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A few days ago Lizzo she was accused of sexual harassment by three former dancers of her corps de ballet. The complaint soon sparked outrage online, but one element in particular made the case even more bleak: it appears that star dance team leader Shirlene Quigley was trying to convert the dancers to her cult, while also subjecting them to religious pressure and inappropriate discussion of sexual topics. This won’t be the first time a global celebrity has been involved in a cult or linked to people who promote it: Tom Cruise and John Travolta are part of Scientology, Madonna follows the Kabbalah and the great monotheistic religions are only part of the variegated religious panorama of the States. Of more than 331 million inhabitants, 450,000 churches are shared by 224 million believers. Besides the Illuminati, Freemasonry and Black Magic, here are 5 stories of celebrities who started or were part of a cult.
Jared Leto
In 2019 Jared Leto and his band i Thirty-second to Mars, created a real cult. The group invited fans who call themselves Echelon – on a retreat to Croatia for a three-day paid music festival with yoga classes and film screenings. The group tweeted photos of Leto leading hundreds of people, also dressed in white, with the caption “Yes, it’s a cult #MarsIsland“partly as a provocative response to all those journalists who criticized the group’s extremist fandom.
Michelle Pfeiffer
Before taking on the role of Elvira Hancock in Scarface, Michelle Pfeiffer was also a young actress battling the Hollywood jungle. She was about twenty when she briefly got confused in one breatharian sect (from English breatharianism), whose supporters claimed to be able to survive without food and feed just “breathing”. In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, the actress revealed that she met a couple of personal trainers in Los Angeles: “They worked with weights and put people on diets. Their specialty was vegetarianism. They were very authoritarian. I didn’t live with them, but I was there often and they always told me that I should come again. I had to pay for all the time that I was with them, so it was very expensive financially. They believed that humans in their highest state were Breatharians.». However, shortly after Pfeiffer met her first husband, actor Peter Horton, the latter starred in a new film about Mooniesa nickname for the followers of the Unification Church of Rev. Sun Myung Moon in South Korea. When she helped research the cult, she realized that she herself was a member of the cult.
Winona Ryder
In 1978, at the age of 7, Winona Ryder moved to Rainbow Municipality in California with his parents, both writers, and younger brother. They were joined by seven more families trying to live on 300 acres of land. Without electricity or television, Ryder became an avid reader and soon developed an interest in acting. The hobby turned into a career a few years later when her family moved to Los Angeles and Winona Ryder got into casting in earnest. While admitting that her childhood was anything but ordinary, the actress fondly recalled those years in various interviews:The place where we lived was 380 acres of redwoods. This was beautiful»he said to Parade.
Joaquin Phoenix
Phoenix’s parents met while their mother was hitchhiking in California. The couple, along with their children River, Rain, Liberty, and Summer, soon joined the group. Children of Godnow known as Family International, a cult promoting spiritual reform founded in 1968 in Huntington Beach, California by David Brandt Berg. Phoenix spent her childhood traveling around South America as a missionary to the Children of God, but around 1974 things got very problematic due to a form of gospel preaching called flirtatious fishingin which women worship, or “fisherwomen”convinced the men, or “fish”to join the community and make a charitable donation through sexual intimacy. This practice has been a major source of financial income and peak membership, given that over ten thousand children have been born at these meetings over the years. Phoenix and his family returned to the United States in 1978 and settled in Florida.
Allison Mack
In 2018, the actress Smallville she was accused of recruiting women into sexual slavery on behalf of Keith Raniere, and brand them with the initials “KR” as a rite of passage. Mack had been part of the psychosect for many years. NXIVMofficially registered as a self-help course company founded by the leader Raniere himself, an entrepreneur also accused of sexual harassment, pedophilia, racketeering, involvement in prostitution, child prostitution, forced labor exploitation, extortion, obstruction of justice, distribution of child pornography.