People who were raised in cults, what was it like and how did you escape?

The Accident and the Fight for Control

Then Justin had a bad accident—a really bad accident. He was on his bike when a car blew through a stop sign without slowing down and plowed right into him. He had to be rushed to the hospital and landed in the ICU. Ray was his emergency contact.

I was with her and some other friends when she got the call. I immediately drove her to the hospital with a couple of other people. She was melting down, understandably.

The hospital staff wouldn’t let us all in when we got there, but they let Ray in. She came out periodically to let us know what was going on. Justin wasn’t unconscious but he was totally out of it. He didn’t seem to know she was there, probably from the painkiller.

She was convinced he had permanent debilitating brain damage. The group of us were just soothing her and reassuring her it would be fine.

A friend of ours who worked at the hospital as an MRI tech was also stopping by when she could on her breaks and calming down Ry. We’d been there all night and part of the day at this point.

The medical staff was giving us reason to be hopeful, but things got worse. To this day, no one knows how they found out. But 14 hours after Justin’s accident, his parents, uncles, and grandfather showed up.

They immediately had all of us removed from the ICU, Ray included. Unfortunately, as his ex-wife, she was no longer his legal next-of-kin. She had no rights against his blood family at this point.

She was absolutely hysterical and inconsolable. She was convinced Justin’s family would hurt him. I’m ashamed to say all three of us that were there with her thought she was overreacting.

We all knew Ray and Justin had left a messed up situation, but it wasn’t like his own family would do anything to impede his recovery. She was getting angry with us for trying to calm her down and tried to explain.

According to their religion, she and Justin deserved punishment from God. Only the greatest suffering could prompt repenting and redemption.

She said their families embraced this thinking and wanted them to suffer. This suffering would prove that they did the wrong thing by leaving and would drive them back to the fold. She said as long as Justin was with his family, he wouldn’t be safe.

Our friend who worked for the hospital came and found Ry at that point. She made Ry swear up and down she wouldn’t tell anyone she told her this. She could get in deep trouble for releasing privileged information to someone unauthorized.

She’d caught wind that Justin’s parents were aggressively demanding the hospital release him into their care and they were involving lawyers. The hospital was currently refusing because Justin wasn’t stable enough to leave.

Our friend warned Ry that as soon as Justin got to be stable or the lawyers scared the hospital enough, the parents might be able to take Justin. This shocked the rest of us.

Realizing his parents were not only willing to remove Justin from the hospital that had saved his life but were actively trying to do it made us really get why Ry was going out of her head with fear.

At this point, Ray snapped into Do or Die mode. Convinced that Justin was about to literally die if she didn’t act, she decided she would do everything in her power to start a fire at home.

This was so that Justin’s family would want to run back to put it out. This wasn’t too hard because she had a lot of dirt on the whole community she came from. Like a mad woman, she started blowing the whistle all over Justin’s family.

She called the IRS’s fraud hotline and detailed all the ways that the family business was committing tax fraud. She submitted an ATF tip about how that same family business was illegally selling firearms without a license.

The business was not following any of the proper protocols. It was knowingly selling firearms to convicted felons. She reported one of Justin’s uncles for owning several firearms as a convicted felon.

She also reported Justin’s mom’s unlicensed daycare business. It was apparently extremely shady, including having over 30 children packed into one house with Justin’s mom as the only adult.

Many of the child care duties were being farmed out to Justin’s 12 and 14-year-old sisters. She called CPS on Justin’s uncles and his parents. In all of these reports, she provided extensive details.

She finished her calls and emails and then she waited. We all waited for several hours and nothing happened.