I hoped she would.
And so I left her there, but not before I banged on the back door of the house—pounded so loud that it felt like I would wake the entire neighborhood up. Then I darted back out into the desert until I was a safe distance away, concealed by a stand of cacti, and watched.
The lights in the house came on almost immediately, just seconds after Emma woke up and began to wail. I waited until I saw the figures silhouetted against the open doorway, and heard the mother’s shriek of disbelief and the father’s cry—“Oh Lord oh Lord, thank you Lord!”—before slipping out into the dark. I traced my way back, blinded by tears, weaving a perilous path between the saguaro and the prickly pear until I finally saw my car in the distance, and my sister standing there, her face pale with worry as she waited for me to come back to her.
“Did they find her?” she asked.
I nodded, for once finding myself incapable of speech.
“That’s good.” She gazed out over the desert for a long minute, her eyes fixed on the silver sliver of moon hanging low in the sky. “Then let’s go home,” she said.
35
IT MERITED ONLY A small story, on page four of the local news section of the Santa Barbara Independent. “Local Authorities Seek Former Psychologist Accused of Running Cult.” Three columns, six hundred words. That was it.
Elli and I read it together, faces pressed close over the smudged newsprint, morning coffee still on our breath. My sister, in her florist coveralls, her hair smelling like shampoo, me in the sweats that I’d scavenged from the back of Elli’s closet. Outside the kitchen window, the Mexican fan palms swayed in the Santa Ana winds. The sky was flat and tinged yellow with the smoke from inland wildfires.
Dr. Cindy Medina, a local psychologist and the founder of the women’s self-help group GenFem, is being sought by local authorities after several former members came forth claiming that they were blackmailed into giving money to the organization against their will.
The group, which set up shop in Santa Barbara three years ago, was founded by Medina under the guise of teaching its members how to “maximize their potential” and “free themselves of the artificial structures that have thwarted women’s achievements.” The organization claimed nearly five hundred members, all women, across four different centers in the United States and Canada. Members were encouraged to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to rise up the “levels” of the organization. Medina claimed to have ninety-seven patents for “behavioral therapy breakthroughs”; however, a search by the Santa Barbara Independent unearthed only four that had actually been granted, including one described as a “guidance system for addressing menopausal anxiety.”
Former members describe an environment of physical deprivation and psychological abuse. Women were manipulated into revealing deeply personal information, or even performing misdeeds, and then blackmailed for their secrets. A former summer camp in Ojai—property owned by Dr. Medina’s family since 1954—served as a retreat where members were forced to participate in activities reminiscent of Synanon’s controversial “The Game,” according to member Alexis Latimer, one of the early whistleblowers. One senior member, a former lawyer who requested anonymity, suggested that Medina held multiple offshore bank accounts into which she had been secretly funneling the organization’s funds.
The existence of GenFem came to light after member Ruth Hollenbach came forward earlier this fall. After being publicly named in a local college admission scandal, Hollenbach defended herself by saying that she was “brainwashed” by Medina into participating. Several other members have since come forward to corroborate Hollenbach’s stories, although little hard evidence has been produced to support their claims so far.
Other members remain adamant that GenFem was simply a supportive self-help group for women, and that Dr. Medina is a victim of slander. “GenFem changed my life,” says member Suzy Chan. “I owe everything to Dr. Medina. Every penny I spent on the program was worth it.”
Medina appears to have drawn inspiration from New Age self-help methodology, experimental psychiatric practices, radical feminist theory, and the writings of Ayn Rand. A former practicing therapist in Connecticut, Medina had her credentials stripped in 2012 for “undue manipulation of a client” after three former patients claimed that she coerced them into signing interests in their businesses over to her. This didn’t prevent Medina from reinventing herself as a “motivational counselor,” eventually receiving invitations to speak at international women’s conferences. Upon arriving in Santa Barbara, she was able to recruit scores of Santa Barbara women—many of them prominent and successful community leaders—into her growing organization.
After several former members agreed to speak to the Santa Barbara Independent, we reached out to Medina, but she declined to comment. Local authorities have launched an inquiry into the organization. However, Medina has not been seen in over a month, and is presumed to have fled the country. Without a paper trail to prove their claims, and their leader missing, GenFem’s former members may have little legal recourse.
As of Tuesday, the retreat in Ojai was empty and shuttered. The GenFem offices in Santa Barbara have closed, and the remaining group leaders are refusing to speak to the press.
“That’s it?” Elli sounded disappointed. “She just…left? She gets to live the rest of her life in Mexico, drinking mai tais with our money?”
I folded the newspaper closed. In the background the television played news footage of forests burning only twenty miles away, in between holiday ads for thousand-dollar television sets and personal drone systems. “Don’t you think that’s for the best?”
“Not really. It doesn’t seem fair that she won’t face any consequences. I mean, poor Ruth. Look at what’s happened to her. I read she might have to serve time in jail.”
I didn’t want to remind my sister that fair would probably involve the FBI and drawn-out lawsuits and investigators who were far more skilled than the Santa Barbara Independent at digging into the regrettable behavior of former GenFem members. Better that the whole thing just fade into the woodwork. Better that the contents of Dr. Cindy Medina’s laptop remained where they currently were: in Elli’s basement, folded inside a garbage bag, at the bottom of a cardboard box full of back issues of Real Simple magazine.
It had been Elli’s idea to steal the laptop, though that hadn’t been the plan. The plan was just to steal the file folder, the one that we assumed held Elli’s handwritten confession. We’d simply take back the blackmail material, so that GenFem would no longer have any leverage over Elli. It was the best option we could come up with, in those few stolen minutes in the summer camp bathroom.
And that had been easy enough. While I distracted the GenFem members in the lounge, Elli had snuck into the empty front office. The door wasn’t even locked, GenFem leadership apparently assuming that their captive congregation was a passive herd that wouldn’t have the temerity to demand their belongings back. For once, Dr. Cindy Medina made a bad psychological assessment.