Death By Lightning Depicts Assassin Charles Guiteau In a Sex Cult. It Really Happened.
Published By admin
WITH A STACKED cast that includes Michael Shannon, Nick Offerman, Betty Gilpin, Shea Whigham, and Matthew Macfadyen, Death By Lightning arrives with a bang as one of Netflix’s best and most exciting limited series of 2025. Across four episodes, the show—created by Mike Makowsky (Bad Education) and executive produced by Game of Thrones duo David Benioff and D.B. Weiss—reflects on the path that led a troubled man named Charles Guiteau (Macfadyen) to assassinate President James A. Garfield (Shannon).
As the series builds up the tension to the moment the shooting happens, it also shows the stranger aspects of Guiteau’s life. Using Candice Millard’s book Destiny of the Republic as the basis, Death by Lightning portrays the way that Guiteau idolized Garfield, but felt disappointed when the man couldn’t live up to the pedestal he placed him on.
“It’s such a fascinating slice of American history,” Macfadyen noted on the Today show. “There’s something very strange and sad about him, ultimately. He wasn’t very well psychologically. Today, he would be diagnosed with all kinds of mental health conditions and given help, I guess. He was like a little drifter and an odd-bod and he couldn’t hold down a job.”
At one point in Guiteau’s life, after a few failures and some influence from his father, he found himself at a religious sect. The group was, as the show depicts, very open sexually and swapping other partners. If it weren’t for the assassination after Guiteau left the cult, this would’ve been the strangest defining moment of his life.
Here’s what to know about the real-life Guiteau’s presence in a sex community.
During Death by Lightning, Charles Guiteau lives with the Oneida community—a group of people who don’t shy away from sex. The real-life Guiteau joined the religious sect in Oneida, New York in 1860, as his father had praised the group. The Oneida sect operated on the philosophy of “free love,” meaning they were very open in that regard.
Just like in the show’s portrayal, Charles struggled to fit in with the other members. He left the community twice. He tried to start The Daily Theocrat, a newspaper in New Jersey based on the Oneida religion, but failed. His second departure from Oneida resulted in him filing a lawsuit against the group’s founder, John Humphrey Noyes, due to failure of payment for work he supposedly performed. However, Charles’s father, Luther Wilson Guiteau, wrote letters in support of Noyes that deemed his son irresponsible and insane, as noted in The Trial of the Assassin Guiteau: Psychiatry and the Law in the Gilded Age.
Content retrieved from: https://www.menshealth.com/entertainment/a69253807/death-by-lightning-charles-guiteau-sex-cult-oneida/.
