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