Hoyt Richards on How to Escape a Cult
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The night Hoyt Richards escaped the Eternal Values cult, after nearly 15 years spent in what he now calls a “mental prison,” he crept past the German shepherds guarding the group’s North Carolina compound. Once he was out of earshot, he bolted.
Richards had been one of the highest-paid male models in the world. He grew up in a loving family, played football and studied economics at Princeton and traveled the world working with celebrated photographers like Richard Avedon and Bruce Weber. How does someone like that wind up living in a garage and devoting his life, and his fortune, to a charlatan claiming to be an alien from a distant star called Arcturus?
That’s the central question in “Bring Me the Beauties: A Model Cult,” a new three-part docuseries directed by the Emmy-winning filmmaker Chris Smith (“100 Foot Wave,” “American Movie”). It premieres Monday on HBO and HBO Max.
Most cult stories have similarities — charismatic leader, seemingly altruistic intensions, mind games. What makes them endlessly fascinating are their peculiarities.
Frederick Von Mierers, the Eternal Values leader, resembled a horror-movie version of a tan, blonde, white-toothed Ken doll. Born Fred Meyers in Brooklyn, he created a phony blue-blood persona as a young man in the 1960s. In 1978, he claimed to have had a near-death experience, which started Von Mierers on the path of claiming to be an alien prophet.
A few years later, he began recruiting young, beautiful people to become, as he says via archival footage in the series, “part of God’s higher cocktail party on earth.” The group frequented Studio 54, dancing alongside celebrities and socialites. Members were promised a spiritual life during the height of Manhattan yuppie materialism.
As in all cult stories, though, things eventually took a dark turn. As Jacki Adams, a former model and Eternal Values member, says in the series, things went “from happy to scary in a heartbeat.”
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Content retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/arts/television/hoyt-richards-bring-me-the-beauties-model-cult-interview.html.
