The first rule of cults is: don’t ever call it a cult. Which is a problem if you’re trying to write a book about them. The patience and pivoting that author and journalist Anke Richter exhibited in finding subjects willing to talk is extraordinary. She set out to trace the still-raw wounds of Centrepoint, the more contemporary sexual abuse in religious community Gloriavale, and the controversial tantric yoga school Agama.
But all of these communities, operating outside of mainstream cultural norms, rely on secrecy. Getting people to talk openly, even decades later, proved complicated.
When she finally finds someone brave, angry or arrogant enough to speak, their stories are wildly disparate from each other. For example, Centrepoint was both a freeing and benevolent social experiment (if you were an adult) and an inescapable nightmare of unrelenting sexual abuse (if you were a child).
Of course, it’s not as clear-cut as that. There are plenty of inbetweens; women who didn’t feel taken advantage of, men who felt the therapy they received was beneficial, and children who had a happy upbringing. But mostly, a narrative of two violently opposing accounts begins to take shape.
How to tell the story was clearly a hard call to make. Richter is constantly juggling her journalistic integrity with the desire to judge perpetrators for their callousness. She openly struggles with the rage she feels at the unchecked suffering the victims endured and the lack of retributive justice they received.
I ask Richter about the lack of accountability from the adults involved. I want to know if she saw a correlation between the kind of person who ends up in a cult and the kind of person who struggles to take responsibility for their own actions.
“Totally,” she agrees. “There’s a deliberate sort of ‘Us versus Them’ narrative to keep people in and to demonise what’s on the outside.”
Although there are similarities in people who end up in cults (they’re usually experiencing a “temporary situational
