My 23 Years In A Cult

EAST Magazine got its server back up and  you can access my article on my experience in "School" here.

My memoir about my years in "School" is in the final stretch. I've been blessed with help from a terrific editor and several friends, including former members. The interest is heartwarming. Stay tuned.

Who Leaked?

Congratulations to the brave people who spoke on and off the record to the New York Post. It would not have been published with just one of us. 

Kudos to Anabel Sosa, who believed in the story and worked for months on this. She and the NY Post have kept their word of protecting the anonymity of everyone who chose to speak off the record. Feel free to thank her yourself here or tell her your story. This story is just getting started and is not over. 

High Crimes and Misdemeanors

Ive been asked many times by friends and acquaintances who know I was involved with Sharon Gans's cult and ask "isn't there a law against what Sharon does?" Here's an interesting article I came across about similar hucksters like Sharon.

Sweet Dreams (Not)

I still have those "School Dreams." Six years later. Do you? 

A Chip Off the Old Block: Ken Salaz Part II

Gans casually compares herself, as if in passing, to Shakespeare, Buddha, Christ, etc. Humble Ken is learning from his teacher. Here he is in Forbes:  

“When I’m painting fast, I am . . . much like Vermeer." 

“It’s been said that Mozart could see an entire symphony in his mind . . . . That’s kind of the feeling I have.” 

His paintings are "better than" photographs. 

Its good to know he paints to be the "modern voice for Emerson and the rest.”

Ken spends his evenings "entertaining such celebrities as Bruce Springsteen and Jimmy Fallon."  

The article fails to mention his other evening entertainment and his deep involvement with a truly demented washed-up old actress and her evil cult. 

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Talented Ken Salaz

Ken Salaz has so many talents.
A magician, a mentalist, a professional pickpocket, a painter, an author.
Ken was even able to recently trick a co-host of the WPIX morning show into inviting him appear on the show.  Ken is also very adept at promoting his talents.

But Ken has another talent which he doesn't have a website for.  So let me help him here. Ken spends at least two nights a week, every week, at a loft building in the Garment Center giving lectures to about 3 dozen middle aged tired, traumatized, and bored men and women who believe they are members of an esoteric school of hidden knowledge. They also view Ken as their "teacher." Ken has a talent in lecturing about such things as self-remembering, negative emotions and other "ideas" of the 4th Way. On top of that he is talented in helping his acolytes with their personal problems, dispensing advice on their jobs, relationships, family, children, sex lives, everything. His speciality is convincing his students that all the problems in their lives are their own fault. Some people would call this gaslighting. Anyway, its all just another trick performed by a professional trickster. What would be truly magic would be for his students to escape.

Gropers

All this groping is quite repulsive. Im glad people are speaking out. But its not only men who grope. In a comment on this blog back last year, we have the following episode recounting Sharon Gans, not to be outdone by Matt Lauer, groping a young lady:

AnonymousOctober 31, 2016 at 11:35 AM

I will never forget the night they introduced the platform. It marked a point of no return for me. I never liked Sharon, or loved her. I disliked her at first sight, and later I feared her for a while because she had the power to kick me out. I feared her reptilian gaze and her falseness and that scary hair. At one Christmas party I was wearing a jacket with elaborate embroidery. She came out of the teacher's room and when she came up to me she said "Oh how wonderful!" And stuck out her hands and placed them on my breasts in the jacket and SQUEEZED. It was shocking and really distasteful.