In this episode, I shared my heartbreaking experience with accidentally joining a cult, leaving a cult, and the red flags associated in general with cults. Dallas Dance Collective / Ecstatic Dance Dallas is NOT a safe organization allowing people to dance. It is an organization that people use to violate women, people, and ignore boundaries. Trust the patterns. Get out. Help is available. I discuss specifics about the man who touched my inner thigh, the other instances of red flags in this organization, and what you can do to protect yourself against sexual assault and cult dynamics.
In this episode, I shared my heartbreaking experience with accidentally joining a cult, leaving a cult, and the red flags associated in general with cults.
Dallas Dance Collective / Ecstatic Dance Dallas is NOT a safe organization allowing people to dance.
It is a cult that has sexually assaulted women countless times in the past.
It is an organization that people use to violate women, people, and ignore boundaries.
I discuss specifics about the man who touched my inner thigh, the other instances of red flags in this organization, and what you can do to protect yourself against sexual assault and cult dynamics.
When I was trapped in this cult, it was like I became a completely different person who could only echo the beliefs of the group.
I am autistic & autistic people are typically resistant to group think scenarios.
I naively thought the organization was solely for dancing.
I did not realize how many people AND organizations are interested in harming me.
That is how compelling and harmful cults are, and it can happen to anyone.
Some of the red flags I discuss are:
Cult Dynamics:
Other red flag phrases, copy pasted from actual messages sent to me:
Long story short. Actions define our patterns which can become our reality.
When someone takes actions that indicate that they do not care about respecting boundaries:
Trust the patterns. Get out. Help is available.
Hello everyone, so for the better part of a year and a half I was debating whether or not I wanted to record this episode and share it with you all.
So before I get started, I want to let you know that if you are an easily triggered person, you probably shouldn't listen to this. If you're triggered by sexual assault conversations, cult conversations, hyper-religiosity conversations—if any of this is triggering to you, then please feel free to skip this episode, move on to a different one.
This episode will not be about my typical neuroscience explanations about autism, but rather I felt the need to talk about how often autistic people are exploited and the reasons behind why we can become exploited, and maybe some hopeful advice and suggestions to prevent us from being exploited.
I unfortunately had the worst year of my life last year, 2023. I'm not going to get into all the details in this episode—maybe a future episode I'll be more willing to share about the kind of mental state that I got into as a result of some of this stuff—but for now, I'd like to keep the focus on warning signs of a cult, warning signs of sexual assault or things of that nature, and ways that you can spot red flags to protect yourself and protect other people if you can't intuitively see social cues. And I might also include some other examples from a recent concert of mine too.
So before I get started, I wanted to share some sexual assault statistics with you, and it's—it's honestly really sad, really unfortunate, and really frustrating that so many autistic people are taken advantage of in ways like that. And I consider myself lucky that I didn't have any extremely major things happen to me, but I did have some minor ones I'll talk about today.
First, statistics:
Almost 90% of autistic people have reported experiencing sexual violence, often on multiple occasions.
Nine out of 10 autistic women are victims of sexual assault.
(Experiences of physical and sexual violence as reported by autistic adults without intellectual disability—that talks about the rates, the patterns. I'm reading the titles by the way of some of these, so if you're interested in more details, feel free to Google those phrases.)
There's also an association of autistic traits in adulthood with childhood abuse, interpersonal victimization, and post-traumatic stress. That one was pretty obvious to me, but it's still worth studying.
And yeah, so in other words, it's an extremely common issue, an extremely common problem, a common trauma that autistic women face. And there's a bunch of reasons and factors behind it, but the tldr is: if you can't spot social cues intuitively in the same way, if you're not making the same assumptions as everybody else, then you could potentially be in dangerous situations that you don't even know are dangerous until something bad happens to you.
And for the rest of the podcast, I'm going to share kind of a rather heartbreaking story of what I personally went through in 2023.
Towards the end of '22—I think it was October or September '22—I love to dance. I think dancing is amazing, I think dancing is fun. It's also a form of stimming for me; it's so much fun to be able to just be myself and dance and exercise and dance some more. I just love dancing, I think it's the coolest thing ever, I really do.
So I was looking around for a group of people to dance with, and I was looking for like a free-form kind of dancing. Like, I've done structured dancing in the past, like step aerobics—and it's awesome by the way, if you've never tried step aerobics go for it, you'll like it, it's lots of routines, it's perfect for autistic people, and it generally has easy-to-follow rules, which is very helpful and understandable.
Anyways, so I was looking for some free-form dance groups, and I came across this organization called Dallas Ecstatic Dance, or Ecstatic Dance Dallas, or Dallas Movement Collective. And I was thinking, "Oh great, other people that like to dance, this will be cool." So every Sunday I would go to the different venues and I would be dancing with other people free-form. Basically, it means you can dance with no rules in particular or limited rules—like you can move around, move your body however you want basically. They don't teach you how to dance; it's just an environment where people are allowed to freely dance.
And so there were a lot of red flags that I missed at the moment—a lot—and I'd like to talk about all of them, and I'd like to talk about how it affected me in brief words. But above all, the goal with this episode is to help you better identify flags that might indicate an organization could be a cult, and to share this experience with you.
I went to this dance group for many months, from like October '22 until April '23. So why did I stop going? I think I'll start with that: what was the catalyst for me to realize all the red flags in retrospect?
There was someone in the group—someone named Grayson, which is by the way a made-up name (most people in this group used made-up names so that they couldn't be tracked later on; you can't exactly tell the police a fake name to find someone who has hurt you).
Red Flag #1: If you go into an organization and everybody is using fake names or they won't tell you their last name or their last name is totally made up, red flag. Fake names are a red flag because it allows people to do really shitty things without being legally tracked or held accountable for it. So if you're in a situation like that, know that that's a red flag.
The reason I stopped going: there was a person named Grayson at this event who—on that day (it actually might have been in March of '24)—on that day, I had been informed that he had been banned from giving people hugs. Now, this is a 53-year-old man, to be clear—53. I'm 28; I was 27 then. So I wanted to make that clear: this is someone that I thought was my friend, who I had hung out with like at his house and with other people and other groups. We had been having a friendship, or what I thought was a friendship, for probably at least six months—hangouts and stuff like that, you know, normal friendship things, or so I thought.
Well, turns out this man who was banned from giving hugs—like that's going to do anything. If you have an organization and someone's not respecting women's boundaries, kick them out! You either kick them out or you become guilty by association, because you are being a bystander to the problem. And that is a big part of why I lost respect for a lot of the people in this group: because they chose the route of being bystanders instead of standing up for ethical values.
So this man decided to touch my inner thigh. He touched my inner thigh without my consent, and I have a trauma response of freeze, so in the moment I froze up, I didn't know what to do. And keep in mind, this is in a public environment, this is with 27 at least other people in a nearby radius. Take a guess how many out of those 27 did something about it. If you guessed zero, you're unfortunately correct. People saw this happening, nobody stepped in, nobody cared, except me. They were bystanders. They were bystanders, and I was harmed. Not only was I harmed, countless other women in this—in this quote organization have been harmed as well, and I'm going to get into more details on that as well.
Red Flag #2: If an organization asks you not to film every time you are in that situation, that's a red flag, because anything can happen and no one will know, and nobody can be reported to the police. How can you report it if it's not on camera? Is it any wonder that cameras aren't allowed in that organization? They don't allow people to film, so women can get screwed over without anyone having evidence of it.
That instance really messed me up. Long story short, that instance triggered a three-month psychotic episode where I was hallucinating, I had delusions, I thought I was dying, I thought I was dead. That's a long story for a different episode, but it really messed things up for me, because it took my feelings of safety in my own body and my feelings of safety in the world and threw it upside down. For four months I was scared to go outside because I thought that every random person on the street could rape me or touch my legs or try to harm me in some way. And this contributed—actively contributed—to this severe paranoia that I went through during that entire experience.
Because if you can't trust that a 53-year-old man is going to have enough common sense and fucking decency not to touch you, how can you trust anyone? Even now I'm still honestly, you know, coming back from being able to trust people again. I used to think most people were genuinely, generally good. I used to think that most people respect other people's boundaries—they definitely don't, that's what I learned. Or at least reasonable people. Maybe I—I used to think that if you talk to a stranger, there's a high probability that they're probably a good person. I don't think that anymore.
And I'm not saying this as a means of pessimism, but rather it's important to be really realistic about understanding that when you're talking to another person, that most of the time that person has an agenda. And maybe that agenda is not a bad thing—it could be a good thing, maybe they do want to make friends, maybe they're interested in the same things you are. But it could be a bad thing too. That agenda could mean trying to get money—like in this organization where they asked people to pay before dance every time, which would be a reasonable request, except there were some manipulative tactics used behind it to try to get more money.
Red Flag #3: If there is manipulative language being used in an organization in order to try to obtain money from you, that's a red flag that you should be aware of.
So let's—let's consider other red flags in this scenario. I didn't go into exactly what this organization was and the problems with it enough, so I'm going to paint a picture for you:
You go into the dance. At the beginning of the dance, everyone is asked to hold hands in a circle environment, so you're holding hands with other strangers.
Then you have to pick a word to describe your experience at the end. So there's an opening circle and there's a closing circle, and there's a lot of spiritual lingo that gets talked about throughout the beginning and end of this dance.
During the dance, they play music that is drumming and hypnotic music and things like that to try to put you into a more receptive mental state—one that is easily malleable and one that reduces critical thinking. And inside of that mental state, people can be taken advantage of.
If you are in a receptive state of mind and you just got done dancing and maybe aren't in a mind state of thinking critically, this means that you can be easily taken advantage of, because people can try to project their own personal beliefs onto you in accordance with their agenda. To give one example of that, religion is one really great example—I'm not saying all religions are cults, they're not, but certainly there are some cults that are offshoots of certain religions. In this case, prior to 2023, and even now really, I've never been a particularly religious person. I didn't grow up with religion at all; I grew up with quite the opposite. I do have my own personal beliefs about God and things like that, but in general I didn't really talk about it until I was in a mind state of that nature.
And so here's the harm that it can cause: if you get someone into a malleable mind state—if you're the leader of a group that tries to get people into these states—then that basically throws individual willpower away and transforms it into groupthink, a whole group power essentially. The power of a group over the individual, where the group can try to convince you to only hang out with them and not other people. They can try to isolate you from your family, from your friends. Or sometimes it's even more subtle than that: sometimes they won't outright tell you not to hang out with people outside of the group, but they'll give you these little subtle social cues, like, "Oh, that person doesn't dance, ooh that's not cool," or you know, little things—little things that maybe autistic people can't pick up on, but in retrospect were definitely there.
Some common dynamics associated with cults:
A Charismatic Leader: This charismatic leader is someone who's like extremely nice—"I am going to create a safe space for everyone to have their own authentic self-expression," that sort of thing. Red flag all around! Or, "Leave your Earthly desires behind you and come join us in the opening circle," or things like that. This charismatic leader has one agenda and one goal, and that goal is to recruit more members into the group, both for obtaining money and for obtaining power. Some of the two most common motivators of humanity, unfortunately, are money and power, and I would say power is an even bigger motivator than money, which is kind of crazy to think about because I operate on the completely opposite of all of this mindset. I don't really care—if I have enough I'm happy, and I don't want power over other people. But there's a lot of people who do. Why do they want it? Because they get dopamine hits from having this power. So this charismatic leader will literally say anything that they have to say to recruit members into their organization, to give the organization more power.
Thought Control: A lot of cults will try to manipulate and control the thoughts and beliefs and behaviors of their members through techniques like isolation, indoctrination, and repetition. I guess I can consider myself lucky that I didn't deal with isolation really; I have a pretty damn good support group and I'm not going to let anything change that. But after leaving the cult, I definitely suffered with a lot of isolation, because it's difficult to explain to people what you've been through if they've never experienced it themselves. Examples of repetition: phrases like "I release control," saying that over and over and over and over and over again, especially under certain drum beats or music. That's a really great example of repetition and indoctrination both. Other indoctrination-type things can be using group psychology to try to get people to see themselves in a better light if they join the organization compared to if they don't—subtleties like that to be able to pit people against each other and basically make it seem like you're only a good person if you're part of this group.
Financial Exploitation: Many cults require members to donate sums of money or give up their possessions to the group under the guise of spiritual advancement or support of the leader's vision. Let's say the leader has the agenda that they want more people in this group to promote their personal religious beliefs (and these religious beliefs can be anything, by the way; in this case, the group I experienced this with was part of New Age spirituality, basically meaning not tied to any one particular religion). In retrospect, it's probably so that they could recruit more members for their organization, to be able to take advantage of more people and push their varying agendas onto people at a subconscious level. Some of that financial exploitation could be charging money or trying to encourage people to tithe or donations and things like that.
Dependency: Cults will often try to create a dependency on the group and leader for its emotional, spiritual, and sometimes even physical needs. They want to convince you that if you're not part of this group that you're not going to be okay. If someone can appeal to personal safety and survival out of fear to make you think that you need this or else you're going to die, or you need this to feel safe, then that's how they're going to rope people into staying even in harmful and abusive circumstances.
Information & Rapid Change / Exclusivity: Cults will only share information that supports their agenda and basically reduce information that doesn't in order to convince people that they're the only right way. They will often claim to have exclusive access to truth, enlightenment, or salvation, making it difficult for members to question or leave the group without feeling like they are losing something valuable.
So after that man touched my inner thigh—the man meaning Grayson—after he touched my inner thigh and I froze up, ultimately I left. I left the group completely, I never came back. I was like, "Fuck this, if people can't respect my basic bodily autonomy rights, then I'm going to get the fuck out of there."
So I left, and I actually confronted the guy and his partner (and I used the word partner—that is not a word that I selected, that's a word that they use to refer to themselves; I have no problems with the word, but in this case it was a red flag in retrospect). So I confronted them both over text. I wanted to tell the guy that what he did was not acceptable, that what he did was a total violation of my boundaries, that it was not okay, and that this is the reason I'm never going to talk to him again and I'm never coming back.
So I did, I told him everything. And of course he denied it, and then he tried to claim it was a mistake, and then he didn't realize what he was doing, and he tried to play the victim in a very fucked up way. Look, if you're a 53-year-old man touching a 27-year-old woman's inner thigh, don't you dare try to play the victim! That's fucked up.
And you know what? In retrospect he's damn lucky I didn't report it to the police. You know why I didn't? I didn't have his first and last name—and this is why people make fake names! I also confronted his partner—not for me, for her. If I was together with someone who was violating women's boundaries, you better believe I would want someone to tell me, I would want to know who I'm with. And I already do, or at least I think I do. I mean, my husband has had tons of green flags all over the place, and it's pretty much the reason I survived last year.
But here's the crazy part: she didn't believe me either, at all! Why did she not believe me? Because it went too far outside of her own perception of him for her to believe it. She wanted us to meet all together at a brunch place, and I said hell no. I was already very much in the middle of psychosis at that point from the whole unhealthy nature of the group as a whole, and I hell was not going to spend my time in a dangerous situation alone with two people who aren't even willing to understand or listen, or two people who don't even realize how harmful their actions are or how fucked up it is to touch other women.
There was another lady in this group, and this other lady would randomly hold my hand, would randomly kiss my cheek, would randomly do things that absolutely 100% crossed boundaries. When I was in the midst of my psychosis, she added fuel to the flames, and it was horrible. The things that she did to me were even worse than the guy who touched my inner thigh, because you know what? I was able to actually almost move on from that (maybe I'm still working through that, I'm still doing therapy every single week and I have been pretty much ever since July 2023).
This lady at dance, she basically tries to insert herself into everyone's relationships. She spent a long time trying to convince me to divorce my husband to have a shitty fling with her, and I basically told her, "I don't know what the fuck you're smoking, but no, I'm not going to do that. I love my husband, I always have, I always will, and I have no interest in a shitty fling with you." So she had no sense of boundaries.
Even now, I have another person that I knew from that group who also has left this cult—she left it as well, and she agrees with me that it is a cult (I didn't even, you know, this is her words, not mine). And so tell me: if you have multiple people leaving an organization recognizing these cult dynamics and recognizing how much they've been harmed from it... to be honest, I'm fucking lucky I didn't get raped. I'm lucky. I'm lucky I didn't get raped, because there were so many instances when that could have happened. I'm damn lucky. I'm lucky that the worst thing that happened to me was psychosis and my inner thigh getting touched and my cheek getting kissed. I'm lucky that it didn't get worse than that. And it's sad—I find it really sad if that is how low the baseline is for the way that women are treated in our society.
And to add even more infamy to this: I told the leader of this organization when this happened. I told her, "Hey, just a heads up, I won't be back, here's why, this person did this to me and that's not okay and I have personal boundaries." So logically, if you are a leader, use your moral compass for a minute: how would you respond? How would you respond if someone came to you, an organization that you are literally the leader of, and they told you that they had been sexually assaulted? What would your response be to that?
Well, her response was sickening. Her response was basically like, "We always try our best to make sure that we create containers of safety, we try to make sure that everyone can express themselves freely"—basically, she didn't care. She didn't do anything. She didn't kick this guy out of the organization, she didn't kick this girl out of the organization.
In fact, it's so much worse than that, because I realized this entire organization is a part of hookup culture. People are trying to have sex, they're trying to recruit other members into this group so that they can continue violating other people's boundaries, bodily autonomy, personal space, and all of the above. In fact, it's part of the cult dynamics.
Look, I'm the biggest fan of free-body culture in theory, in terms of an environment where people are allowed to just, you know, take their shirt off (like I think it's kind of ridiculous women can't go outside on a 117-degree Fahrenheit day without a shirt, but men can), but that's not the same thing as this organization and what they were doing. These people are literally promoting violating boundaries. They claim that they're not; they claim that they're a sober environment (never mind the fact that there were at least five people who told me that they were doing various drugs before and after the dances, never mind that fact). People will turn a blind eye to anything that doesn't fit their agenda. They'll literally pretend like you didn't even say it; they won't hear you, they won't even know how harmful this type of dynamic can be, because they don't care, because it doesn't fit into their agenda, because they're only focused on that one agenda: power and money. Power and money.
To make things worse, I recently found out that one of the members of this group throws sex parties past midnight where he locks all the doors to his house, and I guess there's an orgy scenario where everyone's just fucking each other, I don't know, and then offers them all various drugs. And he charges to get in—I think it was $60 per person to get in—and he kind of uses this dance group as a means of obtaining clients.
Now, here's the ironic part here: that guy, the guy who charges his clients for that, he was one of the only people at this group who respected my boundaries. And it makes sense to think about it, right? Like this is his business model: if he starts violating people's boundaries, he could get in trouble with the law, and then he wouldn't be able to afford to keep up what is essentially a prostitution ring—I don't know if that's exactly the right word to use, but he has an unlimited customer base because people that are going to this group apparently, through some unspoken NT-related rules that I wasn't able to immediately pick up on (like certain phrases that might indicate polyamory and things like that), he has an unlimited customer base of horny people who are willing to pay money to have sex rings or whatever you want to call it.
Now ask yourself this question: if this guy who's charging people for that type of experience, if this guy was one of the only people who respected my boundaries, think about all the other people who didn't! That's a long list. This is not a small group; this group is like at least 50 to 100 members. Most dances will get like 50 people. They charge about $25 per dance—you do the math here, you know. I'll do the math here: let's see, let's take a look at how much this organization might be making just from having one event. Let's say there's 50 members and let's say they charged (I think they raised it to 30 now) $30—that means 50×30 is $1,500 from a single two-hour event. If you're making $1,500 from a two-hour, three-hour-long event, then money is definitely playing a role into the agenda here. So now suppose you have these events weekly, right? Okay, that means you're making $6,000 a month.
So that brings me to the next red flag (I forgot the count that I'm at):
Red Flag: If you ask someone what is their job, and they just tell you that they're blessed with money and they don't give you a straight answer, that's a red flag.
Red Flag: If you go into this organization and you do things differently and people don't respect that, that's a red flag.
Red Flag: If you are looking at how people treat women and other people and their boundaries, and you notice that people who claim to be in committed relationships are running around hugging, kissing, whatever—extremely on a deep level (I don't mean just like a side hug for friends, I mean like more than that)—that's a red flag. Because if an organization can't respect something as basic as women's bodily autonomy, how can you trust them to respect anything else? You can't. You really can't.
So maybe as you're still listening to this you're wondering, "Kelsey, this seems like important information, why were you so hesitant to release this?" Well, I was hesitant because it's scary. It's scary to talk about the past experiences that you've been through, especially when you were in a situation where you were harmed. It's scary to realize that when autistic people can't pick up on dangerous social cues, that they might not even know if they're in a situation where they could be harmed.
Did I know this guy was going to touch my thigh that day? I sure as hell did not know that. And in retrospect, if he had raped me in that moment, those 27 bystanders—they still would have done nothing. The leader still wouldn't have cared. And why? Because it doesn't fit into their agenda. People only care about things that fit into their agenda. And this organization was absolutely sickening: Dallas Movement Collective, or Ecstatic Dance Dallas. This is the type of organization that you should avoid if you value your own sanity, your own clarity, your own boundaries. Avoid!
So it seems obvious, right? It seems obvious after hearing all of this: "Wow, that's a red flag, that's a red flag, how did you not know that in the moment?" This is where a lot of autistic people can get stuck in the whole rejection spiral. Because for people who are not autistic, who can clearly see social cues, it's pretty easy to avoid situations like this unless you're actively seeking them. But for me, I naively thought that people just wanted to dance. I thought that this was an organization that was about dancing, and it wasn't about dancing; it was about hookup culture, it was about violating and harming people, and it was about all the problems with our society of people turning a blind eye because they think that issues that harm other people don't affect them.
This is why I'm labeled as confrontational now. You know what? I would rather be labeled as confrontational for the rest of my life if I fight for my values and I stand up against the bullshit that other people do sometimes. I would rather be seen as the most confrontational person on earth if that means I can maybe save or help at least one other person.
And that leads me to my next example. I think I've talked enough about the other organization and some of the pain that I went through (maybe you can hear it in my voice, maybe you can't, but if you can't hear it, just know that it was the most—probably the most painful situation I've ever been in in my life, and I've been through a lot in my life).
So yeah, I wanted to bring up another situation: about a month ago, I went to this concert. I went with friends, I went with two other people. And so when we get there, it was like a concert for music involving some dancing and stuff like that too. Overall it was still a good experience at this concert, I'm not going to deny that.
But at the beginning of the concert, when we were hanging out dancing a little bit in a group, I had this lady come up to me. She was like, "Hey, can I be part of your group?" And I was like, "Absolutely yes, you can be part of our group. I will literally let anyone in our group—like anyone who is polite or kind."
So she asked, and I could tell she was a young lady (I consider myself a young lady, but she was younger than me even). As we're dancing, this guy comes up to her, and this guy is very clearly more than double her age. So he asks her, "Hey, how old are you?" and she says, "I'm 22." And then she asks him how old he is, and he didn't answer the question.
Red Flag: If someone doesn't tell you their age after you told them theirs, or if they're explicitly asking for your age but aren't willing to give theirs, that's a red flag.
And because of my experience with the shitty dance group, I was able to detect this in the concert scenario. While he was asking this, he started literally backing this lady into a corner. I could actually see his physical body trying to block her off from the rest of our group. And you know what? One of my other friends wasn't there, and one of my other friends couldn't see it until I told her what was going on. In other words, I was the only person who even noticed this was happening first of all—which is ironic as hell because I'm autistic, I'm not naturally good at social cues at all! But the algorithms and patterns that I saw from the previous abuse that I've witnessed was enough for me to detect it in another person in another situation.
So he had been boxing her in physically into the corner, trying to separate her from the rest of the group to get her in a vulnerable situation. And I saw this happening. He was like, "You know, all of us are so drunk, we're not going to remember this tomorrow." Literally all of my friends and I were sober; I don't drink ever, and she doesn't drink very often, and everyone was sober. He was the only guy who was drunk, and he's like, "I'm going to take a picture of us." He didn't really ask, he just takes his phone out and snaps a photo. So I'm like, "Oh, well if you're going to take a picture, let me take a picture too." There was a reason behind that: if something had happened, I would have a photo of this man and I could go to the police if I needed to, if this lady was harmed. So I have a picture of this shitty guy who was hitting on this 22-year-old.
Eventually he was like, "Guess my age," and she guesses 53, and then he's like, "She's magic, she guessed it right." And I'm like, "This is bullshit, he's trying to groom her." So I saw him forcing her into a corner. I acted instantly. I have never been faster to go right directly next to another person in my life, because I saw what she was going through from the perspective of what I went through—what I wish someone had done for me. I wish someone had fucking given a shit. I wish one of those 27 people had stood in and protected me, or at least, I don't know, punched the guy who tried to hurt me. I wish someone had stepped in, and nobody did.
So when I saw this happening to another girl, another lady, I was like, "Hell no, I cannot let this happen." So when I finally got enough cues and detected what was happening with her, I literally walked so close to her, I said, "Hey, let me show you something over here," and I pointed the other direction. So I kind of like almost grabbed her arm a little bit like, "Come over here now."
So we run away from the guy pretty much, and we're walking fast, and I tell her, "Hey, I just want to let you know that this guy is trying to flirt with you, trying to sleep with you probably, and exhibiting a lot of inappropriate behaviors. And I just want to make sure you're aware of this—maybe you are aware of it, maybe you're not aware of it, but I felt the need to tell you that this was happening in case you didn't pick up on it."
She was so grateful. She told me she hadn't—she wasn't sure, she didn't know, she couldn't pick up on any of those cues. She didn't know that this guy was trying to hurt her, she didn't know that this guy was trying to manipulate her into probably coming home with him or God knows what else. She didn't catch any of this (she's probably neurodivergent in retrospect, but didn't talk about that then because her safety is the priority).
So I said, "Hey, if you're uncomfortable, I'm willing to do pretty much anything to get you out of this situation—whether that means pretending to be lesbian, or pretending to be like your best friend from high school, or whatever, I don't care, I'll do whatever I have to to get you out of this situation." Because I knew from a first-person perspective what it's like to have nobody standing up for you.
So she was like, "Oh my god, thank you so much for telling me, yeah I do want to get out of here." So I reunited with the rest of the group, I told everyone else in the group what was going on. One of our members in the group was a guy, thankfully—and it's sad, it's sad that you have to be in a group with a guy for people to treat you with respect, but it's the way society is nowadays, women just aren't seen as respected enough to be given boundaries, to be given respect, to be given proper medical care, and the long, long list (that's a different episode).
Once—so we decided to move downstairs, we physically distanced ourselves from the creepy guy, we went to a completely different location in the building, danced there, and then everything was fine.
And it just made me realize two things:
First, there are a lot of people who miss harmful red flags, and a lot of other people act like it's a moral failing—like as if you're just willingly ignoring red flags. No! Sometimes people are just really blind, they can't see the red flags that are there. If you ask someone who's colorblind to tell you the difference between red and green and they can't, it's not a moral failing on their part to be able to know the difference between red and green because they're seeing it in the same hue. It's exactly like that! It's like a blindness, it's literally like a blindness, and I don't know how else to describe it. But people think that like you should have been smart enough to avoid that situation. No! Here I am: I am literally diagnosed gifted, I am a 2E individual (okay, I don't care about IQ at all, but I'll tell you it anyways: my IQ is about 135). You can be the smartest person on earth and still get sucked into a cult. You can be the smartest person on earth and still get sexually assaulted or raped or harmed. And it is not a function of intelligence, it is not a function of willpower, and it is not a function of not wanting to be safe. Sometimes people miss cues—cues that can harm them. And this results in—for a lot of autistic people, it causes us to be in extremely dangerous situations that we didn't even know were that dangerous until after the situation is over.
And every single day I'm like, I'm so grateful that things weren't worse. It was already the worst year of my life, but you know what? I wasn't raped, and that's rare in a scenario like I've just described—it's rare. And you know what? If it weren't for me standing up for that girl at that concert, who knows what would have happened? Maybe her dead body could have shown up the next day, I don't know. But as soon as I saw that happening, I'm not going to stand by and do nothing like everybody else.
And I would encourage you: when you see something like that happening, when you see something extremely unethical, call people out on it! Who cares? Who cares if people think you're a confrontational person? You know what's more important than that? Safety. Protecting yourself, protecting others, helping other people identify red flags, and helping people get out of these horrible situations.
And you could say, "Well, just don't put yourself in that situation in the first place." It might seem easy to say that if you've never experienced it yourself, but the truth is it's not always easy to avoid, especially if you can't see social cues or social situations, or if you can't easily spot other people's agendas right off the bat, or if you don't have an intuitive social framework for socializing with people. It can be really difficult.
This is why a lot of autistic people rely on rules, because rules are easy to work with. Rules are conditional statements to keep you safe. One of my rules is: if I'm walking alone at night, I carry my keys in a way that could be used as a weapon. How did I learn this? My mom. My mom taught me. I think that there's something really, really wrong in a society where people tell women more about how to prevent themselves from getting raped than they tell men and women alike not to rape. And I think this systematically stems from mental illness not taking it seriously and not helping people understand the concept of boundaries and bodily autonomy. I'm sure there's a lot of societal things that feed into this, because it's probably not very profitable to teach people that they are in control of their decisions, because then propaganda won't work as well on them and other things like that.
What's the conclusion here?
The conclusion here is: if you're autistic, learn how to spot red flags. And it's—it's really sad that we have to learn how to do this, but we do. And I don't just mean red flags in a cult setting; I also mean other red flags: red flags in communication, red flags in relationships, red flags at work, red flags—learn how to spot them! Google it right now, ask ChatGPT, what—whatever you have to do, learn red flags, because it just might save your life or might save the life of someone you care about.
And if you're a person listening to this who is not autistic, who can see all these cues that we might be missing, please don't be a bystander. Please keep an eye out! Keep an eye out, look around you. If someone doesn't seem to be getting these cues, if you can tell that someone's in a dangerous situation, get them out of there—whatever you have to do, go buy tacos, I don't know, get them out of there.
And I know it's not always easy to do that. Sometimes people—like in my case, I was sucked into this cult, my husband had warned me not to go back, I guess probably because he saw some of the signs, but I didn't, so I thought that he was just not understanding. You know, I have a tendency to not listen to my intuition enough, and I should listen to it more, because I try to give people the benefit of the doubt, because that's what I would want other people to do for me. But when it comes to abusers, you shouldn't do this, because abusers and cults are extremely skilled at manipulating you into believing anything.
So if you see someone who's—who's—who's blind to these cues, who's trapped in a situation where they have a high likelihood of being harmed, do something! Do something about it. You know why the Holocaust happened? Not—it wasn't just Hitler, it wasn't even just a couple leaders under Hitler, it wasn't—it wasn't even a group. It was because almost all of that part of society decided to be bystanders. They decided that if this doesn't harm me, I'm going to just ignore it.
And this is what I'm asking you not to do. I'm asking you to stand up for people that you see being bullied. I'm asking you to stand up for people who might be blind to these social cues. I'm actually really asking you for protection—not for me, because I can spot these now, but for people who can't. I have another friend who misses a lot of cues all the time, and whenever she misses them I tell her, "I'm not judging you at all for missing this, and I also used to miss this," and I wanted to explain what this social cue is and how to deal with it and what it means for your own safety, because it's important for you to be able to see this next time just in case anything happens. You know, she's lucky she didn't get raped too; we both are lucky, we were both extremely lucky that things didn't get worse.
So please, if you're—if you're an autistic person listening to this, keep an eye out for the autistic people in your life. Keep an eye out for people that might be using autistic people as a means to push their agendas, or obtain money, or obtain power over other people. Because this issue is not as far from you as you might think. There are countless situations where autistic people are harmed every day from missing cues, because very, very socially intelligent people can manipulate us extremely easily, especially if we don't know what to look for because we haven't experienced those red flags before.
Altogether, keep an eye out. If you see something, say something—and that's not just a pointless phrase that nobody cares about. Get the first and last names of people—the real names, not the fake names like Earth Spirit. Get their real names when you meet people, and be smart about what you're seeing. And I don't mean this from an intelligence perspective, I mean this from a street-smarts perspective: if you can see another person who's missing a lot of cues, just keep an eye out in the situation, keep an eye out, be a little bit more aware for the other person. Because you know what? Maybe you think that this could never happen to you, but it could. It can happen to anybody.
And if everyone right now made the decision to stop being a bystander, this problem would be eliminated overnight. It would probably solve pretty much all rapes too—I mean minus a couple of cases that aren't in public environments and things like that—but if people were more aware and had a sense of compassion and community for their neighbors and cared enough about other people to look out for them, just imagine how much better the world would be. And then I wouldn't be here sharing this heartbreaking story with you. And I'm one of the lucky ones. Me too.