Educational tool only. All groups exist on a spectrum of control. Individual experiences vary. Based on publicly available reports, ex-member accounts, court records, and expert analyses — not medical or legal advice.
103 wellness / multi-level group profiles. All scores are BITE-derived from publicly available sources.
Australian wellness organisation founded by Serge Benhayon (1999). The 2018 NSW Supreme Court defamation case Benhayon v. Rockett resulted in a jury finding that he ran a 'socially harmful cult' and was 'a charlatan who makes fraudulent medical claims'.
Healthy, Happy, Holy Organisation (3HO) and the Kundalini Yoga lineage founded by Yogi Bhajan / Harbhajan Singh Khalsa (1969). Multiple post-2020 investigations (Olive Branch, Premka Pamela Saharah Dyson memoir) documented systematic sexual abuse by the founder and senior teachers.
Sexuality-and-personal-growth company founded by Nicole Daedone (San Francisco, 2004) built around 'Orgasmic Meditation' (OM) — a 15-minute clitoral-stroking practice taught in $7k–$60k course packages. Federal forced-labor and prostitution charges 2023+; June 2024 conviction of Daedone and Rachel Cherwitz on conspiracy to commit forced labor.
Umbrella for the documented high-control segment of the 'Troubled Teen Industry' (WWASP, Provo Canyon School, Élan, etc.). Documented patterns of forced confinement, physical abuse, and severance from family of origin.
Brazilian 'faith healer' João Teixeira de Faria, who claimed to channel deceased spirits at his Casa de Dom Inácio in Abadiânia. Multiple Oprah-Winfrey-promoted appearances. Convicted of rape in 2019; over 600 women have alleged sexual abuse.
US-headquartered multi-level marketing company founded in 2013 by Christopher Terry, marketing trading-education products (foreign-exchange, cryptocurrency, sports-betting) through a recruitment-based affiliate structure. Subject of multiple national financial-regulator warnings (Belgian FSMA 2018, Australian ASIC 2019, Spanish CNMV 2018, and others), sustained Truth in Advertising (TINA.org) documentation, and sustained mainstream financial-press coverage.
The Center for Feeling Therapy was a Los Angeles residential 'therapeutic community' founded in 1971 by therapists who split from Arthur Janov's Primal Institute — Richard Corriere and Joseph Hart foremost — that converted a fashionable therapy into a total institution: some 350 patients lived communally around the Center, worked in its businesses, and submitted every domain of life to their therapists' authority. 'Going sane' meant obeying: patients were publicly humiliated in group sessions, ordered to change jobs, weights, and partners, instructed to give up children for adoption in documented cases, and physically beaten in 'therapy'. The Center collapsed abruptly in 1980 when senior therapists' abuses were exposed internally; the aftermath produced the largest psychology-licensing proceedings in US history — California revoked the founders' and senior therapists' licences — plus large civil settlements. It remains the canonical American case of psychotherapy itself operating as the control technology.
Online 'enlightenment teacher' running Trinfinity Academy and various retreats. After follower Brent Wilkins' 2017 suicide and a major Be Scofield exposé, multiple wellness-press and academic critiques have characterised the operation as a high-control online cult.
Korean-origin yoga and brain-training network founded by Ilchi Lee (1985, Korean operation; US 1991). Subject of 2009 Julia Siverls death lawsuit and ongoing US civil litigation over staff conditions and financial demands.
Mexican former physician who popularised the inhalation of vapor from the Sonoran Desert toad (Bufo alvarius / Incilius alvarius, 5-MeO-DMT) globally. Multiple in-ceremony participant deaths and Mexican criminal investigations.
Active intensive-seminar network founded in 1986 by Harry Palmer (a former Scientology mission holder) and operated through Star's Edge International from Altamonte Springs, Florida. The Avatar Course is delivered as a sequence of multi-day residential intensive seminars (the Avatar Course, the Masters Course, the Wizards Course, the Avatar Professional course) under a Scientology-derived 'tech' adapted into a non-Scientology commercial format. Documented in academic Large Group Awareness Training (LGAT) literature, in sustained mainstream press, and in long-running ex-participant testimony archives.
William Penn Patrick's 1960s cosmetics company was the prototype recruitment pyramid — regulators in dozens of states and the FTC/SEC forced it out of business by 1974 — and its training arm, Leadership Dynamics Institute, ran 'encounter' seminars whose documented beatings, cagings, and coffin exercises produced landmark lawsuits and the book 'The Pit'. The pair form the canonical historical case of MLM economics fused with coercive-group psychology.