There is a 95-year-old woman in a Melbourne nursing home who dotes on a plastic baby doll. You wouldn’t guess it to look at her, but this is a woman who amassed a multi-million dollar fortune, destroyed families, and affected the lives of numer

Two by Twos / The Truth

Oct 13th, 2020 1h 15m

Laura McConnell was born into a fundamentalist Christian sect that claims it has no name. Former member Elizabeth Coleman told Nathan Jolly for news.com.au earlier this year that, “It is of utmost importance to them that they do not have an off

Bonus

Interview Episode: KwaSizabantu

Dec 7th, 2021 1h 43m

KwaSizabantu means “the place where people are helped” in Zulu. Erika Bornman spent most of her childhood years at the KwaSizabantu Mission. Her memoir Mission of Malice is about her childhood, and about her life since leaving. It’s an incredib

Fire This Time

Dec 15th, 2020 1h 33m

As a disaffected youth, Shannon Bundock was drawn to progressive ideas. In her late teens she moved into the city, to a poor neighbourhood in Vancouver, Canada, where she became hyper aware of the inequality all around her. The activists who we

Bonus

Interview Episode: David Freeman – former child member of The Family

1 Jun 29th, 2021 1h 17m

David Freeman was handed over to Anne Hamilton Byrne at the age of two, when he went to live with the other children at The Family’s Lake Eildon property. It took 12 years before he was rescued by the police, and given his freedom. At 15, he vo

The Welcomed Consensus + OneTaste – Part 1

Nov 17th, 2020 1h 28m

Natasha Tiku wrote for Gawker in 2013, “Everyone is interested in doing fun things with their bodies. But the impulse to systematize, replicate, package, sell, and build an ideology around it is uniquely Silicon Valley.” She was writing about a

Zendik Farm

Sep 15th, 2020 1h 52m

Helen Zuman describes herself as “a tree-hugging dirt worshipper devoted to turning waste into food and the stinky guck of experience into fertile, fragrant prose.” Her memoir ‘Mating in Captivity’ details her experiences joining Zendik Farm, a

Ideal Human Environment

Dec 17th, 2019 47m 16s

WANTED: families to volunteer to live for six months in the Australian outback “to advance the frontiers of social science.” Be part of a cutting edge research project to test the ideal human environment. In a country known for a population tha

The Move

Nov 12th, 2019 56m 59s

Followers of The Move rejected mainstream society and headed into the wilderness in the 1970s, building isolated communities that were to set them up for the coming Apocalypse. Many ex-members would later tell stories of physical hardship, beat

Order of the Solar Temple

Mar 12th, 2019 57m 36s

The Order of the Solar Temple was a secret society that would go down sharing the pages of history with Jonestown, the Branch Davidians and Heaven’s Gate. But is it fair to compare the groups? When it comes to incidents of mass violence and cul

The Seaside Sect

Feb 12th, 2019 25m 33s

A New Zealand-born man who moved to Australia in the 1970s and started a sect, telling his eventual 9 wives and 60-plus children that he was Jesus Christ, was put behind bars for 7 years in Victoria in 2000. In spite of the fairly sensational n

Outreach International – Part 2

1 Nov 20th, 2018 1h 22m

Laura left Outreach International when she was 32 years old, having been born into the sect in the late 1970s. Hear her story as she relates the experience of being a young woman in a highly patriarchal and controlling organisation, the difficu

Outreach International – Part 1

Nov 13th, 2018 1h 5m

In May 2017, a sect that started in Melbourne, Australia, 50 years ago, and has been highly secretive over the last few decades, decided to change its closed-doors policy and go public with a website. Whilst up until now very little has been kn

The Workers’ Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought

Oct 16th, 2018 56m 28s

In October of 2013, the British organisation Freedom Charity received a call on their hotline. The woman on the other end said that her housemate had been held captive in South London for 30 years.At the time of this call, Katy Morgan-Davies wa

Synanon

1 Sep 18th, 2018 1h 2m

Synanon began as an addiction support group that gathered in a grimy Californian flat in the late 1950s. It would grow to become a well-funded utopian society throughout the late ’60s and early ’70s, before declaring itself a religion in 1974.

Branch Davidians

Apr 17th, 2018 1h 26m

2018 marks the 25-year anniversary of a 51-day siege that ended in tragedy, following a shootout between the U.S. government and members of a sect called the Branch Davidians. The gunfire exchange lasted for well over an hour, killing four U.S.

The Order of St Charbel

Mar 13th, 2018 1h 33m

William Kamm has a 10pm curfew, and is not allowed to spend time with girls under the age of 17. He is prevented from entering the Shoalhaven district of New South Wales, and his movements and communications are monitored. These are conditions

Koreshanity

Feb 13th, 2018 42m 8s

The Koreshans believed that the earth was hollow, and that humans lived on the concave inside surface of it. They theorised that the moon and stars, and indeed the rest of the universe, was contained within. On the outside? A void. When they fo

Universal Knowledge

Jan 16th, 2018 57m 34s

Carli McConkey was a 21-year-old university graduate when she decided to attend the Mind Body Spirit Festival in Sydney, and came across the stand for Life Integration Programmes. The course they offered sounded like exactly what she needed to

Kenja Communication

Dec 12th, 2017 1h 16m

Ken Dyers passed away 10 years ago this year, but the organisation that he spearheaded with his partner Jan Hamilton lives on. In spite of a few parallels, this Australian organisation, called Kenja, has been listed as a suppressive group by th

Aum Shinrikyo

Nov 14th, 2017 58m 32s

Twenty years ago this year, Japan was to become a nuclear wasteland, according to the leader of a sect who claimed that the only survivors would be his followers and 10% of the major cities. It was in the lead up to this year of the predicted a

The Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God

Oct 17th, 2017 40m 5s

Ugandan cult The Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God was one of the deadliest in world history, with the number of casualties similar to the infamous Jonestown massacre. The mastermind behind it? A woman who said she was

Interview Episode: LGATs with John Hunter PhD

7 days ago 1h 34m

For his 2017 PhD, John Hunter put forward a hypothesis that offers insights into both the “transformational” experiences associated with large group awareness training (LGAT) participation and the common claims of psychological harm and problem

Bonus

Message from Sarah

28 days ago 5m 25s

A little update from Sarah about what to expect with Let's Talk About Sects now that we're winding up the sixth season of the show. Don't worry, we're not going anywhere! But there are a few small changes to make sure that this project remains

The Retreat: a Divine Madness Update

Mar 12th, 2024 1h 34m

In the last episode of season 5, we looked into a Boulder, Colorado community then known as Divine Madness and led by Marc Tizer, usually referred to as 'Yo'. Its members were recognised for some amazing results in ultramarathons. At the time o