April 19, 2025 • 51 mins
Laura McConnell grew up in a fundamentalist sect with no name.
Along with no official title, the group also claims to have no registration around the world, no formal hierarchy, and no official places of worship.
According to Laura, it's this secrecy and denial that has allowed abuse to flourish within the community. She joins us today to expose what she witnessed and experienced inside the group she calls The Truth.
Guest: Laura McConnell
Host: Gemma Bath
Executive Producer: Gia Moylan
Audio Producer: Scott Stronach
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
True Crime Conversations acknowledges the traditional owners of land and
waters that this podcast was recorded on. Oh hi, there,
it's your host, Claire Murphy, and today I'm bringing you
a powerful episode from our archives that you might have missed.
Perfect for some extra weekend listening. It's an episode where
Jemma Bath interviewed Laura McConnell, who grew up in a
(00:26):
fundamentalist cult with no name. Along with no official title.
The group also claims to have no registration around the world,
no formal hierarchy, and no official place of worship. According
to Laura, it's this secrecy and denial that has allowed
abuse to flourish within the community. In this episode, she
exposes what she witnessed and experienced inside the group she
(00:50):
calls the Truth.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
This episode contains discussions of sexual assault and mental health struggles.
Please take care while listening. It's nineteen in Melbourne and
Laura McConnell is sifting through photo after photo on a
(01:12):
microfish at her university library, searching for old newspaper clippings.
She's only six months into her new life after escaping
an ultra conservative cult known as the Truth. After feeling
uncomfortable in her world for years. Laura made the enormous
(01:32):
decision to stop believing and move away from her community
in western New South Wales. But in her world, that
meant saying goodbye to her family, her friends, everyone she's
ever known. She thought if she left, she'd die. That's
what she was told. But here she still was, and
(01:55):
something was bugging her. Laura grew up believing that two
teenagers from her community, Norella and Stephen, died in nineteen
ninety two because they listened to the rock band Nirvana.
That's what she'd been told, but the story has niggled
at her over the years. Something doesn't feel right, and
(02:18):
she's keen to investigate. Eventually, she stumbles across an article suicide.
The siblings had taken their own lives because they didn't
want to live within the confines of their strict religious
upbringing anymore. Wow, she'd been lied to. What else were
(02:42):
they lying about? As Laura continues to reflect and research
the life she left, she realizes something. The world she
grew up in was a cult guilty of numerous crimes,
crimes that went unspoken, crimes that were normalized by those
(03:02):
around her. Grooming sexual abuse, domestic violence, spiritual abuse, financial abuse.
She realizes another thing too. These crimes she witnessed were
overwhelmingly affecting one half of the group, the women, women
(03:22):
who grew up with nowhere to run, no path to freedom,
and no voice of their own. I'm Jemma Bath and
this is True Crime Conversations a Muma mea podcast exploring
(03:46):
the world's most notorious crimes by speaking to the people
who know the most about them. But this month, instead
of looking at specific criminal cases, we're focusing in on
the people behind the scenes of crime in the eyes
of the community she left. Laura McConnell is a true
(04:07):
simply because she doesn't believe anymore. But she hasn't gone quietly. Instead,
Laura is very loudly and very proudly trying to get
the word out about the dangers of the truth. She
doesn't want the children and teenagers growing up inside to
believe what she did, that there's no way out. She
(04:30):
wants to be the inspiration. She wishes she had someone
who followed a different path. Perhaps what makes the truth
so dangerous is its secretiveness. It has no proper name,
no official places of worship, and no doctrinal statements other
than the Bible itself. Instead, everything is passed down in
(04:52):
person from generation to generation. There are no priests or ministers. Instead,
those in charge are called workers. They encourage members to
spend their lives proving their worth to God and Jesus,
often through acts of suffering. Today's guest grew up in
the Truth before making her escape at the age of nineteen.
(05:16):
Laura joins us. Now, Laura, how do I even refer
to this group or church that you grew up in?
Is it true that there's not really a name for it?
Speaker 3 (05:37):
Yeah, it is so they claim to have been started
in the beginning, so they claim not to have a name,
and in fact they claim not to have any registrations
around the world, no formal kind of church, hierarchy, no name.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
So for the purposes of this interview, how should we
refer to it? How do you refer to the group?
Speaker 3 (05:53):
I personally call them the Truth because that's what I
grew up, calling them the Truth or the Friends or
the Way. In Australia, I think internally and people who
have left call it the Truth. In America and the
US they use that less. They say the two boy twos.
But I'm Australian, So I tend to use the truth brilliant.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
We'll call them the Truth. You said it started at
the beginning. Apparently, apparently, can that be pinpointed back to
a I'm going to say man, because I assume it's
a man, a man, a place, a person, a country.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
It will be no surprise to anyone outside the Truth
to learn that, in fact, it was not started by
God or by Jesus. It was started by a man
in Ireland in the late eighteen nineties, William Irvine, and
then spread to other parts of the world from there.
Came out of a very interesting time in Ireland where
several fundamentalist groups came out at the same time. The
Jehovah's Witnesses, the Exclusive Brethren, and also the Truth came
(06:41):
out of this time in Ireland as well. So it
was a time of quite a lot of our people
and where people were searching for something different to mainstream Christianity,
and these fundamentalist groups sprung up. The Truth happens to
be quite a secretive version of it, which doesn't share
a lot of its background and claims to have no name,
for instance.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
And they call themselves a religion. Is that what they are.
Speaker 3 (07:01):
They refer to themselves as a non denominational, loose group
of Christians when pushed, so you have to push quite
hard to get that information from them. And part of
that is that none of us are really taught anything
else about Christianity outside the group, so we can't, as
lay people, usually even explain what our beliefs are or
where they fit within the Christian spectrum of beliefs, or
in fact, within the spectrum of religion full stop. Because
(07:22):
we're not taught anything. We're kept quite in the dark
about not only our beginnings and our belief structure, but
also about what other Christianity even is. So at a push, yes,
they're described as very loose, home based Christians who read
the Bible and are dictated to by the Bible, and
that's really all they can tell you about where they
sit in the Christian spectrum.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
So I guess my next question was what are the beliefs?
Are there any I guess looking back, you could probably
pinpoint them.
Speaker 3 (07:48):
Yeah, we're told that there really are no rules, a
bit like the name thing. There's really no rules. Your
spirit led, So you're led by the Bible, right, you
read the Bible and you'll interpret it and the people
around you, the men around you. Normally, we'll interpret the
Bible for you. We had a very literal interpretation of
the King James Bible, a very conservative, very extreme, fundamentalist
interpretation of the King James Bible. We are led to
(08:12):
believe that women should be tightly controlled in terms of
their dress and their appearance. We are taught to keep
ourselves separate from the world, which is also something common
in fundamentalism in general, as is control of women and
children and girls. The core beliefs are really very extreme
in terms of women's sexuality, gender appearance, that we should
(08:32):
be modest at all times, and a lot of that
is dictated to us by elder men in our family
and families and communities. And you know, things like TVs
and radios and pop music when I was growing up
were forbidden. It is a little looser these days. Although
most people don't have a TV openly, They will have
it in a cupboard where it can be shot away
and hidden. Lots of people now have computers and the Internet,
(08:54):
but that was also forbidden when I was growing up.
I live very sheltered lives, so there's this idea that
we are in the world, but we are not of
the world. So we don't consume things in the world
the same way that mainstream Christians do. We are in
this world, living in it, but we don't consume things
the same way.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
And is it a I guess, a belief that the
world is going to end one day? Is that part
of it?
Speaker 3 (09:18):
Yeah, So, while again we don't openly discuss that, as
a lot of other Christian groups do, that you know
that there is going to be this end of the world.
That is basically a lot of the control is about
in the group in that they really fundamentally believe that
Jesus is going to return at any moment, and he
is going to select from the people in the world
the best or a certain group of people who have
(09:39):
behaved in a very certain way, coincidentally the way that
they have interpreted the Bible inside the truth, and he
will nominate those people to go back and be in
heaven and everybody else is going to hell. Ultimately, when
it boils down to all of this behavior and all
of this control that happens within the group is a
terrible fear about the world ending any minute, and all
of us going to help.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
Is there a date.
Speaker 3 (09:59):
Are we working towards the ru fortunately or unfortunately, I
don't know. When you do a lot of research into
cultic groups, even the ones that have a date, the
date moves constantly and nobody says, oh, by the way
that date's moved, maybe this is a croc of shit.
But even the ones that do have a date, nobody
ever seems to do anything with it. But no, there
is no date. It's just imminent any second Jesus is returning.
(10:21):
And we literally live in fear that we're going to
turn around the corner as a woman wearing a pair
of jeans, and that Jesus is going to magically reappear
and see us in a pair of jeans and be
like off to hell for you.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Wow, Just how big is this group? Because it doesn't
have a name. From my understanding, there's no real places
of worship, there's no church or anything like that. It's
very elusive. So how is this able to spread? How
big is this group?
Speaker 3 (10:47):
So there has been a lot of turmoil in the
past couple of decades. Certainly in Australia there was a
lot of people who left in the nineties, there was
a big falling out in Canada in the late nineties
as well, and a lot of people fell away. It
is very hard to get an understanding of how many
people are in the group worldwide because with no registered entity,
there's not a lot of records that people can act,
especially people outside the group like myself. We sort of
(11:09):
believe that a group of people who've left a sort
of the opinion there used to be around two hundred
thousand worldwide. There is probably more like fifty thousand now.
I would say, perhaps even less. There is a big
reckoning happening in America at the moment, with a lot
of abuse alligations coming to light, and I would say
the number is falling rapidly by the day. Yeah, when
I was growing up, I would have said there was
(11:29):
around fifty thousand here in Australia, but I would say
that number is ten now at a guess. But you're right,
there's no church buildings. So the truth believes that church
buildings are worldly, and that we worship in family homes.
So we worship in the living rooms and the laundrooms
of our community. Of one of the more senior men
or families in our community will hold that we have
(11:50):
got a history of using things like scout halls and
school libraries and want not to have services on a
Sunday afternoon to try and encourage outsiders to attend. Once
a year there is a large event called the convention,
and there is a ground that is owned by a
wealthy family. For instance, in a state, that could be
old church property, but in theory there is no church
property and no church buildings.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
So in Australia, are there some common towns or states
where there are more people inside this group?
Speaker 3 (12:22):
Yes, there are. Again, I've been out now over twenty years,
so I think it has changed a little since my
childhood in terms of where people congregate together. But like
a lot of fundamentalist groups, not just Christianity but also
Judaism and Islam, families and communities tend to congregate together
in similar suburbs, in similar towns, And I think there
can be a bit of a misconception that people from
(12:42):
cultic backgrounds live in kind of compounds, you know, but
that's really often not the reality. We just tend to
congregate together in family groups and community groups because often
our work is very intertwined. Our families work in family businesses,
and money is very tied up in each other's lives
and investments and work. So personally, my own community comes
from rural New South Wales, and there are certainly family
(13:05):
groups that congregate together in places like Doubo, places like
a Mudgykawer, rural places outside the major centers. That's not
to say there are also not large family groups in
Sydney and Melbourne and large urban areas. There are, but
my own personal experience of the group is more rural.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
So using your community as an example, does that mean
your family lives in one house in a normal neighborhood
in the street, and then all of the other families
involved in the truth are also descending on that same neighborhood.
Speaker 3 (13:38):
My personal experience is actually of a farming family. So yeah,
my family had farms all within a similar region, and
we all shed farm machinery. And this is also common
with most fundamentalist groups. With businesses, they share employees, they
share family members to work, they share tractors. In rural communities,
they all work on each other's farms. So yeah, I
mean I come from an environment where our farms were
all next door to each other, or at least down
(13:59):
the road from each other. The ones who did live
in town live within the proximity of each other in
a community so that they can get to each other's
houses easily on Sundays for services. So yeah, we have
our own space and our own homes, but we are
also very close and everything is shared, you know, in terms,
not everything, but lots of things are shared resources.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
If you're not allowed to do worldly things, it's almost
like you're living in the world, but you're in your
own little world. Does that mean people from the truth,
They're not nurses, they're not police officers, they're not members
of society. They're working in more private, kind of family
run businesses.
Speaker 3 (14:37):
It does always surprise me how many there are working
in worldly professions, but they make a very deliberate effort
to stay separate. Right, So, there are teachers, and there
are nurses, and certainly for women, there's only very few
professions where women can really work outside the home because
they tend not to be able. I mean, our hair
is so weird, our clothing is so weird. We don't
have a lot of shared vocabulary with the world outside
(14:59):
of our community. We're a little bit creepy and freaky.
So it is quite hard for us to integrate, especially
women who look very different. Men can often mainstream they
wear demure clothes and suits and slacks and polo shirts.
But they can actually kind of mainstream a little bit
easier than women can. So a lot of women work
in jobs they can fit around their family commitments and
our church commitments. There are teachers and nurses. But yeah,
(15:23):
things like hairdressing is off limits. Things that bring us
into contact with too much worldliness is really off limits
for us.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
I've got to ask, because you've used the term weird
to describe dress and hair, paint a picture for me.
What kind of things were you allowed to wear and
what did your hair look like back then?
Speaker 3 (15:43):
Well, think of the Mormons in Utah. You're they're right,
except probably not quite as uniform. When I was growing up,
women liked more floral dresses. But certainly there is a
preoccupation with being modest. So this idea that you can't
show your neckline your shoulders. When I was growing up,
things like toe cleavage wear an issue. So you couldn't
wear sandals because toteviage.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
Sorry toe cleavage, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (16:05):
Toe cleavage was seen as being immodest, and like dresses,
you know too long, we're seen as worldly. Too short
was seen as immodests. So there's this very like mid
calf length sort of everyone has this standard mid calf
length kind of dress. Trousers, as read in the Bible
are seen as man's clothing, and women are not allowed
to be men, so no trousers or no genes. Women
(16:25):
are not allowed to dress like men. And we're not
allowed to cut our hair. Certainly, by the time in
twelve or thirteen, mostly our hair is pulled back into
kind of a bun because to have it too flowy
and too showy is to be too worldly.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
So were you homeschooled because of all of this or
were you in mainstream schools?
Speaker 3 (16:43):
Most truth kids, in fact, all the ones I know of,
go to mainstream schools. It is a bit like the
rest of our ideology, whereas we're in the world, not
of the world, so we're said to school, but we're
very much taught to be very careful about what we believe,
and in line with a lot of the secretive nature
of the group, we're not very open about our belief
systems with the schools and with the teachers, but we
are taught that things like dinosaurs are fake, and that
(17:05):
we we taught at school that are not real, and
we just have to sit there and we have to listen,
and then we go home and we pray for those
people to be converted and to understand that what they're
teaching is false. So we are sent to school, but
we are also taught that the things we're learning at
school are not true, and that we just have to
do it. Like lots of things, we have to do
it because to survive in the world until the world ends,
(17:27):
we need to participate in This.
Speaker 2 (17:30):
Was that confusing as a child.
Speaker 3 (17:31):
Horribly horribly, very isolating, and we weren't really allowed to
make friends with people at school because they were seen
as worldly, and we weren't really allowed to participate in
extracurricular activities or birthday parties or have close friendships with people.
So it was very lonely. And in fact, I often
think that being homeschool might be nicer, because then at
least we'd be with our I mean, I was lucky.
I came from a very large family. I had siblings
(17:52):
and I had cousins, and I had lots of other
kids around me, lots of kids. I think, you know,
in smaller families or maybe one or two siblings. It
can be very isolating to be a child from the truth.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
How did your family find themselves as part of this group.
Speaker 3 (18:08):
My family been in for a very long time. On
my maternal side, I am fifth generation, fourth generation born
inside I think my father's side, or on my paternal side,
i'm third generation. Wow, So my family has been in
a very long time, which further entrenches the issues which
I'm sure we'll touch on later about leaving. Because you
don't have any contacts outside the group. Everything you know,
everyone you know and love is inside the group. In
(18:30):
a nutshelle, I believe my family, which I think is common,
was preyed on because they were poor and because they
were rural, because they had experienced loss and trauma and poverty.
They were preyed upon by people in the group and
love bomb, which is also something that happens with cultic
and high control groups. They love bomb people who are
going through periods of distress and who are finding it
(18:51):
difficult and not getting what they need, you know, through poverty,
through the social security system, through loss and grief and whatnot.
My family had been in a very long time.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
Did you have a happy childhood.
Speaker 3 (19:04):
That's the hardest part for me in reconciling my life
in general, is that in lots and lots of ways,
I had the most beautiful childhood. You know. I came
from a farm where I was given free reign to
be and to do, and there was no one to
judge me. But you know, I was riding motorbikes in
a dress and riding horses in a dress, and running
(19:25):
and jumping and skipping, and I had all these cousins
and a very big, close knit family. And I think
as a young child, I had a very idyllic life
until I sort of got to about eight, when I
really then had to start behaving more and more like
a truth girl. You know, I really had wonderful childhood,
very carefree, very practical. You know, I worked with my
(19:46):
father and my grandfather around the farm. From the earliest age.
I rode motorbikes. Being a girl from the truth didn't
hold me back until I was about eight, and then
I realized, oh, okay, there's a behavior that's expected of
me now. And that's really when things got very hard
pretty much from then on.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
Was it also because you started to look around and
realize that other kids were doing things you weren't allowed
to do, or that perhaps boys were doing things that
you weren't allowed to do.
Speaker 3 (20:10):
Yeah, one hundred percent. So then I started looking around
and going, why don't I know anything about TV shows
like all the girls around me? Why don't I know
anything about pop music like all the other girls around me?
And you know, then you know, I started to essentially
be sexualized really by the truth, which is like, you know,
you can't run and jump like that in that dress.
You need to be sitting down and you're being modest,
or you'll never be able to get married. No one
will want to marry you, you know. And that was
(20:31):
a threat held over me pretty much from the age
of eight, that if you don't sit down and behave
and if you don't set a good example, no one's
going to want to marry the girls in our family
because you're a bad influence.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
Was there an age you were expected to be married
by and was arranged marriage part of the truth.
Speaker 3 (20:48):
The truth is a very small group of people, even
at its biggest when I was growing up, and so
marriage was something constantly talked about because to find somebody
to marry, which I think is common with fundamentalist groups
can be quite a problematic thing because, like we're all
related often and so you know, we're constantly on the
lookout for someone that might be able to marry our
daughters because they're not a second or third cousin. So
(21:09):
you know, it was always a topic of conversation. A
lot of my cousins married very young, or at least
met their spouse very young at you know, fourteen fifteen
and were married at sixteen seventeen eighteen. So you know,
while there was never an expectation said outright by either
of my parents that I would get married, that was
what was expected of me by our community and by
our family, and you know, I watched that happen around me,
(21:31):
you know, like it was just an expectation. I never
felt comfortable with it personally, and it wasn't ever what
I wanted, But also didn't really feel, certainly before the
age of about fourteen, that there were any choices. I thought,
that's just the way it had to be. And the
other thing is that the roles for women and girls
are so tightly defined you literally have no other job sometimes,
(21:52):
like what else are you going to do other than
get married and have babies, or you can go and
be a preacher, which we call a worker, and that
never appeared to me either. So I didn't want to
be a preacher or a worker, and I certainly didn't
want to get married and have children, which is really
old what led me out of the group.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
You're listening to true crime Conversations Behind the Scenes of
Crime Special with me Jemma Bath. I'm speaking with Laura
McConnell about growing up in the fundamentalist religious cult The Truth.
Up next, Laura exposes the crimes she witnessed and experienced
during her time in the sect and how she eventually left.
(22:40):
What did marriage in the Truth look like? I guess
this is the point where we start to touch on
a bit more of the crime aspect of the truth,
because domestic violence was that an accepted part of marriage.
Speaker 3 (22:56):
I think it's not even just marriage. I think all
of our families are violent, coercive, abusive places. And that
hurts me to say, because they come from that community
and that is my culture. But I come from a
culture of embedded violence. I come from a culture of
endemic sexual abuse. In endemic coercive control, endemic spiritual abuse,
(23:17):
people abuse their children physically. I think that has gotten better.
But you know, growing up, all of us would smack
our dolls constantly because that's what we saw happening around us.
Kids around us were smacked constantly. There's just sexual violence
and grooming and abuse was just endemic. And it wasn't
(23:37):
just in marriages. It was within family groups. It was
our preachers or workers grooming and abusing girls. Sometimes boys,
but in my experience, a lot of girls. And you know,
our distrust of the world outside allowed that behavior and
still allows that behavior to flourish because we do not
trust even as leavers, we do not trust authority because
we're taught to fear the outside world. There's also no
(23:59):
structures inside the group to enable us to report it anywhere.
We have no registered clergy, we have no registered organization,
we have no employee processes to talk about clergy who
are abusive. So the group itself, it's not only just
spousal violence, it's violence across the board in terms of abuse.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
What did you know about sex? Was that something that
was taught to you? Because I can imagine when you
go into a marriage as a young woman and you're
expected to have sex. Were you taught that you were
allowed to say no, for instance, or.
Speaker 3 (24:36):
We have no concept of sexual education and absolutely no
concept of consent. Roles for women and girls are very
clearly defined, and to step outside of them results in
back lagin, results in more violence in different ways. You know,
you have spiritual violence of Bible versus being used to
coerce you, of you being called bitter or being called immodest,
(24:57):
or being told that you have a bad spirit for
raising issues. You know, and that's not just family violence,
that's all kinds of issues. As a woman girl, your
role is to be subservient. Your role is to follow
what you've been told and towards the interpretation of the Bible,
and not to ask too many questions. I was very lucky,
I think, in that I came from a farming background,
(25:18):
I knew what sex was. I knew a lot more
than a lot of other kids around me because of
the family I came from. My own parents also were
not probably as conservative around sexuality and sex as a
lot of other parents around me. So you know, in
lots of ways, I was lucky. But no, we are
taken out of things like sex education. We are not
(25:39):
allowed to do things like learn about dancing about music,
about dinosaurs. You know, like the list of things were
not allowed to know about it is never ending.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
You've mentioned grooming or like childhood sexual abuse. What can
you tell me about how that kind of emerged in
the communities in Australia. I know that there was a
more high profile case that actually made the news with
two preachers from your own community.
Speaker 3 (26:03):
Yeah, so we have a very very big entrenched problem
preachers or our workers being perpetrators of abuse, of abusing power.
And then they are not only perpetrating sexual abuse, they're
also porptrating spiritual abuse by controlling people and controlling how
people report abuses to authorities. And as I mentioned earlier,
there is quite an awakening happening in the US at
(26:24):
the moment about exactly how bad the issue is of
our workers being involved in sexual abuse and CSA or
childhood sexual abuse. I think there is just a massive
misuse of power. These people are not trained. They offer
themselves to be preachers. They don't go through a formal training.
They often just shadow an older preacher or worker for
a time and that's how they learn behavior. They're in
(26:46):
an environment where they think that women and girls are
subservient to them and that they have control over them.
And so, yeah, we have a very endemic issue of
men in our community, not just workers, but also senior men,
elders in families being abusers of generations and generations and
then teaching the men under them and around them how
to be abuses. That's the reality. It's endemic. And you know,
(27:08):
I've been screaming quite loudly about how bad it's been
for you know, eight odd years, and been shut down
a lot by my own community as well as the
leave of community in lots of ways, because people don't
want to talk about how bad it is. But there
is a lot of us who were abused by our
preachers or workers, and not only abused, but also observed abuse.
Because the reality is that children in groups we know
(27:29):
we saw other children experiencing and being roomed as well.
That's the reality.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
So this is something that happened to you personally? Yeah, correct,
how have you grappled with that?
Speaker 4 (27:41):
Now?
Speaker 2 (27:42):
As an adult looking back that experience.
Speaker 3 (27:45):
For me, it's very hard because I often feel a
lot of survivor guilt because I grew up understanding a
lot about sex and I also then went on to
study at university and to work in areas involving family violence.
I always thought that I got off pretty lucky because
I wasn't raped. I felt like one of the luckiest
people in my family because there were so many people
(28:05):
in my family in particular, who were abused to experienced abuse.
I just felt like the luckiest kid going around. And
then in the last few years, I had this realization that, like,
I can probably need two hands to count the number
of times where I was groomed and where I was
sexually assaulted, where I was put in situations where senior
men were touching me, where senior men were putting their
(28:27):
hands places I did not want their hands, or having
sexualized conversations with me, were exhibiting sexualized behavior like rubbing
themselves against me. And all of a sudden, I have
this realization. In the last couple of years, Laurie, you
were sexually abused. You were like, you might not have
been raped, but that's fucking abuse.
Speaker 1 (28:46):
It is.
Speaker 3 (28:46):
And not only that, I saw that same behavior happening
on my cousins, on other people around me. So not
only did I experience it, but I also realized how
much of it I'd seen and it was so endemic
and so normalized that we didn't think it was abuse.
Speaker 2 (29:01):
How old were you do you remember that kind of
stuff starting or can you not remember when it started?
Speaker 3 (29:06):
I can't remember when. My earliest instance is around eleven, right,
I mean, you know that's the reality. It's like it
probably didn't start then. It's just probably the first time
I realized what.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
It was, which is terrifying that these kids don't even realize.
Speaker 3 (29:21):
No, And I'm also up against that when it comes
to raising awareness. You know, That's also why I get
so much pushback because people are like, why is she
making so much noise about this? Like we weren't raped,
It's not that bad. Like, Okay, I think maybe most
of you haven't really clicked about what abuse is.
Speaker 2 (29:36):
So these two workers from your own community, what were
they accused of doing and what happened to them? Are
they in jail?
Speaker 4 (29:42):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (29:42):
So Chris Chandler and Ernie Barry two men that I
came across. Actually, they came to my community when I
was around thirteen or fourteen, and yeah, one of them
was involved in allegedly sexually assaulting me. Let's just go
with allegedly. Both those men are dead, so it's a
little easier for me to have this conversation and to
be a little more transparent about the things that have happened.
(30:03):
But both of those men were found guilty, and actually
there are far more victims of those men than have
actually ever made it to court because of the way
the community really just most of us are just so
terrified of the legal system, and in lots of ways
we have a right to be because our experiences don't
fit neatly into a mainstream legal system. You know, it's
(30:23):
pretty hard to take a group with no name to court,
and preachers who don't have an employment record and can
say that they're not preachers of anything, because that's what
we're up against, right Like I think Chris did spend
some time in jail, I don't think that any Barry
did spend any time in jail. They were both found guilty,
but again, the number of cases that could have been
brought against them is nowhere near the number they were
(30:44):
found guilty of. Because people in our community are just
too terrified to speak up comes with extreme consequences. Often,
you know your own family will disown you, often shun you.
People in your community across the street to avoid you.
People will undermine you. You are left with nothing. You
are left with no money and no home and no family.
So yeah, while those two were found guilty, they were
(31:06):
not felt guilty by nearly as many cases as they
should have been. I think Chris spent a small amount
of time in jail, but not nearly long enough. And
I don't think only spent any time in jail if
my recollection is correct.
Speaker 2 (31:18):
What can you tell us about the death of two
teenagers in the nineties that once again you knew about
or you'd been told about. But what were you told
about them growing up on? What happened to them?
Speaker 3 (31:30):
And that realin Stephen Henderson died when I was I
think twelve maybe thirteen, and their's is a very sad story.
They suicided out near Kinglake in Victoria, and they wrote
a note or at liszt Norelle did, saying that they
didn't want to attend our church anymore and they didn't
feel they had any choice but to attend, and they
were being forced to attend. Those details were very much
kept from certainly the children in the community, but I
(31:52):
suspect also the adults, and we were told that they
died because they had listened to Nirvana and they had
had too much worldly influence. Yeah, you know, and we
believed that, like we believe that these poor kids had
died because of Nirvana, not because actually they had tried
to say to their mother that they didn't want to
(32:12):
attend the church anymore, and that they had been forced
to attend. It wasn't until many many years later, like
I don't know, maybe eight or nine years later, that
I realized and looked up in the newspaper actually and went, oh,
my god, they didn't die because of Nirvana, which just
seems like lunicrous now. But you know, often people inside
these groups live in an alternate reality. Like we drip
(32:34):
fed information. We're told information from a very specific viewpoint,
and we're not told the truth about things. Everything was distorted,
you know, and even the Ernie Barrier Chris Chandler stuff,
you know, when I was growing up and Chris and Ernie,
the conversation started to happen about the fact that they
had been charged. You know, we were told that the
people who charged them, you know, were bitter people, they
were people with very bad mental health issues. And we
(32:56):
were lied to about why these cases were brought about,
like people have just not told the truth about these
criminal cases.
Speaker 2 (33:03):
Obviously we've just touched on a few cases. But are
these crimes or alleged crimes that are being repeated over
and over and over again in communities not just here
but throughout the whole world that you can see.
Speaker 3 (33:17):
Around the world, And let me tell you, it is
worse in countries like Vietnam and Malaysia and where families
are poor. And I mean we touched on this earlier
about my own family coming into the group. The people
who come into the group now are from countries like
Brazil and Venezuela and Uruguay and Vietnam, and they're from
places where there is entrenched poverty. And they're sending workers
(33:38):
or preachers from countries like Australia who have backgrounds as
predators into those environments where I have absolutely no doubt.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
In fact, I have a lot of.
Speaker 3 (33:46):
Emails to suggest that these people are being preyed upon
by our workers or by the Truth's workers in these countries.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
You mentioned before that things are starting to explode overseas.
What did you mean by that? Are things starting to
come out well?
Speaker 3 (34:01):
I think in the US and Canada, in particular, there
was a preacher who died in a hotel room. In
itself is very odd because we tend from the truth
not to go into hotel rooms as preachers. We stay
in people's homes, which is also a problem because that's
where abuses are happening, because preachers are staying in our homes.
So he died in a hotel and there was some
incriminating evidence found on a laptop, and all of a sudden,
(34:22):
some stuff got shared online in some Facebook group, in
a Facebook group, and lots and lots of people in
America studge to ask questions about, well, how many predators
are there? Do we have a register? We don't have
a registered organization, so how do we have a register
of predators in the group? And it suddenly became obvious
we don't. And you know, there's all these predators just
roaming around in our families and communities and in our clergy.
(34:43):
And so people are asking questions and they're not getting
answers because, as we touched on before, the controlling nature
of what gets drip fed in means that nobody ever
gets questions answered in a way that is honest.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
And I guess it's hard because the police can't really
charge anyone, or question anyone, or prosecute anyone unless people
are willing to share what happened.
Speaker 3 (35:03):
Correct And you know in my own circumstances I have
in the past, and in fact I have a case
live at the moment to try and get a case
up against somebody. But unless you have people in your
community who are willing to corroborate your story, you have
absolutely no evidence. And when you come from a community
who is entirely secretive and who is more likely to
undermine you than they are to corroborate your story, the
(35:24):
chances of getting like a legal case up are even
slimmer than they are for mainstream people. And it's hard
for mainstream survivors, let alone people from a secretive community
like ours.
Speaker 2 (35:35):
I've heard you describe the group as putting a lot
of emphasis on suffering. Can you describe that to me
a bit more? And I'm also particularly interested in it
because I feel like what we've been talking about reporting
crimes that would stop you from wanting to do that too.
Speaker 3 (35:53):
I talk a lot about the suffering and a lot
about how I left because I couldn't stand the suffering
you know, like, I have a fairly vibrant, outgoing personality,
and the suffering just did me in. The reality is this, right,
is that life inside fundamentals and life inside Celtic groups
is actually pretty shit, especially for women and girls and
for people outside being a white man. Right, if you're
(36:14):
a white man, it's a bloody nice place to live.
Everything's controlled, You've got a lot of power, you to
wave it around and get people to do what you want.
But if you're not a nice white man in a
fundamental scroup, it's actually a really hard life. And so
to counteract that, you believe that all of this suffering,
that you're going through this looking different, this feeling like
you are an outsider all the time because you don't
(36:37):
look and sound and speak and have any kind of
comprehension of the world outside your home, it's because you're
going to heaven and everyone else is going to hell,
and so you're suffering your way into heaven. I just
need to suffer, and I just need to tolerate this,
and I just need to put up with this because
I'm going to heaven. If I don't, I'm going to hell.
Like there's my alternatives, right, I've got to put up
(36:59):
with this because in the end, my reward is in heaven.
And you just have this horrible mentality of people thinking
they have to put up with horrible mental health issues,
they have to put up with abuse, they have to
put up with families that are controlling, because the alternative
is that you're going to help.
Speaker 2 (37:15):
It feels like a way to explain away crimes against themselves.
Speaker 3 (37:19):
It is bypassing is spiritual. Bypassing, right, we are using
the Bible to basically enable abuse and control by men.
Speaker 4 (37:29):
At the end of the day, let's.
Speaker 2 (37:43):
Talk about you getting out. Did it start with education?
I know that you went to Uni? Was that normal?
Speaker 3 (37:50):
In theory it started with me going to university, But
I think it goes back much further than that. It
goes back with me never being comfortable with my gender
and sexuality role within the group, never feeling like I
was looking around and thinking I fit in here. I
just never fit, you know. And if i'd been a boy,
I used to just wish I was a boy. From
like eight or nine years old, I used to think
I just wish I was a boy. I wish I
(38:12):
could just live like they do. And that's really where
it started is I just never fitted in quite like
I should have. I didn't want to get married and
just have children and be what the other women around
me and girls around me had been. I certainly didn't
want to become a worker, and so it was like, well,
what are my options? You know, my own mother had
been to university, but she'd made a choice to leave
(38:32):
and have children, and then she did go back again
and become a teacher, and so she did set a
good example for me. But she was very much in
the world, but not of the world. She was very
controlled in her interactions with her colleagues. She kept herself
very separate, and she didn't have a life outside the
home except to turn up to work and then come
home again. And I didn't want that life. I wanted friends.
I wanted to experience things. I was a curious kid
(38:54):
who wanted to make friends outside our family and community.
And really I had no option at the end of
the day, what was I going to do? Like, I
didn't have options? And so yeah, I really just nutted
down in my last couple of years of school and thought, well,
if I can get some decent grades, maybe I can
get out of this community, maybe I can go. So yeah,
in theory university's what got me out. But you've started
much much before that.
Speaker 2 (39:15):
How old were you when you finally said goodbye to
the church.
Speaker 3 (39:20):
I actually didn't formally leave until I was nineteen, Okay,
I kept going. I didn't know you could leave. I
thought you died and went to hell if you left.
I didn't know anybody who left, and there were a
few people around me who had left, in my extended
family and community, but I never saw them again. They disappeared,
and they disappeared because they were shunder ex communicated, or
shamed away, or in the case of one of my
(39:41):
extended family, they actually died. And you know that was
used against us. We were told if you leave, that
some accident will befall you and you will die. You know,
I didn't know you could leave. I thought I just
had to try and maintain this life while building another
life outside of it, and somehow try and make them work,
because I thought if I left, I was going to
go to hell.
Speaker 2 (40:00):
So did you leave thinking that might happen?
Speaker 3 (40:04):
Yeah, I did.
Speaker 2 (40:05):
That's a huge huch thing to take on.
Speaker 3 (40:07):
Yeah, the reality is I was really pushed out. I
was excommunicated out because my behavior and my appearance in
my community. I no longer fitted with my community. Was
the reality. I was going to university, I wasn't dressing
the way I should have been. I had dreadlocks. Actually
I refused to cut my hair because we weren't allowed
to cut our hair. But I thought, like a big
dreadlocks with it, and I can still, you know, get
it up in a big bun. With dreadlocks.
Speaker 2 (40:30):
You were really working with what you could.
Speaker 3 (40:32):
Because working with what I had, you know. But of
course I was turning up every Sunday and Wednesday and
they were like, what is she? What is this?
Speaker 4 (40:39):
Like?
Speaker 3 (40:40):
I was not setting the right example. So I was
really pushed out of the community. I thought I was
probably going to die. I was waiting to die, is
the reality for a long time, you know, for six months.
It was the early days of the internet. And I
started searching online and found some things and started to realize, oh, okay,
probably not going to die quite the way they say
I'm going to. Yeah, So yeah, I left thinking I
(41:00):
was going to die.
Speaker 2 (41:01):
Do you even remember the first day that you weren't
a part of the group anymore? What did that look?
Speaker 3 (41:08):
Like I don't really remember. I remember the day I
realized I was never going back. And I just walked
out of a Sunday service and they'd all kind of
been very strange with me. You know, there's a lot
of rituals at the end of services, like you have
to shake hands with everybody, you know, you'll sit in
a circle, and there's a whole lot of rituals that
happen in Truth services, and I just was really uncomfortable
and realizing none of them would look me in the eye,
(41:29):
none of them would shake hands with me, none of
them would let me participate in the rituals. And it
had been going on for a while, for kind of
a year, maybe eighteen months, but this day I just
realized it had escalated and they were really pushing me out,
and I felt really, really uncomfortable, you know, to the
point where they were reversing away from me so that
didn't have to talk to me, and basically tripping over themselves,
you know, to get away from me. And I came
(41:50):
to the end of that service and I walked down
and was bucketing down with rain. As I have said before,
I didn't have any money, I had nothing. Everyone else
had cars, and I had to really on public transport,
and none of them ever offered me a lift, which
is self was weird because I came from a family
in a community that like we're so tight, and you know,
I would never have let anybody take public transport and
would have given anyone a lift. And so yeah, they
(42:11):
just sort of let me walk out. And I was
waiting in the rain for the tram and it was
bucketing down with rain, and they were all driving past
me and just kind of looking the other direction and
refusing to make eye contact with me, and I just
sort of went, I don't think these people want me.
I don't think I belong here anymore. And I just
felt this deep sense of like rejection and shame and thought,
I'm not coming back here anymore. I don't want this anymore.
(42:31):
I don't know what this is, and I don't want to. Yeah,
and I made that decision that DA I'm never going back,
never ever going back. And I was so shamed and
felt so bad that I was willing to die basically
because I wasn't going to participate in that anymore. And yeah,
you know, it was a pretty tough ond six months
after that, like I had nothing.
Speaker 2 (42:47):
Did you have to call your family and tell them
that you were leaving? What did that look like?
Speaker 3 (42:53):
Yeah, So I did try to talk to my family
about it, certainly after I'd found information online about the
group and about them being cultic and about the abuses,
for instance, and about Norell and Stephen Henderson as well.
Like I found information about them and was like, what
the hell. Like, I tried to talk to my family
about it, but they would say things like, Oh, you've
been taken in by the devil, you know, like the
devil puts things on the internet to confuse people. Your
(43:15):
spirit is wrong, you need to go back, and you
need to repent, and you need to come back. And
there was a lot of shaming and a lot of
like thoughts stopping stuff. They just wouldn't listen to anything
that I had to say, so I stopped really talking
about it. But you know, and it also became gossip,
because that's the other thing is that our communities are
very close, and yeah, people just gossip about me and
about my appearance and about my spirit. And then it
(43:36):
really escalated to the point where there was kind of
ostracization and I would go home to my rural community
on holidays and whatever. And yeah, people from my community
would cross the street to avoid me or pretend they
didn't know who I was. Yeah, And you know, and
I from a tiny, little rural community where these are
people I've known my entire life, you know, and these
are people I've known since I was born. They would
just pretend they didn't know who I was.
Speaker 2 (43:58):
And you've described that for the most part, you had
a very happy childhood with your nuclear family, but you
haven't spoken to them now for many years.
Speaker 3 (44:06):
That right, Yeah, there was a lot of ostracization, a
lot of shunning by my extended family, and not just
my family, but my community as well. I think there's
been hopeful things. You know, there is more and more
who have come forward and made contact after leaving themselves,
So that's nice. But you know, people don't realize the
damage that's done to relationships and the damage and the
(44:27):
trauma that happens. And even when people leave, it's not
always happy families, you know. And these are often people
who have protected abuses. For instance, even if they leave,
they're still not going to go back and say, oopsie,
I might have covered up for a predator for you.
You know for somebody, So there's a lot of really
toxic behavior. Still, yeah, there's a lot of cover ups
and a lot of very damaged people, even if they
(44:49):
leave often still not in a great place.
Speaker 2 (44:52):
You mentioned that your first six months were really tough.
What did trying to integrate into normal society look like.
Speaker 3 (45:01):
I'd never worn jeans. I'd never bought a pair of jeans.
I didn't know how to buy jeans. I had never
been to a hairdresser and have my haircut properly, like,
had a hairstyle properly. I didn't know how to use
a hair dryer in my family, which is not common,
Like I think my family were a bit hardcore about this,
but hair dryers were seen as being worldly, so we
didn't use hair dryers. So I don't know how to
blow dry my hair. I'd never used makeup. I had
(45:22):
absolutely no clue how to use makeup. I wouldn't have
known what lipstick or mascara was, you know. I very actually,
very rarely bought clothes knew from a store. I had,
you know, a couple of times, but mostly our clothes
were made within their family or within the community. So yeah,
just things like shopping for clothes. I had no idea
about wearing things that came above my knee. For instance.
(45:44):
I had no idea about how to use a TV remote,
like how to even know what channels are on TV
like pop music, no idea about radio stations, no idea
about pop music.
Speaker 2 (45:54):
But was learning all of this exciting or was it
a bit overwhelming terrifying?
Speaker 3 (45:59):
Because I was also very ashamed, and so to ask
for help from the people around me was very difficult.
Was very ashamed. So I sort of just had to
learn by stealth and by watching and by like being
hypervigilant with the people around me to try and work
out like how do you do lipstick? Like how do
you work that remote control? And now that this is common,
I think while the issues might be slightly different now
(46:21):
there's not good deprogramming services for people when you leave,
you know, it's just not good counseling that's affordable, certainly
for people to go and learn how to live in
the world. We're like aliens from another planet. Like we
might look like other people, but we're like aliens.
Speaker 2 (46:37):
Have you been to the police about the alleged crimes
that you witnessed or saw happen or is there no
point doing that.
Speaker 3 (46:45):
I've raised several different cases with police on various different
things that happened, and in fact, my leaving was also
a very long, very violent process as well. There was
a lot of abuse while I was leaving, things like
leaving notes on my windscreen threatening me, things like voicemails,
leaving threatening voice mails, and you know, every time I've
raised cases with authorities, then experienced another round of violence
(47:09):
and abuse. So I have not only raised it about
things that happen in my childhood, but I've also raised
cases for things that happened as I was leaving. It's
very difficult to prove anything, and as I've mentioned before,
the community is very tight knit and they protect each other,
and you need a lot of evidence even to get
a case up normally, and there is even less evidence
when you have less people who will stand behind you
(47:31):
and support you. And it's also part of the reason
why I speak out because when I first started trying
to raise awareness and started to have court cases try
and get court cases up, there was nothing available for
people to reference when they talked to police online about
who the group was. There was nothing online for people
to send to a police officer and say, this is
the group I came from. This woman is talking about
(47:52):
the group I came from. And for me, in the
last kind of five years, I've just had so many
people reach out and say, you know, I raised a
case and I sent things I found that you've said
online and I sent it to the detective and I
sent it to the police and I said, this is
the group.
Speaker 1 (48:05):
You know.
Speaker 3 (48:05):
I'm not making this up. This is the group, this
is where they come from, this is their background, because
it was just so little published about us, especially in Australia.
Speaker 2 (48:13):
Is that why you've decided to do this interview? Do
you just want to keep getting the message out there
for other people?
Speaker 4 (48:20):
Yeah, I do.
Speaker 3 (48:21):
I want to get the message out, but I also
bigger than that, I want to talk about spiritual abuse.
I want mainstream family violence providers to realize how violent
these groups are and how much support we need when
we leave, and that deciding to leave is a very long,
very violent process, and that we need support, we need housing,
we need funding, and at the moment there just is
not supports for people who try to leave our communities for.
Speaker 2 (48:44):
A bit of hope. What does your life look like now?
Speaker 3 (48:49):
On one hand, I have a really wonderful life, you know.
I have a five year old. I have a brand
called Go Kindly, a betting brand that I co founded
and built. I have wonderful friends and wonderful relationships. And
I'm very deeply loved in the world that I have
created for myself. But on the other hands, I'm also
a deeply traumatized person from the things that have happened
to me, and I have to hold those things very
(49:09):
closely and manage those things. You know, I have CPTSD
as a result of the abuses and the sustained abuses.
I'm very loved. I have a wonderful life, but it
comes with its damage.
Speaker 2 (49:21):
I want our final question to kind of speak directly
to people. I know it's hard to get access to interviews,
but who might be listening to this. They might be
members of the Truth and they want to get out.
What would you say to them?
Speaker 3 (49:37):
I think that people need to come to the realization
inside the Truth that it cannot be changed, it cannot
be made safe. It is a dangerous ideology. It is
an extreme ideology. It's not Christianity. You can leave and
you can go and join a different church. A mainstream
church and still be a Christian. You do not need
to believe in the extreme ideology of the truth. It's
abusive and it cannot be changed. My advice to people
(49:59):
who reach out to me starting to have this conversation
is they're usually very terrified, but is to just start
gradually exploring what life outside the truth could look like
and take very small steps to explore a different church
quietly without anybody really knowing. To educate yourself about what
supports you might need if you wanted to leave, and
that's things like creating yourself your own bank account that's
(50:20):
separate from your families. That's things like thinking about housing
and at what point might you be able to get
your own access to housing if for whatever reason, your
spouse or your family did not want to leave with you,
What would that safely look like, especially from communities like
the one I came from, where leaving would mean they
would cross the street and never speak to you again.
What are the implications of you leaving and thinking those
(50:42):
things through and actually going into a family violence organization
and demanding that they listen to your background, because at
the moment, there are not a lot of family valence
organizations who understand the difficulties leaving fundamentalist groups, but you
have a right to ask that they listen and a
right to ask that they support you.
Speaker 2 (51:05):
Thanks Laura for sharing her story with us. True Crime
Conversations is a Muma mea podcast hosted and produced by
me Jemma Bath, with audio designed by Scott Stronik. Our
executive producer is Giam Moylan.
Speaker 1 (51:29):
We'll be back next week with a brand new episode
of True Crime Conversations, Richat with former Australian Special Forces
soldier Heston Russell about his childhood, his time in the military,
and his infamous defamation battle with the ABC
True Crime Conversations acknowledges the traditional owners of land and
waters that this podcast was recorded on. Oh hi, there,
it's your host, Claire Murphy, and today I'm bringing you
a powerful episode from our archives that you might have missed.
Perfect for some extra weekend listening. It's an episode where
Jemma Bath interviewed Laura McConnell, who grew up in a
(00:26):
fundamentalist cult with no name. Along with no official title.
The group also claims to have no registration around the world,
no formal hierarchy, and no official place of worship. According
to Laura, it's this secrecy and denial that has allowed
abuse to flourish within the community. In this episode, she
exposes what she witnessed and experienced inside the group she
(00:50):
calls the Truth.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
This episode contains discussions of sexual assault and mental health struggles.
Please take care while listening. It's nineteen in Melbourne and
Laura McConnell is sifting through photo after photo on a
(01:12):
microfish at her university library, searching for old newspaper clippings.
She's only six months into her new life after escaping
an ultra conservative cult known as the Truth. After feeling
uncomfortable in her world for years. Laura made the enormous
(01:32):
decision to stop believing and move away from her community
in western New South Wales. But in her world, that
meant saying goodbye to her family, her friends, everyone she's
ever known. She thought if she left, she'd die. That's
what she was told. But here she still was, and
(01:55):
something was bugging her. Laura grew up believing that two
teenagers from her community, Norella and Stephen, died in nineteen
ninety two because they listened to the rock band Nirvana.
That's what she'd been told, but the story has niggled
at her over the years. Something doesn't feel right, and
(02:18):
she's keen to investigate. Eventually, she stumbles across an article suicide.
The siblings had taken their own lives because they didn't
want to live within the confines of their strict religious
upbringing anymore. Wow, she'd been lied to. What else were
(02:42):
they lying about? As Laura continues to reflect and research
the life she left, she realizes something. The world she
grew up in was a cult guilty of numerous crimes,
crimes that went unspoken, crimes that were normalized by those
(03:02):
around her. Grooming sexual abuse, domestic violence, spiritual abuse, financial abuse.
She realizes another thing too. These crimes she witnessed were
overwhelmingly affecting one half of the group, the women, women
(03:22):
who grew up with nowhere to run, no path to freedom,
and no voice of their own. I'm Jemma Bath and
this is True Crime Conversations a Muma mea podcast exploring
(03:46):
the world's most notorious crimes by speaking to the people
who know the most about them. But this month, instead
of looking at specific criminal cases, we're focusing in on
the people behind the scenes of crime in the eyes
of the community she left. Laura McConnell is a true
(04:07):
simply because she doesn't believe anymore. But she hasn't gone quietly. Instead,
Laura is very loudly and very proudly trying to get
the word out about the dangers of the truth. She
doesn't want the children and teenagers growing up inside to
believe what she did, that there's no way out. She
(04:30):
wants to be the inspiration. She wishes she had someone
who followed a different path. Perhaps what makes the truth
so dangerous is its secretiveness. It has no proper name,
no official places of worship, and no doctrinal statements other
than the Bible itself. Instead, everything is passed down in
(04:52):
person from generation to generation. There are no priests or ministers. Instead,
those in charge are called workers. They encourage members to
spend their lives proving their worth to God and Jesus,
often through acts of suffering. Today's guest grew up in
the Truth before making her escape at the age of nineteen.
(05:16):
Laura joins us. Now, Laura, how do I even refer
to this group or church that you grew up in?
Is it true that there's not really a name for it?
Speaker 3 (05:37):
Yeah, it is so they claim to have been started
in the beginning, so they claim not to have a name,
and in fact they claim not to have any registrations
around the world, no formal kind of church, hierarchy, no name.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
So for the purposes of this interview, how should we
refer to it? How do you refer to the group?
Speaker 3 (05:53):
I personally call them the Truth because that's what I
grew up, calling them the Truth or the Friends or
the Way. In Australia, I think internally and people who
have left call it the Truth. In America and the
US they use that less. They say the two boy twos.
But I'm Australian, So I tend to use the truth brilliant.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
We'll call them the Truth. You said it started at
the beginning. Apparently, apparently, can that be pinpointed back to
a I'm going to say man, because I assume it's
a man, a man, a place, a person, a country.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
It will be no surprise to anyone outside the Truth
to learn that, in fact, it was not started by
God or by Jesus. It was started by a man
in Ireland in the late eighteen nineties, William Irvine, and
then spread to other parts of the world from there.
Came out of a very interesting time in Ireland where
several fundamentalist groups came out at the same time. The
Jehovah's Witnesses, the Exclusive Brethren, and also the Truth came
(06:41):
out of this time in Ireland as well. So it
was a time of quite a lot of our people
and where people were searching for something different to mainstream Christianity,
and these fundamentalist groups sprung up. The Truth happens to
be quite a secretive version of it, which doesn't share
a lot of its background and claims to have no name,
for instance.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
And they call themselves a religion. Is that what they are.
Speaker 3 (07:01):
They refer to themselves as a non denominational, loose group
of Christians when pushed, so you have to push quite
hard to get that information from them. And part of
that is that none of us are really taught anything
else about Christianity outside the group, so we can't, as
lay people, usually even explain what our beliefs are or
where they fit within the Christian spectrum of beliefs, or
in fact, within the spectrum of religion full stop. Because
(07:22):
we're not taught anything. We're kept quite in the dark
about not only our beginnings and our belief structure, but
also about what other Christianity even is. So at a push, yes,
they're described as very loose, home based Christians who read
the Bible and are dictated to by the Bible, and
that's really all they can tell you about where they
sit in the Christian spectrum.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
So I guess my next question was what are the beliefs?
Are there any I guess looking back, you could probably
pinpoint them.
Speaker 3 (07:48):
Yeah, we're told that there really are no rules, a
bit like the name thing. There's really no rules. Your
spirit led, So you're led by the Bible, right, you
read the Bible and you'll interpret it and the people
around you, the men around you. Normally, we'll interpret the
Bible for you. We had a very literal interpretation of
the King James Bible, a very conservative, very extreme, fundamentalist
interpretation of the King James Bible. We are led to
(08:12):
believe that women should be tightly controlled in terms of
their dress and their appearance. We are taught to keep
ourselves separate from the world, which is also something common
in fundamentalism in general, as is control of women and
children and girls. The core beliefs are really very extreme
in terms of women's sexuality, gender appearance, that we should
(08:32):
be modest at all times, and a lot of that
is dictated to us by elder men in our family
and families and communities. And you know, things like TVs
and radios and pop music when I was growing up
were forbidden. It is a little looser these days. Although
most people don't have a TV openly, They will have
it in a cupboard where it can be shot away
and hidden. Lots of people now have computers and the Internet,
(08:54):
but that was also forbidden when I was growing up.
I live very sheltered lives, so there's this idea that
we are in the world, but we are not of
the world. So we don't consume things in the world
the same way that mainstream Christians do. We are in
this world, living in it, but we don't consume things
the same way.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
And is it a I guess, a belief that the
world is going to end one day? Is that part
of it?
Speaker 3 (09:18):
Yeah, So, while again we don't openly discuss that, as
a lot of other Christian groups do, that you know
that there is going to be this end of the world.
That is basically a lot of the control is about
in the group in that they really fundamentally believe that
Jesus is going to return at any moment, and he
is going to select from the people in the world
the best or a certain group of people who have
(09:39):
behaved in a very certain way, coincidentally the way that
they have interpreted the Bible inside the truth, and he
will nominate those people to go back and be in
heaven and everybody else is going to hell. Ultimately, when
it boils down to all of this behavior and all
of this control that happens within the group is a
terrible fear about the world ending any minute, and all
of us going to help.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
Is there a date.
Speaker 3 (09:59):
Are we working towards the ru fortunately or unfortunately, I
don't know. When you do a lot of research into
cultic groups, even the ones that have a date, the
date moves constantly and nobody says, oh, by the way
that date's moved, maybe this is a croc of shit.
But even the ones that do have a date, nobody
ever seems to do anything with it. But no, there
is no date. It's just imminent any second Jesus is returning.
(10:21):
And we literally live in fear that we're going to
turn around the corner as a woman wearing a pair
of jeans, and that Jesus is going to magically reappear
and see us in a pair of jeans and be
like off to hell for you.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Wow, Just how big is this group? Because it doesn't
have a name. From my understanding, there's no real places
of worship, there's no church or anything like that. It's
very elusive. So how is this able to spread? How
big is this group?
Speaker 3 (10:47):
So there has been a lot of turmoil in the
past couple of decades. Certainly in Australia there was a
lot of people who left in the nineties, there was
a big falling out in Canada in the late nineties
as well, and a lot of people fell away. It
is very hard to get an understanding of how many
people are in the group worldwide because with no registered entity,
there's not a lot of records that people can act,
especially people outside the group like myself. We sort of
(11:09):
believe that a group of people who've left a sort
of the opinion there used to be around two hundred
thousand worldwide. There is probably more like fifty thousand now.
I would say, perhaps even less. There is a big
reckoning happening in America at the moment, with a lot
of abuse alligations coming to light, and I would say
the number is falling rapidly by the day. Yeah, when
I was growing up, I would have said there was
(11:29):
around fifty thousand here in Australia, but I would say
that number is ten now at a guess. But you're right,
there's no church buildings. So the truth believes that church
buildings are worldly, and that we worship in family homes.
So we worship in the living rooms and the laundrooms
of our community. Of one of the more senior men
or families in our community will hold that we have
(11:50):
got a history of using things like scout halls and
school libraries and want not to have services on a
Sunday afternoon to try and encourage outsiders to attend. Once
a year there is a large event called the convention,
and there is a ground that is owned by a
wealthy family. For instance, in a state, that could be
old church property, but in theory there is no church
property and no church buildings.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
So in Australia, are there some common towns or states
where there are more people inside this group?
Speaker 3 (12:22):
Yes, there are. Again, I've been out now over twenty years,
so I think it has changed a little since my
childhood in terms of where people congregate together. But like
a lot of fundamentalist groups, not just Christianity but also
Judaism and Islam, families and communities tend to congregate together
in similar suburbs, in similar towns, And I think there
can be a bit of a misconception that people from
(12:42):
cultic backgrounds live in kind of compounds, you know, but
that's really often not the reality. We just tend to
congregate together in family groups and community groups because often
our work is very intertwined. Our families work in family businesses,
and money is very tied up in each other's lives
and investments and work. So personally, my own community comes
from rural New South Wales, and there are certainly family
(13:05):
groups that congregate together in places like Doubo, places like
a Mudgykawer, rural places outside the major centers. That's not
to say there are also not large family groups in
Sydney and Melbourne and large urban areas. There are, but
my own personal experience of the group is more rural.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
So using your community as an example, does that mean
your family lives in one house in a normal neighborhood
in the street, and then all of the other families
involved in the truth are also descending on that same neighborhood.
Speaker 3 (13:38):
My personal experience is actually of a farming family. So yeah,
my family had farms all within a similar region, and
we all shed farm machinery. And this is also common
with most fundamentalist groups. With businesses, they share employees, they
share family members to work, they share tractors. In rural communities,
they all work on each other's farms. So yeah, I
mean I come from an environment where our farms were
all next door to each other, or at least down
(13:59):
the road from each other. The ones who did live
in town live within the proximity of each other in
a community so that they can get to each other's
houses easily on Sundays for services. So yeah, we have
our own space and our own homes, but we are
also very close and everything is shared, you know, in terms,
not everything, but lots of things are shared resources.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
If you're not allowed to do worldly things, it's almost
like you're living in the world, but you're in your
own little world. Does that mean people from the truth,
They're not nurses, they're not police officers, they're not members
of society. They're working in more private, kind of family
run businesses.
Speaker 3 (14:37):
It does always surprise me how many there are working
in worldly professions, but they make a very deliberate effort
to stay separate. Right, So, there are teachers, and there
are nurses, and certainly for women, there's only very few
professions where women can really work outside the home because
they tend not to be able. I mean, our hair
is so weird, our clothing is so weird. We don't
have a lot of shared vocabulary with the world outside
(14:59):
of our community. We're a little bit creepy and freaky.
So it is quite hard for us to integrate, especially
women who look very different. Men can often mainstream they
wear demure clothes and suits and slacks and polo shirts.
But they can actually kind of mainstream a little bit
easier than women can. So a lot of women work
in jobs they can fit around their family commitments and
our church commitments. There are teachers and nurses. But yeah,
(15:23):
things like hairdressing is off limits. Things that bring us
into contact with too much worldliness is really off limits
for us.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
I've got to ask, because you've used the term weird
to describe dress and hair, paint a picture for me.
What kind of things were you allowed to wear and
what did your hair look like back then?
Speaker 3 (15:43):
Well, think of the Mormons in Utah. You're they're right,
except probably not quite as uniform. When I was growing up,
women liked more floral dresses. But certainly there is a
preoccupation with being modest. So this idea that you can't
show your neckline your shoulders. When I was growing up,
things like toe cleavage wear an issue. So you couldn't
wear sandals because toteviage.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
Sorry toe cleavage, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (16:05):
Toe cleavage was seen as being immodest, and like dresses,
you know too long, we're seen as worldly. Too short
was seen as immodests. So there's this very like mid
calf length sort of everyone has this standard mid calf
length kind of dress. Trousers, as read in the Bible
are seen as man's clothing, and women are not allowed
to be men, so no trousers or no genes. Women
(16:25):
are not allowed to dress like men. And we're not
allowed to cut our hair. Certainly, by the time in
twelve or thirteen, mostly our hair is pulled back into
kind of a bun because to have it too flowy
and too showy is to be too worldly.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
So were you homeschooled because of all of this or
were you in mainstream schools?
Speaker 3 (16:43):
Most truth kids, in fact, all the ones I know of,
go to mainstream schools. It is a bit like the
rest of our ideology, whereas we're in the world, not
of the world, so we're said to school, but we're
very much taught to be very careful about what we believe,
and in line with a lot of the secretive nature
of the group, we're not very open about our belief
systems with the schools and with the teachers, but we
are taught that things like dinosaurs are fake, and that
(17:05):
we we taught at school that are not real, and
we just have to sit there and we have to listen,
and then we go home and we pray for those
people to be converted and to understand that what they're
teaching is false. So we are sent to school, but
we are also taught that the things we're learning at
school are not true, and that we just have to
do it. Like lots of things, we have to do
it because to survive in the world until the world ends,
(17:27):
we need to participate in This.
Speaker 2 (17:30):
Was that confusing as a child.
Speaker 3 (17:31):
Horribly horribly, very isolating, and we weren't really allowed to
make friends with people at school because they were seen
as worldly, and we weren't really allowed to participate in
extracurricular activities or birthday parties or have close friendships with people.
So it was very lonely. And in fact, I often
think that being homeschool might be nicer, because then at
least we'd be with our I mean, I was lucky.
I came from a very large family. I had siblings
(17:52):
and I had cousins, and I had lots of other
kids around me, lots of kids. I think, you know,
in smaller families or maybe one or two siblings. It
can be very isolating to be a child from the truth.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
How did your family find themselves as part of this group.
Speaker 3 (18:08):
My family been in for a very long time. On
my maternal side, I am fifth generation, fourth generation born
inside I think my father's side, or on my paternal side,
i'm third generation. Wow, So my family has been in
a very long time, which further entrenches the issues which
I'm sure we'll touch on later about leaving. Because you
don't have any contacts outside the group. Everything you know,
everyone you know and love is inside the group. In
(18:30):
a nutshelle, I believe my family, which I think is common,
was preyed on because they were poor and because they
were rural, because they had experienced loss and trauma and poverty.
They were preyed upon by people in the group and
love bomb, which is also something that happens with cultic
and high control groups. They love bomb people who are
going through periods of distress and who are finding it
(18:51):
difficult and not getting what they need, you know, through poverty,
through the social security system, through loss and grief and whatnot.
My family had been in a very long time.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
Did you have a happy childhood.
Speaker 3 (19:04):
That's the hardest part for me in reconciling my life
in general, is that in lots and lots of ways,
I had the most beautiful childhood. You know. I came
from a farm where I was given free reign to
be and to do, and there was no one to
judge me. But you know, I was riding motorbikes in
a dress and riding horses in a dress, and running
(19:25):
and jumping and skipping, and I had all these cousins
and a very big, close knit family. And I think
as a young child, I had a very idyllic life
until I sort of got to about eight, when I
really then had to start behaving more and more like
a truth girl. You know, I really had wonderful childhood,
very carefree, very practical. You know, I worked with my
(19:46):
father and my grandfather around the farm. From the earliest age.
I rode motorbikes. Being a girl from the truth didn't
hold me back until I was about eight, and then
I realized, oh, okay, there's a behavior that's expected of
me now. And that's really when things got very hard
pretty much from then on.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
Was it also because you started to look around and
realize that other kids were doing things you weren't allowed
to do, or that perhaps boys were doing things that
you weren't allowed to do.
Speaker 3 (20:10):
Yeah, one hundred percent. So then I started looking around
and going, why don't I know anything about TV shows
like all the girls around me? Why don't I know
anything about pop music like all the other girls around me?
And you know, then you know, I started to essentially
be sexualized really by the truth, which is like, you know,
you can't run and jump like that in that dress.
You need to be sitting down and you're being modest,
or you'll never be able to get married. No one
will want to marry you, you know. And that was
(20:31):
a threat held over me pretty much from the age
of eight, that if you don't sit down and behave
and if you don't set a good example, no one's
going to want to marry the girls in our family
because you're a bad influence.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
Was there an age you were expected to be married
by and was arranged marriage part of the truth.
Speaker 3 (20:48):
The truth is a very small group of people, even
at its biggest when I was growing up, and so
marriage was something constantly talked about because to find somebody
to marry, which I think is common with fundamentalist groups
can be quite a problematic thing because, like we're all
related often and so you know, we're constantly on the
lookout for someone that might be able to marry our
daughters because they're not a second or third cousin. So
(21:09):
you know, it was always a topic of conversation. A
lot of my cousins married very young, or at least
met their spouse very young at you know, fourteen fifteen
and were married at sixteen seventeen eighteen. So you know,
while there was never an expectation said outright by either
of my parents that I would get married, that was
what was expected of me by our community and by
our family, and you know, I watched that happen around me,
(21:31):
you know, like it was just an expectation. I never
felt comfortable with it personally, and it wasn't ever what
I wanted, But also didn't really feel, certainly before the
age of about fourteen, that there were any choices. I thought,
that's just the way it had to be. And the
other thing is that the roles for women and girls
are so tightly defined you literally have no other job sometimes,
(21:52):
like what else are you going to do other than
get married and have babies, or you can go and
be a preacher, which we call a worker, and that
never appeared to me either. So I didn't want to
be a preacher or a worker, and I certainly didn't
want to get married and have children, which is really
old what led me out of the group.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
You're listening to true crime Conversations Behind the Scenes of
Crime Special with me Jemma Bath. I'm speaking with Laura
McConnell about growing up in the fundamentalist religious cult The Truth.
Up next, Laura exposes the crimes she witnessed and experienced
during her time in the sect and how she eventually left.
(22:40):
What did marriage in the Truth look like? I guess
this is the point where we start to touch on
a bit more of the crime aspect of the truth,
because domestic violence was that an accepted part of marriage.
Speaker 3 (22:56):
I think it's not even just marriage. I think all
of our families are violent, coercive, abusive places. And that
hurts me to say, because they come from that community
and that is my culture. But I come from a
culture of embedded violence. I come from a culture of
endemic sexual abuse. In endemic coercive control, endemic spiritual abuse,
(23:17):
people abuse their children physically. I think that has gotten better.
But you know, growing up, all of us would smack
our dolls constantly because that's what we saw happening around us.
Kids around us were smacked constantly. There's just sexual violence
and grooming and abuse was just endemic. And it wasn't
(23:37):
just in marriages. It was within family groups. It was
our preachers or workers grooming and abusing girls. Sometimes boys,
but in my experience, a lot of girls. And you know,
our distrust of the world outside allowed that behavior and
still allows that behavior to flourish because we do not
trust even as leavers, we do not trust authority because
we're taught to fear the outside world. There's also no
(23:59):
structures inside the group to enable us to report it anywhere.
We have no registered clergy, we have no registered organization,
we have no employee processes to talk about clergy who
are abusive. So the group itself, it's not only just
spousal violence, it's violence across the board in terms of abuse.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
What did you know about sex? Was that something that
was taught to you? Because I can imagine when you
go into a marriage as a young woman and you're
expected to have sex. Were you taught that you were
allowed to say no, for instance, or.
Speaker 3 (24:36):
We have no concept of sexual education and absolutely no
concept of consent. Roles for women and girls are very
clearly defined, and to step outside of them results in
back lagin, results in more violence in different ways. You know,
you have spiritual violence of Bible versus being used to
coerce you, of you being called bitter or being called immodest,
(24:57):
or being told that you have a bad spirit for
raising issues. You know, and that's not just family violence,
that's all kinds of issues. As a woman girl, your
role is to be subservient. Your role is to follow
what you've been told and towards the interpretation of the Bible,
and not to ask too many questions. I was very lucky,
I think, in that I came from a farming background,
(25:18):
I knew what sex was. I knew a lot more
than a lot of other kids around me because of
the family I came from. My own parents also were
not probably as conservative around sexuality and sex as a
lot of other parents around me. So you know, in
lots of ways, I was lucky. But no, we are
taken out of things like sex education. We are not
(25:39):
allowed to do things like learn about dancing about music,
about dinosaurs. You know, like the list of things were
not allowed to know about it is never ending.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
You've mentioned grooming or like childhood sexual abuse. What can
you tell me about how that kind of emerged in
the communities in Australia. I know that there was a
more high profile case that actually made the news with
two preachers from your own community.
Speaker 3 (26:03):
Yeah, so we have a very very big entrenched problem
preachers or our workers being perpetrators of abuse, of abusing power.
And then they are not only perpetrating sexual abuse, they're
also porptrating spiritual abuse by controlling people and controlling how
people report abuses to authorities. And as I mentioned earlier,
there is quite an awakening happening in the US at
(26:24):
the moment about exactly how bad the issue is of
our workers being involved in sexual abuse and CSA or
childhood sexual abuse. I think there is just a massive
misuse of power. These people are not trained. They offer
themselves to be preachers. They don't go through a formal training.
They often just shadow an older preacher or worker for
a time and that's how they learn behavior. They're in
(26:46):
an environment where they think that women and girls are
subservient to them and that they have control over them.
And so, yeah, we have a very endemic issue of
men in our community, not just workers, but also senior men,
elders in families being abusers of generations and generations and
then teaching the men under them and around them how
to be abuses. That's the reality. It's endemic. And you know,
(27:08):
I've been screaming quite loudly about how bad it's been
for you know, eight odd years, and been shut down
a lot by my own community as well as the
leave of community in lots of ways, because people don't
want to talk about how bad it is. But there
is a lot of us who were abused by our
preachers or workers, and not only abused, but also observed abuse.
Because the reality is that children in groups we know
(27:29):
we saw other children experiencing and being roomed as well.
That's the reality.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
So this is something that happened to you personally? Yeah, correct,
how have you grappled with that?
Speaker 4 (27:41):
Now?
Speaker 2 (27:42):
As an adult looking back that experience.
Speaker 3 (27:45):
For me, it's very hard because I often feel a
lot of survivor guilt because I grew up understanding a
lot about sex and I also then went on to
study at university and to work in areas involving family violence.
I always thought that I got off pretty lucky because
I wasn't raped. I felt like one of the luckiest
people in my family because there were so many people
(28:05):
in my family in particular, who were abused to experienced abuse.
I just felt like the luckiest kid going around. And
then in the last few years, I had this realization that, like,
I can probably need two hands to count the number
of times where I was groomed and where I was
sexually assaulted, where I was put in situations where senior
men were touching me, where senior men were putting their
(28:27):
hands places I did not want their hands, or having
sexualized conversations with me, were exhibiting sexualized behavior like rubbing
themselves against me. And all of a sudden, I have
this realization. In the last couple of years, Laurie, you
were sexually abused. You were like, you might not have
been raped, but that's fucking abuse.
Speaker 1 (28:46):
It is.
Speaker 3 (28:46):
And not only that, I saw that same behavior happening
on my cousins, on other people around me. So not
only did I experience it, but I also realized how
much of it I'd seen and it was so endemic
and so normalized that we didn't think it was abuse.
Speaker 2 (29:01):
How old were you do you remember that kind of
stuff starting or can you not remember when it started?
Speaker 3 (29:06):
I can't remember when. My earliest instance is around eleven, right,
I mean, you know that's the reality. It's like it
probably didn't start then. It's just probably the first time
I realized what.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
It was, which is terrifying that these kids don't even realize.
Speaker 3 (29:21):
No, And I'm also up against that when it comes
to raising awareness. You know, That's also why I get
so much pushback because people are like, why is she
making so much noise about this? Like we weren't raped,
It's not that bad. Like, Okay, I think maybe most
of you haven't really clicked about what abuse is.
Speaker 2 (29:36):
So these two workers from your own community, what were
they accused of doing and what happened to them? Are
they in jail?
Speaker 4 (29:42):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (29:42):
So Chris Chandler and Ernie Barry two men that I
came across. Actually, they came to my community when I
was around thirteen or fourteen, and yeah, one of them
was involved in allegedly sexually assaulting me. Let's just go
with allegedly. Both those men are dead, so it's a
little easier for me to have this conversation and to
be a little more transparent about the things that have happened.
(30:03):
But both of those men were found guilty, and actually
there are far more victims of those men than have
actually ever made it to court because of the way
the community really just most of us are just so
terrified of the legal system, and in lots of ways
we have a right to be because our experiences don't
fit neatly into a mainstream legal system. You know, it's
(30:23):
pretty hard to take a group with no name to court,
and preachers who don't have an employment record and can
say that they're not preachers of anything, because that's what
we're up against, right Like I think Chris did spend
some time in jail, I don't think that any Barry
did spend any time in jail. They were both found guilty,
but again, the number of cases that could have been
brought against them is nowhere near the number they were
(30:44):
found guilty of. Because people in our community are just
too terrified to speak up comes with extreme consequences. Often,
you know your own family will disown you, often shun you.
People in your community across the street to avoid you.
People will undermine you. You are left with nothing. You
are left with no money and no home and no family.
So yeah, while those two were found guilty, they were
(31:06):
not felt guilty by nearly as many cases as they
should have been. I think Chris spent a small amount
of time in jail, but not nearly long enough. And
I don't think only spent any time in jail if
my recollection is correct.
Speaker 2 (31:18):
What can you tell us about the death of two
teenagers in the nineties that once again you knew about
or you'd been told about. But what were you told
about them growing up on? What happened to them?
Speaker 3 (31:30):
And that realin Stephen Henderson died when I was I
think twelve maybe thirteen, and their's is a very sad story.
They suicided out near Kinglake in Victoria, and they wrote
a note or at liszt Norelle did, saying that they
didn't want to attend our church anymore and they didn't
feel they had any choice but to attend, and they
were being forced to attend. Those details were very much
kept from certainly the children in the community, but I
(31:52):
suspect also the adults, and we were told that they
died because they had listened to Nirvana and they had
had too much worldly influence. Yeah, you know, and we
believed that, like we believe that these poor kids had
died because of Nirvana, not because actually they had tried
to say to their mother that they didn't want to
(32:12):
attend the church anymore, and that they had been forced
to attend. It wasn't until many many years later, like
I don't know, maybe eight or nine years later, that
I realized and looked up in the newspaper actually and went, oh,
my god, they didn't die because of Nirvana, which just
seems like lunicrous now. But you know, often people inside
these groups live in an alternate reality. Like we drip
(32:34):
fed information. We're told information from a very specific viewpoint,
and we're not told the truth about things. Everything was distorted,
you know, and even the Ernie Barrier Chris Chandler stuff,
you know, when I was growing up and Chris and Ernie,
the conversation started to happen about the fact that they
had been charged. You know, we were told that the
people who charged them, you know, were bitter people, they
were people with very bad mental health issues. And we
(32:56):
were lied to about why these cases were brought about,
like people have just not told the truth about these
criminal cases.
Speaker 2 (33:03):
Obviously we've just touched on a few cases. But are
these crimes or alleged crimes that are being repeated over
and over and over again in communities not just here
but throughout the whole world that you can see.
Speaker 3 (33:17):
Around the world, And let me tell you, it is
worse in countries like Vietnam and Malaysia and where families
are poor. And I mean we touched on this earlier
about my own family coming into the group. The people
who come into the group now are from countries like
Brazil and Venezuela and Uruguay and Vietnam, and they're from
places where there is entrenched poverty. And they're sending workers
(33:38):
or preachers from countries like Australia who have backgrounds as
predators into those environments where I have absolutely no doubt.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
In fact, I have a lot of.
Speaker 3 (33:46):
Emails to suggest that these people are being preyed upon
by our workers or by the Truth's workers in these countries.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
You mentioned before that things are starting to explode overseas.
What did you mean by that? Are things starting to
come out well?
Speaker 3 (34:01):
I think in the US and Canada, in particular, there
was a preacher who died in a hotel room. In
itself is very odd because we tend from the truth
not to go into hotel rooms as preachers. We stay
in people's homes, which is also a problem because that's
where abuses are happening, because preachers are staying in our homes.
So he died in a hotel and there was some
incriminating evidence found on a laptop, and all of a sudden,
(34:22):
some stuff got shared online in some Facebook group, in
a Facebook group, and lots and lots of people in
America studge to ask questions about, well, how many predators
are there? Do we have a register? We don't have
a registered organization, so how do we have a register
of predators in the group? And it suddenly became obvious
we don't. And you know, there's all these predators just
roaming around in our families and communities and in our clergy.
(34:43):
And so people are asking questions and they're not getting
answers because, as we touched on before, the controlling nature
of what gets drip fed in means that nobody ever
gets questions answered in a way that is honest.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
And I guess it's hard because the police can't really
charge anyone, or question anyone, or prosecute anyone unless people
are willing to share what happened.
Speaker 3 (35:03):
Correct And you know in my own circumstances I have
in the past, and in fact I have a case
live at the moment to try and get a case
up against somebody. But unless you have people in your
community who are willing to corroborate your story, you have
absolutely no evidence. And when you come from a community
who is entirely secretive and who is more likely to
undermine you than they are to corroborate your story, the
(35:24):
chances of getting like a legal case up are even
slimmer than they are for mainstream people. And it's hard
for mainstream survivors, let alone people from a secretive community
like ours.
Speaker 2 (35:35):
I've heard you describe the group as putting a lot
of emphasis on suffering. Can you describe that to me
a bit more? And I'm also particularly interested in it
because I feel like what we've been talking about reporting
crimes that would stop you from wanting to do that too.
Speaker 3 (35:53):
I talk a lot about the suffering and a lot
about how I left because I couldn't stand the suffering
you know, like, I have a fairly vibrant, outgoing personality,
and the suffering just did me in. The reality is this, right,
is that life inside fundamentals and life inside Celtic groups
is actually pretty shit, especially for women and girls and
for people outside being a white man. Right, if you're
(36:14):
a white man, it's a bloody nice place to live.
Everything's controlled, You've got a lot of power, you to
wave it around and get people to do what you want.
But if you're not a nice white man in a
fundamental scroup, it's actually a really hard life. And so
to counteract that, you believe that all of this suffering,
that you're going through this looking different, this feeling like
you are an outsider all the time because you don't
(36:37):
look and sound and speak and have any kind of
comprehension of the world outside your home, it's because you're
going to heaven and everyone else is going to hell,
and so you're suffering your way into heaven. I just
need to suffer, and I just need to tolerate this,
and I just need to put up with this because
I'm going to heaven. If I don't, I'm going to hell.
Like there's my alternatives, right, I've got to put up
(36:59):
with this because in the end, my reward is in heaven.
And you just have this horrible mentality of people thinking
they have to put up with horrible mental health issues,
they have to put up with abuse, they have to
put up with families that are controlling, because the alternative
is that you're going to help.
Speaker 2 (37:15):
It feels like a way to explain away crimes against themselves.
Speaker 3 (37:19):
It is bypassing is spiritual. Bypassing, right, we are using
the Bible to basically enable abuse and control by men.
Speaker 4 (37:29):
At the end of the day, let's.
Speaker 2 (37:43):
Talk about you getting out. Did it start with education?
I know that you went to Uni? Was that normal?
Speaker 3 (37:50):
In theory it started with me going to university, But
I think it goes back much further than that. It
goes back with me never being comfortable with my gender
and sexuality role within the group, never feeling like I
was looking around and thinking I fit in here. I
just never fit, you know. And if i'd been a boy,
I used to just wish I was a boy. From
like eight or nine years old, I used to think
I just wish I was a boy. I wish I
(38:12):
could just live like they do. And that's really where
it started is I just never fitted in quite like
I should have. I didn't want to get married and
just have children and be what the other women around
me and girls around me had been. I certainly didn't
want to become a worker, and so it was like, well,
what are my options? You know, my own mother had
been to university, but she'd made a choice to leave
(38:32):
and have children, and then she did go back again
and become a teacher, and so she did set a
good example for me. But she was very much in
the world, but not of the world. She was very
controlled in her interactions with her colleagues. She kept herself
very separate, and she didn't have a life outside the
home except to turn up to work and then come
home again. And I didn't want that life. I wanted friends.
I wanted to experience things. I was a curious kid
(38:54):
who wanted to make friends outside our family and community.
And really I had no option at the end of
the day, what was I going to do? Like, I
didn't have options? And so yeah, I really just nutted
down in my last couple of years of school and thought, well,
if I can get some decent grades, maybe I can
get out of this community, maybe I can go. So yeah,
in theory university's what got me out. But you've started
much much before that.
Speaker 2 (39:15):
How old were you when you finally said goodbye to
the church.
Speaker 3 (39:20):
I actually didn't formally leave until I was nineteen, Okay,
I kept going. I didn't know you could leave. I
thought you died and went to hell if you left.
I didn't know anybody who left, and there were a
few people around me who had left, in my extended
family and community, but I never saw them again. They disappeared,
and they disappeared because they were shunder ex communicated, or
shamed away, or in the case of one of my
(39:41):
extended family, they actually died. And you know that was
used against us. We were told if you leave, that
some accident will befall you and you will die. You know,
I didn't know you could leave. I thought I just
had to try and maintain this life while building another
life outside of it, and somehow try and make them work,
because I thought if I left, I was going to
go to hell.
Speaker 2 (40:00):
So did you leave thinking that might happen?
Speaker 3 (40:04):
Yeah, I did.
Speaker 2 (40:05):
That's a huge huch thing to take on.
Speaker 3 (40:07):
Yeah, the reality is I was really pushed out. I
was excommunicated out because my behavior and my appearance in
my community. I no longer fitted with my community. Was
the reality. I was going to university, I wasn't dressing
the way I should have been. I had dreadlocks. Actually
I refused to cut my hair because we weren't allowed
to cut our hair. But I thought, like a big
dreadlocks with it, and I can still, you know, get
it up in a big bun. With dreadlocks.
Speaker 2 (40:30):
You were really working with what you could.
Speaker 3 (40:32):
Because working with what I had, you know. But of
course I was turning up every Sunday and Wednesday and
they were like, what is she? What is this?
Speaker 4 (40:39):
Like?
Speaker 3 (40:40):
I was not setting the right example. So I was
really pushed out of the community. I thought I was
probably going to die. I was waiting to die, is
the reality for a long time, you know, for six months.
It was the early days of the internet. And I
started searching online and found some things and started to realize, oh, okay,
probably not going to die quite the way they say
I'm going to. Yeah, So yeah, I left thinking I
(41:00):
was going to die.
Speaker 2 (41:01):
Do you even remember the first day that you weren't
a part of the group anymore? What did that look?
Speaker 3 (41:08):
Like I don't really remember. I remember the day I
realized I was never going back. And I just walked
out of a Sunday service and they'd all kind of
been very strange with me. You know, there's a lot
of rituals at the end of services, like you have
to shake hands with everybody, you know, you'll sit in
a circle, and there's a whole lot of rituals that
happen in Truth services, and I just was really uncomfortable
and realizing none of them would look me in the eye,
(41:29):
none of them would shake hands with me, none of
them would let me participate in the rituals. And it
had been going on for a while, for kind of
a year, maybe eighteen months, but this day I just
realized it had escalated and they were really pushing me out,
and I felt really, really uncomfortable, you know, to the
point where they were reversing away from me so that
didn't have to talk to me, and basically tripping over themselves,
you know, to get away from me. And I came
(41:50):
to the end of that service and I walked down
and was bucketing down with rain. As I have said before,
I didn't have any money, I had nothing. Everyone else
had cars, and I had to really on public transport,
and none of them ever offered me a lift, which
is self was weird because I came from a family
in a community that like we're so tight, and you know,
I would never have let anybody take public transport and
would have given anyone a lift. And so yeah, they
(42:11):
just sort of let me walk out. And I was
waiting in the rain for the tram and it was
bucketing down with rain, and they were all driving past
me and just kind of looking the other direction and
refusing to make eye contact with me, and I just
sort of went, I don't think these people want me.
I don't think I belong here anymore. And I just
felt this deep sense of like rejection and shame and thought,
I'm not coming back here anymore. I don't want this anymore.
(42:31):
I don't know what this is, and I don't want to. Yeah,
and I made that decision that DA I'm never going back,
never ever going back. And I was so shamed and
felt so bad that I was willing to die basically
because I wasn't going to participate in that anymore. And yeah,
you know, it was a pretty tough ond six months
after that, like I had nothing.
Speaker 2 (42:47):
Did you have to call your family and tell them
that you were leaving? What did that look like?
Speaker 3 (42:53):
Yeah, So I did try to talk to my family
about it, certainly after I'd found information online about the
group and about them being cultic and about the abuses,
for instance, and about Norell and Stephen Henderson as well.
Like I found information about them and was like, what
the hell. Like, I tried to talk to my family
about it, but they would say things like, Oh, you've
been taken in by the devil, you know, like the
devil puts things on the internet to confuse people. Your
(43:15):
spirit is wrong, you need to go back, and you
need to repent, and you need to come back. And
there was a lot of shaming and a lot of
like thoughts stopping stuff. They just wouldn't listen to anything
that I had to say, so I stopped really talking
about it. But you know, and it also became gossip,
because that's the other thing is that our communities are
very close, and yeah, people just gossip about me and
about my appearance and about my spirit. And then it
(43:36):
really escalated to the point where there was kind of
ostracization and I would go home to my rural community
on holidays and whatever. And yeah, people from my community
would cross the street to avoid me or pretend they
didn't know who I was. Yeah, And you know, and
I from a tiny, little rural community where these are
people I've known my entire life, you know, and these
are people I've known since I was born. They would
just pretend they didn't know who I was.
Speaker 2 (43:58):
And you've described that for the most part, you had
a very happy childhood with your nuclear family, but you
haven't spoken to them now for many years.
Speaker 3 (44:06):
That right, Yeah, there was a lot of ostracization, a
lot of shunning by my extended family, and not just
my family, but my community as well. I think there's
been hopeful things. You know, there is more and more
who have come forward and made contact after leaving themselves,
So that's nice. But you know, people don't realize the
damage that's done to relationships and the damage and the
(44:27):
trauma that happens. And even when people leave, it's not
always happy families, you know. And these are often people
who have protected abuses. For instance, even if they leave,
they're still not going to go back and say, oopsie,
I might have covered up for a predator for you.
You know for somebody, So there's a lot of really
toxic behavior. Still, yeah, there's a lot of cover ups
and a lot of very damaged people, even if they
(44:49):
leave often still not in a great place.
Speaker 2 (44:52):
You mentioned that your first six months were really tough.
What did trying to integrate into normal society look like.
Speaker 3 (45:01):
I'd never worn jeans. I'd never bought a pair of jeans.
I didn't know how to buy jeans. I had never
been to a hairdresser and have my haircut properly, like,
had a hairstyle properly. I didn't know how to use
a hair dryer in my family, which is not common,
Like I think my family were a bit hardcore about this,
but hair dryers were seen as being worldly, so we
didn't use hair dryers. So I don't know how to
blow dry my hair. I'd never used makeup. I had
(45:22):
absolutely no clue how to use makeup. I wouldn't have
known what lipstick or mascara was, you know. I very actually,
very rarely bought clothes knew from a store. I had,
you know, a couple of times, but mostly our clothes
were made within their family or within the community. So yeah,
just things like shopping for clothes. I had no idea
about wearing things that came above my knee. For instance.
(45:44):
I had no idea about how to use a TV remote,
like how to even know what channels are on TV
like pop music, no idea about radio stations, no idea
about pop music.
Speaker 2 (45:54):
But was learning all of this exciting or was it
a bit overwhelming terrifying?
Speaker 3 (45:59):
Because I was also very ashamed, and so to ask
for help from the people around me was very difficult.
Was very ashamed. So I sort of just had to
learn by stealth and by watching and by like being
hypervigilant with the people around me to try and work
out like how do you do lipstick? Like how do
you work that remote control? And now that this is common,
I think while the issues might be slightly different now
(46:21):
there's not good deprogramming services for people when you leave,
you know, it's just not good counseling that's affordable, certainly
for people to go and learn how to live in
the world. We're like aliens from another planet. Like we
might look like other people, but we're like aliens.
Speaker 2 (46:37):
Have you been to the police about the alleged crimes
that you witnessed or saw happen or is there no
point doing that.
Speaker 3 (46:45):
I've raised several different cases with police on various different
things that happened, and in fact, my leaving was also
a very long, very violent process as well. There was
a lot of abuse while I was leaving, things like
leaving notes on my windscreen threatening me, things like voicemails,
leaving threatening voice mails, and you know, every time I've
raised cases with authorities, then experienced another round of violence
(47:09):
and abuse. So I have not only raised it about
things that happen in my childhood, but I've also raised
cases for things that happened as I was leaving. It's
very difficult to prove anything, and as I've mentioned before,
the community is very tight knit and they protect each other,
and you need a lot of evidence even to get
a case up normally, and there is even less evidence
when you have less people who will stand behind you
(47:31):
and support you. And it's also part of the reason
why I speak out because when I first started trying
to raise awareness and started to have court cases try
and get court cases up, there was nothing available for
people to reference when they talked to police online about
who the group was. There was nothing online for people
to send to a police officer and say, this is
the group I came from. This woman is talking about
(47:52):
the group I came from. And for me, in the
last kind of five years, I've just had so many
people reach out and say, you know, I raised a
case and I sent things I found that you've said
online and I sent it to the detective and I
sent it to the police and I said, this is
the group.
Speaker 1 (48:05):
You know.
Speaker 3 (48:05):
I'm not making this up. This is the group, this
is where they come from, this is their background, because
it was just so little published about us, especially in Australia.
Speaker 2 (48:13):
Is that why you've decided to do this interview? Do
you just want to keep getting the message out there
for other people?
Speaker 4 (48:20):
Yeah, I do.
Speaker 3 (48:21):
I want to get the message out, but I also
bigger than that, I want to talk about spiritual abuse.
I want mainstream family violence providers to realize how violent
these groups are and how much support we need when
we leave, and that deciding to leave is a very long,
very violent process, and that we need support, we need housing,
we need funding, and at the moment there just is
not supports for people who try to leave our communities for.
Speaker 2 (48:44):
A bit of hope. What does your life look like now?
Speaker 3 (48:49):
On one hand, I have a really wonderful life, you know.
I have a five year old. I have a brand
called Go Kindly, a betting brand that I co founded
and built. I have wonderful friends and wonderful relationships. And
I'm very deeply loved in the world that I have
created for myself. But on the other hands, I'm also
a deeply traumatized person from the things that have happened
to me, and I have to hold those things very
(49:09):
closely and manage those things. You know, I have CPTSD
as a result of the abuses and the sustained abuses.
I'm very loved. I have a wonderful life, but it
comes with its damage.
Speaker 2 (49:21):
I want our final question to kind of speak directly
to people. I know it's hard to get access to interviews,
but who might be listening to this. They might be
members of the Truth and they want to get out.
What would you say to them?
Speaker 3 (49:37):
I think that people need to come to the realization
inside the Truth that it cannot be changed, it cannot
be made safe. It is a dangerous ideology. It is
an extreme ideology. It's not Christianity. You can leave and
you can go and join a different church. A mainstream
church and still be a Christian. You do not need
to believe in the extreme ideology of the truth. It's
abusive and it cannot be changed. My advice to people
(49:59):
who reach out to me starting to have this conversation
is they're usually very terrified, but is to just start
gradually exploring what life outside the truth could look like
and take very small steps to explore a different church
quietly without anybody really knowing. To educate yourself about what
supports you might need if you wanted to leave, and
that's things like creating yourself your own bank account that's
(50:20):
separate from your families. That's things like thinking about housing
and at what point might you be able to get
your own access to housing if for whatever reason, your
spouse or your family did not want to leave with you,
What would that safely look like, especially from communities like
the one I came from, where leaving would mean they
would cross the street and never speak to you again.
What are the implications of you leaving and thinking those
(50:42):
things through and actually going into a family violence organization
and demanding that they listen to your background, because at
the moment, there are not a lot of family valence
organizations who understand the difficulties leaving fundamentalist groups, but you
have a right to ask that they listen and a
right to ask that they support you.
Speaker 2 (51:05):
Thanks Laura for sharing her story with us. True Crime
Conversations is a Muma mea podcast hosted and produced by
me Jemma Bath, with audio designed by Scott Stronik. Our
executive producer is Giam Moylan.
Speaker 1 (51:29):
We'll be back next week with a brand new episode
of True Crime Conversations, Richat with former Australian Special Forces
soldier Heston Russell about his childhood, his time in the military,
and his infamous defamation battle with the ABC
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On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!