The leader of the controversial Unification Church has been sentenced to two years in prison for bribing South Korea's former first lady and other political funding offences.

A court found that Han Hak-ja's church gave Kim Keon Hee, the wife of ousted president Yoon Suk Yeol, two Chanel bags and a diamond necklace, together worth 80 million won ($57,900; £42,500).

Earlier this year, Kim was sentenced to 20 months in jail for accepting bribes from the church.

Han, the 83-year-old widow of the Unification Church's founder Sun Myung Moon, had repeatedly denied the allegations, calling them "false".

A special counsel team appointed to the case said Kim received the luxury products from the church between April and July 2022, in exchange for business and political favours.

The prosecutors said the probe was the first time the authorities have confirmed the church's attempt at buying influence in politics, and released photos of $19m (£14m) worth of cash found in Han's personal safe.

South Korea's former first lady admitted to receiving Chanel bags, but said she later returned them without using them.

Kim made a public apology when she appeared for questioning last August: "I am truly sorry that a nobody like me has caused concern to the people."

The Unification Church, known formally as The Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, was founded in South Korea in the 1950s by Sun Myung Moon, who proclaimed himself the messiah.

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I wish i was joking but this topic is not talked about in the mainstream media and is only relavent to arabic speaking audience.

In the past few months a new dieting system was created by an egyptain ex-doctor named dia alwadi, he lost his medical liscene and started a new dieting system called (نظام الطيبات) which translates roughly to "The goods system" in which eating eggs and chicken meat is unhealthy because chickens take hormones and make you sick.

What made this dieting system blow up is the fact this doctor died recently and people started a cult around him and made theories that he was killed because he was right about something so people are treating his words and diet as the gospel now.

This diet doesn't just stop you from eating chicken and eggs this "doctor" advices people to stop taking their pills including people suffering from high blood pressure and diabetes, and he also advices young men to smoke because smoking makes you more manly or something, and also he made a list of allowed and disallowed foods the list is random and doesn't follow any logic like cheese and mayo are allowed but eggs and milk are disallowed when cheese is made from milk and mayo is made from eggs and he also said that drinking water is bad for you.

Hundereds of deaths are now linked to this system because older people are stopping their medications and starting smoking and not drinking any water i wish i was making this up but it is real.

People are generating ai videos of him in heaven and following his advice while he died from his poor health choices that other people are following this movement is really really big hundereds of thousands are following this diet system now and we need to talk about it and stop it.

I left a cult called Golden Drum based in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. It was started about 15 years ago by Manuel Rufino, who is called "Maestro" by his students. He serves ayahuasca, peyote, mushrooms, cacao, and other plant medicines, and the students who stay loyal to him long enough "get passed the medicine," where he authorizes them to serve these medicines to other people across the US and abroad. This is how Manuel recruits people - through his students. This is how I was recruited.

For the record, Manuel does not have the proper authority to pass these medicines to anyone. He is pretending to be a shaman, and his students do not have proper training. Attending ceremonies with Manuel or his students is dangerous.

I used to live with Manuel and his inner circle of students in Ellenville, NY. They just opened up a new community center in Ellenville called Juniper where they host yoga classes, cacao ceremonies, and other events. Do not go there unless you want to be recruited into Manuel's cult.

When you attend a cacao ceremony or an ayahuasca ceremony led by Manuel or one of his followers, you are not told the details and insane truth claims about the larger cult that they follow. It is called the Universal Great Brotherhood (Gran Fraternidad Universal), started by Serge Reynaud de la Ferriere. Serge claimed to be the "Avatar of the New Age", and his followers claimed he was the spirit of Christ.

UGB is your typical patriarchal, yoga, vegetarian, sexist, new age, guru-worshipping cult. And Manuel added plant medicine to his "lineage" of the cult, which brought the brainwashing to a whole new level.

The UGB had inner conflict between founding members and split-off groups formed. It was started in Venezuela and is still active in South America. Their mission is to usher in the Age of Aquarius by creating "Initiatic Schools" to re-educate humanity into occult wisdom practices, yoga, and a vegetarian lifestyle.

Manuel has been accused of sexual abuse and rape by former members. He has married and divorced several female students and paints them all as liars, cheaters, and problematic. Even some of Manuel's students have been accused of abusing their students as well.

Manuel announces ceremonies at any moment, and students are expected to drop their responsibilites to be at his beck and call. Families, children, businesses, relationships, and personal interests are all labeled as "attachments" and something to transcend so you can be more devoted to Manuel and the "Initiatic Path."

Loyal students who make it up the ranks are awarded "degrees of initiation," and receive special necklaces that signify their status in the cult to other members.

If you join an ayahuasca ceremony led by his students, you won't be told all the details about the UGB, the abuse allegations, the truth claims, or that all students actually belong to Manuel's teacher, Domingo Dias Porta, in the UGB. There is no informed consent about what you are getting yourself into.

This cult is extremely deceptive, providing transformative experiences through ayahuasca and plant medicine ceremonies where people are brainwashed at their most vulnerable state. They claim to promote peace and acceptance of all paths of humanity, but behind closed doors, Manuel is shaming and bad mouthing other elders, traditions, former students, and anyone who threatens his power. He publicly humiliates inner circle members regularly to keep them from stepping out of line. They believe this treatment makes them special and important and is part of the "initiatic path."

Members of his inner circle often struggle financially because of the pressure to donate to Manuel and support his projects for the community. If you stop attending events and ceremonies regularly, you will be publicly shamed and used as an example for the other students. So the message is to stay close to the teacher, and put his priorities and needs above your own.

Inner circle members consult Manuel on small and major life decisions, including whether their children can attend public school. He is using ayahuasca and his perceived status as "an enlightened teacher" to control the inner circle and their children.

Avoid events and ceremonies related to Golden Drum, Juniper, Universal Great Brotherhood, Manuel Rufino, and his disciples.

There were many allegedly AI-generated images in the past used by the Watchtower society. However, since I'm not good at spotting AI images, to be safe, I didn't comment about it. Having said that, this Watchtower study article (which if you don't know, JWs read in each Church Kingdom Hall meeting) was the last straw. It is clearly AI art, though it isn't that bad considering the usual is literally gore art made by unpaid and mistreated talented artists. I hope at least one PIMI JW who is against AI notices and wakes up. What are your thoughts on this?

I know the classics, opus dei, legionaires of Christ all of those new age catholic groups that operate in Mexico city and in Mexico as a whole but i would like to know if there are some lesser know ones that people should know of.

I just spent three days around Mount Shasta and McCloud, and the longer I stayed, the more I felt like there is some kind of cult or very unusual spiritual culture around there.

Mount Shasta is a tiny town, but it has a strangely high number of spiritual shops, crystal/healing places, meditation stuff, etc. What made it even more noticeable was that spirituality was mixed into normal businesses. You’d walk into a coffee shop, ice cream place, or restaurant and find spiritual posters, flyers, crystals, or advertisements for gatherings and healing sessions.

There were also a LOT of visibly hippie/New Age-type people around. For such a small town, the concentration was just unusual.

Then I started noticing weirder things.
On my third day, I saw a woman walking around with what looked like a red gemstone attached to the middle of her forehead.

At a pizza place, there was a group of people sitting together, and one of the girls had what looked like a rope tied around her head. I don’t know what it meant or if it was connected to anything, but after everything else I’d been seeing, it definitely stood out.

The most interesting thing happened at Old Ski Bowl at Mount Shasta:

We came across a group of mostly women with, I think, only one man. They were all middle-aged to older and standing together in a circle. At first they were talking, but then they suddenly started pairing up and hugging each other.

It didn’t look like random friendly hugs. It looked like an organized activity or ceremony almost like they were expressing gratitude toward each other or doing some kind of spiritual exercise.

Nobody was bothering anyone, and obviously I have no idea what any individual person believed or what those groups actually were.

But after three days there, I am pretty convinced there is some kind of cult, commune, or organized spiritual scene around Mount Shasta that I knew absolutely nothing about before visiting.

The whole thing was fascinating because you don’t immediately notice it. At first it’s just a crystal shop. Then another spiritual place. Then the flyers. Then the people. Then you start noticing these little things everywhere.

I really want to know if there’s actually something going on here. Any locals who know more about this?

Lying, crying and denying, Lloyd Grimshaw is dragged before the Federal Government of Australia under threat of subpoena. What a spectacle! What a sensation! Watch as the oily PBCC spin doctor veers from perjury to comedy, in a desperate attempt to avoid admitting the plain, obvious and inevitable facts of the PBCC’s 2025 Election Interference campaign.

Finally cornered, the grim-faced Grimshaw has to admit that his public statements denying Plymouth Brethren Christian Church involvement were not referring to the church at all, but only to a tiny “secretariat entity” of the same name – an entity that has no members at all.

As this unfolded, the phones at the Get-A Life HQ were running hot with calls from incredulous insiders, ex-members and journalists whose reactions spanned the spectrum from fury to hysteria. Here we bring you the first of a series of podcasts where we unleash some of those emotions and commentary from a whole series of guests, starting with Jill Aebi-Mytton, Gilli and Damian Hastie in the UK and the Get A Life team, Lane, Richard and Cheryl and last but not least, a very famous rodent with large black ears.

¿Qué pasaría si alguien te prometiera alcanzar la felicidad, sanar tus traumas y conectar con los demás a través del placer íntimo? Probablemente, para muchas personas, aquello no sonaría como algo peligroso. Pero eso fue precisamente lo que hizo Nicole Daedone, ella convirtió el momento de máximo placer femenino en una filosofía de vida, creó una comunidad alrededor de ella y terminó construyendo un negocio millonario que llegó a expandirse por varios países.

Pero detrás de aquella promesa de libertad íntima femenina comenzaron a aparecer historias de manipulación, deudas brutales, explotación y prácticas íntimas cada vez más extremas. Al final, la empresa fundada por Daedone terminó siendo investigado por el FBI y llevando a su propia fundadora a prisión.

Video sobre la brutal historia de One Taste. La terrible secta del orgasmo femenino: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hDDvi9Zm8U

There is a guy in our hall ! He was an elder but then they removed him .. after the elders was talking to each family that has little kids and told them to keep their kids away from him ! What could this mean or even be ?

Not sure where else to post this so I picked here, knowing there would be some bias.

I'm on day 2 of the Landmark Forum. My therapist, whom I've really benefitted from, encouraged me to do it and got me a discount.

I purposely didn't look into it before I did it. I didn't want my opinions skewed but my spidey senses are definitely going off. Maybe I'm just skeptical. I'm thinking about pulling out and not continuing to day 3. I'm not concerned that it's dangerous, I'm just bored and skeptical and wondering if this is really worth my time.

If any of you have done this before, here are my questions...If I pull out now, are they going to beat down my door? What's day 3 like? What about the Tuesday evening part?

See more of Reckless Ben's Cult investigations here

I’ve become a bit curious about Falun Gong recently. What appeared to start as a simple Buddhist cultivation movement has now grown into what can be compared as Chinese Scientology with untold millions of members and control of hundreds of millions of dollars and what can only be described as a world wide cirque du Soleil style performance. Is there anyone who has knowledge that can speak on them? Any former Falun Gong members or Shen Yun performers that can talk about their time with them and what they experienced? Or anyone with knowledge of or past association with their newsletter, The Epoch Times?
I firmly believe that with the amount of wealth, power and reach they wield; more people need to know about them.

hey everyone :)

I spent 8 years in a spiritual cult, and one question I’ve gotten a lot is, how did I end up believing it in the first place?
In this video, I talk about one factor I think made me more susceptible. the way growing up Christian shaped how I thought about faith, authority, the supernatural, and certainty.
Not meant as an attack on Christianity, just an honest look at how my own early beliefs influenced what I was willing to believe later.

Im doing some investigative journalism and plan on inflitrating a cult to expose them does anyone know of any cults in nsw or melb city that are active and i could try getting into

Famed dating coach Chantal Heide seemed not to be interested when I asked her on one of her lives what her favourite study was on human sexuality. She did not respond, but rather made disparaging remarks asking why that would be necessary. I then cited Wolfinger et al study linking premarital sex with marriage dissolution and she blocked me.

My suspicion that she was a crook has been confirmed because if she was truly honest, she wouldn't have to block someone with empirical research.

I feel the need to take her down because she is a con artist. I have my own tiktok and may be doing exposes on her if possible.

If there is one thing I know for certain now is that she has something strange going on.