Manhattan Cult Story: My Unbelievable True Story of Sex, Crimes, Chaos, and Survival

They took an oath of absolute secrecy and lived in a covert world in plain sight.

“It didn’t look like a cult. I was relieved. Nobody was in black robes chanting. No kids running around in rags with faraway gazes. Just a bunch of young professionals––hedge funders, doctors, entrepreneurs, lawyers––in a secret loft in Tribeca. They looked, I realized, a lot like me,” says Spencer Schneider. “I had no way to possibly know they were brainwashed––hollowed out souls––under the clutches of a leader every bit as twisted and commanding as Jim Jones.”

When Schneider was a twenty-nine-year-old Manhattan corporate lawyer, an acquaintance invited him to a secret meeting of an “esoteric school for inner development,” known to its students simply as “School.” Suspicious yet curious, he went. At first he found support, community, and meaning among other highly educated New Yorkers. But soon, he found himself trapped in one of the nation’s most secretive and abusive cults. In the name of personal development, hundreds endured decades of sexual and physical abuse, forced labor, arranged marriages, swindled savings and inheritances, and systematic terrorizing. Some of them broke the law. All for their charismatic and demented leader Sharon Gans, a washed-up actress who claimed to be on a spiritual par with Buddha.

This is Schneider’s story of how he got entangled in School, why he stayed, and how––impossibly––he got out after twenty-three years. It’s a cautionary tale about the power of group psychology and how anyone can be radicalized. It’s also a story of surviving traumatic abuse and ultimately finding a path to healing.

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