Diane Benscoter

Diane Benscoter is an ex-Moonie, deprogrammer, author, public speaker and founder of the organization Own Your Brain. From the age of 17-22 she was a follower of Sun Myung Moon, the founder of the Unification Church, which has been known as a religious cult whose members are often referred to as Moonies. Once she left the church, she used her experience to raise awareness to the science behind the human mind and extremism memetics. Benscoter did this through creating her memoir, Shoes of a Servant: My Unconditional Devotion to a Lie. She also became a public speaker, hosting her own TED Talk called "How Cults Think". She is currently raising awareness through her organization Own Your Brain.

Benscoter was born in 1957 to her mother and father. She grew up in York, Nebraska alongside her three older brothers, Larry, Ron, and Bryce and her younger sister Julie. She attended York High School until she was 16, when in 1973 she dropped out. She did not attend class very often and felt that she did not fit in thus causing her to turn to drugs. She then moved to Lincoln, Nebraska where she was hoping to get a job as a writer for a free or alternative newspaper. She was passionate about the Vietnam War at the time, which was fueled by hearing stories from her best friend's brother about the war and songs by The Beatles that called for peace. Benscoter intended to use journalism to change the world and end the war. She went in for an interview at a local paper and came out with an assignment to do a story of a 3-day march from Omaha, Nebraska to Des Moines, Iowa where Reverend Sun Myung Moon would be speaking. Over the course of those three days, she began to believe that Moon was the Second Coming of Christ and that she was his disciple.

Benscoter moved from Lincoln to Omaha immediately after returning from the walk at the advice of her follow Moonie's. She then participated in the church by selling flowers and candy and recruiting new members. The recruitment of new members was referred to as "witnessing", where the objective was to get potential members to come to the center for a free dinner and a lecture. After one year with the church, she was then sent off to be apart of the Mobile Fundraising Teams or MFT. She spent the next four years selling candy and flowers, except this time it was all across the country. She also partook in various training sessions thorough out the rest of her time with the church, which consisted of teachings and lectures that reaffirmed the beliefs of the church. She became one of the church's top sellers and believed she could do more. Benscoter eventually convinced those that were higher up than her that she should move on from fundraising and go back to school and that from there she could be of greater help. She then enrolled at the University of Iowa and stayed with her brother Ron. Around one year into her schooling, Benscoter believed that she had made the wrong choice in going back to school and tried to leave for New York City. Her mother was informed and immediately went to Iowa and brought deprogrammers with her.

Deprogramming

Following her deprogramming from the Unification Church, Benscoter worked and lived at a rehab house in Minneapolis, Minnesota for people coming out of cults. From her job at the rehab house there was an opportunity for her to help with a deprogramming and from then on she would help as often as she could. Eventually, the deprograming in association with the rehab house died down and Benscoter started to do more with teams of deprogrammers. However, she stopped deprogramming in 1988 when she, along with her team, were arrested for kidnapping. She was offered a plea bargain of two years unsupervised probation and at the end of those two years it would be expunged from her record and she took it.

Public Speaker

Benscoter spent the next 20 years, researching and studying the science behind how cults are able to gain their following. She eventually put her findings into speeches and started to speak out openly about what she discovered. Her most famous and popular speech is from a Ted Talk that she gave in February 2009 named "How Cults Think". This video on the Ted website has received over 1 million views.

Author

She used her experiences to create a memoir, depicting her life when she was a member of the Unification Church as well as when she was a deprogrammer. This memoir was released in 2013 and was titled Shoes of a Servant: My Unconditional Devotion to a Lie. Benscoter wrote this book in the hopes that it would deter others from joining groups and cults similar to the Unification Church and that it would also show those that have joined those groups and left that they were not alone. The book receives a 4.3 out of 5 star rating on the Barnes & Noble website.

Founder of Own Your Brain

In 2013, Benscoter created and founded Own Your Brain, an organization whose goal is to expose the how, when, where, and why people can be manipulated. The organization is centered around the research and studying that she conducted after her years as a deprogrammer. The organization uses her book, a blog, a Youtube channel, workshops, and public speaking to promote their message. The organization is set out to inform the public, as Benscoter, believes that informing the public is the best way to deter people from joining groups and cults like the Unification Church. Her current project for the organization is called The Stories Campaign, where she is interviewing other people that have been manipulated the way she was. She is conducting this in order to have people look at the common thread in each story to see the bigger story.

Media

Benscoter has been featured and her work mentioned on multiple platforms of media, including Ted, The Huffington Post, NPR, and Ozy.

Benscoter currently lives in Portland, Oregon with her partner. They adopted a daughter, Camille, whom is now in college.

"I understand how Hitler did what he did, how terrorists strap bombs onto their bodies."—Diane Benscoter

"My mind was closed, fixed, intolerant and impervious to change. I was an extremist."— Diane Benscoter

"The complexity of preventing extremism should not be underestimated, especially in war-torn parts of the world where the use of religious fundamentalism is woven into the culture and vulnerability is high."— Diane Benscoter