Cults: Hidden Killers Investigates

Hidden Killers Podcast
  • 0.0 (0)
  • True Crime
  • Updated Daily

They don't recruit you with chains. They recruit you with answers. With belonging. With someone who finally seems to understand you in a world that doesn't. And by the time you realize the door you walked through only locks from the outside, you've already handed over your money, your relationships, your identity — and sometimes your life. I'm Tony Brueski, and this podcast pulls apart the machinery of cults: how they form, how they control, how they destroy, and how some people find a way out while others never do. Every week, we examine a different group — from the ones that made international headlines to the ones still operating in the shadows right now. We go inside the psychological framework that makes intelligent, capable people surrender their autonomy to a single leader or ideology. We break down the recruitment tactics, the isolation strategies, the love-bombing, the shame cycles, and the incremental boundary violations that turn a community into a cage. We talk to people who got out and people who tried to help those who didn't. And we look at the leaders — because the playbook is remarkably consistent whether the cult is built around religion, self-help, politics, wellness, or something that doesn't have a name yet. This isn't sensationalized. It's not a freak show. The people who end up inside these groups are not weak, gullible, or broken. They're human. And the mechanisms that trap them are operating everywhere — in organizations, movements, and relationships that most people would never think to question. Understanding how coercive control works isn't just true crime education. It's survival information. New episodes drop Monday through Friday. If you've ever wondered how someone ends up giving everything to a group that gives nothing back — or if you've lived it yourself — you're in the right place. Join Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/ Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8-vxmbhTxxG10sO1izODJg?sub_confirmation=1 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspod X Twitter https://x.com/TrueCrimePod This publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.

  1. Samuel Bateman Got Fifty Years — So Why Are His Followers Going Back?

    15h ago

    Samuel Bateman Got Fifty Years — So Why Are His Followers Going Back?

    He's serving fifty years. He still picks up the phone every day. And the women he calls still pick it up on the other end. Samuel Bateman is in federal prison — and a meaningful number of the women Christine Marie risked everything to save have walked right back into his sphere. Some of his adult wives still call him their prophet. Some of the girls Christine helped pull out of his house have returned. The conviction didn't end his control. The sentence didn't end his control. He calls. They listen. Christine describes it as an IV of indoctrination — certainty flowing one phone call at a time into people whose entire identity was built inside a system designed to make leaving feel like death. Warren Jeffs did the same thing from a Texas prison cell for over a decade. Now Bateman is running the same play. Christine tells what she actually knows about what Bateman feeds his followers from inside. The split between the women who got out for good and the women who returned — and whether the ones who left are now seen as traitors, as fallen, as enemies. Why some women can walk out of a coercive group and build a real life the way Christine herself did, and why others can't. The ugly question she keeps coming back to: whether some adults can be reached at all, or whether some people only ever feel at home inside something broken. Short Creek is still standing. Same theology. Same isolation. Same obedience structure. Robin Dreeke and Shavaun Scott examine why the FLDS survives when other cults collapsed. They talk about Faith Bistline — who lost her entire family to Bateman and is now raising the children they helped destroy. What works to help children still inside high-control groups when pulling them out has devastating consequences and leaving them in has worse ones. And the question that hangs over everything: is Short Creek going to break the cycle, or is the machine just sitting there waiting for its next operator? Both experts answer directly. Their answers might not be the ones you expect. Join Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/ Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8-vxmbhTxxG10sO1izODJg?sub_confirmation=1 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspod X Twitter https://x.com/TrueCrimePod This publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice. #SamuelBateman #FLDS #ChristineMarie #TrustMeNetflix #ShortCreek #WarrenJeffs #RobinDreeke #ShavaunScott #HiddenKillers #TrueCrime

    34 min
  2. Samuel Bateman's Police Watched The Footage And Sent Christine Marie Home Every Time

    1d ago

    Samuel Bateman's Police Watched The Footage And Sent Christine Marie Home Every Time

    The local sergeant watched Christine Marie's footage of what Samuel Bateman was doing inside that house. He believed every frame. He still wouldn't move. That answer kept coming back the same way every time Christine and her husband Tolga brought new tape — yeah, that looks real, but we can't act on it. Short Creek had spent decades looking the other way. Polygamy was lifestyle. The local police had stopped seeing what was in front of them long before Bateman declared himself a prophet and started taking "spiritual wives" — some of them children. The system that was supposed to protect those girls had been broken so long nobody remembered what it looked like working. Christine didn't give up. The recording that finally moved the case came in late 2021 — Bateman, in his own voice, describing handing three of his wives to three of his men. One of them was a minor. Christine flipped a mother named Julia Johnson, whose four daughters had been given to Bateman. She helped pull the girls away from him so federal agents could finally move in. Every month the wall held was another month those girls weren't safe. Christine still carries that timeline — and the regret about what she'd do differently to get it shortened. The girls who were rescued couldn't tell interviewers what happened to them. Trained forensic specialists sat across from them and got silence. But their journals — seized by the FBI — were full of it. Dates. Details. Names. In their own handwriting. They could put it on paper but they could not say it out loud. Shavaun Scott and Robin Dreeke examine why. What Bateman's "atonement ceremonies" did to his followers' capacity to recognize harm. The body language in the documentary that viewers are misreading as choice. Why eight girls went willingly with Bateman's wives after being removed from foster care. And the question that makes the co-defendants' cases the hardest part of this story — women raised inside the same FLDS system, married off as teenagers, conditioned from birth, now convicted for doing to the next generation what was done to them. Join Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/ Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8-vxmbhTxxG10sO1izODJg?sub_confirmation=1 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspod X Twitter https://x.com/TrueCrimePod This publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice. #SamuelBateman #FLDS #ChristineMarie #TrustMeNetflix #ShortCreek #PoliceFailure #ShavaunScott #RobinDreeke #HiddenKillers #TrueCrime

    54 min
  3. Samuel Bateman Let The Woman With The Camera Sit At His Table

    1d ago

    Samuel Bateman Let The Woman With The Camera Sit At His Table

    Christine Marie didn't go to Short Creek hunting for Samuel Bateman. She and her husband Tolga moved to the Utah-Arizona border to film something else entirely — a community still recovering from Warren Jeffs going to prison. Then this self-proclaimed prophet stepped out of the wreckage, claimed Jeffs was speaking through him, and saw two outsiders with cameras as the path to the audience he wanted. He let them in. It was the worst decision he ever made. Christine had already lived through coercive control with another false prophet years before. She could read Bateman on sight. Every move he was making — the isolation, the manufactured intimacy, the escalating demands for loyalty — she'd seen done on her. She knew exactly what kind of trust to perform to keep his guard down. She sat at his table every day with a camera while he believed she was making him famous. She was building the case that would put him away for fifty years. A broke, homeless man walked into a fractured community and three years later he was driving Bentleys, commanding fifty followers, and fathers were handing him their young daughters. Robin Dreeke and Shavaun Scott pull apart the behavioral playbook — how Bateman borrowed Jeffs' prophetic authority, why public confessions manufactured complicity instead of accountability, what his obsession with cameras revealed about his psychology, and why police questioned him twice and walked away both times. From a federal detention cell, he maintained enough control that three women risked life sentences to carry out his orders through a shared tablet. Christine describes the cost of maintaining the double life from the inside. How she earned the trust of paranoid believers. How she walked into that house every morning knowing what she was watching. When "documentary maker" quietly turned into "mole" in her own head. And the question the documentary couldn't fully answer — whether Bateman truly believed he was a prophet, or knew the whole time he wasn't. Christine has an answer. She saw him close enough and long enough to know. Join Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/ Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8-vxmbhTxxG10sO1izODJg?sub_confirmation=1 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspod X Twitter https://x.com/TrueCrimePod This publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice. #SamuelBateman #FLDS #ChristineMarie #TrustMeNetflix #ShortCreek #WarrenJeffs #RobinDreeke #ShavaunScott #HiddenKillers #TrueCrime

    42 min
  4. Christine Marie Admits What It Cost To Beat Samuel Bateman

    3d ago

    Christine Marie Admits What It Cost To Beat Samuel Bateman

    The complete three-part conversation with Christine Marie, in one extended interview — for anyone who actually wants to understand how a coercive religious group works from the inside, and what it takes to break one open from the outside. Christine isn't writing about cults from a desk. She survived one. Years before she ever met Samuel Bateman, she'd been under another false prophet's spell — fell for the playbook, walked out, did the work, built a life. Then she moved to Short Creek with her husband Tolga in 2016 to film a different project entirely, and Samuel Bateman rose out of the post-Warren Jeffs FLDS community, declared himself the next prophet, took "spiritual wives" — some of them as young as nine — and let two outsiders with cameras into his house. He thought he was being made famous. He didn't know who Christine actually was. He didn't know she could read every move he was making the second he made it. In this extended interview, she walks us through the full arc. The infiltration. The cover story. The years she spent feeding tape after tape to local police who believed her and refused to move. The Atonement recording from late 2021 that finally pushed the FBI to act. Julia Johnson, the mother she flipped. The morning of the raid. And the hardest part — what coercive control actually looks like once the leader is in federal prison and still calling his believers every day, and what it costs to watch the women you risked your life to save walk right back to him. It's a master class in how cults function, how they hold, and how they sometimes survive even the prophet's downfall. LINKS BLOCKJoin Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/ Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8-vxmbhTxxG10sO1izODJg?sub_confirmation=1 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspod X Twitter https://x.com/TrueCrimePod DISCLAIMERThis publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.HASHTAGS#SamuelBateman #FLDS #ChristineMarie #CultsChannel #TrustMeFalseProphet #ShortCreek #CoerciveControl #CultPsychology #WarrenJeffs #Netflix

    59 min
  5. Christine Marie Tells Why Sameul Bateman's FLDS Followers Won't Leave

    4d ago

    Christine Marie Tells Why Sameul Bateman's FLDS Followers Won't Leave

    The Samuel Bateman case ends with the question every cult researcher eventually has to answer. He's in federal prison for fifty years. Multiple of his adult followers are doing long sentences. His underage victims testified against him in open court. And a meaningful number of the women Christine Marie risked her life to save have walked right back to him by their own choice. Why? In this third and final part of our three-part interview, Christine — herself a survivor of coercive control under a different false prophet years earlier — takes us into the hardest part of the entire story. The arrest didn't break Bateman's hold. The sentence didn't either. He calls his followers from inside federal prison every day, and the certainty he's been feeding them flows right through the line, the way Christine has called an IV of indoctrination. Warren Jeffs' followers held tight after his life sentence twenty years ago. Now Bateman's are doing the same thing. Christine walks us through what she actually knows about what's being said on those prison calls. The split between the women who got out for good and the ones who returned — and whether the ones who left are now seen by the faithful as the fallen. Why some women can leave a coercive group and rebuild, the way she did, and others physically cannot. The point at which she's had to ask herself, with grown adults who keep returning, whether some people only ever feel safe inside something broken. And the larger question her whole career keeps circling — what authorities should actually do about communities like this, or whether religious freedom in America is just going to keep producing the next false prophet, in the same town, every twenty years. LINKS BLOCKJoin Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/ Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8-vxmbhTxxG10sO1izODJg?sub_confirmation=1 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspod X Twitter https://x.com/TrueCrimePod DISCLAIMERThis publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.HASHTAGS#SamuelBateman #FLDS #ChristineMarie #CultsChannel #ShortCreek #CultPsychology #CoerciveControl #TrueCrime #WarrenJeffs #Netflix

    14 min
  6. Christine Exposes What Was Hidden In Samuel Bateman's Cult

    5d ago

    Christine Exposes What Was Hidden In Samuel Bateman's Cult

    Cult communities don't survive by accident. They survive because the world around them — the towns, the sheriffs, the social workers, the neighbors — agrees, often without saying it out loud, to leave them alone. That's the part of the Samuel Bateman story Christine Marie is uniquely qualified to explain, because she watched the agreement hold in real time. In this second part of a three-part interview, Christine takes us inside the wall that almost saved Bateman. Short Creek, the FLDS stronghold on the Utah-Arizona border, had spent decades training itself to look past what was happening to its own children. Polygamy was "how things are out there." Underage marriages were "their lifestyle." By the time Bateman declared himself the next prophet and started gathering "spiritual wives," some of them as young as nine, the local authorities had already stopped seeing what was in front of them. The sergeant in the Netflix documentary believed every frame Christine showed him and still wouldn't move. Christine walks us through what she did about it. Why she stayed with the locals as long as she did. The recording in late 2021 — Bateman describing "the Atonement," three of his wives handed to three of his men, one of them a minor — that finally moved the FBI. The mother she sat with and convinced to flip, Julia Johnson, whose four daughters had been given to Bateman. The morning of the raid. And the broader truth she's been wrestling with ever since: why do communities like this get to operate this long, and what does it actually take to make outsiders care? LINKS BLOCKJoin Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/ Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8-vxmbhTxxG10sO1izODJg?sub_confirmation=1 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspod X Twitter https://x.com/TrueCrimePod DISCLAIMERThis publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.HASHTAGS#SamuelBateman #FLDS #ChristineMarie #CultsChannel #ShortCreek #CoerciveControl #CultPsychology #TrueCrime #PoliceFailure #Netflix

    30 min
  7. Christine Reveals How She Cracked Bateman's FLDS Cult

    6d ago

    Christine Reveals How She Cracked Bateman's FLDS Cult

    Christine Marie knows what coercive control feels like from the inside. She was caught in it once herself, years ago, with a different self-proclaimed prophet. She walked out, did the work, built a life — and then she did something almost nobody who survives a cult ever does. She went back into one. By choice. With a plan. In this first part of a three-part conversation, she walks me through what it took. When she and her husband Tolga moved to Short Creek along the Utah-Arizona border, they were planning something else entirely — a project meant to give a voice to a community still reeling from the imprisonment of Warren Jeffs. Then Samuel Bateman emerged from that wreckage, declaring himself the next prophet, taking "spiritual wives," some of them children, building a sect around the same FLDS framework Jeffs had once led. He saw Christine and Tolga's cameras and made a critical mistake. He let them in. What he didn't see was a woman who had already lived through the playbook he was running. Every gesture, every framing, every red flag that fluttered in his sermons — she'd seen them before, used on her. She didn't have to study him. She had to perform belief well enough that he didn't see her coming. And she had to do it day after day, in a community where her cover slipping meant the women and girls she was trying to save would never get out. She tells me what that performance cost her. What it taught her about how predatory groups work — and whether Bateman, deep down, ever even believed his own prophecy. LINKS BLOCKJoin Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/ Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8-vxmbhTxxG10sO1izODJg?sub_confirmation=1 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspod X Twitter https://x.com/TrueCrimePod DISCLAIMERThis publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.HASHTAGS#SamuelBateman #FLDS #ChristineMarie #CultsChannel #ShortCreek #WarrenJeffs #CoerciveControl #CultPsychology #ColoradoCity #Netflix

    21 min
  8. Keith Raniere's Release Date Is 2120 — Does He Have Any Shot at Freedom?

    May 29

    Keith Raniere's Release Date Is 2120 — Does He Have Any Shot at Freedom?

    She spent $100 million on his organization. He got 120 years. She was the only one who never cooperated against him. Clare Bronfman walked out of federal prison in June 2025. Keith Raniere’s release date is 2120. The final math on NXIVM is devastating. Every co-defendant’s outcome reflects one question: did you cooperate? Bronfman didn’t — 81 months, shackled at sentencing. Allison Mack did — three years, released 2023, dismissed from the civil case. Nancy Salzman did — three and a half years, released 2024. Lauren Salzman testified at trial — probation only. Kathy Russell — two years probation. The organization rewarded loyalty. The courts rewarded its opposite. The civil reckoning continues. Seventy former members filed a federal RICO lawsuit. Over thirty withdrew. The remaining defendants: Clare Bronfman, Sara Bronfman — living abroad since 2018 — and Danielle Roberts, the physician who performed the brandings and lost her medical license. Raniere has a cert petition before the Supreme Court and a habeas petition on hold. The court grants roughly one percent of cert petitions. Every prior challenge has been rejected. The appellate court called the evidence against him a mountain. He is sixty-five years old in a federal penitentiary in Arizona. He built a system designed to make sure no one could leave. He’s the only one who can’t. The final episode of a four-part Hidden Killers investigation into NXIVM and Keith Raniere. Join Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/ Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8-vxmbhTxxG10sO1izODJg?sub_confirmation=1 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspod X Twitter https://x.com/TrueCrimePod This publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice. #NXIVM #KeithRaniere #TrueCrime #HiddenKillers #NXIVMUpdate #NXIVMCULT

    16 min
See All (71)

About

They don't recruit you with chains. They recruit you with answers. With belonging. With someone who finally seems to understand you in a world that doesn't. And by the time you realize the door you walked through only locks from the outside, you've already handed over your money, your relationships, your identity — and sometimes your life. I'm Tony Brueski, and this podcast pulls apart the machinery of cults: how they form, how they control, how they destroy, and how some people find a way out while others never do. Every week, we examine a different group — from the ones that made international headlines to the ones still operating in the shadows right now. We go inside the psychological framework that makes intelligent, capable people surrender their autonomy to a single leader or ideology. We break down the recruitment tactics, the isolation strategies, the love-bombing, the shame cycles, and the incremental boundary violations that turn a community into a cage. We talk to people who got out and people who tried to help those who didn't. And we look at the leaders — because the playbook is remarkably consistent whether the cult is built around religion, self-help, politics, wellness, or something that doesn't have a name yet. This isn't sensationalized. It's not a freak show. The people who end up inside these groups are not weak, gullible, or broken. They're human. And the mechanisms that trap them are operating everywhere — in organizations, movements, and relationships that most people would never think to question. Understanding how coercive control works isn't just true crime education. It's survival information. New episodes drop Monday through Friday. If you've ever wondered how someone ends up giving everything to a group that gives nothing back — or if you've lived it yourself — you're in the right place. Join Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/ Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8-vxmbhTxxG10sO1izODJg?sub_confirmation=1 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspod X Twitter https://x.com/TrueCrimePod This publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.

Information

You Might Also Like