, Ted estimated that he had been involved in over 2000 deprogrammings. With the vast network of deprogrammers
Emily: So, 2, 000 kidnappings.
Andrea: Yeah,
Emily: Okay, that's a lot of people. Wow,
Andrea: yeah, um, with the vast networks of deprogrammers, the CNA enlisted and referred the actual, the actual number is unknown because that's just what he was involved in. Then there was that DL list that the organization kept. Now that list was referenced by the FBI because at this time, like you mentioned there was actual cults happening, right?
You had heaven's gate, you had, um,
Emily: the Manson family.
Andrea: the Manson family, you had Waco. So they were also In a, I guess, legal way and helping out law enforcement. Um, so there's no actual record of how many events of deprogramming were done. In 1980, Susan Worth was a 35 year old teacher from San Francisco. So she's our first adult adult, in her thirties that we have heard of. And she had been involved with coalition to fight the death penalty and the African people solidarity committee. Her parents disagreed with her involvement in these organizations. And so Patrick was paid $27,000 to recover her. That is in today's money. They paid him eight grand back in the day.
Emily: Oh, so you’re saying the $27,000 is today's money.
Andrea: Today's money,
Emily: Okay, that's a lot.
Andrea: She was kidnapped by four men who shoved her into a van, gagged her, deprived her of food and water, handcuffed her to a bed. Mentally fucked with her, for 31 days. Her mother was present.
Emily: Are you serious?
Andrea: Yes.
Emily: That's not good.
Andrea: She was eventually released and although she denounced deprogramming as a, you know, as a method for breaking cults. She did not press charges against Ted or her parents.
Emily: Really? I would've
Andrea: Okay, so this is gonna piss you the fuck off trigger warning for our listeners for conversion attempts and rape. So one of the most disgusting incidents of the deprogrammer events, when Stephanie Reithmuller was kidnapped on the orders of her father because she was a lesbian.
Emily: I knew this was coming. That's why I said it in the beginning. Reminds me of like, conversion therapy.
Andrea: The deprogrammers, showed up. Not because of her religion, not because she joined a fucking cult, but because of her sexuality. When they shoved her into the van, her father was there.
Emily: Stop.
Andrea: From Cincinnati, she was driven down to Alabama. Where she was raped four times by a friend of Ted Patrick's son.
Emily: Was her father there for that?
Andrea: Her mother was present.
Emily: Are you.. what?
Andrea: Her mother was present to try to rape this woman into heteronormative, like standards,
Emily: They should be in jail.
Andrea: She brought charges against her parents and Patrick
Emily: Thank god.
Andrea: Um, so before that, um, so she had been kidnapped her friend witnessed it. I think it was, it might've been her partner. Um, I didn't take note of that. Sorry. Filed police reports, the police were kind of figuring out what was happening. They were getting close. So the mother basically cut loose the deprogrammers before everyone got arrested so that they wouldn't get arrested. And that's why her torment fucking ended. Um, and her mother basically was like of the mentality four times is enough to have turned her, surely,
Emily: Are you saying they raped her four times?
Andrea: yes.
Emily: And her mother's
Andrea: And her Mom’s mentality was, was that four times should be enough
Emily: that's horrific.
Andrea: So she brought charges against her parents, against Patrick, against the thugs, but they were all either acquitted, or the charges were dropped. She did file a civil suit later for four million dollars. And
Emily: How do you acquit someone for that? What do you mean? They just didn't they just They were like, nah, we're fine with that. What year was this?
Andrea: uh, 1981.
Emily: That's too that's no. I mean, no year is acceptable. But we're talking about 80s.
Andrea: Yeah. She filed
Emily: That's insane.
Andrea: a civil suit later. But it was also dropped after she did not report or show up to court for her court hearing on that case.
Emily: That poor woman. I can't, I can't even imagine.
Andrea: With her parents fucking there. So Ted
Emily: I don't have any words.
Andrea: yeah. He went on to court, uh, again. In 1983, for the violation of the civil rights of Richard Cooper, and he was ordered to pay $50,000 in damages. However, after years of court battles, as we have previously listed, he was unable to pay immediately. Ted Patrick, over the years, has been sued multiple times. Five times alone by the Church of Scientology. And during the Reagan administration, many judges stopped adhering to precedence that had allowed parents to kidnap their kids back from cults. And you actually started to see legal traction in the court system, and they began to side with the new religious groups when they would take a case against Ted for the violation of their First Amendment right of freedom of religion as an organization, as well as suing them, suing Ted on behalf of their members, because Ted is violating their first amendment right by kidnapping them, whether or not they were coerced or brainwashed into these organizations around this time of the 1980s in the Reagan administration, you started to see judges basically say this isn't your fucking place to make that call.
Emily: Yeah, I could understand, like, wanting to help your child if they're a minor, but this is not the way you do it. Like, there are better ways to do that.
Andrea: Correct. So the legal bills that came from the violent deprogramming eventually drove the cult awareness network into bankruptcy after being ordered to pay 1.8 million to the church of Scientology and the church
Emily: Did the Scientology, did they, like, sue him, what did you say, like, five times? Is it because he tried to kidnap their members or something?
Andrea: for defamation, actually, there's a,
Emily: Ohhh
Andrea: one very particular like instance where the church of Scientology realized that Ted was shit talking them in the media and saying that like the church was one of the biggest cults around because they took all this money from their members and like cut off their members from their families and stuff.
Emily: I mean,
Andrea: Allegedly.
Emily: I don't want to like,
Andrea: I
Emily: I don't want to agree with anyone, but if the shoe fits, I mean.
Andrea: Allegedly. It allegedly fits. Um, so the church, I mean, they had a shit ton of money where they were just constantly taking CAN, the organization to the fucking court. Um, and eventually the network just could not pay the legal, the legal fees, plus what they were ordered to pay in reparations. The organization was actually bought out by a Scientologist who kept the organization in business, uh, in order to decimate the truth, disseminate, not decimate, disseminate the truth about religions. So they kind of try to use it as a positive spin and would like publish information about the new age religions that Ted had effectively like slandered.
Emily: So they purchased Ted's organization, is what you're saying. And then flipped it on its, okay.
Andrea: Yup. So, nowadays the deprogramming from the 1970s no longer exists in relation to cults. Largely in part because of the high legal cost that resulted from the kidnapping aftermath. Today, we have exit counselors that help families stage interventions that involve no violence and require the participant's consent, as well as their willingness to work with the exit counselors for a few days. Thought reform is still seen in many terror organizations that we encounter today that follow a charismatic or chosen leader, such as ISIS, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, QAnon. Many of the new religion groups still exist in some form or another. And, well, Ted Patrick and the other deprogrammers have kind of fallen back into a quiet life, no longer out in the streets, striking against the cults, like Black Lightning. So what are your thoughts?
Emily: He just disappeared into the ether and just lived a normal life. Like he just stopped. You think he really stopped?
Andrea: Um, I mean, at that point, I think he just didn't have the money to do it anymore, honestly.
Emily: It's one thing to want to save people who are actually in cults, but when you're using violence, and rape, and horrible methods to do what you're doing, I don't see how you can justify any of that.
Like, if you're justifying that, something is wrong with you.
Andrea: Yeah, and I will say for the case of Stephanie, he was not present for, for that. He physically was not there. Um, for the rape. And the attempted conversion of, of Stephanie, Riethmiller, however, it was his network, you know, it's still employed methods that he championed, that he had started and made mainstream. This was the first and only case that I saw that had rape in it. Everything else seemed to have been more along the lines of beating the shit out of people. And, um, in, in a way, brainwashing. Like, he was doing brainwashing. In order to undo the alleged brainwashing of some of these cults, right? Because he was doing sleep deprivation, food deprivation, he had them in isolation. He didn't think that these people were worthy of, you know, their first amendment rights of, because he just thought they were robots. So yeah, weird.
Emily: Yeah, that's an interesting, I kind of want to read more about, I've never heard of this guy. I've never heard of any of, of his network or any, any of this at all. So
Andrea: It
Emily: I kind of,
Andrea: it is a dark, dark, deep hole because I was doing research and single turn I would take, Oh, there's another cult. Oh, there's another famous deep programmer. Oh, the church of Scientology. Oh, you know, the Krishna's, the children of God, there's so much more that goes into, this particular story, but I had a personal positive mentality of this guy that I had kind of sort of heard of in the margins of a rescuer. He was a knight in shining armor. He was there to help people out. And then when I started doing this research, I was like, what do you 14 year old for fucking listening to metal music?
Emily: the documentary you're referencing, is it the movie deprogrammed?
Andrea: Yes. 2015
Emily: Okay. Yeah, I was just looking at that. Where did you watch it?
Andrea: hi, I highly recommend that. Um, I think it was very informative. It was very interesting to see the actual video footage of the people that I spoke about. So you see Dan in there, you see Kathy, um, you see the violence that happened when they got taken. it's very peeled back it shows you very clearly of these interrogations On the other hand, I do think it was pro Ted Patrick
Emily: Really?
Andrea: More than what my story was.
Emily: It says you can watch it on Tubi.
Andrea: Yeah, that's how I watched it. You can just click on it
Emily: Okay.
Andrea: I watched it on my laptop.
Emily: Yeah. Interesting. I don't know how you could be pro this guy, but okay.
Andrea: I mean, it was more sympathetic. I don't know if it was necessarily pro
Emily: Yeah.
Andrea: But it was more sympathetic.
Emily: Okay. Interesting. I'll have to give it a watch. I'll add it to my list of 7,000 things I have to watch.
Andrea: I'll add it to my list. Well, I guess I don't have to add it to my list of six books. That’s probably why I'm a little behind on my, on my book goal
Emily: Yeah, from researching this.
Andrea: we didn't even start talking about the legal dilemma of the First Amendment violations. You know,
Emily: Right, yeah.
Andrea: I mentioned it briefly towards the very end and like the overall question, do parents have the right to kidnap their adult kids?
Emily: No. I mean, I don't think any person should be forced into or out of a religion that they're choosing. I mean, like, our country was founded on freedom of religion. So, if you're choosing a religion, that's your right. Like, you can practice as long as you're not harming anyone else.
Andrea: But what if you are being harmed? What if they are harming you? Like,
Emily: I know, it's tough, like, you mean, like, just by being in a cult, you're being harmed?
Andrea: no. What if the group that you joined is a bad cult? What if it's Heaven's Gate
Emily: Well, that's what, that's what I mean, like.
Andrea: What if it's Jonestown? And that's another thing that happened during this too, is like Jonestown. So, you know, you have hundreds of people literally fucking drinking Kool Aid, commit mass suicide. So the general public's opinion of Ted was do whatever it takes to prevent that. And I think that's one of the big reasons why he got away with it for so long, too was
Emily: Right. Yeah.
Andrea: you’re having the Manson family, you're having the Branch Davidians, you're having, like, really public shit gone wrong cults that when you kidnap Daniel from his ashram where he's just trying to chill and meditate and watch SNL
Emily: Yeah. That's, that's what, when I said, like, you should be able to practice whatever religion you want as long as it's not harmful, like, peaceful religion.
I'm not a religious person. So I don't understand a lot of it, but I think freedom of religion is something that this country was founded on, but, but that means freedom to practice, not freedom to force other people to practice what you think is right.
Andrea: But yeah, I mean, there are so many cults that I want to go into in the future and definitely cover more in depth because there's so much more happening in the world of cults. Not just the deprogramming side of it, but also the harm that happens within each one of these individual groups and how they come about to be, and whether or not they're still in existence today, I think that would also be pretty interesting to see how they fared from the 1970s.
Emily: Yeah, it's definitely an interesting I have always been fascinated by cults like there was a period in my life where I was fascinated by the FLDS and Warren Jeffs and that religion. Warren Jeffs is a monster of a human being, but I watched like a couple of documentaries on that one.
Andrea: I have a book on that one.
Emily: Yeah, it fascinated me since I remember when I was in high school, this must have been like 2004 and they, um, took like 300 kids away from the FLDS compound. And I just remember that story being in the news when I was in high school. And I remember seeing images of these, the women and like 300 children being put on buses and they.
I think they eventually, majority of them were returned to the FLDS, but I just remember that news story and it fascinated me. What was that?
Andrea: oh, that was Buster shaking.
Emily: Oh, okay,
Andrea: He shook off his little ear situation.
Emily: gotcha. But anywho, that was fun. Well, it wasn't fun, but that was a good episode.
Andrea: Well, I'm glad that you learned stuff because I also definitely changed my mind on how I viewed Ted.
Emily: Yeah, when we came into this episode,
Andrea: figuring out.
Emily: when you told me you were gonna do this episode, for whatever reason, my brain thought, like when you said cults, deprogramming. I thought of like satanic cults or like, you know, like Manson family cults. So then at the beginning of the episode when you started talking about Jesus, I was like, what?
Like my brain, I was like, that is not where my brain went. I did not think we were going to be talking about religious cults. So yeah, this was all very interesting. Oh, and now shall we banter or say goodbye? Or do you have any Anything to banter about? I don't think I do.
Andrea: Um, oh, I got new nails. Um,
Emily: Oh.
Andrea: cute. I don't know if you can see them.
Emily: Well, there's snakes, like, reputation.
Andrea: Yes. giving, it's giving, um, witchcraft.
Emily: Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Ha, ha,
Andrea: kind of on par with our episode.
Emily: ha. I broke all my nails. So I cut them all off, and now they are gone.
Andrea: That was your gel thing, your DIY thing
Emily: Yeah, so I made the mistake of getting salon gel, and it completely destroyed my nail beds. So I'll never be doing that again. Because the gel I use at home, I don't know.
Andrea: oh you went to the salon and got them?
Emily: Yeah, like I went and got them done and it ruined whatever they used ruined my nail beds and so when I took it off my nails were like peeling and then they all were breaking they were so weak So I'm never getting them done at the nail place.
I'll just keep doing them myself because when I do them, it doesn't happen
Andrea: go, you can go see my girl, Cause I feel like she doesn't shave down my nail as much
Emily: Yeah,
Andrea: as other places have. And that's for acrylic. So I feel like she probably. Doesn't do a lot of shaving down for like gel either, but
Emily: I don't know what they did to my nails, but I'll just do them myself because I cut them all off because they all kept breaking and then I don't like when my nails aren't even. So I was like, I gotta cut them all because this is gonna drive me insane. So now I gotta wait for them to grow a little so I can paint them again.
Andrea: Oh, speaking of growing, look, the one that I tore off is back.
Emily: Oh, good.
Andrea: I'm so happy. I
Emily: I'm happy for you.
Andrea: I finally have enough to put another acrylic nail on there.
Emily: I know what we can banter about because in my kitchen right now, sits a little vinyl called Lover Live from Paris that your best swiftie friend got for you.
Andrea: I'm so excited. I, um, I honestly never thought it would happen. I
Emily: Me neither.
Andrea: never though she would re-drop Lover Live From Paris ever again.
Emily: Daylight Live from Paris is my roman empire and it gives me chills every time I listen to it. So when I got my vinyl, I put it on and I just listened to Daylight on repeat.
Andrea: Speaking of Roman Empire, I just downloaded, um, because TikTok is leaving. How do, how are we not talking about the
Emily: Don't
Andrea: event that's happening right now?
Emily: don't say red note. Don't do it.
Andrea: TikTok is leaving
Emily: I know but did you download red note?
Andrea: All of the Taylor Swift live from the Eras tour audios are leaving. So
Emily: I know
Andrea: I went and I found the longest version of how did it end when she did it. Um, I don't remember which city she did it in.
Emily: At my show I was there Toronto night six.
Andrea: I was gonna say it was one of the Canadian shows. So
Emily: Yeah, I was present
Andrea: I immediately fucking downloaded that shit. I was like I need the best lives of Taylor Swift's Eras Tour
Emily: I know I need her to release whatever the hell she was recording in Vancouver.
Andrea: I know it's too hopeful and to and too immense to hope that she ever compiles a live Eras tour surprise song situation.
Emily: Oh, I want it.
Andrea: but that would be a dream. Taylor, I
Emily: I know.
Andrea: know youre one of our two listeners. Our 28 listeners. Please do that, we love you
Emily: Hello, Meredith.
Andrea: Hello, Benjamin.
Emily: Oh God. Um, anyway, so dear listeners, I think it's time for us to depart. That too. Well, not yet. I have hope. I don't know why, but I do. Yeah.
Andrea: I have Red Note
Emily: Oh God. I knew you downloaded it. Oh, all right. Goodbye everyone. Until next time.
Andrea: Bye, Emily.
Emily: Bye.
Andrea: and Emily says, welcome to trauma on tap.
Emily: I do.
Andrea: And then I say, I am Andrea. And I say, hi, Emily.
Emily: Okay.
Andrea: Okay. So I hope that helps. Anyone who is confused because I get it
Emily: What are we doing today? I know.
Andrea: I'm doing okay. I had a really chill day. Too chill. I forgot a medical appointment that I was so lucky to get scheduled. I called yesterday. They're like, we have an opening tomorrow. I wrote it down, but I forgot to put it in my freaking phone calendar. So they called me at, you know, 10 minutes after to tell me I missed my appointment. And that I had to reschedule. So I called to reschedule and they said they don't see any openings until April
Emily: Oh my god.
Andrea: So I was like well Okay, then i'll just go die
Emily: I did that yesterday. I was sitting on my couch, and I was engrossed in a audiobook, and I guess I lost all sense of reality. The next thing I know, my therapist is texting me, and she was like, are we still meeting today? And I literally jumped out of my skin. I was like, Oh my God, I'm so sorry.
Cause I, it was 30 minutes. I was 30 minutes late. Oh, whoops.
Andrea: Did you still do it?
Emily: Yeah. I signed on and we just talked for a little bit, but I felt so bad. Idiot.
Andrea: Yeah, I I felt so stupid because I know how incredibly lucky I was to get the spot the next day after I called and I and I messed it up. I ruined it.
Emily: Happens to the best of us.
Andrea: but other than that I am currently ADHD reading six books at once. I'm trying to stay on track for my weekly book reading goal. So hopefully I finish one of them by Saturday, so I can remain on track for the new year.
Emily: I’ll Say a silent prayer for you.
Andrea: Honestly, I think the audiobook is going to be the one that, that like actually is successful. But I also have two audiobooks going on right now.
Emily: Yeah. Well, as of Tuesday, I will be back in the world of Fourth Wing and reading Onyx Storm, so I can't wait.
Andrea: I put, um, Iron Flame on my list. I took it off the do not read because TikTok said it was really bad to Emily said it was good. So read it.
Emily: Yeah, and back to that, cause you had asked me last episode if I liked it as much as I liked Fourth Wing, and now I've finished it. I thought it was just as good as Fourth Wing. I don't know where all this hate's coming from. I don't know if it's like a bandwagon kind of thing, where one important creator said they didn't like it, and then everybody jumped on it.
But I didn't notice any drastic difference in the writing, and it was longer, but I don't know. I don't know where all the hate's coming from, I really don't like the ending. I did cry, but
Andrea: Girl, you sobbed. You posted it on Instagram and you sobbed.
Emily: I think I'm, I'm, I'm glad I waited to read it 'cause now I only had to wait like a week and a half for Onyx Storm.
If I had read it whenever it came out, I don't know when it was like last year, I would've been pissed.
Andrea: Yeah, it came out like last October or November because it, like, the first one came out in the spring and then six months later Iron Flame came out
Emily: mm-hmm
Andrea: Isn’t it supposed to have a fourth one?
Emily: Yeah. So knowing I only have to wait two weeks, um, I think there's supposed to be five,
Andrea: Ooh.
Emily: actually. So. But anyway.
Andrea: So one of the feedbacks from one of my listeners was that we should do a small intro for the case. But we've already started talking so we can tackle that on the next episode Sorry
Emily: Yeah. Oh well. What do you have on tap for the case?
Andrea: But real quick before before I get to my on tap Thank you for your feedback for our 28 listeners that downloaded off of pod bean, which was really nice
Emily: Oh yeah.
Andrea: I don't know how to look at numbers for our other platforms but we are now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and our original link of Podbean is still accessible
Emily: And our Instagram handle is traumaontap as well as on threads and you can find us on Facebook.
Andrea: Yay! We’re real boys and girls
Emily: I think that’s it. Right?
Emily: I know. We don't have any more social media. Right? Okay.
Andrea: Uh, no
Emily: I think that's it.
Andrea: Um,
Emily: And our email is traumaontap@gmail.com. So all pretty easy. Just all traumaontap.
Andrea: Yeah, which is so fortunate because it's a great name. I mean
Emily: I know.
Andrea: claps all around to us
Emily: We also decided that when we actually have listeners, we're going to call you guys our tots because that's the abbreviation of trauma on tap. So you guys are now our tots.
Andrea: Yeah, a fun fact for everybody is that I love potatoes So tater tots are actually, you know, a form of my favorite food a form of Samwise Gamgee's favorite food so Hello Tots
Emily: Your love language.
I also love potatoes, but like a normal amount.
All right. So what do you have on top for me? Sure you are.
Andrea: Um, alright, so this week on tap, I have the interesting and wild history of deprogramming. So
Emily: like a robot.
Andrea: It is in relation to cults.
Emily: Okay.
Andrea: So deprogramming people out of cult mentality. Deprogramming is a service of rescuing loved ones from the new religious movement groups that began to grow in visibility after the second world war. And new religious movements have been around for a long time, but there was a huge boom. And I think that also had to do with broadcast media and how easily accessible, different news sources made these large groups of people joining either Eastern religions or factions of Christianity. And the American population being able to see that was a lot easier versus, you know, in the 1800s, if someone started a new religion, you probably weren't gonna hear about it.
And you, you know, weren't going to lose your teenage daughter to run off to California to join it.
The increased visibility of New Wave Jesus slash Christian communes, which shunned the organized religion aspect of worship, shocked parents as much as the use of drugs, modern rock and roll music, and the rapidly changing world events. Deprogramming arrived in 1971 and seemed to be their children's saving grace. The act of deprogramming is categorized as confrontational therapy, which ranges from kidnapping, false imprisonment, physical restraints food and sleep deprivation, verbal, emotional abuse, and desecration of the abductees religious symbols, as well as, uh, violence for the sake of restoring individual mentality away from occult or court like organizations.
Emily: Wait, so, is this like evangelical?
Andrea: no,
Emily: okay,
Andrea: this is, um, think of like middle America, not overly religious people, parents
Emily: mhm,
Andrea: hiring kidnappers to kidnap their children out of their chosen religion, their new cult commune way of worship in order to beat the shit out of them and get them back into the quote unquote right mentality.
Emily: so, what were, do you have like some examples of those religions?
Andrea: Oh girl I got so many examples
Emily: Are you going to go into that? Oh, okay. Okay. Okay.
Andrea: We’re gonna cover a few different cults We're gonna cover a few of the different people that get abducted in our victims to the deep programmers We're also gonna hear the other side of the story And we're gonna mainly follow the person who started deprogramming and then we're just gonna go through the history from 1971 to now.
Emily: Okay.
Andrea: So, in an article by Jack McKinney, Jan Rogro, who recovered one of her two daughters from the New Testament Missionary Fellowship, says by the federal government trying to dodge this problem, Of proving in court that the organizations were persuading young adults to join by means of deception and flattery, the government is encouraging a lot of nice middle Americans to break the law. The American civil liberties union condemned deprogramming back in the seventies and eighties as a violation of the first amendment. But then we swing back the other way to the fact that many local authorities and actually the FBI did not interfere with these practices because the families were generally the ones that were hiring the deprogrammers. So, deprogramming and the methods employed raises the question, was the anti cult practice ever justified? In the documentary Deprogrammed, which is directed by Mia Donovan, she is a sister of one of Ted Patrick's victims, Matthew Donovan. Their father hired Ted Patrick to deprogram his son for the fear of his enjoyment of metal music and Satanic rituals and worship Ted Patrick
Emily: It almost sounds like, um, like, you know how when, years ago, when people would find out their kids were, like, gay or lesbian, they would, like, send them to, like, conversion camps or something? It almost sounds like that,
Andrea: So I never knew it was so dark I always I had heard of Ted Patrick before but in my mind He came off as someone that was doing the right thing Oh, but Holy shit. Like it gets, it gets intense in here.
Andrea: so Theodore Roosevelt Patrick Jr., known as Ted, was born in 1930 in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He is a high school dropout who only made it to the 10th grade. His only training is his knowledge of the Bible, and as he puts it, a PhD in common sense. He is known as the father of deprogramming and was nicknamed Black Lightning for his quickness. He is African American.
Emily: Okay.
Andrea: In the documentary, we see first hand video account of active deprogramming of a woman named Kathy Crampton in August of 1973, at which point Ted has been actively deprogramming people for about two years. His first deprogramming case had been in 1971 when Ms. Samuel Jackson reached out for help in finding her missing son, Billy. He had been involved with a group, the Children of God. This particular group was founded by David Berg in 1968 and had gone and has gone through many name changes. They have been deemed an authoritarian Christian cult in British court. And the court said that it allowed physical and sexual abuse of children and were known for targeting vulnerable people. Ted's son, Michael, and his nephew had also been contacted by the Children of God. They spent hours looking for these two teens. And when Ted realized that they had been detained in conversation by the Children of God, He realized that they were targeted on the beach in an attempt to convert them. They were minors. Ted describes the teens as psychologically intoxicated after the interaction. His son began to take interest in the Bible after the conversation, and that's when Ted knew something was amiss. So once Ms. Jackson reached out to Ted, Ted knew this was not a one and done. But that the cult did this to other youths, so he began to look into it into other new religion groups, doing research to the point that he decided on his own to join the cult for a few days. He stayed four days and three nights and said if he had stayed even a couple of days longer, he would not have left on his own.
Emily: Really?
Andrea: Oh, yeah. He's like, they were just so convincing.
Emily: In four days? That's crazy.
Andrea: So Ted began investigating and contacting other family members or families who had lost contact with their loved ones to the Children of God. From there, he began to formulate this method of deprogramming for which he will go on to become famous for. And to teach it to other deprogrammers in an organization that he later on goes to found. Shara Prokosh is a former member of the Christ family. she tells us that there is a Bible reference that was repeated to the children of God. If you are not ready to leave your father, mother, brother, sister for my sake, you are not ready for the kingdom of heaven. And my was Jesus. So they're using the Bible to convince these people to leave their family. So with that phrase in mind, believing that the second coming was upon them, many people began to cut off their elementary family. So their nuclear family. And they also, a lot of times, changed their name. And that did not help finding these people. You know, it did not make it any easier. So, in 1971, after his child was contacted on the beach, and after Ms.
Jackson asked for help, Ted founded Free Cogs, Parents Committee to Free Our Sons and Daughters from the Children of God. Free Cogs will go on to become CAN, the Cult Awareness Network, and the Cult Awareness Network provided information on groups that were considered cults, offered support and referrals for deprogrammers to which families could reach out. And by the mid 1980s, they were keeping tabs on over 200 groups that they considered cults that did mind control. The belief was that all members of these groups had been brainwashed. And from that starting point, their argument was that members could not possibly have chosen this way of life. So they have, at that point, no free will. And Ted says that, essentially, when the people joined the cults, they lost their ability to freely think and to use their constitutional rights. So the kidnappings and the deprogrammings were actually not a violation of rights. But instead, he was restoring their rights along with their freedom from the manipulation of the cults.
Emily: I don't, I don't like that you're making me like this guy right now because you already told me he's not doing something good.
Andrea: But can you see why I thought it was a good thing? I was like, oh yea, free people from cults!
Emily: Yeah, like, cause right, right now, all I can think is, wow, he sounds great. He's really helping and getting all these kids away from this terrible organization and what a great guy. Dun, dun dun
Andrea: Yeah. We're gonna, we're gonna bring it right back around, don’t you worry.
Emily: Okay.
Andrea: So, Mia, the director of the documentary, has seen firsthand the post traumatic stress effects on her brother from Ted's methods. Donovan's stepbrother bears the psychological scars of the five days he spent tied up in captivity in an effort to deprogram him from a cult that he was never in. Mia states in her interview with Elena Nicolaou, that as she grew up, she knew the deprogramming effort had occurred. But it wasn't until she read Ted's book Let Our Children Go, that she fully understand the deprogramming of her brother. As an adult, she can understand the methods. Had they been used for actual cults, but Matthew wasn't in a cult.
He was 14. Yes He was violent rage filled. He did drugs and he even admitted to having Abused animals to have killed some cats But he needed psychological, professional mental health intervention, not deprogramming. The abduction of Kathy Crampton that I mentioned earlier shows us video footage of this kidnapping. And we're going to follow Kathy Crampton's case throughout the documentary. So her mother joined the cult for a few days in an effort to establish contact and with the intention of luring her daughter into a car where Ted Patrick was awaiting. We see the forcible kidnapping. We even see her attempting to escape at a gas station two hours later, where she runs to the gas station attendant to tell them that she was kidnapped. She is then picked up and half carried back to the vehicle and shoved inside. Ted allows cameras to witness the interrogation that Kathy's mom and Ted subject her to. So at the 97 hour mark, Kathy requests Ted to talk about her civil liberties, given her position. With no physical way out and she asks if there's any action that she can take and it is at this point that Ted asks the camera crew to leave and then escalates to threats when the reporters tell him that they are there to see the entire process, but they will not intervene and that that had been their agreement. Kathy joins us in 2015, to let us know that after the reporters were kicked out of Ted's house, he took a knife to her throat and told her that she was not a spirit, but a human. And he would cut her, and if he cut her, she would bleed and die. And then proceeded to place her through an exorcism rite of seven to eight hours. Once again, this man has no training.
Emily: So he's just out here abusing people for fun, and being praised for it.
Andrea: he genuinely believes he's doing the right thing.
Emily: Yeah.
Andrea: Genuinely believes That these people have been brainwashed and that the only way is for him to essentially beat the sense back into them.
Emily: This man needs therapy.
Andrea: So during the exorcism, they would ask her to try and make herself vomit. In order to get rid of the demons inside of her She began to heave as instructed and then when she noticed that the room started to believe That the spirits had left. She was like, oh my gosh. Yeah, I think they did. They definitely left So
Emily: Was she like allowed to sleep at all during this time?
Andrea: I don't believe so because part of and they don't mention it for her specifically but in other cases they do talk about how they would just go and badger people and there would be multiple deprogrammers like in the case of Matthew Donovan, there'd be multiple deprogrammers that would come in and they would have slept, but then they would just shake him awake so he could not sleep and then after a few days days, they allowed him to sleep like an hour at a time.
Emily: so they're just straight up torturing these people.
Andrea: Yes, so like I said, Kathy is like, okay, these people are crazy. They think there's demons that have exited my body So I'm gonna go with it. Um, and you see
Emily: Performance of a lifetime.
Andrea: what?
Emily: I said, performance of a lifetime go.
Andrea: Like please stop torturing me
Emily: Yeah.
Andrea: You see her on the bed smiling and her mom is there this entire time her mother is there except for the time where Ted kicked the mom out as well as the cameras and held a knife to her daughter's throat, but the mom is there And she's so happy that the man that she hired has restored her daughter and she says you look so pretty Kathy, even though you're dead tired your eyes Oh my gosh, you look like Kathy again homegirl, Kathy escaped that night. She gone She earned their trust and the second she could She left
After escaping Kathy returned to Seattle and she sued Patrick .However, the judge ruled that her situation was comparable to that of a person rushing to save a child from oncoming traffic.
Emily: What?
Andrea: Yeah, she sued him and her mom her parents and he basically said no, you're not in your right mind. They had a right to do that.
Emily: And how old was she?
Andrea: Uh Shes, I don't remember but I
Emily: Was she a minor?
Andrea: 20
Emily: No.
Andrea: She was a legal adult
Emily: Oh, okay. She was an adult. Well, then she can sue them. She can definitely sue them.
Andrea: Yes in December of 73 Ted was acquitted of her kidnapping from the love family on the behest of her parents. And I actually I think earlier I said that she was part of the children of God. Sorry. She was part of the love family
Emily: Oh, that's a different cult?
Andrea: Yes.
Emily: Okay.
Andrea: And I'm about to tell you a little about the Love Family right now. So, now to put it in sort of a devil's advocate kind of position, because I, this whole time, I'm waffling between I like Ted and Ted's a fucking asshole. The Love Family was a religious group. A Christian commune that started in Seattle in 1968, that was known as the Church of Jesus Christ at Armageddon. The founder, Paul Erdmann, would go on to change their name to Love Israel, was the only husband in the community, and practiced group marriage. Kathy Crampton tells us that the first time she spoke to Love Israel, his voice reverberated inside her head, and inside her soul, the desire to be there was instant. She describes it as essentially love at first sight. When you meet the person you're going to spend the rest of your life with. Sexual relationships were not allowed without authorization from Love Israel, and neither was birth control. Women were expected to serve the men and bow when they entered a room in which there were men already present.
Emily: Oh my god, gag me,
Andrea: And they were not allowed to speak to unless they were spoken to.
Emily: I hate that.
Andrea: They would wake up members in the middle of the night to ask if God had spoken to them in their sleep. Which, as we mentioned before, sleep deprivation. In general, for cults, and we're gonna see this line up for both Ted's side and the cult's side. So just keep in mind some of these, group indoctrination methods. So in general for cults, they use some of the methods that we're going to mention, and even, you and I know, the military uses some of these methods. The main difference in my eyes from the military and the cults though, is that we are, we're there for the constitution, you know, we're there for the branch core values, uh, as the ultimate object of followership, not necessarily an individual. And while isolation does occur, it's not permanent. Like, you know, you're going for six to 13 weeks, depending on your branch. an article I came across that does a great job comparing the two, this article identifies 21 areas of overlap between the military and a cult. Um, it's written by a veteran, um, but he also goes on to touch on subjects such as multi level marketing schemes and like CrossFit. So there are a lot of different groups that use aspects of group indoctrination for their success. It doesn't necessarily make them a cult, but it does make them cult like. Um, and that article is, There are cult like aspects to life in the military, question mark, by veteran EA Sea. And C is spelled like the ocean. So the ultimate goal of behavior
Emily: Wait, what did she just say? Sea spelled like the ocean?
Andrea: yeah,
Emily: Wait, what?
Andrea: S E A. Sea.
Emily: Oh, oh my god, my brain just did not compute that. My brain was like, what the fuck did she just say? Okay, I'll shut up.
Andrea: So the ultimate goal of behavior control is to instill dependency on and obedience to the group ideology and the leadership. All major life decisions must be approved or dictated by the group or its leaders. Punishment and rewards are big in these organizations. A member who does not meet or get permission for major decisions will face punishment. Individualism is discouraged. And you must always put the group first. Rigid rules and regulations are mandated and enforced. Thoughts, feelings, activities for self or towards others are all reported towards superiors. So you're always watched. We also get into the physical alteration and visible compliance that makes it so quick to assess whether or not people are in parameters. So clothing, hair, housing, diet, are you fasting? Are you losing weight? Are you in need of something from us? Um, sexuality is also strictly controlled and regulated by leadership, sleep is withheld. Research shows that an adult should be sleeping 7 to 9 hours a night. Not one, Ted Patrick. Not one.
Emily: Yeah, definitely not one.
Andrea: Members are also financially exploited, manipulated, or made entirely dependent. Members are encouraged to work, and turn over all of their wages to the community. Or, if they already have money, they're encouraged to donate all of their money to this organization that they have joined. There's also a discrepancy between information and what level a member is, uh, in terms of, are they part of the inner circle? Are they a new recruit? So how involved is going to correlate with how much do they know and see?
I take that in lower level of involvement to be a vast majority of the people that did join these groups. Especially in like the 70s, because there's so many people flocking to California, to Oregon, to Washington, that there's no way that they were all top tier level and getting information directly from their leaders. The more people that got recruited, the further away they got from the leadership, the further away they got from information, and the more they were controlled in terms of easy to control things, such as, know, how do they look, what are they eating, where are they sleeping, and monetarily. Part of Ted's method was to expose the lies and manipulation methods and the trickery to which he believed people had been subjected. He would ask people simple questions like, why does God need you to write your leader a check from your bank account? Why does god need money? if the bible was to tell you to multiply, why can't people in your, in your religious group have sex? So he would invite the abductee to question the teachings that they were being told by their community in order to draw some sort of semblance of critical thinking from the kidnappee. Over the course of his deprogramming career, Ted was charged multiple times with various crimes. In 73, he was acquitted of assault charges pressed by Daniel Voll, who belonged to the New Testament Ministry Fellowship. In 74, he was sentenced to a seven day jail term and a $1,000 fine for the false imprisonment of Dina Jones and Kathy Marcus. Their parents hired them because they thought that they were in a Satanic cult. In 75Wendy Ledger alleged that for 14 hours straight, Patrick attempted to deprogram her after her parents tricked her into visiting and then handed her off to Patrick. She
Emily: Wait were those women? Were those women in a satanic cult?
Andrea: no.
Emily: Oh, okay.
Andrea: Mm-hmm. So this is also a lot of, there's no verification. Really? Because Ted doesn't have a background in religions. He didn't go to college to study theology. He just believes in Christianity and doesn't really take a time to learn or to look into Eastern religions. So a lot of it is just I don't agree with it and your parents hired me so you're gonna get kidnapped.
Emily: Oh my god.
Andrea: Um, so Wendy was only allowed her release after she signed a document where she authorized future forced removal if she ever went back to the unification church. Girl she went back. In May of the same year, Patrick was convicted of imprisoning a woman by the name of Joanna Bradley. She had been a member of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. He was sentenced to a year of prison for that case. And then he was also charged for false imprisonment of Richard and Alan Meze in, uh, 75. We’re not even halfway through his charges.
Emily: Oh my god.
Andrea: In 1978, Leslie Weiss pressed charges against Patrick and a man named Albert Turner, one of the enforcers that Ted knows, or knew, for assault, battery, and false imprisonment. The judge in that case, you'll never guess, found no wrongdoing on the behalf of Ted Patrick.
Emily: Like, wasn't this around the time where the satanic panic started?
Andrea: Yes.
Emily: Okay,
Andrea: But once again
Emily: that makes sense.
Andrea: these are not all related to satanic fear. Some of them were, but some of these are genuinely people who joined religious communes, whether or not they were or were not cults. Um, or have or have not turned out to be cults the future. You know, maybe they weren't then, maybe they evolved, but they were preaching Jesus. They were not preaching satan, like satanism. So
Emily: Yeah, that's true.
Andrea: you can’t even really use that as an excuse for what this man is doing.
Emily: I guess I meant more for the judge. Well, I was just trying to think of why would the judge like be willing to say that this, what he did is okay.
Andrea: Well, I think because a lot
Emily: But yeah.
Andrea: of these people were very young, they were college age students, like 18 to 24 years old is kind of the range of people that I saw with the exception of one woman in the, um, I'm going to bring her up later. She was 35. Um, but they were all really young, so
Emily: Okay.
Andrea: I think maybe that that could be a big part of why the judges were siding with the parents because the parents were doing it out of the well being for their children,
Emily: Or so they thought.
Andrea: or so they said. So this next case is one in particular that I find really fascinating. So his name is Daniel Eyink, he was kidnapped by Patrick, hired by the parents in 1979 to be deprogrammed. However, a judge later goes on to rule that Daniel was of sound mind and was exercising his free will by joining a religious community. He dismissed the order of custody that his parents had requested and had been granted by a different judge. They were also requesting a conservatorship of this man. He appears in the documentary. He talks us through his ashram's spiritual commune activities. tells us that most of the time at the commune, they're watching SNL.
They're doing meditations. He was working at a commune associated restaurant. He had a stable job. He had a girlfriend. For all intents and purposes, he was living a normal life. Except that he stopped going home for holidays and eventually he dropped out of college He feels that the main catalyst for the kidnapping was that his parents did not have the understanding That even though he was a high performing high schooler, he was a valedictorian of his high school class, just because he no longer wanted to lead that life in academics didn't mean that he was in a cult, he just kind of was burned out so
Emily: Yeah if, um, dropping out of college and not going home for the holidays was the requirements to be kidnapped, I feel like the entire millennial population would be kidnapped right now.
Andrea: A lot of people, I mean, Gen Z's has a strong, you know, leading of not going towards college and focusing more on trade schools because college has been so warped from,
Emily: that is such a, that is such a boomer thing to do. Like, my kid's not home for Christmas. We need to kidnap him.
Andrea: or, you know, this low value life, according to them, doesn't mesh with what we expected out of him. So he must be worshiping Satan.
Emily: Yeah,
Andrea: So he's in a cult.
Emily: boomers.
Andrea: So Daniel tried to escape after four days, but he was not successful. And he was physically assaulted. After that, he said that he played the game that Ted wanted him to play and went along with deprogramming. He was flown from Cincinnati to New York City to separate him from the ashram. And In order to help break him from his psychological kidnapping, they changed locations a lot as part of their M. O. for the deprogrammers. However, Daniel knew people in New York City, so after he had earned the trust of the deprogrammers, he asked to go outside for a cigarette break.
He was not supervised. He smoked a cigarette, and he left. He was like, I'm gonna go hang out with my friends in New York. I'm not gonna stay here for this bullshit. So then he left,
Emily: What? They just let him go smoke a cigarette?
Andrea: Yeah!
Emily: Oh my god, what kind of, what kind of
Andrea: They thought that he, he
Emily: kidnapper is this? It's the worst kidnapper ever!
Andrea: Well,
Emily: My
Andrea: you gotta
Emily: god.
Andrea: they're doing it for the sake of his mental stability, right? Because they think he's crazy and he seemed to be okay now. So
Emily: Oh my god. That's funny.
Andrea: They let him have a cigarette, nicotine is important, okay? Um,
Emily: It was back then.
Andrea: it was back then. But, okay. So he escapes. He goes back to the ashram. He is kidnapped again. But this time
Emily: Oh my god!
Andrea: yes,
Emily: Are you serious? Guy!
Andrea: he was held for 55 days.
Emily: Oh, why did you go and get kidnapped again?
Andrea: Um, so his parents were like really gung-ho about getting him back, really gung ho. I think he said that his dad, like, basically went and drove his business into bankruptcy for all the money that they were spending trying to get him to renounce the ashram.
Emily: That's insane.
Andrea: Because they’re paying Ted. They are paying him a ton of money to go break the law.
Emily: I can't believe I've never heard of this guy. I'm on his Wikipedia, but I just, I can't believe I've never heard of him. You know, he's still alive. He's 95.
Andrea: He is still alive
Emily: That's, that's crazy. Anyway,
Andrea: It’s during the 55 days of his second kidnapping where he makes some more attempts to escape he fails But he
Emily: no more cigarettes?
Andrea: I'm sorry,
Emily: I said no more cigarettes?
Andrea: zero cigarette breaks.
Emily: I shouldn't be laughing, but.
Andrea: You’re gonna get a patch motherfucker.
Emily: I know.
Andrea: So he said that it was during that second event where he felt that his connection to his parents was completely beyond repair. He knew at that moment that the ashram was his family because the ashram never hurt him. And today, he is part of a different ashram and he still goes and he meditates, he goes on retreats throughout the year, living a normal life.
Emily: I bet, I bet his parents are so mad. They're probably so pissed. If they're still here.
Andrea: Once again, like, the judge was like, get off his dick, you cannot have a conservatorship, he is not in your
Emily: Yeah.
Andrea: custody, he is not a child. So, 55 days goes by, right, his parents take him to court. And they're like, He’s gonna tell you about this ashram who kidnapped him, and has been hurting him, and has been exploiting him, and they have him doing free labor at this restaurant. And Dan gets up there and is like, yeah, my parents just kidnapped me, uh, twice. For like 60 days all together. They beat the shit out of me. I would just like to go worship Peacefully and fucking meditate and I have a girlfriend like I am living a normal life
Emily: Yeah.
Andrea: And the judge is like, yeah go do you boo like fuck your parents.
Emily: Well at least one judge has a good head on his shoulders.
Andrea: Yeah
Emily: Because my god.
Andrea: So that's Dan in 79. So in 1980 Ted was once again charged this time with his first felony for conspiracy kidnapping and false imprisonment. He was sentenced to a year and a $5,000 fine in connection to the deprogramming of Roberta McElfish. He remains adamant that he never even met this person, nor was he involved in this particular kidnapping. He claims he was in San Diego, in court actually, during the entire kidnapping, and to this day he believes that the kidnapping of Roberta was a conspiracy by certain cults, certain high powered, big money, still alive today cults, that forced to try and force him to stop. So he went into $100,000 in debt for that one case.
And,
Emily: Well if um, if he was in court can't they just easily prove that?
Andrea: yes and no.
Emily: Okay.
Andrea: Because as I said, he was charged for conspiracy. So what Ted and the Cult Awareness Network would do is they would get calls from parents and then they would farm those calls out to deprogram
Emily: Oh.
Andrea: across the country. So it was kind of like take out the big band, take, take down the organization mentality.
Emily: Yep.
Andrea: So
Emily: Because he was the ringleader. They were charging him for
Andrea: He’s the founder of the, of the network. Now the
Emily: Okay.
Andrea: Network ended up like kind of back from the deprogramming. And they said that they did not condone the practices of deprogramming. Um, But, on the downlo, you could still call them. You could still get your kid kidnapped. Like, they would freely give you out these people's information.
Emily: Oh my goodness.
Andrea: Yeah. So, he later violated his parole. Uh, for that case, and then was sentenced to three years in prison.
Ted was in and out of prison. And he will freely tell you in that documentary, with a smile on his face, he would get out of prison and immediately go work a case. Like, same day, he was gonna go save someone’s child.
Emily: Probably because he thought he was like a martyr or something. Like he thought he was this like hero.
Andrea: Yeah, and like, my thing is, once again, there are some really shitty organizations and actual, now that we look back in the 70s, actual cults that he was rescuing people from. And the majority of them did not go back. The majority of them stayed with their families. So like, am I happy that there were success cases?
Of course. But man. They, they got manhandled for their fucking freedom that they didn't even ask for.
Emily: Yeah, and I feel like uh, maybe they should've put a little bit more time into doing their research before they just kidnapped someone. Like, made sure they were actually in a cult, you know?
Andrea: So,
Emily: Instead of just listening to the parents.
Andrea: well, I mean, that kind of just goes against. who Ted Patrick is as a person, because his whole thing was strike fast, was the second you have anyone report that their kids were kidnapped or part of a cult or joined voluntarily, whatever, it didn't matter where they were, like you had to go and extract them, like he was running a paramilitary troop situation. Like there was no time to research in his mind because the longer the person was there, the deeper, you know, the grasp upon the clutches upon these people's souls and minds from that cult,
Emily: That's just crazy because, like, some of them weren't even in cults.
Andrea: some of them were not in cults,
Emily: Can you imagine?
Andrea: But there’s also some that were
Emily: Can you imagine you're just hanging out and someone comes and kidnaps you and accuses you of being in a cult and you're like, I have no idea what's going on. Oh, God.
Andrea: girl I am in constant fear of getting kidnapped as is like you and I are both tiny women
Emily: Same.
Andrea: Like
Emily: I know.
Andrea: If you kidnap me and then you also start yelling at me to tell me that i'm in a cult i'd be so fucking lost
Emily: I'd be like, I don't know what's going on. I just read my books.
Andrea: I swear I only like metal music. I don't worship it.
Emily: I would be like, do you mean Taylor Swift? I'll stop doing the heart hands, I promise.
Andrea: I'll stop watching my grainy live streams. I promise.
Emily: Oh, I miss them.
Andrea: No more Easter eggs. I promise. Um, by the 1980s, Ted estimated that he had been involved in over 2000 deprogrammings. With the vast network of deprogrammers
Emily: So, 2, 000 kidnappings.
Andrea: Yeah,
Emily: Okay, that's a lot of people. Wow,
Andrea: yeah, um, with the vast networks of deprogrammers, the CNA enlisted and referred the actual, the actual number is unknown because that's just what he was involved in. Then there was that DL list that the organization kept. Now that list was referenced by the FBI because at this time, like you mentioned there was actual cults happening, right?
You had heaven's gate, you had, um,
Emily: the Manson family.
Andrea: the Manson family, you had Waco. So they were also In a, I guess, legal way and helping out law enforcement. Um, so there's no actual record of how many events of deprogramming were done. In 1980, Susan Worth was a 35 year old teacher from San Francisco. So she's our first adult adult, in her thirties that we have heard of. And she had been involved with coalition to fight the death penalty and the African people solidarity committee. Her parents disagreed with her involvement in these organizations. And so Patrick was paid $27,000 to recover her. That is in today's money. They paid him eight grand back in the day.
Emily: Oh, so you’re saying the $27,000 is today's money.
Andrea: Today's money,
Emily: Okay, that's a lot.
Andrea: She was kidnapped by four men who shoved her into a van, gagged her, deprived her of food and water, handcuffed her to a bed. Mentally fucked with her, for 31 days. Her mother was present.
Emily: Are you serious?
Andrea: Yes.
Emily: That's not good.
Andrea: She was eventually released and although she denounced deprogramming as a, you know, as a method for breaking cults. She did not press charges against Ted or her parents.
Emily: Really? I would've
Andrea: Okay, so this is gonna piss you the fuck off trigger warning for our listeners for conversion attempts and rape. So one of the most disgusting incidents of the deprogrammer events, when Stephanie Reithmuller was kidnapped on the orders of her father because she was a lesbian.
Emily: I knew this was coming. That's why I said it in the beginning. Reminds me of like, conversion therapy.
Andrea: The deprogrammers, showed up. Not because of her religion, not because she joined a fucking cult, but because of her sexuality. When they shoved her into the van, her father was there.
Emily: Stop.
Andrea: From Cincinnati, she was driven down to Alabama. Where she was raped four times by a friend of Ted Patrick's son.
Emily: Was her father there for that?
Andrea: Her mother was present.
Emily: Are you.. what?
Andrea: Her mother was present to try to rape this woman into heteronormative, like standards,
Emily: They should be in jail.
Andrea: She brought charges against her parents and Patrick
Emily: Thank god.
Andrea: Um, so before that, um, so she had been kidnapped her friend witnessed it. I think it was, it might've been her partner. Um, I didn't take note of that. Sorry. Filed police reports, the police were kind of figuring out what was happening. They were getting close. So the mother basically cut loose the deprogrammers before everyone got arrested so that they wouldn't get arrested. And that's why her torment fucking ended. Um, and her mother basically was like of the mentality four times is enough to have turned her, surely,
Emily: Are you saying they raped her four times?
Andrea: yes.
Emily: And her mother's
Andrea: And her Mom’s mentality was, was that four times should be enough
Emily: that's horrific.
Andrea: So she brought charges against her parents, against Patrick, against the thugs, but they were all either acquitted, or the charges were dropped. She did file a civil suit later for four million dollars. And
Emily: How do you acquit someone for that? What do you mean? They just didn't they just They were like, nah, we're fine with that. What year was this?
Andrea: uh, 1981.
Emily: That's too that's no. I mean, no year is acceptable. But we're talking about 80s.
Andrea: Yeah. She filed
Emily: That's insane.
Andrea: a civil suit later. But it was also dropped after she did not report or show up to court for her court hearing on that case.
Emily: That poor woman. I can't, I can't even imagine.
Andrea: With her parents fucking there. So Ted
Emily: I don't have any words.
Andrea: yeah. He went on to court, uh, again. In 1983, for the violation of the civil rights of Richard Cooper, and he was ordered to pay $50,000 in damages. However, after years of court battles, as we have previously listed, he was unable to pay immediately. Ted Patrick, over the years, has been sued multiple times. Five times alone by the Church of Scientology. And during the Reagan administration, many judges stopped adhering to precedence that had allowed parents to kidnap their kids back from cults. And you actually started to see legal traction in the court system, and they began to side with the new religious groups when they would take a case against Ted for the violation of their First Amendment right of freedom of religion as an organization, as well as suing them, suing Ted on behalf of their members, because Ted is violating their first amendment right by kidnapping them, whether or not they were coerced or brainwashed into these organizations around this time of the 1980s in the Reagan administration, you started to see judges basically say this isn't your fucking place to make that call.
Emily: Yeah, I could understand, like, wanting to help your child if they're a minor, but this is not the way you do it. Like, there are better ways to do that.
Andrea: Correct. So the legal bills that came from the violent deprogramming eventually drove the cult awareness network into bankruptcy after being ordered to pay 1.8 million to the church of Scientology and the church
Emily: Did the Scientology, did they, like, sue him, what did you say, like, five times? Is it because he tried to kidnap their members or something?
Andrea: for defamation, actually, there's a,
Emily: Ohhh
Andrea: one very particular like instance where the church of Scientology realized that Ted was shit talking them in the media and saying that like the church was one of the biggest cults around because they took all this money from their members and like cut off their members from their families and stuff.
Emily: I mean,
Andrea: Allegedly.
Emily: I don't want to like,
Andrea: I
Emily: I don't want to agree with anyone, but if the shoe fits, I mean.
Andrea: Allegedly. It allegedly fits. Um, so the church, I mean, they had a shit ton of money where they were just constantly taking CAN, the organization to the fucking court. Um, and eventually the network just could not pay the legal, the legal fees, plus what they were ordered to pay in reparations. The organization was actually bought out by a Scientologist who kept the organization in business, uh, in order to decimate the truth, disseminate, not decimate, disseminate the truth about religions. So they kind of try to use it as a positive spin and would like publish information about the new age religions that Ted had effectively like slandered.
Emily: So they purchased Ted's organization, is what you're saying. And then flipped it on its, okay.
Andrea: Yup. So, nowadays the deprogramming from the 1970s no longer exists in relation to cults. Largely in part because of the high legal cost that resulted from the kidnapping aftermath. Today, we have exit counselors that help families stage interventions that involve no violence and require the participant's consent, as well as their willingness to work with the exit counselors for a few days. Thought reform is still seen in many terror organizations that we encounter today that follow a charismatic or chosen leader, such as ISIS, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, QAnon. Many of the new religion groups still exist in some form or another. And, well, Ted Patrick and the other deprogrammers have kind of fallen back into a quiet life, no longer out in the streets, striking against the cults, like Black Lightning. So what are your thoughts?
Emily: He just disappeared into the ether and just lived a normal life. Like he just stopped. You think he really stopped?
Andrea: Um, I mean, at that point, I think he just didn't have the money to do it anymore, honestly.
Emily: It's one thing to want to save people who are actually in cults, but when you're using violence, and rape, and horrible methods to do what you're doing, I don't see how you can justify any of that.
Like, if you're justifying that, something is wrong with you.
Andrea: Yeah, and I will say for the case of Stephanie, he was not present for, for that. He physically was not there. Um, for the rape. And the attempted conversion of, of Stephanie, Riethmiller, however, it was his network, you know, it's still employed methods that he championed, that he had started and made mainstream. This was the first and only case that I saw that had rape in it. Everything else seemed to have been more along the lines of beating the shit out of people. And, um, in, in a way, brainwashing. Like, he was doing brainwashing. In order to undo the alleged brainwashing of some of these cults, right? Because he was doing sleep deprivation, food deprivation, he had them in isolation. He didn't think that these people were worthy of, you know, their first amendment rights of, because he just thought they were robots. So yeah, weird.
Emily: Yeah, that's an interesting, I kind of want to read more about, I've never heard of this guy. I've never heard of any of, of his network or any, any of this at all. So
Andrea: It
Emily: I kind of,
Andrea: it is a dark, dark, deep hole because I was doing research and single turn I would take, Oh, there's another cult. Oh, there's another famous deep programmer. Oh, the church of Scientology. Oh, you know, the Krishna's, the children of God, there's so much more that goes into, this particular story, but I had a personal positive mentality of this guy that I had kind of sort of heard of in the margins of a rescuer. He was a knight in shining armor. He was there to help people out. And then when I started doing this research, I was like, what do you 14 year old for fucking listening to metal music?
Emily: the documentary you're referencing, is it the movie deprogrammed?
Andrea: Yes. 2015
Emily: Okay. Yeah, I was just looking at that. Where did you watch it?
Andrea: hi, I highly recommend that. Um, I think it was very informative. It was very interesting to see the actual video footage of the people that I spoke about. So you see Dan in there, you see Kathy, um, you see the violence that happened when they got taken. it's very peeled back it shows you very clearly of these interrogations On the other hand, I do think it was pro Ted Patrick
Emily: Really?
Andrea: More than what my story was.
Emily: It says you can watch it on Tubi.
Andrea: Yeah, that's how I watched it. You can just click on it
Emily: Okay.
Andrea: I watched it on my laptop.
Emily: Yeah. Interesting. I don't know how you could be pro this guy, but okay.
Andrea: I mean, it was more sympathetic. I don't know if it was necessarily pro
Emily: Yeah.
Andrea: But it was more sympathetic.
Emily: Okay. Interesting. I'll have to give it a watch. I'll add it to my list of 7,000 things I have to watch.
Andrea: I'll add it to my list. Well, I guess I don't have to add it to my list of six books. That’s probably why I'm a little behind on my, on my book goal
Emily: Yeah, from researching this.
Andrea: we didn't even start talking about the legal dilemma of the First Amendment violations. You know,
Emily: Right, yeah.
Andrea: I mentioned it briefly towards the very end and like the overall question, do parents have the right to kidnap their adult kids?
Emily: No. I mean, I don't think any person should be forced into or out of a religion that they're choosing. I mean, like, our country was founded on freedom of religion. So, if you're choosing a religion, that's your right. Like, you can practice as long as you're not harming anyone else.
Andrea: But what if you are being harmed? What if they are harming you? Like,
Emily: I know, it's tough, like, you mean, like, just by being in a cult, you're being harmed?
Andrea: no. What if the group that you joined is a bad cult? What if it's Heaven's Gate
Emily: Well, that's what, that's what I mean, like.
Andrea: What if it's Jonestown? And that's another thing that happened during this too, is like Jonestown. So, you know, you have hundreds of people literally fucking drinking Kool Aid, commit mass suicide. So the general public's opinion of Ted was do whatever it takes to prevent that. And I think that's one of the big reasons why he got away with it for so long, too was
Emily: Right. Yeah.
Andrea: you’re having the Manson family, you're having the Branch Davidians, you're having, like, really public shit gone wrong cults that when you kidnap Daniel from his ashram where he's just trying to chill and meditate and watch SNL
Emily: Yeah. That's, that's what, when I said, like, you should be able to practice whatever religion you want as long as it's not harmful, like, peaceful religion.
I'm not a religious person. So I don't understand a lot of it, but I think freedom of religion is something that this country was founded on, but, but that means freedom to practice, not freedom to force other people to practice what you think is right.
Andrea: But yeah, I mean, there are so many cults that I want to go into in the future and definitely cover more in depth because there's so much more happening in the world of cults. Not just the deprogramming side of it, but also the harm that happens within each one of these individual groups and how they come about to be, and whether or not they're still in existence today, I think that would also be pretty interesting to see how they fared from the 1970s.
Emily: Yeah, it's definitely an interesting I have always been fascinated by cults like there was a period in my life where I was fascinated by the FLDS and Warren Jeffs and that religion. Warren Jeffs is a monster of a human being, but I watched like a couple of documentaries on that one.
Andrea: I have a book on that one.
Emily: Yeah, it fascinated me since I remember when I was in high school, this must have been like 2004 and they, um, took like 300 kids away from the FLDS compound. And I just remember that story being in the news when I was in high school. And I remember seeing images of these, the women and like 300 children being put on buses and they.
I think they eventually, majority of them were returned to the FLDS, but I just remember that news story and it fascinated me. What was that?
Andrea: oh, that was Buster shaking.
Emily: Oh, okay,
Andrea: He shook off his little ear situation.
Emily: gotcha. But anywho, that was fun. Well, it wasn't fun, but that was a good episode.
Andrea: Well, I'm glad that you learned stuff because I also definitely changed my mind on how I viewed Ted.
Emily: Yeah, when we came into this episode,
Andrea: figuring out.
Emily: when you told me you were gonna do this episode, for whatever reason, my brain thought, like when you said cults, deprogramming. I thought of like satanic cults or like, you know, like Manson family cults. So then at the beginning of the episode when you started talking about Jesus, I was like, what?
Like my brain, I was like, that is not where my brain went. I did not think we were going to be talking about religious cults. So yeah, this was all very interesting. Oh, and now shall we banter or say goodbye? Or do you have any Anything to banter about? I don't think I do.
Andrea: Um, oh, I got new nails. Um,
Emily: Oh.
Andrea: cute. I don't know if you can see them.
Emily: Well, there's snakes, like, reputation.
Andrea: Yes. giving, it's giving, um, witchcraft.
Emily: Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Ha, ha,
Andrea: kind of on par with our episode.
Emily: ha. I broke all my nails. So I cut them all off, and now they are gone.
Andrea: That was your gel thing, your DIY thing
Emily: Yeah, so I made the mistake of getting salon gel, and it completely destroyed my nail beds. So I'll never be doing that again. Because the gel I use at home, I don't know.
Andrea: oh you went to the salon and got them?
Emily: Yeah, like I went and got them done and it ruined whatever they used ruined my nail beds and so when I took it off my nails were like peeling and then they all were breaking they were so weak So I'm never getting them done at the nail place.
I'll just keep doing them myself because when I do them, it doesn't happen
Andrea: go, you can go see my girl, Cause I feel like she doesn't shave down my nail as much
Emily: Yeah,
Andrea: as other places have. And that's for acrylic. So I feel like she probably. Doesn't do a lot of shaving down for like gel either, but
Emily: I don't know what they did to my nails, but I'll just do them myself because I cut them all off because they all kept breaking and then I don't like when my nails aren't even. So I was like, I gotta cut them all because this is gonna drive me insane. So now I gotta wait for them to grow a little so I can paint them again.
Andrea: Oh, speaking of growing, look, the one that I tore off is back.
Emily: Oh, good.
Andrea: I'm so happy. I
Emily: I'm happy for you.
Andrea: I finally have enough to put another acrylic nail on there.
Emily: I know what we can banter about because in my kitchen right now, sits a little vinyl called Lover Live from Paris that your best swiftie friend got for you.
Andrea: I'm so excited. I, um, I honestly never thought it would happen. I
Emily: Me neither.
Andrea: never though she would re-drop Lover Live From Paris ever again.
Emily: Daylight Live from Paris is my roman empire and it gives me chills every time I listen to it. So when I got my vinyl, I put it on and I just listened to Daylight on repeat.
Andrea: Speaking of Roman Empire, I just downloaded, um, because TikTok is leaving. How do, how are we not talking about the
Emily: Don't
Andrea: event that's happening right now?
Emily: don't say red note. Don't do it.
Andrea: TikTok is leaving
Emily: I know but did you download red note?
Andrea: All of the Taylor Swift live from the Eras tour audios are leaving. So
Emily: I know
Andrea: I went and I found the longest version of how did it end when she did it. Um, I don't remember which city she did it in.
Emily: At my show I was there Toronto night six.
Andrea: I was gonna say it was one of the Canadian shows. So
Emily: Yeah, I was present
Andrea: I immediately fucking downloaded that shit. I was like I need the best lives of Taylor Swift's Eras Tour
Emily: I know I need her to release whatever the hell she was recording in Vancouver.
Andrea: I know it's too hopeful and to and too immense to hope that she ever compiles a live Eras tour surprise song situation.
Emily: Oh, I want it.
Andrea: but that would be a dream. Taylor, I
Emily: I know.
Andrea: know youre one of our two listeners. Our 28 listeners. Please do that, we love you
Emily: Hello, Meredith.
Andrea: Hello, Benjamin.
Emily: Oh God. Um, anyway, so dear listeners, I think it's time for us to depart. That too. Well, not yet. I have hope. I don't know why, but I do. Yeah.
Andrea: I have Red Note
Emily: Oh God. I knew you downloaded it. Oh, all right. Goodbye everyone. Until next time.
Andrea: Bye, Emily.
Emily: Bye.
