Podcast series featuring Pine County cult leader debuts
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Many Minnesotans remember learning of River Road Fellowship cult leader Victor Barnard and the abuses that occurred in rural Finlayson through the testimonies of his victims during his 2018 trial. Now, this story will be told for the world to hear through a new podcast series.
The 10-part weekly podcast will be featuring Barnard’s case, prosecution, subsequent fleeing, capture and finally imprisonment of Barnard.
The podcast is titled “The Turning – River Road” and produced by Rococo Punch. It can be found on iHeart True Crime +, Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Bernard’s story will be featured in season three of the award-winning podcast. It features testimonial from Lindsay Tornambe, a key witness in the trial, and Pine County Attorney Reese Frederickson.
When Tornambe was 13 years old, she was chosen by the leader of her family’s commune for a “special role.” She became one of the youngest maidens of the River Road Fellowship. At the time, she didn’t know what that really meant for her. After a ritualistic ceremony that married her and other girls in the group to their adult leader, she endured more than a decade of mental and physical abuse hidden from outsiders.
When Tornambe and a friend decided to escape, they became the whistle-blowers that prompted an international manhunt in 2014 that would bring the entire cult crumbling to the ground and an eventual capture of Barnard overseas.
However, when Barnard pled guilty to sexual assault in 2016, Tornambe and her fellow maidens’ stories were not heard by the public. Nearly a decade later, Tornambe — now herself a mother — will tell the story on her own terms through the podcast series.
Elin Lantz Lesser, host and producer at Rococo Punch, took an interest in this case because as a team they have been creating audio documentaries on communities with dangerous power dynamics or where some kind of lofty goal was pushed on a group of people in unusual extremes. The two previous seasons had been on similar topics.
Content retrieved from: https://www.isanti-chisagocountystar.com/news/podcast-series-featuring-pine-county-cult-leader-debuts/article_15eb1734-7932-462e-b0ec-7bfab9b21fe2.html.
