00:00:00
This is exactly right. on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Just listen. We don't care where you hear it. Joy is essential and it's also elusive.
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But now there's a new and exciting way to start your journey toward a more joyful existence.
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Joy 101. It's a new podcast hosted by me, Hoda Kotb. If you're craving inspiration to maximize your joy,
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tune into these candid, uplifting, and moving on-air chats. Open your free iHeartRadio app.
00:00:58
Search Joy 101 and listen now. Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb is presented by CVS. You know the famous author Roald Dahl.
00:01:08
He thought up Willy Wonka and the BFG. But did you know he was a spy? Neither did I.
00:01:14
You can hear all about his wildlife story in the podcast, The Secret World of Roald Dahl.
00:01:19
All episodes are out now. Was this before he wrote his stories? It must have been.
00:01:24
What? Okay, I don't think that's true. I'm telling you, the guy was a spy. Binge all 10 episodes of The Secret World of Roald Dahl.
00:01:31
Now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello.
00:01:55
And welcome. To My Favorite Murder. That's Georgia Hardstark. That's Karen Kilgariff.
00:02:01
And it is our, today, when we record this, it's our Halloween. It's our Halloween.
00:02:09
And it's kind of overcast outside and there's all these crows in my neighborhood.
00:02:12
It feels so spooky. That have never been there before. They just showed up. And they're holding little knives like that famous crow in Canada.
00:02:21
Canuck. Wasn't that his name? I think so. I remember that. One of the great Nick Terry videos.
00:02:29
That's right. How's your Halloween going? Do you have a lot of candy or did you not do that?
00:02:34
You mean to have I eaten a ton of candy? Yes, fine. Yes, I have. I was just wondering if you just didn't get any
00:02:39
just for that reason alone. Yes, I've eaten eight K-days just today alone. Right?
00:02:45
It's the easiest thing in the world to do. The combo bag I got was Hershey's Plain,
00:02:51
Reese's Cups, Almond Joy, and Kit Kat, which seems like a good cross section. It hits. Only one miss.
00:02:59
Because who cares about a chocolate bar, right? Right. Although I care about all of it so deeply, I wish I didn't.
00:03:06
But it is the funniest thing where I've lived here now three years. No one's ever come to my door ever.
00:03:12
And I still was like, but just in case. Well, I was just telling you that our new neighbors told us,
00:03:19
because this is a Halloween street where people like bus in to fucking Halloween to trick or treat here.
00:03:24
And you can tell because the people who have like gone all out with their lawns and stuff are unbelievable.
00:03:31
And I even heard there's like a band, like a live spooky band playing on one corner.
00:03:36
Like it's crazy. It's going to be crazy. My Chemical Romance. There's going to be a concert.
00:03:41
But our neighbor said one year he did a clicker counter and they counted 800 trick-or-treaters.
00:03:47
So I am not prepared for 800 trick-or-treaters. You're going to have to go to the last minute store
00:03:56
and get one of those like gigantic plastic bags of like dum-dums. You know what I mean?
00:04:02
Yeah. Something that nobody wants just so I can pass them out. This will be your learning year if you're new.
00:04:09
Definitely. Yeah. Hopefully they'll give us a break. They don't start immediately egging your house.
00:04:17
I don't know. We don't even have a pumpkin. Like we have some like really dumb like paper decorations, you know,
00:04:25
like paper decorations on a stick. We didn't even carve a pumpkin. Here's my advice.
00:04:31
That's better because the second you hand out that last, well, payday, you've already told us.
00:04:37
Payday. You hand out that last payday, you pull down all those paper decorations,
00:04:42
turn out all the lights, head into the basement, the California basement. Done. I'm ready.
00:04:49
Right? These days I've been going to bed at like seven o'clock. So if these little kids think that I'm passing out candy later than that,
00:04:56
they got another thing coming. They're like, our bedtime's at 7.30, ladies. Ding dong, ding dong.
00:05:01
Very exciting true crime news. Yeah. There's a couple pieces going on right now.
00:05:07
It's really exciting. Do you want to go? We should talk about the Delphi murders that I covered in episode 235,
00:05:15
which is a case I've just been constantly obsessed with because it's the murder of two young girls
00:05:20
in Indiana, Abby Williams and Libby Germain. And they have audio and video footage
00:05:27
of the alleged killer. And it's been like five years and they haven't been able to make her an arrest.
00:05:33
So it's been so frustrating and almost seems impossible that they couldn't make an arrest.
00:05:38
Finally, someone's been arrested. A man, like a local man has been arrested and he absolutely looks like the guy in the video.
00:05:46
It looks like the sketch that the witnesses saw. So it's really exciting. I hope this is him.
00:05:52
I hope he can be brought to justice. It would have to look like the person in the video though So that kind of a given I just want to not to argue but only to do the thing that like just to be the fit for the fairness factor
00:06:06
I did see people online. So this is about as alleged as it gets, but they were talking about the person that was arrested
00:06:12
lived close to the bridge. Okay. All right. So, you know, that could be Reddit chat,
00:06:19
but it's very exciting that at least a cold case Those little girls, like the pictures, people keep sending us the breaking news article.
00:06:29
And they're babies. They're little babies. They're just really little girls. Yeah.
00:06:33
It's such a tragic story. I really hope that this guy can be brought to justice.
00:06:39
And the town of Delphi itself has been, you know, basically suspended and horrified for five years.
00:06:47
It's just like video and audio. How is it not? It defies logic that they haven't been able to catch someone based on that.
00:06:56
And the little girls took the audio and video themselves. And it's almost like they were trying to help catch their killer.
00:07:02
And it hasn't. Well, and they did. They did in the long run. And they did. Hopefully.
00:07:06
I mean, if it all turns out. Yeah. They did. That work and that forethought and that smartness actually worked.
00:07:14
Yeah. You want to give them that credit because... And you can do that by arresting someone based on what they were able to capture.
00:07:21
So it's very exciting. It's really cool. That was one where I remember at the end you telling that story.
00:07:28
And I was just like, yeah, those are the ones. I mean, I think that's how a lot of people feel about true crime.
00:07:33
It's like, I don't want to know that. Yeah. Because then you're just sitting there.
00:07:37
I think anyone who listened to that story, people who love true crime, those are the ones that stick with you.
00:07:43
And then you're just like... Totally. Will anything ever happen? And then there's movement.
00:07:48
And that's, it's amazing. Same thing with, I don't know if you heard about this,
00:07:53
the lady in the dunes. No, this is the first you're telling me. This is the first I've heard about it.
00:07:58
Please tell me. This is so exciting. So essentially they used the same kind of DNA,
00:08:03
I don't know, tracking. They use that same thing that they used for Golden State Killer.
00:08:08
And 48 years later, this is from boston.com, written by Daya Lynn Dwyer. 48 years later,
00:08:14
they have her name. She's identified as Ruth Marie Terry of Tennessee. Wow. Yes.
00:08:22
And do they know any information about her, what she was doing there? It's just breaking right now.
00:08:27
This article says she was 37 years old when she was murdered. She had ties to California, Massachusetts, and Michigan.
00:08:34
The cool thing is authorities, it says in this article, authorities vowed during Monday's press conference
00:08:40
that the step of identifying Terry is just the beginning of the ongoing work in the case.
00:08:44
pledging that their mission to identify and bring to justice, her killer is now redoubled.
00:08:50
Yeah. I forgot about these details. Her hands were severed and her head was almost cut off.
00:08:57
Yeah. So dark. They absolutely need to identify who would do that to another human being for sure.
00:09:05
Totally. Well, it's great that she got her name back. That's always a huge step in the right direction.
00:09:10
I mean, that's kind of eerie two in a day. I mean, two in like a, I guess it was, would be a matter of a week or something, but two huge cold cases.
00:09:19
Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Finally getting a little movement on, on them. That is great. I love to hear it.
00:09:25
Makes me so happy. Very nice. Speaking of anxiety, I've got a book. Oh yeah. I'm reading. That's just kind of, it's called Anxiety RX and it's by this doctor
00:09:37
named Russell Kennedy, who created this like new way. He has anxiety. He's had it his whole life.
00:09:46
And he, I don't know, he's just giving me this new way to look at my own anxiety and to look at
00:09:51
what anxiety is and how it's more this alarm in the body and that our brain picks up on and just
00:09:58
runs with. I don't know. It's just a really great book. And I highly recommend it for people who
00:10:02
want to understand their anxiety a little more and in that way are able to help themselves.
00:10:07
Anxiety Rx by Russell Kennedy, MD. Cool. Let's see. Should we do a Exactly Right highlight?
00:10:14
Sure. This week, comedian Emily Heller, one of the greats, is Bridger's guest on I Said No Gifts.
00:10:21
If you've ever seen Emily do stand-up or if you like stand-up, you have to watch Emily Heller.
00:10:26
She's truly hilarious and you might know her because two years ago at the Emmys,
00:10:31
she brought a purse that said Getty Images on it and basically like had the copyright Getty Images logo on her purse.
00:10:41
Yeah. And she kind of got a little pickup for that, but she's a hilarious person.
00:10:45
I love that. Yeah. She's so funny. She's a great writer. And then on Lady to Lady this week,
00:10:51
Banana Boy, Kurt Brunner joins the ladies. So be sure to check that out. Kurt is a lovely person
00:10:56
and very, very funny. Who also has a special out. It's called Perfectly Stupid. And truly,
00:11:01
Kurt is one of my favorite stand-ups along with Emily Heller, but truly so brilliant. Like such a
00:11:09
hilarious performer. So go watch that. Also, we have a seasonal twist on a classic merch design
00:11:16
over at the My Favorite Murder Store. We have a new fucking hooray t-shirt design that's basically
00:11:22
in Christmas lights. So if you want to swear on the holidays, get over there and get your
00:11:27
fucking new fucking hooray shirt. Yeah. And do, if you want to get your, all your holiday gifts at the My Favorite Murder store,
00:11:34
make sure you order by December 8th to guarantee delivery on time. And that's at myfavoritemurder.com in our store.
00:11:42
All kinds of good gifts over there. There's some good holiday merch coming up. Some like very pretty ornaments,
00:11:49
you know, stuff that like, if you know someone likes the podcast, throw them a sticker.
00:11:54
Sure Stocking stuffers pins We have lots of pins and mugs and tumblers Really good mugs Yeah And what are those Koozies Everyone loves a koozie You love a koozie in winter It funny Love it
00:12:06
My sister sent me just, she walked down the row of kids from her class who were lining up for the Halloween parade
00:12:14
at her school today. Oh, no. And I'm telling you, some of the classics just never go out of style.
00:12:20
There was a little girl who was so perfectly dressed like Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz.
00:12:24
I was like, your mother handmade you that dress. It was so cute. Just a full-on Pikachu.
00:12:31
Oh. So many cute little kids. They're so excited. Like this is the children's holiday.
00:12:38
It is. This is the greatest holiday, I think. That's one that everyone, except for people who believe Satan is real,
00:12:44
can get behind and enjoy and have fun with. I'd say the top two children's holidays
00:12:49
are Halloween and Yom Kippur. Wouldn't you say that? Yom Kippur is a strong. When I was a kid and Yom Kippur rolled around, man, oh man.
00:12:58
Oh, you and your sister just screaming all the time. Yeah, we'd wake up at 5 a.m.
00:13:02
and start yelling, it's Yom Kippur! And wake up, run downstairs in our little pajamas.
00:13:10
I'm Anna Navarro. And on my new podcast, Bleep with Anna Navarro, I'm talking to the people closest to the biggest issues
00:13:17
happening in your community and around the world. Because I know deep down inside right now,
00:13:22
we are all cursing and asking what the bleep is going on. Every week I'm breaking down the
00:13:28
biggest issues happening in our communities and around the world. I'm talking to people
00:13:33
like Julie K. Brown, who broke the explosive story on Jeffrey Epstein in 2018. The Justice
00:13:38
Department, through we counted four presidential administrations, failed these victims. Listen to
00:13:45
Bleep with Adam Navarro on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:13:50
you know the famous author Roald Dahl he thought up Willy Wonka and the BFG but did you know he was a spy
00:13:57
neither did I you can hear all about his wildlife story in the podcast The Secret World of Roald Dahl
00:14:04
all episodes are out now was this before he wrote his stories it must have been what? okay I don't think that's true
00:14:11
I'm telling you I was a spy binge all 10 episodes of The Secret World of Roald Dahl
00:14:16
now on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts Before NXIVM, Nancy Solzman wanted to help people.
00:14:25
Being able to help somebody, it's probably the biggest motivator of my entire life.
00:14:29
She trained in something called neuro-linguistic programming. People loved our training.
00:14:34
Then, everything changed. Yeah, and they called it a cult. How does a method designed to improve lives end up in a cult?
00:14:42
A knife in the hands of a surgeon is an amazing tool. A knife in the hands of a murderer is a weapon.
00:14:48
Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:14:59
Religion is a fascinating topic. I think every time we end up talking about a cult, something that's been proven to be a cult or whatever,
00:15:08
the arcs of religion and religious fanaticism that kind of arc into the cult-like behavior truly fascinates me.
00:15:17
Yeah. Because if you keep back from that cult dividing line, you can actually have like a spiritual experience
00:15:25
that's very meaningful and guides your life in an important way. Absolutely. But it takes one little twist-a-roo,
00:15:34
one little... Little sprinkle, little sprinkle of something. Sprinkle of something,
00:15:38
and then you're off to the races. And so that's what I'm going to be talking about
00:15:42
in this week's story. And anyone who has seen the HBO series is called The Way Down.
00:15:49
You will know all about this because that's what I'm going to tell you about. It's the story of weight loss guru turned church leader,
00:15:57
some would argue cult leader, but some would argue absolutely not, Gwen Shamblin Lara.
00:16:02
Yes. So the main sources used today were multiple articles from the local News Channel 5 Nashville
00:16:11
investigative journalist, Phil Williams, who I think basically found this story and followed it and made sure it was in the news.
00:16:19
A 2018 CBS News article called How to Identify a Cult, Six Tips from an Expert. And of course, this HBO series that I highly recommend.
00:16:28
It is so fascinating. And there's so much to this story. It's not simple. It's not simple at all, but it's very fascinating.
00:16:37
And you may have already seen pictures of this woman because her hair, you may have heard the Southern Belle saying
00:16:43
of like, you know, the higher the hair, the closer to God type of mentality about people in the South.
00:16:50
This woman takes it to a degree that is hilarious and you can track it over the years. It's pretty
00:16:56
amazing. It's pretty amazing. So let's start at the beginning. Gwendolyn K. Henley was born in 1955
00:17:03
to Dr. and Mrs. Walter Hodges Henley in Memphis, Tennessee. They're members of a conservative
00:17:09
a Christian church. Basically, they're raised, this family's faith is everything to them,
00:17:14
which is very common. You know, people talk about it. And almost all of the quotes that I'm going to
00:17:20
give you are from the way down the HBO docu-series. Okay. Because there's so many people who were ex
00:17:25
members of this, what would end up being eventually a church who talk about this. And they basically
00:17:31
talk about how when they started and when they were first in it, it was the best times of their
00:17:36
lives, which I think is really fascinating. Yeah. And really the thing to think about.
00:17:41
She's raised in a very strong Christian faith. Her father's a general surgeon, so she's also fascinated by medicine and the way the body
00:17:49
works. And so she goes to the University of Tennessee Knoxville and studies dietetics and eventually gets a master degree in nutrition So when we talk about this though a lot of this subject is about weight loss eating disorders extreme dieting
00:18:07
a lot of triggering stuff. So if you have a problem with any of those things, please listen with caution or not at all.
00:18:15
Because, and especially same with watching this series, I was, there's so many things that are built into,
00:18:21
I think women's mindsets, just if you grew up in a certain era where it was just like,
00:18:27
should I read this book just in case? Like that kind of constant shopping for a diet
00:18:33
or shopping for an answer the way we were all raised here in America. I can't get it out of my head. It's totally ingrained in our brains as much as we want to
00:18:43
fight it. And as much as I think every woman should accept and love themselves the way they
00:18:47
are. I can't wrap my own head around doing that because of the media and the way we're brought up.
00:18:55
It's horrible. It's the way we're all raised. And I think obviously, certainly not strictly
00:19:01
adhering to women. It's pretty much any person like over the age of eight in America, it's horrible.
00:19:09
It was bad when I was growing up. But now, especially in the kind of Instagram world we
00:19:14
live in, it's just like, you have to be beautiful, the end. And whatever, quote unquote, beautiful
00:19:19
means to other people, it's always an exterior definition. So you're just left to wait to see
00:19:26
what the judgment is. It's kind of a horrible thing that's very easy to manipulate, I think.
00:19:31
So if that is a problem that you have, don't bother. There's plenty of other ones to listen
00:19:36
to because I definitely felt it when I was watching all this stuff and reading it. It's
00:19:42
so weird. It is triggering. So when Gwen goes away to college, she, like every other human
00:19:49
being on earth, gains the freshman 15. Gwen starts cycling through fad diets to try to lose the
00:19:55
freshman 15 that she gains. But of course, they don't work because they don't work.
00:20:00
They don't work for anyone. So she tries to take a scientific approach. And what she does is she
00:20:07
has a skinny friend and she starts eating with the skinny friend and observing how the skinny
00:20:13
friend eats, which sounds like the most uncomfortable dinner dates of all time. And she basically documents this person's eating habits and then starts mimicking them. And when
00:20:24
she does that, she finds that she loses weight. Now, let me wreck the secret. Literally, the friend
00:20:30
eats less food than she's given. She basically restricts herself at all times. So it's not a secret and it's nothing amazing.
00:20:40
And one kind of ends up building an empire by romanticizing this very plain old concept.
00:20:48
Wow. And also I would argue that this quote unquote skinny friend probably felt very observed when they were eating
00:20:57
and probably was eating less for a reason. We don't know what people do in the privacy of their own homes.
00:21:03
No, also everyone has different metabolism and their hormones work differently in everyone's body.
00:21:09
You can't mimic someone else because you're not in the exact same replica as anyone else.
00:21:14
So what's going to work for one person isn't going to work for everyone. Also, speaking of eating disorders,
00:21:20
that skinny friend could have gone home and thrown up every single thing that she was observed to have been eating.
00:21:26
It doesn't work that way. But if you're looking for an answer and then you do one thing that seemingly gives you that answer, you're going to get real excited that you have somehow discovered a brand new way of doing things.
00:21:38
So Gwen likes that she's made this connection, but she kind of wants to make more of it.
00:21:43
And so she begins associating her weight gain with lust for food, which is one of the seven deadly sins.
00:21:51
And her weight loss, she correlates with her devotion to God. So by 1982, Gwen has graduated.
00:21:59
She's married a man named David, who is planning on being a church leader. They've started a family in Nashville, Tennessee.
00:22:06
And her career in health and nutrition is off to a start. But this is early mid 80s.
00:22:14
So it's a very toxic era of the eternally toxic diet culture in this country. So this is cabbage soup diet.
00:22:23
It's jazzercise. Cocaine. Milk, diet pills. Cocaine is not bad for you. Everything's fat-free.
00:22:32
This is when like, it was like, look, fat-free cookies. And it's like, right, you're just going to gain weight
00:22:37
from the sugar and all the chemicals. Also, Diet Coke was invented in 1982. Oh, wow.
00:22:43
I didn't realize it was that late in the game. So everything at that time in the 80s
00:22:49
was about body judgment, let's call it. Totally. And being as skinny as possible.
00:22:54
that was like, there was no fluctuation in like body types. It was everyone should be skinny, period.
00:23:01
Right. It was like, it was like supermodel skinny. Yeah. That's it. And if you had a butt, like this idea these days,
00:23:08
it literally makes me like well up with happiness and joy for current generations that having a butt is great,
00:23:17
being curvy is great and trendy. What a fucking relief because it was not like that in the 80s whatsoever.
00:23:25
So Gwen starts hosting. This is her idea. She basically, she knows what she wants to look like.
00:23:31
She loses this weight by associating it with her religion. And then she starts recruiting other people to do it basically the way she's done it.
00:23:40
So she starts hosting meetings for like a little weight loss group in her free time.
00:23:45
She advertises at local businesses and in medical offices. and she eventually builds a group of around 12 people
00:23:53
who are mostly women from her church to meet at her house every week. So it's like she is an off-brand Weight Watchers,
00:23:59
essentially. And it freaks. She's not exactly sure how religion configures into this diet equation,
00:24:04
but she knows that it should. And then in 1986, she says that she, quote, prayed to God for wisdom and the scriptures and understanding
00:24:12
started coming in little by little. And soon Gwen constructs the Bible-based weight loss program
00:24:18
that will make her a star. Wow. So she makes it like a religious study to lose weight.
00:24:27
So she starts saying, and this is the simplest way to say it is, she says, in the Bible, Jesus says all food is clean.
00:24:35
Therefore, there's no food that is bad for you, which was revolutionary back then.
00:24:39
This was like, it had to be fat-free, no carb, whatever. There was all kinds of tricks and fads.
00:24:45
She said, there's no food that's bad. You just can only eat when you're hungry and you have to stop when you're full,
00:24:53
which is essentially intuitive eating. And most people know that is the best way, but that would be like, and if we could all do it,
00:25:00
everybody would be thin. Wouldn't that be great? Because that's not the way people do it.
00:25:04
Yeah. Or that's not the way some people do it for whatever reason. So pretty soon Gwen's diet group has gotten so big, they can't fit at her home to meet anymore.
00:25:14
They have to start doing their classes at the church that she goes to. And she starts recording these lessons onto cassette tapes.
00:25:21
And then she sends them around to other churches. and she calls this program the Weigh, W-E-E-I-G-H, Down Workshop.
00:25:31
And so here's what that basically entails. You pay $100, which is $272 in today's money.
00:25:38
Isn't that horrifying? Yeah. It's like almost three times the amount. You get 12 classes that meet weekly
00:25:44
and people share their weight loss progress, their setbacks. And then they watch videotapes of Gwen telling people
00:25:52
only to eat when they're hungry, essentially. But then with Bible verses in it. She talks a lot about basically the feeling of hunger,
00:26:01
that they have to have faith and turn to God when they don't actually feel a biological grumbling in their stomach,
00:26:09
but they feel like eating. That's when they have to go to God and basically start praying and give it over.
00:26:16
Isn't God a little busy for that? Yeah, for every single time you're like, I absolutely will eat that payday.
00:26:22
You're supposed to like hit your knees and beg for help. I can't even text my therapist when I'm having an emergency.
00:26:29
I'm not going to be knocking on God's door every time I want a payday. I mean, God, the ultimate therapist.
00:26:37
Maren, my researcher Maren goes, as not helpful as that sounds, the program takes off.
00:26:43
There's a lot of editorializing. I love it. Like, this is bullshit. Because it's basically saying that we as humans are bad.
00:26:52
Yeah. And that what we do to ourselves are bad, you know, like the body is a temple
00:26:56
and how dare you desecrate the temple. Yeah. Which puts a lot of fucking pressure
00:27:00
on people who are just trying to lose weight. So soon Gwen is holding way down conferences
00:27:06
and she's leading rallies across the country. So essentially because she sent out the tapes
00:27:12
and they make dieting a church activity. There's community, there's people, like everyone's doing it together.
00:27:20
Totally. There's like unity and friendship in it. And it starts to work for people because intuitive eating, if you can do it, works.
00:27:28
Yeah. That's the natural state. But eating is also a coping mechanism like exercising or drugs or anything else.
00:27:34
So oftentimes we misuse it. So essentially, she goes around and she videotapes these rallies and she has people getting up
00:27:43
and these women are losing hundreds of pounds, like 100 and 150. And of course, those are the people she highlights because the story that she's building is that everyone's doing unbelievably great, not just regular on this diet.
00:27:58
Well, it does make sense. And it's so evil to make eating and weight loss a moral judgment thing.
00:28:05
Right. You're morally bad in God's eyes if you eat, which is just like, it's so like insidious.
00:28:14
It is. Put that in someone's head, you know, especially someone who really believes in God.
00:28:19
As they like to say in politics these days, they're saying the quiet part loud. Because all that advertising is basically saying, you're not good enough to buy this purse
00:28:29
because it's the skinny lady's purse, but maybe you can get it anyway. And then you're like, I have to have that purse.
00:28:34
It's that mentality, only they're just saying it, basically. And then everyone's kind of coming together and being like, I'll do it if you do it,
00:28:43
which is really helpful when you're trying to like stay on a program or, you know, do anything
00:28:49
good. If you're looking around and the people around you know, that's what you're doing.
00:28:53
Yeah. Like there's community there and there's maybe support. So literally at these people give their
00:28:59
testimonies about this diet program. They're of course, standing in the front of a church every
00:29:04
time, microphone in hand, gushing to the audience about how Gwen changed their lives and how
00:29:10
appreciative and indebted they feel to her, not only for the weight they've lost, but also it's
00:29:16
all about strengthening their relationship with God. So by 1991, Way Down workshops are being held
00:29:23
in churches throughout the United States and in Europe. And by 1997, there's about a quarter of a
00:29:30
million participants worldwide. Wow. The same year Gwen publishes the book version of her diet,
00:29:36
It's called The Way Down Workshop. And it's an instant hit. Now, what's crazy is in the HBO series, they spell it The Way Down, W-A-Y.
00:29:45
Yeah. And they show old Nashville local news where they're showing like, they're basically about to do a story about her,
00:29:54
but they go to the bookstore and there so many Christian diet books And basically like God will help you lose this weight She wasn the first Yeah At all God that so evil But I also think she
00:30:06
she put a face to it and she was like really, you know, she, especially the 80s, she has the perfect
00:30:11
blonde bob. Yeah. She's really bubbly and smile, huge smile. So she's like really positive.
00:30:18
And she really skinny too, right? She's pretty regular looking in the beginning. In the beginning,
00:30:23
she's like, she looks like anyone you'd see on TV. Well, yes. So yes, very skinny. Okay.
00:30:29
But it's almost like losing weight is an after effect. It's the relationship with God is kind
00:30:35
of what she's focusing on in a way. So when her book comes out, it's an instant hit. She was on
00:30:41
the bestseller list. She did a book tour. She was on Larry King. Like this book hit in a way,
00:30:48
I think because she was the face of it probably. By the year 2000, Gwen's the head of a
00:30:53
multi-million dollar company. Her book has sold a million copies. There are thousands of way down
00:30:58
workshops being held in churches around the world. So especially as a church, kind of a church ordained
00:31:06
activity, it's taken off. Because at the time there were so many of these kind of like Christian
00:31:12
Bible-based diets out there, people started looking at it, you know, with a little bit of suspicion.
00:31:18
And at the pinnacle of this craze, a theologian and writer named Mary Louise Bringle talks about what she calls the cult of thinness and says, quote, dieting has assumed the fervor and proportions of a leading new religion with its own Bible, its own ritual observances, and its own high priestesses and priests.
00:31:41
It's so true. Yeah. What she's talking about is also some foreshadowing. Yeah. So now Gwen is writing the success of her weight loss program all the way to wealth and fame.
00:31:51
Just two years after her book, The Way Down Workshop is published, she makes the leap from weight loss guru to church leader.
00:32:01
So basically, Gwen, her husband, David, and another couple decide they're going to start a new church
00:32:07
called the Remnant Fellowship Church, which is just outside of Nashville, in a pretty well-to-do area called Brentwood, Tennessee.
00:32:18
So in the early days, the Remnant Fellowship Church has about 80 members. Most of them are from Gwen's Way Down workshop.
00:32:25
It's actually a lot of her employees. Some Way Down staffers eventually claimed that they were under enormous pressure
00:32:32
to leave their respective churches and join the Remnant Fellowship. Yeah. Although Gwen has denied this.
00:32:39
And what's really interesting is in the first episode of the Way Down series, they have like footage of a videotape of her in a deposition of some kind.
00:32:50
And they're asking her these questions of like, who is the leader of this church?
00:32:55
And she's like, there are several of us. Like she's trying to kind of say, it isn't me the whole time.
00:33:02
You know, just that's something to keep in mind that there's another side of this.
00:33:06
That's why they, I believe that's why the filmmakers were doing this series is because
00:33:12
they wanted to basically delve into a person that has built this empire and what that person's
00:33:18
really all about. Right. So basically after about two years, of her 90 total employees, 25 of them leave this church.
00:33:28
That's actually kind of a lot. There are multiple discrimination lawsuits filed against Gwen, one of which states that
00:33:35
Weigh Down employees were, quote, never to question Gwen's teachings, and that if they did
00:33:40
not espouse her doctrinal beliefs, they should seek employment elsewhere. All of those lawsuits
00:33:47
eventually end in settlements. So this is the first of what feels like an unending series of
00:33:53
remnant fellowship controversies. In the year 2000, Gwen posts a newsletter that questions the concept
00:33:59
of the Holy Trinity. Now we're going to focus on some Christianity real quick. Basically,
00:34:06
the bedrock doctrine of Christianity, it's that God exists in three parts, the Father,
00:34:12
the OG, the Son, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. And that's basically God on earth in all of us,
00:34:21
making us kind of spiritual beings. That's the thing where when you're like, I don't get the
00:34:26
Holy Spirit part, they're like, it's faith. You have to have faith, essentially, because it's very
00:34:31
high concept. Her saying, like, that's not how we're going to do it is not cool. Blasphemy.
00:34:39
Yes. Especially evangelical Christians are all about exactly what the Bible says. Yeah.
00:34:46
You don't just get to go in and cafeteria your way through it. So religious publications like
00:34:53
Christianity Today and Baptist Press called Gwen's stance heretical. And a Christian broadcast news
00:34:59
piece warns Christians of people like Gwen who would twist such a fundamental part of their
00:35:04
religion. So the fallout's very real, particularly among evangelical Christians. So Remnant Fellowship
00:35:11
Church loses members. Christian bookstores pull Gwen's books. The publishing house that she works
00:35:17
with cancels her next publication. Several churches stop offering the way down courses.
00:35:22
as early as 2001, there's already some Christians accusing the church of being a cult,
00:35:28
which Gwen and the other church leaders flatly deny. Again, Gwen and the Remnant Fellowship
00:35:34
Church have rejected the accusation that they're anything other than a regular Christian church.
00:35:40
So let's discuss the criteria of a cult and everyone can come to their own conclusion. We
00:35:45
talked about these cult criteria a little bit when I did the Um Shinrikyo episode a couple weeks ago.
00:35:52
But there a 2018 CBS News article by a cult expert named Steve Aischel and he listed the warning signs of cults And you can read that article will be in our show notes if you want to read it all at once
00:36:05
His first criteria quote says, be wary of any leader who proclaims himself or herself
00:36:10
as having special powers or special insight. And of course, divinity. So in 2003, that Nashville-based investigative reporter,
00:36:21
Phil Williams, that I told you about at the beginning, He's done some of the most in-depth reporting
00:36:25
on Gwen Shamblin and the Remnant Fellowship. And he straight up asks her if she's a prophet.
00:36:31
And she basically gives this very cagey, uncomfortable answer and says, I don't believe I know what my gift name is.
00:36:41
That's a yes. Yeah, that's when I'm a prophet. I interpret that answer as a yes.
00:36:47
But Remnant members say that Gwen and other church leaders claim she has a direct line to God.
00:36:53
So this is always the thing of like, we're all going to the same church. I can talk to God.
00:36:57
I'll let you know what he says. And the next step is I'm God. Yeah. So there's no denying Gwen is treated
00:37:04
with an incredible amount of respect and authority within the church. And in the documentary,
00:37:09
a former remnant member says, Gwen, quote, gets all her services for free. Someone comes in, does her hair,
00:37:17
her nails for free, the cooking's free, everything's free because it's a service to God, so to speak.
00:37:23
And speaking of her hair, this is her hair in the 90s when she started. Okay. Just a little bob.
00:37:32
Yeah. Regular blonde bob. And this is what it progresses to in, by 2018. Oh my Lord in heaven.
00:37:41
That is the biggest hair I've ever seen in my life. It kind of looks like not about her appearance, but the hair itself looks like drag queen hair
00:37:49
if they were going to do something where they pull something out of their hair. Totally.
00:37:52
There's something hiding in there. There's like a shoe or something. It's literally a foot of hair teased up.
00:37:59
Yeah. It's pretty amazing. But the point of all that is that as the head of this church,
00:38:05
basically everyone's been convinced to give her everything. Yeah. Also, I was just thinking about that idea that in the beginning with like,
00:38:14
just let's assume she had the best intentions of all. And she started this thing.
00:38:19
And there are people who are actually losing weight because they're intuitively eating.
00:38:25
They've kind of used a couple good mind tricks to eat less than they were eating.
00:38:30
Because a lot of the people who are saying they have lost 150 pounds, clearly they were very, very overweight and something clicked with them.
00:38:39
And it actually, this was a system that like actually was effective for that period of time.
00:38:45
Yeah, it worked for some people. And for her, it having been her idea must have been a very powerful sensation.
00:38:55
So she's in there. Her plan is working. It worked for her. Now it's working for all these other people.
00:39:00
And now it is that churn of like, thank you, I love you. Thank you, I love you. And she's touring around to get it.
00:39:07
And so that affects you as two people who have been on the road and have VIP meet and greets.
00:39:14
It affects you. It does, yeah. You get a little surge. You get a little, you know, a little thing from it.
00:39:20
To me, it feels very, like, it just tracks that she would then be like, we need our own church.
00:39:26
We need our own rules. Maybe I'm a prophet. Yeah. Yes. I'm in charge. Jokes aside about her hair.
00:39:33
It's almost like the bigger her hair got. And I think it was the consciousness. And this was like, you have to think late 80s into the 90s.
00:39:41
Like that weird thing of no one was on TV except for famous people. Right. And suddenly she was, she was on the news.
00:39:48
She was being featured in these stories and stuff. So then she has like an awareness of how she looks.
00:39:54
She watches one time, thinks her hair's too flat, starts back combing her hair. Yeah.
00:39:59
You can see it happening. It's like, that's her descent into, with her descent into madness, you know, downward,
00:40:04
her hair goes upward. Yes. In a way. Or yeah, like this is how, like the focus is off for sure.
00:40:12
Yeah. So Steve Eichel, the cult expert also says, quote, typically cults also exploit their members most financially.
00:40:21
Within the group, they'll exploit members financially, psychologically, emotionally, and all too often sexually.
00:40:28
So there's a qualifier for this exploitation of everyone is giving her stuff for free.
00:40:33
Yeah. You know, anything that they, anything she needs or wants, they want to provide for her because she's, you know, the queen basically.
00:40:41
One of the ways where she starts stepping over the line is that she starts encouraging her church congregants,
00:40:50
especially women, to stay in their unhappy marriages. A former remnant member says that Gwen, quote,
00:40:57
has not let any woman divorce their husband ever in that place. And all of us women that had biblical authority,
00:41:05
which basically means they got their husband cheating. So the Bible says, like, if that happens,
00:41:09
then you are allowed to get a divorce. She said they couldn't. So basically she was rewriting those extreme rules.
00:41:18
Also the Remnant Fellowship condemned the use of antidepressants or any psychiatric medication.
00:41:23
And there's one former member who has a story that Gwen encouraged her to go off birth control
00:41:28
after her husband complained to church leaders that he thought it was affecting her libido.
00:41:34
Ooh. So it's just a wild overstep into the private lives and basically counseling people in things that they don't really know what
00:41:44
they're talking about. Totally. So each of these things points to incredibly twisted and
00:41:48
authoritarian control over members' relationships, their bodies, their mental health, and ultimately
00:41:54
their happiness So this church starts its own microeconomy because basically there are people that went there that were financial planners that were realtors There were like mechanics
00:42:05
And so they all start, you know, if you go to the church, then you go to this guy who's the mechanic who's also in the church.
00:42:12
Right. Like getting their hair done, getting Botox, company that does electrical and HVAC work.
00:42:18
And essentially, a tight-knit microeconomy built around any group has two obvious benefits.
00:42:25
for a leader trying to maintain power. One is that it keeps all of your congregants in this bubble.
00:42:30
So you're not going to any outsiders who are saying, hey, what did you just say?
00:42:35
That doesn't make sense. That doesn't line up. That's not good for you. You keep the outsiders out.
00:42:40
So you have professionals that are basically keeping you in line with the church's thoughts.
00:42:46
And it also makes people think twice about leaving the church because if they leave and they're the mechanic everyone goes to,
00:42:53
all of those people will stop talking to them. Oh, shit. They'll lose everything if they leave.
00:42:59
Yeah, that makes sense. Which is another indicator of a cult. Yeah. According to Steve Eichel,
00:43:05
people who wind up involved with dangerous cults often have this idea that, quote,
00:43:09
if you leave the cult, horrible things will happen to you. Just so it doesn't get lost in the shuffle
00:43:15
of all the religious part of what was being built, fatphobia remains central to Gwen's teachings
00:43:21
throughout all of this. She's not only preying on people's vulnerabilities around body image, but positioning herself as the person who can help deliver her followers from what she considers to be a sinful relationship with food.
00:43:35
So in 2000, she's recorded saying that, quote, if you're struggling with your weight, you have good intentions, but you do not have the desire to serve God.
00:43:44
Remember, the pathway to hell is paved with good intentions. So she's basically equating any weight issue with literal damnation.
00:43:51
damnation. So the stakes are going up. A former remnant member once told reporters that she asked
00:43:57
Gwen, quote, when I was 254 pounds, are you telling me that I wasn't a child of God?
00:44:02
And Gwen reportedly told her, quote, that's right. Gwen denies saying that, but other women have
00:44:09
similar stories that back up that claim. Essentially that level of judgment and that level of,
00:44:16
You know, like you were saying, like if you overeat, you're a bad person. You're a less holy person.
00:44:22
Another member said, quote, I asked her if she thought my salvation occurred when I lost 60 pounds.
00:44:28
And she said, yes, I've been a Christian for 25 years. And another defected remnant member says, quote,
00:44:36
if you aren't losing two pounds a week, you're told to fast. And the more weight you lose, the holier you are.
00:44:43
Yay. Yeah, it's a frightening setup. So it's easy to see how this could break a person down, spiritually, mentally, physically.
00:44:50
But this degrading and offensive practice of linking a person's value and their literal holy salvation to a number on a scale also makes the church and Gwen, along with it, undeniably richer.
00:45:03
She is making a ton of money off of this entire idea. Wow. Former Remnant Fellowship members say that they were required to take continuous
00:45:13
weigh-down courses, which the church charged them for. And they had to buy all the related
00:45:19
materials, the weigh-down books, the videos, the workbooks, any related products that the church
00:45:25
sold. And all of that was cash that went straight into Gwen's pocket. So then I wrote,
00:45:31
so what's next for this up-and-coming weight loss-obsessed church? It is so weird to think
00:45:36
of it as an entire church. Yeah. It's not just like a weight loss community. It's like church.
00:45:43
Yeah. So of course it just all ratchets up the longer it goes on and the more kind of autonomy
00:45:49
she has. Gwen is quoted as saying, there's only one choice. If you want to enter through these
00:45:54
doors, you will love authority and direction and redirection. You will love it. As is the case with
00:46:03
many conservative Christian churches, children are expected to obey their parents, wives are
00:46:07
expected to be submissive to their husbands, and worshipers give authority to the church leaders
00:46:13
who, in turn, strengthen their connection to God. But even by evangelical standards,
00:46:20
remnant fellowship is next level when it comes to discipline and authority, and soon serious
00:46:25
allegations of abuse are made against the church. It just makes sense. It's like she's starting
00:46:32
with a big smile on her face, but basically saying you're not good enough if you're not skinny.
00:46:37
And then people entering into that are like, I agree with you. And I'm forced to like take on
00:46:43
this mindset. And the only way I can feel better is to lose all this weight. And then now I have
00:46:50
the mindset. I've proven this mindset is true. And then they can like put it on other people.
00:46:56
But also lose weight by starving yourself because two pounds a week, like that's very
00:47:00
hard to do. And so you're already kind of torturing yourself in a way based on what this
00:47:07
person's telling you to do, but based on what God supposedly through this person is telling you what
00:47:12
to do, like that's, that's torture in a way, starving yourself. Yeah. The amount of control
00:47:18
that these people are, that are having to, they're having to kind of like introduce into their lives,
00:47:24
but it's being controlled by her and then by everybody else. That's like, imagine the peer
00:47:29
pressure there. Yeah, totally. Yeah. Nasty. So a 2007 Associated Press article says, quote,
00:47:37
former members have accused remnant fellowship leaders of condoning beatings with glue sticks
00:47:43
and locking disobedient children in their rooms with only a Bible for company. So I looked this up because I was like, what do you mean glue sticks? Yeah. They mean hot glue gun
00:47:56
sticks that you put in for a hot glue gun. So they're like, 10 inches long. Yeah.
00:48:01
And they're basically made of unmelted glue. Yeah, yeah. It's just a little, hard, long piece of plastic to beat kids with.
00:48:10
Oh, no. Yeah. It's super fucked up. There's church audio circulated where Gwen reportedly, quote,
00:48:18
praises a remnant leader for repeatedly spanking his strong-willed two-year-old daughter.
00:48:24
Horrifying. The church is denied categorically of physical abuse toward children,
00:48:29
but they don't disavow corporal punishment. The Associated Press piece reported that Gwen, quote,
00:48:36
does believe in spankings and has used a wooden spoon on her children. And that, quote, she hadn't advocated glue sticks as punishment,
00:48:44
but didn't think there was anything wrong with it. Fuck that. So this is the problem with absolute power.
00:48:51
Is there still human beings making these decisions? So if Gwen beat her kids, then it's okay for you to beat your kids.
00:48:58
Totally. I hate it. I think Jesus would raise an eyebrow. Yeah. So this leads to the horrifying conclusion
00:49:07
where two Remnant Fellowship Church members, Joseph and Sonia Smith, are convicted and sentenced to life in prison
00:49:14
for the 2003 murder of their eight-year-old son, Joseph. So to be extra clear, there's no official criminal link
00:49:23
that's ever been Joseph Smith Jr.'s death and Remnant Fellowship Church. But during the investigation,
00:49:30
police receive a recording from 2003 that captures a conversation between Sonia Smith and Gwen.
00:49:37
So Sonia Smith, who's the mother, is talking about how she had, quote, locked her unruly son in his room from Friday to Monday.
00:49:45
And afterwards, he began to behave respectfully. Gwen responds to that statement by saying,
00:49:51
that's a miracle. You've got a child going from bizarre to in control. Praise God.
00:49:57
So this mother was like trying to report her extreme kind of discipline and get credit from Gwen.
00:50:06
Yeah, totally. And that, it was like, that's, she's like, sounds good. Not even entertaining the idea
00:50:14
that these people could be not okay or taking it further than they're telling her.
00:50:19
Right. And in fact, Remnant Fellowship never wavers in their support of this couple.
00:50:25
The church takes donations for their legal fees. They dedicate a website to declaring the Smiths innocent.
00:50:31
They peddle a conspiracy theory that former church members are actually behind the, quote, false charges.
00:50:39
And later in 2009, the church even files an appeal on behalf of the Smiths. That appeal is denied.
00:50:46
Before NXIVM, Nancy Salzman wanted to help people. Being able to help somebody, it's probably the biggest motivator of my entire life.
00:50:54
She trained in something called neuro-linguistic programming. People loved our training.
00:50:59
Then, everything changed. Yeah, and they called it a cult. How does a method designed to improve lives end up in a cult?
00:51:07
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Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb is presented by CVS. So what finally starts kind of waking people up
00:52:29
within the Remnant Fellowship Church is Gwen's second marriage. So the woman who historically suggested her congregants
00:52:37
should not under any circumstances divorce their husbands, she divorces her husband.
00:52:42
Shit. She falls in love with a man named Joe Lara, who's a sporty guy from California,
00:52:48
who had a bit of a reputation for letting his girlfriend support his lifestyle, his very luxe lifestyle.
00:52:56
He's a struggling actor who was known for playing Tarzan in a series called The Epic Adventures.
00:53:02
So in 2010, Joe and his on-and-off partner, Natasha, move with their infant daughter to Nashville
00:53:09
so he can pursue a country music career. He doesn't make it in the music biz and his relationship with Natasha eventually falls apart.
00:53:17
But, and Natasha's featured in the HBO documentary and she's a badass. So you probably want to watch it just for her input.
00:53:25
But they break up. Joe starts working as a handyman. And in 2017, he joins Remnant Fellowship
00:53:32
through a networking group. That's when he and Gwen meet and fall in love. Some people have questioned Joe's love for Gwen
00:53:38
or whether it was genuine. No one will ever know the heart of man. But in any case,
00:53:44
he very quickly becomes a prominent member of Remnant Fellowship Church, climbing the ranks to become, quote,
00:53:50
an essential part of the church's leadership team Of course he reaps all the benefits from this He starts appearing in Remnant videos with Gwen is able to record his music in the church studio At this point the church has their own music studio
00:54:07
Wow. So he's just taking advantage and like getting whatever he can out of it. I mean, could be,
00:54:12
they could have been deeply in love, who knows? But it's basically, it benefits him.
00:54:17
Yeah. For sure. And in some ways it feels like his dream of stardom might be coming true.
00:54:23
Right. at the same time, Gwen is softening her messaging on divorce saying at that point that, quote,
00:54:29
there's obviously cases of divorce that God allows as much as he hates it. God hates it. I just imagine her pretending that God said that to her, you know, like, come on.
00:54:43
I imagine her pretending that she fucking knows what quote unquote God is thinking.
00:54:49
Like those are those little things that start to slip in where it's just like you start to take for granted.
00:54:56
Well, Gwen would know what he likes and doesn't like. There was another interview where she starts talking about how God is jealous of us because we can lose weight.
00:55:05
Like that we have these whatever. She says something is like, and the interviewer goes, God is jealous.
00:55:12
Like what, isn't he supposed to not be petty? I don't think so. So Gwen has rationalized her divorce from her husband, David, who she was married to for 40 years.
00:55:25
Holy shit. Uh-huh. David has mostly been in the shadows. He's in the leadership of the church.
00:55:30
But some people attribute the relationship ending to David's possible discomfort or even disapproval with what the church was turning into.
00:55:39
Others think it might be because David himself was overweight. Gwen didn't like how that made her look.
00:55:46
And it wasn't her vision of how remnant church members should look. Ultimately, no one knows but God.
00:55:52
Yeah. There are these videos that they made of the church, and it's like children singing in a choir,
00:55:58
but the little girls have like dark red lipstick on. Oh my God. It's really creepy, but it's like,
00:56:04
there's a lot of like cartwheels and playing in the sun. And it's like, it's always great.
00:56:08
Everyone's always laughing. Yeah. And it's very creepy, very Stepford. So it would make sense that she would want to get rid of like a not hot first husband
00:56:19
and then marry a hot second husband. It's all about image, it sounds like with her.
00:56:25
So of course. So it's reported David doesn't want a divorce. So Gwen has to pay a lot of money and give him a lot of the assets to end the marriage
00:56:36
so she can marry Joe. The divorce is finalized only two months before her second wedding.
00:56:43
The Shamblins divvy up their many assets, which include properties worth a collective $20 million.
00:56:50
Holy shit. Yeah. Man, church is big business. Yeah. Well, because they don't have to fucking pay taxes.
00:56:58
Oh, right. Duh. Oh my God. Eventually, two months later, Joe and Gwen get married in an over-the-top ceremony
00:57:05
on remnant property, of course. So there's an ex-member who describes what life in this church was like.
00:57:12
And they say, quote, this is in the HBO documentary. The leadership has a say in everything you do.
00:57:18
You don't go on a trip anywhere without their permission. You don't have family come visit you without their permission.
00:57:24
You don't go to funerals or weddings of family members without their permission.
00:57:28
You are not alone ever. You're in church services or you're going over to someone's house.
00:57:34
They stay in touch with you all day long. They even control your social media. Damn.
00:57:41
Fuck that. That's not regular church. No. One of the filmmakers of this series, The Way Down, Niall Capello,
00:57:48
talked about the difficulty they had getting former members to open up about their experiences
00:57:53
in the Remnant Fellowship Church because some ex-members were worried that it wasn't a real
00:58:00
documentary, that the whole thing was a ruse, that the producers basically were hired by the
00:58:05
church to dig up dirt for like legal battles and custody cases and stuff like that.
00:58:11
Yeah. Holy shit. Yeah. It's scary. It's scary. And it just speaks to the level, if you're used to a church panel being the ones who
00:58:23
tell you whether or not you can go on vacation, then it seems like all of that, it's all actually
00:58:30
kind of reasonable for them to be that suspicious. Because it's like, I'm sure they've seen much
00:58:35
worse than people going, oh yeah, we're making a documentary. Here, talk into this microphone
00:58:40
and tell me all the bad things you think. Disparage the church to us right now. Yeah,
00:58:45
for sure. For sure. It's like, no, thank you. So there are two more characteristics of cults
00:58:52
that apply here from Steve Eichel's list. One is the qualifier is the group operating under
00:58:58
the intense feeling of pressure from its leaders, which we just talked about, whether it's the
00:59:03
pressure to lose weight, buy books or videos, keep your business and social circle only within the
00:59:09
group, pressure to not get divorced, so on. And he also talks about groups using deceptive means
00:59:15
to attract followers. For example, a diet program that turns into a church. But the rest of that
00:59:22
paragraph says, then once recruited, the church will subject its members to an organized program
00:59:29
of thought reform or what most people refer to as brainwashing. And we've talked about brainwashing
00:59:36
a ton on this show. And one of the very first steps of brainwashing is withholding food.
00:59:44
Yeah. Yeah. That's so true. It's kind of a perfect setup, right? To just kick off,
00:59:51
like exercising is the thing a lot of cults do of like get up and jump up and down for five minutes or whatever where you kind of just burning and you not eating protein They feed you a lot of sugar but they don let you eat anything else And that slowly starts to break you down just from exhaustion
01:00:08
Yeah. So this was a congregation of people who were probably exhausted and underfed most of the time.
01:00:16
Yeah, totally. So they were easily manipulated. Yeah. This is a quote from a Listverse article by a writer named George Edwards.
01:00:23
And it said a cult technique sometimes used in conjunction with sleep deprivation involves instructing members to follow special diets containing low amounts of protein and other important nutrients.
01:00:35
And as a result, cult members always feel tired, rendering them powerless to resist the dictates of the cult ideology.
01:00:42
Yikes. So that kind of begs the question, why would anyone want to join this church separate from the diet part or if they weren't there from the very beginning?
01:00:52
Right. A journalist named Adrienne Horton theorizes about what drew people to the Way Down program and then the Remnant Fellowship Church.
01:01:01
She says, quote, The Way Down workshops promised something many women were desperately craving, a framework for weight loss that felt meaningful, infused with righteousness and familiarity of religion, a community and common purpose beyond the home, a message of control delivered by another woman, thin and perpetually bubbly, an extreme and euphoric manifestation of the diet mantra, nothing tastes as good as being skinny feels.
01:01:29
Remnant Fellowship offered support, the security of rules and black and white thinking,
01:01:33
plus free babysitters, in-house homeschool, legal services, and so on. So they kind of made it as easy as possible
01:01:42
to be on this diet. Yeah, totally. All that support. So this next part I'm going to tell you about
01:01:48
is the spoiler of all spoilers. So if you are planning to watch this series, then don't listen to it.
01:01:54
You have to listen to it, Georgia. Okay. If you want to go watch it, really watch it because it's great. It's really an amazing story. And there's a lot to it. Like,
01:02:03
this is obviously such an oversimplified way to tell this story. There's so much more good stuff.
01:02:08
And it really does contain that subtlety of what people derive from the feeling they get in church
01:02:17
or temple, wherever they go to seek kind of like solace and peace in a truly fucked up world.
01:02:25
and how that gets twisted and how it's hard to catch because it's small and nuanced.
01:02:32
And if you're in it, it seems normal to you. Like the frog sitting in the pot where the water starts boiling.
01:02:39
This happened. So they go to make this documentary, basically, right? And it reminds me of like
01:02:45
the leggings multi-level marketing Netflix series, where it's like, you want to talk to the people
01:02:52
who are doing it of like, hey, talk to me about what Your idea is like, let's really get into this.
01:02:59
So they had been shooting with Gwen Shamblin, her family, the people in the church.
01:03:05
Then on the morning of May 29th, 2021, around 11 a.m., the Reform Fellowship Cessna, they
01:03:14
had their own plane, a small plane, and they were flying to Palm Beach, Florida for a MAGA
01:03:22
rally. and it was Gwen and her husband, Joe, and five other passengers, including Gwen's son-in-law, Brandon Hanna.
01:03:30
And shortly 90 seconds after takeoff, the plane experiences mechanical failure, crashes into Tennessee's Percy Priest Lake,
01:03:40
and everyone on board is killed. No. Yes. What the fuck? In the middle of filming this documentary?
01:03:49
Yes. Holy shit. Yes. I have to watch this now. Yeah. And I really want to, I know I've said it a bunch,
01:03:56
but I really do want to be fair in the way that this documentary, they were making it so that Gwen Shamblin herself could speak for herself
01:04:04
about where she came from, what she built, why she did it, and what it was all about.
01:04:10
Right. And to me, that's the best part of documentaries is that you basically just get presented with the facts.
01:04:16
Right. And you get to decide as you're watching it. And as you hear people who are in the church, people who have left the church, you get to hear what everyone has to say and decide for yourself.
01:04:26
So it's tragic that all of those lives were cut short in the middle of basically this filming.
01:04:35
None of those questions. Gwen can't answer any of those questions for herself. And what's interesting is the Remnant Fellowship Church is still in operation.
01:04:43
Its website says it has, quote, a leadership team of over 90 shepherds, deacons,
01:04:48
ministry leaders, and ministry assistants. There are reportedly 15,000 members in 150 congregations worldwide.
01:04:57
But it remains unclear who is going to actually lead the church now that Gwen is dead.
01:05:04
And then just in an ironic afterward, a lawyer named Gary Blackburn recently told Phil Williams,
01:05:10
the investigative journalist, that he's looked at Gwen's will multiple times and that he says, quote,
01:05:17
I haven't seen any money left to the church. Perhaps I'm cynical, but it suggests to me that the accumulation
01:05:24
was not for God, it was for Gwen. At the time of her death, 66-year-old Gwen Shamblin Lara was, quote,
01:05:31
about one third the way through a nine-week video series on greed, a series in which she urged
01:05:38
remnant fellowship followers to prepare to give up their wealth. Whoa. But we'll never know what she wanted to say
01:05:46
because it all ended. And that is the tragic story of the Weigh Down Christian Diet Program,
01:05:54
the Remnant Fellowship Church and its late founder Gwen Shamblin Lara Damn what a fucking tale Isn that just insane
01:06:05
Yeah. My God, that was long. That was long and wild and involved and good. Good job.
01:06:13
Thank you. Thank you. I just think it's so fascinating. what's happening in our country these days
01:06:20
is based in, you know, just the split, the way people are so truly polarized to a degree
01:06:28
where someone tried to kill Nancy Pelosi in her house in San Francisco, attacked her husband.
01:06:35
It's gone so far and it is so extreme and it is so dangerous. And if we never question our sources,
01:06:44
who's telling us what to do, why, how it actually feels, what our life scenarios are like.
01:06:50
Like if we just don't question anything and it becomes only focused ever on the fight
01:06:56
or the hate or the anti aspect, then we're all gonna end up in a cult because it's just reaction after reaction.
01:07:04
And to me talking about, you know, the essence of Christianity is based on the teachings of Jesus Christ.
01:07:12
Jesus Christ, who was Jewish, who was probably a man of color who basically hung out.
01:07:20
And part of this, I'm stealing from John Fuglesang, who is a brilliant comedian, writer, and philosopher.
01:07:27
And I just watched him say all of this. So I'm stealing it from him. And he says it much better than I will.
01:07:33
What Americans are starting to do to Christianity is so in direct conflict with the teachings of Jesus
01:07:42
and taking care of the poor, like basically doing unto others as you would have them do unto you.
01:07:49
Like we've gone through the looking glass in that way. So people who are arguing like they're MAGA Christians
01:07:56
and they're glad that someone tried to kill Nancy Pelosi with a hammer, you have gone too far.
01:08:03
This isn't the elephant versus the donkey anymore. No, no. You can't really say that
01:08:08
because no one can tell you you're in a cult. And it's so scary. It's so scary that, you know, they're indoctrinated in this hatred and believe that it's the right way and it's the right thing to do and the right way to be and feel is to be someone who hates.
01:08:25
It's all about make the other team suffer. Totally. Try to kill Nancy Pelosi. Are you fucking, like, no.
01:08:34
It's not what this is about. No, totally. Totally. That's not okay. That's well put.
01:08:40
But it's just scary. It is. It's a very scary time. Should we leave it at that for this week?
01:08:46
I feel like that was a pretty solid story, a standalone story. And then I'll go next week.
01:08:51
Okay. Let's do it. Cool. Oh, now you get to go and serve candy to the children. Oh, I serve the children.
01:08:58
Serve the children. Serve the children. Tell them you serve them as you give them payday funds.
01:09:04
I serve. You totally creep out their parents the whole time. As I'm drinking a can of wine.
01:09:09
I serve your children. I serve you. Thank you guys so much for listening and being along for these almost seven years with us.
01:09:22
Thanks for being in our cult. We think you're closer to the God if you eat at least eight paydays a day.
01:09:31
Absolutely. That's always been our stance. Yes. If it feels good, eat the payday.
01:09:37
Eat the payday, do it. All right. Well, stay sexy. And don't get murdered. Goodbye.
01:09:43
Yeah. Elvis, do you want a cookie? This has been an Exactly Right production. Our senior producer is Hannah Kyle Crichton.
01:09:57
Our producer is Alejandra Keck. This episode was engineered and mixed by Stephen Ray Morris.
01:10:02
Our researchers are Maren McClashon and Gemma Harris. Email your hometowns and fucking hoorays to myfavoritemurder at gmail.com.
01:10:09
Follow the show on Instagram and Facebook at My Favorite Murder and Twitter at My Fave Murder.
01:10:15
Goodbye. I'm Anna Navarro, and on my new podcast, Bleep with Anna Navarro, I'm talking to the people closest to the biggest issues happening in your community and around the world.
01:10:34
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01:10:41
Every week, I'm breaking down the biggest issues happening in our communities and around the world.
01:10:46
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01:10:52
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01:10:59
Listen to Bleep with Adam Navarro on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
01:11:05
Will Ferrell's Big Money Players and iHeart Podcast presents Soccer Bombs. So I'm Leanne.
01:11:11
Yeah. This is my best friend, Janet. Hey. And we have been joined at the hip since high school.
01:11:14
Absolutely. A redacted amount of years later, we're still joined at the hip. Just a little bit bigger hips.
01:11:20
This is a podcast. We're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey.
01:11:25
With all the snacks and drinks. Why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer? They hit a BOGO.
01:11:31
Well, then you got it. Listen to Soccer Moms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
01:11:38
10-10 shots, 5, City Hall building. How could this have happened in City Hall? Somebody tell me that.
01:11:45
A shocking public murder. This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
01:11:52
I screamed, get down, get down, those are shots. A tragedy that's now forgotten and a mystery.
01:12:00
That may or may not have been political. That may have been about sex.