The man who saves people from the world’s most dangerous cults
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“I don’t want my name in this,” says Grace*, a 40-something mother from central California. “Or Zak’s*. Actually, even the cult, can you change that too? Because they have their bots. They’ll come after us.”
It was 2023 and Zak was 18, a bright teenager starting at an Ivy League college. But it was his first time living away from home, and the pressure was beginning to take its toll. So he joined a yoga class to help him relax. It was affiliated to a bearded Indian guru from Mysore, India, in the Maharishi mould. And within a couple of months, Zak had changed. He was uncommunicative and withdrawn. Then he started talking about dropping out of college and living in an ashram in India.
“I started researching this group, and cults, and that’s how I learnt about Rick Ross,” says Grace. “I had never heard of deprogramming before.”
For five consecutive days, 10 hours a day, Ross, a slight then-70-year-old, sat with Zak and his parents in their living room. “He became part of our family for a while,” says Grace. “He brought a lot of research and videos about the guru’s life that we all watched together. And he told these long stories that went off on all these tangents. I was like, ‘Where’s he going with this? This isn’t going to work, I know my son…’ But he brought it back every time. He was showing how this guru was actually a grifter who wanted power and riches. And he kept saying, ‘Would a good person do this?’ By day three, my son was nodding.”
Talking about this three years later, Grace cries. That breakthrough was everything. Zak is back on track at medical school, he’s engaged, and the whole episode is in the past. They never bring it up. But she knows that they almost lost him.
“I can’t say enough about Rick,” she says. “He showed us that deprogramming isn’t a light switch; it’s more of a path that you follow. It takes time. Zak was in this deep, dark hole where we could see him but he really couldn’t see us. And Rick saved his life.”
I’ve come to visit Ross in Tucson, Arizona, and we’re heading back to his flat after lunch at his favourite Mexican spot. “You’re the first reporter I’ve invited to my home,” he says. “I’m usually careful, because of all the death threats.”
On social media, death threats may be par for the course. But Ross is the most famous cult deprogrammer and investigator in the country with the most cults on earth. Since 1982, he’s deprogrammed more than 500 people, testified in court cases in 13 states, and lectured at more than 30 colleges and universities. He’s appeared on CNN, Fox News and the BBC’s Panorama; participated in more than 20 documentaries; and been an all-round thorn in the side of everyone from the Branch Davidians of Waco, Texas, to the Nxivm sex cult. It’s not tweets that he’s worried about.
“The justice department contacted me when Rama Behera put me on a kill list,” he says, referring to an Indian cult leader who had set up in Wisconsin in the 1970s. More recently, he was in the crosshairs of Keith Raniere, the gnomish tyrant of Nxivm, who famously had women branded with his initials and whose high-ranking members included the Smallville actress Allison Mack. Ross spent more than a decade fighting lawsuits brought against him by Raniere and Nxivm for publicly criticising their practices, with the claims against Ross ultimately being dismissed. In 2018, Ross testified at Raniere’s trial for crimes including sex trafficking and possession of child abuse images.
“He’s locked up in Tucson, you know,” he says. Raniere was sentenced to 120 years. “I didn’t want his followers knowing that I lived here too, because I thought the women of the group might kill for him – they were becoming like Manson followers. He could weaponise them from jail.”
Read more https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/02/15/rick-ross-cult-deprogrammer-interview/
Content retrieved from: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/02/15/rick-ross-cult-deprogrammer-interview/.
