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#coercive-control
2 articles
Knutby: The Swedish Pentecostal Cult and the Nanny Made to Kill
Knutby is a small village in the countryside of Uppland, north of Stockholm, the kind of quiet Swedish place where little is expected to happen. But within it, over the late 1990s and early 2000s, a small Pentecostal free-church congregation, the Knutby Filadelfia, had turned inward and grown strange. Its members had come to believe that one of their own leaders, a woman named Åsa Waldau, was the 'Bride of Christ' — a divine figure destined to marry Jesus at his return — and the congregation had developed the isolating, all-controlling dynamics of a cult, in which spiritual authority and personal power were dangerously fused. At the center of the drama was a charismatic and manipulative pastor, Helge Fossmo, who exercised profound influence over the community and, in particular, over a vulnerable young woman named Sara Svensson, who worked as a nanny for his family and whom he had drawn into a secret relationship. In January 2004, that machinery of manipulation produced murder. Sara Svensson, acting on the direction of Fossmo — who had manipulated her, in part through anonymous text messages purporting to carry divine authority — shot and killed Fossmo's wife, Alexandra, and gravely wounded a neighbor, the husband of another woman with whom Fossmo was involved. The crime, when it was unraveled, revealed not the act of a lone disturbed woman but the terrible product of a coercive religious community and a pastor who had turned a follower into a weapon. This is the story of Knutby, of the murder it produced, and of how a closed congregation became a machine for making an ordinary person kill.
NXIVM: The Self-Help Company That Was a Coercive Cult
From the outside, NXIVM looked like an ambitious self-improvement business. Founded in the late 1990s near Albany, New York, it sold expensive courses in 'Executive Success Programs' — personal and professional development, communication, overcoming one's limitations — and it attracted an impressive roster of members, including successful professionals, wealthy heiresses to the Seagram fortune, and well-known Hollywood actresses. At its center was Keith Raniere, whom his followers revered as a uniquely brilliant and ethical man, calling him 'Vanguard' and treating his teachings as a path to a better self and a better world. But behind the seminars and the self-help vocabulary, NXIVM was something very different: a coercive, hierarchical group built around total devotion to Raniere, in which members were financially exploited, psychologically manipulated, and bound ever more tightly to his control. And within it, Raniere built a secret inner circle even darker than the rest — a clandestine sorority called DOS, in which women were recruited under false pretenses, made to hand over blackmail 'collateral' to guarantee their obedience, subjected to extreme dieting and sexual coercion, and branded in the skin with a symbol that, unknown to them, incorporated Raniere's own initials. When survivors escaped and spoke out, and journalists exposed the branding, the whole structure collapsed. Raniere was arrested, tried, and convicted of racketeering, forced labor, and sex trafficking, and sentenced to 120 years in prison. This is the story of how a company that promised self-improvement became an instrument of exploitation, and of the women whose courage brought it down.
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