493 - The Gloriavale Cult: Hell Disguised as Heaven

We seek to live a practical Christian life that mirrors life in heaven, where there is perfect obedience to God, complete unity of thought, no self-will, no argument or strife, and no sin. So says the website of a place called Gloria Vale, a place marketed as heaven on earth. Though the name alone sounds like it could be a ski resort or a real estate firm, Gloria Vale is in fact a 600 or so person community Reed Colt Compound in New Zealand on the beautiful shores of Lake Brummer. Their vision of a pure earthly paradise is, of course, nothing new. Indeed, it's been around in Christianity from the very start, going all the way back to the concept of the Garden of Eden. And in some ways, Gloriavel is indeed a DENIC. Life within Gloriavel promises a kind of innocence and security unavailable in the modern world. Children dressed identically in long conservative clothing grow up free from the pressures of commerce, media, and personal debt, and are raised into adults surrounded by a close-knit network of their extended families. As adults, they don't have to go to work for some company that doesn't care if they live or die as long as they turn a profit. They have skills developed from age seven or so, cooking, sewing, gardening, and Gloriaville promises that whatever work they're assigned, though it will not be paid, it will be meaningful. How lovely. It'll be God's plan for them. A plan that includes providing them food, shelter, and spiritual guidance. With all of that taken care of, what do they need money for? All of this was the brainchild of one man, Neville Cooper. The charismatic Australian Pentecostal preacher had made a name for himself as a young man, seemingly going to any length to preach his message. In the tradition of American evangelists like Billy Graham, he set up high-energy, passionate tent revivals on months-long tours. But unlike Billy Graham, he made it his mission to get as far out into the wilderness as possible, literally to preach to those who would otherwise never be preached to, whether that meant driving or flying a small plane and touching down on some remote beach. After years of preaching and falling out with one church after another, because he perceived other church leaders to be totally wrong about this or that element of doctrine, he decided to build his own collective community in Springbank, New Zealand. The idea was simple. Why embrace the materialism of the broader world? Why not share everything? Possessions, responsibility, work, meals. Why not put God in charge? Or rather, God's favorite preacher, Neville Cooper, and let yourself simply enjoy paradise. But of course, like in Eden, in Gloriavale, you would need to play by God's rules. Living at Gloriavale meant that you had to do everything that Neville Cooper said, from giving your children biblical names, to obeying a dress code, to working without pay, to letting him watch you have sex, to maybe sleeping with your wife, or maybe watching you or even helping you jerk off. What? Uh-huh? Don't remember those verses about those last few things? Oh, you must have a different Bible than Neville did or something. The strange story of New Zealand's wonderful, heavenly, definitely not creepy at all, Gloria Velcolt, on today's Get Right With God, women, submit to your husbands, and husbands submit to some random preacher who is more than likely wanting to walk you fuck as is God's will. Don't you twist this around into some bullshit. It's not right here, right now on another definitely not cult, cult, cult edition of Time Suck. This is Michael McDonald and you're listening to Time Suck. You're listening to Time Suck. happy monday happy monday well that's how i started the show happy monday monday to you welcome to the call of the curious how long would you listen if i kept talking like that hey i'm dan cowins sir sucks a little sir sucks a lot uh man who's so thankful the last week you didn't have to hear about clowns showing you the wieners or people eating their own shit and you're listen to time suck uh hail nimrod hail lucifina praise be to good boy bojangles and glory be to triple m uh we are into february of 2026 a totally normal year nothing alarming happening in the u.s or in the world at all right now we probably won't even start world war three this year but if world war three does happen can the glory avail senior leadership be some of the first to die asking for a friend let's get started today's story takes us to new zealand we haven't really spent that much time there on time suck uh very little uh though a single country new zealand is actually two islands divided by cook strait well it's actually over 600 islands but there are only two huge ones where nearly everyone lives. The North Island is the home of volcanoes, hot springs, mud pools, geysers, beautiful beaches, while the South Island is full of nothing but really ugly people, three-legged sheep and used dildos. Too much to get into to explain how it got that way. It used to be a lot nicer. No, the South Island is also beautiful. Both islands are beautiful. South has rugged alpine mountains, glaciers, access to activities like swimming with dolphins, whale watching, you know, Stuff you can do anywhere. Many of us probably know New Zealand's geography, mainly from the Lord of the Rings trilogy. It's gorgeous, lush, and wild. People have been living there for a little under a thousand years, so, you know, not as long as people have been living in most of the rest of the world. Polynesians settled New Zealand between the late 1200s and the mid-1300s. They called the land Aotearoa, named according to legend by Koupe, the first Polynesian in New Zealand. Using the stars and ocean currents as his navigational guides, Kupé adventured across the Pacific Ocean from his ancestral Polynesian homeland of Hawaiki, where Hawaiki actually is exactly is unknown. Over a few hundred years, more Polynesians followed Kupé, landing in various parts of New Zealand. Polynesian migration was planned and deliberate, with many making return journeys to Hawaiki, according to the legends. and though Europeans who colonized New Zealand beginning in the 1600s came into direct, often violent conflict with the Maori, the indigenous Polynesian people of New Zealand who sought nothing more than self-determination and access to the resources they'd had access to for generations. Today, Maori culture is respected and incorporated into much of daily life in New Zealand. One of the reasons, I think, why Americans tend to romanticize New Zealand. Not only is it a beautiful natural landscape, but life there emphasizes respect. Respect for other cultures, respect for the land, respect for oneself in the form of time away from work and plenty of physical activity, time with friends and family, healthy routines. This attitude even extends to religion. For many New Zealanders who do identify as Christians, somewhere around 30%, intense religious observance like regular church attendance is not the norm. Church-going rates are considerably lower than affiliation rates, and many people treat religion as a private or cultural background, rather than as a strict lifestyle framework. But as always, wherever there's a dominant culture, there's also various subcultures, and New Zealand, of course, has that as well. Within Kiwiland, an affectionate nickname for New Zealand, there are several strict religious communities, places where faith shapes every aspect of life, that trace their roots back to the global rise of charismatic Christian movements in the post-war years. With a lot of competition, preachers often sought out the most remote areas to make names for themselves, places their fellow preachers could not or would not access, including geographically isolated, distant communities. They were fertile ground for drumming up a supportive, dedicated congregation. They were also, unfortunately, fertile ground for a sadistic grifter to take advantage of isolated and often uneducated people. The era when a lot of these communities were being founded coincided with the social upheaval we've covered many times here on TimeSuck, the 1960s counterculture, which caused some people to seek out tightly structured communities as a source of certainty and moral clarity. And after the counterculture movement faded, avoiding the evils of the modern world, which in many ways is a continual rehashing of the questions and upheavals the counterculture grappled with, became a continual justification for these people to stay in those communities. Why try to navigate a world that's always getting faster, more competitive, less certain, when you never had the tools or the opportunity to do so in the first place? Why submit yourself to constant social, technological, and moral upheaval when there's a place where roles are clear, expectations are fixed, and every day has a purpose set by tradition? Why risk your family's security and your sense of belonging chasing freedoms that might feel abstract, confusing, even threatening? This is what Neville Cooper, the founder of a strange community on the west coast of New Zealand called Gloria Vale, asked of his followers. Of course, he didn't do so in as many words. Many of the things Cooper preached, opposition to divorce, birth control, homosexuality, premarital sex, or support for large families, strict gender roles, and male leadership, might sound familiar to anyone who understands the beliefs of ultra-conservative Christianity. But those teachings, while at the forefront of Cooper's messaging, weren't the core draw of Gloriaville. the true message was less about any specific moral stance and more about how to exist in a world that feels incomprehensible and threatening Cooper created a system in which obedience and immersion in community were the solution for life's uncertainty the architecture of the community purposely removed the need to question negotiate or engage with the outside world and that lack of questioning also made it tragically very very easy for many of the community's men including Cooper himself to perpetrate decades of sexual abuse on the community's adults and children, including Cooper's own children. When these children were raised in Glorievale, and many, many were and still are today, they had no tools, language, or experience to contradict what they were being taught. They didn't know that abuse was abuse. The system itself trained them to accept, obey, and endure, leaving them uniquely vulnerable to exploitation. Exploitation that, we'll see, the government of New Zealand continues to have a hell of a time addressing for some reason. This makes it even more impressive that many of them, including kids as young as 14 or 15, managed to get the fuck out, and we'll hear from some of them today. While we can't get into every story to come out of Gloria Vale, we will spend significant time with two of Neville Cooper's relatives, who I hope you come to love as much as I do. His son, Phil, and his granddaughter, Lilia Tarawa, two people who had to discover what autonomy meant completely for themselves. Today's story will begin with the original version of GloriaVale at Springbank, New Zealand, before we move back in time to meet Neville Cooper, a young man who will become a pretty famous preacher across both Australia and New Zealand, and who will have an admittedly good idea about congregants caring for one another, but who will then twist that idea until it suits his appetite for power and sex. So let's meet this fucking dirty ding-dong now. It's just going to get weird. So fucking weird. in today's cult, cult, cult, time suck timeline. Strap on those boots, soldier. We're marching down a time suck timeline. In 1969, 43-year-old Neville Barclay Cooper founded a Christian community in the rural community of Springbank near Christchurch, New Zealand. this community according to later material from Gloria Vale would involve sharing and caring for one another while keeping separate from a world that was becoming more ungodly oh no! Neva wasn't the most likely candidate to push for this kind of lifestyle or maybe he was, it probably depends on who you believe according to the website GloriaValeLeverSupportTrust.org .nz a website founded and ran by those who have been able to break out of this super fucked up cult. Neville was born in Toowoomba, Queensland, Australia in 1926, a city of almost 150,000 people today. And he left school at the age of 12 to work in his father's fruit shop. Not Bob, not Bob's bonsai fruit shop, I don't believe. Other sources say he left school at 14, worked for something called a panel beater. Either way, he didn't have much in the way of a formal education. Sounds about right for a cult leader. Right, leading a cult depends on what? Deception and confidence above all else. And nothing gets in the way of both of those things more than a strong education. Smart, truly educated people ironically tend to doubt themselves and question things. Question things more than idiots who claim to have all the answers. Such an unfortunate paradox in life. Neville probably did not make the decision to leave school alone. His dad, Alexander Cooper, was allegedly a, quote, hard man. Common for the time. And his mom, Elizabeth Ethel Skinner. remembered as being both frugal and mean. Well, that's fun. What a fun couple. The two argued frequently as the stress of raising Neville and his siblings during the Depression deepened. Finally, at the age of 16, Neville left home on to bigger and better things or for the time being, at least on to living at his aunt's house. That year was 1942, three years after Australia joined World War II. On December 3rd, 1939, accepting the UK's declaration of war on Nazi Germany. toward the end of the war, probably in late, maybe 1942, early 1943. Neville joined the Air Force, but he'd never end up going into active service. Someone in his family did, though, his elder brother would die during the war in Africa, unnamed older brother. Not clear how he died or exactly what conflict he died in. Whatever happened likely was not a peaceful death. And news of his brother's death apparently crushed Neville. Still living with his aunt, he sought comfort where she found it, in the Church of Christ, a Pentecostal church. Now, Neville starts to get some ideas. At the age of 21, God apparently called Neville to be his minister, according to Gloria Vale texts. A hundred percent. Oh, yeah, for sure that happened. God needed a good man named Neville. No way God could talk to everyone himself, make sure everybody gets the same heavenly message the same way. Uh-uh, that'd be too logical. That would make way too much sense. That would cut out the middle man. And God loves the middle man. He needs some fucking Nevels to save souls. That year, God's chosen Nevel also met his future wife, a young woman named Gloria Perry. Nevel was 21. Gloria was four years old. Do not question the choices of God's one true Nevel. She was 16, maybe. Some of us would say she was actually 15. Either way, the two got married in 1949. And Faith, the first of their 16 children. Oh, fuck yeah. Born in 1952. She was followed quickly by four more daughters, Grace, Hope, Mercy, and Lil Skanky Puss. I mean, charity. But how great would Skanky Puss be after the other girls being named Grace, Hope, Mercy? That really makes me laugh. At the age of 23, Neville began working as a traveling evangelist. His mission was simple. To get that dick sucked. I mean, to bring the word of God to as many people as possible. and luckily he was young brimming with energy incredibly full of you know charisma uh even if people didn't always believe in the fire and brimstone visions that he preached they frequently found the young man relatable after all in the wake of world war ii who'd want to see the world cleansed of evil who don't want to return to a traditional family life to community values to things that offered stability instead of destruction prosperity instead of doom some version of that message floated out from the marquee, a large portable tent where God's one true Neville preached. Go, Neville, go. Be the best Neville prophet a Neville prophet can be. His ministry was called the Voice of Deliverance. And its reputation grew, or as its reputation grew, I got distracted by the deliverance theme. He was invited to speak across the country. When a new invitation came in, he'd pack up the tent, start driving. Later, he piloted his own plane through the New South Wales and Queensland. Gloria, meanwhile, left at home with a growing family. And home was actually a lot of different places. And this was because God's one true Neville would regularly join up with this or that Christian group to expand each other's reach. Only then to fall out with them over some minor disagreement that G.O.T. Neville just could not let go of. The family would then move and set up in a new town, attend a local church, only for another disagreement over theology or doctrine to inevitably pop up. I guess a lot of other preachers had a hard time accepting that Neville was God's one true Neville. This was happening insanely often. Sometimes just, you know, 12 months after settling into a new town, they would be on the move again. But soon, special Neville, sweet, glorious Neville, the Neville to end all Neville, would come up with a solution to this problem. By June of 1959, Neville had completed converting an old bus into a three-room home. And now, their home could be anywhere. The family hit the road, but unfortunately, three days after his eldest daughter's seventh birthday, disaster struck. It was winter, but the bus was warm and baby skanky puss. I mean, charity. It was tucked into the bedroom at the rear. Much to the delight of the four older girls, the family's pet rabbit was hopping around the floor of the living room. But then suddenly, that stupid fucking rabbit knocked against the heater. spilling kerosene onto the floor. Gloria grabbed a cloth to clean it up, but then some friction apparently ignited the spark. God was trying to destroy Neville. Now the rabbit caught fire and fled, tearing around the small room, setting furniture aflame as it ran. I've read about this exact scenario playing out so many times. This is a classic bus rabbit fire. This is exactly why it's now illegal to have rabbits in moving buses. No, I've of course never heard of this happening before. This is so fucking random. Soon the van was an inferno. at the door to the back room where baby Skanky Puss, I mean baby Charity was sleeping, was blocked by rabbit flames. Neville and Gloria grabbed the four older girls, raced outside from there. Neville smashed the window, snatched the baby. Everyone was alive. Well, probably not the rabbit. I assume the rabbit was burned alive and died in agony. But the rest of the family were alive, but now destitute. They had no money, no furniture, no transportation, only each other in the clothes they were wearing. Luckily, a church in Maryborough, north of Brisbane, heard about what happened and invited God's one true Neville to preach there. Had a house for him too and once they got there the Cooper family began building their life back up from scratch. And then something amazing would happen. A burning devil rabbit hopped into their new home and burnt it to the fucking ground. Damn you hell hair! Damn you! No. Soon after their arrival Special Neville went to an auction hoping to buy some cheap furniture for their empty home and at the auction an old piano caught his eye. Definitely not the kind of thing a family with young kids needed but he just really, really wanted it. And when he got it home, God told him to get it. He opened the back and to his enormous surprise, but not really because he was listening to God, he discovered a wad of banknotes. Eight hundred pounds. Allegedly. Neville made an effort to track down the original owner, but the auction house said they had no idea who donated, so the money's yours, buddy. And I'm going to call bullshit on that. But I wasn't there. Maybe it did happen that way. Or maybe Special Neville found the case and didn't tell the auction house. told himself, you know, that this was God's money for him. The job with Mariborough Church wouldn't last, though. Special Neville, God's purist, most Neville Neville, wore out his welcome once again. In 1962, Special Neville moved his young family to Brisbane, where they lived in a war pension house, from what it sounds like, an assisted living facility for veterans. By now, Gloria had given birth to two sons, John and Mark, with baby Philip born shortly after the move to Brisbane. But Brisbane would not prove all that stable either. Soon, yet another fallout, gosh dang, led to God's one true nevels, biggest undertaking yet. A three-month tour of New Zealand. And just like in Australia, some people resonated with his message. A call to go back to basics, old school values, a simpler time that supposedly created good, upstanding humans. Back home, he continued to preach, interspersing his campaigns with periods of paid work, during which he'd give up his superstar status and attend church as a regular congregant. But there, too, he just couldn't keep himself in check. He'd argue with the pastor, challenging his doctrine, and find that he and his large family were suddenly on the outs with the community that had just started to embrace them. It didn't matter if special Neville was a preacher or a congregant. His precise interpretation of religion had to be accepted, embraced, and taught, or he'd be arguing nonstop. Classic Neville. Despite all this turmoil, Faith, his eldest daughter, will later reflect on some happy memories from this time. She'll say that when she and her sisters were little, Neville Daddy would brush and braid their hair, and as she got older, he would teach her how to read and write. But there was also work to be done. Still, children were expected to pull their weight. By the time Faith was 12, she was expected to look after her younger siblings. She'd even once be left at home by herself with scarlet fever to look after two babies. A little scarlet fever keep it from babysitting. I gotta go preach. And if the kids didn't help out, there was harsh discipline, especially for the boys. Philip, who will go by Phil as an adult, will remember how fire and brimstone Neville beat the boys with a rubber hose if they weren't obedient. Gloria was better, a little better. She still hit him, but with a wooden spoon instead of a hose. And she never really put her back into it. Never raised her voice either. She was, by some accounts, an exceedingly gentle, passive person. someone who was never angry, even when her husband did stuff like bring multiple visitors around for family dinner without giving her a heads up. She'd just add some water and a few more vegetables to the pot of soup already on the stove. She was how a wife is supposed to be, as deemed by God, a submissive bicycle. Not somebody who insists that I rub her perpetually cold feet on the couch at night, even after my hands get really tired, when I'm trying to relax too, and finish watching Welcome to Dairy or something, for a random example. In 1965, Neville moved his family to the beautiful coastal town of Cairns, Australia, where his parents now lived. This will be a central hub for him now. He can now bring his tent revivals across northern Queensland, a remote stretch of land, bring his vision of a God-centered society to even the most isolated places. Throughout God's one true Neville travels, he brought his video camera. He had a video camera back then, capturing reel after reel of people walking through the bush to attend sermons, arriving in the backs of cattle trucks. Gloria liked to change the scenery, too. Her mother-in-law, Elizabeth, can now help her with child care. But a simple tent revival packed into the back of a van wouldn't be enough for God's most important Neville. He would soon set his sights on a different means of transportation, an airplane. This airplane will actually become a central part of his ministry. Though he'd been in the Air Force, top gun Neville, maverick Neville, never picked up flying when the war ended. But when an anonymous farmer donated a Fairchild airplane to Full Gospel Church, a church he was involved with at the time, he started to log flying hours. Through 1965, he would log 300 flying hours. Flying gave him an opportunity few other traveling preachers had. And in a time of post-war instability, a time that was given rise to evangelical do-gooders all around the world, including our old buddy pals, grifters, Jim and Tammy Faye Baker back in the U.S., having a competitive edge was everything. You needed to have something that set you apart from other people, something that made your ministry special and unique, sort of like show business. showbiz with his plane Ace Neville could land in remote areas of Australia, places few other preachers made it to, or there might not be a radio or a TV to spread the word. The plane itself acted as advertising with voice of deliverance evangelicalistic camp painted across the sides. Film reels would show helpers flocking to the sides of the plane to unload large white tents as congregants, both aboriginal and of European descent, arrived dressed in their Sunday best to listen and cheer as God's one true Neville spoke. At Port Douglas, congregants parked on the beach as the plane swooped down from overhead and landed, dispersing its passengers. Special Neville, Gloria, their blonde-headed children walking in a row, tallest to shortest. Then they'd simply get back on his plane, head off to the next place. On Christmas Eve 1965, he was making one such flight, along with his once again pregnant wife, Gloria, now mother to nine children, ranging from 14 to 20 months, and 14 years. It's 20 months. It would be wild if she somehow had nine children in a fucking six-month gap. And a 14-year-old named Lloyd Hollenworth and a 34-year-old named John Dalton were in the plane. Those last two guys were Aboriginal missionaries. All four were on their way from Mariborough to Kulangata. They were flying low, thankfully, as it will turn out, just above a heavily wooded area about 120 miles from Brisbane when the engine cut out at 1,000 feet. The single-engine plane started to plummet, picked up speed, eventually going over 60 miles an hour, then starts to smash to pieces as it plunges through the treetops. The wings rip off first, then the tail tears away, leaving only the fuselage with the four passengers inside. The cabin continued to hurtle forward, ramming trees as it went, or at least deflecting off of them, and it hit the ground at a terrifying speed of almost 60 miles per hour. when it finally stopped and the pilot's door swung open, God's one true Neville climbed out, petrol pouring all over him. The others, miraculously all alive, scrambled quickly out of the cabin, but then a flaming rabbit, another hell hair, came running out of the forest and fucking blew them all up to shreds. The end. Or, Neville had a light bulb moment. Now, wanting to document this miracle, covered in petrol, Neville reached back into the wreckage, pulled out his 8mm color movie camera, captured the wreck and its passengers as he narrated. Everyone was okay, and I just seized the chance of recording a unique souvenir of the whole business, you would later say. They spent the following days eating mangoes, drinking water while they figured out what to do next. We were all pretty stiff, Cooper said to a reporter later. I kept making little excursions from the plane to find out where we were. I tore the compass out of the fuselage to use for directions in these walks. I kept heading toward the east, but I didn't want to go too far lest I get lost. I found a river then. It turned out to be the Kaori Creek. I went back to get the others. We all went three quarters of a mile to the creek, but we were pretty bruised and not very strong. The current was fast, and we couldn't swim across. I got a petrol tank from the wreckage. It was a 25-gallon tank. He tied the tank to his body with a piece of rope, and the wreckage launched himself into the strong current. It was no good, though. He couldn't make the crossing. He said, we went back to the wreck, spent Sunday night there. And that would be the night of the 26th. And the next day of Monday, Cooper tried to get across the river again, or creek or whatever, big creek. Gloria unraveled a blue jumper she'd been making, knitted it into a rope. They tied it to a piece of real rope, and Michael Phelps Neville dove into the current. This time, he tied the rope around his waist while the party on the bank held the other end. He was three-quarters of the way across when the rope broke. It was do or die now, so he kept going. Eventually, he dragged his exhausted body up the opposite bank and began to walk. Walked for six miles before he found Norman Fisher, a local fisherman. Fucking great name for that. I told him my story, that I'd crashed in a plane a few miles away, Cooper said. He just didn't believe me. Thankfully, though, he agreed to bring his car six miles up the river. He helped Gloria and the other passengers cross before he took them to Tin Can Bay. Three of the passengers would spend that night at a motel. John Dalton would be treated for a small broken bone in his neck in the hospital. Then the next day, Cooper went back with a Department of Civil Aviation investigator. Immediately, it was clear to everyone, Cooper, the investigator, other pilots flying overhead, just how lucky the foursome had been. They could have easily slammed directly into a tree, been speared by a branch, been smashed to bits against any number of thick, gnarled, grossing rocks, could have had a fucking flaming rabbit explode their plane, as I pointed out smartly. One investigator, Constable Rackman, said, it was a miracle that anyone survived the crash. The aircraft was literally ripped to shreds and scattered over an area 200 yards across. On Wednesday, December 29th, 1965, Brisbane's Telegraph News Pictorial published a photo of the crash site under the headline, The Miracle. Four survived this plane crash. And here we go. What a blessing in disguise. God has given his one true Neville such an amazing opportunity, and he will make the most of it. Not only was it a miracle, it was a miracle on Christmas, so it was a double miracle. Obviously, that's how the miracle math works. And his sixth daughter was born just days later, and she would be named, can you guess? Yes, that is right. Baby tits. She was named Baby tits. No, wait, no. No, she was named Miracle. I looked at the wrong portion of my notes. Why is the name Baby tits? Baby tits made me laugh so hard, though. So fucking stupid and creepy. We'll catch up with Baby tits, I mean Miracle, a while down the timeline. For now, just know that this boosted God's one true Neville's reputation already high tenfold. And in 1967, he accepted another request from New Zealand to give a speaking tour. This time, he decided to bring the whole dang family. Skanky puss, baby tits, all of them. He had an idea. New Zealand was even more remote than Australia was, with fewer active, ignorant preachers. What if they packed up and moved there permanently? Could he carve out a place for himself amongst New Zealand's religious elite? Let's find out right after today's first of two mid-show sponsor breaks. If you don't want to hear these ads ever again, please sign up to be a space leader on Patreon. Help us make monthly charitable contributions. Get the catalog ad-free episodes three days early and more. Thanks for listening to our sponsors. Hope you heard a deal that makes some sense for you. And now let's return to 1967 when Special Neville moved to New Zealand where he will soon form his cult. In the winter of 1967, God's one true Neville and the fam packed up and headed for Sydney where they then board a ship for New Zealand. It was freezing. And to keep the kids warm during the drive to Sydney, Neville handed them heated bricks, which is something that you don't hear a lot about. That's what he did. By this time, Philip III's son was five. He wouldn't remember much of the trip, but he did remember the planes towing big banners when they arrived in New Zealand. Hear Neville Cooper tonight! He was a rock star in this world. Phil, glory, and the children settled in the small North Island town of Fielding and tragedy struck when Stephen, the child born between Phil and Baby Tits, I mean Miracle, contracted diphtheria and died at five years old. Sounds like maybe God did not want his one true Neville settling in New Zealand. Or maybe he knew that Stephen would not be righteous enough to bring his father glory, and he destroyed that wicked child. Who can say for sure? We don't know. After a year in Fielding, a town that misspelled its own name, by the way, a town spelled F-E-I-L-D-I-N-G, which is not how Fielding is spelled, Neville moved his family to the small Canterbury town of Rangioria. Rangioria. Rangiora. There we go. I added a syllable. And there he continued to preach, responding in part to the increase in materialism during the post-war boom and probably to the increase in women working outside of the home due to labor shortages during the war as well. His message had now developed into a utopian promise of a world where people abandoned their individualistic, selfish pursuits and lived for the glory of God. This utopia would soon become more than a message. It would become an actual plan for a real place. Meanwhile, in Rangioria, the Cooper family joined the City New Life Church. Same in life, pretty much the same, only Gloria didn't have her mother-in-law to help her now. Still, somehow she managed her nine kids and added four more. From 1968 to 1971, she gave birth to four sons. Michael, David, Daniel, and Kumstain. I mean, Christian. I like to think that her favorite kids were skanky puss, baby tits, and Kumstain. But who knows? That's just me. True to form, Neville soon fell out with the pastor of City New Life. And in 1969, he split away. Always his way or the highway. And for the longest time, that meant the highway for him and his fam. But this time, instead of moving, he would do something different. He decided to take his new followers from City New Life, and he continued to preach his vision of a community dedicated solely to God. He didn't have a church, but that wasn't a problem. He contracted the local St. John's Ambulance Hall down the road from the City New Life Church, and he set up shop. It's dueling churches now. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Now on his own, with his own ramshackle church. God's one true Neville would have to set himself apart once again. What made his church different from all the others? Three dozen trained rats reenacting Christ's crucifixion and resurrection every hour on the hour, complete with costume changes and a custom musical score? No. One morning, Neville saw a couple pushing their baby to church in the rain while simultaneously another family arrived in two expensive cars. The site compelled him to preach about an equal, sharing Christian life based on Christ's principles of love and unselfish charity towards others. Why don't we sell our expensive cars, buy a bunch of cheap cars, fix them up and distribute them to families in need, he suggested. The church responded enthusiastically to the idea. They sold their fancy cars, spent the money on bargains at a car auction. Neville's mechanical skills, the ones he had developed in the Air Force, came in handy for restorations and the first vehicle was soon roadworthy. On Sunday, they wrapped the car in shiny black plastic, topped it off with a gigantic bow, and presented it to the couple Neville had seen walking in the rain. The couple burst into tears of gratitude. I mean, that is pretty fucking sweet and amazing. Was he actually overall a good guy at this point? He might have been. People do sometimes change in the most unexpected ways. And power does often corrupt. And he didn't have much power yet, but he will before long. And he will become so corrupted. For now, his next step was to teach the congregation about total unselfishness and faith in God to provide. For one month, no one purchased anything for themselves. Instead, each family was assigned to care for another church family's needs, including groceries, rent, power, and whatever else. No one knew who was caring for them. Instead, people went to their assignee's home to restock the cupboards and search out bills that needed to be paid. The church leaders started to purchase groceries in bulk to save money, but how could they distribute the food equally? One of special Neville's son-in-laws, Tony Bellet, invented a point system to apportion food equally between men, women, and children, and it worked perfectly. And to those looking on, curious about the young upstart pastor, everything seemed so seamless. Religion with him wasn't hard or depressing or scary. All you had to do was work with each other. His actions would draw people from all over the country, many of them going as far to settle in Rangi Ora, just to attend his services and be part of this new movement. Two such settlers were Naomi and Judah Benjamin. They joined Neville's ministry in 1974 when their oldest daughter, Sondra, was 16. The two were recent converts to Christianity and had left army careers in Australia behind to attend the Faith Bible College in Taranga. They were looking for a place where people lived according to the word of God and Neville's Christian philosophy of working together for the good of all seemed to be exactly what they'd been searching for. Immediately, the two families got along. Twelve-year-old Phil Cooper was intrigued by Sandy. She was a Christian, but she wasn't like the Christians he knew. She was a little sassy, and she carried a hippie-style leather bag with Jesus Loves Me embossed on it. Unfortunately for her, God's one true Neville quickly banned her fancy bag. He claimed it was too worldly, and Sandy reluctantly agreed to give it up. Still, her overall attitude didn't change. She was friendly, she laughed easily, sang often as she went about her work at church. It seemed weird that this girl, who was a talented swimmer and seemed like she could have gone on to compete internationally, maybe even at the Olympics, had agreed to live an austere life of service to others. Indeed, life at Special Neville's Church was austere. To increase his congregation's respectability, he mandated, now that his adherents, dress modestly, mid-calf dresses for the women, and, quote, silver garb for the menfolk. Nobody was to wear jewelry, right, because it was a mark of pride or lust. Nothing will get you sent to hell faster than a fucking diamond ring. And that's right, wedding rings, not allowed. He had another interesting justification for no wedding rings, though. God's one true nevel told his congregation that the giving and receiving of rings have been adopted from ancient pagan rituals, and that such practices would defile the church of God. He said that marriage bond was formed by two things and two things only, a man and a woman's vows to one another, and the sexual act of cleaving together as one flesh. After that, a husband and wife were mated for life and only death could break their bond. But all of that was only spoken of inside the community. And the Cooperites, as they were becoming known, mainly developed a reputation for helping those in need. And a local mayor even described them as an asset to the district. Meanwhile, Faith Cooper, the eldest Cooper child, married a man named Alan in 1970 when she was 18 years old. And he was 120. I don't know how old he was, but he wasn't 120. Alan was a teacher. He was educated, which will cause problems for him with Neville down the road. For now, the young couple settled on his parents' farm in nearby Springbank between Rangiora and the tiny township of Cust. The young couple were happy to agree to special Neville's proposal to establish a religious school on the property where parents could be confident that children were being taught sound, strong moral values. The school at Springbank, one of the first religious schools to ever be set up in New Zealand, started off with 12 pupils, but it will quickly grow. Neville recruited more teachers from amongst his followers and soon the community at Springbank. Where the Cooperites were not just a small asset but a majority was outpacing the growth of the church at nearby Rangiora. 1976, Neville decided to move his family to Springbank. Things were going so well there. Faith and Allen built their own farmhouse on the property leaving the main house vacant so Faith's parents moved in. Springbank isn't that far from Rangiora only five or ten minutes away by car. But for the Cooperites, who tended towards isolation already, things were about to get a lot more insular. For one thing, in Rangiora, the population was probably around 4,000 to 5,000, meaning the 100-strong Cooperite community was big but not a majority. Springbank, which was just an unincorporated farming community, even today it doesn't have anything on Google Maps that looks like a town square. It's not a proper town. It was a place where the Cooperites could make a community in their image, and that's exactly what they did. When more Cooperites moved to Springbank, the point system slowly became its own internal local economy. But then their antics would soon find them at odds with some non-Cuperite Springbank folk. Apparently they would go into people's homes, invited of course like regular missionaries, but then instead of telling people about the good news or talking about salvation, they would criticize wives for not being submissive enough, husbands for not acting like the strong patriarchal heads of households they should have been, and both of the parents for the poor worldly way in which they raise their children. Super fun. People who weren used to this kind of confrontation simple country people often gave in actually and joined the congregation trusting Cooper when he told him he provide protection and security for them That fucking crazy to me But it happened, I guess. And the congregation grew. Not everyone gave in to the Cooperites, though. Like locals Judith Graham and her husband Reg, who lived in nearby Cust. One day they hired some congregants to install a wood stove for him. The workmanship was excellent. and the two were happy until God's one true Neville rang Reg on the phone, asked if he could borrow his TV out of the blue. Reg was, understandably, confused, a little weirded out. And then when he turned him down, Special Neville snapped and said, Why not? You got two? It was clear to the Grams now that the Cooperites were reporting everything they had seen back to Special Neville, maybe even using the odd jobs they were doing as a ruse to gather intel. Indeed, the second television set was upstairs where the workmen had no reason to go. On another occasion, some of their tradesmen came to ask if they could look at the renovations the Grams had had done on the house. When they came into the master bedroom, one of the Cooperite men made an inappropriate remark. What exactly he said is not reported in sources, but it shocked Judith and Reg quickly showed them the door. Get the fuck out, weirdos. Surprised some of those Cooperites didn't get punched. The thing that Judith later remembered most was when one of the Cooper boys ran away. Phil Cooper. We've met him a couple times now. He hated living in Spring Bank. He couldn't do anything without his dad's permission. Couldn't go out with friends, study, even just walk around aimlessly. And when he wanted his dad around, when he actually needed his dad, Neville was always off helping somebody else. Once when he'd spoken up for himself about some complaints, Neville had threatened to disown the 13-year-old. And now we're getting to see the real special Neville. An authoritarian fucking prick. The more power he gets, the bigger of a prick he'll become. 1976, a couple of months before his 14th birthday, Phil was done. He walked onto the main road, started hitchhiking north. He didn't have money. There was no way for him to make money in his dad's new community. Didn't have a plan. But he knew he didn't want to be a Cooperite. Not anymore. He'd figure it out. And the first things seemed to go pretty well for him. He made it to a nearby Kaikora, where a Catholic priest offered him some dinner and a place to stay. How lovely. He took him up on the offer. Had a nice meal. But then after the meal, while he was naked and taking a shower, the priest allegedly walked into the bathroom and didn't seem in a hurry to leave. What? No way. Am I supposed to believe that a Catholic priest was being sexually inappropriate with a 14-year-old boy? There's no fucking way that happened. Nope. No priest, no chosen man of God has literally ever done that. God wouldn't allow it. Let's move on. Later, the priest came into the guest room, sat on the bed, supposedly, and spooked, feeling like the dude was flirting with him, Phil slipped out of the house and spent the night walking around town. Oh, Phil, he wasn't trying to sleep with you. He probably just wanted to naked cuddle in a wholesome, non-sexual priest way. He probably just wanted to play hide-the-boner, like in a fun, just non-sexual way. When morning came, thanks in large part to Father Erection for Boys, Phil decided it was time to head home. Surprisingly, he won't be punished for this. Instead, Special Neville decided that his son needed some time away from the community, get his head right. He took Phil and Glory at Australia, where they stayed in Coffs Harbor, north of Sydney, at a follower's home. And then they all went back to Springbank, where Phil bided his time until he turned 15 in 1977, and then Special Neville agreed to apprentice him to a local carpenter. He'd save up some money doing that, and then he'd leave again. He'd move to Brisbane, down in Australia, where he would convert to Mormonism. In Phil's opinion, Mormonism was way better than being a Cooperite. He could use his actual money to buy what he wanted, including things that Special Neville had banned, like a digital watch, a tape recorder, cassettes, a radio, movie tickets, as much free time as you can afford to take off from work. Wow, man, crazy that the Mormons allow that kind of sin, right? Gosh dang, oh my heck, a digital watch? Are you serious? Might as well stick Satan's nuts in your mouth. For everyone else, life at Springbank continued. Even though the community was firmly headquartered there with its base at Faith and Allen's Farm, God's one true Neville went back to Rangiora to preach every Sunday. He wanted more followers. Also had to take some regular work for a little while. After all, he still had more than 10 mouths to feed. Soon splitting his time between being a superstar preacher and a regular working class guy kind of chapped his ass. And he became convinced that for God's utopia to become a reality, the Cooperites didn't just need to live near each other, help each other out from time to time. No, they needed to share everything. Cult, cult, cult. he began encouraging young couples to move to West Spring Bank, where members of the community would then hand over their money to the church, all of it, which the church then used to fund settlements for new members, which were also built by followers. Women farmed, shopping only for essentials that they couldn't grow or raise themselves, and some members sold off their property and donated the proceeds. But it wasn't a ton of money. These weren't very rich people, and soon the Cooperites were cutting back on everything, even milling their own flour, so there'd be enough money to build the physical backbone of the community, the so-called accommodation blocks. I like some kind of communist bullshit. In these buildings, each family would get two small bedrooms and share a lounge and a bathroom with two or three other families. There were segregated dormitories for young unmarried men and women, along with single rooms for newly married couples or older couples whose children had their own families. There was only one kitchen and women would work there to provide meals for the whole community, as well as in the laundry where they provided everyone with fresh clothes, sheets, and towels. It was actually kind of impressive. The farm was small, but it supported a piggery, about 15 cows, which produced more than enough milk, cheese, and butter for all. The men then built their first methane gas converter, actually the first one ever used in New Zealand, converting cow, pig, and chicken shit from neighboring farms and their own into methane gas, which then they used to run all their vehicles, and that's very impressive. All of this, of course, reduced the need for worldly contact. None of them needed to buy gas at a gas station or exit the grocery store or have a repairman swing by to fix something. And those who lived on the property got preferential treatment, too. For example, if there wasn't enough time to wash everything, the residence laundry would get washed first. And soon, quote unquote, working bees, what they called working sessions, grew from voluntary half days to mandatory full days. Cult, cult, cult. Comrade Neville would quickly formalize all of this. In 1977, eight years after he broke away from City New Life and Ring Eora, Neville Cooper would formally set up his own church, calling it the Christian Church at Springbank. That's not a very imaginative name. I was hoping for something bigger, more eye-catching, right? Something like God's one true Neville's Christ Emporium and Salvation Super Slam Spectacular. Or maybe even something more communist sounding like the Department of Eternal Salvation and Christian Indoctrination and Re-Education. Special Neville now felt free to impose more rules than he did. Rules regarding how people could dress, how they could worship, the behaviors expected from men and women, how parents could raise their children and more. Women, for example, had to dress modestly, in long skirts, sleeves to the wrist, covered chests. It wasn't just encouraged, it was a rule. They also couldn't cut their hair. Instead, they had to hang loose and long down their backs. Men had to wear long-sleeved shirts, ties, and dark trousers. Makeup and jewelry for all, strictly off-limits. Young unmarried women would be expressly banned from working outside of the community. They would need to help the community's married women and mothers. Comrade Neville would also decide the career of each young man. And when it came time to marry, he had to give his permission. And here we go. When one of his sons asked permission to marry Sondra Benjamin, that 16-year-old girl who'd had the bag that said, Jesus loves me, God's one true Neville refused and ordered him to marry another young woman. The son complied. He had strong incentive to comply. By this point, disobedience meant exile. All of this still was not enough for the Nevilleinator, though. Remember, this was a guy who wanted to be in charge of everything in churches where he wasn't even the preacher. So he also mandated a strict schedule that everyone had to follow. Meals would be at the same time, breakfast at 6.30 a.m., lunch at 12.30 p.m., dinner at 6 p.m. every day. Every meal, communal, everybody had to attend. It began with special Neville saying grace. And as people would eat, he would read aloud from a book or newspaper whatever he decided was appropriate for everyone to hear. because he knew, of course, right? He had God's ear. Very quickly, nobody who worked on the commune got to choose what they did, right? They rotated between milking, laundry, childcare, cooking, dishwashing, and more. On the weekends, there'd be a night dedicated for singing, dancing, and a movie. If special, Neville approved of it, of course. And after, and on Sundays, excuse me, everyone would watch the young men play soccer. For some people, this was now too much. They'd wanted a community of people with shared values, but not shared everything. and they didn't want any motherfucker, not even Special Neville, constantly telling them what they could or couldn't do. One of these people was Alan, Faith Cooper's husband, the teacher. By 1978, he'd already decided that he'd had enough, but Faith wasn't ready to leave with him. She couldn't imagine a world where everyone wasn't her friend, where the things that were taught weren't all the same, where food and shelter wasn't always guaranteed. Judah Benjamin was another dude who'd gotten sick at Special Neville's shit. He kept abreast of what was going on in the outside world and when on November 18, 1978, 918 people died in a remote settlement in Guyana, members of the People's Temple cult, followers of a charismatic and fucking insane preacher named Jim Jones, he heard about it. To Judah, he thought there were more similarities between Neville Cooper and Jim Jones than there were differences. And that freaked him out, as it should have. And he asked his wife, Naomi, do you reckon this outfit is getting like Jim Jones's? She didn't. Like Faith, she didn't want to leave, even though she'd been personally rebuked by special Neville repeatedly for reading scripture. Something women were not allowed to do anymore. Nice! Frick yeah, bro! You must submit, bicycle! What kind of Satan's harlot thinks it's okay to read? Glory be to Gilead. Blessed be the fruit, mother trucker. Any abstinence on the part of the women in the commune was supposed to be met with a quick, decisive slap to the face now. And God's one true Neville would not hesitate to slap any of the women, especially his girls, like baby tits and skanky puss. Punishment was different for the men like Cumstain or Alan. When Alan decided he didn't want to garden, for example, Neville called him to a men's meeting, a meeting that would go on until the offender repented. Excuse me. At the meeting, a group of men sat around Alan, asked him over and over again, stuff like, why do you have such a selfish heart? Why are you being so rebellious? Yeah, Alan, you non-gardening, self-righteous prick. Around this time, Neville Daddy decided to track down his 16-year-old son, Phil. He wanted him back. Sent his sister, Skanky Puss, I mean Charity, to persuade him to return. And when Phil turned her down, Neville sent two men to bring him back. His own dad kidnapped him, essentially. It wasn't long before Phil was subjected to a discipline system, and he was soon called to a men's meeting. At 1 p.m., Phil had to turn up at the old farmhouse where special Neville and his family still lived. he had to go into God's one true Neville's room and sit on his bed. All adult men of the community were there. About 25 to 30 dudes sitting on the floor around the room, blocking the door. Not weird at all. They tried to get Phil to talk, but he wouldn't say anything. And this went on for hours. What's the problem? Why are you so worldly? There is sin in your life. You must submit to your elders. God's going to judge you. Right, that kind of shit. On and on, they berate him. The men dissect every aspect of his behavior, ask him why he said this or said that, why he was so disrespectful. How could he shame his family like this? Couldn't he see he was breaking his mother's heart? To his credit, Phil just continued to sit there, refusing to react. Finally, Special Neville demanded that his son change his name, but Phil still held his ground. Told his dad if his dad didn't want to be associated with him anymore, his dad could change his name. Woo! But then, he did let Special Neville take his worldly watch, and he watched his dad smash it on the edge of a table. Phil then got up, went to the door, walked downstairs to his bedroom, began to pack. Soon, Special Neville appeared at his door, informed him that he hated him and wished she had never been born over a watch. This doesn't sound like it's about God. It sounds like it's about Neville's ego. It always is with these cult leaders, right? And I imagine with a lot of religious leaders, too. How often is leadership about service, about being a conduit to the spiritual world for your fellow man, compared to how often is it about wanting to feel special and superior to your fellow man? Special Neville told him that Phil could go. But what if something bad happened to him? What if he got in a terrible accident? Who's going to look after him? Well, at about 8 o'clock before Phil left, completely exhausted, he cracked. He took a worldly tape recorder and he threw it to the floor where it smashed. That poor bastard, he'd almost made it out. Phil would now go on to become one of the commune's hardest workers, constantly trying to prove to his dad that he wasn't a waste of space by washing everybody's dishes, getting up early to milk 15 cows, fixing anything that needed maintenance. While special Neville had his claws and filigin for the moment, he couldn't keep them in everyone. In February of 1979, his son-in-law Alan and his eldest daughter Faith finally left with their five kids. Some household items, their car, and some clothes. Alan found some work teaching in Rangiora, and they would go on to stay together and have five more kids, contradicting Neville's claim that when people left their community, they would get divorced and they would have miserable lives. In addition to going to hell, of course. Still, it would be hard to adjust to the outside world. Faith and Alan had no idea how they were supposed to parent their children. Should they let them wear short sleeves, play sports on Sunday? Was it okay to wear a watch? Would that piss God the fuck off? Finally, Faith accepted that while she wouldn't agree with everything that everybody did, that was okay. She could do what felt right for her. She didn't need some one-size-fits-all rulebook for life anymore. Didn't need some authoritarian leader either. Meanwhile, life on the compound would be exactly the opposite. After Faith and Alan's departure, Neville would insist on total isolation for his followers. Now everybody had to live in the accommodation blocks or you were out. And to get people to agree to this, he reasoned he had to offer something as incentive. And that something would be sex. Cult, cult, cult. But first time for today's second and two mid-show sponsor breaks. Thanks for listening to those sponsors. Hope you heard some deals you liked. Now time to see how shit got real weird real quick once Neville shifted his cult leader focus to sex. Neville felt that the hippie movement, with its emphasis on sexual freedom, had something to offer, provided that the sex was between married couples. He began to hold married couples meetings where he would lecture on the topic of sex now. He told his followers, quote, we need to loosen up sexually, be more open minded about it. Don't be afraid to talk about sex and teach your children about it. I began preaching some weird shit like how it didn't matter if kids literally saw their parents having sex. He said that was better than having them learn it from their peers. Special Neville. God's one true Neville. Neville daddy. I'm going to say that's 100% not true. I would way rather learn about sex from my peers than from watching my parents fuck. Or hearing about them fucking. Or just hearing them talk about sex. You know, in graphic detail. And I think I can safely say I speak for almost everyone there. As part of his new regime, married couples were now encouraged to hop into their compounds pool naked, where their children could be with them while also naked. So now I guess they're nudists. Didn't see that coming. The little travel that was now allowed was only to evangelize, but followers got to keep their clothes on for that. Neville started to send van loads of people, including his son Phil and Sondra Benjamin, into Christ Church to speak about their experiences in the city's so-called Cathedral Square in the heart of the city. This led to these two growing closer, and soon after his 18th birthday in 1980, Sandy Benjamin was all Phil could think about. Despite being the average age at which people lost their virginity in the U.S. and two years older than the average Australian age in 1980, and perhaps more importantly, legal adults, the two had never experienced any kind of sexual intimacy. Special Neville's rules prohibited young people spending time alone until he gave them permission to do so. So feeling like he had no other path available, Phil eventually approached his dad and asked for Neville's permission to marry Sandy. God's one true Neville asked him lots of questions. Why Sandy? Why now? Finally, Phil told him, not knowing at all that this was normal, that his balls were sore, and he was worried about them. Why, Daddy? Why does spending time with sexy Sandy make my balls ache so? I laughed so fucking hard when I first read that. Why do you want to get married, son? Why her? Well, because, gee, Dad, I feel silly saying this out loud, but she makes my balls sore. And I just think that somehow, some way, Sandy might know how to make my balls feel better. Special Neville was reassuring, telling Phil that sore balls were not unusual, and they wouldn't be a problem once he was married. And now this story takes its most fucked up twist by far. Let's meet the real Neville now. how long he has been like this is anyone's guess. God's one true Neville now asked his grown son Phil to show him his sore balls. And then he showed his son how to make the balls not sore anymore. Phil, an 18-year-old man, whipped his dick out in front of his dad and his dad then jerked him off. No, JK. This actually happened. He should have told me to do it myself, Phil would later say. I've got two hands and it wasn't as if I didn't know how. I think he did it to some of my brothers too, but they won't talk about it or they can't. I knew I should have stopped it, but part of me was thinking this is my dad, my leader. Instead, I shut it out, pretending it hadn't happened. What the fucking fuck? Phil knew this was wrong, but he also knew that objecting to it meant losing all the progress he'd made in the past year with God's one true dick beater and the community. Two weeks after this, uh, incident, Phil asked his super creepy ass dad if he could marry Sandy. And God's handjob consented to talk to Sandy on Phil's behalf. And after doing so, he gave his son permission to ask her. But Sandy refused. He was 18. She was 21. She told him to ask again once his dad had jerked him off a few more times. No, she told him to be so fucked up. How about have your dad jerked him off a little bit more? I'm not confident you know how it's done. No, she told him to ask again in six months. Once he'd grown up a little. Once he could jerk himself off. She didn't say that last part. He asked her after four months. And this time she agreed. And they were married in 1981, a few days after Phil's 19th birthday. Well, this wouldn't be a legal marriage, just one within the community, but it would fix Phil's sore balls problem just the same. It would also not be a traditional ceremony. Neville, God's handjob, insisted on their wedding night. He would need to jerk Phil off again while Phil fingered Sandy, while Sandy jerked him off in a ceremony he called the Holy Trinity of Diddling Divinity. No, he didn't do that. That's a good name for a cult ceremony. According to Neville's rules, the couple had to make a public pledge, then go into a specially prepared room to consummate their union. Then they could come out and celebrate in front of everybody. That's still kind of creepy. The newlyweds were given a single room in one of the dormitories to start frucking. Phil became the community's woodworking teacher now, and the toys they made would be sold outside the community, which creepy Neville liked because it brought in money. But despite having a son who gave his all to the community, who didn't run screaming when creepy Neville jerked him off, Neville still wanted more. He always did. Some months after the wedding, he invited the young couple to share a nice meal with him and his wife Gloria in their room in the farmhouse. Phil and Sandy had heard from other young couples about what such an invitation meant. Neville would undress the wife while the husband had to lie on the bed with Gloria. I'm sorry? Well, come again? Apparently it was common knowledge that the wife didn't have sex with Neville and the husband didn't have sex with Gloria, but it was still repulsive to Sandy and Phil, of course. Special Neville becoming quite the groomer, breaking down sexual norms, normalizing deviancy so he can fucking humiliate his followers and his wife's doing this shit too. Despite being creeped out, Phil and Sandy did not feel like they could refuse. After the first time, the invitations kept coming. And Neville would have them do this eight or ten times. Somewhere in that range, Phil would gradually come to understand that this was something like foreplay for his dad. Undressing young women, touching their naked bodies, getting himself good and hard, getting his balls good and sore before he had sex with Gloria. Shit is changing in Springbank. Oh, man. Neville had controlled everyone's spiritual, personal, and professional lives for a few years now. That wasn't enough for him, right? These co-leaders, they always have to keep pushing things further and further, devolve deeper into deviancy, see what they can get away with. Now when couples came to him with their marital problems, God's handjob. First, we get them to talk about their sex lives in graphic detail. Then eventually he started to watch the couples have sex. So he could, you know, offer advice and help them. Probably not even jerk off in front of them. All on the up and up. He didn't hide this. To him it seemed like this fit in with his role as a community's protector and guide. He was just teaching people how to live the right way. Sex included. Full service. What a pal. Danny took shit further still. On occasion the community's teenage girls were now being invited to join Neville Daddy. Who's in his early 50s at this point. and some of the elders, elder men, in the spa pool where everyone was naked and while a pornographic movie was being projected onto a wall. Very godly, right? This was done so God's handjob could point out what was being done right and what was being done wrong. Don't you fucking read anything creepy into that! Under his eye. This is just a couple commanders having fun at Jezebel's. Boys will be boys, if you know the reference. Finally, reports this got to be too much and the community revolted. Judah Benjamin, Sandy's father, left in 1983 with his 18-year-old daughter Yvette. In a documentary made shortly before his death, he would describe Special Neville as, quote, the devil incarnate. Judah would also admit to joining in on the teen girl pool porn party sessions and also being present when couples would have sex in front of God's handjob. Apparently there was numerous people watching at one point. Also added that porn was available to any man who wanted it whenever they wanted it. Yeah, porn would become a big thing at Gloryville. Well, spring, spring, spring break now. He would admit, quote, there would be carpets all over the floor and sheepskin spread out and everything and anything. Up to 10, 12 married couples and Neville would teach on marriage and then teach on sex. I was involved in multiple sexual contact between the couples. I was involved in the nudity. So they're basically having orgies under the guise of godly teaching. Got it. Once special Neville started to get real kinky, he got wild real quick. you know it's just like that one saying goes the one we all know if you can accomplish giving just one grown son a handjob you can accomplish anything you set your mind to other people left the community too now seeking refuge with Faith and Alan who became a sort of waypoint for community members trying to get the fuck out Alan and Faith were horrified by the crude way younger members were talking about the sexual shit they'd seen at the compound now shit that had been normalized and all of this caused God's one true dick beater to further tighten his control these people leaving For example, he now required parents to give their kids religiously appropriate names or those that expressed virtues and values. Phil and Sandy's first child was born in February of 82, and he was named Israel in line with this new naming convention. When 19-year-old Phil wasn't looking after his son, he was trying to get the community to make some money, by the way. Selling wooden toys was one thing, but waterbeds had just come onto the market. When Phil heard about those, he figured it'd be easy to make, and soon it grew from a school project to a business. became so successful he quit the woodworking job, took over as the community's new business manager. With everyone making waterbeds now, this just keeps getting weirder. Just fucking weird orgies in waterbeds. Why not? It was easier to keep people under control now for Neville. Now instead of calling meetings, anyone who said they wanted to leave would simply be given a hundred bucks and put on a plane to Australia. This is what happened to Michael, Phil's younger brother. But he only lasted six months before he came back. Special Neville had seen that forcing people in the community to stay too long eventually gave them the strength to walk out and stay out. But exiling them first thing meant they arrived in the world disoriented, depressed, unable to establish themselves. And now through the 80s, Satan's one true Neville would keep refining his ideas about how his cult should operate. He became more conservative in some ways, aggressively preaching against contraception, divorce, homosexuality, and premarital sex. He talked about how the outside world was a den of wickedness, wantonness, corruption, and crime. He used his mealtime readings to cite articles about murder, robbery, and immorality. They weren't doing righteous shit like having naked porn pool parties with teen girls or giving their sons handjobs. Nuh-uh, not out in fucking Satan's garden. Nobody spoke at mealtimes now except for him. He also extensively studied various historical churches, including the early Anabaptists, the Amish, the Mennonites, the Hutterites. The Hutterite philosophy appealed to him most of all since he saw them as the most scriptural of all the Anabaptist churches. Also admired the fact that they had a history several hundred years old and had suffered persecution before they fled from Europe to America. Perhaps most of all, he liked that they lived in a community without private ownership, following the teachings of Christ and his apostles, dressing modestly and caring for one another. In 1987, Neville invited some of the elders of one of the Bruderhof Hutterite communities in the United States to come to Springbank and check his shit out. Unsurprisingly, they disagreed strongly with a lot of Satan handjobs practices, especially the highly sexualized environment. Video footage from the Times shows the Hutterite men standing as far apart from Special Neville as possible, included a moment when Neville speaks about how girls are physically ready to bear children when they're 12, and boys ready to father children at 14. Despite their misgivings, however, the elders did agree to Special Neville's plan of taking 30 of his young unmarried followers to America for a tour of their communities. Only problem was, how were they going to fund that? Waterbed sales were still decent, but the community was actually getting low on money because more and more people were leaving, taking their free labor with them. But then fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, let's look at it unfortunately, Phil Cooper's friend, an older man named Clive Bilby, not a Cooperite, donated enough money to buy more materials for waterbeds. And the community remained solvent for a while longer. Uh, why? Why Clive? Uh, Clive would eventually take Phil to a waterbed expo in the States. And there Phil saw what it looked like to, uh, you know, be a loving father and a husband who called his wife every day. Also let her make decisions in his absence. Phil had never seen a relationship look like that. In fact, the main relationship he was seeing was quite the opposite. At some point after he got back, Phil went looking for his dad to talk to him about a business matter. Found his father naked in bed with his wife, Gloria. Phil's mom, of course. Okay. But also, a couple naked teen girls. Oh, shit. He's already reached peak cult leader. He's got his wife to join him in his pedophilia. Right? Glory be to God. Through his mercy, all things are possible. Even getting your wife to fuck teens with you. Aside from this being abuse, it was also a stark hypocritical contrast in the way the rest of the community was expected to act. Right? That's always the case. What's good for the cult leader, not good for the cult followers. By this time, everybody in the community was required to wear a uniform. Uh, I guess, well, they've been dressing, you know, similarly for a while, but, uh, but now I guess it's more strict. And this is when Phil had finally had enough. He didn't have the mental strength to make a plan for his whole family, five children and Sandy. So in November of 1989, he called a friend, had him bring just Phil and seven-year-old Israel to the Christchurch airport, where dad and son boarded a flight for Wellington. Uh, they went to stay with Clive and Sue Bilby. There, Phil confessed to Clive that he had been essentially stealing from him for months, pressured by Satan's one true Neville to make up fake invoices. Clive forgave him. When Neville sent Phil's sister Skankypuss, I mean Charity Cooper after them, Phil allowed his son Israel to go back with her, but he would not go back. He was planning. He was actually now the eighth out of Neville's 15 kids to leave the commune. Faith, Mercy, John, Michael, David, Daniel, Comstain, I mean Christian, they'd all left earlier. Baby tits was still in the compound. Phil, now 27, was separated from his wife and kids. He'd get to keep contact with his kids for a little while, but then Neville cut them off, and now Phil knew he had to do something quick to get them out. It was time to kidnap his own family, just as Phil had been kidnapped by his dad years ago. Let's go, Phil, go! In December of 1959, accompanied by a friend and his brothers David and John, Phil made his way back to Springbank, used a contact inside the community to find out where Sandy and the kids were sleeping these days. And when darkness fell, it was go time. phil got out of a car at a neighbor's driveway hopped the fence where he found the power main shut off the compound's electricity then crept inside to find four of his kids sleeping the youngest crystal wasn't there though john and david squirreled the rest of the kids into the back of the car while phil looked for sandy and crystal he found his daughter sleeping next to naomi benjamin sandy's mom who stayed after her husband judah left when sandy woke up naomi woke up too started screaming as phil grabbed crystal and he hauled ass out the door jumped the fence made into the car. He had gotten them out. Hail Nimrod and hail Phil. Fuck yeah. Couldn't love this more, right? Courageous shit and a beautiful dad move. Now Phil was 27 years old with five kids to take care of. And he would take care of them. Phil's a boss. Can he be an honorary boss bitch? I think so. He applied for a statehouse, lived with Faith and Allen while he waited for it to get approved. He also started teaching his kids things they didn't know, like the days of the week, months of the year. Seriously. Taught him how money worked, how food didn't just magically show up on the table three times a day. And a few months later, he repeated the operation in Spring Bank with Sandy, this time with the help of a cult deprogrammer. Phil, Phil, Phil! She went with him, but when they stopped at a hotel, she slipped away. Then later they found her at a phone booth. But then she got in a car, made a drive to Auckland where Phil had left the kids with friends. That's good for a while now. They're all living together in a mobile home, but Sandy is suffering. She's struggling with this. The combination of her extreme loyalty, naivete, deep religious conviction made her feel besieged in the outside world where people bombarded her with ideas and info that didn't align with Satan's one true nevels, you know, his teachings. Sadly, she will return to the cult. She got out, but she went back. Sweet Phil didn't give up on her, though. He would keep trying to get her out for years until finally over Christmas 1991, with the help of Woodcrest, the founding community of the American Bruderhof Hutterites, he managed to find a place for the family to live in upstate New York, and he dragged Sandy overseas where she will give birth to the couple's sixth child before she returns once again to the cult. She had no idea when she left. She was a couple months pregnant with Phil's seventh child, Cherish. Damn it, Sandy. Sadly, they will not reunite again. Poor Phil, but he did everything he could. Phil stayed and taught the Hutterites how to make waterbeds in New York. Not kidding. While all this was happening, Phil's mom, Gloria, started getting sick. She'd been suffering from headaches for a while. But now she completely lost her voice. Satan's one true Neville called up some of his eight kids living outside the community, blamed her illness on the shock of Phil's departure. Of course. At that point, one of his sisters, one still at Springbank, stood up to Special Neville and said to Gloria, see an actual fucking medical doctor. She would, and she'd be diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. Oh man, her days of teen fuckfests are now limited. Gloria would live with the community for another 12 months, dying in March of 1991 at the age of 57, surrounded by a bunch of kids she probably molested in some way. None of her kids who had left the community would be allowed at her funeral because Neville was a disgusting, pathetic excuse for a man and father. Finally, in 1993, some of the survivors of special Neville's sexual abuse had had enough. For a time, they had been content trying to live on the outside by themselves, hoping or helping one another to acclimate and process all the trauma. But then they heard about how now 67-year-old cult leader Neville had married a 17-year-old girl. Who the fuck did he think he was, Bill Belichick? It's time to come forward. The Christchurch police began an investigation into the cult's activities at the end of June 1993. A few weeks later, July 20th, police conducted simultaneous morning raids at dawn on the community premises at Springbank and also at their new location on the West Coast, inland from Graymouth and the South Island of New Zealand, a bigger and much more isolated property. Two years earlier, in 1991, the community had bought 917 hectares of land, possibly using money from some of the members' inheritance to do so. Later, they'd buy an adjoining block, bringing their property to a total of 1,700 hectares, 4,200 acres, six and a half square miles. Big, big chunk of land and a gorgeous piece of property. The new community would now be called Uncle Neville's Handjob Heaven, where the naked teen pool porno parties never stop. It'd be called Gloryville. And soon the first group would trek into the massive rugged valley to explore their brand new land. how Piri Valley was breathtaking. A picture of West Coast wilderness that sprawled for miles on end. The lake sparkled like polished glass, mist steamed off the foothills of the Southern Alps. Icy rivers cut down from the mountains through the forest and pastures and brick by brick, a mighty church began to rise from the rugged land. There would be residential sheds until more permanent housing could be built, along with offices, workshops, a community center, a commercial kitchen, a large mess hall, school rooms, and a preschool. Eventually, Gloriaville will also become, sadly, insanely profitable and remain so to this day. This cult's still around. The men would develop a machine to process highly desirable and profitable sphagnum moss, using all kinds of shit, collected from the swamps to Glen Hopeful, and they ran the only helicopter and aircraft maintenance business on the West Coast for a while. For a time, the church even had an airline called West Coast Air, but it didn't make enough money, and they dumped it. The closeness to the bush and wilderness also allowed the group's enterprising men to start a world-class adventure hunting business catering to wealthy overseas clients. Gloryvale Land offered a variety of game. Wild boar, ram, goat, and game birds. Even helicoptered their guests into the southern Alps to shoot mountain tar and chamois. Haupiri River was rich with fish. Gloryvale added that to their hunting packages as well, right? Some fishing. In addition, they bred trophy red deer, established one of the best huntable herds of Asian water buffalo available in New Zealand. Sounds fucking awesome. They built luxurious lodges in the valley for their guests, called their business venture Wilderness Quest NZ. A business that is still around, still owned by the cult, so don't fucking support it. The cult's followers, most of them, were incredibly excited to be living here. Gloria Vale was a land of promise. God's people were home, and so were the police. and they arrested Satan's one true Neville, the devil's handjob, charged with sexual violation. What? He was now going by the name of Hopeful Christian, by the way. In late January of 1994, it was announced that Hopeful Christian would face nine counts of indecent assault, involving five complainants who have been between the ages of 12 and 19 at the time of the alleged offenses. His son, Phil, who is now living on his own with the kids in Australia, named as one of the complainants. Thankfully, Phil's fucked-up, handjob-given teen-naked pool party orgy orchestrating dad will be found guilty by a jury of 10 counts of indecent assault between 1980 and 1994 against five young complainants. Sentencing remarks by Judge Graham Noble would describe how Neville had assaulted numerous teens between the ages of 12 and 17, especially, including massaging and caressing the naked breasts and genitalia of a complainant on 10 to 20 occasions. He said, All of the while telling them not to tell. And for all of this, Neville was sent to fucking death. And he had his fucking head cut off. No. He got six years. Six years in prison in the Christchurch District Court in September of 1994. And he would appeal. Meanwhile, the Gloryville settlement was attracting some other unwanted attention. 1994, a young reporter named Melanie Reed went undercover at Gloryville for the popular news program of 60 Minutes. She would ultimately spend eight days with the cult. She pretended to be an agricultural student. Her findings would be aired later that year. In one clip, former member Yvette Benjamin shows Melanie a baton-shaped object, which he says was similar to one used to break her hymen the night before her wedding. Yvette claimed, she said to me, I'm going to use this to stretch your muscles so that you don't have any pain. I felt like I was being ripped in two. My God. An anonymous woman told Melanie that she and her teenage sisters were told by Special Neville to undress and touch his dick. Of course. And a young man said he and his teenage brothers were told to undress and watch as Special Neville and his new wife performed a sexual act in front of them. Fucking awesome. Word was now out. Neville Cooper was no man of God and Gloryville was no regular church. It was 100% a creepy ass cult. A disgusting sexually abusive cult as they almost always are. A year later, in December of 1995, Phil Cooper and Yvette Benjamin, Sandy's younger sister, both returned to Christchurch for Neville's second trial, the appeal, on 11 counts of sexual violation, one of which, again, the masturbation of Phil as a teen. Unsurprisingly for the victims, it was excruciating, not only because of the trial, but because earlier that year, Michael Cooper, Phil Cooper's younger brother, had died by suicide, hanging himself in a park from a tree. He'd never been able to recover from not being allowed to see his mom on her deathbed or attend her funeral. Luckily for Phil, the pain of the trial would be worth it. His fucked up dad was sentenced again to prison, but five years now, not six, on three charges of indecent assault, primarily for an incident in which he inserted an unnamed wooden object into a 19-year-old over three successive days. That was a real sticking point for the judge, Christchurch District Court Judge Neil Hathaway, who said, you got her to the point where in her ignorance and her naivete, she would submit to virtually anything to get back together with the man she loved and you treated her cruelly most cruelly in the extreme still the community at Gloryvale stood by Special Neville including a man now calling himself Faithful Pilgrim who would become Gloryvale school principal in 1995 and hold that position until 2000 Faithful Pilgrim said I was not convinced at all that he was guilty of what she was claiming Of course Faithful Pilgrim is probably a fucking pedophile too Neville would appeal his sentence again. In May of 1996, it was heard in the Court of Appeal in Wellington. Luckily, the sentence was upheld and Neville Cooper, a.k.a. Hopeful Christian, a.k.a. fucking Satan's cum dumpster, was finally sent to prison for five years on three charges of sexual assault at the age of 70. Unsurprisingly, the community tried to spin it. Higher-up members told followers that Neville was in jail because he was Christian. Just like Paul and Silas in the Bible, right? Persecuted and imprisoned, and they went out and preached again. All the young ones believed it, and some of the older ones did too, including Phil's ex-wife, Sandy, who still stayed at Gloriaville. And Satan's one true Neville didn't stop leading from prison. He wrote lengthy letters of instruction for his fellow leaders to read to the people. Leadership group would travel to the prison each week to consult with him. So he was kept abreast of everything happening in the community. And they still thought he was perfect. And this perspective was reinforced when Satan's one true Neville was released for good behavior after serving just 11 months. Fuck off. It's not often I agree with any aspect of Saudi Arabia's legal system. But did you know in 2015, a teacher there named Musa al-Zarani was publicly beheaded after being convicted of sex crimes, including the kidnapping, rape, and abuse of several underage girls? Not sure how his trial worked. Maybe he was actually framed for those crimes. Maybe he's innocent. But can we at least consider beheadings for repeat sexual offenders? In, you know, the Western world. It's fucking whole world would be great. Baby tips. I mean, miracle. The daughter Gloria had been pregnant with during the plane crash went to the parole board meeting to vouch for her dad. She didn't believe he was a pedophile. He didn't go around praying on young children, she said. Everything he had done, although it might seem wrong, had been done with the intention of helping those church members who relied on his guidance in their homes. Man, humanity's ability to rationalize the craziest shit in order to hold on to their beliefs, their convenient beliefs, which we are all seeing today in the news every day, will never cease to amaze me. By this point, Baby Tits was married to a man named Perry Tarawa. they would have a bunch of kids. Sarah born around 1987. Sam born around 1988. Lilia born in 1990. Victor born in 1993. Gloriana born in 1997. Asher born in 2000. Judah born in 2002. Serena born in 2004. Melody born in 2007. And Ariel born in 2010. And I think that's it. I think baby tits' uterus probably died sometime in 2011. Both parents and kids would live in a 12 meter rectangle that Lilia would describe later in her memoir, Daughter of Gloria Vale, as follows. Our family's room was on the left rear corner of the hostel and was a 12-meter rectangle with mom and dad's king-sized waterbed, of course a waterbed, at one end and two bunks fitted along the opposite end. Another bunk stretched horizontally through the middle of a full-length curtain that could divide the room in two for privacy. My clothes hung in the built-in wardrobe beside my parents' bed. Five blue uniforms, three white aprons, and a few jackets and cardigans. On our hostel floor, there were four bathrooms, five toilets, and four showers to service all 14 families on the floor. Hopeful Christian's room had its own en suite with a spa bath, which was used for birthing, a toilet, a laundry tub, and storage cabinets. The overseen leader on each floor had a similar setup. Across from the spa room, there was a bathroom that had a bath, toilet, shower, all in one room. Through a partition was a laundry tub and a changing area for babies. This toilet was accessible for wheelchairs. Each hostel floor was an exact replica of the others except the attic floor, which was divided into large areas and used for picnics, game nights, family going out for tea nights, or activities like six-day team games. Baby tits have been appointed house mother and managed the women's realm, the domestic organization of the now 500-strong cult community. She was responsible for all aspects of Gloryville's household duties and budgeting, and her brother Mark managed the business side. and they were answerable only to Special Neville. And now Special Neville's back home. The devil's handjob is returned. He would decide, maybe his brief prison stay had scared him, not to push things too far anymore. According to Lillia's later memoir, again, Daughter of Gloryville, this is when the community's teaching started to get more mainstream and the sexualized atmosphere had dissipated somewhat, at least publicly. Things started to become a little more formalized. Perry, Baby Tits' husband, would serve the church as business manager for discoveries and gardening. He was an appointed servant, a leader in cult speak, and sat on the board of approximately 20 so-called shepherds and servants. Get the fuck out of here. Gloriaville's inner ring of creepy dudes who tended to the sheep, the flock of followers, a.k.a. the other cult members. At first, it seemed like Special Neville would no longer be in charge. When he returned to Gloriaville, he publicly stepped down from his position as leader. He said that the bishop must be without blame. But then wouldn't you know it, Sandy's mother, Naomi Benjamin, said that God spoke to her and forgave special Neville for everything. What are the odds? And he stepped right back up to lead. Devil's handjob back on top, baby. When this happened around the same time that Miracle Baby Tits gave birth to Gloriana, Satan's one true Neville had a revelation. Now it wasn't just that children needed better, more Christian names, but the adults did too. Now nearly all the followers shed the names, given them a birth, and took new ones that they hadn't already. Right? Colt. Colt. Colt. Stan Blatt became Steady Stan True. So stupid. Alistair Barrett became D. Nuts Belong to Christ. I mean, fervent, steadfast. Some resisted. Perry, Miracle Baby Tits' husband, wanted to retain his name, which came from his Maori heritage. Neville allowed him to keep his first name, but replaced his last name with Just. A year later, 1997, Patience, special Neville's youngest daughter, had her first child, who she named Trusty Disciple, like their fucking actual name, birth name. Trusty Disciple. What's up, Trusty? How you been? Good. Great seeing you, Steady. How's Patience? Amazing. Have you seen Blood of Christ? How the fuck are this many weird people in the world? Right? Just cover so many almost every week. Freaks me out when I think about it too much. By this time, Lilia, miracle baby tits of the daughter, had started participating in the work of the women's world. She was seven years old, so, you know, practically a grown woman herself now. She had recently been baptized, an important community tradition that involved months of rigorous preparation before the leaders granted the immersion ceremony. Baptism at such a young age that we're about to be done with, the cult leaders would start conducting weekly meetings after lunchtime on first day, aka Monday, first day, more cult speak, to screen the baptism participants. The reason for this was that previously some of the young boys had been baptized, but afterwards had fallen into sin. Huh. A.K.A. they had questioned leadership. And some had left the church. So the leaders decided that the rebellious had been baptized too young, didn't fully understand what they were doing. Thus, baptism meetings were instigated to carefully instruct and question candidates. The leaders were determined that there would be no room for backsliding once they had been thoroughly vetted. These screening meetings were basically long diatribes about Scripture. when you'd gone to enough of these you were allowed as Lillia was to make your way down the hill to Graveyard Pool and Jack's Creek it was called Graveyard Pool because it was infested with zombies or it was 20 meters away from a community graveyard on the baptism day the community members gathered along both banks of the creek scrambling for a good view of the purification ritual the baptismal party was called to step forward a special Neville would begin to preach one by one kids names would be called and the kids would wade into the icy cold water where special Neville would jerk them off vigorously so that their balls weren't too sore. Or he would diddle them until they were no longer hysterical girls. JK. But that wouldn't surprise me. The baptism was actually pretty normal. And once it was done, you were allowed to work. Oh, yay! What a reward! While boys got to start learning to trade, or at least something that would make the community money, the girls would have to now serve the community literally. Time to submit, girls. Fun time's over. You're seven now. and actually they'd already been submitting, but now they had to submit harder, a little harder to the good, righteous men, whatever, blah, blah, blah. In addition to setting the table and clearing dirty dishes for a group of 500, there was also cooking, knitting, and sewing, which were taught to the girls each day after school wrapped up at 3 p.m., and if they didn't behave either at school or in these lessons, they would be denied a meal ticket, so they'd miss a meal. As they got older, they were also required to cook for the community in a large kitchen, outfitted with heavy commercial equipment, A three-mixer bread-making station stood at the head of the kitchen, followed by a wood oven, electric oven, gas stations, commercial deep fryers, four compartment steamer cabinets, 100-liter steam kettles, one-meter square frying pans, and more. Labor of all kinds defined young girls' childhood at Gloriaville until they turned 16 and were able to marry. And then things would get gross. As we'll see soon, the deviant sexual atmosphere was still very much alive. Just more hidden. the normal courtship period would be about two weeks from when the announcement that is the wedding announcement was made at a communal dinner those two weeks would be frenzied as the community prepared for the wedding including the bride still very much a kid getting measured for sexy lace and satin nighties panties and camisoles the couple would spend regular time with each other during courtship always chaperoned by an elderly couple who would instruct them in preparation for married life apparently at this stage of the group men would no longer instruct couples on sex, at least not as an explicit practice, though it probably still happened. Instead, older women were now required to teach the younger ones details of lovemaking so that they'd be able to bring deep satisfaction to their husbands and build a strong marriage. Because that's, you know, so much better and not creepy at all to have an old lady teach you how to suck dick, you know, before your wedding night. On the wedding day, all the community members dressed in their best and gathered in the hall. The couple would make a grand entrance together, pick their seats of honor at the front. on the wall above them will be scripture what therefore God hath joined together let not man put asunder after a sermon by Satan's one true Neville the woman or girl would say her vow I willingly submit myself to you and will call you Lord my body is yours and the husband will respond I promise to look after our children and fuck the shit out of your pussy and lead our family in righteousness if I ever turn from the church you are not required to submit to me any longer you can give that pussy to whoever you want or I mean my commitment is to God and the church first and secondly to you I will never look upon another woman in lust but I will sometimes fucking jerk it and you know you know what I mean you know what I'm saying maybe not the last part after they've made the vows required by the church they're able to say the vows they've made up themselves and then they would kiss and it wasn't the kind of kiss you'd see at a modern wedding even like a deep smooch with a dip now it'd be like a make out session heavy petty hands going everywhere squeezing boobs you know grabbing ass the couple was encouraged to go as far as they wanted to, in front of everyone. And the next part of the ritual, of course, was special Neville, head pervert, leading him outside, driving him to a separate Gloryville house, away from the main community where they would have sex. The couple. Not Neville, but maybe also Neville. Even though she'd been born and raised in this community, Lilia Tarawa thought all of this was weird and gross. She'd see these ceremonies throughout her teenage years. You know, the nice meal that came at the end was never worth the discomfort of watching a man fucking paw a teen girl's ass in front of everybody. And sometimes, you know, the guy would be considerably older, like decades older than the teen wife. Of course, work didn't let up for the women, and they got married, if anything, it increased. Now they're expected to be both the sex slave of their husbands, constantly available to him no matter what the time, no matter what her mood, and also care for their kids, and also contribute to the community the same rate as before. Glory be to Gilead. All these women were rostered onto four teams with a four-day cycle of duties. There would be washing, cleaning, cooking, and food preparation teams. Each team had two women who would lead it, a primary and a secondary. Let's go, Marthas. Outside of the four teams, a number of women were rostered to school and preschool, teaching, or assigned to the sewing room. This is what Miracle Baby Tits' Tarawa organized. Some tasks had to be started much earlier than others, so within the respective teams, there were adult women who would take turns to get up at 3 or 4 a.m. to begin so the other women could get some sleep. For example, the first women had to get up at four to run the commercial laundry. First woman cooking had to get up at three to start making bread. If they were pregnant, they were only allowed two weeks off of work for the birth. The only respite from work and children were nights when they got to put on shows. So more work. Performing comedy sketches and singing songs. But those sketches were hilarious. And occasional movies that have been heavily censored to leave out anything objectionable. or the films will be straight up propaganda like quote unquote documentaries about Satanism and Illuminati in the popular music industry. Oh my God, I just can't stop thinking about these sketches. When I first read this, I've been thinking about them. I wish we had video of these comedy sketches. Maybe they had an emcee. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the Gloria Vale Guffaws, the compound's number one sketch comedy troupe. Tonight, they will be entertaining you with some skits and sketches called, No, son, this is how you beat it. Come on! Are you ready to laugh or not? And also, learning about the birds and the bees. While butt naked and bent over Uncle Neville's knees. Come on! We're going to have some fun, are we not? Loosen up! Get those butts opened up! Stop fucking pinching those spankers! And finally, what did I just grab in the porno pool party? My swimsuit bottom? Or one of the elders pruning saggy ball sacks? Yeah! It's going to be a great night, everybody! All right! For young people. Work was broken only for the young people social events on 7th day, a.k.a. Sunday evening. Wouldn't be exactly a fun game night, maybe, haven't, though. Instead, on their night off, they'd get to husk a couple tons of corn, preserve fruit for the off-season, Or clear the farmland of rocks and weeds for sowing. Right? You can't give cult members too much time to think and relax. They might get ideas. Still, though, people didn't really complain about this off night because it was the only time, you know, young single people got to interact with the opposite gender. So they're always, you know, somewhat excited. Most people. Of course, not everybody enjoyed it, just as everyone didn't enjoy the first iteration of the group. There were still those that would not accept the rules. Sometimes there were little rules they pushed back on, like not, you know, grabbing extra food from the kitchen when you're hungry. When these crimes were uncovered, they were punished with campaigns. Long sessions where every member would gather and listen to special Neville preach for hours until one by one they'd have to stand up and confess. Or there would be a community-wide fast with members forced to go without food for a day or two, even endure a month-long period in which they would only eat rice. But for more serious offenses, the punishment would be more individualized. Rebellious children, for example, would be shamed before the church. Kids would be marched up to a stage where they would be made to face a wall in shame for two to three hours straight. Their food portions would be confiscated. They would not be permitted to eat as further punishment, right? And there wasn't just consequences for the individual kid. Their parents would also be shamed, denounced for not fulfilling their godly parental duties. The community would hold them accountable for the disobedience of the child. And if they managed to curb the kid's behavior later, you know, beat it out of them, then they'd be praised. Sarah, Lillia's sister, was the target of frequent shaming for the terrible sins of, say, rolling up her sleeves while she worked in the heat or wearing sunglasses when it was bright out. She would be hauled through leaders' meetings where she would be interrogated for hours, forced to admit her sins, made to publicly confess before the church, and repent for following the evil one. A different evil one, to be clear. Not the devil's handjob. Not Neville Cooper. Some other evil one. Her parents, Miracle and Perry, would be blamed too. and finally around 2002 Sarah had had enough. She left, leaving a simple note on her parents' bedside table that said, I can't do this anymore. She's only 15. But even the public shaming and the meetings weren't the worst of it. Lillia once watched a man named Nathaniel Constant, a teacher at the school, beat a kid for not listing on the soccer field, but I guess beat him pretty severely. Parents often beat their kids with lengths of polystyrene pipe, more in the case of school principals, Shepard Fervent, and his 13-year-old son Willie, a leather strap, just beat the fuck out of him. That took place in the classroom. Willie was forced to pull down his pants, show his bare ass in front of the other students, and get whipped. A few months after Sarah left, Lillia's brother Sam did the same thing, right? Gone. And good riddance! You weren't willing to take a new fucked up weird name, right? Sam. So how committed were you? Same then for Naomi Benjamin, Sandy and Yvette's mother. Lillia was thinking of leaving too when she ran into a friend who had left the community. The friend showed her the documentary where Naomi's daughter, Yvette, described being sexually abused by Neville. and then Naomi herself would finally leave. Perhaps the last draw for Naomi was actually that she was suffering from arthritis, and instead of giving her a reduced workload, Special Neville told her she was just being lazy. And so she pretended to have a doctor's appointment at a nearby hospital, then caught the bus to Nelson, leaving behind his son, another daughter, and both their families, as well as poor Sandy, who was now going by prayer, and Sandy's daughter by Phil, Dawn, who would come back to live with the community as a teen. Fuck. Naomi would stay with Phil for several months before leaving to care for her terminally ill sister in Brisbane. Meanwhile, Lilia didn't know what to think. The community was still going strong overall, but getting itself into more scandals, too. Gloriaville had begun founding a sister community in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Right? This shit's fucking spreading. This bat-shit crazy madness is spreading. The leaders would bring Indian families to Gloriaville for a few months at a time to learn how to live properly. then they'd be sent back to build a similar church. Not only did this give Gloria Vale a charitable project to work on, but as a bonus, also brought, you know, young men of marriage age into the fold for single girls who needed husbands. Young men who were not their blood relatives. Indeed, according to Lilia, quote, the Indian mission seemed to have plenty of eager young men who dreamed of marrying Western girls. But not all realized what they were signing up for. In October of 2006, the Hindustan Times reported that Indian student Venkata Siva Rayavarapu had fled Gloria Vale's West Coast commune. Gloria Vale had sponsored Rayavarapu to study English and agriculture at its accredited school. But Rayavarapu alleged that he had been made to work at a dairy farm for six weeks without receiving any pay and that he had then been pressured into marrying a Mexican woman he had zero romantic interest in against his wishes, which he did not do. When the news broke, publicly Gloria Vale member Fervent Steadfast fucking stupid names kill me, disputed Raya Verapu's account, claiming he was attempting to marry a New Zealand girl to gain residency, and the community had sponsored him for the sole purpose of training him to help his own community back in India. Immigration New Zealand subsequently then revoked Raya Verapu's temporary permit. They sided with the cult. And I guess I'm not surprised, the cult's a very profitable business now, making good money for the local government in the form of taxes. There was still tension in the community, after this matter was settled, and of course there was, there's just continual tension there, around this time, Lillia's younger brother Vic, and some other boys, started to cut their hair short, spike it up, wear pants low on their hips, how evil! In response, Special Neville marched Vic, and another boy Gideon, into the sewing room, where he ordered them, to surrender their shirts, and trousers, he then measured, where the trousers, should sit on each boy, commanded the women, to sew the trousers, on the shirt, or onto the shirt, so the boys could not adjust, where the pants sat, on their hips, Each outfit of Vic's would end up being sewn together, but then Vic would simply use his mom's miracle baby tits of sewing kit to rip him back apart. What a rebel! In such disrespect. This was right around when Lillia, at the age of 16, was expected to make the commitment, a rite of passage where a child moves into adulthood. Glory Vale children were expected to make their commitment at age 16, because that was the time now ordained by the church for a child to come of age. coming of age meant displaying the mental physical and spiritual qualities expected of an adult ready for marriage by 16 an individual's walk with christ was expected to be firm rooted once again this involved being called in for questioning by the servants and shepherds for women much of the question involved submitting did lilia accept the role of a woman to be meek and quiet did she promise not to teach a man ever not to speak or preach in the meetings but to quietly go about her duties and submit herself to the male leadership? Could she put aside lust of the flesh, pride, her own selfish desires? Would she renounce all possessions to the church? Could she be a dumb, docile, come dumpster for Christ? This time, however, there was an additional question. The Sunday TVNZ series was going to make a documentary about Gloryville, and the leaders wanted her to speak in it to declare her face to the world, to make them look good and wholesome, right? Great for recruiting. Around January 2007, the TV crew arrived. Of course, everybody who spoke in it was thoroughly coached about what to say. And as another condition, reporter Janet McIntyre had to conform to the community dress code by wearing a full-length dress. Not the dudes, though. Later, Janet would say, While I kept my ankles covered and people appeared polite, I now know from members who have since left that I was held in contempt. I was attacked for being a woman doing a man's job instead of being at home raising a family. They were told I was a prostitute because I wore makeup. Everywhere we turned, we were gobsmacked by the bizarre way of life. Mass prayer rituals, women consigned to silence and subservience, large families living in cramped quarters, young children in regimented work programs. Hold on, wait a minute. Was she trying to say that not all women who wear makeup are sex workers? Is that true? I thought they were. Wait a minute. should I stop approaching women in public who are wearing makeup and asking them questions like how much? Or does it cost less if it don't come? Or what if I try and bend it around and stick it in my own butt and you just watch? Is that free or does that still cost money? Anyway, Lillia and a few others would be interviewed by producer and investigative journalist Chris Cook. And the special would eventually air under the name of Paradise on Earth. A week later, Lillia was ready to make her commitment and a TV crew would film it. before the whole community she recited that she loved the Lord and would spend her entire life in obedience to him she said she knew there was a place that God had given women and she would stay in that place by submitting herself to men God, somebody fucking gets it, right? No She also promised that she would never take legal action against Gloryville and that her earthly relatives would not choose Christ or who would not choose Christ would be stripped from her The last promise was the most important of all that she would never leave Gloryville but soon afterwards her younger brother Vic would run away he'd stay with Perry's mother Honor in Wellington she'd left the community many years before but this time instead of miracle baby tits and Perry appearing sad they looked thoughtful and they spent long nights now whispering seemingly planning something more on that soon in 2008 Gloryville held its bicentennial even though that means 200 years not 50 you fucking morons even though this was their 49th year not their 50th but who cares about facts and definitions right when you're when you're in a cult reality is whatever the leader says it is yay uh israel phil's son returned all the phil's kids were invited but he was the only one who went bringing along his wife jess and their son zion what they found was a community hustling to produce a massive concert that would uh be attended by hundreds not just community members but retirees who had started coming regularly for some of their previous shows right they're in showbiz now that's how they do it in hollywood that's how they do it in Gloryville. These shows have gotten to be so lucrative that Neville sent three members of the community to wet a workshop in Wellington, a prestigious, right, showbiz company that worked on The Lord of the Rings, Avatar movies, and more to learn how to construct the props and special effects. 2008's theme would be the Rainforest Express with decorations to match. The dining hall was decorated with elaborately painted hangings, walls covered in a painted forest, a stage frame with trees and toucans. A couple of lizard-like creatures were rigged to bounce up and down to the beat of Satan's one true Neville walking onto the stage, preaching his version of the ideal family life to his captive audience. What is this, Shen Yun now? The musical performances were in Gloria Vale fashion, polished and flawless. The singing likewise. There would even be skits, not necessarily religious ones, but reminiscent of school concerts from the 1950s, so wholesome. All the while, girls in long blue dresses with long hair and headscarves would serve a three-course meal. women who weren't working would stand in the back, many of them teenagers, already holding multiple children. During the concert, now 82-year-old God's one true convicted sex offender Neville got two boys to carry a large photo onto the stage. And that photo was actually a collage of dozens of other photos of Neville benevolently jerking off many of the cult's boys and men. It wasn't a tasteless photo. No, it wasn't graphic. It was black and white, so it's artistic. uh no the photo featured the faces of hundreds of children and as they held it up neville explained that none of those kids would have been born if gloryville was like the outside world and believed that two kids were enough according to him the community loved children i mean he's not wrong if you just replace the word love with fuck uh there was also a model train a miniature railway sound effects of thunder rolling and rain beginning to come down and actual moving floor beneath the audience right actually pretty impressive uh the real drama though came when the play started. A science teacher, a fucking dirty, devil, piece of shit science teacher, who introduces himself as faithful, opens the play based on the story of Noah, explaining that the flood was a real event. Oh, I see. Sorry, it was a good science teacher. Never mind. I take back everything I said. He's one of the ones who gets it. He had explained that the flood was a real event that produced the fossils of the world, which in turn proved the theory of evolution is wrong. God, I couldn't have said it better myself. Fuck science! Fuck, I mean, real science. Fuck real science. People like Neville should be in charge of science. Then the actors built an art for the animals. Life-sized, beautifully constructed elephant. Two cannibal, camels, two ponies, a couple of rhinos, lion, cow, several other creatures, probably two cows. Destin's all in pairs. All this, of course, was made by the community. And at the end of the concert, Hopeful took to the stage again to explain that they wouldn't be taking anything from the audience. Instead, They would be giving each person a gift. On the visitors' way out, girls of about 10 years old would hand out loaves of homemade bread and pats of fresh butter. And out of all these people, all these retirees, Gloria Vale looked so happy, wholesome, and safe. They had no idea what was happening behind closed doors, unless they happened to live in the area. Then they might have had some idea. They might have heard that local store clerks had seen community men come into video shops and leave with armfuls of porn. Literally armfuls. they might have heard that at breakfast. Neville would regularly ask, okay, men, hands up if you had sex with your wife last night. Meanwhile, Miracle Baby Tits and Perry were planning something. They got permission from the devil's handjob to live outside the community in a house in Moana, a township about a half hour away from Gloriaville, situated on the northern shore of Lake Brunner. There were moss swamps out there that needed harvesting, and Perry and Baby Tits hoped they could walk a fine line of not living in the community, but also work for it. they'd come back to GloriaVale each day for work and school they would be cult commuters now, very modern living off the compound would allow the family to have some modern luxuries they didn't have before some crazy hedonistic shit like cereal for breakfast internet access that included YouTube videos of satanic Illuminati members Rihanna and Taylor Swift soon their kids who had already left the cult Sarah and Sam would come to live nearby Sarah was now in her 20s Sam was in his late teens. Sam had a long-term partner, a little boy tattoo that said miracle. Sarah had a nose piercing and wore her hair short like a man's. It's fucking gross, right? It's like they didn't even care about burning in hell forever for that shit. Soon Lily would visit, start wearing pants, shaving her legs, using Maori words, which she'd been told not to do. And she kept reading her Bible. Another thing she was not supposed to do. how could her fucking lady brain properly interpret all of its wisdom now Lydia finally realizes that Gloryvale have been duping her the entire time they've been picking and choosing certain scriptures what? I've never heard of a Christian doing that. Picking and choosing? like that women aren't allowed to wear men's clothing according to the Old Testament but Gloryvale's uniforms of mixed wool and cotton should have also then been forbidden if they were actually following every word still she didn't leave immediately She was frightened of what waited for her in the outside world of losing dozens, if not hundreds of her relatives. And of course, of burning in hell, something the devil's handjob preached more and more often in recent years. Despite more members questioning the cult, by 2009, GloriaVille had become a more thriving than ever business enterprise. After registering as a charity in 2008, it still enjoys tax-free status. Even though its business ventures make millions of dollars each year. Make that make sense to me. I would love to see new laws in the U.S. here restricting the tax-free status of all religious institutions unless they can prove that a certain amount of their proceeds are truly dispersed back into the community. Right? The reason. One of the main reasons. That status exists in theory. And same would go for all non-religious charities as well. Filings from 2022 would say that GloriaVille made a profit of about $2.3 million New Zealand dollars or $1.34 U.S. dollars with net assets. $1.34 million. Net assets of New Zealand, $25.25 million. That's outrageous. Also, the year before that, 2021, an ongoing legal case revealed the group received $4.8 million in New Zealand dollars in government funds, such as $2.3 million in working families payments, aka the government provided welfare to low-income families, which was given directly to Gloria Vale's leadership. That was happening since at least the early 2000s. Fucking gross. By 2009, the Tarawa family had decided they had enough and it was time to get out. And that was going to be hard. Miracle Baby Tits and Perry had nine kids at this point, including Lillia, all of whom they now had to support with no careers, no safety net, no housing, etc. But they'd make it work. Hail Baby Tits! Gifts would come pouring in from other ex-members to help them. Gifts of clothes, homeware, and more. Lillia got to celebrate a birthday, her 19th, properly for the first time. For the first time in her life, she got a birthday party with a cake, candles, and gifts. She could wear high heels now, and she did. She could wear makeup, not even have to do sex work because of that. She could buy clothes at the mall, go out drinking. She found out for the first time that there had been two female prime ministers in New Zealand in their history. She had not known that, even though Gloria Vale had voted. Voting was always arranged by Special Neville, who would have the government bring in booths and tell his followers who to vote for. She now became a youth leader at a new church, led co-ed camping trips and retreats. scandalous, had her first kiss with a boy, what? And then she decided to pull back from a new church to explore some other beliefs. Catholicism, Islam, Buddhism, atheism. Also met her uncle Phil. We love Phil. He offered her a job at a sign writing company in Coffs Harbor, Australia. She accepted, spent a couple months in Australia, the furthest she'd ever been from Gloria Vale at that point. Towards the end of her time working for Phil, he threw a massive party for his daughter Crystal's 21st birthday, even arranged to have her flown to a palatial venue in a helicopter. business must have been going great for him and I love it. And Perry and Miracle came too, along with all of Lillia's siblings. They all danced and sang and drank. They partied in the infinity pool, played on the tennis courts, watched movies in the home theater. Finally, at the age of 21 herself, Lillia decided she was no longer Christian. Much of her family still considered themselves Christian though, including her mom, Baby Tits. I mean, Miracle. Crazy that Baby Tits is old enough to be a grandma now. Feels like just a couple of hours ago, Baby Tits was a baby. God, they grew up so fast a miracle i should finally just call her that now i accepted her daughter different beliefs understood it was okay even good for people to have different beliefs uh meanwhile for everyone back in gloryville the abuse was of course not over it's still not i i would imagine by 2015 more people started to pour out and in april of that year more former members came forward with allegations of physical and sexual abuse separation of families coercive treatment in the community. Charity services would conduct an investigation alongside the Ministry of Social Development, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment as well, and all these agencies wouldn't really fucking do shit. They had to have a lot of these agencies because Gloria Vell was everything, a church, an employer, a school, etc. You know, it's hard to tell which side was responsible for what, you know, or if it was all of it. The charity services investigation looked at financial statements from 2008 to 2015, interviewed 18 former Gloria Vell members spoke to several people who helped former community members and other people who had stayed at Gloryville or provided services for them. Their final report, completed in December of 2015, found that the Gloryville Trust, quote, appeared to have engaged in a pattern of actions mentioned in the act's definition of serious wrongdoing. These included five women who left Gloryville alleging they were victims of sexual assaults, allegations that community members and women from outside the community had also been sexually assaulted by the same alleged offenders. There were also claims that Gloryvale leadership were aware of these allegations, blamed the victims, and failed to take any action. Right? On brand for these types of places. Community members were beaten and struck with objects by parents, teachers, and elders. Members were compelled and coerced to work excessive hours, given no choice over allocated jobs. If leadership considered that someone had broken community rules, they would be, quote, summoned to a servants and shepherds meeting. The report stated that former female members alleged that leadership in these meetings would refer to them as, quote, sluts, whores, and being evil. Sounds like they must have been wearing makeup or something. Bank accounts were set up in members' names without their consent nor knowledge. Members were coerced into signing a document that handed over all their assets to Gloryville. Of course, Gloryville leadership would deny all of this. Trustee Fervin Steadfast, that name still kills me, said, quote, People can make allegations, but it doesn't mean that they're true. I see no basis for them. They now created their own policy, the church did, the cult, to address these allegations. A policy whereby allegations would be investigated by the community itself. Sweet. Taking a page out of the Jehovah's Witnesses playbook. If the allegation is found to be true, the involved parties would be gathered together and warned not to disobey the commandments of the Bible or break laws of New Zealand. My God. If you molested some kid, you would be sternly warned to no longer disobey the commandments of the Bible going forward. These fucking clowns. The community leaders would then seek to, quote, bring the offender to genuine repentance for their transgression toward the person. They would also, quote, bring the person who had been assaulted to genuine forgiveness towards the person who had assaulted them. Hey, kids, sorry about sticking my wean in your butt. I know that's wrong now. Won't happen again. Let's shake on it. Let's hug. only if the offending continued would they then be reported to the police how is it how fucking how is this allowed in addition they told investigators that the following measures had been taken one the servants and shepherds meetings had often been very emotional but they were changing how they are run now so that fixes that two a clear message was sent to members that anti-smacking laws apply inside the community good good don't fucking smack your kids around 3. 10 couples who were parents within the community had completed a 10-week parenting course that outlined anti-smacking laws. Excellent. 4. Procedures around members signing over all their assets to GloriaVille quote, need to be improved. Nice! Problem solved! Looks like they fixed everything. They also said a lawyer will attend and explain to each person the legal and financial implications of signing the document. And that was that for New Zealand's investigation at the moment. Well done, New Zealand! Fucking great job. A plus handling of all this. How are your law enforcement investigations into sex crimes even fucking worse than ours are? Two years later, the authorities will be back. 2017, Salem Temple, the son of leader Howard Temple, faced charges as sexual offending against a young girl between 2005 and 2013. Eight years of abuse. The alleged offending occurred during a period when Salem Temple was in a position of authority as a leader of a youth group. Temple told the court that he had had a consensual extramarital affair with a complainant when she was 17. After an aborted trial and a hung jury in a second trial, charges were dismissed in 2021. More police investigations were coming now. But before that, the devil's handjob himself, special Neville, Satan's one true Neville, right? Hopeful Christian died. Oh, what? May 15, 2018, of cancer. He was 92. Lord always takes a good one so young. He left his 42-year-old bride behind. and probably a bunch of victims of molestation. Howard Temple would succeed him as the community's leader, a man who will shockingly turn out to also be a long-time pedophile. More on that soon. In July of 2020, the New Zealand police, in conjunction with Aranga Tamariki, the Children's Protection Ministry leader, launched Operation Matthias in investigation in child abuse at Gloryville after receiving information about the alleged abuse of an 11-year-old boy. In September of 2020, a 20-year-old man was charged with doing an indecent act on three boys at the compound between the ages of 12 and 16, probably to teach them how to relieve their sore balls, you know, in a helpful teaching way, as opposed to something untoward. The charges were representative, meaning multiple offenses of the same kind, were alleged to have been committed in similar circumstances over a long period of time. Cool. Allegedly, but actually not allegedly because he did do it. he would plead guilty in 2021 and then was released without conviction because for some reason the court felt that since he had been a teen himself when the acts were committed there was a low chance of re-offending so why punish him? What the fuck is actually going on over in New Zealand? It sounds like a great place to be a pedo. Two months later in late September of 2020 WorkSafe New Zealand dispatched inspectors to Gloryville to investigate claims that some members have been forced to work for more than 20 hours a day This came about because the news organization News Hub had investigated how former Gloryville members have been targeted by the sex leadership for speaking to the media As a result of the News Hub investigation, Justice Minister Andrew Little ordered the police, work safe, and the Labor Inspectorate to launch a second investigation into allegations of controlling behavior and labor exploitation at Gloryville. But these investigations would not go anywhere at the moment. Of course not. favor, accepting they've been employees of GloriaVale since, wait for it, they were six years old. Court found the trio had been forced to perform strenuous, difficult, and sometimes dangerous work when they were legally required to be in grade school. A company was given nine notices now and told to complain. Oh, they were given notices. Man, New Zealand just continuing to really kill it on the crime and punishment front. Now let's back up a little bit more to allegations of abuse. In 2020, Faithful Pilgrim resigned as principal of the Gloria Vale School following a complaint to the New Zealand Teaching Council. Teacher's disciplinary tribunal found him guilty of serious misconduct for twice endorsing a teacher he knew had sexually abused a nine-year-old. Endorsed him still, though, even though he knew that, as being of good character and fit to be a teacher. Fuck. On an application on a teaching certificate. He was suspended for teaching for three months, banned from serving as a principal for three years. The position will be taken over by his son, Abraham Pilgrim. But as of October 9, 2025, the Ministry of Education was considering canceling this registration as a private school due to serious concerns about the school's ongoing ability to provide a safe environment for kids. Yeah, you think? Now let's back up to February 2021. Two men and one boy charged as a result of an ongoing investigation into child abuse that started in July of 2020. On August of that year, a former Gloryville man pled guilty in the Grey Mouth District Court to eight charges of indecently assaulting girls, two charges of indecently assaulting a boy, one count of sexual violation. Though he denied ten charges of indecent assault, twelve counts of sexual violation, and five counts of rape. This all covered a period from 1986 to 2012. Damn. On August 11th, New Zealand police, Oranga Tamariki, and the teaching council confirmed that they were investigating allegations of physical and sexual abuse of students at Gloryville School, which at that point had 204 students, ranging from year one to year 11. They report that according to the investigation so far, at least 60 people in Gloryville have been involved in, quote, harmful sexual behavior. This investigation will go on to identify 138 potential victims of crimes. It spans four decades. 17 people have been charged with something so far, and at least 18 other suspects have remained under investigation as of December of 2023, and then details online about the investigation seem to disappear. On May 27, 2022, Gloria Vale's leadership issued a public apology for sexual abuse, child abuse, and labor exploitation. How did they apologize? They apologized. That's way better than prison time. That's way better than stripping them of non-profit status and burning their entire fucking compound to the ground. They claimed that much had changed following special Neville Cooper's death in 2018. Now they were allowing young people to decide whether or not they wanted to live at Gloryville as adults. Promise. Pinky swear. No coercion involved whatsoever. No threats of hell and damnation. To address future sexual offending, the leadership said they'd established a child protection leads team that answered directly to the Ministry of Children. I'm sure they would never hide anything. And as a sweet little bonus, they added that they had restructured their business operations to allow parents to spend more time with their kids after 3 p.m. Four days later, on May 31st, two senior GloriaVale leaders, fervent, steadfast, and faithful Pilgrim, resigned from their positions as senior community leaders following a public apology. Steadfast had previously served as GloriaVale's financial controller. He was a dude who should have been paying everybody for the work, but wasn't. Pilgrim previously served as principal of GloriaVale Christian School until his resignation in 2020 for failing to protect pupils, as we talked about. A few days after that apology, June of 2022, 40-year-old Timothy Disciple, these fucking names, sends to two years and five months in jail for seven charges of indecent assault against five victims, some under the age of 12, from 2000 to 2006. Five victims, seven years, gets a maximum sentence of two years and five months. And I'm sure Mr. Disciple then was then totally safe for kids. And he is back out, and he would only serve 21 months, thanks to an appeal. Also in June of 2022, Joseph Hope, a 43-year-old electrician, he was sentenced to two years and nine months imprisonment on three charges of indecently assaulting a girl under the age of 12, one charge of sexual violation of a girl. This fucking, it's a haven of pedophiles. March 7th, 2023. All these good Christian pedophiles. March 7th, 2023. The Timaru Herald reported that a former Gloriaville farm manager, John Reedy, pled guilty to assaulting two 11-year-old boys with a metal fence standard, basically a fence post. because they disobeyed him while farming. Same month, senior leader Samuel Valor confirmed that the community was building another commune on the edge of Lake Brunner to house its growing population, which had risen to almost 600. Fucking great. Gloryville purchased the site for $3 million, New Zealand money, using funds from its charitable trust. Jesus. Right, this is just pocket change to them. They can amass so much money without paying taxes. Then just a few months later, the group's new leader, the Devil's Handjob 2.0, God's one true Howard Temple. was charged in July and in August of 2023 with sexual offenses against 10 different girls for crimes that occurred from 1997 to 2022. Full quarter of a century of continual sexual abuse. Victims as young as nine years old. In late July of 2025, the now 85-year-old piece of shit underwent trial on 24 charges. Less than a year before, he claimed that his leadership had prompted a totally different attitude and way of thinking and how leaders responded to sexual abuse complaints, but clearly that didn't happen. He initially said he was innocent, but then just two days into the proceedings, admitted to 12 crimes. In August of last year, he resigned as church leader, was replaced by Stephen Stanfast, who's probably another pedophile. In December, for all that abuse, he was sentenced to 26 whole months in jail. They fucking love pedophiles in New Zealand. Not the people, but the government. Remember the new commune in India? Well, in March of 2024, the TVNZ documentary series Escaping Utopia reported that Glorievale's offshoot compound in southern India consisted of five New Zealand women, their husbands and at least 32 kids. It was overseen by a dude named Faithful Stronghold, an Indian convert who attended the Glorievale School in New Zealand. And the documentary alleged that members of the Indian commune had experienced, and you're going to be shocked to hear this, a bunch more sexual abuse. Many of the women who moved there had been strongly coerced to do so, making it human trafficking as well. New Zealand police confirmed they had received a formal letter about the allegations, and I fully expect they will do approximately nothing going forward. According to human rights lawyer Deborah Manning, this new compound was even more off the grid than Gloryville. Children born there lacked birth certificates, other identifying documents. The women's passports were confiscated, making it very hard for them to fucking leave. Since 2024, even more investigations into the cold have been ongoing, including one about parents silencing babies and young kids by covering their mouths and noses. Something talked to them by child development expert, Satan's one true Neville Cooper. Other ongoing developments included the fallout from the earlier employment court rulings that found its male and female members were employees, not volunteers. One of the elements of that fallout was that the Bank of New Zealand have been pursuing the closure of Gloria Vale's commercial bank accounts, citing their human rights policy in light of the employment court rulings. A court of appeal decision in December of 2024 allowed BNZ to terminate the banking relationship, leaving the community to have to find a new bank. That's a strong message. Oh, man, how would they ever find a new bank to store their millions? That'll teach them. The cult is also dealing with a multi-million dollar class action suit on behalf of a group of former members. There are currently four lead plaintiffs, Anna Courage, Pearl Valor, Gideon Benjamin, and Hosea Courage. The defendants are Gloria Vale's current senior leadership, including the overseen shepherd, seven other senior leaders, and the entire Christian Church Community Trust, the entity behind Gloria Vale's operations. Another defendant is the New Zealand government. Five different agencies, including Ministries of Social Development, Business Innovation, and employment and education, plus the Department of Internal Affairs and Oranga Tamariki for not doing nearly enough to stop the cult. Fucking good. The defendants alleged that they were deliberately entrapped in slavery from birth and that Gloria Vale's founding documents were essentially instruments of slavery that deprived members of free will, control of assets and remuneration for their labor. The leaders absolute control created the master slave relationship they claimed and multiple government agencies have done almost nothing to stop it. The initial four plaintiffs are each seeking damages of $2.5 million each, with the final figure for the entire class action expected to be far higher. The case is currently in the high court and is in the early complex stages of litigation. A finding in favor of the plaintiffs on the slavery claim would be a landmark ruling in New Zealand and would likely bankrupt the community's operations. If you do pray, please pray for that to happen. Simultaneously, nine former members have lodged a claim with the Employment Relations Authority for lost wages and compensation totaling $5.2 million. The cult's legal team is appealing some of the earlier employment rulings, though, so that may delay the final decision. Will all that be enough to shut down the cult if the plaintiffs win? They still have about 550, 600 members somewhere in there. If things get really bad, you know, what's to stop many of them from spinning off into a new group? A group that will grow and grow through more generations of more abused kids? Will these fuckers ever go away? Or will some form of Neville Cooper's creation always limp forward? When, if ever, will the creepy handjobs likely finally end? Good job, soldier. You made it back. Barely. Gloria Vale. What a mess. Won the New Zealand judicial system. I gotta say, does not seem well equipped at all to clean up. Right? I mean, just like in America. Still waiting on all those Epstein files to be released. Department of Justice, you disgusting pedophile enabling treasonous fucks. Over 500 pages. Completely redacted? Really? Every word? Go fuck yourselves, you pieces of shit. the Illuminati might just be real and run in the US and New Zealand right now God I'm so sick of this shit right it's exhausting why do so many governments seem to go out of their way to protect sexual predators how sad that GloriaVale still exists why is it still there there's nothing wholesome about patriarchal exploitation putting on some old timey clothes not using profanity doesn't make your life better doing everything in your power to carve out the most independence for yourself and the freedom that comes with that you know to make your own choices often does What a shitty dream, comrade Neville, sold his flock. Come live with me and all your needs will always be provided for, provided that you do exactly what I say always. That kind of power and control over people is just never a good thing. The fucking strongman game never really works out in the long run. Too much power, not good for people, especially the kind of people who crave too much power. People who want to make all the decisions. Neville might not have been a creep when everything began. I'm sure he was a fucking prick. But he might have actually thought he was helping to teach people about sex early on. But then by the time he was throwing porno pool parties with naked old men and teen girls, clearly he was in this mostly for the fucking. To sexually consume the flesh of teen girls and the occasional son's dick. So gross. And such a clear example of why no religious group should ever be allowed to not have strong governmental oversight. If it was up to me, special laws would apply to anyone who wants to homeschool their kids or live in a multifamily compound that includes a school equivalent. Government agents would be able to show up unannounced, right, and be able to interview kids separate from adults. Employment agents would be able to talk to the employees of nonprofits and make sure they're not being exploited, right, show up at any time. And stripping the tax-free status of organizations found guilty, you know, should be on the table as a punitive measure. Religious freedom, it just too often turns into abuse. So sick of that shit too. Also, for anyone wanting to live in some kind of intentional living utopian community, if you have to go through with it, well, at least never, ever give them all your savings of your assets. Give yourself some kind of escape option if shit doesn't work out. Being part of a community where you are taken care of but never get to accrue any assets is tantamount to just begging to be abused or exploited in some way at some point. It's just a matter of time. If a community sounds too good to be true, it probably is. or it will become too good to be true down the road. Right? Life is hard. And the world is full of greedy, power-hungry, dirty dick motherfuckers. Always has been, probably always will be, so do the best to protect yourself. Not set yourself up for failure. And also, don't ever jerk off your kid to make their balls feel better. Time for today's takeaways. Time to stop. Top five takeaways. Number one, the community that would become Gloria Vale was founded in 1969 by Australian evangelist Neville Cooper, who later changed his name to Hopeful Christian, even though he wasn't. It was originally located in the Canterbury region of New Zealand near the town of Cust, where it was known as the Springbank Christian Community, and that was where all the abuse began. Special Neville's early sexual abuse included pressuring couples into letting him watch them have sex, masturbating his son, touching wives while her husband's laid in bed with Gloria. He was found guilty and sentenced to five years in prison in 1995 on three charges of indecent assault against a young woman in the community and would serve less than a year. Simultaneously, the community relocated to a large isolated property, which they named Gloriaville. It was believed by some that the culture of abuse did not continue after Neville's imprisonment, but it sure did. Number two, while there's no total count of how many have experienced abuse at the hands of Gloriaville members, we can safely assume that it's at least in the hundreds. It's a possibly still ongoing police investigation. Operation Matthias has identified over 138 potential victims across decades of historical abuse. And there have to be many more thought to possibly have been abused who still have not come forward. Number three, Gloryville, not only sexually abusive, it's also exploitive or exploitative. I guess either one works. Work at Gloryville is organized along strict gender lines with women confined to domestic work like cooking, cleaning and child rearing. men working in the lucrative community businesses. This unpaid labor generates immense wealth, especially when they don't get fucking taxed. Such bullshit. You know, makes so much money for the community's leadership while members possess no personal property or financial independence, making it so hard for members to leave. Number four, Phil Cooper and Lilia Tarawa, Neville's son and granddaughter, were both able to get out of the cult with their families, though it was not easy. They had to face instability as people without any formal education or training, no access to savings and no housing. Luckily, former members have established a network to support those leaving. You don't have to be in a cult to have a community. And you can check out GloriaValeLevers.org.nz if you're curious. And number five, new info. In 2017, Lilia Tarawa gave her TEDx talk. Titled, I grew up in a cult. It was heaven and hell. At TEDx Christchurch. It's accumulated millions of views since its release. 12 million as of this writing listen to a little less listen to a little bit here less than two minutes see how sexual and physical abuse is far from the only kind of horrible shit perpetrated against women and girls when you put a bunch of pathetic old misogynistic patriarchal cunts in charge of shit listen to the pain in Lillia's voice as she recounts something happening to her that no one you know would ever be criminally charged with the kind of thing that no one will ever be criminally charged with but is so damaging. Music was one of my favorite hobbies. We were taught music in the first year of school so by the time I was 17 I was competent on five musical instruments. Think for a moment about a time you achieved something really important. Remember how it felt? Remember how proud you were in the moment? It probably felt similar to the day I received my first school report It was the most exciting day of my life as a 6 year old I'd scored excellent grades and even better personal comments from my school teacher So you can imagine my excitement when my grandfather took the school report and read it to the 500 members of my community at dinner. And then he said, we don't want women like you. My stomach dropped. I turned bright red. There was air being sucked in my nostrils, but I couldn't breathe. See, my school teacher had written in my report a sentence that read, Lillia demonstrates leadership skills which could be useful for when she's older. And my grandfather humiliated me for hours and this would become a common theme throughout my life. Afterward I left that dining room a changed six-year-old girl and what changed was my belief I was worth anything more than what he said I was. Man, fuck any guy still in 2026 who still thinks that women are inferior to men. And if you want to point to your religion as justification for that belief, then fuck you and fuck your religion. Those guys always seem to think that they're so strong but they never ever are. They're fucking weak, pathetic cunts always. Insecure, scared, cruel, stupid little boys wearing grown men's bodies, and I fucking hate them. Fuck the Neville Coopers of this world. You want to be a tough, strong guy? Be kind. Have empathy. Have compassion. Takes a lot more strength to have that than just, you know, dismissive, self-righteous cruelty. Hey, Lucifina, she wouldn't fuck Neville Cooper with his favorite son's dick. Time suck. Top five takeaways. The glory of ill cult, hell disguised as heaven, has been sucked. oof man still out there thank you to the Bad Magic Productions team for helping making time suck thanks to Queen of Bad Magic Lindsay Cummins thanks to Logan Keith helping to publish this episode designing merch for the store at badmagicproductions.com thanks to Sophie Evans for just kicking ass with the research on this one thanks to the All Seen Eyes moderating the Cult of the Curious private Facebook page the Mod Squad keeping Discord fun and everyone over the Time Suck and Bad Magic subreddits, and now let's head over to this week's Time Sucker Updates. Updates? Get your Time Sucker Updates! First up from an anonymous and probably already dead now, Meshack, who wrote in with the alarming subject line of, I did not follow your advice and accidentally slammed my hard dick in a door. Oh God, so much blood. Please send ambulance. That's great. Hello, Lord of the Rings. this suck. I hope my subject line caught your attention. Oh, it did. Don't worry, I'm alright, and have been very cautious about doors. Recent time, suck listener. I've been listening to your other catalogs for about three or four years. Thank you. Writing in response to your most recent podcast, I'm recording a few weeks out now, trying to get some space, episode 490, How to Fail at Murder and Life in regard to your idiot to the internet segment at the end of the show. The mental gymnastics that people have had to go through to come to those conclusions is maddening. I come from a tiger family because I lived in poverty. My parents wanted their kids to never struggle the way they did. Let me tell you that I had a one by six fashioned into a paddle with holes drilled through it for dealing punishment. Regularly had things thrown at me, smacked for talking out of turn, even got into a fist fight with my dad at 18 when he drunkenly swung at me. I blocked it, which enraged him more. Afterwards, told both my parents I was leaving for good. I have been no contact with my parents since then. Took homelessness and run-ins with the law on the chin to avoid calling my parents for help. If a parent yelling at their child over failing grades signs their death warrant, then my God to my parents deserved the absolute worst of the worst. Living in a Tiger family didn't have a term for it until now was hard. I was their golden child with a 4.0 GPA, never spoke out of turn. The one running with the law I had before I turned 18 was for a curfew violation that resulted in me being grounded for six months. This resulted in me actively seeking to disappoint my parents, light substance abuse with opioids and amphetamines until a friend overdosed and it scared me away from it. skipping classes, happily handing over an unsatisfactory report card, knowing I was going to get the shipping out of me, and ultimately dropping out and forfeiting a full-ride scholarship to the University of Utah. Damn. I had so much anger, so much hatred, that I killed my parents. JK. I just realized the best revenge was spite rather than ruin my own life. So I cut out contact, went homeless for about three months after turning 18, enlisted in the Army, served my contract honorably, but had problems with my knees so I couldn't continue. Now I'm working a very well-paying job, married to my beautiful wife, using my GI Bill to major in aviation science and meteorology, finishing my junior year, finishing, and living with the fact that they don't get to bask in my success. I don't think I'll ever have a relationship with my parents again. Last time I visited them, we got into a heated debate about flat earth, that I mentioned they're flat earthers, and climate change, as if it's not literally what my degree is in. But honestly, I'm not upset that I cut off the relationship. Why didn't Jennifer just do that? It could have been so much healthier to just cut off contact, go do her own thing. Not sorry for the length of the email. Three out of five stars wouldn't change a thing. Hail Lucifina. Praise be to good boy Bojangles. If this makes it on the podcast, please leave my name out as I maintain a strict work slash personal life separation. And I suggest you to my coworkers where I prefer they don't get any hint of my past life. Anonymous. Oh, man, Anonymous, thank you for sharing this powerful message. Hail Nimrod to you for doing what you had to do to escape a very toxic familial situation and improve your life. Parental relationships are so important, but not necessary to have a happy, fulfilling life. I've had a pretty rocky, rocky relationship with both my parents over my life. Different points. Nothing like what you endured. Nothing at all. But I used to get so jealous of other people's parents. Parents who seem to really listen to their kids, take a truly active and interested role in their lives. Maybe she seemed a little more stable and, I don't know, good with advice. And then eventually I just let go of my hope for that. And honestly, I'm just happier without that expectation hanging over my head anymore. I mean, I still do have relationships with my parents, but not like a lot of people. None of us get to choose who our parents are. Some of us get lucky. Some of us don't. Some of us choose to wallow in the misfortune, not having the parents we want. some of us focus on other aspects of our lives, choose our own families, move on, right? And that is the healthiest choice. Jennifer Pan chose over and over again to be weak, to not make the hard choice, to take the easy road, even though she still hated it, and that was on her. And look at where it got her, and look at where your choice got you, Anonymous. Yeah, well fucking done. And now another Jennifer Pan-related message from a meat sack named Matthew, who wrote it with a subject line of parallels to the Jennifer Pan story. Greetings, Master Sucker. Long time first, uh, or, yeah, long time first time and all that jazz. After listening to episode 490, I felt compelled to write in as I saw some similarities in my life with that of Jennifer's time as a young adult. Minus the whole putting a hit on your parents stuff. I wanted to let other meat sacks know that even if you fuck up royally, you still have a chance of success if you work hard and cut the bullshit. I grew up as one of those gifted kids that excelled at every subject in school with very little effort. My folks were not as strict as the pans, but they did have high expectations of me, and they pushed me to be my best self. I was a decent athlete, learned how to play a few instruments, was an all-around okay kid. But because I never really had to try, I had a terrible work ethic, and that became apparent once I went to college. I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life, but I ended up enrolling in chemical engineering, only took a semester of terrible grades to realize I was in over my head, so I switched to computer science. another idiotic move not realizing that path also required a lot of self-regulation and work ethic that I did not have couple that with the excessive partying and smoking a ton of weed and I was on the road to failure three years uh in barely hanging on I was kicked out of school due to failing grades and I was devastated I was a gifted one in the family huge emphasis on the quotes around gifted I wasn't supposed to fail and here's where things start feeling a lot like part of Jennifer's story. I had a part-time job that covered a lot of expenses, but I had to ask my folks for money most months to keep afloat. So how was I going to keep the cash flow coming in? I lied to my folks and to my girlfriend, said I enrolled in another semester and was going to graduate. For months, I would leave the apartment I shared with my girlfriend, saying I was going to class. Then I'd camp out in my car near campus, waste my time away. I kept this lie up, even telling everybody that I was graduating and had ordered my gown and everything. Cut to a week before graduation ceremony, I eventually was cornered and had to confess. I was met with shock, dismay, disappointment, and anger. My girlfriend, the absolute saint of a woman she is, did not leave me, but I wouldn't have been surprised if she had. Unsurprisingly, I was cut off financially by my folks. Things were rocky, to say the least. Instead of blaming others, fabricating more lies, or calling a hit on my family for insurance money, I immediately got a job. This seemed like it could be turned into a career. Big nationwide company with a huge network. Okay, pay for the time, good benefits. The work was physically demanding and dangerous with long hours, often 70 plus per week, and I spent a lot of time out of town at one point for nearly a year straight. Life was tough at this point, but it was my fault. But I stuck with it partially out of atonement to my girlfriend and family, but largely to prove to myself that I could commit and be responsible. I did this for four years before I had saved up enough money to finish school. I took an aptitude test to figure out what degree would actually appeal to me and got to it all the while picking up local overnight jobs at work so I wouldn't have to go on a leave of absence. I eventually graduated but didn't walk because I felt like I didn't deserve it. After getting my degree I realized I had some leverage and options, spoke to my boss about other opportunities in the company, turned out a position opened up in another local branch that favored having a degree in natural sciences. I immediately jumped on it and while I wasn't getting as many hours the hourly pay was better and the work was more fulfilling and far less back-breaking. Over the next six years, I thrived in that position, married my girlfriend, who I can never give enough praise for being such a patient, loving, and badass woman to, and we eventually bought a house together. I'm now the manager of the branch, and I've been for nearly four years, which has given my wife the opportunity to leave her job and pursue a more fulfilling career. I went from being a constantly lying, dumpster fire leech of a person to living comfortably in an amazing relationship where we tackle life together with support, care, and most importantly, unyielding honesty. Also, my relationship with my parents has never been better. The self-inflicted smack in the face taught me that I had to be accountable and work my ass off and I'm a better person for it. Apologize for the long email, but as I listened to that episode, it got my mind racing on how horribly my life could have turned out if I hadn't learned from my mistakes. And I hope that if you read this, it can serve as a message to others that even if you fuck up, living honestly and working hard can lead to positive results. I love your podcast. I've gotten several others hooked. Please keep up the great work and never stop sucking. Your fan, Matthew. Oh, man, thank you, Matt. My God, man. I don't know you, but I'm so fucking proud of you. Like, you're an inspiration, dude. Seriously. You know, you chose to take actual personal accountability, responsibility for your fuck-ups. You made hard changes. You tough shit out for years, and now look at where it all got you. I wish I could hug you. Right? Someone needed to hear this message today. I can feel it, and I hope they follow your badass example. Now go eat your girlfriend's pussy until she tells you that you're free to leave, pig. She deserves it. Do not deny her what she has rightfully earned. Now for one more great message. From a great sack, William Schmidt, who wrote in with the subject line of, are we still all team meat sack in reality? Dear Master Mushmouth Lord of the Suffers, I'm writing in because I'm done observing from the bushes, but not like a creepy Italian, and speaking about something that annoys and concerns me. and has unfortunately begun to seep into the cult. More and more in today's world, I see the attempt to gatekeep things due to political beliefs or voting records. Things like, you vote a Democrat, you shouldn't own guns. Or, you vote a Republican, you can't listen to this artist, or watch this actor. This is nonsensical bullshit people make up and say. I've always chuckled and brushed it off until I stumbled upon a comment on one of the splinter cult groups on Facebook. An individual commented that they couldn't believe that anybody who voted for Red could listen to Time Suck or anything bad magic. In my opinion, isn't that the exact opposite of the point of being curious? Also, people aren't allowed to potentially have changes in beliefs or regret some of their decisions. Maybe that strong, right-leaning individual listening to the time slot decides that maybe in the middle is where they align. They learn to be curious, to do their own research, search for the answers they want, not the ones shoved on our faces. Gatekeeping or trying to politically align everything only creates division and not diversity. Seeing that bothered me because I've fallen in love with this community, A place where political, personal, and any other differences don't matter as much, where who you are as a person and your character is more important. And now there's people trying to gatekeep bad magic because somebody voted a certain way? I'm sorry, but in my eyes, that is not teammates hack. That is not embracing the cult of the curious. That is bullshit. A bit about me. I personally was turned on at times like at a very difficult crossroads in my life. It was 2021. I had unexpectedly lost my father at the beginning of the year. My fiance's best friend and our primary child care provider ghosted us, and I was forced to transfer to a new department at work where I didn't know anyone. Needless to say, it all worked out. Two of my new coworkers introduced me to the suck. I've been a listener ever since. The episodes helped me get through my shifts. The updates give me inspiration, including the drive to finally go to therapy for my own mental health. And the community as a whole makes me want to be a better human. Put differences aside and care about each other as humans. Sorry about the length and girth of this email, but to be honest, you liked it. three out of five stars wouldn't change a thing uh this happens to make it on an episode please give a shout out to mr ben and michael for turning me on to the suck uh thanks for the uh pronunciation guide on the different spelling of michael uh your cheesy wisconsin sack will schmidt p.s the bombings in the milk wars short suck occurred less than 45 minute drive from my door plymouth the chief's chapel of the world is where our county fair is held crazy shit man thank you so much for this message will uh and hell yeah shout out to mr ben and michael yeah i love this message uh so much and i feel like i finally have the words to to address this issue one's political affiliation just like one's religious affiliation rarely actually defines who somebody truly is right like let me talk about some examples i have a lot of friends and family who voted for trump all three times and I love them and they are great people. And I say that as somebody who truly hates Donald Trump. And listen, when I say that, that is not an endorsement of the Democratic Party. I have frustration with both. But there is only one politician I hate more than any other living person on earth with the possible exception of Vladimir Putin, and it is Trump. Because I truly think he is an evil, draft-dodging, fake, Christian, grifting, nipple-baby, racist, misogynistic, divisive, hate-mongering, pedophile fuck. So how could I possibly be friends with people who support him? Because they don't agree with every shitty thing he does. Who does agree with every single thing any politician or any political party does? Nobody in my orbit. I'm sure they're out there, but they're fucking rare, right? That is not common. No fucking way. Same with religion. You know, it's not a secret. I don't like religion. I don't like any religion. I would just as soon as go to church as I would sign up to have my fucking balls kicked 20 times by the NFL's best punter. And yet, some of my best friends are religious. Some of my best friends are Christian. Some of the people I love the most in this world are Christian. How could that be? Because being Christian doesn't mean you are of the Gloria Vale variety of Christian any more than being Republican means you're one of the fucking Proud Boys. You know, some member of the inner circle of MAGA hell. And regarding being curious, you are exactly right. You said gatekeeping or trying to politically align everything only creates division, not diversity. And that ethos is why I do bite my tongue more often than not, despite the shit I've said, about political things. I try not to push away people who don't think like I do. For everyone who wants nothing to do with anyone who voted for Trump, what the fuck are you doing? Let me ask you this. is the party you support just totally free from sin are you do you not think about how the only reason we have trump right now is because neither major party has done nearly enough to improve life for the average citizen in far too long people in general only vote for somebody branding themselves as a disruptor in mass if the status quo has not been fucking working and it hasn't been and finally even if somebody is a terrible person because they believe in some organizations or a person's worst ideals shouldn't truly curious people want to welcome them even more into hearing their ideology I mean if you truly if you're serious if you want to change the world if you want to make it what you think is better what fucking good is it going to do to just eternally preach to the choir and get nothing but high fives from people who you know already agree with you fucking nothing. So thank you, Will. That shit pisses me off, too. Thank you for being the kind of person I'm so proud to have listened to these long-ass episodes. You give me hope. Stay curious, truly curious. Christians, non-Christians, Democrats, Republicans, all others. Even if you fucking can't get enough of Trump, you're still fucking welcome here, right? I can handle you liking him if you can handle me fucking hating him. I'm not perfect, and neither are any of you. So let's fuck up, let's fuck around, and find out together. Hail Nimrod. Next time, suckers. I needed that. We all did. Well, thank you for listening to another Bad Magic Productions podcast. Be sure and rate and review Time Suck if you haven't already. Don't jerk off your son this week. If he can't jerk himself off, he'll just have to learn to live with some sore-ass balls. Keep on sucking. If you want to learn more about this cult, there are a number of recent documentaries and docuseries you can watch. Here is the trailer for the 2024 docuseries Escaping Utopia. It is currently on Amazon Prime, Apple TV in some countries from what I can tell, possibly elsewhere, other platforms, and just incredibly well done. My perception of the outside world was that it was a very dangerous, destitute, evil place. In Glorivale, it's protected. We are the chosen ones. We are the people of God. We were told, this is what we're protecting you from. we've taken out of this evil, wicked world. Cross this bridge and you've lost your soul. And that's the psychological prison. One, two, everybody's smiling. You don't join a cult. You get the cruciate. You had to see the New Zealand West Coast to believe it. Dense bush, steep, steep mountains. No one for bloody miles. The women are there to serve the men, work, have babies. Looking back, knowing what I know, yes, we were slaves. If you control the wife, you control the husband. If you control both of them, you've got the whole family. The physical abuse, the psychological, sexual, the emotional, the spiritual abuse. I don't want those sort of things to add to my kids. She's not safe here. This is the opportunity in history to get it right. I want a baking chair. Let's go to foreign space. You're going to school. You've got to go down five. You don't have a family anymore! These are people coming out like refugees. All this abuse, just so much of it makes me feel sad. I'm going to hide the camera now. If no one does anything, these people aren't ever going to get free. Remember those kids and go and do the right thing. To actually escape physically just feels impossible. but to escape psychologically it actually is impossible and that is escaping utopia again I will admit I did not watch it I believe Scopey did but it just looks really good and reviews are really good and that is Neville Cooper's real legacy right let's all hope that if his spirit exists somewhere out there it is being ruthlessly fucking tortured right