Ex-Cult Member Shares Experience, Thoughts on Kelly

Was R. Kelly a cult leader? We asked this cult expert — who was once a cult member himself.

Transcript

00:00Back in 1974, when I was 19, I was recruited by three smiling, flirting women who were

00:29members of the Moonies, and my girlfriend had just dumped me, and I was waiting in between

00:36classes at Queens College, and they started picking my brain for everything about my background,

00:43which led to an invitation for dinner.

00:46And that led to two and a half years of fanatical, fascistic indoctrination, dropping out of

00:54college, quitting my job, cutting off from my family and friends, throwing out my poetry

00:59even though I was a creative writing major, and I had such a radical personality change

01:05that my family and friends were like, what's up with Steve?

01:09Whenever there's a disparity of power, where somebody is a minister or a teacher or a celebrity,

01:18you know, who's wealthy, and there's someone who's underage especially, who hasn't reached

01:24maturity, that disparity is going to create more of a vulnerability.

01:54It's hard, and one is very afraid to speak out.

02:06One hears retribution, harassment, lawsuits, and such.

02:12I don't know what was put into their minds, but it is my sense that with the Me Too movement

02:19and other women coming forward, and people hearing other people's stories, especially

02:26celebrities talking about being taken advantage of by Harvey Weinstein or others, it's those

02:35types of things that would empower someone to say, yeah, Me Too.

02:48And now you're meeting me 43 years later, I've been to graduate school, I'm in a doctoral

02:55program, I'm in a forensic think tank at Harvard Medical School, and I'm training psychiatrists

03:03and psychologists and mental health professionals to understand what mind control is all about,

03:10how it's done, and how to wake people up.