Sitting in the Cotswolds farmhouse that he shares with his wife, the fashion designer Savannah Miller (sister of Sienna), Nick Skinner is explaining how an intelligent, middle-class man could get sucked into the grips of a religious cult in Costa Rica and find himself brainwashed, suicidal and fighting for the custody of his child.
"People don't tend to go looking to join a cult," he says. "Instead, curious and often idealistic people are led into recruitment and their lives are then ruined. That is certainly what happened to me."
Nick, 38, has decided to speak out for the first time about his experience because he believes there is still a great deal of misunderstanding and ignorance about how cults recruit people. "There are so many cults out there recruiting everyone from students to the elderly, and the number is rising."
Nick was the former, an idealistic student. The son of a dentist, he grew up in Devon and went to boarding school at Downside in Somerset. In his twenties, after a short stint at university, he and his then girlfriend, Allie, decided to travel, working their way around the world. Not even a baby could stop their wanderlust.
Just a few months after their son, Oscar, was born, the couple headed to Costa Rica. Talking to fellow travellers, they heard about a "biological reserve" in a remote part of the country with a community who lived on-site.
"I've always been a keen environmentalist," says Nick, who is now a bushcraft teacher, "and the community sounded amazing. It was self-sufficient, set in forest scenery. They kept goats and helped the indigenous population. We had to see it."
The couple hitched a lift to the reserve. "It was breathtakingly beautiful and instantly inspiring, full of vibrant, happy people living in simple buildings made from wind-felled trees. There was no electricity, radio or television. Allie and I were broke, so when they offered to let us stay as volunteers, it was like a dream.
"There was a dress code," he continues. "Very short hair and beards for men – the founder didn't want us looking like hippies to outsiders – and long hair for women, while 'modesty' dictated a ban on bare legs. The image was scientific and professional."
The reserve seemed well‑organised, with families, single men and single women all living in separate buildings. As well as Costa Ricans, there were Americans and a Dutch woman.
On their first evening, Nick and Allie joined a group discussion that ended with a short meditation. "It was a bit like a yoga class. We got the impression we were among some very good people who were welcoming two hard‑working Europeans into their community."
Everyone had a timetable, and the couple were given guidelines on community life, meal times and working patterns. "As we got into the swing of the timetable, the meditations became more intense. We only spoke basic Spanish at first, so our understanding was limited. The conditions were loose early on, but gradually we lost more and more freedom."
Soon the pair were assigned their own individual tutors, who helped them "integrate". "It was help with factual things at first, practical stuff, but soon we were being tutored in the beliefs and values of the group. Looking back, the religion was a hotchpotch of everything from Buddhism to Christianity. We were never told things – it felt as if our own inquisitiveness led us to find things out. After a month we asked if we could stay there permanently."
Nick and Allie discovered that the community had been set up in the 1980s. The founder had persuaded an initial group of people to follow his teachings: give up their lives, sell everything, and pool their resources into buying a piece of land.
To gain acceptance into the group, Nick and Allie were asked to make a one-off payment of £500 each to cover their living costs and kit out their cabin – there was a comprehensive list of items they required, such as two spades and a two-ring cooker. Rather like the dress code, every cabin had to be identical.
Nick had no money, so he returned to England to work in a cousin's factory. When he arrived back at the reserve two months later, Allie had changed. "She had become much more like the others – I think even at the beginning, I had held something back – and was very sure of her new beliefs. She began calling the leader – a charismatic 30-year-old – 'The Master', and she was distant with me, less tactile, and mechanical in our lovemaking. Her emotions were tightly controlled."
The couple soon found they were being given very little to eat – and requests for more of the vegetarian food were met with accusations of greed. Meanwhile, the new timetable dictated that they wake up at 3.30am for meditation, sermons and parables.
"We were told, why sleep when you can be doing something useful?" says Nick. "I realise now we were being weakened by sleep deprivation and a meagre diet so we'd become too weak to resist the force of the group. They'd talk about how consumerism was destroying the world, agricultural reforestation, how to create a harmonious lifestyle – all topics we found fascinating.
"That was the external face of it. The internal face was the development of self, spiritual evolution, how to become the perfect human being, with the leader a sort of living manual to achieve this. If you questioned him that wasn't tolerated, and people were ostracised and shunned as punishment."
Nick was being fed barely enough to live on and was physically exhausted from the manual work, the martial arts and long runs that were part of the regime. He lost three stone in weight. The questioning part of his mind remained active, but he silenced it because he wanted to keep his family intact.
Allie, on the other hand, had turned into an unquestioning devotee. Their relationship became strained and she moved out of their shared cabin into the single women's accommodation. Nick could still visit his son, but this eventually became difficult and Allie accused him of "snooping". Soon he was forbidden from visiting Oscar at all.
'I tried to gain more acceptance from the cult leader, but it was hard as he used psychological tricks, with rewards for compliance and punishments for crimes such as questioning the teachings. When I managed to get myself into 'acceptance' mode, everything made perfect sense – and when you see how together everyone is, how close, and that you're not part of that, you want to be. You would strive for acceptance. But no matter how hard I tried to give myself up to the group, a part of my brain always resisted."
A year passed, and Nick became more compliant. He recalls this period as the time he was most engaged with the group. The leaders weren't convinced, however, and suggested Nick return to the UK to work on environmental study for a year, and to come back when he was clearer about what he wanted.
"I had become good at detaching myself emotionally, which is what they encourage, but I was very sad about leaving Oscar. They wouldn't let me take him. When I arrived home my parents were mortified at my physical appearance – I was very thin and gaunt. I didn't know it then, but they had sought professional help on how to deal with me and my situation, and had been told that challenging me could be the worst thing they could do. So they decided to sit it out and hope I'd one day see the light."
Nick returned to the group a year later. The thought of being estranged from his son overwhelmed him, so he knuckled down with his "tutor", who persuaded the leader to let him stay.
"I didn't question a thing, and the leader was pleased. I stopped listening to my quiet voice that challenged them, and I continued like that for two more years, believing I was learning to be the perfect person. We were told the end of the world was coming. We were so cut off from the world, with no newspapers or anything, the beliefs of the group were all we had. The longer you are in the grip of a cult, the harder it is to leave – you think you are an evolved being and the outside world is meaningless. There's also a big part of you that won't admit it's all rubbish, that you were wrong to accept it's not real, to admit defeat."
Nick eventually became close to Danny, another member who was becoming disillusioned with the community, "and talking to him, my mind started opening up. I started questioning things I had been told. For instance, the leader had said that he'd had an accident as a child and had been pronounced clinically dead, that he was a soul from another planet – rubbish, of course, but by the time we were told this we were so far gone, we believed it. Recruitment is a slow, steady process, you kind of slip into it, and before you know it 'facts' such as these are plausible. What you don't know early on is that everyone else is in on it, so you are being recruited by the entire group. I remember an American girl arriving and we all recruited her, me included. I'd become one of them."
Nick knew he had to leave with Oscar, so he focused on being ultra "good". It worked. The leader agreed that Nick could take Oscar to England for a holiday.
When Nick arrived home he was a fragile mess, seeing the outside world through the group's eyes one minute, and as a critic the next. "Everyone at home seemed so self-indulgent. I'd been brainwashed to think my parents were very negative, which they weren't – it's all part of being accepted, to be alienated from those who care about you. I'd had no contact with my parents for a year, as their letters had gone unread, left in the town a two-hour walk away."
Three months passed. It was time to return to Costa Rica, but in his heart Nick knew he wasn't going back. He contacted Allie's parents to explain, and they invited Nick to visit their home to discuss the situation. They hadn't told him Allie would also be there, and she grabbed the boy.
An eight-month court battle ensued, during which time Nick made contact with the anti-cult expert Graham Baldwin, who runs Catalyst, a charity that helps cult victims get their lives back. Graham counselled Nick and helped prepare his court case against Allie, putting him in contact with a specialist lawyer. Nick was only allowed to see Oscar with a child psychologist present. Suicidal thoughts crossed his mind.
"This group wasn't about money but power," explains Graham Baldwin. "Nick was very confused when I met him, like many people in his position who are trying to make sense of what happened to them. I let him talk a lot, but I asked a lot of questions, such as 'why do you think they did this or that?'. Cult victims must find the answers themselves. Cults target intelligent young people who are often searching for something. Anyone can be recruited. There is no immunity."
It was actually Allie's sister who saved the day. Having visited the group in Costa Rica, she came forward and said she believed Oscar was better off with his father. Oscar was made a ward of court.
Nick, meanwhile, slowly started rebuilding his life – and Savannah Miller became a big part of this rehabilitation. When they first met at a friend's wedding eight years ago, she describes him as a "poor lost puppy". They married in 2005 and now have three children – as well as Oscar, 16, who continues to live with them.
Nick kept a diary during his stay with the group, something that is helping with Paradiso, the film script he is working on, about his experiences in a cult. He intends to donate some of the profit to Catalyst to help pay for a therapy centre for the victims of cults – unlike many countries, the UK still lacks such a facility.
Catalyst currently deals with around 200 cases a year, and estimates that approximately 1,500 cults operate in the UK alone. As Savannah says: "Without Graham's help, who knows if Nick would have recovered and turned into the confident man he is today."
*Some names have been changed
