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begun to compartmentalize and disown his Krishna recent past. Would this defensive
posture facilitate or impede the process of eventual integration? Ken then offered to give
Curt some of his personal papers, but Curt refused, instead recommending that Ken keep
them so that he could refer to them in the future to gain further insight into his thinking
while a devotee. Ken insisted, however, and they compromised. Ken would keep the papers
and give Xerox copies to Curt. Ken then read more from his journal. Everyone focused on
Ken with great interest in his writing, Ken expressed some of his doubts, but the intense
guilt he felt was very evident and all his doubts were ascribed to maya. He repeatedly
begged for purification, and reported feeling better after being purified by his guru. Nothing,
however, seemed to help absolve Ken's considerable guilt over his occasional “lusty”
thoughts and sexual impulses.
Ken continued to read from his journal, reviewing his thinking of just a few days ago. He
occasionally stopped to comment on his thinking to Curt and Sandy. Some of his doubts
were years old. Nobody commented on this, but I was struck by how Ken could have had
such strong doubts and remained in the movement for so long. After about 20 minutes, Curt
asked Ken to wait until Dara came before reading the rest. Curt then asked Ken when he
wanted to go to Iowa (for rehab). Ken replied either Saturday or Sunday. He was hesitant,
however, because “there is so much I want to go over [here] and I don't want to [leave
prematurely.] Curt explained that the deprogramming situation was a sheltered one and
they did not want him to get too caught up in it. It would soon be time to move on, even
though Ken might be a little shaky. If Ken was not ready by Sunday, they would wait.
Rather than return to the tape with the Maury Povich show on it, Curt then decided to
switch to a different videotape, a documentary entitled “Thy Will Be Done,” that focused on
the Jonestown People's Temple massacre in particular and cults in general.
The Third Day: Evening
Video marathon. The third day of the deprogramming turned into a video marathon.
Following “Thy Will Be Done,” the deprogramming moved briefly back upstairs, then
returned to the den for “Ticket to Heaven,” an hour-and-a-half movie based on one ex-
member's experiences with the Unification Church. Ken and Sandy began talking about how
Unification Church indoctrination compared with ISKCON methods. I found it excruciatingly
difficult to remain silent and distant during both the movie and the discussion that followed,
as “Ticket to Heaven” came so close to describing exactly my own experiences as a
Unification Church trainee. By now I felt personally invested in Ken's renewed freedom and I
had difficulty containing my own excitement as an observer of this drama. When Ken finally
asked questions about my experiences, I answered him emotionally and at length.
Late evening. The discussion inspired by “Ticket to Heaven” was moved into the kitchen
when, shortly after 9:00 p.m., we were called for dinner.
Ken continued to eat somewhat spartanly, while his mother doted over him and encouraged
him to eat as much as he wanted from the array of vegetarian and nonvegetarian foods on
the table. As we ate, Ken continued to relate his personal experiences to those of the
characters in “Ticket to Heaven.” To me, he seemed to be expressing at least as many
differences as similarities. Dinner lasted 20 minutes. After dinner, we went back into the
den to watch more videotapes, beginning with the “Hairy Kishkahs,” a comic sendup of
ISKCON that appeared on the “Thicke of the Night late-night variety show. Ken only found
this to be moderately interesting. I did not think it was all that funny myself. At around
11:00 p.m., Sandy ran his copy of “The Wave,” a critically acclaimed anti-fascist
documentary I had heard about, but never viewed. I was genuinely excited about having
the opportunity to see this tape, which was based on a true story about a social studies
teacher who, as a lesson in “living history,” inspired a fascist youth movement called “the
Wave” in his high school. The students were easily caught up in the movement and in fact a

Cultic Studies Journal, Vol. 6, No. 2, 1989, Page 67
number of them were in reality emotionally damaged by this experience. The final scene
took place at a large school rally in which the teacher revealed to hundreds of eagerly
waiting, impassioned teenagers the identity, on newsreel, of the Wave's “national leader:
Adolf Hitler. Ken was moved by this documentary, much as he was by the earlier tape on
the Texas guru kulas. “The Wave” was followed almost immediately at around midnight by a
documentary on the rise of the Nazi SS. It seemed that the deprogrammers were trying to
draw parallels between ISKCON and fascism. The point: violence is the inevitable outcome
of totalitarianism. Following the SS film Sandy and Curt played a documentary entitled
“Armies of the Right,” which chronicled the growth of paramilitary far-right organizations
(e.g., the Minutemen) in Bible-belt America. Ken lustily devoured granola as he watched,
apparently fascinated. Finally, shortly after 1:45 am., Sandy and Curt announced that
everyone ought to get some sleep. This time even Ken was exhausted. Just before 2:00
a.m. Ken went upstairs to bed. Sandy and Curt discussed briefly which bars might be open,
and they left shortly thereafter. I was asleep, on the couch in the den (along with Brian), by
the time they returned.
The Fourth Day: Morning
I awoke at around 9:30 a.m. It was Friday, and the sun blazed in through the large glass
windows. The Epsteins had already left for work. Raymond Epstein was in the kitchen with
Sandy, talking. The smell of fresh coffee permeated the air. Brian was also awake, in a
chair not far from the couch that served as my bed. A Ph.D. candidate in Communications,
Brian was the most academically-oriented deprogrammer on Curt's team and because I was
genuinely interested in his familiarity with the philosophy of science and formal logic, I
served as a welcome audience for his lengthy discourses. During lulls in the
deprogramming, he often talked to me about books and articles he found illuminating and
especially relevant to deprogramming. When I appeared to be fully awake that morning,
Brian immediately began talking to me about a book he had recently read, People in
Quandaries, by Wendell Johnson.
At about 10:45 a.m., Ken came downstairs. He asked if there were any videotapes that
were funny or at least lighter than the three emotionally draining ones we viewed last night.
Sandy pulled out one of Jerry Lewis' later movies, “Cracking Up.” Shortly before noon, Greg
Stern arrived. He sat down to watch the end of “Cracking Up.” Following the movie, Ken told
Greg he was still interested in seeing the Maury Povich show in which Greg and I were
interviewed. Forty-five minutes later, Brian's wife Stephanie, pregnant with their first child,
came in to visit. Stephanie, who was a former Moonist, became interested in my own
experiences and activities, including my doctoral thesis. We talked for almost an hour.
Another video tape was put on, and as Ken watched “The Moore Report” I reflected in my
notebook. The amount of information being fed to Ken seemed overwhelming to me. I
wondered to myself about the similarities between this process and the “information
overload” used by cults to manipulate attitude change. But the purpose seemed to be to
give reference points and information in response to Ken's constant questioning, and his
ongoing success at putting new information together and relating it to his personal
experiences. The deprogrammers were feeding Ken information as quickly as he could take
it in. As for information overload, the only difference between this process and cult
“brainwashing” seemed to be content rather than process: First, Ken seemed to possess a
ravenous “information hunger.” Secondly, cults employ misinformation whereas the
deprogrammers seemed to be using “truth.” Ken seemed to need a constant sounding board
for his ideas and an ongoing source of validation as he made more and more connections.
Fourth Day: Afternoon
The discussion sparked by “The Moore Report‟s” investigations of various cults lasted for
almost two hours. Ken, who despite the deprogrammers' best efforts had not as yet gotten