About this episode

Christine Marie shares her harrowing experience with a cult and her efforts to bring down its leader.

You're smarter than the people who join cults... and that's exactly why you're easy to recruit. Dr. Christine Marie had a knack for languages, a faith she'd kept since childhood, and four kids she'd have died for. None of it protected her. A man who gazed without breaking eye contact told her he was the prophet she'd seen in a dream — and step by tiny step, she lost her money, nearly lost her children, and came within a protective order of losing her life. This is the part most people get wrong about cults: it isn't weakness that lets them in. It's the certainty that it could never be you. Christine survived a manufactured "marriage" to a con man, a police system that filed her trafficking case as a bad romance, and a public docudrama that turned her trauma into entertainment and slut-shamed her in front of the world. Then she did something almost no one does — she went back. Armed with a PhD in media psychology and an emotional-support farm's worth of animals, she embedded in Short Creek, earned the trust of an FLDS community everyone else had written off, and helped bring down self-proclaimed prophet Sam Bateman, working undercover alongside an FBI agent who finally moved "at…

People in this episode

Host: Tegan Broadwater

Guest: Christine Marie

Topics covered

• cults
• manipulation
• true crime
• psychology
• interviews

Keywords

• cult recruitment
• manipulation
• FLDS
• Sam Bateman
• media psychology
• trauma
• groupthink

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: FLDS, FBI

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