The Return of Doug Riggs

Satanic ritual abuse and "Nephilim hybrids" in Oklahoma

On the August 16th-17th broadcast of Coast to Coast AM, guest L.A. Marzulli was nattering on about endtime prophecy, natural disasters, and a Great Deception involving aliens or the Illuminati or something. I wasn't really listening. Then he said this: According to two researchers who contacted him recently, at least two American women claiming to be victims of Satanic ritual abuse (SRA) have reported that the Satanists took them to Mount Hermon to be impregnated by fallen angels, which Marzulli referred to as the Nephilim of Genesis 6:4 (I'm not even sure if the Nephilim are supposed to be the same "sons of God" that mated with human women, or giants unrelated to the angels, or the offspring of angels and women, but that's a different post). The researchers who alerted Marzulli to this story had no vested interest in the matter, he insisted.
Marzulli then hinted that the hybrid offspring of these women have some connection to the alien breeding program, and that the Nephilim are keeping them at an offworld location.
"Will they bring them back at some point?" host George Noory asked.
"Yes, they will," Marzulli replied without hesitation.

So I Googled "Nephilim ritual abuse" and found a recent online radio interview with Pastor Doug Riggs, described as a friend of L.A. Marzulli. The subject was "Nephilim Mothers".
The name Doug Riggs was very familiar to me, but I couldn't recall precisely why. I rifled through some notes. Sure enough, I had jotted down a bit of info on the guy. A month or two ago I had stumbled upon a documentary from 1994, In Satan's Name, which originally aired on HBO. Riggs and his Morningstar Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma, were featured in the film's most memorable and disturbing segment.

In 1994, no fewer than 14 members of Morningstar Church believed they had been brought up in Satanism, were horrifically abused as children, and had Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD). All of this was based on repressed memories they recovered while in "counseling" with Pastor Riggs, during sessions lasting up to 19 hours in length. Please keep in mind that we're not talking about Okie bumpkins, here. These were reasonably intelligent, middle-class people who seriously should have known better.
To be fair, Morningstar didn't look like a cult. Riggs was a poised, handsome man with graying hair and a mellow voice. He spoke knowledgeably about psychology. It's no wonder that parishioners turned to him for pastoral counseling unrelated to Satanism or abuse (marital trouble, eating disorders, etc.).
From 1985 on, these counselees began recovering memories of horrific, lifelong ritual abuse at the hands of Satanists. Namely their own parents. And after 1991, when Riggs learned about MPD (now known as Dissociative Identity Disorder), they began to discover they had hundreds, even thousands, of separate personalities because of the Satanic ritual abuse. Riggs told them that every single one of their alters could be possessed by demons.
Counseling was conducted in a large room with a mattress on the floor, so counselees could go through abreactions without hurting themselves. Riggs would lay on top of the person when abreactions became intense, while helpers held the person's arms and legs. In this way, counseling and deliverance from demonic possession were merged into a single process. In one filmed session with a 30ish man, Riggs ordered a demon out of his body ("Explode the seals!") while the man writhed and convulsed on the mattress, growling obscenities.
Ultimately, Riggs concluded that all these people had been victimized by the same Satanic cult, led by a man named Joe (father of one of the parishioners, Pam), and that God had brought the victims together at Morningstar to be healed. Joe supposedly conducted powerful rituals for high government officials (including leaders of the Soviet Union), the Vatican, even heads of state. The narrator of In Satan's Name explains that in reality, Joe was a Nebraska salesman who had never left his home state. He died during filming.
Needless to say, the allegations tore apart families. A graceful, soft-spoken couple in their 60s, Jim and Fran Field, mourned the loss of their daughter Cynthia to what they considered a destructive, all-consuming cult.

This was as far as In Satan's Name took the story, but I soon learned that the situation at Morningstar was even stranger.
A testimony written in 1999 by 49-year-old Morningstar member Kim Campbell starts out as boilerplate SRA stuff. Campbell explains that Satanism, "as old as mankind itself", is a blend of Sumero-Akkadian/Babylonian mystery religions, Kabbala, and Paganism. "The culture is unbelievably and ingeniously evil; virutally everything about the culture is humanly damaging." Kim was subjected not only to "every abuse, trauma, and demonization imaginable within satanism", but to "medically-based mind control programming" at U.S. government facilities, clinics, and the Tavistock Institute (a favourite bugaboo in the world of conspiracy theory). Half of his waking preschool life was spent "being indoctrinated and incested". This realization came to him after 18 months of therapy with Pastor Riggs.
It isn't until page 7 of the testimony that shit gets seriously weird. Kim drops this bombshell: His real father was Edouard Philippe de Rothschild, and Kim was the "bastard son...of occult incest", indicating his mom Lula (who died in 1977) had some relation to the Rothschilds. Kim spent much of his childhood and adolescence on his dad's French estate, and was brought up in homosexual incest. He thought it was normal, even admirable.
Edouard despised God and loved humanity with equal passion. "Such was the true generational core of my ancestral iniquity and, being a Rothschild descendant, it was maximally demonized." As all Satanists do, Edouard introduced his son to Christianity, "with none other than Herr Josef Mengele himself coaching him over his shoulder." Kim was being groomed to infiltrate the Protestant church. As Riggs declared, the members of Morningstar Church "had come together to live in such a way as to hasten the Lord's coming for His Bride, but we also had been constituted in the occult to frustrate the will of God for the Church and bring the antichrist instead."

Wow. Just wow. Somehow, Doug Riggs convinced most of his 30-40 parishioners that they were multiple personalities programmed in Zedekiah's cave by the great families of Europe (plus Nazi doctors) to infiltrate the Christian Church and pave the way for the Antichrist, who will be a member of the Hapsburg family associated with the name "Alexander".
Instead, they found a saviour. Un-fracking-believable, no?

Let's go back to L.A. Marzulli for a moment. He also mentioned that Dr. Mengele was one of the originators of mind control. This is a very popular notion in conspiracy circles, but it makes little sense. Mengele was a geneticist, not a psychiatrist, and there's no evidence that he took even the slightest interest in psychology.
Marzulli also made reference to the work of I.E.D. Thomas, a Welsh minister who believes that UFOs and alien abductions are demonic manifestations, another guise of the Nephilim.

Back to Riggs and the Morningstar Satanists. Last April, Riggs and his wife were guests on The Byte Show, accompanied by about half a dozen of Riggs' SRA victims, to discuss the infiltration of Nephilim hybrids into society.
Riggs began the show with a reading of Matthew 24:37, in which it is stated that the coming of the Son of Man (Christ) will be just like the days of Noah. And what happened in the days of Noah? Nephilim mated with the daughters of Man. That's exactly what Riggs contends is happening now. Fallen angels - the "B'nai Elohim" - are interbreeding with human women, by force. He cited the work of I.E.D. Thomas. Hmm. Call me an asshole, but I'm starting to wonder if Marzulli's "two researchers" actually exist. Isn't it more likely that he got his eschatological Illuminati-Satanic-Nephilim info from his buddy Doug?

Two women gave their stories of being "Nephilim mothers".
Sally, a surprisingly chirpy woman, says that after joining Riggs' church, she began to journal and pray, and memories started surfacing. She shared her journal with the pastor, but after a time she felt God compelling her to share things directly, even her most frightening memory (the President wearing a gorilla costume). Through prayer and God's guidance, she learned to trust her emerging memories. She learned that she came from a royal bloodline, stamped with a certain iniquity and allied with Nazi doctors. Many years ago she revealed to Riggs that she had once given birth to a Nephilim child. She had been groomed literally from the womb to bond with the principality (spirit) that sired this child.

Riggs sat on the Nephilim hybrid revelation until this year. Now he's an expert on the subject. Riggs explains that Nephilim conception occurs at age 13, through an arcane genetic-engineering process (angels can't reproduce). Gestation is 4 months. Once the Nephilim hybrid sons have matured, their mothers are encouraged to become their lovers, carrying on the tradition of "incesting".

The second woman, Juliana, learned just this year that her recovered memories of giving birth to human sons were actually screen memories of bearing Nephilim sons. Like all the other Morningstar members, she was born to a European "royal family", then placed with relatives in the U.S. She was "incested" by the couple she called her mom and dad. She trusts her recovered memories because of their emotional intensity, a very poor indicator of whether a memory is true or false.

For the rest of the program, Riggs made a strenuous effort to show that the SRA victims' memories didn't come from him. Hilariously, though, he got them to explain how he doesn't tell them what to say by telling them what to say.
There is, of course, ample reason to suspect that the Satanic Illuminati stories did come from Riggs. First of all, there's that peculiar use of "incest" as a verb. While this may be common usage in the survivor community, I have come across it only a handful of times - and every single instance involved Riggs or one of his church members. Secondly, recovered memories of SRA have turned out time and time again to be unreliable (see the Ingram case for a particularly chilling example). Thirdly, some of the key details are whack. There was no Edouard Philippe de Rothschild, and if there had been he would have been Jewish. How, I wonder, would a Jewish Frenchman and a Catholic Nazi groom a child to infiltrate American Protestant churches? If the Satanic New World Order plot is closely linked with Hitler's plan to create Aryan supermen, as Riggs contends, why would a former Nazi help a Jewish man raise his illegitimate children? And Satanism notwithstanding, why would a Nazi and a Jew be hanging out together in the first place?

Then there's the fact that this has all happened before.
In the early '90s, right around the time Riggs was learning about MPD/DID, psychiatrist Bennett Braun opened a DID treatment unit at Chicago's Rush Presbyterian Hospital. Within a year, he and his colleagues had most of the patients convinced they were lifelong victims of Satanic cults, that their alter personalities still practiced Satanism, that they had ritually sacrificed and/or eaten other people, and that because of their Satanic affiliations they posed a mortal danger to their families, themselves, and other patients. Braun even told them that flowers sent to their rooms were coded mind-control messages from Satanists, with certain colours representing threats and commands.
As former patients like Pat Burgus and Mary Shanley later revealed (see the Frontline documentary The Search for Satan), the people in Braun's DID unit were so heavily medicated that stories of cannibalism and Satanic incest began to make sense to them. They have since renounced all their "recovered memories", and some filed lawsuits against Braun and the other doctors involved in their treatment.
What happened at Rush Presbyterian isn't much different from the spectacular displays of female hysteria that gripped Paris's Salpetriere Hospital in the late 19th century. Under the influence of Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot, numerous women underwent bizarre convulsions and contortions not unlike the symptoms of "demonic possession". When Charcot died in 1893, the symptoms abated, leading some of his colleagues to suspect that the hysteria had been iatrogenic in nature. Medical historian Edward Shorter supports this conclusion in his book A History of Psychiatry (1997, John Wiley & Sons).
Though Dissociative Identity Disorder is classified as a dissociative disorder in the DSM-IV, Multiple Personality Disorder was considered a form of hysteria. Specifically, it was Grande Hysterie - the very same condition suffered by Charcot's patients.

It's tremendously disturbing to me that Riggs has been carrying on this "counseling" for over 30 years without interruption, and that he is bringing a new generation of "victims" into his circle (his youngest, a Canadian named Sarah, is just 21 years old).
There's troubling evidence that the Nephilim hybrid/recovered memory nonsense has taken hold in at least one congregation in Australia. Riggs is also closely associated with Russ Dizdar, a pastor we'll examine in the next post.
Also, Riggs' belief system is rooted in a school of thought that sees all mental illness as demonic in nature, and/or indicative of repressed memories. He insists that before they enter into counseling with him, his parishioners read the work of Neil T. Anderson, a minister who preaches that 80% of Christians are "demonized" to some extent and that most (if not all) mental illness is a symptom of demonization. He offers "clinical deliverance" (exorcism) as treatment.

Tell Me Again How Satanists Abduct Children?

"Trafficking Probe Key to Americans' Fate in Haiti" by Michelle Faul and Paul Bajak, Huffington Post

Ten Baptists, or people posing as Baptists, were caught trying to smuggle over 30 children out of Haiti with neither documentation nor permission. This sort of thing occurs with alarming regularity in the wake of natural disasters, yet conspiranoids and anti-occult crusaders will not stop harping on the late-'80s case of The Finders, an obscure religious group that was "caught" transporting children of its members. Authorities allegedly found files on the children of non-members, photos of children sacrificing a goat, and other disturbing stuff in a warehouse owned by the group. Though nothing more is known, this has been used as evidence that "Satanic" child trafficking and abuse is widespread.

For some, it must be tempting to think that only those who practice "non-traditional" beliefs could be capable of such monstrosities, but the Haiti case and many others should make it clear that child trafficking is child trafficking - it doesn't matter what its alleged perpetrators do in their spare time. It is a crime that transcends racial, religious, geographical, and ethnic boundaries. It is a crime that must be stopped, no matter who's doing it or how.

The Devil in Massachussetts

I know that at this moment, many Americans are deeply upset over Scott Brown's election to the Massachusetts Senate. A Republican in that swing state will almost definitely spell the end of the new health care plan that could - if properly administered - transform U.S. health care from the "privilege" it is today to the basic human right it should be. This is tragic.

However, Pollyanna that I am, I'm going to point out a couple of things about the Democratic contender, Martha Coakley, that aren't so great:

1. She didn't try hard enough. Wasn't she on vacation for part of her campaign?

2. Coakley has a very mixed track record when it comes to common sense, and her handling of the Amirault case is as good (er, bad) an example as any.

Let me take you back to 1985. Almost exactly 25 years ago, Violet Amirault and her two children, 31-year-old Gerald and 28-year-old Cheryl, were charged with abusing and molesting children in the daycare run by Violet in Malden, Massachusetts.
Violet Amirault opened Fells Acre Daycare as a single parent and had been running it since the mid-1960s without any complaints. In fact, it was considered one of the best daycares in the community, and there was always a waiting list.
Then, in the autumn of 1984, the family of a 4-year-old who attended the daycare considered the boy's sex play with his cousin to be a troubling sign. They questioned him about bad touching by adults. He said that Gerald Amirault (known as "Tooky") had removed his pants one day. This was true; Gerald helped the boy change his clothes after he wet himself on one occasion.

Somehow, this incident mushroomed into a vast array of bizarre accusations. On September 12, 1984, more than a hundred parents attended a meeting to discuss the issue with police. Gerald had just been arrested, two days before the birth of his third child, and police were interviewing all of the daycare's 70 or so children with the help of a pediatric nurse named Susan J. Kelly. Parents were encouraged to question their kids at home, as well. Soon, they were eliciting stories of secret rooms, clowns, sodomy with a butcher knife, a murdered baby, biting robots, witch and "bad lobster" costumes, and something about an elephant. One child said, "Tooky was sorry for chopping me into little pieces." Another said that 16 fellow preschoolers had died.

Jurors at Gerald's trial didn't hear about clowns and monsters, but they did hear about secret rooms where child pornography was produced. These rooms were never located. At Violet and Cheryl's trial, the allegations were more outlandish: a child lashed nude to a tree on a busy street, robots, butcher knives, etc. The prosecutors made an unusual decision to face the child witnesses directly toward the jury rather than the defendants, ostensibly for the children's peace of mind.
There was no physical evidence in the case. The prosecution rested solely on interviews of the children. Video recordings of these sessions reveal that if the kids denied being abused, Kelly prodded until they disclosed something - anything. Officer John Rivers referred to the process as "getting blood from a stone".
No one had ever heard screams of terror coming from the daycare, nor seen any naked children tied to trees. No Malden toddlers had mentioned Satan at the dinner table until after Gerald Amirault was arrested.

Nonetheless, Gerald Amirault was convicted of raping and abusing 9 children, and was sentenced to 30-40 years in prison. His mother and sister each received sentences of 8-20 years for raping and abusing four children. The women's lighter sentences were clear indicators that the prosecution and jury considered Gerald to be the head of the family's Satanic Robot Clown cult.

Violet's and Cheryl's convictions were overturned in 1995, when a judge ruled that they had been denied their Constitutional right to face their accusers in court. Then the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court reinstated the overturned convictions, and the Honorable Isaac Borenstein granted motions for separate trials. However, he ultimately ruled that "grave errors" in the original questioning of the children had irrevocably tainting their testimony, rendering it inadmissible as evidence. He believed the case bore the earmarks of ritual abuse hysteria, noting that none of the kids showed signs of abuse prior to the arrests of the Amiraults.
In 1997, the Supreme Judicial Court ruled that Violet and Cheryl would be reincarcerated until their new trials. Violet passed away during this time, having spent close to a decade of her golden years in prison.

Here's where Ms. Coakley enters the picture. In October 1999, as the Middlesex district attorney, Coakley struck a deal with Cheryl Amirault: In exchange for being released, Cheryl would receive 10 years probation - as long as she gave no TV interviews and had no unsupervised contact with children.

For Coakley, this deal wasn't about getting some leniency for a woman almost universally considered an innocent victim of "Satanic panic". No, for her it was about keeping Gerald Amirault in prison. Early in negotations, she demanded that the long-serving Amirault family attorney, James Sultan, pledge to drop Gerald as a client in return for Cheryl's release. Sultan refused.

In July 2001, the parole board unanimously recommended that Gerald's sentence be commuted. The final decision would be up to Governor Jane Swift.
Coakley, acting as advocate for the victims and their families, began lobbying Swift on their behalf.

While it's commendable for Coakley to offer assistance to victims of child abuse, this particular case wasn't a good place to start. Either she isn't well-acquainted with the facts of the case, or she's harebrained enough to believe that a Satanic Robot Clown cult operated a Hell Hostel for toddlers in plain view of a small town's residents for nearly 20 years.
There is a third, even less appetizing possibility: That Martha Coakley politically exploited the Amirault case to make herself appear very tough on crimes against children. Again, being a victims' advocate is commendable - but this wasn't the right place to start. The Fells Acre case is full of victims: the Amiraults, the parents who believe their children were horrifically abused in a safe place, and the children who were persuaded of the same thing by suggestive questioning. Some of them bear psychic scars to this day. Victim Phaedra Hopkins and her family spoke out against the proposed commutation of Amirault's sentence, as did Jennifer Bennett. She says she and the other kids were telling the truth; the Amirault family ruined her life. Brian Martinello and his mom, Barbara Standke, also spoke out. Brian had scratches or sores on his genitalia when he went to Fells Acres at age 4. He and his mother remain convinced that this was the result of sexual abuse.

Governor Swift rejected the parole board's recommendation in 2002. Gerald Amirault spent another year and a half in prison before being released on parole, a registered sex offender and convicted child abuser for the rest of his life.

Thanks, Ms. Coakley.



Notes on Sources:

Most of the information in this article comes from John Demo's excellent book The Enemy Within: 2,000 Years of Witch-hunting in the Modern World (Viking, 2008), Dorothy Rabinowitz's January 14, 2009 Wall Street Journal piece ("Martha Coakley's Convictions"), and news articles on the Fells Acre case compiled online by Hugo S. Cunningham. All online materials were retrieved January 20, 2010.

To date, a definitive account of the case has yet to be written.

Christian Visions Led to the Starvation of an Infant

Attleboro, Massachusetts, Spring 1999: Michelle Mingo received a vision from God that compelled her to instruct her sister-in-law, Karen Robidoux, to consume only almond milk for a period of time. This would purge her ungodly vanity, Mingo explained.
The problem was, Karen was breastfeeding her infant son, and Mingo also instructed the Robidouxs too feed him only breastmilk.
52 days after Karen and baby Samuel began this odd dietary regimen, Samuel died of starvation. Father Jacques had recorded the whole ordeal in a journal - unfortunately for him, because he and his wife were brought up on murder charges. Mingo was charged only with being an accessory to assault and battery on a child.

The Robidouxs and Mingos belonged to a Christian sect that believed in divine revelation; members followed "leadings" of their brethren. Jacques's father, Roland, started this unnamed church in 1978, after leaving Armstrong's Worldwide Church of God. He adopted the beliefs of a former nurse named Carol Balizet, who wrote Born in Zion. She encouranged believers to withdraw completely from society because it is controlled by "Satan's counterfeit systems": banking, medicine, education, commerce, entertainment, government, and schools. The church, known informally as The Body, lived semi-communally and echewed such things as eyeglasses, entertainment, and hospital births. Karen's father, Roger Daneu, joined in 1986. Jacques, an unemployed window-washer, married Karen in 1996. She already had 2 children, and together they had 3 more. Jaques was made a church elder shortly before Samuel's death.
Mingo's "leading" told her that Karen, 26, was too vain.

Jacques Robidoux was convicted in June, 2004.
Michelle Mingo lost custody of her 5 children.

Sources:

"In God's Wilderness" by Anne Thompson, AP, Portsmouth Herald, Sept. 17/00

"Jury acquits Robidoux of murdering baby" by John Ellement, Boston Globe, Feb. 4/02

"Woman admits role in child's death" by John Ellement, Boston Globe, Feb. 11/02

Louis Lamonica, Jr.

Ponchatoula Satanists to go on trial "sometime in 2006"

It's very difficult to find any information on the imminent trial of the 7 people charged with involvement in child and animal abuse in Ponchatoula, Louisiana, (see my post "Recent Allegations of Satanic Ritual Abuse in the U.S.") but one blogger (Professor Pan) has reported that the DA announced the case will go to trial "sometime in 2006", and an article in the Baton Rouge Advocate confirms this.

Meanwhile, this bizarre and disturbing incident of alleged Satanic ritual abuse has received very little attention from the mainstream press in the U.S., and even reactionary Christian news sources seem to be ignoring it. A search of World Net Daily, for instance, turns up not one reference. Where are all the fundie Satanic Panic advocates who were crawling from the woodwork in the '80s and early '90s? Should we be grateful that no one is blowing Ponchatoula out of proportion...or should we be concerned that no one seems to care when a whole churchful of kids is possibly exploited?

Recent Allegations of Ritual Abuse in the U.S.

The Ponchatoula Case
A tiny church in small-town Louisiana will be the focus of a criminal trial; the pastor confessed to ritual/sexual abuse of children.

In May 2005, a former pastor named Louis Lamonica, Jr., walked into a police station in Livingston, Louisiana, and admitted that he and several other members of his church congregation had sexually abused children (and a dog) in the years 1999-2003 (when Hosanna Church of Ponchatoula shut its doors). He admitted to molesting two boys from the age of 4 until they were 12 or 13. Amazingly, Lamonica was stunned when Livingston police arrested him - he thought he was reporting crimes, not confessing to them! At any rate, it was hardly news to the police. They had first heard of the abuse a week earlier, from an Ohio woman named Nicole Bernard. Bernard told police she had fled Louisiana to protect her two children from pedophiles in Lamonica's congregation.

Within a couple of weeks, 9 former members of Hosanna Church had been arrested and charged with aggravated rape of children under 13. Among the accused were a Tangipahoa Parish Sheriff's deputy, Lamonica's 45-year-old wife Robbin, the church pianist, Nicole Bernard, and Bernard's ex-husband. This is when things started to get really weird. Several of the accused and some of the witnesses stated that Hosanna Church had been a cover for a Satanic sect that conducted ceremonies involving pentagrams, animal sacrifice, and black robes. Lamonica himself said that he had ritually sacrificed cats and poured the blood over children forced to take part in the ceremonies.

Hosanna Church was started by Louis Lamonica Sr., and during his lifetime was a vibrant body of at least 100 members. When Jr. took over the reigns in 1993, membership plummeted until barely a dozen congregants remained. Lamonica was, by all accounts, a strange and difficult man, a demanding and over-controlling pastor. No one suspected that he was a child molestor and a Satanist, however. Somehow, in a quiet town of 5000 that is known for its Strawberry Festival (and its plethora of churches), this behaviour didn't catch anyone's attention.

I have to wonder: Did the accused fabricate stories of devil-worship to justify their sexual abuse of children and animals? Is it all a "Satan made me do it" smokescreen? It seems entirely possible, however, that Lamonica turned to occultism after Christianity didn't work out for him, and secretly gathered a handful of followers who were attracted to children and/or Satanism. The unsolicited confessions of Nicole Bernard and Louis Lamonica lead me to believe that this could be one of the few authentic instances of ritual abuse in the U.S.

8 adults are currently awaiting trial on charges of aggravated rape of children (all 4 men are accused of abusing 3 children, two boys and a girl); a 54-year-old woman has been charged with failing to report the abuse. The prosecutor has made it clear that allegations of Satanic worship will not be included in the trial.

Sources:

May 19/05 90 WAFB Baton Rouge (CBS affiliate) news report by Matt Clough

Mormon Ritual Abuse?
Famed Latter Day Saint apologist Hugh Nibley has been accused of ritualized molestation by his grown daughter, a columnist for O magazine.

In 2005, 42-year-old motivational speaker and author Martha Beck released her memoir of breaking away from the Mormon (LDS) Church, entitled Leaving the Saints. Mrs. Beck was one of 8 living children born to the influential Mormon apologist Hugh Nibley, a prolific scholar and foremost Mormon apologist. In her book, Beck claims her father sexually molested her between the ages of 5 and 9, and did so in a ritualistic manner (whilst chanting ancient Egyptian phrases and Bible passages). Mrs. Beck began to "recover" the memories of incest as an adult, though she says she has traumatic memories she never suppressed, as well.

There is a small amount of physical evidence in this case, but it doesn't point directly to Mr. Nibley molesting his daughter. We may never know what really happened. It is significant, however, that Mrs. Beck's 7 siblings have refuted her allegations (see hughnibleydefense.com). Is the family in denial about possible abuse, especially now that Mr. Nibley is no longer alive to defend himself? Is Mrs. Beck mistaken about the events of her childhood? If abuse did occur, was it occultic/ritualistic in character? Time may tell.

Mrs. Beck is a successful author and life coach who has a regular column in O magazine. She deals with sensitive issues that most mainstream columnists sidestep: Loneliness, loss of faith, toxic relationships, etc. Oprah has called her one of the most intelligent women she has ever met.