Celebrities with links to cults and communes

Michelle Pfeiffer revealed that during her early acting days, she was involved with a couple who practiced Breatharianism - the belief that a person can live without food and water, sustained only by sunlight. She identified it as a "very controlling" cult-like situation that she had to escape from.

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Joaquin and River Phoenix were born into the Children of God cult, which their parents joined before their birth. It melded worship of Jesus Christ with '60s free love and doomsday predictions. Abuse was rife. "I think my parents thought they’d found a community that shared their ideals... but I think the moment my parents realized there was something more to it, they got out," Joaquin told P l a y b o y.

The actress was born into the Children of God cult. In her memoir, she explained how women were there to "serve the men" in intimate ways. "My dad and I escaped with my dad's other wife in the middle of the night," she remembered. "I remember running through a cornfield in thunder and lightning, holding my dad’s hand and running as fast as I could to keep up with him…[The cult] sent people to find us. I remember a man trying to break in with a hammer."

Actress Glenn Close spent several years of her childhood in the Moral Re-Armament (MRA), a group her family joined when she was just seven years old. She described the experience as oppressively dogmatic and controlling. "You basically weren't allowed to do anything, or you were made to feel guilty about any unnatural desire," she told Hollywood Reporter. She got out when she was 22.

The Arquettes grew up in Virginia’s Skymont Subud commune, which aimed to be a utopian society. There was no electricity, bathroom, or running water, as Patricia explained to Oprah. Rosanna told The Daily Beast that the place was set up as "a way of worshipping God in any way you feel" and not totally culty. But she acknowledged "a lot of dysfunctional human beings ... in one compact place" may have resulted in some unscrupulous behavior by "some yucky adults."

Winona Ryder grew up with her parents in the Rainbow Family, a communal group of six other families that rejected conventional society. Ryder told Parade that although it may invoke cult-like images, it was a happy time. "The place we lived was, like, 380 acres of redwoods. It was beautiful," she said, adding that there was no TV and she was a bit of an "outsider" at school.

'Bachelor' star Keira Maguire spent her early years in a p 0 l y -gamist cult known as The Seaside Sect, founded by her father in Australia. The cult's leader reportedly had 64 children with nine wives. She said on the show that she didn't know who her real mom was until she was six.

The 'Smallville' actress Allison Mack became notoriously associated with the NXIVM cult, a group that started as a self-help organization and descended into abusive practices, including branding members with the founders' initials. She served 21 months in jail for her involvement with the group's crimes.

'10 Things I Hate About You' actor Andrew Keegan co-founded Full Circle, a spiritual community in California, although he denies reports that he was a cult leader. He said that basically, it was just a cool place to hang out. "We went through something really significant from 2014 to 2017," he told Pod Save America. "Looking back, it was insane. I was putting down 10s of thousands of dollars, but we opened it up and spent three years and really did build an amazing friend group."

Rapper and singer Angel Haze grew up in a strict religious community called the Pentecostal Greater Apostolic Faith. "We all lived in the same community, within 10 minutes of each other," they told The Guardian in 2012. "You weren't allowed to talk to anyone outside of that, you weren't allowed to wear jewelry, listen to music, to eat certain things, to date people… you weren't allowed to do pretty much anything. Church was on Sundays, Wednesdays, and Fridays."

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