Has the U.S. Begun Busting Cults like They’re the Mafia?
Far-reaching RICO laws impact many beyond the mob & election-averse authoritarians.
With the historic fourth indictment of former U.S. president Donald Trump under Georgia’s version of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, popular awareness of this type of law has simply skyrocketed. In comparison to even just a few days prior, many now know that RICO laws exist both federally and in many states, and that prosecutors use them to go after a wide range of enterprises in which people work together towards common goals and end up committing multiple criminal acts. As one big sign of this growing awareness, the front page of the New York Post even screamed “LA MAGA NOSTRA,” cleverly combining the infamous acronym with the self-designation of some mafiosi (“La Cosa Nostra,” meaning “our thing”).
Just as interesting but much less known, however, is how over the past few years these same laws have begun to be wielded against those rare subcultural groups that get tagged with the loaded word “cult,” at least in that handful of extreme cases where such groups have gone beyond being merely unusual and actually have become profoundly criminal.
Since a historic later 20th century outburst of concern about groups like the Unification Church and Hare Krishnas, slippery questions of consent and the right to engage in odd countercultural activities have bedeviled the intersection of any such groups with the American legal system: how much is something really wrong, and how much is just prejudice, like loved ones disagreeing with adults’ atypical but otherwise valid life choices?
Starting in the late 1960s, two miscalibrated attempts at accountability foundered in the legal system due to their dependance on a faulty theory of brainwashing techniques that somehow could exceed ordinary pressure and purportedly override an individual’s volition.
In the first, people tried to establish Britney Spears-like conservatorships. Only, that fell apart when it became clear that although someone might have joined an unusual group, they suffered no form of mental incapacitation.
In the second, people tried to have members removed from harmful influences and placed under a regimen of sometimes dubious deprogramming techniques. Only, that fell apart when some didn’t change their minds and then turned the tables by raising questions of religious freedom and even making countercharges like kidnapping.
Since then, when it comes to fringe groups and the law, a maxim something like “Prosecute the crime, not the group” has become common.
That is, until the recent spate of at least three high-profile trials deploying a playbook centered on the more-known-from-the mafia RICO Act: the 2019 NXIVM case, the 2021 conviction of R & B superstar R. Kelly, and the 2022 guilty verdict and guilty plea coming out of the Sarah Lawrence “sex cult” prosecutions.
From these three, the R. Kelly case is the most well-known and best illustrates how this approach plays out on the ground and carefully toes the line between respecting rights and righting wrongs.
As has often been detailed in the media, women who became involved with Kelly could suffer broken contact with family and friends and engage in a range of unusual practices like remaining in isolation for long periods of time, wearing baggy clothes, and not meeting the eyes of anyone else. To some extent, this could at least appear consensual, like when law enforcement arrived for a welfare check and an adult woman informed them that everything was fine. Elsewhere, Kelly’s behavior crossed clear lines with coercive confinements and with minors and thus resulted in conviction on a range of charges.
Most importantly for the intersection of American law and what people call cults, prosecutors sought harsher punishments for Kelly and his enablers by using RICO and thus were forced to dig into religious aspects of the enterprise. That is, although the crimes could be prosecuted separately apart from RICO, prosecuting them through RICO meant that justice could be better served and notably stiffer penalties imposed if a few more hoops were jumped through -- primarily, ticking off different legal boxes and showing that the people charged were working together in some greater “enterprise” that also spawned the crimes. For that step of the case, different organizational glue from the practice of go-betweens contacting women to the existence of their behavioral rules become highly germane and legally relevant, even though such matters are not illegal in and of themselves. Thus, although Kelly’s cabal wasn’t singled out as ‘bad religion” in some violation of religious freedom, some of its more-religious aspects surfaced in places like the indictment and constituted an essential part of the prosecutors’ case. In their eyes, it isn’t just isolated crimes anymore, you might say; it’s the group itself that’s the problem, or at least the pattern of criminal conduct that’s been emerging from its key players. So, for the purposes of RICO, that cult-y stuff can be brought forward as much as anything else that binds those particular people together, thereby bringing the religious phenomena into exceptional prominence within the criminal proceedings.
The history of this legal approach is very much understudied and underdiscussed, but it seems to be gaining traction. Before the three recent trials – a phenomenon partially recognized by the Daily Beast -- there was at least two much prior instances: a 1980s state-level racketeering charge against a follower of the notorious guru Rajneesh, and an unevenly successful early 1990s prosecution of a messianic Florida group where some members conspired to commit murder. Since the recent trials, RICO use versus so-called “cults” has even surfaced at least once more, as part of a Rolling Stone-covered legal strategy against a California church where members were allegedly abused.
Whatever its full history and whatever its future applications, though, this legal approach seems to have been firmly put on the map as a way to bring abusive religious institutions to justice in the U.S. Although the “cult” label can be used to unduly stigmatize and even gravely harm those engaging in out-of-the-ordinary behavior, it’s also very much true that some groups start spiraling off crimes and thus merit treatment not only as dysfunctional or unethical, but also criminal.
And now, it seems, in those rare and extreme cases when something’s gone very wrong and the word “cult” has started flying, prosecutors are seeking to use all the tools at their disposal to dismantle those truly reprehensible institutions, or at least as much as they would with any mafia clan.