Cult expert claims this never-seen-before footage features Ginni Thomas discussing Lifespring experience
An expert on cults on Thursday published video that he says shows him interviewing Ginni Thomas in 1989.
Steven Hassan, "one of the world's foremost experts on mind control, cults and similar destructive organizations," is the author of the 1988 book, updated 2015 and 2018, Combating Cult Mind Control, the 2012 book Freedom of Mind: Helping Loved Ones Leave Controlling People, Cults, and Beliefs, and the 2019 book The Cult of Trump: A Leading Cult Expert Explains How the President Uses Mind Control.
"I knew Ginni Thomas. Ginni Thomas was in a cult (the large group awareness training cult, Lifespring). Here she is in 1986 speaking at an event I hosted for former members," Hassan wrote on Twitter before posting his video.
The time that Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, spent in Lifespring has been previously reported.
"Ginni graduated from Creighton University, in Omaha, and then attended law school there," Jane Mayer reported in a January New Yorker profile. "Her parents helped get her a job with a local Republican candidate for Congress, and when he won she followed him to Washington. But, after reportedly flunking the bar exam, she fell in with a cultish self-help group, Lifespring, whose members were encouraged to strip naked and mock one another’s body fat. She eventually broke away, and began working for the Chamber of Commerce, opposing 'comparable worth' pay for women. She and Thomas began dating, and in 1987 they married."
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In February, The New York Times reported Clarence Thomas attended one of her de-programming meetings.
"Clarence and Ginni met in 1986 at a conference on affirmative action, which they both opposed. After a stint at the civil rights office of the Education Department, he was running the E.E.O.C.; she was an attorney at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and mused that year to Good Housekeeping about someday running for Congress. She had extracted herself from a New Age-y self-help group called Lifespring, which she would denounce as a cult, but was still attending meetings held by a cult-deprogramming organization, and she took him along to one. He would describe her as a 'gift from God,' and they married in 1987 at a Methodist church in Omaha; it was her first marriage, his second," The Times reported.
It was also mentioned in a 1991 Washington Post profile titled, "The Nominee's Soul Mate."
"Some women's rights activists are upset by her lobbying against such issues as comparable-worth legislation and the Family Leave Act. Some religious rights groups are troubled by her anti-cult activities in light of her involvement with Lifespring, a controversial motivational group," the newspaper reported. "She has declined to talk with reporters until after the hearings. She's not the story, she said. Yet she is a compelling and persuasive figure."
Watch the interview below.
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