Trust Me: Cults, Extreme Belief, and Manipulation

Updated: 01 Oct 2025 • 230 episodes
art19.com/shows/trust-me

Trust Me is a weekly interview podcast about cults, extreme belief, and the fine line between devotion and delusion—told through firsthand accounts from the people who lived it. Hosted by two women who’ve been in cults themselves, Lola Blanc and Meagan Elizabeth, the show features survivors from groups like Heaven’s Gate, the Manson Family, NXIVM, OneTaste and more–sharing personal stories of how they got in, how they got out, and everything in between. Each week, they invite these guests alongside experts who can dive deep into seductive leaders, the darker aspects of organized religion, and the subtler shades of groupthink and the psychology of influence. Trust Me explores it all with unfiltered honesty, dark humor, and a lot of heart. This isn’t a sensationalized deep dive into cults—it’s a compassionate, first-person exploration of what it means to believe, to belong, and to break free. At the end of the day, wanting to believe in something bigger than yourself is one of the most human instincts there is.

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Aaron Goldenberg, actor, comedian, and (hilarious) content creator, joins Lola and Meagan to talk about being gay as a Christian child, what it was like learning Bill Gothard’s IBLP homeschool curriculum as a boy, and how his parents discovered his queerness and sent him to conversion therapy. He talks about Exodus Int

77 min
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Journalist Sarah Stankorb comes on the show to talk about her book, Disobedient Women, and the deep dive she did on why a series of evangelical women in America began to leave their communities as the internet came into prominence. They discuss patriarchal teachings within cultures like the Quiverfull movement, includi

73 min
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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

82 min
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Journalist Jane Borden joins the girls to discuss her book Cults Like Us, a gripping investigation into how cultic thinking is woven into the fabric of American life. Jane delves into the radical roots of early Protestant settlers, how the deep-rooted American mythology of a strong rebel cowboy who can save us from the

61 min
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Megan Elizabeth Cox–not to be confused with our Meagan Elizabeth–shares how she first started Gwen Shamblin’s weight loss program as a child, when her mom began listening to the cassette tapes in the 90s. She opens up about what it was like growing up in a family that was fixated on weight loss, how it felt meeting Sha

77 min
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Journalist Claire Hoffman joins us again, this time to discuss her new book Sister, Sinner: the unbelievable true story of Aimee Semple McPherson, a glamorous Pentecostal preacher who pioneered entertainment evangelism. McPherson was so famous in the 1920s she could have been a Kardashian. Claire talks about how the ea

54 min
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