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Mia Donovan: I guess me and Matthew were both about 14 when he was deprogrammed. If you can imagine, you're 14 and this is going on—I thought my mom and her boyfriend were crazy. It just seemed really surreal. I didn't really understand what was going on. I didn't know if [Matthew] was in a cult or not. He was a heavy metal kid. There were rumours at school that him and his friends were sacrificing cats. The whole thing was just very bizarre.The most bizarre thing was meeting Ted after the deprogramming. I still didn't really understand what this all meant then.But then Ted came home and they wanted to rid the whole house of any Satanic triggers, so he took away a lot of my books and records, but in a really dumb—like in a way that I remember thinking this made it even more ridiculous. They took away my INXS album, because there was a song called, "Devil Inside." Things like that.
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Matthew's [second] cousin was deprogrammed very successfully by Ted in the mid-'70s. [He was in] a Hare Krishna cult…So two of his second-cousins ended up working for Ted for about a decade on all these Canadian deprogrammings. So I had that sort of in.That really helped, because [Ted] doesn't remember Matthew. His estimation is that he deprogrammed about 3,500 people, which I think is kind of crazy. I don't know if that's possible, but maybe indirectly, because at the peak of his career he had a lot of people working for him.
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But in the early days, I think, he did have some success with Bible-based groups. Because Ted knows the Bible inside out. The first cases, it was usually [The] Children of God, and he would just expose how these leaders twisted Bible scripture.But then all these different alternative religions appeared, people adopted different lifestyles…
Yeah, it's like, how do you asses when a group is actually potentially dangerous or if it's just like something different?
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No. I mean, I think it's really hard. I think that there [are] situations where you can assess, but I mean, it's really hard to answer. I've been thinking about this since I started [making the film]. It's the type of thing that every time I interview somebody else it just kind of throws me for a loop. It's just a very complicated situation because you never know. I don't think anybody could have foreseen Jonestown happening.Or even The Heaven's Gate, if you studied them, they did seem to be very, very controlled in a very closed environment. But there's still no way to have predicted they would have done that. [39 members Heaven's Gate committed suicide in 1997.]Aaron, who's in the film, whose parents tried to deprogram him three times from the Christ Family, [which was] considered a very dangerous, high-controlled cult in the '70s and '80s, but now [the members are] in their 60s and they're all living quite happily together. I think it would be kind of sad to pull them away from that family.I have conversations with them, I can hang out with them, and they believe this man Lightning Amen is the second coming of Jesus. They believe it so much, but it doesn't seem to really harm them.
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Yeah. And being vegetarian.There was this moral panic. And then because of Manson and I think Jonestown, this fed into this paranoia, because deprogramming became very popular right after Jonestown. Parents were just like, "Oh my god, we have to save [our kids]." In some cases people say that [deprogramming] really was helpful. Like Steve Capellini in the documentary, he's so thankful that his parents hired Ted.Ted's methods were pretty controversial though. He kidnapped people, held them against their will and then harassed them with questions for sometimes months at a time. One of the things the film shows is that some people were so worn down by the process that they just acquiesced, said whatever they needed to say to make it end. It made me wonder, does this guy have any clue what he's doing? Or is he just persistent?
I think there are so many approaches…I just think that it worked some times so he kept doing it. And when it didn't work, it didn't work, but he didn't necessarily adapt. But other people after him adapted. A lot of people he deprogrammed out of different groups became deprogrammers themselves and really refined it and changed the method a lot. So Ted is not—I mean, he is sort of like the extreme version of deprogramming, the sensational version.
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His definitions are very black and white. To him a cult is just somebody who controls your mind and controls your critical thinking. Someone who destroys your ability to think critically and controls your will.How does Ted distinguish between a cult and what we think of as traditional religions?
Ted today, he doesn't explain himself very clearly, but from the archives he always described the difference being personal autonomy and how [cults]…through sleep deprivation and repetition and a form of hypnotism, would interfere with your ability to think critically. Then you become sort of enslaved by it, the will of the leader.We talked about some of the people who didn't think that deprogramming worked. Then on the flip side, there were people who really felt that it did work. That it helped them come to their own conclusions about the alternative religions they were members of. Is it possible to say if deprogramming was actually necessary? Can you say the ends justified the means?
That sort of comes back to the other questions. I personally think that most of the people he deprogrammed probably would have left the group on their own eventually. I think it was just part of that era. I've met so many people who had spent a lot of time, months or years, in different communes or groups in the '70s and then eventually left. Without the moral panic I think that some people may have stayed, some people may have left. But like I said, it's so difficult to tell.
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No. Yeah, I don't think he [did], and I think that's where he sort of discredited himself in this history. Because there are other well-known exit counsellors who are around today and who are very well-respected.Rick Ross, who is in the film, said that he declines half of the calls he gets. He'll say, "This is not a cult situation. This is a family issue."Has Ted seen the film?
No, he's going to see it on Sunday.How do you think he'll react and are you excited, nervous?
I'm really excited. I'm nervous. I don't know how he's going to react. I think he'll be fine because I've told him who I was interviewing. I've always told him. He understands the controversy. But he loves it. He's like "Anybody wants to debate me, they can debate me." He likes the controversy.Deprogrammed screens Sunday April 26 at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.This interview has been edited for length and clarity.Follow Regan Reid on Twitter.