Rick Ross

I just recently testified in Atlanta in the trial of cult leader, Eligio Bishop, who headed a group called Carbon Nation. And he would recruit people online through Facebook, through Twitter, X. He would have videos on YouTube. And it was all done online. And he would create a compound through an Airbnb that he would rent online.

And then he would bring people to, at one point, Costa Rica, Mexico, then Panama. Subsequently, those countries deported him. They told him, you are not welcome here. We don't want you here. He eventually ended up back in Atlanta, his hometown, where he was prosecuted for unlawful imprisonment and rape. And I testified at his trial.

And my role in my testimony was to help the jury understand how this went on for so long and the women that were being brutalized and horribly mistreated did not come forward. The jury needed to get their head around that, that these women felt that what was going on was either their fault or nothing was wrong because that was the environment that they were embedded within that Bishop controlled.

And Bishop in court, of course, said, oh, I'm not guilty of anything. These women had consensual sex with me. No, they did not. He used coercive persuasion, thought reform techniques, and force to take advantage of and exploit those women. And now he's doing life in prison without parole.

What Bishop uses and what Ranieri used and what all cult leaders use is control of the environment, what Lifton calls milieu control. Then they hold out their program as a sacred science that cannot be questioned. Then they use a kind of cult of confession to exhume and obtain information to leverage their power over people.

Then they have another one of Lifton's criteria, which would be doctrine over person, the subordinating of everything you feel, everything you think to the group program. And step by step, inch by inch, the leader then becomes more and more in control of the people. And the key to breaking that control is taking a break from the group, which is what I frequently will tell people.

I'll say, can you take a break? Is there a legitimate reason to leave? Is there a legitimate reason to take a break? If you're in a group and there's no legitimate reason to leave, what does that mean? I mean, because you can belong to a church or a club.

And if you say, gee, I'm moving, I wanna go to a different church or I can't be in this club anymore, my wife doesn't like it or whatever, the group would say, fair enough, all the best, stop by and see us sometime. But if you're in a group and there's no legitimate reason to leave and you're made to feel shame

and even fear over leaving, and the group is creating in your mind unreasonable fears about leaving, you're in trouble. What kind of fears would those be? Well, in NXIVM, that they would use the same verbiage that Scientology used. Ranieri would tell people, if you doubt what I'm teaching, if you are thinking of leaving, you are a suppressive person, an SP.

And that means you will never be a success in your life. You will fail at everything unless you can overcome that being a suppressive person. And Scientology, if it labels someone a suppressive person, that would be the reason to disconnect if you are a Scientologist from that person. A group that is more spiritually based can contort the Bible or a person's religious beliefs.

They might say, for example, if you leave our organization, you will be damned. You will have no salvation. Salvation is predicated on belonging to our specific organized group under our specific leader. And if you leave, there is no other church that can provide salvation for you. There is no other place that you can be protected. Our leader is your spiritual covering, your protection.

And when you doubt our beliefs, when you... think maybe we might not be right, that isn't even you thinking. That's Satan attacking your mind. So you have people that doubt because they see something that conflicts with their own morality, their own ethics, and they say, oh, that's not good. That must be Satan attacking my mind.

And they are basically shutting down critical thinking by using techniques like this. So what we don't understand is how this happens. And let me just tell you this. I have deprogrammed five medical doctors. One was an orthopedic surgeon. Another was a highly accomplished anesthesiologist. This can happen to anyone given the right set of circumstances. That is, no matter how educated you are.

no matter how good you think your life has been, you may come at a vulnerable point in your life, and we all have vulnerable points in our lives where things aren't going well, and have the bad luck At that point, to have someone you trust, someone you know, someone who's a coworker, an old friend, a relative who says, hey, I know you're hurting.

And this group that I'm involved in, this church, this organization has ways to help you. Why don't you come with me to one of our meetings?" And bit by bit, step by step, the group brings you in, all the while lying, being deceptive, not disclosing what they're really all about, withholding the kind of information that you need to make a more informed decision. So this can happen to anyone.

You know, there's not an Ivy League school that I have not sat with a graduate of, it seems to me. One man that I worked with was, he was doing his residency after graduating from Yale Medical School when I met him. And I only talked to him for less than an hour. And he ran away, a medical doctor in residency, graduate of Yale Medical School. Wow.

He ran away in terror from his own father and mother. who were there with his grandmother to do this intervention. Years later, he would leave the group and get in touch with me. But at that point, that Yale Medical School graduate was not able to critically think. And I also work with a man who had an MBA from Wharton, and he ended up deciding to stay in the cult.

And I've worked with people that were Harvard graduates, graduates of Penn, all of the Ivy League schools, Cornell. Not long ago, I worked with a Cornell graduate who scored over 90 in the MCAT to be admitted into medical school, very high score in the MCAT, graduate of Cornell, would be accepted in any medical school practically in the US.

And he was going to go and live in an ashram in India and give everything up. And his parents brought me in. We did an intervention. This was about a year ago. And it was successful. And I can remember when his family was driving me to the airport. And for a while, we were alone. He was in the back seat, and I was sitting in front of him in the car.

And he said to me, Rick, you have no idea how bad it was. And he started to cry. And he said to me, they really had me. They really had me. And this was a straight-A student that graduated with honors from Cornell. So if you think that somehow you're invincible, you're the one person that is not persuadable, that nothing can persuade you,