Re: Teal Swan

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In 2012, Swan (born Mary Teal Bosworth) started posting YouTube videos claiming that from ages 6 to 19, she was ritualistically abused by a satanic cult. During those 13 years, she alleges, she was raped, tortured, sewn into a corpse and forced to watch the murders of immigrant children. She managed to escape with the help of her friend and business partner Blake Dyer, and, in 2005, she filed a police report but says there was insufficient evidence to prosecute her abusers. After a brief stint modeling, Swan began her spiritual healing practice in 2010. Her work since — including three books and many seminars — focuses on emotional healing and spiritual growth. All revenue from her books, online store and speaking engagements gets funneled through Teal Eye, a for-profit corporation.

Today her followers, aka the “Teal Tribe,” number 23,000 strong on Facebook. In addition, she has 403,000 subscribers on YouTube, 57,500 followers on Instagram and what she calls an “intentional community” in Costa Rica, where she and 20 others live together.

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To ask Rick Ross, executive director of the Cult Education Institute, is to learn that Swan has a familiar M.O. “In my opinion, Teal Swan fits the pattern of a [cult leader],” he tells me. “She has apparently become an object of worship, and it seems that her charisma and supernatural claims are the driving force of her school of healing and workshops.”

Criticism, then, is par for the course, but Swan comes in for an extra helping because of her stance on suicide, which she has referred to as “the best option”

[www.youtube.com]

for some people, saying it’s like hitting the “reset button” on life. I take this to Ross, who calls Swan’s comments about suicide “deeply disturbing” and adds that “this is the difference between receiving counseling from a licensed professional and a self-help guru without meaningful credentials.”

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After we finish the interview, Derek and I take the train back to Paris. I’m both pleased by how well it went and surprised at how taken with her I am. But the next day, I’m told that Swan posted about our meeting on her blog. “There are two different styles of interview, one is supportive and the other is antagonistic,” she begins, calling ours antagonistic because I asked about claims made against her. Unlike a supportive interview, she writes, which “is set up to make you look good,” the antagonistic interviewer “is already biased against you and is simply setting up the interview as a trap to make you look bad … [and] to make them feel personally validated.”

Did Swan mean for me to see this? Is it a warning? And then I’m reminded of something else she said during our interview: “For somebody who’s never had a sense of belonging, [Teal Tribe] becomes … their new family. Which works until the minute that someone has a falling out with me. … If anyone has an issue with me, turning against me, they stand to lose all these people they’re really close to.”

Swan posted that our interview had left her feeling “targeted.” Certainly not my intention, but the targeted part? Yeah, I get that.