Twin Flames Universe founders Shaleia and Jeff Ayan. Photo / Instagram
Twin Flames Universe founders Shaleia and Jeff Ayan. Photo / Instagram
Review by Karl Puschmann
Karl Puschmann is Culture and entertainment writer for the New Zealand Herald. His fascination lies in finding out what drives and inspires creative people.
It wasn’t so much the look of love in their eyes as it was the look of raw, lonely desperation. It was a look that made them easy marks for Jeff Ayan, his unusually named wife Shaleia and their love cult, Twin Flames Universe.
Shaleia’s exotic name, which sings off the tongue amongst a flowery scent of Eastern mysticism, is as fake and phony as their “guarantee” of finding people their soulmate through a series of highly expensive online courses and seminars.
Now, if the American couple had kept their scam at that level, Netflix wouldn’t have made Escaping Twin Flames, a new three-part documentary that completely exposes the pair for starting and running a cult.
Twin Flames Universe was a sick amalgamation of Shaleia’s hippie-dippie mysticism and Jeff’s long history of grifting. He’d long dedicated himself to finding ways to get people to give him their money and TFU was the one that hit big.
How big? Big enough to buy new Porsches, shop at Chanel and purchase a multi-million dollar block of land to build a compound on.
They did this by fleecing the lonely. They convinced people that if they paid the exorbitant fees of their online courses and seminars, then finding one’s true flame “was guaranteed”.
That is clearly ridiculous. Love is the last thing you can ever guarantee. But dating can be brutal and these poor souls were desperate. The series is filled with actual footage from these courses and seminars, and they are cringey and laughable - and it’s hard to fathom how anyone could fall for it.
To that end, Escaping Twin Flames follows a handful of people who tell you exactly how they fell for it. Heartbreakingly, it also follows a few parents who tell you exactly how their now-estranged children fell for it.
Both sets of people tell how Jeff and Shaleia forced a wedge through their lives, distancing them from families and friends, pressuring them into paying for ongoing courses and then working for them, and in some extreme cases, into having major sex-change operations.
The mini-series frequently left me spluttering out loud. Jeff and Shaleia are so obviously full of crap that even if I was hopelessly lost, I wouldn’t follow the directions they gave me. Forget about turning to them for help finding my true flame.
Jeff in particular is a gold star pillock. Smarmy, egotistical, and misogynistic. He doesn’t just think he’s god’s gift, he believes it.
His courtship advice is routinely atrocious. After listening to Jeff, one poor woman gets a restraining order placed against her and ends up in jail. She got off lucky. Another follower, a timid and anxious 19-year-old, is forced to move away from her family to live with her “true flame”, a mentally-ill, borderline-abusive 28-year-old who messaged her on the TFU Facebook page for months and months (she is eventually rescued by her sister).
But getting people to literally buy into the true flame idea and having them pay through the nose for their courses and seminars was only step one. Step two was the embrace of multi-level marketing, which turned students into coaches for a high, ongoing fee and a cut of their wages.
With true love guaranteed, there was no shortage of poor rubes lining up and shelling out to find their soulmate.
At that point, Twin Flames Universe was not much more than a scam. Where things get sinister is when Jeff learns that by becoming a church, taxes can be avoided - and the series motors straight into Bonkersville.
As ludicrously unbelievable as Jeff and Shaleia and their Twin Flames Universe is, the damage done to people’s lives is horrifically real. Those who escape acknowledge how, from the outside, the whole thing looks, sounds and feels crazy, while saying that on the inside it’s not only real, it’s frightening.
The video footage backs up the verbal and emotional abuse regularly dished out by these phoney purveyors of true love.
As things get more intensely batty - at one point Jeff shows pictures of Jesus onscreen, points out their passing resemblance and heavily insinuates he is the second coming - I kept finding myself wondering why anyone was listening to this clown. And then I’d see footage of Twin Flames Universe’s disciples and the sad look in their eyes, and remember that love can make suckers of us all.
