The three-year nightmare that engulfed Irene Davidson's daughter
began at a table set up at a festival in Brooklyn's Prospect Park.
Covered with "progressive" slogans, it was manned by
volunteers for a group calling itself the Women's Press Collective.
Sign up, they told Davidson about four years ago, you'll get to
write "progressive things" for our newsletters.
"I asked what their orientation was. It was so vague,"
recalled Davidson, a former Brooklyn resident and longtime follower
of leftist politics. "They couldn't really answer my questions,
but I didn't worry about it."
So Davidson signed up her then-18-year-old daughter, whose name
is being withheld, and unwittingly started a spiral that left her
daughter brainwashed by a shadowy leftist cult that talked constantly
of revolution but never did much more than churn out reams of paper.
The Women's Press Collective turned out to be one of many front
organizations for the Provisional Party of Communists, the cult
whose members were arrested this week at their Brooklyn brownstone
for gun possession.
"It was the worst experience I've ever had," Davidson
said yesterday of the three years, ending last November, in which
her daughter lived at the Brooklyn headquarters. "It was like
seeing a curtain made of rocks coming dowm between me and my child."
Cult members incessantly called her daughter and convinced her
to visit the group's headquarters on Carroll Street, Davidson said.
Once there, the daughter was subjected to "unbelievably painfully
long lectures" by cult founder the late Gino Perente on everything
from American politics to the Russian Revolution.
"They had slogans all over the place, things like 'Just Do
as You're Told," Davidson said. "In their minds, they
were calling for a revolution, but it really wasn't serious."
Within months, Davidson's daughter was hooked full-time, said
Davidson, who got to visit occasionally unlike most parents. She
said her daughter "would be walking around with a clipboard
writing things. It was all paperwork." There were no arms visible
in the building, she said.
Eventually, Davidaon said, her daughter grew depressed and quit
after the group shipped her to a small "field office"
upstate.
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freedom and the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The fact that a person’s name or group appears on our website
does not necessarily mean they are a destructive mind control cult.
They appear because we have received inquiries and have established
a file on the group.
The Freedom of Mind Resource Center Inc. was established by cult expert Steve Hassan.
