Will Act For Followers

What happens when failed artists become cult leaders?

In today’s post,

• Cults in The Wild R.I.P Paul Morantz, the anti-cult attorney.

• The Big Post On cult leaders who use their followers to live out their artistic dreams.   

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R.I.P Paul Morantz

Sometimes…I wish that I didn’t know anything about cults. - Paul Morantz

Back in March I recorded a series on the Synanon cult and its leader, Charles Deidrich. In one of the group’s earliest acts of violence they placed a rattlesnake in the mailbox of an attorney who’d recently bested them in court. Paul Morantz was that attorney and his win against Synanon would be the start of his career fighting exploitative cults (including The Church of Scientology). Deidrich ordered a hit against Morantz thinking it would shift interest away from his community, but it had the opposite effect. Morantz, who began his career fighting for the disenfranchised, used the media frenzy to publicly indict Deidrich and situate himself as the attorney to call when you needed to fight well armed cults. Paul Morantz passed away this October and left behind a fascinating legacy.

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Image Source

Will Act For Followers

The above image is from the cult classic Rosemary’s Baby, and the extra on the far left has gone on to create his own horrifying legacy. Michel, Andreas, Reyji, and The Teacher are aliases Jaime Gomez has gone by over the past few decades. In addition to his role as an extra in a film about a satanic cult, Gomez has gained prominence as a leader of the Buddhafield cult. While members of Buddhafield were brought together to by their love of exercise and a desire to escape the negativity of the outside world, eccentric and sexually violent demands tore the group apart. Director Will Allen documented his experiences working closely with Gomez in Holy Hell, which has maintained strong interest since its 2016 release. I wrote a bit about my thoughts on the documentary in last week’s Weekly Cult Roundup. 

Since then I have been thinking about why Gomez and other failed artists who went on to found cults.  In Gomez’s case, he over exaggerated some aspects of his acting career and obscured others. Besides his brief appearance in Rosemary’s Baby, his only other features were in low budget pornos that he denied existed. After luring followers into a pro-yoga, anti-drug, and sex-free community, he betrayed their trust and used them to live out his fantasies. While the second half of the documentary has generated much discussion because of Gomez’s sexually exploitative nature, it also focuses on his heightened creative output. Under his tenure Gomez had followers build a theater for a grueling ballet performance they never executed and starred in “spiritual” films and music videos that were only shown to other followers.

But Gomez is not the only cult leader that used his followers to live out his failed artistic dreams.