Dominique (2:21)

What about you? Where did you start?

Phil Vine (2:23)

Well, I got this tip, classic news tip, right, from someone who I guess you'd describe as being on the kind of fringy edge of an alternative community, saying that there was this small group of people who had escaped, that was the word used from this high demand cultic group based in an old hunting lodge like Way up into the remote parts of Ti Waipunamu, the South Island. So I heard stories of supernatural powers being offered at this place, this. This wellness center. People being promised they could fly, people thinking that a guru there, who they were all based around, could cure them without medicine. And I guess the thing that galvanized it for me was I got shown this series of photographs of a man in his 30s. This guy started off with a kind of a small mole under his eye. And there were these series of pictures taken over weeks and months where this mole got bigger and bigger and bigger until it was a growth which obscured his eye. And so these were taken by the members of the cult to show that their guru, the grandmaster, would be able to cure cancer. By the time I saw these photos, he had died after receiving treatment, life force energy treatment from the guru AI Ping Wong. I have to say, for legal reasons, that AI Ping Wong was never charged with anything over this.

Dominique (3:58)

Where do you even begin with that?

Phil Vine (4:00)

Yeah, I guess there was a big flood at the start because there were, like, four people who'd. Who'd, you know, escaped. And we sat down in this kind of this hotel conference room, beautiful beige walls and, you know, no character whatsoever to hear all these stories. And then it was, I guess, a matter of just trying to double ch. Work out what was true. If anything was an exaggeration, it turned out none of it was. I mean, cults have got to be one of the strangest manifestations of people's kind of search for meaning. I guess maybe that's why we're all so interested in them, you know? What would you say was the kind of weirdest, sort of almost disturbing part of your investigation?

Dominique (4:46)

There were so many moments where I was shocked. I learned things that hadn't been in the media or reported on before. So we've got Chantelle McDougal, Simon Cadwell, her partner, their daughter Leela McDougal, and their friend Tony Poppich were the four people who disappeared. One of the. The moments really early on was interviewing a woman named Diane Abbott, who's in the very first episode of. Of the Nan up four. And she had met Chantelle through a homeschooling group, and she went to Chantelle's for a play date where she actually met Simon Cadwell for the first time. But after she left, she received a phone call from Simon where he said to her, oh, you know, Chantelle's got end time syndrome. Essentially, she believes that the end of the world is coming, and it's such a small moment. But it was one that really painted the picture of what kind of a person Simon was doing something like that. It's like drawing a wedge between your partner and their friend. It was just little moments like that that really stood out to me and made me feel like, gosh, this man, he was 18 years older than her. She was just 17 years old when she met him. And I just don't know how much of a chance you stand against someone like Simon, who is so spiritually dominant.

Phil Vine (6:15)

I don't know about you, but I found, like, surprises around every corner, you know, and you sort of started after about the fourth or fifth surprise, you started going, well, anything could happen here, you know. It was when I went back to someone who I'd interviewed 20 years before, who just left the cult. And what had happened to her at that culture. She had come from California with her mum. Her mum had taken this alternative treatment, had died. They'd paid the Grandmaster, AI Penguin $1.5 million for the privilege of that. She was completely wrung out. I got this phone call in the middle of the night from her going, ah, Phil, you've got to help. The cult members are around our motel room and they're saying, come back, come back, all is forgiven. And I'm going, just call the police. Oh, what am I gonna do? What am I gonna do? Just call the police. And then, like all this time later, I'm talking to her again and I just threw out this kind of speculative question, I suppose. I said, would you. You know, it's still going. Would you ever consider going back? And much to my surprise, she said, yes, I really would. I think AI Peng Wong was ahead of her time. I still think she's got so much to offer.

Dominique (7:35)

How did you manage to build that trust with them to the point where you're receiving phone calls in the middle of the night from them?

Phil Vine (7:43)

I guess this is kind of cliche and you recognise this. And I have to say it's largely untrue, in my experience, and unfair. There's this idea that followers of cults, right, are these passive victims with no agency, that they're strange and weak and deluded creatures. And what I discovered was that they're actually just regular people, you know, and they've been sucked into something they couldn't prevent. And it was easy enough to get in and impossible to get out. So, you know, I tried not to fall into that trap of prejudging, which is easy to do because it's a kind of. It's a classic kind of Journalistic tale, isn't it? You know, kind of rabid, evil cult leader and these kind of minions, you know, who don't really have a story. But, you know, these were not dropouts by any stretch of the imagination. You know, they were doctors, lawyers, engineers, like I say, worldly people. But they somehow got themselves embroiled.

Dominique (8:48)

I think that's something that I've thought a lot about over the making of the Nan up four is the. I think it's a human trait, but also a trait definitely that journalists have of wanting to really make everything black and white and fit things into a neat little box. But it was really important to me because I think that podcasting is the perfect medium for it to explore the nuance and try and hold these two truths at one time.

Phil Vine (9:19)

You will have had to have reassured quite a number of people in a story which was originally, well, trampled by the rest of the media. How did you get to manage to get people to talk after they'd had, you know, all the channels banging down their door?

Dominique (9:38)

I really began by Speaking to the McDougals first, Chantel's parents. So it was a few conversations and then eventually they agreed to be part of the podcast.

Phil Vine (9:51)

But I really remember you. I remember in the podcast you got quite emotional when they agreed to talk to you. Where did that well up from, do you think?

Dominique (9:59)

Oh, I mean, I'm just an emotional person, to be honest. I feel I wear my heart on my sleeve, which probably comes across a little bit in the podcast. But I just, I think because I'd had a few conversations with Jim McDougal where it really hit home. Gosh, this guy's just so trying to get on with his life at the same time as balancing this real hope and despair about what's happened to his daughter and granddaughter. And I was also aware that being part of a this six episode podcast that's also been turned into a vodcast, it would be asking a lot of them and they would be really vulnerable in that experience.

Phil Vine (10:48)

So both of them, both of these stories that we looked into, they did happen, as you were saying, quite a long time ago. Did you find yourself dealing with people's memories? Well, old memories as opposed to recent memories? It wasn't something that happened last week, it was something that happened last decade or the decade before. Was that an issue in terms of reliability, you know, people Remembering back to 2007?

Dominique (11:12)

Absolutely, yeah. There was a lot of instances where people. Yeah, I mean, I can't even remember what I did last week. Let Alone what I did 20 years ago. So I was actually amazed that some of these people did have these really vivid memories. I will say, one of the things that we did to sort of get around that, we had really thorough fact checking. I think we triple, quadruple checked everything that was in the podcast. And there were ways that we were able to, you know, if you said that this happened, then we can go back and find something similar or, you know, people had things written down in their diaries or had made certain phone calls that were recorded. So yeah, but it was tricky. And that's something that we kind of acknowledged that some of the people I interviewed couldn't remember the exact timings of things, but they had really strong memories of certain moments that really stuck with them. What about for you? This has happened over so many decades.

Phil Vine (12:15)

I guess I was lucky because I got two bites at this story. So I did the original story back in 2004. So I had interviews to draw on, interviews from the people who'd left. I actually got an interview with Ipeng Wong as well. And so I had that as a base. So when I went back to it last year, I had their accounts, I suppose, from the time, which is good. But like I say, the beauty of a podcast is you can actually go to different people and if they do have conflicting recollections of the same event, you can play them and then people can get this kind of 360 degree kind of view of this thing that is remembered because nothing is ever remembered perfectly. But you get very close to that by having a number of people. And it's really important when they do admit that, oh, I can't remember that to play that as well, I think because people understand that memory isn't 100% reliable.

Dominique (13:16)

You know, I'm wondering because I know you brought a lot of your own personal experience into the lodge and, and dealing with alternative medicinal therapies.

Phil Vine (13:29)

How.

Dominique (13:30)

How did your own experience kind of inform the way that you interviewed and put the podcast together?

Phil Vine (13:37)

Yeah, I mean, it was kind of a little bit reluctant for me because it was really personal. So I had this awful time 10 years ago where I got cancer, lymphoma, and, um. And as well as doing. I'm fine now, by the way, thank you.

Dominique (13:50)

I'm glad.

Phil Vine (13:51)

As well as doing the standard kind of conventional stuff like surgery and radiation, I also got on board with some pretty wacky alternatives. And I debated with my colleagues and my boss about whether or not I should put this into the podcast. But I did end up talking about it because I think it was relevant. And I talked about how I found myself one evening just after my diagnosis, lying out on the veranda under the trees. We kind of live in a forest, full moon, of course, surrounded by the. Surrounded by the.

Dominique (14:25)

Why is it always a full moon?

Phil Vine (14:28)

I don't know. I'm surrounded by these, you know, light workers who work with light. And I don't know whether what they did had an effect. It felt pretty strong at the time psychologically. I was, you know, I was in a pretty vulnerable space, I guess at the time, but completely at odds with my hard nosed, kind of journalistic brain. But it did help me to understand, I suppose, how people, when they are desperate and I felt desperate, then do reach out to stuff that otherwise they might not if they weren't in that situation. I'm really fascinated by the draw of these gurus. Right. I haven't come across many in my life, but the guy that you were looking at, a tall, kind of goodish looking kind of Englishman, is that right? What techniques do you think he used in order to draw in his circle?

Dominique (15:30)

This is something I see still am thinking about, of how he was sort of actively thinking about and cunning in the way that he went about things and how much of it was just things that he truly believed that he was bringing people along for the ride with. But I, I think what's really struck me was when I spoke to people, one person I spoke to said, you know, whenever we were at a party together, he always had this crowd of people around him and he could really spin a yar and tell a great story. And I think that's maybe one of the aspects of him that kind of followed through and drew people to him throughout his life. I think in this day and age that the concept of coercive control is so much more broadly understood and that it's actually not a matter of would you have fallen for him or would have you been gullible enough to fall for him? It's about the fact that, you know, people like Chantelle are actually preyed on. And certainly in Cadwell's case, he used some like, pretty textbook techniques to exert that control. You know, manipulation, isolation, that kind of separation from family and friends. You know, he isolated Chantelle, he tried to disconnect her from her family, he kept tabs on her movements and, and activities. And I just think, what chance does a 17 year old have against that?

Phil Vine (17:09)

Yeah, yeah, true that.

Dominique (17:10)

But listening to your podcast, Iping Wong wasn't really. And I struggled to Kind of understand how people could kind of look to her as a leader. What, what did you learn about her in that way?

Phil Vine (17:26)

Well, so, yeah, I don't think she had that much Riz. But that's. It's a really personal thing though, isn't it? It's like, it's like chemistry. So what is charismatic for one person isn't for another. And so I came face to face with her twice. We doorstepped her on an escalator in a shopping mall in Croatia where she was just about to give a teaching. And then her lawyers agreed to an interview. But I didn't get to sit in the same room as her. I was at her HQ at the lodge, surrounded by her followers, which was weird. And she beamed into me from one of their satellite clinics in Germany. And I found it really hard to understand how she talked anyone into anything. But I think it's something to do with the fact that she under communicated and that allowed her followers to kind of fill in the spaces and bring their own philosophy and adapt what she was saying and kind of come up with their own solutions.

Dominique (18:20)

It's almost like when you speak in these really vague terms, but with this real sense of surety. I wonder if, you know, people that are in these vulnerable times of their life. That's just a really comforting thing.

Phil Vine (18:35)

Hey, so before we go, Dom, maybe we should put some lessons out there for people who might be on the edges of one of these high demand groups and others who might know people who are. Do you have any kind of advice? I suppose,

Dominique (18:51)

I mean, I'm not an expert, but I've interviewed experts and I know that at times of uncertainty like we're experiencing now, cult recruitment actually goes up because people are looking for really simple answers to these huge problems that don't really have simple answers. And it's a time when cult leaders are able to take advantage of that and say, we have the answers and we can protect you and come with us and we'll look out for you. And that's a really tempting position to be in, I think, for people who are vulnerable and looking for a place to belong and looking for that certainty. But I would say to anyone, you know, who is seeing their family member or their friend perhaps getting tied up in a cult or, you know, I guess perhaps having these extreme beliefs, all of a sudden, the advice that I got was just to keep talking and never shut those people out. What about you? Anything that you learned along the way?

Phil Vine (19:52)

One little nugget. If someone who's offering you alternative wellness treatment, be it cult or not. And they say my way or the highway, you shall not have any other treatment other than mine. Red Flag. Run away.

Dominique (20:08)

Well, it's been really great chatting to you Phil, and if it could Expanse listeners are interested, you can check out Phil's podcast. Just search the lodge wherever you get your pods. And thank you as well to everyone who made this episode happen, Tim Watkin, Blythe Moore, Pia Wersu, and Grant Walter, who also mixed the episode.

ABC Radio Host (20:29)

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