Ep. 102 | 3 Terrifying Cults You've Never Heard Of...

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• 0:02Speaker 00

  Fall never arrives all at once. First the air, then the light. And slowly, the things you love begin to find each other. A jacket meets a dress. A hoodie slips beneath a blazer. An old cap finds a new scarf. Because you don't simply step into the season. You create it, layer by layer. Until it finally feels like fall. Find fall your way at Ross.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  From the studio that brought you WandaVision. I was an Avenger, but I'm not a hero anymore.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  The Vision returns for the final chapter of the groundbreaking trilogy.

• 0:42Speaker 02

  That family wasn't real. You sure about that? I had a father called Vision. How is this possible?

• 0:49Speaker 01

  Don't miss the two-episode premiere of Marvel Television's Vision Quest.

• 0:53Speaker 03

  Nothing bonds a family together quite like Mortal Jeopardy.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  Now streaming, only on Disney+.

• 1:00Speaker 04

  When you imagine a cult, you probably picture white robes and candlelit rooms hidden deep in a forest somewhere, far from civilization. And sometimes, that's exactly what it is. But sometimes, a cult is just a convincing voice telling you that everything is going to be better if you just buy a cheap course. And sometimes, it truly is selling everything you own to join a higher cause. The shape changes, the promises change. But the core always seems to stay the same. Every cult needs three things. A charismatic leader, a method of manipulation, and eventually, more often than not, a great tragedy.

• 1:40Speaker 04

  So this is the story of three cults, on three different continents, that all followed a similar playbook, and all eventually failed horribly. Crime, conspiracy, cults, serial killers, and murder. All things that I love to consume, and I know you do too, you sick, twisted, beautiful, intellectually-minded freak. And I'm glad you're here. I'm glad you're here. We're diving into three different cults. It's been a minute since we did a three-parter. So without further ado, let's unbuckle our seatbelts, go Mach 5 on the highway, sample the brakes, and bust through the switch, and into these three cults together.

• 2:28Speaker 00

  Fall never arrives all at once. First the air, then the light. And slowly, the things you love begin to find each other. A jacket meets a dress, a hoodie slips beneath a blazer, an old cap finds a new scarf. Because you don't simply step into the season. You create it, layer by layer, until it finally feels like fall. Find fall your way at Ross.

• 2:56Speaker 01

  From the studio that brought you WandaVision. I was an Avenger, but I'm not a hero anymore.

• 3:04Speaker 01

  The Vision returns for the final chapter of the groundbreaking trilogy.

• 3:08Speaker 02

  That family wasn't real. You sure about that? I had a father called Vision. How is this possible?

• 3:15Speaker 01

  Don't miss the two-episode premiere of Marvel Television's Vision Quest.

• 3:19Speaker 03

  Nothing bonds a family together quite like Mortal Jeopardy.

• 3:23Speaker 01

  Now streaming on Disney+.

• 3:26Speaker 04

  So to understand what happened in the quiet Swedish village of Knutby, you first need to understand the man in the center of it. Helge Arnold Fosmo was born on July 27, 1971, to Norwegian parents in Björnberg, a small village in Vernum County, Sweden. And his family wasn't particularly religious, but when Fosmo was around 10 years old, something shifted. He joined the scouting organization of the Mission Covenant Church in his village, and by age 11, he had declared himself a born-again Christian. And it was a decision that would define the rest of his life. And in high school in Kristinahem, he threw himself into religious community work,

• 4:09Speaker 04

  volunteering at a Christian youth cafe and becoming deeply embedded into that world. And at 17, he met a young woman named Helena Johansson, the woman who would become his wife eventually. And two years later, in 1989, he joined the Pentecostal Church in Kristinahem, where Helena was also a member. And after graduating, he enrolled in Carlsted University to become a science teacher, but eventually dropped out and returned to teach at his old school in Björnberg. So by 1993, he was deepening his involvement with charismatic Christian movements, specifically a group called Yaspys, which drew its inspiration from Olfekmen Livetsord,

• 4:52Speaker 04

  which was a megachurch built around the Word of Faith movement. And the Word of Faith theology taught that prayer was a direct pipeline to God's provision. Physical healing, financial prosperity, emotional restoration, any desire you could name, if you prayed for it according to God's plan, would be given to you. If only it was that easy. But Fosmo was drawn in completely to this. But a few months later, he left Yaspys and rejoined the Pentecostal Church, but this time as a youth pastor in Kristinahem. And it was here in 1993 that Fosmo would meet a woman who would change everything, a woman named Osa Valdal.

• 5:34Speaker 04

  Now, Osa Valdal was born on October 26, 1965, and she had trained at a Pentecostal Bible school in Stockholm, studying theology, and by 1990 had been hired as a youth pastor at a Pentecostal church in Uppsala. But that chapter didn't last, and she was actually forced to resign following her divorce and other tensions within the church. And she then moved to Knutby, a small village east of Uppsala, where she came to live with the Valdal family and eventually married their son Patrick in June of 1994. But long before that marriage, in March 1992, she had already begun part-time work at the Pentecostal congregation in Knutby, a small traditional church that had been established

• 6:17Speaker 04

  during the Pentecostal revival in Sweden back in 1921. So before Valdau arrived, it was an unremarkable congregation. But under her influence, that changed pretty quickly. And she climbed the church's hierarchy with startling speed, and then made a move that should have raised every alarm bell in the building. She declared herself the Bride of Christ. That's a pretty good promotion. But this wasn't just symbolic language, nay-nay. It's a title that carries specific theological meaning, traditionally given to the church as a whole. But Valdau taught it literally. She was, and she claimed, the woman destined to marry Christ Himself.

• 6:58Speaker 04

  And everyone in the congregation were basically invited as guests to her wedding, her and Christ's wedding. So her theology took on an intensely eschatological direction, focused on the end of days, on death and divine judgment. A tale as old as time for cults, right? And she preached a doctrine of pre-tribulationism, the belief that faithful believers would be raptured, lifted bodily into the clouds before the great tribulation arrived. And Valdau expected she would be taken to heaven like the Virgin Mary, united with her bridegroom, you know, Jesus Christ. But she wanted a bigger audience for this message. The cult leaders are never just satisfied with like a couple people.

• 7:42Speaker 04

  They're like, I need a mega church, you know? So she began traveling to other Pentecostal communities across Sweden, personally recruiting people to relocate to Knutby permanently. And the congregation grew somehow. But devoted followers arrived convinced they had found something rare, a community chosen by God Himself. And Helge Fosmo was among those drawn in, the guy we were talking about before Valdau. So when he first met Valdau in 1993, there was an immediate spiritual connection. And by 1997, he had uprooted his family entirely,

• 8:22Speaker 04

  moving to Knutby with his wife Helena and their two children in August of that year. And he and Valdau began working side by side. ...launching a month-long training school for young Christians across Sweden that ran three times a year. And Fosmo also founded a missionary organization called Aid for Nations, which organized Bible schools in India and Hong Kong. And together, they were building something formidable. And Fosmo claimed he received messages from God directly. How convenient! Every time, without fail, they don't even, I swear, all these cult leaders, I feel, really get together and they're like, "We're gonna do these same 10 things." And they really do.

• 9:04Speaker 04

  They all claim they're like prophets and that they're the middleman to God, they're like the assistant to God, and they're like, "Whatever he says, he says it through me, and it's not my business, you know? If he says, 'I gotta take 80 wives,' I gotta do it as he just told me to, you know? I don't, I don't make the rules. I don't make the rules. Anyway, I'll take that one, that one." I'm just kidding. No, but seriously, he said that he had a direct line to God. And Valdaug claimed to be God's chosen bride, as we know. So each one reinforced the other's authority, and their combined influence over the congregation became total. And the congregation became increasingly isolated from the broader Pentecostal network around it.

• 9:45Speaker 04

  By the late 1990s, other churches in the region were growing alarmed. And pastors from Knutby had stopped attending shared events, and longtime members were quietly leaving, put off by the shifting leadership style. And the families of people still inside were reaching out to church authorities even, desperately trying to maintain contact with loved ones who seemed to have disappeared into the community. Again, cult 101, you gotta isolate. You gotta isolate people so they don't actually talk to other people and realize what they're doing is a little nutty, you know? But nobody could say exactly what happened inside. But we know something was wrong. Because at its height, the Knutby congregation had somewhere between 90 and 100 members,

• 10:30Speaker 04

  and it operated like a corporation, but a spiritual one, a strict pyramid, structural with Osa Valdaug at the top. And beneath her sat a tier of elders. pastors who included Vosmo himself and held enormous authority over ordinary congregants. And every member was organized into teams, each led by a team leader. And members were expected to consult those leaders on all matters of spiritual guidance. But this wasn't framed as a church hierarchy. It was framed as obedience to God. So if you didn't go through your team leader, you weren't just ignoring a rule. You were defying the will of God himself. Former member, speaking years later for the HBO docu-series, Pray, Obey, Kill,

• 11:14Speaker 04

  describing the suffocating atmosphere inside. Congregants were required to maintain what they called peace around the Bride of Christ. And if that peace was disturbed, if anyone caused friction or disruption, it was taught that this would delay the second coming of Jesus. Those are pretty big sticks, man. Like, if you just talked a little too loud or you interrupted the Bride of Christ, she's like, "Ah, that's it. He's not coming for another 10 years and it's all Jimmy's fault." And Jimmy's like, "I didn't know." You know, how convenient for the cult leaders. They just keep pushing it back every time. They just get a little bit pissed just so they can keep the cult going. So the weight of that responsibility naturally kept people silent and compliant. And if silence wasn't enough, there were other methods.

• 11:59Speaker 04

  And the first was isolation. Members were cut off from family members who questioned the church. So the only people you could turn to, the only community that you had, were people already inside. People who would always steer you right back toward compliance. And the second was spiritual manipulation. Because Valdaugh and Vosmo used prophecies, visions, and claimed divine communication to steer individual members. These visions would be announced about specific people in the congregation, like messages that told them what to do, where to go, who to be with. But essentially, comply and God's blessing followed, you know? And refuse and His favor would be withheld.

• 12:41Speaker 04

  Now, Vosmo even claimed that God, I shit you not, was texting him directly on his mobile phone. What carrier is God using? I must know. And Fosmo would forward these messages as divine instructions to the others in the congregation. Because of course, in reality, Fosmo was writing the messages himself and sending them anonymously to Svenson, a member of the congregation, and claiming them to be divine commands, right? Classic, classic cult leader stuff. So it was just a new kind of manipulation dressed in ancient clothing. And the third method was physical. So for those who didn't fully buy in, that was met with violence.

• 13:25Speaker 04

  And former members described a punitive culture within the congregation. That allegedly included Valdaugh biting people in the face, and also stabbing someone with a fork and slamming members' heads against walls. Did God tell you to do that one too? Did he do, did he do that? So the threat of physical consequences was always in the background. And Valdaugh also reportedly exercised control over members' most private lives, dictating their sexual conduct, sometimes forbidding relationships outright and assigning new ones herself. So this dynamic bled directly into Fosmo's marriage. And while wed to his second wife Alexandra,

• 14:08Speaker 04

  he carried on a sexual relationship with multiple women in the congregation, including the family's nanny, Sarah Svenson. So that's, that's the person he's texting me like, oh, man, God just told me like, we gotta go, you know, we gotta go in the closet and just like do seven minutes in heaven. It's where I know, like my wife is, she's like, I guess if God said so, you know? So I guess, you know, see you there at 3:30 maybe after I'm done eating my chocolate cake from earlier. So, so sick and disgusting. And even later, he would have relations with his neighbor's wife, Annetta. And the arrangement with Sarah Svenson was striking in its just brazenness. Because she had originally arrived as the family's nanny, but moved into the master bedroom with Fosmo.

• 14:52Speaker 04

  Well, Alexandra, his own wife, slept in the guest room. What a dick. And Fosmo justified this by calling it spirit. Rather than carnal, because their relationship wasn't adultery, he would say it was heavenly love, an act of God, something God said, thumbs up, Fosmo, do what you, well, do what you gotta do, bud. So there were lots, lots and lots and lots of red flags in the beginning, but the affairs weren't even the worst ones, and it would actually be a death. Because on December 18th, 1999, Fosmo discovered his first wife, Helena, dead in the bathtub of their home.

• 15:33Speaker 04

  And investigators found a hole in her skull and a toxic concentration of opioids in her system, but ruled her death an accident. And her husband sold her belongings within days and falsified certain documents tied to her death. But nobody connected those dots at the time. And within months, Fosmo would remarry, and his new wife was Alexandra Bjork, which was Osa Valdau's younger sister, the one that he eventually kicked out into the, into the guest bedroom because he invited the nanny into the master bedroom, just a mess. So the two cult leaders were now bound together by family, though, because he was married to Valdau's younger sister.

• 16:15Speaker 04

  So the congregation processed Helena's death through the lens of their apocalyptic theology. God's kingdom was coming soon, they believed, and Helena had simply been just taken home first, when she clearly was murdered by her husband. But they believed she'd be there just waiting for the rest of them. It was a comforting story that worked and held for a little while. Then came the hammer. So in the early morning of November 8th, 2003, Sarah Svensson crept into Fosmo's home and attacked Alexandra with a hammer while she slept. And Alexandra awoke and fought back and managed to call for help.

• 16:57Speaker 04

  And the assault was never reported to police, and instead Svensson was quietly sent away from the community to live with her father in southern Sweden, removed like just a problem to be managed. And shortly after, Fosmo and Alexandra flew to Hong Kong for the Bible school that Aid for Nations was running and from thousands of miles away Fosmo resumed contact with the banished Svenson through text messages messages she believed were being forwarded from God himself again what carrier is he using I need to know and one message in particular was calculated and cold because God or Fosmo told her would not show her mercy until she completed what

• 17:41Speaker 04

  she had started and he then instructed her to acquire a handgun no small task in Sweden by the way very difficult and she was told to shoot Alexandra and she was also told to kill their neighbor Daniel Lind whose wife Fosmo had been sleeping with just a greedy disgusting monster bastard and Svenson believed every word because in her mind she wasn't planning a murder she was just carrying out a divine command so on January 10 2004 at approximately 4:40 in the morning Sarah Svenson entered the Fosmo home and walked to the master bedroom where Alexandra lay sleeping and she would fire three shots and Alexandra

• 18:26Speaker 04

  Fosmo would die instantly and Svenson then walked roughly 100 meters to the neighboring home belonging to 30 year old Daniel Lind and he answered the door at her knock and she aimed and fired hitting him in the head and chest and his jaw was also shattered and his teeth were destroyed and at that point he was bleeding severely but against every odd he managed to call emergency services and he would survive oh your God didn't plan that did he now didn't send you a little text update to be like ah I gotta go back and finish the job sucks when that doesn't actually work you know sucks when you're actually making it up you know but luckily he survived and that's when Fosmo you know

• 19:10Speaker 04

  awoke because he had no idea what was going on even though he planned the entire thing and told Svenson to murder these two people and he claimed to accompany Daniel Lind into the ambulance To the hospital, and there he was taken in for questioning shortly after, and his account was almost offensively simple. He just said, "I'd been asleep in the other room and I didn't hear anything. I didn't hear a gun go off, what was that, five times. Really heavy sleeper. God's got me on some NyQuil, it's crazy." The following day, January 11th, Sarah Svensson walked into a police station and she would actually confess to both shootings, thank goodness.

• 19:51Speaker 04

  And she guided investigators to the evidence herself, which were shoes in a dumpster and a silencer in a small bag, and a gun at the bottom of the lake. And she told them she had acted alone. But fortunately, investigators didn't believe her, because the more insistently she claimed sole responsibility, the more certain they became that someone else was involved. And eventually, they were right. So under questioning, Svensson's account started to crack, and she revealed that she had been receiving anonymous text messages she believed to be divine commands. Messages that had been forwarded to her by Helge Fosmo. And the text urged her to kill Alexandra, framing it as mercy.

• 20:34Speaker 04

  Because Alexandra had just lived out her time on earth and was destined for heaven. So it was a "kindness." And Fosmo had encouraged her through Bible passages and up to 44 exchanges of text messages per day. And he had told her that God would not grant her mercy if she failed to act. And investigators recovered erased messages from her phone confirming her account. And Fosmo and Annetta Lind, Daniel's wife, with whom Fosmo had been having an affair with, were both arrested. Karma's a bitch, you monsters. So wiretapping established that Svensson and Fosmo had been lovers, and the manipulation pattern was unmistakable.

• 21:16Speaker 04

  And forensics moved quickly to build a case, but there was no physical evidence directly tying Fosmo to the scene. No fingerprints and no ballistics, but the digital trail drew hundreds of inciting messages, combined with the witness testimony from congregation members of about his history of psychological control was damning. And investigators would luckily reopen the case of Helena Fosmo's death, his first wife. And looking back at evidence with fresh eyes, they determined that her head wound couldn't have been caused by a fall. And worse, the opioids found in her system hadn't been found in her stomach, meaning that the substance hadn't been administered in an invasive way, almost certainly against

• 21:58Speaker 04

  her will, which it's just so frustrating to think, like, it's just so blatantly looked over. It's, I mean, I, at least, her family knows now and, and everybody knows now, but what an injustice. Her and Alexandra is just, eh, it's just absolutely horrible. But they would see that she had been poisoned. But despite everything that pointed toward foul play, the evidence still wasn't sufficient to secure a conviction against Fosmo for Helena's murder. And Annetta Lind was eventually cleared of involvement in her husband's shooting and released. And investigators also turned their attention to the woman at the very top, Osa Valldau herself. But her direct involvement in the murders wasn't clear, and prosecutors declined to

• 22:42Speaker 04

  pursue charges against her. Then, Fosmo said something that stopped investigators in their tracks. Cause he wasn't the brains, he claimed. Valldau was. So this was a stunning statement, one that hung in the air without consequence. But with no evidence to act on, prosecutors couldn't really move. Valldau would remain free. The woman who had built the entire ideological scaffolding that made this murder possible, walked away from the investigation without so much as a formal charge. So the trial opened in May 2004 and became a national obsession in Sweden. And headlines shifted multiple times a day for months, documenting a story that mixed

• 23:23Speaker 04

  religious manipulation with sexual control and murder in a way Swedes had never quite encountered before. And Sarah Svensson testified in devastating detail. She described how Fosmo had worked on her over years, using his religious authority and their sexual relationship as twin levers to bend her will until she had almost none of her own, saying, quote unquote, "Hegel's word was my law, and by the grace of God, I got to be his slave." And on July 30th, 2004, both were sentenced. Fosmo would receive life imprisonment for solicitation of murder and attempted murder, but he was acquitted of Helena's death due to insufficient evidence, unfortunately.

• 24:07Speaker 04

  And Svensson was found guilty of murder, but rather than prison, the court ordered her to receive psychiatric care, acknowledging the profound degree to which she had been psychologically broken down and weaponized by someone she trusted completely. And Fosmo maintained his innocence throughout the trial and pursued every avenue of appeal available to him, but luckily, all were rejected. Where's your god now? And also, I'm not talking about like, you know, god god, you know? I'm talking about his texting god, that guy. I'm talking about himself, basically. And the Pentecostal movement moved swiftly in parallel, expelling the Knutby congregation from its national network in 2004 on the grounds of unorthodox beliefs and revoking its right to officiate marriages.

• 24:52Speaker 04

  But even with Fosmo behind bars, Knutby didn't collapse overnight, and Valdau continued to lead the congregation, because there was no repercussion for the woman that created this whole shitstorm. And life inside carried on with unsettling normalcy. And in 2005, she inspired the sect to open a spa and released a CD of church music. I'm gonna go ahead and never listen to that. And in 2007, she published an autobiography titled "Without Apparent Irony: Bride of Christ, Whom Can One Trust?" And then, in August of 2006, Fosmo gave an interview from prison that changed the public record, and he confessed, for the first time, that he had been responsible for Alexandra's

• 25:35Speaker 04

  murder, and he said he was done living a lie. Quote, "Since I left Knutby, I have gone through a long process. Feelings, thoughts, behavior, my whole self were impregnated by a poisonous sect culture." And he acknowledged others had been involved in what happened, but he refused to name them. And Sarah Svensson was released from psychiatric care December 2011, with evaluators determining there was no risk of relapse. But the congregation meanwhile was slowly hollowing out, losing members year by year as the weight of what happened became impossible to ignore. So by 2016, internal revelations

• 26:14Speaker 04

  about ongoing sexual exploitation and abuse made continuation untenable. And Valdaud departed the congregation, and in 2018, the church dissolved entirely. And 16 years after the murder, Osa Valdaud finally faced a courtroom. And she was convicted of eight counts of assault against former members, slapping, kicking, forcing people into stress positions. And two other Knutby leaders were also charged, one for assault and one for sexual exploitation. And Valdaud received a suspended sentence and 120 hours of community service. That's it. For the woman who had built a cult around herself, claimed to be the bride of Jesus,

• 26:56Speaker 04

  and created the environment in which a murder was engineered, that was the full extent of her punishment. Just... what the hell? The justice system of Sweden? What the hell? And as for Fosmo, he never did serve life. And he was actually released on parole in 2022 after serving 18 years. And both he and Valdaud are free today, largely out of public view, though. So the name Knutby entered the Swedish language as kind of a shorthand, a metaphor for religious extremism, manipulation, and catastrophic consequences of unchecked spiritual authority. And the 2021 HBO docu-series Pray, Obey, Kill brought the case to international

• 27:39Speaker 04

  audiences, and its impact was significant. And what the Knutby case demonstrated, above everything else, was that charismatic authority combined with claims of divine communication is one of the most powerful and dangerous tools a manipulator can wield. Because Fosmo and Valdaud didn't need weapons or locked doors to control their congregation, they just used quote-unquote "God." And they used isolation, and they used the simple devastating human desire to belong to something meaningful. So members who thought they were living in holy community were being cited. psychologically dismantled. And when they had no one left to turn to outside the church, the people doing the dismantling were the ones who could tell them whether something was wrong.

• 28:23Speaker 04

  So Knutby claimed one life and directly damaged dozens of others. So we choose to remember that one life. And I heavily sympathize with the people that were dragged into that horrible cult. But that brings us to our next one. Because in a remote corner of Uganda, another cult was building toward a tragedy on a scale that you can't even imagine. A movement that didn't end with a single murder, but with hundreds.

• 28:54Speaker 00

  Fall never arrives all at once. First the air, then the light. And slowly, the things you love begin to find each other. A jacket meets a dress. A hoodie slips beneath a blazer. An old cap finds a new scarf. Because you don't simply step into the season. You create it, layer by layer, until it finally feels like fall. Find fall your way at Ross.

• 29:22Speaker 01

  From the studio that brought you WandaVision. I was an Avenger, but I'm not a hero anymore.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  The Vision returns for the final chapter of the groundbreaking trilogy.

• 29:34Speaker 02

  That family wasn't real. You sure about that? I had a father called Vision. How is this possible?

• 29:41Speaker 01

  Don't miss the two-episode premiere of Marvel Television's Vision Quest.

• 29:45Speaker 03

  Nothing bonds a family together quite like Mortal Jeopardy.

• 29:49Speaker 01

  Now streaming, only on Disney+.

• 29:52Speaker 04

  So the Knutby case was built around one man and one woman's manipulation of a small, isolated congregation in rural Sweden. But what happened next, in the hills of southwestern Uganda, operated on an entirely different scale. This wasn't one or two manipulators and 100 followers. This was a machine with three engines, each one drawing from a completely different world. And together, producing something far more powerful and far more deadly than any- of them could have built alone. But understand the movement for the restoration of the Ten Commandments of God, mouthful of a name, by the way. You first need to understand the woman at the heart of it.

• 30:35Speaker 04

  Kredonia Muirinde was born on July 30th, 1952, in Bugarama Village and Tungamo District, Uganda. And she was the daughter of Paulo Keshaku, a retired Roman Catholic catechist, a lay religious teacher, who would prove to be far more significant to the story than his humble description suggests. So Kredonia dropped out of school, young, and her early adult life was marked by turbulence as her first husband would pass away and her second husband would pass away not long after. By the time she married her third husband, Eric Mazima, a wealthy older man who already had taken six wives before her,

• 31:18Speaker 04

  she had outlived two marriages and carried the reputation that followed. So the marriage to Mazima was difficult. And Kredonia was unable to conceive with him, despite having children in her earlier relationships, and she suffered severe convulsions she believed were caused by the spirits of his previous wives. So to contribute to the household, she worked as a barmaid and shopkeeper, running what became known as the Independence Bar in Kanugu. And it was a prestigious establishment. And it was kind of a place that locals associated with prostitution and some sources, including some that may trace back to Muirinde herself, described her as a former lady of the night. But that claim is contested by scholars,

• 32:03Speaker 04

  some of whom believe the lady of the night narrative was deliberately constructed to parallel the story of Mary Magdalene, lending Muirinde a kind of biblical resonance.

• 32:15Speaker 04

  Don't even get me started on Mary Magdalene dude, all that stuff about her being a lady of the night and a prostitute, it's all like baloney made up by some Catholic Pope and so, we could, we could make a whole video about it, I'll get into it later. Anyway, so whether it was true, or fabricated, or self-applied, it became part of how the outside world understood her, so it's important to know. And then, on August 24th, 1988, something would change, and Mweyrendee woke and told Mazima she had received a vision from the Virgin Mary. And Mary, she said, had instructed her to divorce him immediately. And she continued to experience these visions, particularly a cave site called Nyakashenyi. Sorry if I'm saying

• 32:59Speaker 04

  these wrong, but it was a place in Uganda associated with the fertility goddess, Nyabingi. And they would slowly transform her into something none of her husbands, her neighbors, or even herself could have anticipated. So, that's our first, that's our first cog in this engine. Does that make, I don't know how engines work, um, but pretty crazy. She's starting out with some, some pretty elaborate visions happening right now. You know, what could go wrong? And the second cog, or, you know, bracket thing of the movement came from a very different direction. Joseph Kibweyderay was born in 1932 in Kishariro in Entugamo District. And unlike

• 33:43Speaker 04

  Mweyrendee, Joseph was a man of standing, educated, well-connected, and genuinely respected. And he actually attended a Catholic secondary school and went on to join St. George's Teacher Training College in Abanda in 1955. And by 1956, he was headmaster at Ruchuka Primary School. And by 1959, he had been promoted to Assistant Supervisor of Catholic Schools across the region. And he would marry Karezah Kuri Bakana in 1960, a woman who later became Secretary of the Uganda Land Commission. And together, they would have eight children. And by 1963, he was one of the most influential men in Catholic ...education in the country.

• 34:27Speaker 04

  And he ran for political office in 1980 with the Democratic Party. So on paper, Joseph was exactly the kind of man you'd hold up as an example. Stable, devout, accomplished. But in 1984, he claimed to have begun experiencing visions of the Virgin Mary. Visions, he said, had been communicated to him through Craydonia Muirinde, the woman we talked about previously. And he was actually prone to violent seizures. And around 1998 to 1999, he was actually briefly detained in a psychiatric facility for manic depression. And somewhere in the space between his public life and his private suffering, he had become susceptible to what Muirinde was selling.

• 35:11Speaker 04

  So again, what could go wrong? And the third cog pillars, the bratchet in this engine was the one that lent the entire movement its veneer of intellectual credibility. And that person was Dominic Katari Babo. And he was a Roman Catholic priest. So he's educated, he's polished, and he's highly regarded. And in the mid 1980s, he traveled to the United States on a scholarship arranged through the Los Angeles Archdiocese, earning a master's degree in Religious Studies from Loyola Mary Mount University between 1985 and 1987. And while he studied, he lived at St.

• 35:53Speaker 04

  Anthony's Parish Rectory in El Segundo, California, where priests who worked alongside him remembered him as pleasant, you know, conscientious and humble. A man who drove a donated car to get between the parish and the university. What a nice guy. And he would leave the United States on July 10, 1987. So back in Uganda, Katari Babo's American education gave him an authority that money couldn't buy. And his friend, then attorney, General Bart Katurebe, described him as a model priest. The last person anyone would expect to fall into something like this. But fall he did. Fall he did. And we will get into that now. So when the-

• 36:35Speaker 04

  Early 1990s, Kattari Baba was excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church and joined a movement that ran in direct opposition to everything he had studied and believed. Three people then: a woman, from humble origins, who claimed visions from the Virgin Mary; a wealthy, respected politician, whose mental health had made him vulnerable; and a priest, with an American master's degree, whose credentials would attract the educated and devout. Together, they became the "engine" of one of the deadliest cult massacres in modern African history. But the story of this movement didn't begin with any of those three, actually.

• 37:17Speaker 04

  It began decades earlier, with a dead girl and a grieving father. Kredonia's father, Paulo Keshaku, had lived most of his life as an ordinary Ugandan Catholic catechist. But in 1960, he reported a vision of his deceased daughter, Evangelista, who had died years before. And in his vision, she told him that he would receive messages from heaven, predictions that would come true nearly 30 years later. Similar to the one in Sweden, these messages from God streamline, streamline of communication, you know, how handy. But it was in 1988, the same year Kredonia claimed her first vision, that Keshaku reported

• 37:57Speaker 04

  seeing Jesus Christ Himself, standing alongside the Virgin Mary in St. Joseph. And they instructed him to use his land near Kanungu as a gathering place for believers. And he listened. So by June of 1989, Keshaku instructed Kredonia and his granddaughter Ursula to travel across Uganda, spreading the Virgin Mary's message. And during that journey, the two women would arrive at the home of Joseph Kibwete Re. And Mwirinde told him the Virgin Mary had directed them to seek Him out. And Kibwete Re was shaken, not because the claim was outlandish, but because it aligned

• 38:39Speaker 04

  too perfectly with his own experience, because he had seen an apparition of Mary near his home. ...five years earlier. So the convergence felt to him like confirmation. So together, Mweyrendee and Kibwe Tere founded the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God in 1989. And its message was urgent and absolute. The world was ending, and only those who strictly obeyed the Ten Commandments would survive. Same as every other cult. World's gonna end. Gotta follow everything we say, otherwise you won't go to heaven if the world ends. And you gotta stay away from your family. It's just, you know, it's

• 39:22Speaker 04

  crazy. It's crazy how it just works in the same cycle, and it works every time. But more often than not, it ends in great, great tragedy. And we will get to that. But this was a message that resonated in Uganda in ways that it might not have elsewhere. Because the country had endured decades of political violence. The AIDS epidemic was devastating communities, and people were living in genuine fear of what tomorrow might bring. So this was a movement that offered certainty, and salvation had fertile soil to grow in. So the movement attracted Catholic priests and nuns who found its theology compelling. And among those who

• 40:04Speaker 04

  eventually joined was the excommunicated priest, Paul Ikazire, and Dominic Kataribabo. But Ikazire would later leave and return to the Catholic Church, and in doing so, he revealed something important. Mweyrendee was the true power in the movement. And Kibwe Tere was the face, the respectable masculine figurehead who made the cult legible to the outside world. But Mweyrendee was the architect. But Kashaku would die in 1991, so the group relocated to his land near Kanungu, the very site he had been instructed to offer to God. And by October 1993, local villagers had grown hostile enough to temporarily drive

• 40:48Speaker 04

  them out, but they would return. And Katari Babo sold three of his properties, his car, and his milling machine to fund the growing community. And by the late 1990s, the movement had become a full-on compound, surrounded by pineapple and banana plantations, swelling with new members, and accumulating significant assets through mandatory donations from those who joined. Until this whole time. And at its peak, the movement had somewhere between 1,000 and 5,000 members. And every one of them had given up everything they had owned to be there. But the stated goal of the movement was simple: follow the Ten Commandments, preach the word

• 41:31Speaker 04

  of Jesus Christ, obey, and be safe. And the methods used to enforce that goal were something else entirely, though. The movement enforced silence as religious discipline, so members were sometimes prohibited from speaking at all, and required to communicate only through sign language. And this was framed as a rigorous observance of the Ninth Commandment: Thou shalt not bear false witness. But, as we can see from the outside looking in, its practical effect was to sever members from normal conversation, from family, from the ordinary social bonds that might otherwise allow someone to say something isn't right here.

• 42:12Speaker 04

  So days would pass in total enforced silence, and fasting was institutionalized, and members were permitted only one meal a day, Monday through Friday. And they were isolated from outside food sources, and only crops grown on the compound's own lands were permitted. And soap was forbidden as a sinful indulgence, and sexual contact of any kind was prohibited, not as a matter of waiting until marriage, but as a permanent rejection of the flesh. And the movement taught that AIDS was a divine punishment for adultery, and just sex itself was framed as a gateway to damnation. And the most

• 42:53Speaker 04

  potent tool, as with every cult, it seems, was spiritual manipulation. And Wayrinde claimed to receive direct messages from the Virgin Mary through what she described as a hidden telephone system, not texting this time, because she would actually communicate these messages through everyday objects, not technically the handphone like I just demonstrated, but objects like a rock or a piece of wood, if you will. And of course, only she could hear it. But these messages were commands, and commands from the Virgin Mary were not to be questioned. And nightly prayers were led by 12 apostles called the Entumwa, six men and six women

• 43:38Speaker 04

  who were preparing the faithful for the second coming of Christ. And the compound was framed as Noah's Ark. Those inside were safe, and the world outside was lost. And members had already surrendered their homes, their land, their cattle, their savings. So there was nowhere left to go. And that was by design. And those who broke the rules faced starvation, hard labor, and physical abuse. And the leaders naturally lived very differently, of course, as they all do, because they would live in a stone house at the top of a hill, surrounded by plantations, insulated from the depravations they imposed on everyone else. Very godly of you.

• 44:22Speaker 04

  And children within the compound fared no better than adults. And they were actually used for child labor and kept in unsanitary conditions, and some were reportedly abducted from outside communities. And Ugandan authorities became aware of some of what was happening, but they wouldn't act. And the movement's apocalyptic beliefs were codified in a roughly 84-page tract called "A Timely Message from Heaven: The End of the Present Times," largely written by Katari Babo. And it elevated the leaders as, say it with me, prophets. They always gotta be prophets. And laid out the theology of destruction and served as a recruitment and indoctrination tool.

• 45:07Speaker 04

  And new members were required to read it multiple times before gaining full membership. And a date was eventually set. The world would end on December 31st, 1999. The year 2000 would be year one of the new world. This was like a widely thought belief as a Y2K. You know, this was, this was when all the computers were gonna shut down and the world's gonna end and planes were gonna crash. This was like a very common thought among a lot of people. A lot of people thought the world would end and a lot of churches, a lot of these just predatory churches preyed on these people, like selling, you know, end of the world products and, and it is just very, it's a, it was a crazy time.

• 45:51Speaker 04

  I was, I was pretty young, but you know, I remember the craziness. So as the millennium approached, the compound became increasingly frenzied. And in 1999, a Ugandan newspaper called The New Vision ran an interview with a teenage male member of the movement. And he told the paper that the world was going to end within the year and that there was no time to waste and that anyone who wanted to be saved needed to confess their sins immediately. And the interview spread fear and excitement in equal measure. And members who had drifted away were re-enlisting and people were confessing sins around the clock and workers abandoned the fields entirely and new members arrived daily, surrendering their possessions at the gates.

• 46:36Speaker 04

  But January 1st, 2000 would come and go. And as we know today, nothing really happened, did it now? And the silence that followed was devastating. Members who had sold their land and given away their cattle and severed ties with families who hadn't joined now and had nothing. And the prophecy that justified all of it had simply failed to materialize. And Mwirinde and Kibwe Tere faced something close to revolt and members stopped making payments and former members who had surrendered everything demanded it back. And Ugandan police took note of the unrest and the leader's response was not to collapse,

• 47:21Speaker 04

  na na, can't give up now, you know, double down, why not? It was to reset. So. Not unlike a ton of other cults, a new date was announced. Guys, it's a new date. We got it mixed up. Virgin Mary called me on my water bottle, guys. It's March 17th. March 17th. Yeah, okay, confirm? Might change. Okay, just, it might change, but as of right now, it's March 17th, and it was. It was March 17th, 2000, new date. New date, and the Virgin Mary herself would return on that day to take the faithful to heaven. But this time would be different because they would have a proper ceremony. A true ascension. The confusion of January was reframed as a test of faith.

• 48:05Speaker 04

  Those who had doubted needed to recommit, and many of them did. Unfortunately. So on March 15th, 2000, Wayrinde went shopping. She bought sodas in bulk and delivered invitation letters to members across the region. And on March 16th, the movement held what would prove to be its final gathering. A massive celebration that functioned as a farewell to the world. And three bulls were roasted, and around 70 crates of soft drinks were provided, mostly Coca-Cola. And members who had traveled from across Uganda gathered at the Kanungu compound to mark the eve of their ascension. And by all accounts, it resembled a last supper.

• 48:50Speaker 04

  But on the morning of March 17th, 2000, the congregation gathered at the church, a building they called the ark. And as members poured in, some noticed that the windows and doors had been boarded shut from the outside, nailed closed. And before anyone could fully register what that meant, the building would explode, and a massive fireball tore through the structure. And neighbors heard the blast from a distance and rushed toward the compound to find the church completely destroyed, engulfed in flames. And the bodies of the deceased would be everywhere. And the initial estimates placed the dead at 330 people.

• 49:34Speaker 04

  But the number would rise. Investigators pieced together what had happened. ...happened, as two days before the fire on March 15th, Katari Babo had visited a shopkeeper named John Musoke in Casese and purchased approximately 50 liters of sulfuric acid, signing the receipt "Father Dominic" and paying around $167. And he told Musoke the acid was needed to replenish batteries at a remote seminary. And Musoke later recalled being uneasy about the quantity. And police found this receipt at the compound, and the acid, investigators believed, had been used alongside gasoline as an accelerant.

• 50:17Speaker 04

  And a witness also reported encountering a cult member carrying nails and a hammer toward the compound that same morning. But the fire was not the full extent of what had happened. And four days after the blast, as authorities spread across the country to investigate every property the movement had ever occupied, the true scale of the horror began to emerge. And at the Kanungu compound itself, six bodies were found sealed inside the latrine. And at the Bohunga compound in Rutama, near Rukungiri, a site that had served as one of the movement's satellite communities, 153 bodies were unearthed, and 59 of those bodies were children.

• 51:01Speaker 04

  And at Dominic Katari Babo's estate in Rugazi, Buxenri district, police found two separate killing sites. And in the yard and sugarcane field, 74 bodies were exhumed. And inside the house itself, investigators noticed that the floor of one of the bedrooms had been freshly poured with concrete. Katari Babo's nephew told investigators that his uncle had claimed he was digging a pit for an underground refrigerator, and even sold the property to the nephew just six days before the fire, for the equivalent of about $3,300. And when prisoners from a nearby jail were brought in to dig through the concrete, they

• 51:42Speaker 04

  found 81 more bodies packed beneath the floor. And of those 81, 48.

• 51:51Speaker 04

  were children, and many would have claws ringed around their neck, so the cause of death was assumed to be strangulation, and others showed signs of stabbing, poisoning, and blunt force trauma, and some bodies had even been partially dissolved in sulfuric acid. And at the farm of a man named Joseph Nyimurinda in Rushojoa, eighty-one more bodies were discovered, undressed, packed tightly into a deep pit, and dead for approximately a month. And forty-four of those were children. And in Bouziga, an affluent suburb of Kampala, fifty-five more bodies were found in the house of Katari

• 52:34Speaker 04

  Babo, and they were buried beneath a chicken shed that had been built over the graves as deliberate concealment. So by late March 2000, with preliminary counts from all sites combined, Ugandan police estimated the total dead at around nine hundred and twenty-four. And Vice President Speziosa Kazibwe said publicly that she believed the true number exceeded a thousand. And for context, the Jonestown massacre in Guyana in 1978, which I have covered, this is the Jim Jones People's Temple, if you want to go watch that video, I have made that, but until then, the most deadly single cult event in modern

• 53:18Speaker 04

  history had killed nine hundred and eighteen people. So if the nine hundred and twenty-four estimate was accurate, the Kanungu massacre had surpassed it. And when forensic pathologists completed their formal examination months later, the confirmed count was revised to seven hundred and eighty, the lower number reflecting the limits of what investigators could formally document, given the scale and condition of the remains. The nine hundred and twenty-four figure remained the most widely cited, though, but it was always just an estimate, and the investigation that produced it was deeply imperfect. But what nobody disputed was this: the bodies showed clear evidence

• 54:01Speaker 04

  Of murder. People had been killed weeks or months before the fire, and some had been dead for years. So this was an organized extermination of anyone who had become a liability. Those who had demanded their money back, those who had questioned the failed December prophecies, those who had simply seen too much. And the leaders were nowhere to be found. And not one of them had been inside the church when it burned. So Ugandan authorities moved quickly in the immediate aftermath, deploying investigators to every compound associated with the movement before evidence could be destroyed.

• 54:41Speaker 04

  But the resources available to them were catastrophically inadequate for what they found, because there were no body bags. Investigators had only surgical gloves, and some covered their faces with cypress sleeves because the smell was unbearable. And the bodies were examined for only a few minutes each before being reburied in trenches. And mass graves were missed entirely. And forensic work was rushed and, in some cases, corrupt. And the official numbers that emerged from this process were estimates as much as counts. But the central question was, where were the leaders? And investigators were initially stumped. And the forensic team and police had initially assumed that Kibwe Tere, Mwirinde,

• 55:26Speaker 04

  and the others had been inside the church when it burned. And a witness in Kungu changed that assumption, because they reported seeing both Kibwe Tere and Mwirinde leaving the celebration in the early hours of March 17th with packed suitcases. And in April of 2000, Ugandan authorities issued international arrest warrants for six individuals: Kibwe Tere, Mwirinde, Kitarie Babo, Publicity Secretary Joseph Kasuparit, Joseph Kasapuriri, Treasurer John Kamagara, and Ursula Komunhongi. And they faced 10 counts of murder each. That's it. With the death penalty attached, though. So, there is that. And a reward.

• 56:11Speaker 04

  was offered for information, but not one of them was ever found. So the pursuit of justice for what happened in Kanungu was, from the beginning, undermined by institutional failure at every single level. And nine months after the massacre in December of 2000, Uganda's International Affairs Minister, Moses Ali, announced the creation of a commission of inquiry, and it would be responsible for defining what constituted a cult, reconstructing the events at Kanungu and identifying the perpetrators. And it had six months to complete its work. And the commission never held a single meeting, though. And it had no money, no offices, and no facilities.

• 56:54Speaker 04

  So it ceased to exist before it even began, basically. And the Uganda Human Rights Commission published a report in May 2002, a document that did what the abandoned commission could not, laying out clearly what had happened, arguing unambiguously that this was a mass murder, and making recommendations to the government about how to prevent something like this from happening again. But the government did not act on those recommendations. And the criminal investigation was formally closed 10 years after the massacre. And 20 years after, no arrest has been made, no prosecution has begun, and none of the six named leaders has been located, charged, or held in any way accountable.

• 57:37Speaker 04

  So the commission that was supposed to provide answers produced nothing. And the government that was supposed to act did not. And it was, by every measure, a complete collapse of justice. And a failure made worse by the fact that the warning signs had existed for years before the fire. Local officials had been aware of child labor, and complaints had been filed. And the cult had even been temporarily expelled from its compound by villagers in 1993. So every intervention stopped short of anything that might have mattered. And for the survivors, the aftermath was compounded devastation. The members who had been away from the compound on March 17th, or who had somehow assumed

• 58:21Speaker 04

  ...escape the violence of the preceding months, returned to find their families gone, and their former lives completely erased. Everything they had owned, land, home, cattle, savings, had been surrendered as a condition of membership. And the cult had taken it all, not to mention a lot of people's family members and friends. And there was nothing to go back to and nowhere to go. So many were trapped by survivors' guilt so severe it was incapacitating, because some had brought their entire families into the movement, and some of those families were now in mass graves. And the government declared April 2nd, 2000, a national interdenominational prayer day. Great, that's exactly what they needed, just a day.

• 59:02Speaker 04

  How about some fucking investigation, arrests, justice, anything? It was, it's just a joke, it's disgusting to think of all these people that were just treated like nothing, and the highest authority also treated them like nothing. It is devastating. Because there was no justice, obviously, but there was no housing assistance, no financial support, no psychological services. The prisoners who had been conscripted to dig up the concrete at Katari Babo's estate, forced to pull 81 children's bodies from beneath a bedroom floor, were given no support either, of course. And the local Catholic Church, embarrassed by the degree to which the movement had drawn

• 59:46Speaker 04

  from its own clergy and membership, initially made it difficult for survivors to return to the faith, which is disgusting. And the community around Kanungu was left to process an atrocity without the tools or resources to do so. And an attempt was reportedly made by at least one person to revive the movement, but it came to nothing, luckily. But the Kanungu massacre stands as one of the deadliest cult events in recorded history, with an estimated 924 dead across multiple sites. And what made the movement so effective and so lethal was the specific combination of conditions it exploited. Uganda in the late 1980s and 1990s was a country shaped by fear.

• 1:00:31Speaker 04

  And there was a movement that offered certainty, that named the fear and gave it a divine cause and promised a way through, and arrived at exactly the right moment to recruit at scale. And the three leaders each served a distinct function in making the movement credible as we know. And I pray karma has gotten to all of them, or God, whichever one came first. But they all deserve a special seat in hell. But to this day, no one connected with the leadership of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God has seen the inside of a prison. And there is no memorial at the site of Kanungu. And there are no graves marked with names. There is quite literally

• 1:01:12Speaker 04

  only the long, quiet wait of what happened. A wait that survivors and the families of the dead have carried alone. So my heart goes out to every single one of those people. It's just, it's hard to even fathom or understand how that could be going on, just somewhere around the globe. So. And the fact that I've never even heard about this until I researched it. It's one of the most devastating cases I've ever read, and it is, nobody knows about it. So that is why I wanted to cover it today.

• 1:01:55Speaker 00

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  But this next cult was different in almost every way that didn't matter, and identical in every way that did. This cult operated in the open, in Venice Beach, Los Angeles. It had a website, a streaming platform, a clothing line, and a record label, and a foundation. And its leader gave lectures at Harvard Divinity School, and celebrities attended its classes and posted about it on Instagram. And it looked, from the outside, like exactly what it claimed to be: A modern wellness studio run by a charismatic, spiritual entrepreneur. But, newsflash: It wasn't. Katie Anne Griggs was born on August 30, 1979,

• 1:03:38Speaker 04

  on a farm in Fort Collins, Colorado. And her mother, Nancy Anne Steinhorn Galway, was a farmer, a movement therapist, and by some accounts, a physical comedy performer, or a therapeutic clown, if you will, which I can't help but just think of Robin Williams, when he acts like a clown in the hospital. Why can't I remember that movie name? But essentially that. But her father would leave the family when Katie was a year old, and she was raised largely by her mother and her stepfather, a man who went by Rabbit Galway, his legal name, and her brother. Katie grew up steeped in New Age spirituality. The idea of aligning your body, mind, and soul, of tuning your chakra, as the practice framed it,

• 1:04:22Speaker 04

  was not something she encountered as a teenager and decided to explore. It was the water she swam in from childhood. And one family story captures it. At around seven or eight years old, she gathered her family around the dinner table and made them stare at a candle flame in silence. And whether it was meditation, or performance, or both, it was the same impulse that would define the rest of her life. She wanted people's attention. Not unlike a lot of other people in Los Angeles, but this is significantly worse. She just wanted to be the one in the center. And her friends from childhood remembered her that way. Focused on the spotlight, on being adored, and on becoming famous.

• 1:05:06Speaker 04

  And she was a theater kid, a performer, someone who understood instinctively how presents work. And after high school, Katie enrolled at City University in New York in the early 2000s, where she was introduced to Ashtanga yoga. But college would bring something else too, something awful, and that is S.A. And that trauma would pretty much destabilize everything. And she would stop attending classes properly, started going to parties, and use drugs to manage what she was carrying. And eventually, she would drop out. But she would rebuild slowly, and she would return to college, but this time completing a bachelor's degree in liberal arts at Antioch College in Ohio, studying English, poetry, and humanities.

• 1:05:51Speaker 04

  And she experimented with different names during this period. Athena Day, Katie Day, Kundalini Katie, each one kind of a reinvention, a way of shedding one's skin and stepping into another. And it was shortly after September 11th, 2001, while working in a fashion showroom in New York, that she walked into a Kundalini yoga class for the first time. And within minutes, she felt something she later described as a surge of energy traveling up her spine and out through the top of her head. And it was the feeling, she said, that she had been looking for her entire life. So the stage had been found, and the performance would follow. So Katie's entry into Kundalini yoga was an introduction to a world that would prove

• 1:06:35Speaker 04

  to have a much darker architecture than it appeared. Because Kundalini yoga, as it was practiced in the West, had been introduced by a man named Harbhajan Singh Kalseborn, known publicly as Yogi Bajan, who traveled from India to Toronto, Canada to Los Angeles in 1968. A former customs inspector, he became the face of Kundalini Yoga in America and established the 3-H-O Foundation: Healthy, Happy, and Holy. And the timing was perfect, because the late 1960s were full of disillusioned young Americans looking for spiritual direction. And Bajan was charismatic, authoritative, and strategically brilliant. And he built an empire worth hundreds of millions of dollars,

• 1:07:20Speaker 04

  counting presidents, popes, and the Dalai Lama among his connections. And he founded Yogi Tea, and he established Akal Security, and he was, by every visible measure, a beloved and respected spiritual figure. But what was happening beneath that surface would not become fully known for decades. And after Katie's first class in 2001, she committed to the practice completely. And she visited Bajan ashrams and took part in the three-day White Tamtric Yoga Marathon. And in 2002, she met Bajan face-to-face, an encounter she described as transformative. And she then came under the mentorship of a man named Hari Jiwon Kalsah,

• 1:08:04Speaker 04

  a longtime Bajan disciple, whose real name was Steven Oxenhandler. Little bit different, but Hari Jiwon had served 18 months in federal prison following a 24-month conviction for his role in a telemarketing fraud scheme, which involved fraudulent toner cartridge invoicing. Whatever that is, dude. And when he was released, he was a felon in his 40s with limited options. And he had found his footing within the Kundalini Yoga community. And he recognized something in Katie: charm, stage, presence, and beauty. The ability to hold a room. So he saw her as a vehicle for what the Kundalini Yoga world badly needed:

• 1:08:45Speaker 04

  a modern rebrand, a younger face, someone who could carry the legacy forward into a world that had moved on. ...from aging spiritual teachers. And he became her mentor in the truest sense, shaping her practice and her persona. And Katie completed her Kundalini Yoga Teacher Certification in 2004, the same year Yogi Bajaj died. And before his death, Bajaj had reportedly given her the spiritual name Guru Jagat, meaning "bringer of light to the universe." That's not going to help with her ego. And she claimed this herself, though the claim was disputed. But what is clear is that she began using the name publicly in 2012, and that by the time she fully embraced it, it had become more than a name.

• 1:09:30Speaker 04

  It was a brand, a costume, and a throne all at once. So for years before the studio opened, she built her base slowly, teaching classes from her living room, running a website, cultivating a following through proximity and personality. And then in 2013, the pieces came together. And together with Hari Jiwon, she founded the Rama Institute for Applied Yogic Science and Technology in Venice, Los Angeles. That sounds like a lot of bullshit. But she was now officially Guru Jagat. And the institute was framed as a place of transformation, somewhere you could go to become wealthy, empowered, beautiful, and enlightened.

• 1:10:12Speaker 04

  And the promise, in other words, was literally everything. And in the wellness culture of Los Angeles in 2013, that promise found a ready market. It would today, honestly. And within months, celebrities were attending. Demi Moore, Alicia Keys, Kate Hudson, Russell Brand. That one's not as surprising. And by 2014, the institute was successful enough to open a second location in Boulder, Colorado. So every morning from 8:30 onwards, a parade of predominantly white women made their way into the Venice studio. And reishi cappuccinos from the nearby organic grocery, Arowan, in hand. And they were required to wear all white with head wraps or turbans. And hypnotic mantras by White Sun,

• 1:10:55Speaker 04

  a Grammy-winning band founded by Hari Jiwon, poured from the speakers. And rainbow prayer flags hung Above sheepskin rugs where followers sat and waited. And glittery crystals, sacred ornaments, altar offerings, and the photographs of Yogi Bajaj that decorated the walls. And at the front of it all, on a stage surrounded by crystals and plants and a gong built for the rock band Van Halen, which is pretty cool, I'm not gonna lie, sat Guru Jagat. The whole thing was staged with extraordinary precision, designed to be visually overwhelming, to feel exclusive, and to photograph well, of course, because you can't be in Los Angeles and what you do doesn't matter unless you post it. Okay?

• 1:11:39Speaker 04

  Because Ramah, in the language of the era, was extremely Instagrammable. And people came partly because they wanted to belong to something that others would be jealous of. A tale as old as time. And that desire was baked into the experience from the beginning. And Guru Jagat preached that there was nothing spiritually incompatible between enlightenment and wealth, and that Kundalini Yoga could help you achieve both. And she described herself as a serial entrepreneur. And she wore white robes and large earrings and projected the image of spiritual leader who was also a fashion icon sleigh. I'm just kidding. And the practice involved repetitive physical movements, chanting, breathing, and mantra with early morning sessions.

• 1:12:24Speaker 04

  And sometimes, starting between 3:00 and 4:00 in the morning. I'm out. I wouldn't get caught in this call. That's way too early for me. I'm out. Won't be there. But described by regular attendees as physically addictive, producing states of euphoria. But behind the aesthetic and the celebrity validation, the structure was familiar. And staff at Ramah were required to demonstrate full devotion to the institute and to Guru Jagat personally. And many were classified as independent contractors to sidestep labor protections. And they worked around the clock, updating her social media, managing her schedule, uploading classes, coordinating events, and were either unpaid or paid well below minimum wage.

• 1:13:07Speaker 04

  And when Guru Jagat temper ignited, which former employees described as happening with explosive unpredictability, there was nowhere to go. And she reportedly called staff at three in the morning with irrational demands. So the environment was one of control maintained through fear. Sound familiar? And with total devotion as the only safe coaster. So while Guru Jagat was the public face, Hari Jiwon was running the operation from the wings. And all significant decisions went through him first. And he was in the structure that former staff later described the actual boss. And Guru Jagat was both his instrument and his product.

• 1:13:51Speaker 04

  And the final architecture of Ramah was built on tiered extraction. An online membership to the Aquarian Women's Leadership Society costing around $727 a year. What the fuck? And in person, courses ran to $1,500. And retreat packages started at $2,000. And teacher training programs cost $3,500. And Guru Jagat position was that spiritual peace was expensive. That spending money on your development was itself a form of devotion. Duh. And the money, she said, didn't go to her. No. Given the lavish lifestyle she maintained, former employees found that claim a little unconvincing. But the institute would just keep expanding.

• 1:14:35Speaker 04

  And a third location opened in New York City in 2017. At 125 Stanton Street on the Lower East Side. A converted gravestone shop converted into an alleged women-owned yoga studio. And a fourth opened in Mallorca, Spain. And Ramah TV launched as a subscription streaming platform. And a record label followed. And a clothing brand called Guru Jagat Collection. And a lifestyle brand called Robotic Disaster, which that one fits. And a book, Invincible Living: The Power of Yoga, The Energy of Breath, and Other Radiant Tools for a Radiant Life, reportedly published in English, French, and German. And lectures at Harvard Divinity School. And she taught yoga at Bonnaroo.

• 1:15:17Speaker 04

  And a podcast, Reality Riffing with Guru Jagat, that eventually reached listeners. ...in over 50 countries. And she also established the Rama Foundation in 2016, a nonprofit offering scholarships to underrepresented communities and donation-based space in South Los Angeles, which just completed their picture. You know, a spiritual empire with a philanthropic wing and a guru who was also a brand. But Katie Griggs had wanted to be famous since she was a child and by every external measure, she had succeeded. And for years, the cracks were internal, contained with the walls of the studio absorbed by the staff who had nowhere else to go.

• 1:16:00Speaker 04

  And former employees and students had been quietly accumulating stories of abuse and manipulation for as long as Rama had existed. The explosive temper, the 3 a.m. demands, the culture of fear, but these accounts circulated only among former members, people who had left in trying to understand what had happened to them. But from the outside, Rama still looked like what it had always appeared to be. But then, in December of 2019, the architecture began to crack from the outside. And Pamela Sahara Dyson, Yogi Bajan, former personal secretary and one of his most senior administrators, published a memoir called Premka: White Bird in a Golden Cage. And the book was a bombshell by all accounts.

• 1:16:45Speaker 04

  And Dyson described in precise and devastating detail how Bajan had coerced her and other staff members into sexual relationships, exerting control over their lives through spiritual manipulation, using the language of devotion and divine will to justify rape and abuse. And she wrote about the forced sexual relationship that resulted in a pregnancy and about Bajan ordering her to have an abortion. And the book opened a door that had been locked for decades and dozens of other women walked through it with their own accounts. So by March 2020, the Siri Singh Sahib Corporation, with organization that managed Bajan's legacy,

• 1:17:27Speaker 04

  had commissioned a private investigation by a neutral third party called an olive branch. And nearly 300 witnesses participated. And the report, published in August 2020, was unsparing. And it concluded that Bajan had almost certainly essayed three women, caused physical injury to eight others during sexual encounters, and engaged in non-consensual touching of nine more. And also, shown inappropriate images to minors. And directed women to engage inappropriate acts with each other in front of him. And/or with him. Just a disgusting pervert. But the investigators estimated he had abused approximately 100 women

• 1:18:12Speaker 04

  over the course of decades. So his wildly-promoted celibacy was a fabrication. Shocking. And his spiritual authority had been used as a weapon. Shocking. And the report also identified financial exploitation, drug smuggling, money laundering, and systemic abuse of children in 3HO boarding schools in India. So the Kundalini yoga world split immediately. Studios canceled Kundalini programming entirely, and teachers publicly denounced Bajan. And the community that had built itself around his teachings faced an existential reckoning. And Guru Jagat watched all of this and made her choice. She took to social media to defend Yogi Bajan.

• 1:18:57Speaker 04

  When pressed on the allegations by followers, by journalists, by people who wanted to understand where she stood, she framed him as a historical figure whose complexity needed to be understood in context. Ohhh. What, bitch? The way one might understand a founding father. And she told Vanity Fair she wasn't going to spend her days trying to figure out whether someone like George Washington had done things she'd disagree with today. Your ignorance is stupid. I hate you. And Bajan's image stayed on the walls of every Rama studio, and his teachings remained central to the curriculum. And the institute didn't budge. And Haribhijwan's response was, if anything...

• 1:19:38Speaker 04

  A lot worse. In February of 2020, he posted a 52-minute video suggesting that Dyson had fabricated her account for financial gain. Oh, great. Victim blaming. Awesome. And he dismissed every allegation and defended Bajan completely. And former 3HO members and Sikh activists who spent years trying to bring Bajan's abuses to light were furious, naturally. And for them, Ramah's refusal to distance itself from Bajan was not just a failure of leadership, it was an act of choice to protect a system of abuse. And the public backlash intensified rightfully so. And then came the pandemic. And with

• 1:20:18Speaker 04

  it, something began to slip in Guru Jagat herself. She refused to comply with California's public health guidelines, and she declined to promote vaccines. And her podcast became a vehicle for increasingly erratic content like claims that COVID-19 was caused by chemtrails, that artificial intelligence was a tool of control, that global conspiracy was operating beneath the surface of daily life, which, you know, I don't know about all of those, but maybe she had some points in there somewhere, but I don't like her anyway, so she's just stupid. And she amplified QAnon content, she discussed Pizzagate, she invited Holocaust denier David Icke and her conspiracy theorist author Furstenberg onto

• 1:20:59Speaker 04

  the podcast as guests. Just go in full conspiracy mode, right? But again, the whole Pizzagate thing, that's, that's, well, that was true, seeming like. Again, I'm not justifying anything she's doing or whatever, but it's incredibly ironic how she's saying all of this stuff about Pizzagate and all this, like, government and all this stuff, when she is involved in the same thing and she's still praising a person that was involved in similar things. It's just the most hypocritical She's so hypocritical, it's infuriating. And the audience that had followed her was not uniformly prepared for this turn, and enrollment began to drop. And the celebrities who had once been photographed at Rama events grew quiet,

• 1:21:44Speaker 04

  and revenue declined. And on October of 2020, Guru Jagat was scheduled to appear at Alicia Keys' Soul Care Lounge, a high-profile wellness event that would have restored some of her visibility to a mainstream audience. But Sikh activists organized and protested her inclusions, and Keys removed her from the panel. So it was just a public signal that the culture around her had shifted, and the platform she had built was no longer usable. Now, there was no police investigation into Rama, no arrests, no charges. What accountability existed was informal and more community-driven than anything. And in July of 2020, an Instagram account called Rama Wrong appeared, and operated by former Rama employees Nicole Lorton and Becky Lavelle.

• 1:22:29Speaker 04

  And the account became a gathering point, a place where former employees and students could share what had happened to them and find others who understood. And stories accumulated really quickly, and accounts of unpaid wages, psychological manipulation, the creation of culture where any questioning of Guru Jagat was framed as a spiritual failing. And the wellness community that had once celebrated Rama began to look at it very differently. And journalists started paying attention, and enrollment continued to drop and revenue did too. So the empire that had taken a decade to build began to visibly deteriorate. And then, in July of 2021, Guru Jagat broke her ankle while on a work tour in Germany.

• 1:23:12Speaker 04

  She declined treatment there and flew back to Los Angeles for surgery. And her mother later recalled the phone call she received from Europe, with her daughter scared, in pain, asking to come home. And the surgery went ahead in Los Angeles. Shortly after, a pulmonary embolism developed, which was a blood clot that traveled to her lungs. And on August 1, 2021, at 9:07 PM Pacific Time, Katie Griggs went into cardiac arrest.

• 1:23:41Speaker 04

  And she was only 41 years old at the time, and she would pass away. So there was no trial, no criminal charges were ever filed, no sentencing to follow. Guru Jagat died before any formal investigation could ever be launched. Not that one was particularly imminent, but the abuses at Ramah were real, but they were the kind that falls between the cracks of legal accountability, like wage theft and labor violations that are difficult to prosecute, and emotional abuse in spiritual context that is harder still. And staff had signed contracts classifying them as independent contractors. So civil suits were theoretically available, but the state they would have been filed against had almost nothing in it.

• 1:24:25Speaker 04

  And Guru Jagat's net worth at death was an estimated around $500,000, and family and former employees described her as effectively broke or in debt, with a money trail unclear. So she would be buried at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles. And Harijan Wan Kolsa, the man who had shaped her from the beginning, who had run the operation from the sidelines, who had publicly defended a serial abuser and built a system of exploitation alongside her, disappeared from public view entirely. His fate remains unknown, but he had never been held accountable for anything. And the celebrities who attended Ramah been photographed at Ramah

• 1:25:06Speaker 04

  and lent their names to Ramah's credibility quietly just moved on. What's accountability for celebrities, right? And most said nothing publicly, and some distanced themselves with a word or two, but none of them faced any consequences for having normalized the institution with their presence. And the victims were left with their trauma and their unpaid wages and their lost years. Now, without Guru Jagat, Ramah had no center. The entire structure had been built around her personality and her presence. And without her, it began to dissolve almost immediately. And the Venice flagship closed, and the Boulder location closed, and the New York City studio closed, and the Mallorca space would close.

• 1:25:50Speaker 04

  And Rama TV went dark, and reality riffing with Guru Jagat stopped uploading, and the clothing brand, the lifestyle brand, and the record label all vanished. The Rama Foundation, the nonprofit, the scholarship programs, the donation space in South Los Angeles dissolved, and former students were left to navigate the wreckage in whatever way they could. And some continued practicing Kundalini Yoga independently, separating the practice from the institution, and others abandoned it entirely, too damaged by the association to return. And a community of former members formed around shared processing in therapy groups, online spaces, the continued work of @RamaWrong.

• 1:26:31Speaker 04

  And former employees described symptoms consistent with PTSD, nightmares, anxiety, difficulty trusting others, and some were consumed by guilt for having participated, for having recruited others, and for having defended the institution when it was still running. And some were just angry and had no one to direct that anger toward. The person responsible was dead, and both of them were dead. And the man behind the curtain had just fully disappeared, and the legal system had never engaged. So there was nowhere for the feeling to go. But the story of Guru Jagat and Rama has been extensively documented in the years since her death, including in the documentary Breath of Fire. It became, in the language of wellness community that once embraced it, a cautionary tale.

• 1:27:16Speaker 04

  But what it's a cautionary tale about is worth being precise. Rama was not a fringe operation. It was not hidden in a compound or an isolated rural community. It operated in the most visible corner of America wellness culture, validated by celebrity attendance and press coverage and nonprofit with a social justice mission. The exploitation that ran through it, the wage theft, the psychological abuse, the cult of personality built around a single charismatic figure, was all conducted in plain sight, dressed in... Weird white linen outfits and accompanied by Grammy-winning music for some reason. But the whole aesthetic was just a trap.

• 1:27:59Speaker 04

  Because when everything looks clean and aspirational and expensive, and when the people around you are celebrities and the studio is on Instagram and the guru is on a podcast with hundreds of thousands of listeners, it becomes very difficult to say, "This is a cult." This is exploitation. Something is wrong here. The trappings of legitimacy were so carefully constructed that questioning them felt like a personal failing. A sign that you weren't spiritually developed enough to understand what was being asked of you, if that makes sense. And the defense of Yogi Bajaj in that context was not incidental. It was very revealing. When Pamela Dyson's memoir forced every Kundalini teacher in America to choose a side,

• 1:28:44Speaker 04

  Guru Jagat's choice told her followers exactly what her loyalty structure looked like. And a significant number of them remained anyway. Because by that point, the investment was too deep and the community was too real. And the alternative, which was accepting that something they had trusted had been built on exploitation, was too painful. So the dynamic with the psychological difficulty of leaving something that you've sacrificed for is the same in every cult. From the Swedish village, to the Ugandan compound, to a yoga studio in Venice Beach. The specific details change and the aesthetic changes and the scale changes, but the mechanisms don't. And as long as people are searching for meaning,

• 1:29:29Speaker 04

  there will be someone ready to exploit that search. So please be careful out there. But that is that for this deep dive on three different cults. Maybe ones you've never heard of. I genuinely have never heard of any of these until somebody brought them up in the comments. So please let me know other subjects or cults or people you want me to deep dive into, and I will do that. But until then, I will see your beautiful face and please stay safe out there. Okay?

• 1:30:02Speaker 00

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