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- [00:03]
A
Stuff podcasts.
- [00:10]
B
Previously on the Commune.
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C
We were planning on trampoline outside the meeting and dad come out and told us and I lost my shithead. We did not want to be there.
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D
Centrepoint is a communal psychotherapy culture.
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A
Once you eliminate all the strings that tie us together, once you substitute for that blind obedience to a leader, the danger is obvious.
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D
This episode of the Commune contains strong language, references to drug use and suicide, and descriptions of sexual abuse.
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E
If you're not comfortable, make yourself comfortable. Surprising how often people sit in uncomfortable postures on uncomfortable chairs because they're not prepared to move. It may even require a little bit of mutual adjustment with your neighbours. Get those lumps and bumps out. This is one time when you can take some of your limits off and
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D
allow yourself to be really comfortable. I'm Adam Dudding and this is the commune. Episode 10, the writing on the Wall.
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C
I tried to be a good kid and then at one point I just stopped giving a fuck.
- [01:32]
D
Remember Nate? We heard from him a couple of episodes back. The Centrepoint child who went to that Pink Floyd concert. Nate talked about the guy we called Benji, the paedophile who was ejected from Centrepoint because he was molesting boys.
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C
When they found out and they got rid of him, I was so happy. I was so goddamn happy.
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D
But remember I said Nate had two stories that we thought were especially important and which hadn't been heard in public before. The first was about Benji. That all happened when Nate was around the age of 12. Nate's second story starts a couple of years later than that. We're now well into the 1990s and Centrepoint has recently taken a huge hit to its reputation because members and ex members have been convicted of child sex abuse and drug offences. So you'd think Centrepoint might be on the defensive, perhaps being a little more careful in its treatment of its children and its teenagers. But what Nate tells us suggests that wasn't always the case, because Nate's second story is also about predatory behaviour towards boys. But this time the predators were older women.
- [02:42]
C
They always sort of hung around and watched you and then they'd come and ask you off. And most of the time. Nah, piss off.
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D
What sort of age are you at this point?
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C
14, 15? Old yucky woman. Would you like to go off with me? No, no, I don't want to juggle the old bat. But there was constant pressure and they won't leave you alone.
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D
So Nate is being propositioned with that classic Centrepoint phrase of would you like to go off? By women decades older than him while he is below the legal age of consent. And Nate says there were times when he'd cave because his defences were down. By which he means he'd been drinking or taking drugs.
- [03:21]
C
I'd be off my face on either some drugs and mushrooms, ecstasy or very, very drunk and then take advantage of that. I woke up a few mornings in the bed going, no memory of this instant, like, what the hell am I doing here? But the worst part wasn't the act itself. This one woman would come to the shower afterwards and tell you, you can't wash me off you.
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D
Nate says, because he felt shame. It made it hard to say no the next time it happened.
- [03:48]
C
He'd be shamed by this woman anytime she wanted it. I'll tell everybody what's going on, you're going to come and do this, follow you around. The community's really hard. How do you avoid that? Centrepoint is a place where we're supposed to tell everybody what's. But you know, you don't tell anybody. And that's how certain point was they didn't want you telling anybody. In fact, if you didn't enjoy that abuse, there was something wrong with you. You're attention seeker, you're a liar, you're this, you're that, there's something wrong with you. You're not enjoying what's going on.
- [04:22]
D
At the time, he felt totally alone in this.
- [04:25]
C
Yep, I've heard she wasn't the only one. Which is sad in itself because if we had spoken to each other, a lot of the feelings that she was trying to use against us wouldn't have worked. If we'd been talking, we could have turned around and gone, hey, this is gonna stop. Because we're not ashamed, because we're talking about it.
- [04:47]
D
Being 14, 15, going through the hormonal madness of puberty. It can be tough under the best of circumstances and these really weren't the best of circumstances.
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C
It was very confusing for a young teenage boy because there was some very good looking older women. If you have a sexual fantasy about somebody and then it happens, is that still abuse? Of course it is. There are adults, we're children, but I didn't know that at the time.
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D
So Nate says that despite having this coerced sex with older women, he still managed to maintain some normality around sex. A kind of innocence almost.
- [05:21]
C
I had, yeah, very little sexual experience in a normal sense until much later. Outside standing point. You're at a party with a girl and you're really into her, but you back out because you're too afraid of being rejected. People might find that hard to believe, but I managed to hold onto those values somehow. Still very, very special thing to me. Yeah.
- [05:44]
D
When Nate talks about this, the way he maintained his own boundary in the middle of everything, I find that moving. You created this form of normality for your sexuality in the midst of pretty difficult circumstances. It's extraordinary.
- [06:00]
C
Well, thanks. I feel pretty good about it, in a sense.
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D
You had this piece of self identity that was strong enough to hold up in that strong headwind.
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C
I never really looked at it that way. So that was life.
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D
Nate didn't tell anyone about the older women at the time and he hasn't attempted any sort of legal action in the years since.
- [06:28]
C
Apparently in that time, a male couldn't be assaulted by a woman legally. And even now we couldn't bring charges because at that time it wasn't legal, which is crazy.
- [06:36]
D
There's evidence we've seen which makes it clear Nate wasn't the only underage boy predated on by older women at Centrepoint. We've seen documents showing that at one point in 1996, police received a complaint that a 12 year old boy had had sexual intercourse with at least four women and that the women were aged in their 30s, 40s and 50s. But as best we can tell, the police decided there was no crime committed, so no action was taken. New Zealand's sexual assault laws had a big overhaul in 2004, making them more gender neutral. But back in the 90s and earlier, the law was mostly blind to the concept of an older female sexual offender and younger male victim. The most surprising bit of evidence we've seen regarding this complaint about the 12 year old boy and those much older women, it's something which really shines a light on the way Centrepoint was thinking about children and sex even by then. Because after that failed complaint to police, a concerned father at Centrepoint posts a public notice on the commune's notice board just near the front door. The concerned father writes that he is fucked off about what the older women had done to the boy and his notice. I had felt that there was a
- [07:51]
F
clear agreement between the adults here that sex between adults and kids was strictly off limits.
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D
What was the response to this notice? Well, it seems at least one of the women found it pretty funny because she scribbled a little note in reply and put that up on the notice board too. It read, dear, if there was no
- [08:11]
A
sex allowed between adults and children, wouldn't
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D
be able to fuck you. And she signs off with her name and Just so you follow the joke, that second bleeped name was the partner of the man who posted the original notice. Hilarious. It boggles the mind, but this notice bought war. I guess you could describe it as the writing on the wall as a sort of miniature example of how Centrepoint was dealing with its troubles. At this time, inside the community, there are some genuine looking efforts to make Centrepoint a safer place for children. Things like a course that the Department of Social Welfare helps arrange, where a psychologist from Auckland University comes to run training sessions on identifying sexual abuse. But at the same time, and I guess this is no surprise, some Centrepoint remainers are totally minimising the crimes that put Potter and others in jail. And you can see this in the pages of the Centrepoint newsletter. Editors have come and gone, but it's still the commune's propaganda outlet. Several offenders write articles about their experience of being convicted or imprisoned, but there's seldom any real acknowledgement of wrongdoing. And more often than not, there's a little get out clause somewhere in there. One man writes that I pleaded guilty
- [09:32]
F
to one charge of indecent assault, but the facts were not completely accurate as presented by the Crown.
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D
The man goes on to imply that his victim had testified against him only because the police had bullied her into it. In the same issue, another Centrepoint pioneer thinks it's time to draw a line under the whole nasty business.
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G
It is time for us to stop being ashamed of ourselves. It's time to reframe our recent history. Time to talk widely, articulately and proudly of our expertise, including what we've learned from hanging in and surviving the stresses of the past few years.
- [10:09]
D
In a later issue, someone writes a brief history of the community, and they describe the period immediately after the raids
- [10:16]
C
like There was a great deal of stress, confusion and fear as residents grappled with the knowledge that people they had lived with and loved now felt damaged by their experience at Centrepoint.
- [10:29]
D
Felt damaged. That old Centrepoint instinct to turn any accusation back on the accuser to blame the victim is still going strong. And then there's the new book by Felicity Goodyear Smith. We've spoken about Felicity before, very briefly, you might recall. She's the wife of John Potter. That's Bert Potter's son. Felicity was never a Centrepoint member, but she was the community's GP after Keith, so she was deeply enmeshed with the community. Felicity's husband, John Potter, was one of the members imprisoned for historic child sex abuse. And the following year, Felicity publishes a book called first do no Harm, which is a strong attack on what she calls the sex abuse industry. There's a chapter about false complaints by children. There's a bit where she describes this new trend where adults recall sexual incidents from their childhood which weren't traumatic at the time, but which they've now decided, in retrospect, were traumatic and as a result, people end up in jail. There's a bit where, without any sort of footnote or caveats, she writes about, quote, consensual sexual contact between a child and adult, unquote. The review of the book in a CentrePoint newsletter in 1994 is very positive. And here's a weird thing. Remember the whole drama around Benji from episode 7? The guy Nate told us about who came into the community and started molesting young boys, got caught and was then quickly booted out. Well, we've heard from multiple sources that what happened to Benji made some people believe that Centrepoint was in fact safe for children and therefore all the other alleged abuse against the girls didn't even happen. One former Centrepoint child of the 90s told us that for a long, long time she believed the girls behind the court cases must have been lying. In an email she said the fact that the community rejected Benji, quote, reinforced the lies they told me later on when accusations were going around and people were being arrested. So, yeah, things were complex for the kids at centrepoint in the 1990s. We'll hear from one of them after the break.
- [12:53]
E
We don't believe it can happen. For most of human societies,
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D
the year is 2020. The outbreak centres on the city of a deadly pandemic is raging and in Aotearoa, New Zealand cabinet meet this afternoon, our government slams the border shut. I'm Adam Dudding.
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B
I'm Eugene Bingham. And in our new series Quarantine Nation, we are looking back at New Zealand's experience of a global catastrophe.
- [13:21]
A
You're holding in your hand this sample and it's like, this could just change New Zealand.
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F
I can recall pacing around the room thinking, we've just got to move quickly.
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D
Living through Covid was deeply weird.
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C
Big surge in New Zealand. So, you know, it's terrible.
- [13:37]
B
So in Quarantine Nation, we take a minute to figure out just what happened.
- [13:41]
D
What were they thinking? What was the world thinking? Made with the support of NZ On Air Out Now. While making this podcast, we talked with more than a dozen former children of Centrepoint. Some you've already heard from.
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A
Oh, yes, I remember you. We actually jumped in the big silver
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G
vat that was full of jelly and
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A
swam around and ate it. There was a huge toaster that could fit about eight pieces of toaster.
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D
But so far, we've not really heard from the children of Centrepoint who arrived there really late in the piece. Kids whose time at the commune was mostly after those big raids and the arrests and the convictions. In 2010, Massey University researchers interviewed 29 former Centrepoint kids. And one of the things that stood out to the researchers was that this youngest cohort of ex Centrepoint kids generally had far more positive memories of the place than the older children. We contacted a number of people from this cohort, but we had real trouble lining up formal interviews. And we'll get into why that is a bit later, but from the initial chats we had with them, we could piece together a picture of the centre point of that era. And we seemed to be hearing about a place that was indeed relatively benign when compared to the centre point described by older kids, people like Angie or Renee. And certainly a wildly different place from the early Centrepoint that had been revealed in the sex abuse trials. We heard about a centre point where, sure, the community was shrinking, the adults were arguing, but the kids just got on with hanging out and having fun. A place where people still talked about an old guy called Burt Potter and sometimes visited him in prison, but he mostly seemed irrelevant to their lives. A place where, sure, there were therapy groups available but you didn't have to do them. A place where, sure, you'd start experimenting with sex a bit younger than the other kids you knew at school, but it didn't seem that big a deal. A place where you'd heard that some bad things had happened in the old days at Centrepoint, but now the biggest trauma in your life was possibly that outsiders would point at you as you got off the commune bus at school, or that kids teased you by saying Centrepoint kids had to share their undies when you knew that just wasn't true anymore, if it ever was. They describe a place where you knew some of the members had been to prison for crimes they committed ages ago, and now they were back and didn't seem like dangerous people at all. Several people made a particular point of saying how much they liked Ulrich, the chemical engineer. So, yeah, most of this group eventually chose not to do a formal interview for this podcast, except for one guy.
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F
So, I'm Julian, I'm 38, and I lived at Centrepoint back during primary school. It must have been.
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D
Julian went to Centrepoint with his father and stepmother in the early 90s. And aside from A gap in the middle lived there for most that decade. Some of what he has to say about the Centrepoint life sounds pretty familiar.
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F
It was like walking into a school camp and then finding out that that's where you're going to be staying from now on.
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D
The rules for kids were loose and wolf packs formed, though mostly they got
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F
up to kind of goofy, stupid kid
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D
stuff, like shooting Roman candles at each other on Guy Fawkes night. But some things about this version of Centrepoint are less familiar. Remember the notorious longhouses where multiple families shared a space?
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F
A lot of them had been converted from just big, long buildings into separate rooms.
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D
Yes, teenagers were still losing their virginity pretty young.
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F
I would have been maybe 13, 14.
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D
But Julian says that first sexual experience with an older girl who had once been his babysitter was a positive one.
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F
It definitely didn't feel like there was pressure for it, so there wasn't a sense of sort of being taken advantage of.
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D
As for the wider Centrepoint culture of much older men having sex with underage girls, Julian says he wasn't aware of it.
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F
As far as I knew at the time, that was all kind of a thing of the past. It was something that happened before the people involved were rounded up and removed. I was, I guess, sort of aware that things had happened and that there was a sordid past, but it wasn't really discussed. It wasn't talked about.
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D
Julian never even met Potter at all.
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F
He was already gone before I arrived.
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D
Julian's very matter of fact about it all. He's fallen out of touch with most of his Centrepoint connections, but remembers his years there mostly with fondness. In his late teens, he came out as gay and that went fine. There was no pushback. He thinks that for him, overall, I'd
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F
say that most of it was a pretty positive place to be.
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D
But occasionally there are those moments so familiar to us from interviewing people who lived at Centrepoint, where his stories stray into areas that are a bit hair raising. Arguably they're small things relative to the wild extremes we've heard about in this podcast. But maybe they're not so small if you think about them in isolation, such as the Christmas present Julian received one
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F
year when I was about 14, 15, my Christmas present was a tab of LSD.
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D
This gift was given by an adult and it was given with the condition
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F
that they were there when I had it for the first time to make sure that I was in a safe environment.
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D
I guess there was also adult endorsement of kids under 16 going out to pick magic mushrooms.
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F
There was a forest in the area that they grew fairly abundantly.
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D
The point about under 16s doing this
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F
little chore was if I was caught by anyone, then there'd be a slap on the wrist or I could feign ignorance and nothing would come of it.
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D
All this seemed fine to Julian at the time, but, oh, I mean, I
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F
look back at it now and it's straight up abusive. Yeah, it was terribly neglectful. I've seen a number of counsellors over the years and describing that to them is one of the things that always sort of causes a. Hang on, sorry. You always kind of get a double take when you say that for the first time.
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D
So inside Centrepoint, some people at least, are happy. But outside, there's a growing diaspora. Many of these former members have settled in the nearby suburb of Torbay. They half jokingly call themselves scatterpoint. These ex members are struggling with their own lives as they try to reassimilate. But they still have deep ties to the commune and frankly, many of them are worried. One of the things that alarms them is the kind of revolving door with the prison. Convicted sex offenders who get released and head straight back to Centrepoint. And among those worried Scatterpoint people, well,
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A
Barry, first of all, leaving was. It was just surviving.
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D
Eventually, Barry gets a job as a counsellor, funnily enough, and that's enough to support herself and her youngest daughter. After 13 years, she's free of Centrepoint, but not really. You don't get to leave a cult as simply as that. Her ex husband, John, remember, he was one of those convicted of offences against girls. He serves some prison time, but then he's back in the commune.
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A
So John was still there. We had our little daughter and in my mind, I should keep that parental relationship going.
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D
So their daughter was regularly visiting John in Centrepoint, and during one of those visits, a TV crew was there making a documentary. Barry heard that her daughter had been filmed, so she sprang into action.
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A
Somebody told me about that. So I think I contacted her and said, you had no right to film my daughter without my consent. And she said, well, her father gave consent. And then she just turned on me and said, well, what do you let your daughter go there for anyway? You know what goes on there. And so that was kind of a wake up for me. Whoa. I need to look at this again.
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D
So there's that. Meanwhile, Barry's wrapping her Centrepoint experience into her new career as a counsellor. But in the 13 years since she was last out in the real world, things have changed a lot.
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A
I realised I had to go back to university and up my qualifications.
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D
So back to uni to study psychology, where she finds herself drawn to studying the social dynamics of groups and the psychology of leadership, especially charismatic, narcissistic, psychopathic leadership.
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A
I mean, it was just a journey, really, a personal journey for me as well. Just starting to see how it worked and that it wasn't just Centrepoint.
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D
It turned out that there were other places where a charismatic, narcissistic, psychopathic leader had led his flock astray. And here was the research to prove it.
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A
Just having that academic knowledge, that research, knowledge that was very empowering.
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D
It was a bit like that time when she'd read the Larry Constantine book about children and sex and finally found the science there in black and white to back up the instincts that she'd been ignoring. There was one particular book on the subject that really blew her mind, by a cult expert called Janja Lalic.
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A
So this book got passed around and people said, oh, it's like the bible of explaining what we've been through.
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D
So, yeah, this is when Barry learns all the stuff about cults she told us about way back in episode four. In groups now.
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E
This is the law of the land.
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D
Out groups.
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E
We're coming up against it now. We sort of bend it.
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D
Love bombing.
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E
Very beautiful human beings.
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D
Loss of identity.
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E
Let's take all the limits off we can.
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D
Loss of reputation.
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E
We have got two heads.
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D
Loss of privacy.
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E
Lack of doors on our toilets.
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D
Pecking fights.
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E
Council chambers with a little bag full of gelignite.
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D
Stopping thoughts, Thoughts going through your mind. You just watch them go through strange tasks.
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E
The task of carrying a large cross around for several days and always. Now my answer to that is tuck more often.
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D
Six plus the kicker, telling everyone in the cult that when they leave, they'll get sick or die or run out of money or end up in a mental institution just like your mother did. Because, yeah, one of the really hard parts about being in a cult is what happens once you're no longer in it. Especially if you're someone like Barry, who's actually a founding member of the cult and was right up close to the leader. Once you've been there, where do you go next?
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A
It's such a long process of, who am I now? Who do I want to be? Who have I been? How can I face people? Do I tell people? Do I not tell people? I've got to live, how I've got to earn a living, you know, who can I tell and not lose my job? That kind of thing. So that's a long process. But the, you know, those hours, two o' clock in the morning, lying awake, just going over and over things and then children and what they've got to say to you and coping with that and your identity as a parent, you know, I wouldn't be the only one that had suicidal thoughts at times and worked through. That's not going to help.
- [25:32]
D
Barry's academic studies were telling her that cult members typically experience a breakdown of their identity and replacement with a cult Persona. And then if you come out the
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A
other side, if you've had an adult Persona before that, then when you break the cult psychology, you can go snap back into to that, which is a very disorienting process and you're going back a decade or more to pick up your old self. So that's really strange, that's bad enough.
- [26:06]
D
But Barry says if someone arrives when they're a young child or they're even
- [26:10]
A
born within a cult, they haven't got an adult Persona to go back to and so it's so much worse for them.
- [26:19]
D
And knowing this stuff, reading the books, wrapping your head around the person you were and the terrible things you've done, Barry says it doesn't exactly make things better.
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A
It doesn't help explain it to your children or anyone who doesn't know that. But it does help deal with the demons in the night.
- [26:47]
D
Now she's out of the commune. Barry is slowly but steadily getting her own life in order. But Centrepoint won't leave her alone. She still feels a responsibility. For now Potter is totally out of the picture. He's still in jail serving a relatively long sentence. But that's not the case for everyone.
- [27:04]
A
They were all coming back to the community and they'd all got out early because, you know, they're nice middle class guys and white and they all behaved well and so they all got out on good behaviour quite early. And by then all of us with any nous about it had left. And it was even more highlighted, was I going to let my daughter go back there? And who was there there to monitor things?
- [27:35]
D
A source inside the community is feeding her information about what's happening inside and it doesn't sound good. She hears that the reason the parole board is letting sex offenders back is because someone in the community, someone Barry doesn't trust, has officially vouched for them. She contacts the parole board, she contacts the child protection people at the Department of Social Welfare.
- [27:57]
A
I went to SIPs and parole board and how can this be happening?
- [28:01]
D
But nothing seems to change. It's a nightmare. It feels like the Cogs of the SendPoint sex abuse machine have drifted back into position and could roar back into action, yet there aren't any obvious rules or laws that can stop it.
- [28:16]
A
I was, you know, around the house and just this muttering going on inside me. This shouldn't be happening. This can't be happening. Someone should close this down. And this is a bit weird, but I actually heard an auditory voice go, you close it down. You close it down.
- [28:41]
D
Whoever it was who talked to Barry that day, they were offering sound advice.
- [28:46]
A
It was kind of quite a commanding male voice. Not Cecil DeMille, God or anything, but it was just stop me in my tracks.
- [28:58]
D
Barry stopped in her tracks and thought a bit harder about what it might take to really stop the Centrepoint machine sending its members to jail. That hadn't shut it down. It no longer had any public reputation to speak of and no real friends in the media. But that didn't seem to make much difference. Membership was shrinking, but still it wouldn't die. The parole board, social welfare, they didn't seem to have any leverage. There had to be some other way. She was very loyal, Barry. To everybody. She was.
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A
She was picking. Lovely.
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G
That's very young, Dave.
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E
It is, it is. It is very young.
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G
Very young for a child to insist investigate sexual activity.
- [29:55]
A
On the second day of Christmas, my true love gave to me. One sugar pill, ten tabs of acid and a lesson in honesty.
- [30:21]
D
That was episode 10 of the commune, a stuff production. It was researched, written and produced by Eugene Bingham and me, Adam Dudding. Mixing by Andrew McDowell. Digicake music by Audio Network look, we're 10 episodes in now. We're really glad you're still listening, so we'd like to ask a small favour. Take a moment, pop into the Apple podcast store and leave a five star rating and a quick review. Apparently the algorithm likes it and it'll mean more listeners can find the podcast. Thanks. For more information about the Commune, head to Stuff Co nz. Thecommune. The year is 2020. The outbreak centres on the city of Zealand. A deadly pandemic is raging and in Aotearoa, New Zealand cabinet meet this afternoon. Our government slams the border shut. I'm Adam Dudding.
- [31:25]
B
I'm Eugene Bingham. And in our new series, Quarantine Nation, we are looking back at New Zealand's experience of a global catastrophe.
- [31:32]
A
You're holding in your hand this sample and it's like, this could just change New Zealand.
- [31:36]
F
I can recall pacing around the room thinking, we've just got to move quickly
- [31:40]
D
living through was deeply weird.
- [31:43]
C
Big surge in New Zealand. So, you know, it's terrible.
- [31:48]
B
So in Quarantine Nation, we take a minute to figure out just what happened.
- [31:52]
D
What were they thinking? What was the world thinking? Made with the support of NZ on air out now.