The Follower

When he was nineteen, Jeff Gross fell under the sway of the charismatic, fifty-one-year-old Mildred Gordon. She offered him guidance on life, spiritual fulfillment, and sex. With a handful of others, they started Ganas, an "intentional community" on Staten Island. The world's leading cult deprogrammer calls it something else. Jeff spent more than half his life under Mildred's spell. Today he lives in hiding. For the first time, Jeff tells his extraordinary story about life inside Ganas and how he ultimately escaped.

- By David Gauvey Herbert

On the night of May 29, 2006, after seeing the documentary An Inconvenient Truth in Manhattan, Jeff Gross took the ferry back to Staten Island and walked home to Ganas, a communal-living experiment he'd spent decades building.

He climbed the steep steps up to the group's cluster of houses scattered among leafy walkways and squinted his way through uncut shrubs and poor lighting. As Jeff approached his porch, a figure stepped from the shadows and raised a handgun.

What do you want? Jeff shouted, and then, “No, no, don't do it!

Shots pop-pop-popped as the shooter unloaded six rounds into his hip, stomach, arm, and neck. Jeff fell to the ground, blood pumping from his wounds. His assailant stepped over him and fled. A neighbor who heard the shooting knelt beside Jeff and shouted for towels to stanch the bleeding.

Many moments had delivered Jeff to this one. Since 1980, Ganas had been a community that embraced all manner of new-agey life. But his relationship with the group-particularly with its charismatic and often abusive leader, Mildred Gordon-had become unrecognizable since their early days. He'd signed over a small fortune, endured thousands of hours of feedback sessions, and entered a four-way marriage. And now he was bleeding out in the back of an ambulance.

How had Jeff gotten into this mess? And why had he stayed?

When we met in October 2021, decades after he hooked up with Mildred, I asked him that very question, only to hear his deeply unsatisfying conclusion. To me, I know you're writing your story, but I tried to tell you before you ever came out here that, in my opinion, it's just like any situation, he said of his nightmare at Ganas. Families, relationships, jobs, all of them can go bad. But we're talking about so many people in this situation, it seems even more complex than layered because of our lifestyle.