CULT’S FOUNDER AND HIS WIFE
THE blank, almost ghostly stare that Graham’s six-year-old daughter gave him was quite troubling enough. But what came next sent a sliver of ice through his heart. ‘You are not love, Daddy,’ she told him, quietly. ‘Serge is love.’ By themselves, the words made little sense. But to Graham, they were the realisation of his worst fears: his only daughter, Lara, was lost to the clutches of an international cult called Universal Medicine.
And cult leader Serge Benhayon, a man once described by a court as having an ‘indecent interest in young girls’, had become more important to Lara than her own father.
It is only today, following an extraordinary five-year legal battle, that Graham has finally been able to win back custody of his daughter from his former partner and the sinister organisation that controlled her.
Universal Medicine, known among its 2,000 devotees worldwide as UM, has already drawn criticism for its repertoire of bizarre doctrines and rituals. These include sessions where women massage each other’s breasts – to help them ‘connect’ with their bodies – and a prescriptive diet that bans carrots, red apples and potatoes to help followers ‘burp out’ evil spirits. Uruguayan-born Benhayon, 55, a bankrupt former tennis coach, came to believe he was the reincarnation of Renaissance painter Leonardo da Vinci after having a spiritual epiphany while sitting on the toilet. His daughter Simone, he insisted, was none other than Winston Churchill.
UM’s ‘philosophies’ are a curious blend of New Age thought, religious theory and quack science. But the central idea – that the soul’s positive energy conflicts with the negative energy of the body – has resonated with many who, like Graham’s former partner Frances, seek solace in an uncertain world.
It can call on as many as 200 British followers, some of whom gather for conferences at its UK headquarters, a smartly restored 17th Century listed building. The Lighthouse, in the picturesque countryside outside Frome, Somerset, is run as an upmarket guesthouse.
Among UM’s wealthy student patrons are scions of industry, the son of a viscount, and Old Etonian accountant Simon Williams, 48, the owner of The Lighthouse.
Despite such outward respectability, however, the accusations facing the cult are serious. And this month Graham’s concerns were vindicated when he was given full custody of Lara following a High Court battle.
In a judgment seen by The Mail on Sunday, Mr Justice David Williams ruled that UM was ‘a cult with some potentially harmful and sinister elements’ and that the previously loving relationship between father and daughter had ‘crumbled as a result of exposure’ to it.
The ruling has temporarily banned Frances, Lara’s mother, from seeing her daughter. And it blamed her for ‘failing to truly get to grips with… the pernicious effect of her adherence to… Universal Medicine and their impact on her much-loved daughter’.
As is common in the family courts, the hearing was not open to the public and the central figures in the case must remain anonymous. The names in the documents and in this report have been changed.
Today Lara is still only nine and has barely known anything other than life in the sect’s tight grip.
‘When the judge delivered his verdict, I just broke down in court and cried,’ Graham says. ‘This has been a fiveyear nightmare but the one thing that has kept me going has been Lara.
‘I knew that if I didn’t fight for her, no one would. The courts, social services and children’s services couldn’t get a handle on it until it was too late – and Lara had already been destroyed. It has been emotional torture.’
Lara’s journey had been difficult from the outset. Graham and Frances met on a dating site in 2010 and found themselves expecting a baby after just three months together.
Within months of Lara’s birth in March 2011, the relationship had broken down, although the pair remained amicable and lived just minutes apart to share responsibility for Lara.
What Graham didn’t know, however, was that at some point Frances had been drawn under the influence of Universal Medicine. To this day he does not know when or how.
By the following year, Frances’s behaviour had become increasingly odd. ‘It was strange,’ Graham recalls. ‘I would ask normal questions about, say, coming over a bit earlier to pick up Lara, day-to-day life stuff, and Frances would give me this ghostly stare and wouldn’t answer. It was disconcerting.’
It was in 2014, when Graham was asked to collect Lara, then three, from a location described as a ‘health and wellbeing clinic’ that he became
I knew that if I didn’t fight for her, no one would and she’d be destroyed