Learning from our mistakes: Problems with the New Zealand Anti-cult response of the 80s and 90s

Bronwyn Rideout - 30 September 2024

During our “very special” episode of the Yeah…Nah podcast with Anke Richter, Anke referred to an anti-cult organisation that was taken over by Scientology. The group she was referring to was the Citizen’s Freedom Foundation / Cult Awareness Network (CAN), which was founded by Ted Patrick in 1978. Although he had no formal education or training, Patrick was a pioneer of deprogramming, which he developed in response to the expansion of various cults and religion movements throughout the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Deprogramming was always controversial, but seen as a necessary evil by many parents who paid Patrick and others like him to return their (often adult) children to them. Methods employed by Patrick and others included abduction, sleep and food deprivation, emotional abuse, desecration of symbols of the detainee’s faith, and sometimes physical violence.

The problem with deprogramming

The word “deprogramming” reflects the prevailing belief in mind control and that individuals who were joining cults/new religious movements were doing so under the influence of the cult/group leader. From a modern skeptical lens it is easy to look back on the practice as pseudoscientific, akin to conversion therapy. Even if we dislike or abhor the actions of individual groups, the deprogramming process is legally dubious because it requires one to hold another person against their will and deprive them of their freedom through the process of an extralegal abduction. Personal testimonies about the effectiveness of deprogramming are mixed and, while allegedly quite effective at first, the mounting failures provided ammunition for cults to fight back through civil suits and criminal actions. The growing liability presented by deprogramming saw the practice gradually go out of favour with prominent deprogrammers like Steve Hassan, in favour of what is called exit counselling, which is voluntary and ideally devoid of many of the negative features of deprogramming.

Deprogramming in NZ

Throughout the 1980s, New Zealand was not exempt from the kinds of scandals that failed deprogramming attempts brought. In the early 1980s, much ink was shed about efforts made by kiwi families to retrieve their children from the Unification church, sometimes laying out up to $16,000 NZD to bring in deprogrammers from overseas.

Evening Post, December 16, 1984

Maybe the most famous of these were Moonies/Unification Church members Maree Gauper (then Maree Ryan), formerly of Invercargill, and Rosalind Menzies of Christchurch. Maree was one of the first missionaries of the group in New Zealand, and both Menzies and Gauper had married American men. Gauper was the subject of two unsuccessful attempts at deprogramming, one in Australia when she first converted, and the second which lasted for 10 days in NZ under the auspices of Joe Alexander and his sons from the Tucson Freedom of Thought Foundation in Arizona. Alexander was a controversial choice for Maree’s family, with $3 million in lawsuits against him in the United States. During her confinement, Maree was kept in a room with boarded-up windows, and had someone to follow her whenever she went to the toilet. She described the deprogramming technique used as one of ridicule, harassment, and haranguing, until she was finally goaded into a shouting match. Then Maree changed tactics and decided to play along with what Alexander and his team required, while engaging in a brief hunger strike. When the police finally arrived, she returned to the Unification Church and called her experience a test of faith. Interesting to note was the response of the police, who declared Maree’s abduction a low priority for them and stated that she was in hiding with her brother and mother during the deprogramming; moreover, one detective inspector said that he thought no crime had been committed.

Maree Ryan arriving at Unification Church Headquarters, The Press 16 August 1983

Rosalind Menzies’ public recollection of her deprogramming session seems significantly less dramatic. She was secluded for seven days in a North Canterbury farmhouse with a couple of Americans. In news articles from the 1980s, Menzies recalled the experience as being devoid of pressure, and described one deprogrammer as kind, caring, and understanding (although she too was chaperoned to the bathroom to prevent her from harming herself). Menzies was persuaded to renounce her church membership and end her marriage. Gauper remains both a devoted member and is still married to her arranged husband over 40 years later; she wrote a memoir about her deprogramming experience called Free Maree: When Faith, Family, and Freedom Collide.

In 1983, Jacinta Satherly, formerly of Nelson, filed a kidnap complaint in the state of Tennessee. She was abducted by deprogrammers in Knoxville and transported over state lines to South Carolina. As with the others, she was held for 5-6 days and successfully deceived the deprogrammers that she was coming round to their arguments before escaping their grasp and returning to the Unification Church. As with Maree, the deprogramming failed to take with Jacinta and, as of 2017, Jacinta was still married to her arranged husband and both remain in the Unification Church. Jacinta’s daughter, Kasmira Krefft, published a photo book about the experiences of current and ex members of the Unification Church in New Zealand.

The end of the Cult Awareness Network

Ted Patrick of the Cult Awareness Network (CAN) was the subject of many civil and criminal cases regarding his methods over the decades he practiced. Things began to unravel for the group with the failed deprogramming of Jason Scott. In January 1991, Jason’s mother, Katherine Tonkin, had left the Life Tabernacle Church and wanted 18 year-old Jason and her two younger sons to leave with her. Tonkin was referred to Rick Ross by CAN. Scott testified that after four days of confinement and physical and emotional abuse, he was successful in convincing Ross that the deprogramming was successful. While having a celebratory meal held soon after the incident, Jason called the police and had Ross and his associates/accomplices arrested. Criminal charges were brought in 1993, with Ross being acquitted and his associates either receiving suspended sentences or not being charged. A civil suit was also filed on behalf of Jason by longtime member and Scientology counsel Kendrick Moxon. Scientology had often been a target of CAN’s attention and, in turn, financed some cases brought by people who were harmed by deprogramming. In 1995, the jury held Ross and associates were liable for negligence and conspiracy in depriving Scott of his civil rights and religious liberties, with $1,000,000 awarded in punitive damages against CAN.

Rather than pay the judgement, CAN used the insurance money to launch a series of appeals which were definitively rejected and unsuccessful in 1999. CAN then declared itself bankrupt as a result of this and other lawsuits. Scientology subsequently purchased the CAN name and assets and ran CAN as a networking service for cults and nontraditional groups. As for Scott, he did eventually reconcile with his mother and, with a new lawyer, settled with Ross for a much lower amount plus 200 hours of “professional services” from Ross himself.

NZ Anti-cult groups

With DeCult just under a month away, I thought it might be appropriate to briefly profile two different New Zealand “anti-cult” groups from the 80s/90s: The Free Mind Foundation and the Ritual Action Network/Group, aka RAG.

Free Mind Foundation

The Free Mind Foundation (FMF), formerly the Organisation to Combat Control and Alteration of the Mind (OCCAM) was led by David McLeod in the early 1980s. McLeod was an active member of the Humanist Society of NZ, and had worked as a teacher. Upon his death from cancer in the mid-1990s, a totara tree was dedicated to him by the Humanists on Wrights Hill. All that remains of the Free Mind Foundation is a box in the Beaglehole Library, which contains a collection of correspondence, newsletters, clipped newspaper articles, and various ephemera from various groups, but mainly the Moonies and the Divine Light Mission.

While the FMF wasn’t an anti-religious group, it was one that was driven by parents of cult/sect members rather than by ex-members. And with that often came the expectation that their adult children should return to the faith of their parents - rather than these parents showing any reflection about how the qualities of mainstream religious belief may be similarly problematic to the cults their children were in. Which isn’t surprising. Newsletters of the FMF that survive predominantly reported on overseas cult movements such as the Osho, and the scholarly debate that was happening around deprogramming, but there are also some insights into what was happening locally. Having reviewed Rebecca Priestley’s “End Times” for the newsletter, it was intriguing to read about allegations that evangelical groups such as charismatic Christian foster home network “The Open Home Foundation” and the Transcendental Meditation group were given leave by school administrators to have access to, and be able to recruit students from, high schools.

From what survives, it appears that McLeod did not connect people with deprogrammers, and was instead focused on legislative change. There were two attempts to get the Human Rights Commission to launch an inquiry into cults, in 1979 and 1981. McLeod also wrote to J.W. Grant, Director-general of Social Welfare at the time, about the existence of skilled therapists and counsellors to help people who are under the influence of cults, with an explanation of how that fit under the Children and Young Persons Act 1974. While Grant was sympathetic, he replied that the department was not aware how widespread the problem was, or of its size, followed by a bit of waffle about the young person being willing to receive assistance in the first place, and how NZ social workers did not have the specific training necessary.

I’ve been unable to determine whether FMF were active beyond the mid-1980s, and I am open to hearing from anyone with insight into these later activities. It’s depressing to see how little progress has been made nearly four decades later.

Ritual Action Network/Ritual Action Group

The second group of interest, and likely less obscure, is the Ritual Action Network/Group, or RAG, which sprung up in New Zealand between the tail end of the satanic panic in the United States and the criminal case against Peter Ellis. While RAG was not an anti-cult group in the same sense as FMF or its counterparts, fear of Satan or satanic practices never fails to stir up emotions in the public as a common threshold for decency or boundaries of sensibility being violated. Even in the anti-cult space, there are those who are not even Christian who would use satanic as a pejorative to describe the actions of certain gurus and leaders.

According to Lynley Hood in her book about the Christchurch creche case, A City Possessed, and Professor Michael Hill (who presented an abridged version of his paper Satan’s Excellent Adventure in the Antipodes at the 1998 Skeptics conference), RAG was founded in early 1991 by Upper Hutt Police officer Laurie Gabites, who had visited the United States and gathered information about ritual abuse. The group claimed to have members from the clergy, law, and government departments, as well as counsellors and survivors of ritual abuse. Key members of the group were social workers Ann Marie Stapp and Jocelyn Frances (O’Kane), both social workers (with the latter practicing hypnosis and recovering memories on several individuals), and Nigel Marriott, a probation officer. It is recalled that RAG both regurgitated much of the satanic panic fearmongering, and promoted the work of Pamela Klein, a rape crisis worker/Social Worker from Illinois who was an “expert” witness/consultant in ritual abuse cases in America and Britain, and was later revealed to not be a legitimate therapist, having falsified her qualifications.

What helped make RAG successful where FMF faltered was that RAG had connections to the government through Raewyn Good, a former Wellington Regional Councillor and staff member at the Department of Social Welfare. McLeod largely corresponded to parents who were reluctant to voice their support out of shame or fear of further alienating their children. Hood also reports that Frances, Stapp, and Good utilised Department of Social Welfare and ACC facilities and funding, alongside a $5000 grant, to organise unauthorised $80/person workshops on ritual abuse throughout NZ, where attendees were told that babies were being killed and eaten by powerful men nationwide, and that children were being made to drink blood and urine. It was reported that seminars were often followed by an uptick in ritual abuse allegations.

RAG would hold its first major workshop at the Family Violence Prevention Conference in Christchurch in September 1991; a mere 11 weeks before the first complaint was made in the Creche case. Gabites was reported in national newspapers making claims that are both believable and not - pornographic images of kiwi children being sent overseas? Believable. Those images being of children engaging in animal sacrifice - far less so. In A City Possessed, the influence of the RAG workshops on the Peter Ellis case is presented as pervasive, although it is clear that they were far from the only group with vested interests, and their impact on the case was indirect.

In 2001, Ann-Marie Stapp posted a statement on the bulletin board nz.general putting distance between herself and what was reported in the media:

…My one and only statement in this forum. On a personal level - I think the name Ritual Action Group was a stupid name and never would have agreed to it had I any say in the matter. Have a think about what rag’s means. RAG’s (1991) purpose was to discuss/educate about all types of abuse - professional, medical, intra and extra familial, pedophile rings, physical, sexual and emotional abuse and assist in developing a multi agency approach to dealing with child abuse so children in the year 2000 would not be killed.

I was briefly involved with it but left when I did not agree with the professional and personal behaviour of two of its members. My role was to listen to women’s stories who had survived abuse by pedophiles (whether that included a “ritualistic” component or not). I did not buy into the 1990s stranger danger version of satanism in the way the media represented this…”

In true internet fashion, Stapp would be pulled into making more and more posts in response to her one and only statement. Mainly she tried to argue that she did not endorse any use of the terms “satanic” or “ritualistic” to describe the abuse she was teaching about, but rather “organised systematic abuse”. Aside from weathering a couple of usenet flame wars, Stapp has gotten off lightly with the passage of time. In 1993, Jocelyn Frances/O’Kane was sentenced to nine months of periodic detention and 12 months of supervision for defrauding the Social Welfare department of $30,000, while Raewyn Good, a former Wellington Regional Councillor, was arrested that same year on cannabis possession and fraud-related charges that same year. Gabites, who was presenting himself as a community safety expert, also backtracked his talk of satanic/ritual abuse, and the RAN/RAG operations seem to have petered out, so to speak, by 1994 at the latest.

Final Thoughts

When David McLeod wrote to the Department of Social Welfare about support for young people leaving cults, I doubt he would have wanted the Faustian bargain that came in the form of RAG’s success seven years later. We certainly don’t want to see further harm caused by the application of non-evidence based practices (deprogramming) or claims (satanic/ritual abuse) on vulnerable groups. As we’ve learned from the Peter Ellis case, it is far too easy to conjure up, let alone scapegoat, a target of ridicule in the name of quasi-religious fear. We can certainly get behind the need for providing special training to healthcare practitioners to learn about cults, and for the need for a secular agency or group to replicate what the Gloriavale Leavers’ Support Trust does for their flock. Still, due to this history that NZ has of outside (namely American) opportunists coming into this country and selling New Zealanders on their faulty bill of goods or manufactured hysterias, we need to be alert and critical of claims made to discern beneficial practices, and benign organisations, from the practices and groups that are detrimental to the wellbeing of kiwis.