Issue 181 – March 2025

S.M.A.R.T.
(Stop Mind control And Ritual abuse Today)
P. O Box 1295, Easthampton, MA 01027-1295 USA E-mail: SMARTNEWS@aol.com
Home page: https://ritualabuse.us/

Issue 181 – March 2025

The purpose of this newsletter is to help stop secretive organizations and groups from abusing others and to help those who allege they have been abused by such organizations and groups. This newsletter is not a substitute for other ways of recovering from ritual abuse. Readers should use caution while reading this newsletter. If necessary, make sure other support systems are available during and after reading this newsletter.

Important:
The resources mentioned in this newsletter are for educational value only. Reading the books cited may or may not help your recovery process, so use caution when reading any book or contacting any resource mentioned in this newsletter. Some may have a religious or other agenda that may be separate from your own recovery process. Others may have valuable information on secretive organizations, but have triggers or be somewhat sympathetic to those organizations. Unless explicitly stated otherwise, the views expressed in this newsletter constitute expressions of opinion, and readers are cautioned to form their own opinions and draw their own conclusions by consulting a variety of sources, including this newsletter. Resources listed, quoted and individual articles, etc. and their writers do not necessarily support all or any of the views mentioned in this newsletter. Also, the views, facts and opinions mentioned in this newsletter are solely the opinions of the authors and are not necessarily the opinions of this newsletter or its editor.

Copyright 2025 – All rights reserved. No reproduction of any material without written permission from the editor and individual authors.

Information in this issue includes:
– SMART is celebrating our 30th anniversary.
– The 2025 Online Annual Ritual Abuse and Mind Control Conference August 16 – 17, 2025
– Videos, PowerPoints and transcripts from our 2024 conference
– Survivorship Announces Its 14th Annual Weekend Conference Fighting Child Abuse Survivorship Trafficking and Extreme Abuse Online Conference 2025 May 16 – 18, 2025 Survivorship is celebrating its 36th year helping survivors and co-survivors of child abuse.
– Law enforcement targets online cult communities dedicated to extremely violent child abuse
– ‘How I Escaped My Cult’ Trailer Previews 10 Stories of Bravery, Resilience
– The Box: Out of the Impossible | Testimonial Documentary | Full Movie | Cult Worshippers – The movie discusses complex PTSD and DID.
– What Was Project MKUltra? Inside the CIA’s Mind Control Experiments That May Have Involved Charles Manson – The new Netflix documentary ‘Chaos: The Manson Murders’

SMART is celebrating our 30th anniversary. This is our 181st newsletter. Our first issue (online at https://ritualabuse.us/2008/10/issue-1-march-1995/ discussed the book Ritual Abuse What it is, Why it Happens and How to Help by Margaret Smith. This discussed Masonic Ritual Abuse. It covered a thesis on Masonic Ritual Abuse called “Ritual Abuse, its Effects and the Process of Recovery Using Self Help Methods and Resources, and Focusing on the Spiritual Aspect of Damage and Recover.” Over the years, SMART expanded its scope to cover institutionalized abuse, clergy abuse, government mind control and sex trafficking issues. SMART has had yearly conferences since 1997. SMART has become one of the largest ritual abuse resource information providers on the Internet.

The 2025 Online Annual Ritual Abuse and Mind Control Conference August 16 – 17, 2025 – If you are interested in participating in our conference or getting on a mailing list, please write: smartnews@aol.com Internet conference information: http://ritualabuse.us/smart-conference/

Videos, PowerPoints and transcripts from our 2024 conference https://ritualabuse.us/smart-conference/2024-conference/2024-conference-video-presentations-and-powerpoints/

Survivorship Announces Its 14th Annual Weekend Conference Fighting Child Abuse
Survivorship is celebrating its 36th year helping survivors and co-survivors of child abuse. It was founded in 1989 by Caryn Stardancer and Catherine Raggazzi. For many years, Survivorship has provided resource information, education and conferences for survivors of extreme abuse. https://survivorship.org
Survivorship is proud to announce that this May 16 – 18, 2025, we will be having an online conference. Our Survivorship Trafficking and Extreme Abuse Online Conference 2025 will have presentations for survivors and clinicians. We will be celebrating the gains fighting ritual abuse. https://survivorship.org/the-survivorship-trafficking-and-extreme-abuse-online-conference-2025

Presentations will include “Progress made against Ritual Abuse in Scotland since 1980” by Laurie Matthew. Dr. Laurie Matthew OBE is the founder and Manager of Eighteen And Under an award winning charity providing confidential support services to young people who have been abused. She is a founding member of MAIRSINN (formerly the Ritual Abuse Network Forum – RANS). https://www.mairsinn.org.uk/ https://www.18u.org.uk

“Researching, Writing and Publishing about Masonic Ritual Abuse – What are the issues?” by Lynn Brunet. Lynn Brunet (PhD) is an Australian art historian whose research examines the coupling of trauma and ritual in modern and contemporary western art and literature. It traces the connection between Masonic and other fraternal initiation rites and complex trauma in the work of so-called ‘tortured’ artists and writers.

“People Who Identify as Plural” by Randy Noblitt PhD. This presentation discusses the variety of circumstances where people may have the experience of multiple identities or selves. Randy Noblitt is a professor of Clinical Psychology at Alliant International University, Los Angeles and a licensed psychologist in Texas. He has evaluated and treated extreme abuse survivors clinically since 1979.

“Successful Investigations of Extreme Abuse Cases – The Role of Mental Health Professionals in Family Courts” by Dr. Rainer Hermann Kurz. Rainer Kurz is a Chartered Psychologist based in London. Since 1990 Rainer has worked in Research & Development roles for leading test publishers. His PhD dissertation was on enhancing the validity and utility of ability testing.

“Ritualistic Abuse Survivors Difficulties Obtaining Services” by Neil Brick. Ritualistic abuse survivors have struggled to obtain adequate mental health and social support services for over twenty years. Neil Brick is a survivor of ritualistic abuse. His child abuse and ritualistic abuse newsletter S.M.A.R.T. http://ritualabuse.us has been published for 30 years. http://neilbrick.com
Ritual Abuse Evidence https://survivorship.org/ritual-abuse-evidence/
Child Abuse Wiki – Ritual Abuse http://childabusewiki.org/index.php?title=Ritual_Abuse

The Box: Out of the Impossible | Testimonial Documentary | Full Movie | Cult Worshippers – One woman’s journey through unthinkable abuse and being raised in a cult. The Box is a documentary story of horror, healing, and hope, a journey out of the impossible. (May be triggering) The movie discusses complex PTSD and DID. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhtJ_8AiBd8

Describes violent crimes
Law enforcement targets online cult communities dedicated to extremely violent child abuse – US Homeland Security Investigations, supported by Europol and the French Police, arrested members of an online community dedicated to grooming, sexual abuse, acts of cruelty, torture and murders
Law enforcement authorities target members of prolific online communities dedicated to the sexual abuse of children and manipulation of vulnerable minors into committing violent crimes. This coercion into committing violent crime spans multiple areas, including acts of cruelty against people and animals, murder and self-harm. These extremist communities are part of a larger online network, so called “The Com”. Through this network, extremists around the world collude to groom and abuse children. These groups operate virtually in easily accessible online spaces such as social media platforms, mobile applications and online gaming platforms. International cooperation via Europol has intensified in the past year, leading to the identification of dangerous individuals and the safeguarding of victims, mostly vulnerable minors.
Two suspected leaders of online group “CVLT” arrested in the US

On 30 January, the United States Homeland Security Investigations arrested two individuals for participating in a neo-Nazi child exploitation ring that groomed and then coerced minors into produce child sexual abuse material and images of self-harm. The group allegedly abused at least 16 minors around the world. According to the investigation, the two men were members of “CVLT” (pronounced “cult”), an online group that promoted neo-Nazism, nihilism, and paedophilia as its core principles.

The investigations into these individuals (a 23- and 41-year-old males from the US), were supported by Europol, and involved the French National Police (Police Nationale), the United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency and the New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs. These arrests follow previous arrests of two other prolific members of this community, both males in their twenties. One of the previously arrested suspects has been in French custody since 2022 for several child exploitation and related offenses. The second is currently in the US, serving a 50-year sentence for child sex abuse crimes committed in 2020 and 2021.
Three of these four arrested offenders are considered to have acted as leaders and administrator of the violent online abuse community, hosting and running CVLT online servers and controlling membership for the group.

Victims trapped in an abuse cycle
Members of this violent CVLT community groomed children into producing child sexual abuse material through various means of degradation, including exposing the victims to extremist and violent content. CVLT specifically targeted vulnerable victims, including minors suffering from mental health issues or a history of sexual abuse….

CVLT members’ coercion escalated to pressuring victims to kill themselves via video livestream. They blackmailed the victims to submit and remain silent, threatening to distribute already-obtained compromising photos and videos to their family and friends. CVLT would sometimes go through with their threats against victims who tried to escape their grip. CVLT is part of a larger network of extremist and child abusers active within similar online communities, referred to as “The Com”.

Extremely violent online communities manipulate children and young people
Violent online groups are targeting and manipulating vulnerable children and young people across widely accessible online platforms. There are multiple groups, associations and evolving subgroups that make up the online network known as The Com – short for community. The Com is a virtual community of groups and individuals who conduct illicit activities that glorify serious violence, cruelty, and gore.
Elements of The Com network are known to have extreme ideological views and victimise children, coercing them to commit violent acts. Predators groom their victims through different methods – one approach is establishing friendships based on trust or romantic relationships. Another technique involves the use of power or coercive tactics with one goal – taking control over the victims, while getting them to engage in serious violence, self-harm, or other gruesome. It’s a vicious cycle – the predators in this network influence children or young people into conducting acts that increasingly shame, incriminate, or isolate them, this in turn makes them more vulnerable to further exploitation.
https://www.europol.europa.eu/media-press/newsroom/news/law-enforcement-targets-online-cult-communities-dedicated-to-extremely-violent-child-abuse

describes abuse
‘How I Escaped My Cult’ Trailer Previews 10 Stories of Bravery, Resilience | Exclusive Video – Loree Seitz February 6, 2025
“If I got caught, he would for sure kill me,” one survivor says in the Freeform series Freeform’s new docuseries “How I Escaped My Cult” is gearing up to debut 10 distinct stories about ex-cult members who managed to escape their circumstances.
In the trailer for the new series, shared exclusively with TheWrap, 10 women unpack the terrifying journey to break free of the cults they were once in, with one subject saying “I was trapped … I decided that it was time to escape.”

The stakes couldn’t be higher for these women, as one recalls, “If I got caught, he would for sure kill me.” The subjects explain that by being in a cult, members are being brainwashed and soon it becomes the only reality that they know. “He claimed he heard the voice of God,” one subject said in the trailer, while another explained “members were giving over entire paychecks — he’d grab us by the throat and slam us against the wall.”
While the women explain “the most evil things you could imagine” happened to them while in the cult, they recall their gut instinct to escape and how they pulled it off.

The docuseries, which hails from the team behind “How I Caught My Killer,” follows the survivors through their escapes to reporting the cult leaders to the FBI, with one subject saying “I really did want this horrible monster to pay for what he had done.” https://www.thewrap.com/how-i-escaped-my-cult-trailer-freeform/

What Was Project MKUltra? Inside the CIA’s Mind Control Experiments That May Have Involved Charles Manson – The new Netflix documentary ‘Chaos: The Manson Murders’ speculates that Charles Manson was linked to the CIA’s MKUltra operation. Find out what it was and why it was so controversial By Jessica Sager Published on March 8, 2025

Charles Manson was the evil behind the brutal murders of Sharon Tate and at least eight others — but a new documentary speculates that Manson and his “family” of followers may have been influenced by government agents before committing their 1969 killing spree.
Journalist Tom O’Neill conducted two decades of research for his 2019 book Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties, which is the basis for the new Netflix film Chaos: The Manson Murders, now streaming.

The film and O’Neill’s book each delve deeply into the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and their initiatives to spy on American citizens during the Cold War, as well as their secret experiments with drugs, mind control and infiltrating counterculture movements. One such operation was Project MKUltra, which sought to develop a “truth serum” for interrogations.
While it remains unknown whether Manson and his followers were involved with intelligence operations in an official capacity, O’Neill points out parallels and commonalities between the slayings and the government’s goals during the 1960s….

What was Project MKUltra?
MKUltra was the name given to then-secret CIA experiments in mind control. Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA’s top chemist, spearheaded the program, which began in 1953 and ran through the early 1960s, per NPR. The goal was to develop a “truth serum” for interrogations, as well as substances to make people forget things they’d done and to control behavior, according to journalist Stephen Kinzer, author of Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control.

At Gottlieb’s behest, the CIA conducted experiments on and administered mind-altering substances, including barbiturates and LSD, to often unsuspecting individuals without their consent or knowledge. Their test subjects included other CIA agents, college students, psychiatric patients, cancer patients and prisoners, among others.
According to Kinzer, Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, as well as poet Allen Ginsburg and Grateful Dead songwriter Robert Hunter, were among volunteers for MKUltra experiments with LSD, while gangster Whitey Bulger, who was incarcerated at the time, was told he would be given an experimental treatment for schizophrenia when he was administered LSD over the course of a year.

Ted Kaczynski, then a 17-year-old Harvard student who would later become known as the Unabomber, was subjected to psychological experiments, according to The Washington Post, that may have exacerbated his schizophrenia. (Though, per The Washington Post, there is no evidence suggesting LSD or similar substances were used on Kaczynski.)….
Some of MKUltra’s activities came to light in December 1974 when The New York Times published an expose on the CIA’s activities during President Richard Nixon’s administration. President Gerald Ford established the United States President’s Commission on CIA Activities to investigate further.

The United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, also called the Church Committee, took hold in 1975 to investigate MKUltra and COINTELPRO, among other operations that were deemed intelligence abuses….
In 1977, Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) led congressional hearings investigating MKUltra, especially in regard to its use of LSD and its link to the death of scientist Dr. Frank Olson…. There is no actual evidence that Manson was involved with MKUltra, Operation CHAOs or COINTELPRO, but O’Neill believes there are potential speculative links between the cult leader and the CIA and FBI’s activities.

“What he did aligned with the objectives of both those groups, which basically wanted to turn society against the young hippie movement,” O’Neill told Jacobin in 2023. “They wanted people to think of them not as harmless young kids with long hair, smoking pot and experimenting, but rather as dangerous bogeymen, out to kill your daughters or abduct your kids.”
O’Neill alleged that Dr. Louis “Jolly” West, a psychiatrist rumored to be involved with MKUltra (but who long denied ever being involved with the CIA), had an office in the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic. Another psychiatrist, James Allen, reportedly told O’Neill that Manson and his followers frequented the clinic often for STD screenings and pregnancy tests and that Manson was required to go to the clinic as a condition of his parole at the time. O’Neill claimed that the clinic staff conducted experiments on clinic patients using amphetamines and LSD.

O’Neill posited that Manson may have picked up on mind control techniques from MKUltra and that his and his followers’ experiences at the clinic may have ultimately led them to commit the murders.
“I think there is a good likelihood that Manson is a product of MKUltra, whether he was knowledgeable about it or not,” O’Neill said. “But I haven’t been able to definitively prove it. I chased this story for 20 years, hoping to get conclusive information one way or the other, but I could neither disprove it nor prove it to my satisfaction.” https://people.com/what-was-mkultra-chaos-manson-murders-11692546

The biggest bombshells from Netflix’s Chaos: The Manson Murders documentary: Mind control, LSD, MKUltra, and the CIA – Errol Morris’ new documentary pulls from Tom O’Neill’s 2019 book, which disputes much of what we know about the Manson Family. By Randall Colburn Published on March 8, 2025
The Tate-LaBianca murders, committed by the Manson Family in the summer of 1969, are among the most famous in the realm of true crime — and just about everything we know about them might be false.
That’s the argument posed by author Tom O’Neill in his 2019 book, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties. It’s a dizzying but lucidly-written takedown of Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter, the 1974 best-seller that’s long been considered the definitive account of the case.
Today, Netflix releases Chaos: The Manson Murders, a new documentary in which famed filmmaker Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line) offers three perspectives on the brutal murders of actress Sharon Tate, Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski, Steven Parent, Jay Sebring, and Leno and Rosemary LaBianca….

As with any Morris documentary, Chaos is clear-eyed and fleet-footed, balancing multiple perspectives and challenging its subjects. Though it only touches on a fraction of the revelations in O’Neill’s book, it zooms in on the question that’s followed the case for more than 50 years. As O’Neill puts it: “One of the biggest mysteries about this case is how Manson was able to gain control of his followers to the degree that he could get them to go out and kill on command, without remorse, without hesitation, complete strangers.”

Manson may have been involved in the CIA’s MKUltra program
….But O’Neill has the receipts, and Morris highlights several official documents that support the author’s findings. It goes something like this: When Manson and his followers lived in San Francisco in the summer of 1967, they frequented the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic to treat the consequences of their promiscuous lifestyles, namely venereal diseases. Manson’s parole officer, Roger Smith, also had an office there. Smith told O’Neill that he met Manson at the clinic on a weekly basis.
Another frequent visitor of the clinic was Louis “Jolly” West, a scientist with expertise in hypnosis and brainwashing, whose name appears often in literature about U.S. government conspiracies. According to O’Neill, West called the clinic a “laboratory disguised as a hippie crash pad,” and he used the clinic to recruit subjects for his study of the effects of LSD on youth.
The LSD and other psychoactive drugs were also a key aspect of MKUltra, and, though West denied it until his death in 1999, O’Neill has several official documents proving that the psychiatrist was financed by the CIA to work on MKUltra experiments in mind control. In those documents, West discussed not only how to conduct experiments to implant false memories, instill specific mental disorders, and induce trance states, but also how to hide them.

“West came into the picture more than a year after I’d begun the research when I started suspecting the involvement of MKUltra in this case,” O’Neill tells Morris. “[I] found out he’d been at the Haight-Ashbury free medical clinic working with these people who had contact with Manson during the time Manson became exactly what the CIA was trying to create — programmed assassins.”….
He goes on to discuss how Manson was able to get his followers to “completely abandon their sense of morality and their code of ethics and to believe that there’s no such thing as evil.” LSD, O’Neill says, was a way for Manson “to create personality change and make it fixed, [to] make it last after the LSD trips had ended.” That, he says, was a key research objective for the MKUltra researchers.
While O’Neill suspects Manson was involved in those experiments, he could never place Manson and West in a room together.

“How did he learn how to brainwash those kids, really in under a year?” O’Neill asks. “Yeah, he was a con artist, but everybody who knew him in prison and everyone who knew him prior to becoming Charlie Manson said he was a joke to everybody. Nobody took him seriously. He suddenly got help. Where did that come from?”….
O’Neill alleges that the Tate-LaBianca murders were used to tarnish the 1960s counterculture movement
So, what story did the prosecution want to tell?
“Exactly what we think of now when we think of the Manson murders,” says O’Neill. “That these kids went out and became corrupted by the freedoms of the ’60s movement and turned into monsters. So, in other words, don’t let your kids do drugs, don’t let them join communes, don’t let them march against the war, because they’re all going to be turned into these crazed killers who have no respect for life.”
O’Neill goes on to detail two projects the U.S. government was operating during Manson’s arrival in San Francisco: the FBI’s COINTELPRO and the CIA’s CHAOS. These efforts sought to disrupt and undermine anti-war and New Left movements.

“Those programs were designed to infiltrate left-wing groups, especially the [Black] Panthers, and neutralize them,” says O’Neill. “That’s what their own documents say — do whatever it took to basically make them ineffective, wipe them out.”
While O’Neill doesn’t go so far as to say the Manson murders were “orchestrated” by the U.S. government, he does say the murders served the purposes of COINTELPRO and CHAOS, “to have the world finally turn against this left-wing, anti-war movement which a lot of people conflated with hippies.”
He adds, “‘Orchestrated’ sounds like it was planned in advance, executed, and then covered up. It could’ve just been that Manson had leeway to do whatever he wanted for two years. Maybe that’s all it was. It’s kind of ironic, if nothing else, that before we knew about COINTELPRO and the FBI setting up the Panthers, Manson’s plan was to pin these murders on the Panthers.” https://ew.com/chaos-the-manson-murders-biggest-bombshells-netflix-11692444

March 10, 2025 · Filed Under Uncategorized