CultNEWS101 Articles: 12/9/2025

[Patrick Ryan]

Jeffry Epstein, NXIVM,  2819 Church

Raja Leaks: Epstein’s Secret Iowa Mission: How the TM Empire Landed on Moscow’s Hit List

"When Jeffrey Epstein quietly slipped into Fairfield, Iowa in 1988—far from Manhattan penthouses and blackmail-soaked social circuits—he wasn’t seeking enlightenment. His visit to the Maharishi International University, escorted by investor Bill Elkus, opened a window into a strange convergence of billionaires, meditation elites, and geopolitical intrigue. As former KGB sources later confirmed Soviet interest in the TM movement, a darker picture emerged: a spiritual empire courted by global power players, from Moscow’s intelligence operatives to Wall Street’s richest men. Epstein’s Iowa pilgrimage wasn’t a detour—it was a clue to a hidden struggle over influence, ideology, and control."

Rolling Stone: She Spent 20 Years in NXIVM and Helped Put Its Leader in Jail. Now She’s Speaking Out

Lauren Salzman, one of the first members of the cult, is telling he story for the first time in the new podcast 'Allison After NXIVM'

"Lauren Salzman didn’t have long as an adult before she became part of NXIVM, the self-help sex cult led by Keith Raniere. She had only graduated college a couple months before her mother, Nancy Salzman, brought her into the group. Nancy had met Raniere around Thanksgiving; by spring break she was in his fold. “She took us on this vacation to Florida, and she called it the transition from mother to friend vacation,” Lauren recently told podcaster Natalie Robehmed. “She spent the entire vacation in the hotel room reading Atlas Shrugged and on the phone with Keith trying to deprogram her children from being parasitic and to have real self-esteem.” Not long after this meeting, Lauren entered into a relationship with Keith; they would stay together, in some capacity or another, for the better part of two decades.

It was Lauren’s 2019 testimony that helped bring down Raniere, who was sentenced to 120 years in federal prison after being convicted on several counts including racketeering, sex trafficking, forced labor conspiracy, and wire fraud conspiracy. (Nancy Salzman was sentenced to 42 months for charges including racketeering conspiracy.) Lauren has been silent since that testimony. That is, until she agreed to be interviewed for Robehmed’s new podcast, Allison After NXIVM, from Campside Media and CBC."

RNS: Spanking is often normalized in evangelical culture. When does it become child abuse?

"Those of us who follow Jesus — who himself had the strongest of words for any who harm children or cause them to lose faith — should be the loudest voices decrying this unethical and harmful parenting practice.

Last week, an Alabama second-grade Christian school “teacher of the year” was allegedly shown in a viral video hitting her son with a belt. She also allegedly verbally abused him, pulled his hair and berated him for failing to complete his chores, according to news reports. A family member secretly filmed the incident, and the teacher, Randi Nicole Staples, was arrested, charged with willful abuse of a child and fired.

The video is upsetting — the sight and sounds of a belt on human flesh, a child’s cries and distress, and the mother’s persistent rage triggered many people. But online comment sections revealed people, often Christians, defending the mother, blaming the child, making jokes or referencing their own childhood mistreatment and spanking as normal. “The rod” Proverbs made their predictable appearance, alongside Christians quibbling that even if the mother’s execution was extreme, the concept itself was biblical.

It reveals that many people think the imaginary line drawn between spanking and abuse is, first, determined by the parent, second, completely subjective and, third, based on parental intent rather than considerations of ethics or impact. “Spanking” and “discipline” are euphemisms for a practice that happens behind closed doors, often with no witnesses present. Add in a parent’s overwhelm, isolation, anger or dysregulation, and you have a recipe for escalation.

Earlier this month, 2819 Church, an Atlanta megachurch, fired one of its staff pastors, Kenneth McFarland, after he was arrested and charged with second-degree cruelty to children. McFarland allegedly beat his 15-year-old stepson with an electric cord from a video game system, leaving bruises and blood that seeped through the boy’s pants at school. The church’s leadership rightly denounced the alleged violence, yet staff pastors have given multiple sermons describing their own childhood beatings and advocating for parents to vigorously employ “the rod” of discipline, one of them even going so far as to feign unstrapping his belt during a sermon to indicate what he meant.

The difficult truth is that this is far from rare. After reviewing over 100 popular Christian parenting resources, I can say without question that Christian teaching from pulpits, bookstores, conferences and streaming channels has enabled all kinds of abuse. And our accepted community norms around “spanking” has further enabled it."

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