the FOLLOWER
On the night of May 29, 2006, after seeing the documentary An Inconvenient Truth in Manhattan, Jeff Gross took the ferry back to Staten Island and walked home to Ganas, a communal-living experiment he’d spent decades building.
He climbed the steep steps up to the group’s cluster of houses scattered among leafy walkways and squinted his way through uncut shrubs and poor lighting. As Jeff approached his porch, a figure stepped from the shadows and raised a handgun.
“What do you want?” Jeff shouted, and then, “No, no, don’t do it!”
Shots pop-pop-popped as the shooter unloaded six rounds into his hip, stomach, arm, and neck. Jeff fell to the ground, blood pumping from his wounds. His assailant stepped over him and fled. A neighbor who heard the shooting knelt beside Jeff and shouted for towels to stanch the bleeding.
Many moments had delivered Jeff to this one. Since 1980, Ganas had been a community that embraced all manner of new-agey life. But his relationship with the group—particularly with its charismatic and often abusive leader, Mildred Gordon—had become unrecognizable since their early days. He’d signed over a small fortune, endured thousands of hours of “feedback” sessions, and entered a four-way marriage. And now he was bleeding out in the back of an ambulance.
How had Jeff gotten into this mess? And why had he stayed?
When we met in October 2021, decades after he hooked up with Mildred, I asked him that very question, only to hear his deeply unsatisfying conclusion. “To me, I know you’re writing your story, but I tried to tell you before you ever came out here that, in my opinion, it’s just like any situation,” he said of his nightmare at Ganas. Families, relationships, jobs, all of them can go bad. “But we’re talking about so many people in this situation, it seems even more complex than layered because of our lifestyle.”
The lifestyle Jeff and his coresidents lived until he was shot has a lot of names, though he still can’t bring himself to use the c-word. But America’s foremost cult deprogrammer, Rick Alan Ross, described the group during Jeff’s time as exactly that. Cults exist on a spectrum, Ross told me. “You have Waco Davidians, Heaven’s Gate, Children of God, and then you have groups that are far less destructive,” he said. “Jim Jones is a 10; Keith Raniere is a 9.” Ross considers Ganas as it existed when Jeff was there to be a 5 or a 6.
Jeff is now sixty-seven. It would be easy to look at his life these days—one in which he lives in hiding, afraid for his life, with a five-inch scar up his belly, lingering PTSD that once left him unable to tell waking life from dreams, and an outstanding $1.3 million judgment against his shooter—and think, Well, that’s what happens when you belong to one of the longest-running cults in New York City. But the closer I got to Jeff’s story, the more I came to see that he and other former members were right: This was a more complicated cult story than the ones I thought I knew, and an entirely more unsettling one.
It all started half a century ago, on a hot day when Jeff decided to go to the pool.
At Arizona State in the fall of 1973, everyone seemed to have life figured out except for Jeff Gross. He was nineteen, tall and lanky, with a melon scoop of kinky hair, almost handsome but hopelessly sheltered. It was a party school, and Jeff did not know how to party.
