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thugs who will kidnap the boy and deprogram him with forceful, violent methods.‖20 After
Lou Grant realizes that his house was chosen for a ―violent‖ intervention, he throws the
deprogrammers out. He convinces his colleague that deprogramming is wrong and that the
son should be allowed to choose for himself. Father and son then take a walk in the rain to
talk it over.
A Saturday Night Live television comedy skit about a deprogramming repeated sometime in
1987.21 The skit begins with a haggard young woman tied to a chair where she is subjected
to taunts and arguments from two male deprogrammers. The woman wears a plain dress
and has dark circles around her eyes, thus enhancing a zombie-like trance. While the
agitated deprogrammers work, a number of cult members crash into the place through
windows and doors. John Belushi plays the cult leader. The cultists walk slowly, imitating
characters from the old horror film, The Body Snatchers, hollow-eyed with arms
outstretched while handing out brochures. As one deprogrammer looks at a brochure, the
other one yells, ―Don‘t read it, man!‖ or something to that effect--too late. The
deprogrammer suddenly transforms into a cult member, his eyes turn dark and he behaves
in a robotic way. While the remaining deprogrammer struggles to avoid the cultists, the
police led by comedian Bill Murray, storm onto the scene and proceed to shoot everyone in
sight. After the mayhem the camera focuses on the deprogramee as she rises slowly from
the floor to crawl eerily toward the audience. Even bullets cannot stop the brainwashed. In
any case, back to the movies.…
A Mother’s Deception
An NBC special, aired initially on October 17, 1994, is titled Moment of Truth: A Mother’s
Deception. It depicts Nora, a middle-aged woman who got caught up in a psychotherapy
cult that convinced her to leave her family. The group leader, a psychiatrist played by
Daniel Hugh Kelly, convinces Nora under hypnosis that her husband had abused her.
Starring Joan Van Ark as Nora and Tom Kurlander as reluctant deprogrammer Ben Jacoby,
the story composites two similar cases from information I provided to the production staff
while working with the writer. Although the events and characters in the story were
fictionalized, most were derived from actual interventions I helped to conduct in 1988. My
efforts to persuade the writer to design the story around a non-coercive intervention worked
temporarily until the producers demanded that the writer insert some kind of abduction and
confinement.
Based on events I provided that actually occurred in other cases, the writer described an
initial attempt at a non-coercive meeting that failed. After first agreeing to the meeting with
Ben, Nora declined to meet with him after her cult leader shows her news clippings from
Jacoby‘s past as a busted deprogrammer. A non-violent ―abduction‖ scene ensues as the
daughter and husband convince Ben to do just one more. The writer invents an off-duty
policeman, whose son Ben had helped out of a cult in years gone by, who tricks Nora to go
with him to the intervention site. In collusion with the daughter who is driving, the
uniformed officer pulls them over. He informs them that the car is ―reported as stolen.‖ The
officer then escorts them to the safe house.
A twist in the image of a deprogrammer shows Ben Jacoby as a youthful but respected
history professor who had retired from deprogramming. Nora‘s husband and daughter
convince Ben to help them despite his promise to the college that he would do no more
deprogramming work. Jacoby comes across as an intelligent, sensitive man, but one who is
deeply scarred by his own cult experience in his youth. Toward the end of the intervention
he uses the scars on his wrists from a suicide attempt to impress Nora about the dangers of
The Path. The story ends after a dramatic scene that pits the group leader against the
deprogrammer and the family. Nora has to decide what the truth really is. She realizes that
her ―memory‖ of abuse from her husband is false. She goes back to her family. The story,

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narrated by the daughter, mentions that Nora went to a clinic to recover and was still in
therapy after several months, but things were ―getting better.‖
Signs and Wonders
The next significant movie we will consider is Signs and Wonders, a British Broadcasting
Company production from 1994. It aired in America in 1995 and several times thereafter.
This long movie portrays a dysfunctional British family with a daughter who joins a
communal, American sect headed by an Asian man. The father is a struggling Anglican
minister with a drinking problem and doubts about his faith. The older son is a skeptical
philosopher caught up in the fringe ―deconstructionist‖ world-views of a charismatic German
scholar. The mother, Elizabeth, convincingly played by Prunella Scales, is characteristic of
strong, dedicated mothers like the one in Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck—an unselfish
person who loves and helps everyone in her distressed family. Her primary concern is to
help rescue from the cult her daughter, Claire, played by Jodhi May in a solid performance.
In this endeavor, Elizabeth is essentially alone as her son and husband are not so
concerned. She contacts an ―exit counselor‖ called Diamond, a role rigorously interpreted by
James Earl Jones. Elizabeth engages him to monitor and hopefully to exit her daughter out
of the group. While Elizabeth prepares to travel to America, Diamond orders one of his crew
to infiltrate the group. Group life appears similar to that in Split Image and Ticket to
Heaven: Every one is kept busy either praying, tending to chores, going to meetings,
recruiting new members, or fundraising. Diamond‘s edgy crewmember must escape from
the commune and from the psychological pressure he feels to stay and join. He reports that
the daughter is in deeper than they thought, and that she is being prepared for a special
―task‖ for the leader.
In a crucial scene on a beach Diamond and his two-man, one-woman crew, discuss the
possibilities of contact with Claire. The crew wants to kidnap her. Diamond argues against
their radical suggestion. He says it violates his non-coercive way of intervention. But, true
to the film industry‘s need to dramatize these encounters, Diamond breaks his code and
agrees to abduct the young lady. Now we are back to the familiar coercive deprogram style
again. The crew manages to abduct the daughter while she is fund-raising on the street by
dragging her into a black van. They do all of this rather professionally for a team that
supposedly works only non-coercively, and they work, uncharacteristically for
deprogrammers, without a family member present.
The mother arrives after the team has the daughter in a hotel. In a bizarre series of scenes,
Diamond, dressed as a blind person to avoid the police, secretly meets the confused mother
in a public square. They get in his car where he explains what they had to do to get Claire.
On their way to the hotel Diamond educates Elizabeth about ―mind control‖ and cults while
interviewing her about her knowledge of brainwashing. He gets very upset with her when
she states that she feels responsible for her daughter‘s joining the group, and that she
expects him to deprogram Claire out of it. Diamond suddenly stops the car and commands
Elizabeth to get out! As they stand on a sidewalk, he emphatically lectures that he ―does not
unbrainwash the brainwashed‖, that he is an ―exit counselor‖ not a deprogrammer--―Never
use that term with me‖-- who educates his clients and does not coerce them. Diamond also
convinces the mother that anyone joins cults, that there is no family profile of cult recruits.
To my knowledge this was the first introduction of the term ―exit counselor‖ in a film of this
genre. Unfortunately, little of an exit counselor‘s educational style makes it into the
dramatic intervention scenes. The story reverts to the old deprogramming stereotype in
every way, just as it portrays the now classic version of a ―Moonie‖ cult household.