SMART's Ritual Abuse Newsletter - Issue 181 - March 2025 - Celebrating 30 years
The newsletter is online at:
copied with permission
Information in this issue includes:
– SMART is celebrating our 30th anniversary.
– The 2025 Online Annual Ritual Abuse and Mind Control Conference August 16 – 17, 2025
– Videos, PowerPoints and transcripts from our 2024 conference
– Survivorship Announces Its 14th Annual Weekend Conference Fighting Child Abuse Survivorship Trafficking and Extreme Abuse Online Conference 2025 May 16 – 18, 2025 Survivorship is celebrating its 36th year helping survivors and co-survivors of child abuse.
– Law enforcement targets online cult communities dedicated to extremely violent child abuse
– ‘How I Escaped My Cult’ Trailer Previews 10 Stories of Bravery, Resilience
– The Box: Out of the Impossible | Testimonial Documentary | Full Movie | Cult Worshippers – The movie discusses complex PTSD and DID.
– What Was Project MKUltra? Inside the CIA’s Mind Control Experiments That May Have Involved Charles Manson – The new Netflix documentary ‘Chaos: The Manson Murders’
SMART is celebrating our 30th anniversary. This is our 181st newsletter. Our first issue (online at https://ritualabuse.us/2008/10/issue-1-march-1995/ discussed the book Ritual Abuse What it is, Why it Happens and How to Help by Margaret Smith. This discussed Masonic Ritual Abuse. It covered a thesis on Masonic Ritual Abuse called “Ritual Abuse, its Effects and the Process of Recovery Using Self Help Methods and Resources, and Focusing on the Spiritual Aspect of Damage and Recover.” Over the years, SMART expanded its scope to cover institutionalized abuse, clergy abuse, government mind control and sex trafficking issues. SMART has had yearly conferences since 1997. SMART has become one of the largest ritual abuse resource information providers on the Internet.
The 2025 Online Annual Ritual Abuse and Mind Control Conference August 16 – 17, 2025 – If you are interested in participating in the conference or getting on a mailing list, please write: smartnews@aol.com Internet conference information: http://ritualabuse.us/smart-conference/
Survivorship Announces Its 14th Annual Weekend Conference Fighting Child Abuse
Survivorship is celebrating its 36th year helping survivors and co-survivors of child abuse. It was founded in 1989 by Caryn Stardancer and Catherine Raggazzi. For many years, Survivorship has provided resource information, education and conferences for survivors of extreme abuse. https://survivorship.org
Survivorship is proud to announce that this May 16 – 18, 2025, they will be having an online conference. The Survivorship Trafficking and Extreme Abuse Online Conference 2025 will have presentations for survivors and clinicians. They will be celebrating the gains fighting ritual abuse. https://survivorship.org/the-survivorship-trafficking-and-extreme-abuse-online-conference-2025
Presentations will include “Progress made against Ritual Abuse in Scotland since 1980” by Laurie Matthew. Dr. Laurie Matthew OBE is the founder and Manager of Eighteen And Under an award winning charity providing confidential support services to young people who have been abused. She is a founding member of MAIRSINN (formerly the Ritual Abuse Network Forum – RANS). https://www.mairsinn.org.uk/ https://www.18u.org.uk
“Researching, Writing and Publishing about Masonic Ritual Abuse – What are the issues?” by Lynn Brunet. Lynn Brunet (PhD) is an Australian art historian whose research examines the coupling of trauma and ritual in modern and contemporary western art and literature. It traces the connection between Masonic and other fraternal initiation rites and complex trauma in the work of so-called ‘tortured’ artists and writers.
“People Who Identify as Plural” by Randy Noblitt PhD. This presentation discusses the variety of circumstances where people may have the experience of multiple identities or selves. Randy Noblitt is a professor of Clinical Psychology at Alliant International University, Los Angeles and a licensed psychologist in Texas. He has evaluated and treated extreme abuse survivors clinically since 1979.
“Successful Investigations of Extreme Abuse Cases – The Role of Mental Health Professionals in Family Courts” by Dr. Rainer Hermann Kurz. Rainer Kurz is a Chartered Psychologist based in London. Since 1990 Rainer has worked in Research & Development roles for leading test publishers. His PhD dissertation was on enhancing the validity and utility of ability testing.
“Ritualistic Abuse Survivors Difficulties Obtaining Services” by Neil Brick. Ritualistic abuse survivors have struggled to obtain adequate mental health and social support services for over twenty years. Neil Brick is a survivor of ritualistic abuse. His child abuse and ritualistic abuse newsletter S.M.A.R.T. http://ritualabuse.us has been published for 30 years. http://neilbrick.com
Ritual Abuse Evidence https://survivorship.org/ritual-abuse-evidence/
Child Abuse Wiki – Ritual Abuse http://childabusewiki.org/index.php?title=Ritual_Abuse
The Box: Out of the Impossible | Testimonial Documentary | Full Movie | Cult Worshippers – One woman’s journey through unthinkable abuse and being raised in a cult. The Box is a documentary story of horror, healing, and hope, a journey out of the impossible. (May be triggering) The movie discusses complex PTSD and DID. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhtJ_8AiBd8
Describes violent crimes
Law enforcement targets online cult communities dedicated to extremely violent child abuse –
US Homeland Security Investigations, supported by Europol and the
French Police, arrested members of an online community dedicated to
grooming, sexual abuse, acts of cruelty, torture and murders
Law enforcement authorities target members of prolific online
communities dedicated to the sexual abuse of children and manipulation
of vulnerable minors into committing violent crimes. This coercion into
committing violent crime spans multiple areas, including acts of cruelty
against people and animals, murder and self-harm. These extremist
communities are part of a larger online network, so called “The Com”.
Through this network, extremists around the world collude to groom and
abuse children. These groups operate virtually in easily accessible
online spaces such as social media platforms, mobile applications and
online gaming platforms. International cooperation via Europol has
intensified in the past year, leading to the identification of dangerous
individuals and the safeguarding of victims, mostly vulnerable minors.
Two suspected leaders of online group “CVLT” arrested in the US
On 30 January, the United States Homeland Security Investigations
arrested two individuals for participating in a neo-Nazi child
exploitation ring that groomed and then coerced minors into produce
child sexual abuse material and images of self-harm. The group allegedly
abused at least 16 minors around the world. According to the
investigation, the two men were members of “CVLT” (pronounced “cult”),
an online group that promoted neo-Nazism, nihilism, and paedophilia as
its core principles.
The investigations into these individuals (a 23- and 41-year-old
males from the US), were supported by Europol, and involved the French
National Police (Police Nationale), the United Kingdom’s National Crime
Agency and the New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs. These arrests
follow previous arrests of two other prolific members of this
community, both males in their twenties. One of the previously arrested
suspects has been in French custody since 2022 for several child
exploitation and related offenses. The second is currently in the US,
serving a 50-year sentence for child sex abuse crimes committed in 2020
and 2021.
Three of these four arrested offenders are considered to have acted as
leaders and administrator of the violent online abuse community, hosting
and running CVLT online servers and controlling membership for the
group.
Victims trapped in an abuse cycle
Members of this violent CVLT community groomed children into producing
child sexual abuse material through various means of degradation,
including exposing the victims to extremist and violent content. CVLT
specifically targeted vulnerable victims, including minors suffering
from mental health issues or a history of sexual abuse….
CVLT members’ coercion escalated to pressuring victims to kill
themselves via video livestream. They blackmailed the victims to submit
and remain silent, threatening to distribute already-obtained
compromising photos and videos to their family and friends. CVLT would
sometimes go through with their threats against victims who tried to
escape their grip. CVLT is part of a larger network of extremist and
child abusers active within similar online communities, referred to as
“The Com”.
Extremely violent online communities manipulate children and young people
Violent online groups are targeting and manipulating vulnerable children
and young people across widely accessible online platforms. There are
multiple groups, associations and evolving subgroups that make up the
online network known as The Com – short for community. The Com is a
virtual community of groups and individuals who conduct illicit
activities that glorify serious violence, cruelty, and gore.
Elements of The Com network are known to have extreme ideological views
and victimise children, coercing them to commit violent acts. Predators
groom their victims through different methods – one approach is
establishing friendships based on trust or romantic relationships.
Another technique involves the use of power or coercive tactics with one
goal – taking control over the victims, while getting them to engage in
serious violence, self-harm, or other gruesome. It’s a vicious cycle –
the predators in this network influence children or young people into
conducting acts that increasingly shame, incriminate, or isolate them,
this in turn makes them more vulnerable to further exploitation.
https://www.europol.europa.eu/media-press/newsroom/news/law-enforcement-targets-online-cult-communities-dedicated-to-extremely-violent-child-abuse
describes abuse
‘How I Escaped My Cult’ Trailer Previews 10 Stories of Bravery, Resilience | Exclusive Video – Loree Seitz February 6, 2025
“If I got caught, he would for sure kill me,” one survivor says in the
Freeform series Freeform’s new docuseries “How I Escaped My Cult” is
gearing up to debut 10 distinct stories about ex-cult members who
managed to escape their circumstances.
In the trailer for the new series, shared exclusively with TheWrap, 10
women unpack the terrifying journey to break free of the cults they were
once in, with one subject saying “I was trapped … I decided that it was
time to escape.”
The stakes couldn’t be higher for these women, as one recalls, “If I
got caught, he would for sure kill me.” The subjects explain that by
being in a cult, members are being brainwashed and soon it becomes the
only reality that they know. “He claimed he heard the voice of God,” one
subject said in the trailer, while another explained “members were
giving over entire paychecks — he’d grab us by the throat and slam us
against the wall.”
While the women explain “the most evil things you could imagine”
happened to them while in the cult, they recall their gut instinct to
escape and how they pulled it off.
The docuseries, which hails from the team behind “How I Caught My
Killer,” follows the survivors through their escapes to reporting the
cult leaders to the FBI, with one subject saying “I really did want this
horrible monster to pay for what he had done.”
https://www.thewrap.com/how-i-escaped-my-cult-trailer-freeform/
What Was Project MKUltra? Inside the CIA’s Mind Control Experiments That May Have Involved Charles Manson
– The new Netflix documentary ‘Chaos: The Manson Murders’ speculates
that Charles Manson was linked to the CIA’s MKUltra operation. Find out
what it was and why it was so controversial By Jessica Sager Published
on March 8, 2025
Charles Manson was the evil behind the brutal murders of Sharon Tate
and at least eight others — but a new documentary speculates that
Manson and his “family” of followers may have been influenced by
government agents before committing their 1969 killing spree.
Journalist Tom O’Neill conducted two decades of research for his 2019
book Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the
Sixties, which is the basis for the new Netflix film Chaos: The Manson
Murders, now streaming.
The film and O’Neill’s book each delve deeply into the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and
their initiatives to spy on American citizens during the Cold War, as
well as their secret experiments with drugs, mind control and
infiltrating counterculture movements. One such operation was Project
MKUltra, which sought to develop a “truth serum” for interrogations.
While it remains unknown whether Manson and his followers were involved
with intelligence operations in an official capacity, O’Neill points out
parallels and commonalities between the slayings and the government’s
goals during the 1960s….
What was Project MKUltra?
MKUltra was the name given to then-secret CIA experiments in mind
control. Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA’s top chemist, spearheaded the
program, which began in 1953 and ran through the early 1960s, per NPR.
The goal was to develop a “truth serum” for interrogations, as well as
substances to make people forget things they’d done and to control
behavior, according to journalist Stephen Kinzer, author of Poisoner In
Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control.
At Gottlieb’s behest, the CIA conducted experiments on and
administered mind-altering substances, including barbiturates and LSD,
to often unsuspecting individuals without their consent or knowledge.
Their test subjects included other CIA agents, college students,
psychiatric patients, cancer patients and prisoners, among others.
According to Kinzer, Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s
Nest, as well as poet Allen Ginsburg and Grateful Dead songwriter Robert
Hunter, were among volunteers for MKUltra experiments with LSD, while
gangster Whitey Bulger, who was incarcerated at the time, was told he
would be given an experimental treatment for schizophrenia when he was
administered LSD over the course of a year.
Ted Kaczynski, then a 17-year-old Harvard student who would later
become known as the Unabomber, was subjected to psychological
experiments, according to The Washington Post, that may have exacerbated
his schizophrenia. (Though, per The Washington Post, there is no
evidence suggesting LSD or similar substances were used on Kaczynski.)….
Some of MKUltra’s activities came to light in December 1974 when The New
York Times published an expose on the CIA’s activities during President
Richard Nixon’s administration. President Gerald Ford established the
United States President’s Commission on CIA Activities to investigate
further.
The United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental
Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, also called the
Church Committee, took hold in 1975 to investigate MKUltra and
COINTELPRO, among other operations that were deemed intelligence
abuses….
In 1977, Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) led congressional hearings
investigating MKUltra, especially in regard to its use of LSD and its
link to the death of scientist Dr. Frank Olson…. There is no actual
evidence that Manson was involved with MKUltra, Operation CHAOs or
COINTELPRO, but O’Neill believes there are potential speculative links
between the cult leader and the CIA and FBI’s activities.
“What he did aligned with the objectives of both those groups, which
basically wanted to turn society against the young hippie movement,”
O’Neill told Jacobin in 2023. “They wanted people to think of them not
as harmless young kids with long hair, smoking pot and experimenting,
but rather as dangerous bogeymen, out to kill your daughters or abduct
your kids.”
O’Neill alleged that Dr. Louis “Jolly” West, a psychiatrist rumored to
be involved with MKUltra (but who long denied ever being involved with
the CIA), had an office in the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic. Another
psychiatrist, James Allen, reportedly told O’Neill that Manson and his
followers frequented the clinic often for STD screenings and pregnancy
tests and that Manson was required to go to the clinic as a condition of
his parole at the time. O’Neill claimed that the clinic staff conducted
experiments on clinic patients using amphetamines and LSD.
O’Neill posited that Manson may have picked up on mind control
techniques from MKUltra and that his and his followers’ experiences at
the clinic may have ultimately led them to commit the murders.
“I think there is a good likelihood that Manson is a product of MKUltra,
whether he was knowledgeable about it or not,” O’Neill said. “But I
haven’t been able to definitively prove it. I chased this story for 20
years, hoping to get conclusive information one way or the other, but I
could neither disprove it nor prove it to my satisfaction.”
https://people.com/what-was-mkultra-chaos-manson-murders-11692546
The biggest bombshells from Netflix’s Chaos: The Manson Murders documentary: Mind control, LSD, MKUltra, and the CIA
– Errol Morris’ new documentary pulls from Tom O’Neill’s 2019 book,
which disputes much of what we know about the Manson Family. By Randall
Colburn Published on March 8, 2025
The Tate-LaBianca murders, committed by the Manson Family in the summer
of 1969, are among the most famous in the realm of true crime — and just
about everything we know about them might be false.
That’s the argument posed by author Tom O’Neill in his 2019 book, Chaos:
Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties. It’s a
dizzying but lucidly-written takedown of Manson prosecutor Vincent
Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter, the 1974 best-seller that’s long been
considered the definitive account of the case.
Today, Netflix releases Chaos: The Manson Murders, a new documentary in
which famed filmmaker Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line) offers three
perspectives on the brutal murders of actress Sharon Tate, Abigail
Folger, Wojciech Frykowski, Steven Parent, Jay Sebring, and Leno and
Rosemary LaBianca….
As with any Morris documentary, Chaos is clear-eyed and
fleet-footed, balancing multiple perspectives and challenging its
subjects. Though it only touches on a fraction of the revelations in
O’Neill’s book, it zooms in on the question that’s followed the case for
more than 50 years. As O’Neill puts it: “One of the biggest mysteries
about this case is how Manson was able to gain control of his followers
to the degree that he could get them to go out and kill on command,
without remorse, without hesitation, complete strangers.”
Manson may have been involved in the CIA’s MKUltra program
….But O’Neill has the receipts, and Morris highlights several official
documents that support the author’s findings. It goes something like
this: When Manson and his followers lived in San Francisco in the summer
of 1967, they frequented the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic to treat the
consequences of their promiscuous lifestyles, namely venereal diseases.
Manson’s parole officer, Roger Smith, also had an office there. Smith
told O’Neill that he met Manson at the clinic on a weekly basis.
Another frequent visitor of the clinic was Louis “Jolly” West, a
scientist with expertise in hypnosis and brainwashing, whose name
appears often in literature about U.S. government conspiracies.
According to O’Neill, West called the clinic a “laboratory disguised as a
hippie crash pad,” and he used the clinic to recruit subjects for his
study of the effects of LSD on youth.
The LSD and other psychoactive drugs were also a key aspect of MKUltra,
and, though West denied it until his death in 1999, O’Neill has several
official documents proving that the psychiatrist was financed by the CIA
to work on MKUltra experiments in mind control. In those documents,
West discussed not only how to conduct experiments to implant false
memories, instill specific mental disorders, and induce trance states,
but also how to hide them.
“West came into the picture more than a year after I’d begun the
research when I started suspecting the involvement of MKUltra in this
case,” O’Neill tells Morris. “[I] found out he’d been at the
Haight-Ashbury free medical clinic working with these people who had
contact with Manson during the time Manson became exactly what the CIA
was trying to create — programmed assassins.”….
He goes on to discuss how Manson was able to get his followers to
“completely abandon their sense of morality and their code of ethics and
to believe that there’s no such thing as evil.” LSD, O’Neill says, was a
way for Manson “to create personality change and make it fixed, [to]
make it last after the LSD trips had ended.” That, he says, was a key
research objective for the MKUltra researchers.
While O’Neill suspects Manson was involved in those experiments, he could never place Manson and West in a room together.
“How did he learn how to brainwash those kids, really in under a
year?” O’Neill asks. “Yeah, he was a con artist, but everybody who knew
him in prison and everyone who knew him prior to becoming Charlie Manson
said he was a joke to everybody. Nobody took him seriously. He suddenly
got help. Where did that come from?”….
O’Neill alleges that the Tate-LaBianca murders were used to tarnish the 1960s counterculture movement
So, what story did the prosecution want to tell?
“Exactly what we think of now when we think of the Manson murders,” says
O’Neill. “That these kids went out and became corrupted by the freedoms
of the ’60s movement and turned into monsters. So, in other words,
don’t let your kids do drugs, don’t let them join communes, don’t let
them march against the war, because they’re all going to be turned into
these crazed killers who have no respect for life.”
O’Neill goes on to detail two projects the U.S. government was operating
during Manson’s arrival in San Francisco: the FBI’s COINTELPRO and the
CIA’s CHAOS. These efforts sought to disrupt and undermine anti-war and
New Left movements.
“Those programs were designed to infiltrate left-wing groups,
especially the [Black] Panthers, and neutralize them,” says O’Neill.
“That’s what their own documents say — do whatever it took to basically
make them ineffective, wipe them out.”
While O’Neill doesn’t go so far as to say the Manson murders were
“orchestrated” by the U.S. government, he does say the murders served
the purposes of COINTELPRO and CHAOS, “to have the world finally turn
against this left-wing, anti-war movement which a lot of people
conflated with hippies.”
He adds, “‘Orchestrated’ sounds like it was planned in advance,
executed, and then covered up. It could’ve just been that Manson had
leeway to do whatever he wanted for two years. Maybe that’s all it was.
It’s kind of ironic, if nothing else, that before we knew about
COINTELPRO and the FBI setting up the Panthers, Manson’s plan was to pin
these murders on the Panthers.”
https://ew.com/chaos-the-manson-murders-biggest-bombshells-netflix-11692444
