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Hello and welcome back to Cult Leader. I'm your Cult Leader Spencer Henry and it's Friday, which means that this is a little leader where I read the stories you send to me.

Hey, if you have a story you'd like to share with the Cult, be it about family drama or your connection to a Cult or crime or just an embarrassing thing that happened to you when you were younger. I want to hear about it. Send it over to SpencerAtColtLeader.com and put little leader somewhere in the subject line or the body of the email.

How's it going, babes? Hope everybody had a nice week. This week we talked about the Minnesota whipping cult, truly wild story. Next week we're getting into a more recent Cult, well in comparison to some of our recent stories from Texas. And I cannot believe I have not heard of this story before because it's a big one. It's a doozy.

As you can tell, I'm just here by myself today all on my loan, some, that's not true, hot dogs here. Hi, hot dog. Last week Madison joined us though and I thought it was really fun reading some of those Cult related, am I the assholes? So I have one that I wanted to read.

I'm gonna get us going today and it says, would I be the asshole if I met up with a friend's estranged mother behind his back? I, 29 year old female, have been doing some volunteer work at a food pantry. On my first day volunteering, I met a guy, EricEarlie30smail, there that I really hit it off with. He was apparently there to help out as part of a religious neo-Christian obligation, which I thought was nice but I didn't press much further at the time as I'm an atheist.

And I'm not particularly interested in talking at length about religion, fair. As I volunteered at the food pantry more and more and got to know him better, we became friends. He's a very introspective, old soul type of guy and I enjoyed my time with him.

I was willing to tolerate his god protect you and put your trust in god thing because I truly enjoyed his company a lot and I'm beyond the point in my life where I get offended by that sort of thing.

The only thing about him though is that he'd been quite cagey about his family and much of his past by extent. I understand that some people have bad past with family and things in the past that they'd rather not reminisce on but he's so evasive and brosk about the topic that it planted the thought in my head that he might be hiding something.

When he started to open up a bit, specifically about his mother, he described her as an absolute nightmare and he never got into specifics and it didn't feel appropriate to ask him. Long story short, he told me that among other things, she was highly controlling and would have kept him at home forever if he had let her.

Well, long story short, a good bit of time passed where things were going smoothly until I got a message on Facebook from a woman who I didn't recognize claiming to be Eric's mother. Now normally I would have blocked her and moved on if it wasn't for what she said in her message.

This is the part of the story where him being religious becomes important.

Eric's mother said that her and her son had been very close until he found a religious group a few years ago that drove him away from her. She said that it was like night and day and that it seemed like he was sucked into the vortex of it too quickly for her to pull him out.

All of this I could almost disregard as typical excuses from an abuser but what was really bizarre was that she told me when he joined this religious group, he changed his name from Charles to Eric, which I'm assuming she's, I think she's using fake names here.

And totally cut himself off from everyone in his past, not just his mother. That's pretty cool to behavior, right?

She asked me if I would be willing to meet up for coffee, both out of worry for her son and for myself, saying that it's possible Eric will turn on me too.

The only thing I didn't mention is that I think I'm his only friend outside of this religious group and I don't want to isolate him entirely by screwing this up.

So what I'd be the asshole if I agreed to meet up with her. And you know, when I initially read this, I'll tell you what everyone wrote in the second.

But when I initially read it, I was like, it's hard because you don't know if this woman is telling the truth.

Well, one, how did she even find you? I'm assuming that she must have been friends with this guy on Facebook and the mom saw that and how she reached out to her.

But that aside, I'm like, it's definitely not your place to get involved.

I feel like it is kind of a tricky position to be in because if you heard that, you'd be like, damn, oh, I want to give this mom some sort of solace that at least her son's okay and maybe try and help her out.

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