EXCLUSIVE I agreed to meet an ex-cult member. Just days later, he was found dead with his throat cut from ear to ear: Brave anti-cultist shares shocking stories about the thousands he saved from a life of hell – amid fears there are 2,000 cults in Britain today

Placing my coffee mug down on the desk in my small office, I steadied myself before answering the phone. Lifting the receiver, I listened to a university student whose voice was trembling with anxiety, his breaths coming quick and shallow. He was convinced something terrible was about to happen to him.

By the late 1980s, I had heard this kind of story with depressing regularity after setting up a hotline for people who had found themselves in a cult and wanted out.

The young man, aged 19, was trying to leave a high-control cult which had a reputation for severe punishment for deserters.

‘It’s normal to feel fear,’ I said. ‘It’s what they have instilled in you to keep you in. It sounds like you are already out psychologically — you’ve just got to get out physically.’

Still, his voice trembled. I explained the only reason to be afraid was if he knew something he shouldn’t — cults fear ex-members talking to the police as law-breaking is common practice.

Ian Haworth (pictured) created the Council on Mind Abuse, in 1979, to support cult leavers and raise awareness of how cults recruit

One charity has estimated that as many as 2,000 cults are operating in Britain today (stock image of a cult)

There needs to be a national education programme about cultic abuse so people are pre-warned, says Mr Haworth (stock image of people in a cult)

I offered to meet him for a coffee. He said shakily: ‘I’d like that, but I can’t for two weeks. I have exams.’

In the meantime, I put him in touch with a former member of this cult, and we agreed to meet in a fortnight.

A few days later, I had a call from his father that winded me then and still haunts me today. He told me his son had been found with his throat cut from ear to ear.

The police said it was suicide but the boy’s father, a surgeon, said it couldn’t have been, as there was no blood at the scene. He also said his son was too squeamish to have drawn a knife across his neck. The father was so concerned about the safety of his remaining family, they immediately emigrated.

Was this young man killed by his shadowy masters, as punishment for knowing the hollow truth of their organisation, or had he been driven to take his own life by the unbearable stress of awakening from a cult? I can believe both explanations.

He lived in Toronto, Canada so it would be easy to dismiss his experience as typical of the religious fundamentalism of North America, not the sort of thing to worry us in the UK. But one charity has estimated that as many as 2,000 cults are operating in Britain today.

Occasionally, one will surface to public consciousness, as happened with a Maoist sect in leafy Herne Hill in South London.

In 2016, its leader Aravindan Balakrishnan — known as ‘Comrade Bala’ to his followers who had been brainwashed into believing he had godlike powers — was jailed for 23 years for offences including child cruelty, false imprisonment and assault. He died at HMP Dartmoor in April last year, aged 81.

Maoist cult leader Aravindan Balakrishnan arrives at Southwark Crown Court in London on November 25, 2015

His cult was an extreme and violent one but many more lurk on the fringes of society, often seeming smiling and welcoming. It is these organisations that I’ve devoted my adult life to fighting, by pulling free from their clutches as many victims as I can.

I have helped thousands since I established my first group, The Council on Mind Abuse, in 1979, to support cult leavers and raise awareness of how cults recruit. But I’m 76 now, and this year I took the hard decision to retire.

The reason I embarked on this career spanning five decades was because I experienced first-hand how manipulative and exploitative cults can be.

Lancashire-born, I’d sought my fortune as a business student in Toronto in the 1970s. One summer’s day in 1975, a young lady invited me to attend a meeting that was going to improve my life. I was single and she was attractive, so I thought, great!

Several people at the meeting struggled with alcohol and drugs while my demon was tobacco. So I signed up for their quit smoking group, which claimed a 95 per cent success rate.

There were 40 of us in a motel room out near the airport. We couldn’t ask questions — we had too much to get through to keep stopping, they said.

The toilet breaks were scheduled — again it was explained away. So when the leader said: ‘Go — you’ve got six minutes’, we all dashed to the loos, with no time to talk to anyone or express doubts, which was of course planned.

Maoist cult leader Aravindan Balakrishnan arrives at Southwark Crown Court in London on November 18, 2015

When we returned we had to sit somewhere different. I later realised this was to stop us noticing who had left the meeting.

I returned to the sessions over the next few days, submitting myself to hypnosis 16 times, though they called it meditation.

We were put through visualisation exercises and programmed to accept this group — a new age philosophy based on Hinduism and the occult — as the answer to everything.

We attended all day at weekends and after work during weekdays, often until midnight. By day four, I was exhausted but at least they had removed my desire to smoke. The downside was that I had become a victim of mind control. There were two Ians living inside me — real Ian was being elbowed out by cult Ian.

Soon, I was out recruiting for the cult in my spare-time, unware that I was even a part of it.

A few days later my neighbour, who I had tried to recruit, showed me an article he had saved for me from the Toronto Star. It was about my group. There were interviews with casualties who had suffered severe psychological damage, the result of mind control.

Disturbed, I took the article to a birthday party for the cult’s leader and said, ‘I thought you were about peace and love and brotherhood?’. Their response was to make anti-Semitic comments about the author, the journalist Sidney Katz. My light came on and I left, traumatised and angry.

By l979, I had recovered and started The Council on Mind Abuse, which was the forerunner to The Cult Information Centre (CIC), a London-based hotline for cult victims that I set up in 1987, having moved back to the UK with my wife and two children.

The line was busy from the day we opened. I had a call in the mid-1990s from a 30-something woman whose partner had changed beyond recognition. She wondered if he might be in a cult. Tearfully, she explained he had told her that if she wouldn’t join the group, they were finished.

There are so many more of these pernicious groups operating now — an estimated 2,000 against just 500 in the 1990s — but scant support for victims (stock image of a cult) 

This cult sounded very similar to my own, so I suggested she and her partner meet my wife and me for a drink. As they walked into a pub off the M25, they appeared as a well-dressed, professional couple. It was all very pleasant.

Eventually I got him talking about his group. I listened for a while before relating my experience, of how I had two people living inside my head. I talked of the hypnosis, the use of sleep deprivation to weaken recruits to be more susceptible to the group’s message, the control over bathroom breaks, the lack of privacy to remove space to think.

He recognised all of it. I played it thick, asking him, a smart cookie of a man, to explain the group’s philosophy. He couldn’t, of course, because it was all made-up nonsense. At some point during the evening, his light came on and he pledged to leave the cult and stay with the woman who loved him.

Many wrongly believe that people join cults. They don’t — they get recruited. Cult victims are commonly seen as weak-minded, vulnerable, friendless types, whereas it’s actually well-educated people with high earning potential, healthy minds and lots of friends who are prime targets.

They have money, which the cults will take, and friends to be recruited. A healthy, flexible mind can be bent. Those with poor mental health tend to have a rigid way of thinking. I’ve taken calls from Oxford and Cambridge graduates, pupils from the best public schools in the land, psychologists, accountants, hedge-fund managers.

The common denominator is that they tend to be caring people, keen to improve their lives and their communities. They can be any age. Someone sitting on a park bench in tears can be recruited, but so can someone full of the joys of spring.

It’s a mistake to think ‘It can’t happen to me’. It can happen to anyone.

Those who run cults, on the other hand, are devoid of care, compassion or empathy. I would describe most of them as being mentally sick.

Some are driven by greed, to extort money from people, while others get their kicks in subjecting cult members to sexual abuse. But often it is purely about exerting control over other people.

I’ve been on the receiving end of that dark will to dominate.

One man called to tell me ‘Your End is Near’ before hanging up. Another said ominously: ‘You are being observed. You will be stopped’. It’s hard not to get spooked.

A member of an infamous high-control cult described me on national radio as having a criminal record but I have never broken the law in my life. I’ve been taken to court by a global self-improvement cult that successfully sued me for libel.

It’s no surprise that I’m careful about who I trust — you never know who might be a cult member.

A guy phoned me twice weekly for two months to get advice, claiming his brother was in a cult, but I soon realised he was the cult’s PR man, trying to find out how much I knew.

‘Come on,’ I said, having twigged, ‘how long is this going to go on for?’ He slammed the phone down. I called him back and asked if he wanted to talk.

We met in a cafe and he immediately said he needed the loo, which I suspected was a ruse to turn on recording equipment. I bumped into him a few months later at an event and he blocked my path to say: ‘We can play dirty, you know’.

‘I thought you were all about peace and light,’ I said. ‘How can you square this behaviour with the core values of the movement?’ He looked defeated.

The Council on Mind Abuse, in 1979, to support cult leavers and raise awareness of how cults recruit (file photo of man in cult)

There is one young cult victim who still pops into my head. She was in the front row of a lecture I gave on cultic abuse at a school in the late 1980s.

The teacher had already made me aware of her presence — though, thin and pale with an agitated look, she wasn’t hard to spot.

Afterwards, she came over, and admitted she had been attending occult meetings in the woods late at night. Disgusted with herself, she ripped out two crosses from her ears and a crucifix chain from her neck in front of me.

Weeks later, I heard that the Salvation Army picked her up roaming the streets. Carved into her arm was the name of her cult, courtesy of her masters for renouncing them. A teenage girl, branded for life.

The last call to the helpine — which ended with my retirement — was from a lady I had spoken to weekly for the previous 18 months.

She was in her early 20s and her partner, an entertainer, was in a therapy cult, the kind where recruits are invited to share all their innermost fears and thoughts in an effort to ‘fix’ them, which is of course just a way to gain emotional control.

She said her boyfriend was much changed, but she loved him and wanted to get him out. I told her the very worst thing she could say was ‘you’re in a cult’ or to criticise the group.

I encouraged her to share things they had enjoyed before the cult got to him, so she found old photographs of them on holiday, trying to retrieve his pre-cult personality, lovingly telling him how much she had enjoyed those days.

She spoke about some of the wonderful cycling trips they had enjoyed — how he didn’t have time for any hobbies any more.

In spite of immense frustration that he couldn’t see what was happening to him, she remained loving and calmly persevered. My very last call was with this lady, ecstatic that her partner had left the cult.

Now I don’t know who is going to fill my shoes. They’re not exactly queueing up!

Too many people still think it is someone’s own fault if they get sucked into a cult, and that it is a matter of free choice. Neither are true.

There needs to be a national education programme about cultic abuse so people are pre-warned. There are so many more of these pernicious groups operating now — an estimated 2,000 against just 500 in the 1990s — but scant support for victims.

There is a cult in your neighborhood, for sure. If you suspect you are being targeted, research the group.

Ask to meet some of their advocates who have acquired whatever it is they promise, be it peace, light or enlightenment. If they won’t answer your questions, get out fast.

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