'The Taste of Love festival was my accidental entry into cult journalism after a decade as a foreign correspondent.' Journalist Anke Richter. Photo / Emma Wallbanks
After visiting a new-age festival, Anke Richter pursued a 10-year investigation into high-demand communities from Centrepoint to Gloriavale. In her upcoming book Cult Trip, she grapples with her own explorations around the world that became increasingly conflicting.
On a wet tropical night in 2012, I stood on the balcony of the community centre in Byron Bay, stretching my arms out into the rain to cool off. "This", I thought, "is how I always want to be." I was on a euphoric high after a session of ecstatic dance at the Taste of Love festival – the largest annual gathering of tantric teachers, sexual healers and shamanic practitioners in Australia. It wasn't really my scene, but I had an assignment. And I was curious. Within a day, I was intoxicated by what the shiny happy people there called "life energy". Something clicked. My cynicism vanished along with my apprehension.
Without any sneaky recruitment, Taste of Love gave me my first taste of infatuation with a new tribe, as it called itself – a word that years later became conflicting and even repulsive, besides its cultural appropriation. But on that hot and sweaty weekend, when I hugged, laughed, danced and exhaled into "Omm", my internal shift on the balcony became a reference point. I experienced what thousands of people do when they get hooked by a teacher or group: a sense of tapping into something profound. It felt like falling in love.
The new-age festival was also my accidental entry into cult journalism after a decade as a foreign correspondent. On my last day, while sipping iced chai in the courtyard, I met Angie Meiklejohn. The fellow New Zealander who gave sensual massages in Wellington opened the door to an historical tribe far more extreme than the gentle seekers floating around us.
Angie, in her 40s, had lived at Centrepoint as a teenager: Bert Potter's therapy commune in Albany where many children were sexually abused, and adults later ended up in jail. As her survival strategy in this intense environment, Angie became a "commune concubine".
When we first met, Potter was still alive. I had never heard about him. Only months later, after he died, was Angie ready to talk about what had happened to her at the place that was a happy home for many, but an ongoing nightmare for others. Hers was a story of drug rape, grooming, alcoholism, prostitution. It still lingered.
The lasting shadow of New Zealand's "free love" community soon became my obsession. I embarked on a labyrinthine investigation, more into the emotional carnage than the criminal side. "Centrepoint was a selection of average, normal people," Angie had told me. "Not monsters or freaks." They had pursued a utopian dream of sexual freedom and self-realisation. What had gone wrong? I wanted to know what they were thinking, the gullible lovers who competed for their turn in Potter's bed, and the idealistic parents who placed their daughters at his mercy. How did their children move on?
I spoke to dozens of survivors, but also enablers and perpetrators, including the guru's convicted son, John Potter. I surprised the cult's drug chemist at his home. I met a woman who had arranged a "threesome" with a teenager for her husband's birthday. And I found a girl who had barricaded herself with junk in her caravan on the property so men couldn't come to her at night. Louise Winn was possibly the most violated victim of the warped ideology about the sexualisation of "free children". She had never told anyone the horrors she suffered, to the point of attempting suicide at 11. Her disturbing account was a turning point that affected me deeply.
The years I spent mired in the damage wrought by Centrepoint eventually took their toll. The weight of all the unresolved trauma of others crept under my skin while the legal and psychological challenges seemed unsurmountable. I was overwhelmed by what I had unearthed and eventually gave up.
While struggling with the aftermath of a disastrous sex cult, I became entangled in current cult-like groups myself. Since the Taste of Love festival in Byron Bay where I had my own blissed-out awakening, I went on a roller coaster of personal exploration around the world and into every corner of my heart.
The initial week-long training I took with ISTA (International School of Temple Arts) turned out to be more cathartic than erotic. We learned "emotional release tools", where you bash cushions and scream into your hand – teachings from the human potential movement and 70s encounter groups. In one of the roleplay exercises, I channelled a younger Louise from Centrepoint. Overcome with rage, I kicked and yelled at invisible men until I collapsed.
We held rituals out in nature that were raw, tender and physical, and we sat in sharing circles to reveal our fears, wounds and desires. Men embraced their dormant femininity, women expressed their inert masculinity – all to heal parts of us that are repressed and to gain self-awareness. I thought I had found the real me through "embodiment", the buzzword for these visceral experiences promising higher states of consciousness. From now on, I hoped, this adventure ride was going to enrich my life on every level.
Soon I started to pull more friends in so they could get the same benefits. But a few years on, the sparkling world of love, liberation and learning that had enticed me revealed its cracks. There was a covert harem culture at ISTA. Male pioneers surrounded themselves with young female lovers, often from their trainings, who were then accelerated to apprentices and facilitators. Although my unease grew, I mostly ignored what felt off and instead held on to what worked for me – like the hundreds of people who had joined Centrepoint and found it to be a good place for personal growth.
In 2018, the international tantric school Agama Yoga in Thailand was rocked by a sex abuse scandal. Thirty-one women had submitted reports, including rape allegations, about the Romanian head of the school and other lead teachers. A woman had been hospitalised with psychosis after being urged to have group sex. I flew to Koh Phangan to help break the story.
Like Centrepoint, Agama was full of likeable, smart and caring people: spiritual seekers who wanted to deepen their knowledge or become a yoga teacher. Those who had concerns tried to bring them up, hoping to change the patriarchal system from within. They were dismissed. Some students stayed until it was too late to leave. Or too late to look away.
Agama became another turning point for me. The neo-tantra field, which I was first sceptical and then so passionate about, was tainted. Finally, the wellness and woo-woo world came under scrutiny and #MeToo caught up with some of its worst perpetrators. Brazilian faith healer John of God fell from grace. The heads of large Western Buddhist organisations had to step down. NXIVM, the American multi-level marketing cult where women were branded with hot irons, was exposed – as well as OneTaste, an exploitative enterprise selling "Orgasmic Meditation" which I had only visited the year before.
Millions of people who'd never heard of any of these groups or gurus watched the series Wild Wild Country about Osho, formerly Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. His slick ashram in India was part of my cult trip too. But my curiosity soon curdled to concern.
While I finished a "Wheel of Consent" course in Byron Bay that gave me more insight into the nervous system's trauma response, I also closed a chapter in my life that began in the seaside town six years earlier. My former workshop highs were now demystified. Constantly "dropping the mind" while you're loved up or turned on can result in overriding your inner "yes" or "no" – assuming you're even aware of it, especially if past trauma is retriggered and not handled professionally. In the week-long 24/7 training full of rituals, circle confessions and cathartic release, a potent cocktail of brain chemicals floods your system and clouds your thinking. If you crave a desired outcome like the rest of the enthralled group, then you won't speak up when something doesn't feel right – especially if you don't want to be labelled as "acting from your wounding" or "stuck in victim consciousness".
I stopped recommending the ISTA trainings I once raved about. My innocence was gone. This edgy work had helped me but, while I was chasing transformation around the world, I had blocked out its shadow. Spending more money on it felt unethical. I was wary of charismatic leaders creating a residential community around them and was frustrated by faculties that didn't have sufficient complaint and aftercare systems in place because they felt exempt from ethical codes of conduct by their evolutionary cause. Justified criticism was labelled as a "witch hunt" or "gossip". If there was a problem, it was your "projection". I'd seen too much arrogance and obfuscation but not enough accountability from the top.
I even wondered where I had unwittingly pushed people's boundaries as a workshop assistant, with best intentions so that everyone gets with the programme – and because I wanted to keep playing with the cool kids. Suddenly, I could empathise with those who wanted to call out the dark side of Centrepoint or Agama while trying to hold on to their community and friends. Both is rarely possible. Despite my misgivings, I was also grieving what I had lost.
Gloriavale became my next project: a saccharine-looking world that is really a gulag where children became slave labourers and women breeding machines. I went in there twice and did not expect to find many similarities between the fundamentalist Christian enclave and the radical new-age cults I had researched. But late charismatic leaders Hopeful Christian of Gloriavale and Bert Potter of Centrepoint had more in common besides being convicted paedocriminals. They defined what their people's sex life should look like, how it should be done, how often and with whom.
In all cults, not just the recent high-profile ones that turned into sex-trafficking organisations, sexuality plays a central role and is either amplified, suppressed, or distorted. It becomes a means of control. Sexual abuse is also a mainstay. According to cult expert Dr Janja Lalich, author of Take Back Your Life, 40 per cent of women in cults – or high-demand groups, as they're called – have experienced it. So had every woman from Gloriavale I met. It was heart-breaking.
Once I realised what had pulled me into a "tribe", it became harder to demonise those who had done questionable things in their own closed-off environments. Where would I have found myself on the sliding scale from bystander to apologist in such a pressure cooker? After exploring the minds of once-loyal cult members, I'm now less interested in the role they played back then. I want to know where they stand after the downfall. Are they still holding on to their old ideology, making excuses for it, or are they involved in a process that helps the survivors?
So far, only a few former Centrepoint members have shown commitment to reconciliation with the second generation. Agama Yoga is still up and running, with the main alleged abuser at the helm instead of in a courtroom. Gloriavale is going through a legal upheaval and has apologised to its victims, but lasting change and reparations still need to be seen.
While wrapping up my book earlier this year, another call-out stirred up the cultiverse — and my own past. After flying under the radar for years, ISTA and the adjacent "mystery school" Highden Temple in Palmerston North have come under scrutiny. Six hundred people joined a Facebook group called "Issues with ISTA and Highden Temple Trainings", where more and more disturbing details are shared. Many of them were new to me.
Fifty-four reports have now been collected by a group of independent sex educators. They're holding the rapidly growing organisation with a strong antipodean foothold accountable for ignoring serious complaints, for sex between predatory teachers and vulnerable students, for manipulation and gaslighting. One accused ISTA lead faculty, a former rabbi, has since taken a break and all his courses in Israel were stopped. The head of Highden publicly responded to being called "a dangerous cult leader" while others are pushing for change. Emotions are flying high and people have stepped out.
It will be crucial to see how ISTA handles this crisis. If the wild child of the conscious movement won't make amends and listen to its critics, then I'm left with a sad conclusion: I, too, have been in a cult.
"Cult Trip: Inside the world of coercion & control" is out next week (HarperCollins, $38). Anke Richter will be speaking at VERB Wellington on November 6 and at the Women's Bookshop in Auckland on November 9.
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