The man who saves people from the world’s most dangerous cults

‘Deprogrammer’ Rick Ross shares the lessons learnt from a career spent reuniting families with loved ones lost to destructive sects

The Telegraph, UK/February 15, 2026

By Sanjiv Bhattacharya

“I don’t want my name in this,” says Grace*, a 40-something mother from central California. “Or Zak’s*. Actually, even the cult, can you change that too? Because they have their bots. They’ll come after us.”

It was 2023 and Zak was 18, a bright teenager starting at an Ivy League college. But it was his first time living away from home, and the pressure was beginning to take its toll. So he joined a yoga class to help him relax. It was affiliated to a bearded Indian guru from Mysore, India, in the Maharishi mould. And within a couple of months, Zak had changed. He was uncommunicative and withdrawn. Then he started talking about dropping out of college and living in an ashram in India.

“I started researching this group, and cults, and that’s how I learnt about Rick Ross,” says Grace. “I had never heard of deprogramming before.”

For five consecutive days, 10 hours a day, Ross, a slight then-70-year-old, sat with Zak and his parents in their living room. “He became part of our family for a while,” says Grace. “He brought a lot of research and videos about the guru’s life that we all watched together. And he told these long stories that went off on all these tangents. I was like, ‘Where’s he going with this? This isn’t going to work, I know my son…’ But he brought it back every time. He was showing how this guru was actually a grifter who wanted power and riches. And he kept saying, ‘Would a good person do this?’ By day three, my son was nodding.”

Talking about this three years later, Grace cries. That breakthrough was everything. Zak is back on track at medical school, he’s engaged, and the whole episode is in the past. They never bring it up. But she knows that they almost lost him.

“I can’t say enough about Rick,” she says. “He showed us that deprogramming isn’t a light switch; it’s more of a path that you follow. It takes time. Zak was in this deep, dark hole where we could see him but he really couldn’t see us. And Rick saved his life.”

I’ve come to visit Ross in Tucson, Arizona, and we’re heading back to his flat after lunch at his favourite Mexican spot. “You’re the first reporter I’ve invited to my home,” he says. “I’m usually careful, because of all the death threats.”

On social media, death threats may be par for the course. But Ross is the most famous cult deprogrammer and investigator in the country with the most cults on earth. Since 1982, he’s deprogrammed more than 500 people, testified in court cases in 13 states, and lectured at more than 30 colleges and universities. He’s appeared on CNN, Fox News and the BBC’s Panorama; participated in more than 20 documentaries; and been an all-round thorn in the side of everyone from the Branch Davidians of Waco, Texas, to the Nxivm sex cult. It’s not tweets that he’s worried about.

“The justice department contacted me when Rama Behera put me on a kill list,” he says, referring to an Indian cult leader who had set up in Wisconsin in the 1970s. More recently, he was in the crosshairs of Keith Raniere, the gnomish tyrant of Nxivm, who famously had women branded with his initials and whose high-ranking members included the Smallville actress Allison Mack. Ross spent more than a decade fighting lawsuits brought against him by Raniere and Nxivm for publicly criticising their practices, with the claims against Ross ultimately being dismissed. In 2018, Ross testified at Raniere’s trial for crimes including sex trafficking and possession of child abuse images.

“He’s locked up in Tucson, you know,” he says. Raniere was sentenced to 120 years. “I didn’t want his followers knowing that I lived here too, because I thought the women of the group might kill for him – they were becoming like Manson followers. He could weaponise them from jail.”

So I’ll be circumspect. Ross lives in central Tucson in a generic housing complex – cult deprogramming clearly hasn’t made him rich. It has, however, sent him around the world, and as a result his 850sq-ft home resembles a curiosity shop; every wall is covered in trinkets and mementoes from his travels. “Over 200 masks!” he says proudly. It’s an odd home, but then Ross is an unusual character: an American original in many ways. In pictures, he cuts a menacing figure in black, and in emails he’s stern and clipped, but at home he’s a folksy and garrulous man of 73, a gay divorcee who lives alone with his chihuahua, Peanut. We settle into the two armchairs that face the TV, and for the next few hours he unspools story after story about his tangles with some of the most vengeful and sociopathic organisations of our time.

“I’ve been lucky,” he grins. “No one has actually made an attempt on my life. And even though I’ve been sued five times, I’ve never paid a dollar in fees. I go and appeal to law firms for help every time. Nxivm spent $5m in legal fees to take me down and my defence was worth $2m. So I’m rich if you count pro-bono legal work.”

‘My advice to parents is take away their phones’

We live in cultish times. In 2018, the International Cultic Studies Association estimated that there were 10,000 cults in the US, twice the number there were in 2003, and there’s no reason to believe that this trend hasn’t continued. Ross estimates that in the UK there are reportedly 500-2,000 groups. The long decline of religion left a vacuum of purpose and belonging, then technology fragmented us further, and cults have flourished in this habitat, preying on a disillusioned public with promises of special knowledge, chosen membership and a new dawn. Cult dynamics are at play in so much of what ails us – white supremacist groups and Islamic extremists. When the mainstream feels broken, the fringe swoops in.

“I thought the internet was going to help,” Ross laughs. He launched his first website – now culteducation.com, a free library of clippings about destructive groups – in 1996 in the belief that getting the information out there would weaken them. Instead, emerging leaders use the internet to learn how to start their own groups. “They copy each other,” he says. Nxivm was inspired in part by Scientology (both groups use the label “suppressive persons” to describe individuals that obstruct your progress, which subsequently requires that they be removed through “disconnection”), which Ross describes as “the most advanced system to dominate the human mind that I’ve ever seen”.

Cults no longer need to take to the streets to recruit. The infrastructure of social media and YouTube, alongside online payment systems such as PayPal, allows them to indoctrinate online and secure a stable revenue stream. “I call it the online compound,” Ross says. “Because cults need to isolate people and keep them in a bubble of peer reinforcement, and that’s what these algorithms do. That’s why my first advice to parents is to take away the phone. If you’re concerned about your child, then you need to control their access to the internet.”

And cults are adaptive, as the late psychologist Margaret Singer observed, in Cults in Our Midst: “Cult leaders are opportunists who… adapt their pitch to what will appeal at a given moment.” That’s why no one ever joins a cult – they join a vegan community, a meditation class, a martial arts club. One group that recently captured the zeitgeist is the Shekinah Church in Los Angeles, the “TikTok cult”, as seen in the Netflix documentary Dancing for the Devil. An investigation into alleged sexual abuse and forced labour is ongoing. Another is Eligio Bishop, or “Natureboy”, a messianic back-to-nature guru from Atlanta (Ross appeared as an expert witness in his 2024 trial). Bishop harnessed the interest in black identity politics post-George Floyd by specifically targeting black followers in particular, and he tapped into a vogue for remote working, by moving his compound from one Airbnb location to the next. “He had 35,000 followers on Twitter,” says Ross. “That’s where he raised money. And he would tell people to come to his location in Costa Rica, then Mexico, then Panama.” Bishop is now serving life without parole for false imprisonment and rape.

What’s notable about Bishop, says Ross, is that at its outer reaches, his group was harmless. “This is very common – benign on the outside, destructive cult at the core. It was the same with Bikram yoga. If all you’re doing is following on social media or going to a yoga class, you’re not a ‘pawn’ as Margaret Singer would say,” he says. “People use the word ‘cult’ way too loosely.”

He cites three long-accepted criteria for a destructive cult, as laid out by psychiatrist Robert Lifton in 1981. “One: a totalitarian leader who’s beyond accountability. Two: that leader must be using coercive persuasion and thought reform techniques to gain undue influence. [Lifton also wrote the primer on thought reform.] And three: the effect must be harmful. That’s why it doesn’t help to say that Swifties [Taylor Swift fans] are a cult – they’re obviously benign.”

‘You can use a cult’s own literature to indict’

A typical deprogramming begins like any intervention, with luring the subject out on some pretext – Grace, for instance, told her son that they were celebrating her birthday. But this can be difficult. In 2019, Ross worked on a case in which a young woman who was struggling with depression joined a Catholic-based support group that moved her to a facility in Florida, where all communication was cut off.

“They took her phone, her passport, everything,” says her ex-boyfriend, Derek*. “It took me a month to figure out where she even was. So I contacted Rick, and for six weeks he helped me figure out who they were, through all their shell companies. And we saw that they had people working for free, like indentured servants, while a few people had mansions. In the end, we said if they didn’t release her at 5pm, we would hold a press conference and expose them. Then once she was out, Rick did the intervention.”

Everyone who realises they’ve been lured into a deprogramming will resist somehow. Some fight – Ross has been smacked in the face so hard it ruptured his eardrum. Others try to run. With Zak, his mother begged him: “I clung on to his legs and just broke down, ‘We love you, this will help us all, please stay for just one day…’”

But sometimes they break free. In the early 2000s, a family in the Cotswolds hired Ross to get their daughter out of the Kabbalah Centre, where Madonna and Guy Ritchie, her husband at the time, were members. But the moment the daughter saw the situation, she took off and it was four hours before her brother got her back.

“Her father was the problem – he would argue with her and berate her,” says Ross. “The first thing families need to do is stop yelling, because they’ll just shut down and go back to the group, which will rebut everything you said. These groups always say, ‘Your family won’t listen to you, they don’t really love you.’ So withhold your criticism. Instead you should say, ‘I really care about you, I love you, and what you say carries weight and meaning for me.’”

Ross’s first strategy in a deprogramming is to use evidence and reason. He brings binders of documents and court records – originals rather than copies, where possible. For both Zak and Derek’s ex-girlfriend, Cassie*, it was his hard proof that ultimately convinced them to turn the corner, and he got there slowly, through his long, looping stories. “It’s a way of gently making a point I want you to understand,” Ross says. “I don’t want to push it at you, so I come at it sideways. You can listen because it’s about somebody else. Then it may hit you – ‘Hey, that sounds like what happened to me’.”

Sometimes, however, there just isn’t the time. In the Kabbalah case, the daughter, Jessica*, allowed just one hour, so Ross let it rip. “I showed her documentation that the founder, Philip Berg, had lied about his PhD. And I asked, ‘Would a good person do this?’ And she ‘snapped’. That’s what we call it in deprogramming – there’s a book, Snapping, by a couple of friends of mine [Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman]. Her way of communicating changed at once. It was like a containing wall broke and she was no longer so resolute.”

It’s reassuring to know that facts can still be persuasive in this “post-truth” era. But what happens when they aren’t? With some cults, science and reason simply have no purchase. Facts are outgunned by “alternative facts”. Misinformation rules.

“I once did a successful intervention in Colorado with a man who was in a UFO cult,” says Ross. “We’re talking lizard people who zip up and all kinds of crazy conspiracies. So I went through the group’s literature, and said, ‘I don’t care about the lizard people or the FBI cover-up. I just want to know, does this empower the leader or does it empower you?’ And everything we read empowered the leader. So then the question became ‘Why is the leader constantly being lifted up but not the members?’ That was a successful intervention. You can use the group’s own literature to indict.”

‘Children have a predator in their pocket’

It’s a sobering thought that as malign groups proliferate, our principal line of defence consists of Ross and Peanut, in this remote Arizona flat. It’s David and Goliath, only Goliath is winning and David is close to retirement. But worse still, there’s no successor. No deputy or apprentice, no graduate in deprogramming from the Rick Ross Cult Academy. Ross is the last of the Mohicans.

“It’s true, deprogramming is a dying profession,” he says. “Don’t ask me why, I have a 70 per cent success rate.”

He’s currently on retainer for a case with a Chinese family who are entangled in a romantic/financial swindle. But such gigs are rare; they started drying up during Donald Trump’s first term. Last year, Ross did only one deprogramming. These days he mostly works as an expert court witness.

Ross partly blames his rival, Steve Hassan, the US’s other brand-name cult deprogrammer. An ex-“Moonie” – member of the Unification Church – turned psychologist, Hassan is the more upmarket choice: he has a PhD, a book deal at Simon & Schuster and he charges a lot more than Ross, partly because he employs a team in his interventions. Ross believes that this has created the perception that deprogramming is only for the rich. Ross, however, is more the working man’s deprogrammer – he’s an autodidact who didn’t go to college (“Though I’ve lectured at an Ivy League college”), he self-published his book, and he works alone, charging a more affordable $1,250 (£910) per day, with a $3,750 retainer. There’s no love lost between them. And they often compete for the same cases. Grace, for instance, went to Hassan first about Zak because “he had the education”, but then found him lacking in compassion and overeager for money.

“I’m worried what will happen when Rick retires,” says Grace. “Who’s going to carry it on? Because kids are getting preyed on right now, through their phones. They’ve got a predator in their pocket.”

One reason why deprogramming is struggling, even in this age of cults, may be because its chequered history continues to cast a pall. In the 1980s, when Ross started out, pioneers such as Ted Patrick were known to physically abduct cult members and aggressively undo the group’s brainwashing using cult-like tactics of isolation, manipulation and coercion.

“We saw it as the lesser of two evils,” Ross explains. But critics charged that deprogrammers were no better than cults, and possibly worse. And Ross had to face this charge head-on, in a landmark court case that almost ruined him.

He had become a deprogrammer rather by accident. The work began in his 20s, after he learnt that his grandmother was being harassed at her nursing home by a Jews For Jesus-type group that had infiltrated as nurses’ aides. Eager to make his family proud, he took on the group and won, which led to a position helping Jewish prisoners in Arizona and also a seat on a national Jewish committee on cults for the Union for Reform Judaism in New York. Between prisoners and cult members, he chose to devote himself to the latter.

It was a rough-and-tumble business back then. Cults had a grip of the American imagination after Manson and Jonestown, and deprogrammers had emerged as a muscular counterweight, battling for young minds in a digestible and compelling contest. Ross was riding high. He appeared on all the big TV talk shows, including Oprah, Ricki Lake and Dr Phil. The FBI sought his advice on Waco in 1993 (where a 51-day siege of David Koresh and his Branch Davidian cult resulted in the deaths of more than 80 people); he was an on-scene analyst. But then came Jason Scott.

Scott’s mother, Kathy Tonkin, had engaged Ross to deprogramme her teenage son. She had brought him into the Life Tabernacle Church in Washington and was now trying to get him out.

“I remember it perfectly,” Scott says today, now in his 50s. “Mom called and said, ‘Come over for a meal and get your stuff from your bedroom.’ But when I got there, Rick had four guys zip-tie my legs and arms and drag me out on my chest into a van, where they sat on my back for a four-hour drive. I had bruises all over my body. Then when we got to the hotel, they cuffed me spreadeagled to the bed for three days. It was humiliating.”

After tricking Ross, Scott made a dramatic escape and had the deprogrammer and his associates charged with kidnapping. And Ross found himself up against not just Scott, but also Scientology, which had stepped in to assist, seeing an opportunity to take the notorious cult-critic down. Ross beat the criminal charge, but he was ordered, after six years of litigation, to pay Scott around $2m in damages. And his world collapsed. He filed for bankruptcy and had to move back in with his mother. He was approaching 45.

Incredibly, Ross got out from under it. “Scott left the group because of reasons we’d talked about in the intervention,” he says. “Sometimes seeds are planted, even if the intervention is unsuccessful. And he sold me the judgment for a few thousand dollars, if I agreed to deprogramme his then-wife, who was still in the group. I did talk to her, but it was unsuccessful.”

Scott remembers it differently. “I settled because I wasn’t going to get any money anyway,” he says. “And I didn’t need deprogramming. I would have left on my own. I already had one foot out the door.”

Scott is friendly with Ross now; bygones are bygones. But Scott is still haunted by the kidnapping, and life has been difficult ever since – a mess of family conflicts and burnt bridges that has left him homeless, an especially painful outcome given that his family, which has cut him off, owns a major restaurant chain.

“All deprogramming does is destroy families,” Scott says, bitterly. “The problem isn’t the cults; it’s the family. So before you deprogramme your kids, ask yourself, what kind of environment did you provide, growing up? Because kids with strong families don’t have problems with cults. They feel safe going back to Mom and Dad and asking the tough questions. Never lose that connection.”

‘There is no type that joins a cult’

It’s dark outside. Ross and I have been talking for hours. But there’s something else he needs to say, he’s been circling it all afternoon.

“When I was bankrupt and depressed,” he says, “I fell into an abusive, controlling relationship. That’s when John* came into my life.”

It’s the great irony of his story: a physician-heal-thyself scenario of epic proportion. And he looks pained as he talks about it. “I mean, I literally wrote the book. There are two chapters in Cults Inside Out about abusive controlling relationships. I’ve done many interventions to get people out of relationships like that. Many.”

And yet, while Ross was warning against these techniques of mind control and exploitation, he was bound by them – the very shackles he was warning about. And he couldn’t see it.

They met online, “which is typical of how people get recruited into cults”, and Ross couldn’t believe his luck. John was younger than him and smart, too, working on a master’s in business.

An abusive relationship is very similar to a cult. “It’s a bait and switch,” he says. “You get love-bombed to lure you in, and then the indoctrination starts, the gaslighting. You depend on them to make decisions. They become your gatekeeper. You get isolated. Take Tina Turner – she’s not a weak, helpless woman. But [her abusive ex-husband] Ike got hold of her at a vulnerable time in her life. And that’s what happened with me and John. He chose every vacation, every restaurant, every friend we socialised with. He controlled our phones.”

Once the dam breaks, like one of his deprogrammings, he can’t stop. It took many years before they broke up, and Ross felt scarred. But he had learnt an important lesson. Something he didn’t know about cults when he started in the 1980s.

“We used to think there was a type,” he says. “When people asked, ‘What kind of a person joins a cult?’ you would hear things like, ‘Oh, well-meaning people, or idealistic people, who want to change the world.’ But let me tell you, there’s no type. I’ve deprogrammed medical doctors with Ivy League degrees. Brilliant people who, if I reveal their names, they’ll never practise again. The only thing that they have in common is this: they are going through a difficult time in their lives. 

“This is what I’ve learnt through my work. Bad things can happen to good people through no fault of their own. And the predatory nature of destructive cults is a pernicious evil in our world, wreaking havoc in the lives of innocent people. It often simply boils down to bad luck – bumping into a predator while experiencing a bad patch in life.”

*Names have been changed

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