Leah Sottile

One gal I spoke to, she got there and thought, oh, I'll just get a piece of pizza when I land. And the people who picked her up were like, no, no, no, you're not getting that. You don't get to do that. So what I think is so fascinating about these groups is that even the people who aren't benefiting from the power enforce the rules.

You know, I like to call them Amy's deputies because they really were kind of like spreading her message and appointed by her to do so. They were the most hard liners about doing things the way that Amy wanted. So you had that financial control you had. The inability to leave. You also had people who had kids, who had spouses, and they were really not allowed to call them.

Maybe they could get permission to make a call, but it was rare. And in one instance, there was a woman who was starting to have real doubts about being there. And she was on the live stream at one point, and her family was so relieved to see that she was on the live stream because they hadn't heard from her. They didn't know if she was okay, and they didn't know where she was.

Resting in any way was taking energy from Mother God, which is an affront to the earth itself. You know, a typical day at the Love Has One house was essentially you were going to get maybe four hours sleep if you were lucky. And that was because if Amy was awake and drinking, then you two were awake with her. If she was asleep, you may be allowed to go to bed.

Father God was kind of seen as sort of the enforcer. And so and at one point, Father God and arguably Amy, too, decided we just want you to cut down all these trees around the house. But we're not going to allow you to do that with a chainsaw. You're going to do that with hand tools.

And we're going to watch you from the patio of the house do hard, hard labor to just clear this area because Amy wants a garden. You know, so it was backbreaking work.

There's video of him on the live stream saying like, I've arrived, I'm here. You know, he had already been so indoctrinated with their beliefs online that when he got there, he was like ready to talk about them. And you even hear a father God be like, well said, like you're talking about what we talk about almost better than we talk about it.

At some point, he says that he was handed a drink by someone. He drank that and he was told to go fight darkness in the wilderness. His family believes that he was drugged in some way. He went out into the woods. In this really remote area, he got lost. They didn't go looking for him and they lost track of him.

No one lived anywhere near Colorado. So you had people driving there. You had people getting on flights. You had people online trying to say, hey, my brother is missing. We don't know where he is. We heard he's with this group. We don't think he's there anymore because I think people on the live stream were joking about him leaving. They launched this full assault to try and find him.

A man on Facebook said, I'll bring out my tracking dog to find him. And his sister was like, Okay, great. I don't know who you are, but I really hope you can help us. And they literally did find him walking on the side of the street. He had been in the hospital. He checked himself out of the hospital saying he didn't want to be there. He'd been found naked on someone's property.

It sounds to me like he was having like a serious psychedelic experience or a mental break. And he just had no support system at all from these people who said, come here. We love you more than anyone. Mother understands you. They just cast him to the wind.

One was selling kind of spiritual consultations over the phone. What has long been called in New Age circles like a psychic surgery. They also sold a lot of products. They sold candles. They sold crystals. They sold artwork painted by Amy and Father God. I would say the most...

lucrative product for them the most expensive one was colloidal silver this is something that transcends politics it transcends really cultural beliefs you've got the most conservative militia guys agreeing with the most hippie moms about that colloidal silver is a substance that you should ingest And really the way that it's made is like putting a battery hooked up to wires in water.

And they sold that as this sort of divine substance. And it was expensive, you know, several hundred dollars. So people would buy colloidal silver. They needed to be taking it every day. Obviously, you get people taking a substance that's expensive every day. They're going to need to keep buying it from you.

Back in the 1800s, there were people who worked in silver mines that would die of silver poisoning, and they would have ingested so much silver into their bodies that their skin would turn blue. Most notably, there was a man who died, and when they did an autopsy of his body, all of his organs were blue, his liver, his heart. It had changed his physical body so severely that it killed him.

And with Amy Carlson, you see that as she goes forward in her life, she starts to kind of turn gray at a certain point. And that gray becomes a kind of purple, becomes a kind of blue.

Amy Carlson's life, you know, she starts to become extremely anti-Semitic. She starts to say super racist stuff. She's got conspiracy theories about the Illuminati and lizard people. America is a divine land kind of thing.

They said, look, we're here to check on the kids that are living here and we're here to talk to mother. They were very familiar with who Amy was at that point. And Jason Castillo really chillingly says, OK, well, the children are sleeping and mother is in rest. She has rested. They didn't know what that meant, but they went in the house. This is like after midnight.

There were several people in the house. They're all awake, like working on their projects that they've been given. They're not sleeping yet. The police go into the back bedroom of the home and it's essentially a shrine. There are Christmas lights everywhere, twinkling, covering every surface, the bed, the furniture, the ceiling. And in the bed is Amy Carlson's dead body.

wrapped in a sleeping bag, covered in makeup, and essentially mummified.

She was not to ascend from Mount Shasta. She was going to ascend from Ashland, Oregon, which is a couple hours north of Mount Shasta, also a very new agey town in the west. So they brought her to a hotel in Ashland and essentially just waited for her to die.

And she did, she died in a hotel room there surrounded by several of her followers who, you know, their deification of her is so evident from seeing the way that they treated her at the end of her life. Probably most chillingly, one of her closest followers said, God just died. Like, how are we supposed to respond to that? And so. Yeah, they were beside themselves grieving.

And I think that there was a lot of question around, what is this now? We don't worship Father God. Father God is just this guy that's supposed to be there as a support system for Mother God.

They wrapped up her body and they took her out on a camping trip. Father God slept with her body in a tent. They had a campfire. They made pancakes. And then eventually some of her followers just said, you know what? She needs to go back to Colorado. They drove her across several state lines all the way back to southern Colorado, a very, very long drive, and set her up in that home.

I mean, I don't know what their plan was. It seemed like they were planning to live with her dead body for as long as they could to worship her.

There's probably three or four groups that break away and start their own thing. They start writing books about her. They put out educational curriculum that they believe. That was like one of Mother God's goals was to have schools that were set up in her image and her ideology. And of course, everybody starts selling colloidal silver and live streaming.

In some cases, selling like t-shirts with Amy on it. Meanwhile, in Texas, her actual family is like, oh my God, what happened? And now we're dealing with the trauma of this loss of this person that we lost twice in our life. And now you're selling t-shirts of her? It was just really like so many layers of grief for them as well.

As far as this book is concerned with Amy Carlson, she had no original ideas. They were all ideas that I don't even think she knew where they came from. This book tries to figure out where they did.

This book began for me when I had 15 tarot decks and I wasn't sure why. I don't mean for this to be an attack, but for people to understand, look, this stuff is big. It's everywhere. You should know. Here's where it comes from. And here's where it starts to get grifty. Because I think that we are living in a time of grifters and that's not going to stop anytime soon.

So if anything, it's more of a cautionary tale of like, hey, you know, You go in a river, you might put on a life jacket. You go into the New Age, you might want to know that this does exist here. Have your eyes open for it.

a very typical movie teenage suburban upbringing. Good family, two sisters, really supported in anything she wanted to do. The type of kid who would get a car when she turned 16, that kind of family. Amy was really into singing and into, you know, looking her best, being very presentable. She competed in choir competitions, things of that nature.

As her story goes forward in time, she has her first child when she's pretty young, you know, 18 or 19 years old. And the relationship doesn't really work out. She's not a very welcoming mother in that motherhood doesn't really fit her. Her son, Cole, who is her oldest child, just remembers her being very distant, crying a lot, not really wanting to have a lot to do with him.

And even Amy's own mother, Linda, told me she didn't take to motherhood right away. At a certain point after Amy's had two more children with two other men, one of which she marries, they have a divorce. She starts drinking a lot. She gets a couple DUIs. She has some trouble all the while managing several McDonald's stores throughout Texas.

So she's got a fairly demanding job, but there's something lacking in her life. And in her 30s, she encounters groups online that are talking about the alien-human hybrid community, basically.

I can't remember what the specifics of it are, but it's essentially like you're a god. You are fated to be something big and bigger than this mother who manages McDonald's stores, never got famous as a singer. Like at one point, she hears a voice that says, you'll be the president of the United States. And she's like, oh, my God, I believe that's actually true.

in one fell swoop amy decides to abandon her life in texas including her three young children to pursue a new chapter of existence she literally backs away from a table at a restaurant with her family and says i'm leaving and they think oh you're just going home something like that but what she does is she actually literally just leaves her life and they don't see her again

And what she means by that is that she is the physical embodiment of the planet. That's the best that she explains it. She is Earth itself. So any damage to her, whether that's emotional, physical, is actually damaging to the Earth itself. Amy weaves a very elaborate story about how she came to be.

in her current form and the big part of that is that she is a reincarnated being she says she's been reincarnated something like 574 times and that in her past lives she was cleopatra she was jonah vark she was the queen of lemuria

She developed an idea that she is Mother God. Whoever the man that she is personally with at that point is Father God. There ended up being many Father Gods over time.

She starts to kind of like distribute new age ideas and a lot of astrological predictions. She would do like almost like a newscast where she would wear this little headset and she would speak to the camera and she would give this really kind of like weather forecast of the stars in a way. It was really funny and it was really kind of like sweet.

It became really disturbing for me to understand that Amy created this belief system. She created this group. It was almost like a game of Dungeons and Dragons, right? Where she was like the dungeon master and she's coming up with all the rules and people are playing it her way. But when she said, time out, like I need to go to a hospital, the people in her game kept her in it.

If you're living in that reality, I could almost see how it would be attractive.

They're almost impossible to watch because even if you understand the code that they're talking in, it's very confusing and it's just rambling. And so they would be running these live streams with two people talking about all of their concepts, but also about lots of conspiracy theories.

So that to them was healing the world with love, was engaging with people who had questions about their spiritual ideas. Okay, I can understand a church saying, we heal the world with love because look how we're giving all this money to this children's program or we're helping refugees get housing or things like that.

When you're just like chatting with people in a live stream, it is just more supremely online than perhaps I'm willing to be and to understand as love. But I guess, you know, there's a lot of lonely people in the world and that is love to them is to make friends with other people online. So it's complex.

The Ascended Masters, or the Galactics as she calls them in Love Has Won, are people that you and I and many people who listen to your show would be familiar with. They are Chris Farley, they are Whitney Houston, Tupac Shakur, and most notably, the actor Robin Williams. Robin Williams holds a larger place than anyone in the Love Has Won belief system.

It sounds objectively ridiculous to say, here's a group of people who worships Robin Williams, right? But what I came to understand in my reporting is that Robin Williams was really kind of like an entry point for Amy to get people into the group. They heard about Robin Williams and they were like, oh my God, I loved Robin Williams and I feel so sad about his sudden death.

They just provided her with more of the same thing that actually was killing her.

We can all talk about Robin Williams in Mrs. Doubtfire or What Dreams May Come or, you know, his standup performances or Mork and Mindy.

Essentially, if you were living in the Love Has One house, you were a servant of Amy and her father, God, at that time. That's what it became.