A Cult Within A Cult Within A Cult. Ft. Jodi Hildebrandt. Ft. Ruby Franke.

@kathygriffin

Trigger warning. This has haunted me my whole life. I tried everything I could think of. No one would do anything. #SA #speakup #believevictims #believewomen #triggerwarning

♬ original sound – realkathygriffin

This is actor and comedian Kathy Griffin demonstrating how to deal with a sexual predator in your own family. She names her late brother Ken as a pedophile and details how she tried for years to “get him caught” and how her family ostracised her for her efforts. She notes that anyone’s obligation or perceived obligation to stump for their predatory “bros” meaning friends and support system means little to her when she refused to support her own actual “bro” meaning her own brother.

Obviously, she is talking about the recent celebrity support for convicted rapist Danny Masterson who is an actor and Scientologist most famous for his role in the 90s sitcom That 70s Show. As of a couple of months ago, Masterson is pretty well known for being a convicted serial rapist, and now as of a couple of weeks ago everyone knows he’s been sentenced to 30 years to life in prison which is frankly astonishing to me. We’ll see how that pans out and how long he is actually there.

I will note here that Griffin could have probably killed her brother had she wanted to since she probably had access to him and he likely trusted her. But since most people will never go that far and likely don’t see vigilante justice as an option, I’m willing to concede that Griffin did a good job and certainly more than most people are willing to do, obviously including boymoms and everyone who has a predatory male in their family or inner circle. And that’s a lot of fucking people innit. It has to be. So Good Job, Kathy Griffin.

The comments on this Tiktok indicate that her message was timely and relevant to hundreds if not thousands of rape victims who share their experiences of the family and legal systems which are repetitive and gnarly at the same time. It really says something that so many girls and women can have such varying circumstances where the details may (or may not) vary but the context and outcomes are almost exactly the same.

Honestly I think we are talking about a genre here. The thing about a genre is that you can tell almost the entire story without worrying about spoiler alerts because everyone already knows what’s going to happen without having to even see or read it. What does it mean that women’s real lives and our experiences with boys and men, and with family and legal systems, is so fucking common and predictable that it’s essentially a genre? I don’t know, but I think we can put the NotAllMen to bed. NotAllMen within a more or less global patriarchy is about as predictive to the plot and outcome as NotAllSuperheroes or NotAllRomanticComedies or whatever on a movie theater poster would be.

It’s just marketing, meant to sell you something you don’t need, something you already have, some story that’s so common and repetitive you already know how it ends. And the beginning and middle too. Whether the rapist goes to jail is about as tangential and meaningless as cutting off Thanos’ head after he had already killed half the universe. And you don’t even need to watch the movie to know what I’m talking about, do you. Some of my readers have probably seen it but actually seeing it is not required. Obviously.

This is mommy vlogger Bonnie Hollein who I have written about before. Bonnie and her entire extended family — 3 sisters and a brother and their families, and their parents aka Grandma and Grandpa Griffiths — are family vloggers who are also Mormons and for whatever reason have amassed an enormous following on YouTube. Over the last few years, one of the sisters, Ruby Franke, had apparently fallen in with a therapy-based cult, stopped going to church, and cut her family out of her and her children’s lives. I have written about Ruby before too.

So Ruby went down the rabbit hole of a cult, when she and her whole family were more or less in a cult already, the cult of Mormonism (or LDS, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints). Bonnie and her sisters conveniently leave out the apparent fact that the “cult” that took their sister — and led her away from her church — is a Mormon-led, Mormon-funded, Mormon-approved organization that the church itself recommends to its members seeking assistance with mental health, childrearing and relationships.

Here it gets tricky to differentiate between groups, religions, so-called “high demand” religions and cults and there is a lot written about the differences, or alleged differences which can become confusing. Apparently, the Mormons themselves started out as being more cult-like and over time became more religion-like while outsourcing some of their more egregious cult tactics to approved organizations, but if you stand far enough away these things look pretty much the same. Again it seems like “genre” is a decent enough word for what we are talking about here. The beginning, middle and end are pretty much known without even needing to see the show.

In Ruby’s case, she came under the thrall of a charismatic leader who advocated “alternative” therapy and a tough-love parenting style. Ruby’s involvement in the Mormon church-approved therapy cult culminated in one of Ruby’s minor children escaping out a window after months and years of abuse, and both he and a female minor were found to be emaciated with duct tape and ligature marks on their wrists and ankles. Currently, Ruby and the Mormon therapist Jodi Hildebrandt are being held without bail in a Utah prison, having been charged with multiple counts of felony child abuse.

Which is apparently a hell of a thing in Mormon country where both Ruby and Hildebrandt are connected to the church and where ubiquitous religious control including strict parenting and severe punishments for any deviation are the norm. Hmmm. Bonnie and her sisters have taken to social media multiple times to make statements and then retract them again, and then make more statements, and more retractions. The above vid is Bonnie’s most recent statement and it currently stands. In this local news article, a former member describes what happened in Hildebrandt’s therapy sessions, where men and their disgusting urges are not pandered-to and where fathers are instead encouraged to physically separate from their families if they are having “dangerous” (read: predatory) behaviors and thoughts including using porn. Obviously the Mormons’ objection to porn is the standard conservative objection to it, where boys and men cannot be the Kings they are meant to be while under the thrall of addiction.

The conservative objection to porn and their Kings fapping to images of abuse has nothing whatsoever to do with protecting women and children. In point of fact, the Mormons themselves make life so miserable for women and children that those who can’t abide by the roles dictated by the church commonly run away from home, placing themselves in extreme danger of further exploitation and abuse including “survival sex” like prostitution and performing in porn. Of course, nonconforming girls and women are always vulnerable to extreme poverty and abuse under any patriarchal system (aka patriarchy) aren’t they, and most homeless women, prostitutes and porn performers are not Mormons or escapees from formal cults or high-demand religions.

But some of them are. According to Hildebrandt’s own niece, who was once a victim of Hildebrandt’s “therapy” herself, she escaped her confinement and ran away as a minor only to become homeless and raped in a homeless shelter. In this extensive interview with the niece, she reports that literally anything would’ve been preferable to remaining in Hildebrandt’s care including living in a shelter or on the street, or jail.

In this interview, the niece reports that Hildebrandt actually “hates men” including the Church elders, is a closeted lesbian and has inappropriate relationships with the women she counsels, and the only limit to Hildebrandt’s power and influence is that she was born female and was systemically oppressed due to her sex and prevented from acheiving a position of true power within the church. My guess is that “blame the lesbian” is going to carry the day here, and that this was likely premeditated, where Ruby is very pretty, wears tons of makeup and has been moved to the jail’s medical ward because the process of being accused of a crime is making her mental. The alleged lesbian who enthralled the pretty Mormon mommy is holding her own in the general population. Who says the Mormons don’t make space for LGBT. Scapegoat is a role all cults make space for.

Speaking of therapy-based cults, the NYC-based Sullivanians have been in the media since June when a book was published about them. The New York intelligentsia have pounced on this story, finding it fascinating that, where cults allegedly thrive in isolation, a bona fide cult could even exist “in plain sight” in Manhattan’s wealthy Upper West Side. But exist it did, from the 1950s through the 1990s when it disbanded following accusations of….anyone? Anyone? The long term sexual and other abuse of women and children.

Interestingly, the Sullivanians believed that the nuclear family was the root of most if not all mental illness. Therefore, members separated from their families of origin and within the cult, biological fatherhood was not recognized and “parents” especially mothers were not allowed to raise their own kids, instead tasking other women in the community with childrearing and ultimately sending children off to elite boarding schools where they were predictably subjected to more abuse.

One of the intelligentsia rags even included radical feminist Shulamith Firestone in their writeup of the Sullivanians because of her similarly critical stance (!) on the nuclear family and specifically on women’s oppression, which she believed was rooted in women’s biological reality as gestaters of children. Wait, was Firestone’s stance even similar at all to the Sullivanians’ where Firestone actually cared about women and children and the Sullivanians was a rape-fest that positioned all males over all females and where (obviously) male supremacy reigned? From what I gather, the foundation of the Sullivanians ideology was an “alternative” psychotherapy that challenged the primacy of the nuclear family, which is actually a radical feminist tenet and potentially subversive, but where did they go wrong?

Perhaps more to the point, why did radical feminist Shulamith Firestone die alone in her New York City apartment after a lifetime spent in and out of mental hospitals but the Dear Leader figures of the Sullivanians (and Scientologists and Mormons for that matter) amassed great financial wealth and a massive victim-pool of abused and exploited women and children to do with as they pleased? Maybe because radical feminism isn’t a fucking cult? Maybe because challenging the primacy of the nuclear family does not in and of itself lead to exploitation and abuse?

Maybe because the defining characteristic of a cult, all internet search results aside, seems to be the in-real-life abuse and exploitation of women and children, because that’s where all of them end up. Which is interesting, considering that male supremacy, and the abuse and exploitation of women and children that logically follows, is also the defining characteristic of patriarchy, innit. I am sure there is more that could be said about cults and high-demand religions, and how they follow a certain template of a more or less global patriarchy, including very predictable and sexualized punishments for specifically female noncompliance, but I will leave it there for now.

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