Erika Lantz & Elin Lantz Lesser - Book Burnings, Rapture Drills, & the River Road Fellowship
Trust Me: Cults, Extreme Belief, and Manipulation
Exactly Right and iHeartPodcasts
4.4 • 1.9K Ratings
🗓️ 17 September 2025
⏱️ 83 minutes
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Summary
Guests Erika Lantz and Elin Lantz Lesser join to discuss season 3 of their investigative podcast The Turning, which follows the journey of a young woman named Lindsay, a former member of a Christian group in Minnesota called River Road Fellowship. They talk about the background of the leader Victor Bernard, how Lindsay’s parents moved the family to the cult compound, and what it was like living there—with rapture drills that required the members to never venture far from the compound, a massive bonfire designed to destroy the members’ attachments to their pasts, and other forms of strict control.
They discuss how Lindsay was selected as a teenager to be one of Victor’s ten “maidens,” a group of girls and women living next to his lodge who were subjected to coerced labor and eventually sexual exploitation in what Lindsay only later learned was meant to be a lifelong commitment, the escape plans she was making, and how glimpses of the outside world led her to finally leaving.
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| 0:00.0 | This is exactly right. |
| 0:07.4 | Trust me. Do you trust me? |
| 0:10.5 | Would I ever lead you astray? |
| 0:12.1 | Trust me. |
| 0:13.0 | This is the truth. The only truth. |
| 0:15.6 | If anybody ever tells you to just trust them, don't! |
| 0:19.3 | Welcome to Trust Me, the podcast about cult's extreme belief and manipulation from two |
| 0:25.1 | former bookworms who've actually experienced it. |
| 0:27.7 | I'm Lola Blanc. |
| 0:28.9 | I'm Megan Elizabeth. |
| 0:29.9 | That introduction will make sense later, you guys, I promise. |
| 0:33.3 | I wish I could honestly say I'm a current bookworm, but let's be honest, the reading is, |
| 0:39.4 | the reading is diminished in the age of social media. That's okay. That's okay. Thank you. |
| 0:43.0 | Yeah. Today our guests are Erica Lance and Alyn Lance Lesser, two sisters and hosts of the podcast, |
| 0:48.9 | The Turning. Each season, they cover a different community or story of devotion and abuse, |
| 0:53.8 | including previously nuns and ballerinas. |
| 0:56.4 | And now their latest season explores the story of the River Road Fellowship, following a girl named Lindsay. |
| 1:02.7 | They're going to tell us about how after a mysterious dinner guest named Victor Bernard showed up to Lindsay's house, her parents moved her family out to his religious compound in rural |
| 1:11.7 | Minnesota. We'll talk about how life changed on the compound, becoming more and more restrictive |
| 1:15.9 | and isolated from the outside world, how they couldn't leave a 30-minute radius of the camp in case |
| 1:20.8 | Jesus came back, and how Lindsay was forced to burn her only form of escape, her beloved books. |
| 1:26.3 | We'll also hear about how Lindsay was then selected |
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