Allyson’s Story

At 26 years old

*Please read with caution, graphic violence is described.

In 1998, when I was 26 years old, I met The Welcomed Consensus. I was involved with them until 2000. In 2019, I received a call from a producer who wanted to do an HBO documentary on OneTaste, a company that teaches courses similar to The Welcomed Consensus and Lafayette Morehouse. OneTaste was founded by Nicole Daedone, a woman who lived with the Welcomed Consensus around the same time I did. In 2000, I left The Welcomed Consensus, got involved with OneTaste from 2001 to 2006, then left and did therapy for three years. The documentarian on the phone told me some very disturbing things I didn’t know about. After the call, I was flooded with memories from both groups. My husband found me sitting on the bathroom floor. We’d been married for seven years, and he knew about my past, but I had spared him the gory details. I realized that those details were trauma that I hadn’t worked through. My husband and I talked about everything, all the details, and how I felt. He and I agreed that I would decline to participate in the documentary and resume therapy. 

OneTaste is on the web but the US locations are closed following an FBI investigation. Erwan introduced Nicole to DOing (OMing), and The Welcomed Consensus.

My husband and I started researching what the documentarian told me on the phone. My husband found Christine’s blog. I started reading her site and found a post where she referenced Daniel Shaw, a cult therapist who provides counseling for former members of cultic groups and who worked with many people from the NXIVM cult. I started therapy with him right away. Over a year and a half, I processed my experiences with both The Welcomed Consensus and OneTaste. Daniel told me that he thought my mother was a narcissist. He taught me what a cult is and how they function. He explained that I had a double whammy of a narcissistic parent and indoctrination, that I had PTSD, and that most people never fully recovered from these kinds of experiences. Having these new perspectives, I could unravel and understand how my childhood set me up to be vulnerable to RJ’s group and how RJ’s group primed me to be even more susceptible to Nicole’s group.

As part of a series on cults, Vice TV did a segment on OneTaste. I’m not referring to this documentary.

I understand how my PTSD affects my daily life and how to manage it. I learned a lot about narcissism, but I still want to learn more. I feel that I will be in recovery, on some level, for the rest of my life. Wikipedia currently states that “OneTaste and its leadership have been accused of cult-like operations, similar to Lafayette Morehouse.” I will add to this – also similar to The Welcomed Consensus. Wikipedia also says, “OneTaste is currently under investigation by the FBI for prostitution, sex trafficking, and labor law violations. In 2018, OneTaste closed all their US locations and stopped hosting in-person classes.” 

One of the major things I did in my therapy was come to understand what made me susceptible first to The Welcomed Consensus and then to OneTaste. Here’s a little about my background. I grew up in the suburbs of New Jersey, about an hour from New York City. Both of my parents commuted to NC for work. My mother was a Certified Public Accountant, and my father was a creative director at an advertising firm. My mother was very controlling. She always asked me what I was doing and then used the information to tell me what to do. She never related to me from a place of curiosity, interest, or unconditional love. She always acted superior to me, and her opinion and ideas always trumped mine. When I got mostly C grades in 9th grade, she threatened to kick me out of the house unless I got B’s and A’s.   

Sometimes my mother would listen in on my phone conversations without me knowing and interrogate me about things I said. She didn’t want me to drink, do drugs, or have sex before marriage. If she didn’t like my friends, she told me I couldn’t see them. My father was mainly focused on work and numbed out by having a few drinks each night and smoking marijuana. The only thing my father and I connected over was spirituality. He was very interested in it and ignited my interest in it, too. My brother was a bully and was diagnosed with clinical depression and psychosis at 17. I was not close to my brother at all.

Learn to recognize the signs of narcissistic manipulation, here

My parents got divorced when I was 14. My mother tried to get me not to speak to my father, but I fought her over it and did. Looking back on my childhood, I feel like I had no identity. I had no idea who I was and had led a very sheltered life. When it was time for me to go to college, I picked out a school with an interior design program. Then I got accepted to a different college, Rutgers University, and my mom and brother strongly suggested I go there. I took their advice. Rutgers did not have an interior design program, and I ended up just picking mathematics as a major because I was good at it. I wanted to major in psychology, but my mom’s opinion was that psychology wasn’t a real career. I got a career as a computer programmer after college and moved to San Francisco to work in the internet industry. I did not feel connected to my job because my heart wasn’t in it. By 26, I was very unhappy, lonely, gullible, and lost. This emotional state made me very vulnerable to controlling groups.

I started volunteering at Landmark Education, a self-help group some considered a cult. My father introduced me to Landmark because, as I later understood, he leaned on spirituality the same way he did alcohol and marijuana – as a way to escape. At Landmark, I met a man named Erwan, a long-time student of The Welcomed Consensus. Erwan taught his own sensuality courses similar to the WC. Soon after meeting him, I went to a rave with a friend who worked at Google and ran into him. I quickly jumped into a relationship with him and moved in with him. He introduced me to The Welcomed Consensus very soon after we met and I quickly got involved with them. 

Previously EST, then the Forum, and now Landmark, tags itself as “Personal & Professional Growth, Training & Development”

I attended weekly WC BenchMark gatherings and began working my way through courses. There was a very specific curriculum, and the courses became more and more expensive as I went. I was able to pay for them because I cashed out on my internet stocks right before the crash of the industry. I made a quarter of a million dollars before taxes. I had no idea what the value of the money I had was. I didn’t realize it was enough for a down payment on a house. My mom knew I had the money (she had advised me to sell my stock), but she deliberately didn’t help me navigate how to invest. She was afraid I would buy a house in San Francisco and stay out West. So, I spent tens of thousands of dollars on Welcomed Consensus courses. Erwan knew about my money, and I wonder to this day if the WC did, too.

Erwan was non-monogamous before we met but agreed to be monogamous with me because I was very afraid of non-monogamy. On their honeymoon, my father told my mom he didn’t believe in monogamy. I saw my mom go through years and years of hurt and paranoia about my dad’s fidelity. Erwan and I lived together for a month or so, and then he really wanted to live communally again (he had before). One night Erwan introduced me to Nicole Daedone and said he wanted to move in with her and her boyfriend so that he could live in a communal environment again. Nicole was Erwan’s ex-girlfriend. We moved in with them shortly after. 

When I lived with Erwan, Nicole, and her boyfriend near Golden Gate Park.

I was staying with The Welcomed Consensus in Shingletown in Northern California, doing sessions for my Confirmation Course. Erwan had just broken up with me. We had been together a little less than a year. He no longer wanted to be non-monogamous. I was still very triggered by non-monogamy, but in my interactions with The Welcomed Consensus, I saw women and men who seemed to be very happy living a non-monogamous and what seemed like a spiritual life. I started to wonder if non-monogamy could work after all. Nicole broke up with her boyfriend and got back together with Erwan. Erwan introduced Nicole to The Welcomed Consensus. Nicole says in her TEDx talk that she learned how to OM from a “Buddhist monk.” Nicole first learned DOing from Erwan and then from The Welcomed Consensus.

In my last Confirmation Course session at Shingletown, RJ asked if I wanted to move in. I became very emotional at this suggestion and started crying because I was afraid to say the wrong thing. I was feeling all of my insecurities at once (and there were a lot!). I responded, “I don’t know!”

RJ responded to my emotions by yelling in disgust, “Get this crazy person out of my sight!” I was escorted over to the other house on the property. I sat crying and feeling Hexed and confused. If you look up hexing in the dictionary, it says, “To cast a spell on; bewitch.” Hexing was something that The Welcomed Consensus used often. They defined a Hex as confirmation of a self-doubt. I genuinely feared that I would end up crazy like my mom, and when RJ called me crazy, it hit directly on that insecurity. After some time, RJ came to me at the other house and knelt beside me. He looked up at me and said, “I know some people you can live with – Chrissy and Dennis. Do you want to do that?” I felt relieved and said, “Yes.” I thought Chrissy and Dennis were just outside friends and not a part of RJ’s group.

The Two-Headed Monster course at Shingletown. Back row Wendy, Richard, Bill, other, Dennis, Susan, other, other, other, Sheri, Francoise, and RJ. Front row other, Dave, Yvonne, Rachel, Teri, me, and Erwan. Before I moved in with Chrissy and Dennis.

It took me 24 years to realize that, in those moments, RJ was actually figuring out a way to get me under his control without me knowing it. The next thing I knew, RJ put me in a U-Haul van with Richard Held, one of The Welcomed Consensus community members at the time. Richard drove me to Erwan’s house in San Francisco. He packed my things, loaded them into the van, and then moved me into Chrissy and Dennis’s house. I remember crying in the van, feeling horrible, and in a sort of daze. Something was terribly wrong, but I didn’t understand what it was.

While living with Chrissy and Dennis, I was still working full-time, now as a project manager in technology. I participated in all the activities of Chrissy’s Welcomed Consensus communal house – did chores, and was told I needed to stroke myself for 15 minutes at work every day. Finding a place to do this was really daunting, but I figured out how to do it. Dan Shaw explained to me that this was The Welcomed Consensus’s way of taking over my nervous system. He described it as a form of spiritual or energetic rape.

It wasn’t long after moving in with Chrissy and Dennis that I had my first experience of physical abuse. The Welcomed Consensus was giving a course at the San Francisco house on Joost Avenue.  RJ was in town leading the course. I was attending. I really don’t remember much about the course until RJ asked me to be escorted out of the room. I was brought back to the kitchen and a car was called for me. I was put into the car and sent home. I sat in the taxi sobbing, and the driver asked me if I was ok.  

Me in silhouette in the garage at Chrissy and Dennis’s. Packing the truck for another trip “Up North”.

I went into the house and told Chrissy and Dennis what had happened. Dennis looked at me very seriously and told me to take off my skirt. Then he told me to turn around. He smacked my ass really, really hard three times with his hand. It really hurt. I cried and kept my mouth closed after this point. That was a turning point for me. I feel like I fell into a deep, dark hole from then until 2006. I was never told what I did. My guess is that I wasn’t paying attention in the course and probably daydreaming. From talking with Chrissy, I now know that RJ orchestrated the whole thing from behind the scenes and commanded Dennis to exact this punishment.

I lived with Chrissy and Dennis for a year, and it was a tough year. I remember feeling unhappy a lot of the time. I don’t remember much from that year except for a few really hard situations. I remember doing withholds one day with Bill, a man who lived in Chrissy’s house and a former Welcomed Consensus community member. I felt uncomfortable sharing my innermost value judgments. Withholds were value judgments of yourself or others, and you’d have to say them for 15 minutes to another person who acted as your witness.

Another difficult time was when Dennis came home from work one day, went into his room, opened his closet door, rifled through his clothes, and yelled with disgust and anger, “I can feel your anger all over my clothes!” My chores included folding Chrissy and Dennis’s laundry and hanging up their clothes. When he said that, I felt wrong and scared. Another memory is of Chrissy assigning me to make a compost bin from wood with the help of Bob, a man who lived in Chrissy’s house. I had never built anything like that and was nervous about making it. I remember the last day before it had to be done. I was out in the backyard, in the dark, digging in the dirt with my hands and crying, trying to get the bin done in time and meeting Chrissy’s demands. I also had to sleep on a tiny cot in the garage for a long time. It was awful. My last memory is of Chrissy pulling me up the stairs by my hair. I can’t remember why.

In Mexico with Bill, Dennis, and Chrissy.

I decided to move in with The Welcomed Consensus after a year of living with Chrissy and Dennis because I thought maybe things would get easier. By this time, Nicole had moved into the Joost Ave house, and many other people who I met through Erwan. I didn’t realize I was going deeper into indoctrination. Each day, The Welcomed Consensus community woke early, did withholds, had a DOdate, had breakfast, worked until sunset with an informal lunch, and then had a formal community dinner. I now understand that cult members who are kept busy are easier to control.

I lived with The Welcomed Consensus for a little over a year. I have several memories of being there that caused me to have PTSD. One afternoon, Clint (now Cedric) and Yvonne were having a DOdate. At that time, whenever people had a DOdate, they also had to have an observer. I was the observer for the date. Clint began not stroking Yvonne’s clit but slapping her pussy. He kept doing it over and over and over. Yvonne said nothing. By the end of this assault, her pussy was on the verge of bleeding.

I was so deeply involved with The Welcomed Consensus that I agreed to change my name to Mia. I am on the Bio’s page of The Welcomed Consensus website

Another memory is from one night when a lot of community members were hanging out in the house where RJ lived. RJ told me I was assigned to be Yvonne’s “bitch.” He told me to kneel in front of her. He pulled up my skirt from behind and started whipping my ass with a crop. He continued to hit me over and over.  I looked up at him. He looked at me with the craziest look I had ever seen. His face was beet red, and he was sweating. He looked very drunk. His eyes were wide, bulging out of his head, and he had a look of crazy rage. I put my head back down, and he kept whipping me. When he finished, he told Yvonne to bring me to the other house. When I got there, I looked at myself in the mirror. There were whip marks everywhere on my ass, and I was on the verge of bleeding.   

My last memory was like in The Wizard of OZ when Dorothy sees the man behind the curtain. The Welcomed Consensus’s full veil of secrecy lifted, and I saw the truth. This triggered me out of my trance of indoctrination and into a state of fight or flight and an understanding that I had to get the hell out of there as soon as possible. One night, the community had dinner together and then watched a movie afterward. After the film, the lights went on dimly, and everyone started heading to bed. I had kitchen cleanup that night, so I went into the kitchen and began washing dishes. I heard yelling and looked up.

RJ’s room was just off of the kitchen/living room area. I saw RJ’s door cracked open, and inside I saw RJ, Susan, Francoise, and Wendy all huddling around Sheri. Sheri was doubled over on the floor. I saw RJ kick her with his cowboy boots over and over again. Susan, Francoise, and Wendy all yelled at Sheri. I heard one of them yell, “Stay the fuck down, Sheri! Stay down! The sooner you stay down and shut up, the sooner he’ll stop!” The dishes dropped out of my hands. I ran downstairs to my bed. I looked around to see if anyone heard what I saw, but everyone was asleep. I got under my covers and pretended to sleep. I heard footsteps scattering above me. I heard the sliding doors open and people calling Sheri’s name. I think that she had run out into the woods. There were bears and mountain lions out there. Somebody came down the basement stairs and crawled into my bed. I opened my eyes and saw RJ staring at me. He said, “Have you seen Sheri?” I said no. He left. As soon as he left, I got out of bed and went into a storage area that was off the basement and sectioned off. I found a recliner chair, curled up in it with no blanket, and slept with one eye open the entire night. 

The Welcomed Consensus 2000. Susan, Wendy, RJ, Sheri, Francoise, and Mt. Shasta.

This scene shattered any illusions I had about The Welcomed Consensus. The rumor I heard about RJ being violent was true.; I was being lied to, they all knew about it, and they were all hiding it. I had heard a rumor that RJ once pistol-whipped Wendy. Then one day RJ, Wendy, and I were taking a hike. I asked them both if the story was true. Wendy laughed at me, and they both said it wasn’t true.  This community was not a happy, spiritual one. I had to get out of there. I had a car, but it was being used by some community members who took it to San Francisco. I had to wait for my car to return.

At breakfast the following morning, Sheri sat next to me at the counter in the kitchen. She swizzled around on her stool and had a huge black eye. She told everyone that she had fallen. When everyone started heading out to do their daily chores, I hid in the woods in a trailer I found that The Welcomed Consensus used for storage. When the sun started to set, I headed back to the house. I was one of the first people in from the day. Yvonne and Terri walked in right after me. I turned to them and said, “Do you know what happened last night?” They said no. I said, “RJ kicked the shit out of Sheri, and I saw it!” They hung up their coats and didn’t say anything.

That night, after dinner, a house meeting was called. RJ sat on the couch, visibly angry, and insinuated that someone in the community was up to no good – saying things about him and upsetting people. Everyone just sat there silently. I sat there frozen like a deer in the headlights. I really thought that was it for me. I was terrified. Thank God nobody said anything. 

The houses were on 40 wooded acres in Shingletown. No were to run.

I slept in the recliner again and hid in the trailer the next day. Before dinner, I came out and sat on a bench looking out to the Klamath River. Sheri came outside, sat beside me, and put her arm around me. She asked, “Are you alright?” I said, “I miss my mom.” That was my way of saying I wanted to go home, but I was too afraid to say it. Soon after, RJ pulled up next to me on his ATV and said, “Hop on.” He drove me around a little and said, “Sheri is going to kill me if I don’t get money from you.” I know now that this was extortion, but at the time, I was just scared and needed to get the hell out of there. I wrote RJ a check for the amount of money he asked for. The next morning I heard that my car had come back. I went into the main house, asked for my keys, and said I was leaving. I was really scared they weren’t going to let me leave. RJ was in the kitchen, and he wouldn’t look at me. I got my keys and left. That was the year 2000.

Someone put together a CD of the music from that time. This is the cover.

I drove to San Francisco and moved in with a woman, Stephanie, who lived with Christine and Dennis at the same time I did. I lived with Stephanie for a year, but things didn’t work out. Right around this time, Nicole Daedone moved out of The Welcomed Consensus and rented a house with Robert and Carol. Nicole asked me if I wanted to live with her, Rob, and Carol. I was still floundering and very traumatized from my Welcomed Consensus experiences, although I didn’t realize it at the time. I said yes to Nicole. That is all of my story I will write for right now. There is a lot more, but this is what I feel I can post now.

Today, I am grateful for my life. I am very aware of how lucky I was to have my Wizard of Oz moment with the WC. If RJ’s door hadn’t been cracked open that night, I wouldn’t have seen what I saw, and I very well might still be living with The Welcomed Consensus today. This is a terrifying thought. I haven’t told my story until now, but I feel like this is the right time for me.

I had no intention of sharing my story because I was very afraid. The combination of coming to a certain place in my recovery, hearing other people’s stories, finding out about the 2020 BBC podcast about OneTaste, and finding out from Christine’s blog that two of RJ’s children (Ginger and Mallie, who I saw growing up with The Welcomed Consensus and who are now adults) were recruiting for the WC has made me feel that now is the right time for me to share mine.  

Please feel free to comment here or contact me directly at alli@truthaboutrj.com. Thanks for reading and if this stirred up anything for you please visit the Links and Resources page for more information.

The BBC Podcast about OneTaste. OneTaste is currently trying to sue them for defamation.