Quick Facts
Biography
Sharon Gans (born July 29, 1942, in New York City and died on or about January 20, 2021, in New York City) was an American actress and cult leader.
Gans grew up in the Bronx New York. She graduated from University of California, Berkeley in 1959 with a degree in Theater and performance studies. She is best known for playing the role of Billy Pilgrim's wife, Valencia Merble, in George Roy Hill's the 1972 film version of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. Gans also starred in the award-winning documentary Artists and Orphans: A True Drama. In 1966, she won an Obie Award for Best Actress for her performance in Soon Jack November.
Career
In October 1988, Gans directed the play The Legend of Sharon Shashanovah, presented at the 47th Street Theater in New York City. Gans co-wrote A Chekhov Concert with Jordan Charney that was performed by the Moscow Contemporary Theater.
Gans was a party to the 1978 US Supreme Court case called Kulko v. California Superior Court in which the Court held that Gans had no right to sue her ex-husband for child support while she remained in California and he in New York; the case authored by Justice Marshall describes the facts surrounding the Gans/Kulko marriage in some detail.
Cult allegations
Gans, and her late husband Alex Horn, founded and operate a "school" of the Fourth Way which some former students have asserted is actually a cult but which Gans has vehemently disputed.
In its July 2019 issue, EAST Magazine published an article by Spencer Schneider, part of a book-length memoir the author is writing about School, in which he describes the School led by Gans as an ultra-secret organization which engaged in various forms of physical and emotional abuse of its members, including himself, such as forced adoptions, arranged marriages, public humiliation, and forced-labor.
On November 12, 2019, the New York Post published an exposé on Sharon Gans and School. The article quotes former members who came forward to recount, among other things, surreptitiously being recruited, mental abuse, arranged marriages, hard labor and sleep deprivation.
Gans died on or about January 20, 2021 at her home at the Plaza Hotel.
