Survivor Stories: The Dark World Of Cults (True Crime Documentary) | Real Stories

hello and welcome to the doc exchange a real stories podcast in partnership with the grierson trust every week i'll ask a new filmmaker or filmmaking team about three documentaries connected by a single theme that have made a meaningful impression on their work and life [Music] i don't have full recall of what happened when i was under hypnosis i remember a lot of it but not all of it i was under obedience to do what i was told by then the abuse had started i didn't want to have sex with him wouldn't him have sex with me or use me for sex anymore they made him have sex with a dog they cut one of his testicle out and made immediate they took his teeth out with a hammer and chisel techniques of mind control are so effective a lot of people think if we could just get him or her out of the group that would be it it's not as easy as that cults are very very active in the uk they're damaging individuals they're damaging families they're damaging the economy there are up to a thousand different cults in in operation and i'm known for being conservative with my figures [Music] i think everyone who manages to escape a cult and build any sort of semblance of a normal life is truly a survivor the children of god were formed in 1968 by a former evangelical pastor called david berg my parents both joined the cult as teenagers in france they were both around 17 when they joined this was in the first decade of the cult's existence when the cult appeared to be quite an exciting place to be they married within the cult and began having children not long after they were sent to thailand where i was born [Music] the children of god believed that all christians should abandon all their personal belongings and families and live fully for christ they became quite a large movement so in total i believe they had about 30 000 people passed through the cult over the decades that they were the most active at any one time there were about 10 000 members of which about 60 were children because they didn't believe in contraception there is hidden population though less hidden now because some of these young people are coming out talking about their experience of people who were born or grew up in cults it's easy for people to say well you know why did you join this group you're so stupid or needy or weak or vulnerable or whatever it is you can't say that about the people who are born or brought up in these groups and who've really suffered terribly for the majority of my childhood we lived in combo homes very large homes and it was run very much like a military camp we were divided up by age groups we had very strict schedules we all slept together eight together and and basically they were raising us to be members of god's final army religious fanaticism or cultish behavior warps the ideology and it makes it try to perceive to the victim in effect that what they're doing is actually correct what they're doing is right even though it's a hyperliteral interpretation of the faith so not only were we being trained you know spiritually and physically to become soldiers you know we were told that we would die as martyrs and receive you know amazing gifts when we got to heaven for our sacrifice we were told that we would have superpowers you know like being able to shoot thunderbolts from our eyes they also predicted the end of the world several times which meant that we children were brought up with the firm knowledge that we were going to die most likely in our teenage years you have this total belief system a total ideology where you can only believe the cult beliefs nothing else this is all you need to know it covers everything so you know forget all the other things that you might be interested in and we can explain everything that ever happened in the world and ever will happen in the world if they can play to some of their fears and tell them that well actually the world itself is coming to an end as well they portray this in effect a doomsday type scenario which makes those individuals fearful for their own lives i can't say i remember many moments where i was happy i think the fact that we were not allowed to see our parents as much as most children would or even our own siblings meant that you know you just felt very alone often no matter how many people were surrounding you we had a lot of time being brainwashed with berg's doctrines no matter what kind of relationship you were in everyone was encouraged to sleep with everyone else who was in their commune to the point that they actually had sexual sharing schedules so people didn't even have the option of who they wanted to sleep with they were told who when and how [Music] cults do not allow free choice other organizations the churches your local social group allows free choice to become a member or not what you see is what you get in a legitimate organization that's not what you get in a cult [Music] things escalated when david berg brought out the law of love he brought out several letters about child sex in which he claimed that it was acceptable for children to experiment sexually and be sexually active by the time they hit puberty which for some girls and boys would be about the age of 12 or 13. this unfortunately caused quite a wave of child sex abuse in the cult where every person who was inclined that way took his doctrines as the go-ahead to abuse children and unfortunately i was one of them at the age of four i was abused on multiple occasions by an adult man who lived in our home and who looked after us children [Music] the children of god have been known for the abuse of people from very early days and what's happened to people in that organisation is quite [Music] tragic [Music] it was in my second year art school i had come out of a marriage emotionally i was lost i was just really interested in broadening my horizon i saw posters for native american shaman i thought that would be interesting to go and check out this guy imagining it'd be a wizard old man with a white beard and this person who arrived on the platform was a young easygoing american guy like a chat next door he just happened to have a very big gift in healing as he said he had warping great eyes and he was issuing out love it seemed from those eyes he looked at me and said you you're the one you can help me you're strong you can really help me and it was like okay that's that's me at last i know where where i belong people assume that there has to be something wrong with you to finish up an occult simply not true if you're a caring loving person who wants to either better themselves or make life better for others then you're an easy target so a lot of these individuals if they are having personal problems in their family if they suddenly meet somebody who's offering them a solution to many of the questions that they have then you are giving them what they're looking for what society can't give them and i think that's one of the most powerful things about tulsa somebody had given over her house to him in london turned it into sort of a temple kind of thing this is over months but clearly it was say this group was getting tighter if you can control other people you can get some fringe benefits you can get sex you can get money you can get free labor you can get adulation but i think the fundamental motivation is to control others to control kind of your environment it was like my outer life was diminishing and the the life within was getting stronger as it went on he then dropped his christian name and started using a tibetan name because he started claiming that he was this the proper buddha not the dalai lama wasn't the real dalai lama but in fact he was and he was also not only the dalai lama but he was also jesus reincarnated and i totally took it on board i thought yep i know that's real i know that's right and he said yeah the people who have formed themselves around me and i was one of them other disciples reincarnated and i thought i haven't got a problem with that [Music] i would argue that the average cult member although he or she isn't aware of it is no longer critically able they're no longer able to critically evaluate it's as though they can just switch off logic in the person's mind and so when cult members say peculiar things when they do peculiar things that don't seem to make sense to the rest of us um it's it makes perfect sense to them because they're doing what they're programmed psychologically to do and amazingly out of the blue i was called because i became his partner he decided that i was actually his true partner he dumped his wife and decided i was the one and it was like what if he was jesus i was mary and i really believed that you know i really believed it because i had no choice to believe it but i was then by his side so that yeah the sexual abuse did start then [Music] the sexual abuse that i went through uh happened on multiple occasions and over several months before this person was actually excommunicated because another child he abused had complained but i never spoke about it and i didn't tell my parents about it for a decade because there was also the fear of you know if you reported something that happened to you you were then seen as someone who was lying you weren't necessarily believed you know there was very much a culture of protecting the abusers in the cult sadly it's not unusual for cults to be involved in sexual abuse and for those being brought up in it that's just their reality until they manage to escape if they manage to escape cult leaders fit the profile of psychopaths they are charming seductive manipulative they lack empathy they're highly intelligent i was under you know obedience to do what i was told and there was no kindness in that anymore the horrors started at that point because he started really launching into our our characters you know how bad we were and how we had to really either be close to him or go to hell he decided no i wasn't married at all i was in fact lilith i was the archdemon which of course by then i again fully believed and at that point i was suicidal because i thought well there's nowhere for me i don't know what to do but he even warned us against that that don't commit suicide said don't even think of it because you might be in hell here but you won't get away from me if you even if you die i'll be there because i'm god and that's what stopped me killing myself um because i was i was there you know with the raised blades in the bathroom it was i can't tell you you know the hell was just indescribable david berg introduced another doctrine called flirty fishing which was the belief that women in particular should use their bodies in order to win people to christ it soon became clear as with all his other doctrines that there was another agenda and you know before long women were being sent out to apparently win souls for christ but to encourage those that they were spending time with to donate financially to the cult this escalated in no time to religious prostitution where women were being sent out solely to fundraise and offering their bodies in return as far as sexual abuse goes it's usually one extreme or the other you're either forced to be involved in sex with whoever walks in through the door or no sex at all and for those being brought up in it that's just their reality these women genuinely believed that they were doing something for god i don't think they saw how they were being used i think the way all cults brainwash their members is pretty much the same techniques of mind control the same techniques are used to radicalize people they're sometimes called techniques of psychological coercion and they do break people down psychologically and those techniques for me are the key to understanding the cult phenomenon [Music] my name is mark i was involved in the buddhist group to now consider to be a cult there is a hidden uh dark side to the group since that time i've been trying to warn people i was a bit sort of a disaffected teenager really when i left school at that time it heard about cults you know only somebody who's sort of weak willed and gullible would ever get involved in a cult i had been going along to this buddhist group in north london to learn meditation the leader sort of took an interest in me he had been ordained as a buddhist monk i quite like the idea of helping him in his work of what he claimed was his work of helping to bring buddhism to the west but he was able to twist that into saying oh we need to break through our psychological conditioning and particularly our conditioning as regards sexual orientation [Music] and i looked upon him as a teacher and tried to follow his teachings and that basically led me up the garden path but i didn't know that at the time we didn't sort of see that we took advantage of my good nature everyone says that if someone is sick or is there a drug addict or if they've been a victim of a crime they should be helped in this instance for some reason because they've joined the so-called faith in voluntarily it's thought that they don't deserve any help not just religion but any kind of idealist sort of outlook on the world can take advantage of people's naivety and goodwill and twist it for their own ends i didn't know much about so i wasn't able to separate out the genuine buddhism for them i mean subtly twisted version of it he likes sort of manipulating young heterosexual men to try and change the sexual orientation or at least will let him engage in sexual acts with them so i think it's basically a power thing personal gratification i think [Music] capacif control legislation that we have now which only applies within within a domestic context has to apply within groups well the worst thing from my point of view is he tried to make out that my feelings of love or affection for women or a sort of neurotic projection which i had to overcome if i was to kind of break through my conditioning and and sort of make progress on the body's path i see myself as very much a victim of misuses of people's good will to gain power over them to get money out of them and to get sex out of them and i just fell victim to all three [Music] they shouldn't get out they should not get out they should die in jail because life should mean life if you take life you should die in jail the perpetrator of the court he put his head down and didn't even look at the judge because he knew what he had done was despicable he knew the evil that he had done to him i think the word kelp did enter all of our minds at a very early stage because what was being described was a single individual who had gathered around him a number of vulnerable people and who was exercising complete control over their lives deciding where they lived what they did even where they ate they were compliant because of a leader called zaid zaman who i would call an individual that had machiavellian traits that was cunning he was sinister he was devious and he essentially used individuals for his own pleasure and gratification so the group with which the case was concerned comprised five individuals the eldest was k rayworth her life had taken a downturn in about 2004 when she had divorced following that she'd become involved in internet dating and it was through that that she was to meet the younger man zaheed zaman who was known as zed then we had of course jimmy pratt myra wood and the fifth member of the of the group was anne corbett i don't know what the definition of what a cult is but these these five were very much together and four of them turned on one of them the kind of cultish behavior that this case revealed often occurs totally under the radar and so the british public were being exposed for the first time probably the first time to something that was very new to them and secondly the public was outraged i believe and rightly by the brutal and barbaric way in which jimmy had been treated by people that he thought were his friends me and jimmy met in 1992 in newcastle he was on a stall in the town center and we just got chatting that was it he was fun-loving he was funny he was staffed as a brush he would do anything for anybody we were together for 14 years and then after a while he was having an affairs behind me back i'm getting in trouble with the police and i says right asses just leave i don't want nothing more to do with you anymore i did see him around town the old jimmy he was clean he was tady he was always smartly dressed but then the jimmy i seen just before the christmas he was scruffy and i'm thinking well and i'm looking i'm thinking that's not jimmy and i says hello how are you he said i'm fine but the person that he was with that dragged him away and that was the last time i had seen him was two weeks before christmas and i had never seen him after that so i didn't know what had happened to him jimmy was a man with vulnerabilities who by the time that zahid zaman met him was reliant to some extent at least upon soup kitchens and so he was typical prey for zahid zaman they knew he was vulnerable they knew he was homeless i'm thinking why didn't you just walk away but i said he was still vulnerable we were still scared during the latter stage of 2015 jimmy posted to facebook images of injuries to various parts of his body to his face to his torso and in particular to his back where he had terrible bruising and in due course we have discovered that he had a series of broken bones including what must have been an extremely painful fracture to his scapula when i seen the photos on his website page it made me feel very sick i've never seen anything like that it's all he had been beaten to an inch of his life i could tell by how scared he was by his images and the face on him how scared he really really was the police turned up in middle our door it helped us turn on easter saturday night and they went er we've come looking for jimmy i have been missing since february i just thought nothing of it because jimmy b and jimmy used to do it all the time and then it was a sunday when i got that phone call you died between the 9th and 10th of february that year well the police were notified on the 25th of march 2016 as a result of a phone call to the police from saheed zaman in relation to the fact that he'd been assaulted by one of his friends and aunt corbett he handed to the police three pieces of paper that he said he'd torn from anne corbett as she fled the scene on which pieces of paper were a confession by and corbett to the murder zaman himself whilst there was extravagantly upset he was very upset he was crying he was screaming out loud and this was all recorded on the officer's body-worn video demonstrating how upset he was at the thought that his good friend james prout was dead police officers then spoke to others in the in the house so a lady called k rayworth who had been at one stage saheed zarman's partner but still lived with him she filled in some of the the details but again they were lies she maintained the story that anne corbett was responsible for the the death of jimmy prout and another person who had lived with jimmy pratt called myra wood who was the partner of zahid zaman she chipped in again to corroborate this false story as it turned out that ann corbett was so responsible for the killing of jimmy primes corbett was located corbett was obviously aware that she wrote the note she agreed i'd not wrote the note but it was as a result of the coercion that zaman had put around her and she wrote it at his behest um and when confronted with the police being arrested for murder it unraveled in relation to what what was going on and she started telling um what had happened firstly she was able to tell us where james's body was which was some 150 yards away from the address buried in some undergrowth and had been there for approximately six weeks she also confirmed that they'd even been back to the body to recover um the bank card from his pocket so that he could take money out of his bank account and she also confirmed that jimmy had been abused by all of them and assaulted over a period of time she also confirmed that she herself had been involved in that in some a number of assaults including some horrific incidents of appalling abuse on jimmy on the weeks and months leading up to his eventual death whereby at some man's request corbett put some trousers over james's mouth and evidently we suffocated them he invited me uh into his a flat he shared with two others at that time i thought he was just extending friendship but obviously with the benefit of hindsight he wanted to be available for his own sexual gratification he used to masturbate himself on my stomach and that was his sort of his thing really it went along like that for about four years my parents had both died by that time so i was able to buy a big country house in the norfolk countryside for them to run retreats and everything so i was living there with a number of other of his disciples and then um i told him i didn't want to have sex with him or didn't want to have let him have sex with me or use me for sex anymore eventually find the strength to say no go away [Music] when i look back now on my childhood you know for many years i was very angry and bitter about what the cult had done but i think now when i think back you know not only to myself but to all the other children who are raised in the cult i just feel an immense sadness because you know we weren't allowed to be children we didn't have childhoods the day i left was a bittersweet day i had a lot of younger siblings at that point and i'd been very involved in looking after them so you know leaving them was almost like leaving my own children you know i couldn't be 100 certain that my siblings were safe and yet i knew that i had to escape because i would be of no good to anyone in the cult it was a moment of elation because finally i had freedom where i was finally going to get a chance to think for myself and to do things that i wanted to do and build my own life of course i thought it'd be that simple but it really wasn't [Music] you know i went on to realize very quickly that i was just not able to integrate into the world i had no idea who i was i had no idea what my personality was your entire brain has been programmed by someone else you have no idea which thoughts are yours and which thoughts have been placed in your head by the cult techniques of mind control are so effective a lot of people think if we could just get him or her out of the group that would be it it's not as easy as that you can take someone out of a cult but getting the cult out of the person it's another thing altogether psychologically that sort of hook of being part of a cult is very difficult to always leave so even when you do leave and you want to reintegrate it's you'll still have that sense of dependency on the cult and it's very hard to de-program somebody you really need to educate yourself about what has happened to you don't stay in the wilderness of thinking you're the worst person in the world because you're not you're actually one of the best you okay we moved into this retreat center in the norfolk countryside in 1976 and i eventually broke free in 1986 and it so happens that i had um read the novel about jane eyre which is sort of about love that sort of kind of catalyzed me into seeing that all this stuff he had been saying about love is just a neurotic projection and so and it was just complete nonsense it was untrue and once i saw it was untrue i began to see the all the rest of his teaching was untrue i sort of saw through them they turned against me once i started criticizing the leader in the group so they kind of pushed me out more or less i owned sort of majority share of this retreat center they eventually persuaded me to sell it to them it has affected my life a great deal i don't have a job or a partner or any great role in life other than as an ex-cult member because if i hadn't been involved in the cult i wouldn't have been involved in trying to warn people about cults from going through the same sort of things as i went through [Music] it was a sunday when i got that phone call i had been found dead i was just i just went wait and i was like crying and speaking about the same time i was as shocked i thought [Music] jimmy hated fighting if somebody went to autumn to like have a gordon he would run so i can't understand jimmy why didn't he run why didn't he leave but he was so scared to leave i just wish i could have heard his voice again to say that i was my i was sorry i shouldn't have left him i'd had experience of of gangland cases in which there would commonly be a hierarchy and a senior figure who controlled other persons but i'd never experienced a situation in which one individual had such a significant indeed complete degree of control over every aspect of the lives of a number of other people the level of brutality to which jimmy pratt was subjected was wholly exceptional he wasn't just beaten with fists and feet it wasn't just that weapons were taken to him on a very regular basis but but he was also subject to terrible tortures they made him have sex with a dog and they put one of his testicles out and made a music they took his teeth out with a hammer and chisel they battered him and so the final months of jimmy's life from late 2015 to early 2016 were marked by what can only be described as daily tortures and tortures of the type that perhaps hadn't been seen since the the dark ages these are descriptions of sadism individuals were getting pleasure out of inflicting harm on him all of us who were involved in the in the case were affected by what we knew jimmy had been through and there were some very clear demonstrations of that so we had cctv footage they were showing the cctv cameras they only kept that wasn't jimmy i knew the way he was walking they were tying them dragging him up and then we had the final footage of him on the 6th of february 2016. a man barely able to stand bearded being dragged down the down the street and so we were able to see with our own eyes the deterioration in this man as a result of the way in which he was being treated and no one could fail to be affected by that they are the worst of criminals that you're ever going to meet and they are capable of the worst behavior some of which i've experienced in my experience as a police officer so in court zahid zaman remained confident i have no doubt that he thought that he could manipulate the process and manipulate the outcome by telling lie after lie but during the course of cross-examination his lies which were absolutely obvious were exposed very clearly for the jury zeizerman and ann corbett were found guilty of murder they both received life imprisonment and myra wood and k rayworth were found guilty of allowing the death of a vulnerable adult the day they were sentenced when we found out when they were sentenced and what what sentence they were getting were all jumped up and tell them to rot in jail cult leaders send out recruiters to talk to people find out what makes them take home in on that area of interest and bring them in through the door the people that say could never happen to me are usually the easiest people to recruit life prior to involvement in the cult was great i was in a a job that i enjoyed by the time the course had finished i've given the group all the money i had which was fifteen hundred and fifty some dollars in my current account and i dedicated my life to the group i went to work the next day and resigned for my job they hypnotized us 16 times in the four-day course the course was gone until one or two in the morning so we were becoming sleep deprived and by the end of the course you're theirs once i'd escaped from the cult i was quite a mess for the 11 months of withdrawal that i then went through i wouldn't wish that experience on anybody today we equate a lot of the symptoms with post-traumatic stress disorder i think it still stands on its own though it's very difficult when you come out of a cult you feel like you're just dropping off the edge of the planet it's the most strange experience it was organized as a cell structure we had different names that was claire and i was nb 25 very soon after i formally joined i was set up in a relationship with someone in the group a sort of arranged marriage little memos would come to you from your contact in these little beige envelopes telling you what to do and i got a memo one day as did my husband say we should have children so we did go on to have children as has requested ordered decisions about reproduction and your family are taken out of your control you have no time to reflect on what's going on so i stayed for another nine years and eventually got out when my son was about five one of the things that helped me start to be able to regain my sensible thinking was one we got one of these memos criticizing how we were raising our son i just was like i'm out of here this group is crazy and i'm out of here cults are not a thing of the past i think that's a misconception a lot of people have the issue now is that they are smarter and they have more ways to hide and more ways to operate undetected some cults in the uk might have 50 members others will have thousands of members they will vary a great deal but it is a huge problem and people are being recruited every week i'm not sure anyone ever truly gets over a cult experience at least a hundred have already committed suicide you know of people who were in the colds i would like to see us take the sun as a public health issue in a very serious way it's not going away and it's much more prevalent than we think in terms of accountability it's just not there i think there should be not only to make cults accountable for their activity but also to protect individuals and families if people could understand the real dangers that cults present groups like isis and al-qaeda recruit and indoctrinate and manipulate their members in very much the same sort of ways i think cult leaders should be prosecuted for these crimes um i think it's a time in society now that society the police cps the criminal justice system more generally starts to take cults seriously these groups are getting away with murder and still are the only thing apart from governmental action which will which will help with that is publicity it almost feels like these cult leaders and abusers are untouchable i don't know if there is some fear of authorities being accused of religious persecution i don't know what it is what i do know is that nothing's being done [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Real Stories

Views: 355,324

Keywords: Real Stories, Real Stories Full Documentary, Real Stories Documentary, Full length Documentaries, Documentary, TV Shows - Topic, Documentary Movies - Topic, full documentary, full episode, Cults, Taboos And Twisted Faith, documentary, cult, religion, crime, scientology, cults, science, true crime, sky, murder, sex, god, faith, cult leader, spirituality, conspiracy, bbc, movies, pbs, documentaries, music, internet, world, youtube, alien, film, interview

Id: GD5iI3jzpoE

Length: 42min 37sec (2557 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 21 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Mackm123456]

Stories like this is why alot of people are ahtiest now. When you sexual abuse a child, it really traumatize people.