95 - Jeffrey Epstein, Bill Gothard, and the Architecture of Abuse

In 2024, as public conversations about abuse, grooming, and accountability unfolded again and again, Amanda found herself watching familiar patterns repeat. These patterns felt uncomfortably close to the high-control religious world she thought she had left behind. For Amanda, this was not just cultural commentary. It was personal.

In this episode, Amanda and Kyle step away from sensationalism to offer something different: structure.

Using the cases of Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Gothard, Amanda explains the architecture of abuse. She examines how power is built, protected, and normalized, how grooming operates long before it becomes criminal, and why systems so often defend themselves at the expense of survivors.

Rather than focusing on graphic details or individual pathology, this conversation examines the conditions that allow abuse to flourish. It explores why the stories in the news feel eerily familiar, why true accountability and justice rarely occur, and why simply removing bad actors never fixes the underlying problem.

By the end of this episode, you will have a clearer framework for recognizing grooming and power dynamics.

This episode is for anyone who has felt disoriented watching recent narratives unfold, and for those who want language, clarity, and a steadier way of understanding what is really happening beneath the headlines.

Transcript

0:01

Hi everyone, welcome to The Cult I Left Behind podcast. I'm your host, Amanda Briggs, and I'm here to tell you my stories of growing up in the IBLP cult, which you might know from the Duggar family. And I'm your other host, Kyle Briggs. I'm Amanda's husband, and I have not heard most of these stories before. So stay tuned, and we'll all get traumatized together. All right, welcome back to the next episode. Today we've got something a little more serious around current events in the United States. I think that's something Amanda has been thinking about for a while now and how that kind of relates to power and control dynamics that happen in places like cults. So you want to share with us what you've... Yeah, So we are going to be discussing the Epstein situation, the Epstein files, Jeffrey Epstein as a sex offender. and how that relates to Bill Gothard and the same power and abuse dynamics and a lot of the same tactics that showed up in the IBLP cult and how Bill Gothard and his brother Steve operated. And we've talked about this a bit. If you go all the way, all the way back to the beginning of the podcast, we did a couple episodes about Bill and Steve and how they trafficked young women internally within the cult. and just abuse and power dynamics there. But today we want to slow down and compare Bill Gothard and at times Steve Gothard with Jeffrey Epstein and power and abuse dynamics that exist. And we've been we've been watching this conversation about Epstein unfold carefully over time and without much comment so far. I know I've made brief comments in passing about believing women, about releasing the Epstein Files, but we haven't done a full episode on this topic until now. It's not because we're unsure about what we've been seeing. It's because we wanted to be precise and offer commentary through a different lens than the news cycle. I want to be especially careful with this topic out of respect to the survivors, both of Jeffrey Epstein's and his, what shall we call them, co-conspirators, yeah, and Bill Gothard and Steve Gothard's survivors. So this isn't This isn't meant to be clickbaity. This isn't meant to be rage bait. This is always and forever about believing survivors and protecting people from systems of harm. So we invite you to come into this conversation with us through that orientation to the topic. And for me, I'll share with you guys, you may or may not have picked up on this, that 2024 was a year of just unspeakable heartbreak for me not just because of what was revealed about everything that has gone on with Jeffrey Epstein and the survivors of that entire um network of abuse and criminality um but also because of how it was talked about and watching people choose again and again not to believe survivors and watching people in positions of power people with wealth basically get away with crimes committed against children, sex crimes committed against children. And as I watched the public narratives unfold, I felt in my body, in my bones, in my heart, in my mind, like I was right back inside the cult I thought I had left behind. I was living in it again in our country. And what we're hoping to offer through this episode is education, and a reframe for how we understand power, risk, and abuse. This episode is about patterns, patterns that survivors tend to recognize immediately because we've lived inside them. And those patterns show up very clearly when you place Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Gothard side by side. So today we want to talk about what Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Gothard have in common, not as individuals per se, but as systems, because neither of them simply abused people. They built environments where abuse was efficient, repeatable, and protected. So let's start with who these systems consistently targeted. And I'm going to use a pattern of discussing what Jeffrey Epstein was known for and then what Bill Gothard is known for when it comes to power and abuse tactics and dynamics. So Epstein, the target population was adolescent girls, not children broadly. So most victims were 14 to 17, old enough to be sexualized by society, could be blamed for their choices that got them into those environments. Not really, but in the narrative. And some like, well, according to certain commentators, like ambiguous consent. age range, which children are children and age of consent is age of consent. And there are actual laws about how old you can be and have sex with someone who is X number of years older than you and when it becomes criminal. So it's not actually legally ambiguous. It's really not. People just like to play it that way as part of PR stunts. So these children were also young enough to be economically vulnerable, psychologically easier to manipulate and easy to isolate from adults who would perhaps otherwise intervene. So how this compares to Bill Gothard is he went after that same demographic. So there are pedophiles who target toddlers and young children. As far as I know, Epstein didn't do that. As far as I know, Bill Gothard didn't do that. They targeted adolescent girls on the edge of adulthood. And I don't think that was a mistake or an accident. They did that because these weren't 7, 8, 9, 10-year-olds where society would just completely agree, yes, those are tiny little children who should be protected. It's because adolescence is where systems usually are able to blur responsibility. And we see that with Megyn Kelly, who made the comment about like, well, a 14-year-old is basically a woman. Like, full stop, sorry. Honey, no, that is a child. That is a child. We saw the same thing in my story with my brother, where they were trying to use adolescence in his defense, his criminal defense as a way to protect him. Oh, but he was young. So it's like for perpetrators, adolescence is how they try to protect them. Oh, but he was young. Oh, but you know, they maybe didn't know better. For victims of crimes, for survivors, they use adolescence the other way. Oh, they were basically adults. It's so fucked up and twisted. And I am feeling a lot of rage in my body right now. This is not going to be an easy episode for me to get through. Thanks for coming on the journey. So then when we move to the second parallel, I noticed it's For Epstein, abuse tied to specific repeated locations. So from what I understand, a lot of the abuse in Epstein's case was clustered in specific locations. There's the island, certain estates, certain houses that he owned. And these locations tended to be controlled, ritualized. Some of the photos that have come out of the files about the island, just disgusting. And these locations were also known within the inner circle. And when we look at Bill Gothard's parallels, it's huge. So for Bill, abuse was clustered at headquarters in one of the specific buildings on the Oakbrook, Illinois property where his office was located. Also the training centers, North Woods being a huge one, Indianapolis being another one that comes up in the story. So the repeat locations aren't incidental. They allow abuse to become ritualized and predictable and normalized within that environment and within that inner circle, whatever that is. So for instance, in my home, my brother typically abused me in very specific locations. I knew if I went into that specific room with him, this is what was going to happen. So this is a theme, this is a tactic. I think part of it is because Predators figure out the environments they can control, and then they take their prey back to those environments. And that piece about the inner circle knowing, like Bill and Steve Gothard's abuse of young women in the cult was an open secret. The board knew about it. Various individuals affiliated with the cult knew about it, but no one does anything about it. They just protect the locations. where the abuse occurs. The third parallel I see when I look at Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Gothard is facilitated access to victims, not just random opportunity. So for instance, Epstein created systems, transportation, scheduling, quote, appointments. There were logistics involved. It wasn't just impulsive rape. It was planned attacks on children, on young girls. And Bill, Bill was the same way. He moved young women to Steve. So he trafficked young women from Oakbrook, Illinois to the Northwoods Conference Center to his brother Steve. He, Bill, moved women across the country. He manipulated their parents to send young girls to him. And in some cases, he moved people from across the world. He moved young girls across the world. to bring them to his location for abuse. And within this similarity, you know, Epstein promised work as models, things like that. Bill Gothard also promised work. Hey, come be my personal assistant, 14-year-old child. As I've said in the past, what 14-year-old kid knows how to be a personal assistant? Hey, come work at headquarters, come work at this training center. So there's this false promise of profit. to entice the young person or their parents. It's all manipulation. Hey, I just want you here so that I can then corner, manipulate, abuse, and silence you. The fourth parallel I want to talk about is power accumulation as a means, not necessarily as an end. We're going to talk about this twice in this episode. I'm going to summarize the parallels here, and then I want to talk about power accumulation and how normal people think about it and how predators think about it. Perpetrators of sex crimes think about it because it's very, very different. And I talk about this in my business when I do speaking engagements around abuse prevention, specifically in the workplace. So this is a very important topic that, in my opinion, is not discussed enough. So we're just going to park here and talk about it quite a lot this episode. So for instance, Epstein's wealth and connections reduced scrutiny, they increased silence, they, the wealth and connections expanded his access to potential targets, potential victims. So yeah, he had a lot of money, but his power wasn't just about the money. The power created risk insulation, risk protection for him, which allowed the abuse to escalate because it could. He had infrastructure, to protect him. So his power and wealth were a means not to the end of, hey, I have power and wealth. It was a means to abuse. And Bill Gothard, in a lot of ways, was the same, but it was less about monetary wealth, although he did have He did have wealth. He had property. He had income that the cult generated. But Bill built up an enormous amount of social capital with his followers. And they defended him to the nth degree. So yeah, he had power through wealth and property, nowhere near the level Jeffrey Epstein did. But most of his power was as a spiritual guide, a spiritual head, the leader, the source of all truth. So it's interesting. You don't necessarily have to have a lot of cash to become someone with an enormous amount of power that you can manipulate and abuse people through. You can also build up an enormous amount of social capital and then use that to control and silence people, manipulate them, get them to do what you want, and then protect yourself. Bill had a lot of risk insulation, not because he was as wealthy as Jeffrey Epstein, but because he had positioned himself as the source of God's truth. So it's very interesting to look at this and look at like the different things predators accumulate to protect themselves. While you were saying that, I was trying to think like, I mean, they're using their influence with their friends or their colleagues or, you know, in these situations, but I was trying to think, is there a good use of influence? Like, I think people understand what influence is. We have influencers, like that's a normal thing in culture that like you want to have influence with people. And this is just like the epitome of misusing influence. I think there are people alive now who use their power, influence, and wealth positively. What's Jeff Bezos's ex-wife's name? She donates like what, billions of dollars to amazing causes. You have Taylor Swift who donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to every city she went to on the Eras tour and I think to the food banks, right? I think she gave her entire crew like almost$2 million in bonuses because the tour did well. So she redistributed the wealth. I can think of poets and authors who are using their platforms to spread healing and love and education and light. I hope our podcast does that. whatever influence we have, I hope it is helping people love themselves better, love others better, think through things in a new way, have more information than they did before they listened to an episode. I do think it is possible to use power, wealth, and influence in a way that is good. Now, don't get me started on how much power, wealth, and influence people should have, because I do have opinions about that. But Broadly, I think you can use these things for good. You don't have to turn into someone who uses their power, wealth, and influence to isolate themselves from risk when they commit crimes. And I think it gets a little tricky when you're trying to, like you can't just look for the signs of people building influence because it could be used for good or evil. And so I feel like that makes it harder to catch. Yeah, you have to be discerning. And that can be hard, because what do we know about perpetrators? They're cunning, they're charismatic. Yeah. So you can't just look for somebody trying to build influence, because plenty of those people out there, not all of them are bad. I mean, I'll be frank, I'm trying to build influence all the time, but I think I have a really good message. And I hope people scrutinize me. I invite that. Like if someone's going to have a voice in your life, interrogate their integrity. That is fair, and that is right, and that is what we should be doing. So interrogate my integrity. I welcome it, and I will adjust as needed. I think that that's what you do when you're serious about trying to create help and hope instead of harm. you welcome those moments, even if they sting, even if you do have to recognize you were wrong about something or you weren't educated enough about something and you have to backtrack it and apologize and change your ways. Like, that's good. That means you're someone who can grow. So yeah, I think you make a good point. So the next parallel I notice is that cover-ups for both Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Gothard weren't just legal, they were social. So for Epstein, there was, you know, the reputation wandering and the victim intimidation and the strategic philanthropy and, you know, trying to garner social credibility. But when you look at Bill, if you replace philanthropy with religious authority, it's basically the same thing. So his social capital, Bill's social capital, provided ways to silence his victims, to intimidate his victims, to ruin their reputation, which was basically the worst thing that could happen to you in the IBLP cult. So Bill could send his victims home in shame to parents who would believe Bill, not their own daughter. So if this language feels familiar to you right now as you're listening to this episode, that's because it's designed to be. It's how system It's how systems teach survivors to doubt themselves. There is a lot of intimidation. There is a lot of, hey, here's how I can ruin you. A lot of blackmail. My brother did that. Hey, I'm going to make mom and dad believe this was your fault too. Hey, if you don't stay silent, I'm going to kill you. Hey, if you don't stay quiet, I'm going to hurt our younger siblings. I'm going to do the same thing to you, to them that I do to you. I'm going to cut you up with my knives. Like there's There's a lot of manipulation and intimidation that goes into silencing victims. And there's a lot of posturing that goes into protecting yourself as the perpetrator. And Jeffrey Epstein did it and Bill Gothard did it. They use different means, but it was the same goal. The same goal is like, hey, I'm this good guy. See me? See me being good? I'm so good. Another parallel is that international reach piece. Epstein's abuse expanded internationally. It's jurisdictionally complex. And when you move, when you move your victims, you're isolating them from their normal support networks that they hopefully had where they came from. And Bill did this too. So he brought at least one victim in from another country. I think there was more than one, but he also did that nationally. He would move people across the country, remove, isolate them from their support networks. And it does, when you're moving people across state lines or international borders, it makes it messier in terms of investigating and prosecuting the crimes. There's a lot more that has to go into that. Even just in my case, you know, we lived in Illinois when the abuse occurred. I didn't report it until my brother had already moved to Wisconsin. So even just one state away complicated the legal process. Prosecuting across state lines one state away complicated the legal process. And, you know, added a lot more barriers, red tape. It took a lot longer to get to the point where they could do the arrest, like, And then you add other countries into the mix, Yeah. I mean, if you're trying to hide what you're doing and you like take a person out of their house and you're not, committing this crime where they live or in the town they live in or the state they live in, like the further away you get from where they're normally at, the harder it is to catch them, harder it is for other people to notice what's going on. And the harder it is to report as the survivor. Like when I reported my brother, I had to travel back to Illinois. I didn't live there. My brother didn't live there anymore. But I had to make the report in the county where the assaults occurred. Interesting. So that's another thing. Like if you're living in New Zealand, do you have the time and resources to come all the way back to Illinois in the United States to make a report? No, people get speeding tickets when they're driving out of state. And then they're just like, well, I'm not showing up to defend that. So I just have to pay it because I'm not going to go back, you know, 14 hours just to show up and defend myself in court. So yeah, that, I mean, I think people resonate back. You got a passport that's current. Like, there's so much. There are so many more barriers when you're moving across state lines and international borders. The last parallel I want to talk about right now is just the way survivors were dismissed in both scenarios. So, you know, for Epstein victims being framed as like unreliable, complicit, troubled, Epstein's system required disbelief of the victims. for that system to survive. And the same thing is basically true with Bill Lake. Cult survivors already know this move. Trauma survivors, sexual assault survivors already understand this. When we look at Bill's side of things, these young ladies were called encouragement cases. Rebellious, struggling, ungodly, impure, sexually ruined, you know, trampled garden, chewed up piece of gum. So These weren't just descriptors that Bill used to isolate his victims and to, make people not believe them when they spoke up. They were also disciplinary tools. Like, I'm going to name you. are rebellious. You are troubled. You are impure. You're ungodly. You're an encouragement case. So it's a way of shaming the survivor. And I know I'm going back and forth between victim and survivor. And just for those of you who are newer to our podcast, I use victim as like the legal term. I think of people who have experienced sexual assault as survivors, but I also think it's important to use the legal term victim to remember that these are people who had crimes committed against them. So please understand that as I'm flipping back and forth. In my head, I'm thinking victim when I'm talking legally, and then I'm thinking survivor when I'm just speaking normally. So the bottom line in all of this is that Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Gother didn't just abuse people. They didn't just abuse young girls. They built environments where abuse was efficient, repeatable, and protected. And it is disgusting. Yeah, I'm trying, like, I think when you're saying all this stuff, like I'm feeling a lot of angry emotions about it and I'm trying to like put the words on it because it's like, there's a certain level of evil in which you are like targeting A minority or you're targeting a person that's disadvantaged. And like, that's what these people are doing is like, they have a lot of money in social capital and they're targeting people that don't have a lot of money or social capital. Like they're just a normal high school kid. You know, And I don't know all the details and stuff, but I know they're not some famous person or somebody with a lot of social capital and people that are going to be on their side. No, it's the opposite. Like, these. Troubled youths. Yeah. And it's like, you know, if they're troubled youth, like they don't deserve what they got, but they were very maliciously targeted for their standing. Vulnerability. Yeah, their vulnerability. Exactly. Thank you. And so I feel like when you're go and target a vulnerable group. Like that's a different level of like evil. Evil. Thank you for saying that. I feel like I've been waiting my whole life to hear someone just say that. So when we think about power and when we think about risk, I want us all to change how we orient to it. In my experience, we tend to orient toward people in positions of power by thinking, hey, there is no way this person would risk what they've worked for. I saw it so many times in the military, like, hey, there is no way this general, this colonel, this high-ranking person would risk their career, their pension, everything, you know, to to sexually assault this young soldier, this young airman. this young sailor. But the truth is, predators work for status so they can abuse it. Now, not everyone in authority is a predator, but we can't think that people function the way we do as non-predators. We can't think predators function the same way we do. Yeah, that's what I was about to say. It's like, it's that thought process of like, why would they risk all of that to do this thing? Or like, why would you risk it at all? Like, that's something a normal person would say that is not a predator. And so it's hard to think about it when you hear like, oh, so-and-so general did this thing. You're like, but why? Like, that's so risky. You wouldn't do that. Right. The whole reason they worked to get that status was so they could do this harmful thing and be protected. And I feel like when you look at it that way, if you frame the picture that way, like it makes a lot more sense because you have to look at it through a different lens. It's not like what a normal, average person that do this. Yeah, they're just trying to get the promotion. They're trying to take better care of their family, go on a better vacation next year. Like get more time off. Yeah. Most of us would never be willing to risk everything we've built. But predators are willing to because that's why they built it. Yeah, most people want a lot of money so that they can, you know, Do all these good things with it, or just take care of their family, buy their houses and cars or whatever, and that's what their goal is for wealth is to make their lives easier, more comfortable, but people that seek money for committing some sort of crime or to the power and status, the legal, the lawyers who can protect them. So to understand this dynamic even better, how predators are willing to risk everything they've built, because that's why they built it, to have this access to do this harm. We need to understand how grooming works. Now, if people are ever taught how grooming works, it tends to be focused on individual grooming. Almost no one, in my experience, is taught how institutional grooming works. I teach this, like I go do workshops about this because it's so important. And once you see it, it's impossible to unsee. So real quick, individual grooming works like this. And it's generally in this order. A perpetrator, a predator will target an individual, they'll try to gain access, then they'll isolate the individual. They work on building trust and then desensitizing their victim. And then they control and manipulate them from there. So the goal of individual grooming is to prevent disclosure and facilitate ongoing abuse. I'll repeat that. The goal of individual grooming is to prevent disclosure, so keep the victim silent, and facilitate ongoing abuse, usually through the silence of the victim. This is adapted from Craven, Brown and Gilcrest, which is a 2006 article in Mick Linden, which is a 2012 article. Organizational grooming, on the other hand, goes like this. The predator, the perpetrator, will integrate into an environment with potential targets. They then work toward and achieve a position of trust. They attain insider status with significant individuals in the organization. then they actively create opportunity to access potential targets. They do this while appearing helpful, charming, and charismatic. Then, of course, there's that individual layer of grooming that's also going on. But institutional or organizational level grooming, the goal there is to ensure the organization believes and protects the predator, not the survivor, if the abuse comes to light. So again, the goal of organizational or institutional level grooming is to ensure the organization or the institution believes and protects the predator, not the survivor, if the abuse comes to light. That's also adapted from Craven, Brown and Gilcrest 2006 article. So I'm sure we could all sit here in the privacy of our home or car or office or wherever you're listening to this show and think of a lot of other applications for that statement. And I think we can all think of plenty of times we have seen this drama play out where the grooming is so well done that we have seen huge swaths of organizations, cults, populations believe and protect the perpetrator, believe and protect the predator. not the survivor when the abuse comes to light. Yeah, and I think when you get into systems like that, especially when there's money involved, like when you're in companies or organizations where there's, you know, you're being paid to be a part of it, the people have value to the organization. And if that, like you said, if that person has climbed the ranks and they have a lot of value and the other person has perceived less value or is less valuable, like logically, the organization is going to protect the more valuable person. I mean, it's not a human thing. At that point, that's a systems thing. Like, you know, if you phrase that the way I just did, like, obviously it makes more sense to protect the more valuable thing. But we're not talking about- But at what cost? Yeah, but we're not talking about people. Like when I phrased it that way, it was more from a process and a systems perspective, but not from a people perspective, which is where it gets lost. I remember my first year in the military, I was a second lieutenant working for a general select. I was like a junior executive officer. And we were doing annual reviews for officers, and it was a pilot squadron, well, it was a wing. in the Air Force, but they were all pilots that we were reviewing annual performance reports for. And this guy, this officer who was a pilot, had multiple DUIs. And there was a, they call it an eyes only document. So the person being reviewed doesn't see it. goes from their commander all the way up the chain to the top reviewer. In this case, it was the general select, his office. We, as executive officers and junior executive officers saw it as we prepped each report for the general select. And this note about this pilot guy from his commander said, I know he's got these DUIs, but he's a great pilot and we need pilots. I think you should just overlook it. The fury, the fricking fury. I saw stuff like that all the time. I saw it with sexual assault. I saw it with, you know, DUIs and performance reports. This stuff happens. It's, it should be shocking. It's horrible. It's awful. These cover ups are happening all the time at every level of society and the government. Like they're, it's happening. What's puzzling to me is the shock It's not that shocking when you learn to recognize the patterns. You just look around and go, oh, there it is again. Oh, hey, look, there it is again. And then you wish you could, you know, have a glass of wine and weep for a year because no one's doing a great job stopping any of it. Yeah, I think the thing that's concerning to me is that I've seen that to some extent, varying levels within like corporate America. And It's like the culture is always the same. Like it just happens and it's allowed to keep happening. And it won't like. Allowed, yes. Like, and that's been my experience. I've worked for like 20 plus companies at this point. Like I've been around the block as far as jobs and not every place had these issues. But I can tell you like in my experience, because I feel like I've worked way more companies than an average person will work at in their lifetime. Like some people, like there's people that I work with now that have been there for 50 years. And I've worked at enough companies to see that, like, I would say it's common that behavior is allowed in the cover-ups. are allowed and they play out the exact same time, the exact same way every time. And that is the concerning part to me is that culturally, I feel like at least in America, it's like, that's okay. And I feel like I've worked enough places to know that it wasn't a one-off. It wasn't, hey, just the people at this company. It's just like, no. In general, unfortunately, I feel like that's an okay thing to happen here. And I guess I would say to that, I agree with you. And if you listen to this podcast and you're shocked and horrified by the stories I shared about growing up under Bill Gothard's cult, open your eyes, look around. What other, what cult are you in? Because this stuff is happening everywhere. I'm just talking about it. It's happening everywhere. And to your piece, Kyle, we allow it. We allow it to happen far too much. We don't believe survivors. We allow people with wealth and power to cover it up. Right now, Congress is breaking the law, or not Congress, the Department of Justice and the Trump administration are breaking the law. Congress passed a law on November 19th, the Epstein File Transparency Act. And the full Epstein File documents were supposed to be released December 19th. It still hasn't happened, not fully. And I don't, like, what are we doing about it? What are we doing about it? That's the grand scheme. That's, you know, at national, international level. Bill Gothard was, I mean, huge in my life, obviously, growing up, but nowhere near the same level of power and influence that Jeffrey Epstein had. but he still perpetrated enormous harm using the same the same tactics my brother perpetrated enormous harm using the same tactics basically like it's it's just a smaller scale yeah the military did it corporate America does it Hollywood we all know about that one like this happens and I hope to God that in my lifetime We become a society where when we find out about systems of harm and abuse like this, we fucking light the world on fire. Until justice is served and the people who are harmed are holistically cared for. These systems of power and abuse and the cover-ups and the risk insulation, it has got to stop. And I would ask that if you're listening to this, like, just keep your eyes open wherever you go, wherever you work, wherever you're involved, like, and speak up when you see these things. And I've done that when I've spoke up about stuff and it still gets swept under the rug. But like, you have to try. And I feel like if enough people are saying it, more likely that it'll turn out differently if there's more people that have a good moral compass and will stand up for vulnerable or disadvantaged or people that have had crimes committed against them because it happens all the time. I'd love to end this on some big, inspiring powerhouse of a statement. I'm exhausted. I'm angry. I'm sad. I'm hurting. We'll let the episode speak for itself. I think you did a good job relaying the message, providing some insight and guidance on what to look for. So now it's up to everybody else to use that wisely. So we'll wrap it up here. Go out, stand up for the people around you. Stand up for your communities. Do the right thing. We'll be back in two weeks. Thanks for listening to another episode of The Cult I Left Behind. Until next time, don't join a cult. If you enjoyed this podcast, please like, share, and subscribe, and we will catch you on the next episode.