A tormented father’s five-year fight to save his daughter...from breast-fondling cult that says burping casts out evil spirits
concerned for his daughter’s safety. ‘When I walked in, I found Lara under a blanket crying her eyes out,’ he said. ‘Her mother was there with this other woman who was just looking at Lara, but not reaching out to comfort her.’
So troubled was Graham by the encounter that he discussed it with his mother, who Googled the clinic and found it was run by UM, a sect which had originated in Australia.
‘I started to look myself and came across an Australian blog run by a woman called Esther Rockett. It detailed her own shocking experience.’ Rockett claimed Benhayon had indecently touched her during a ‘healing’ session and had performed the same rituals on others – claims the country’s Supreme Court found were ‘substantially true’ when Benhayon tried to sue for defamation.
The court also found that Benhayon, whose second wife Miranda started living with him when she was 14 and he was her 31-year-old tennis coach, ‘makes fraudulent medical claims’, ‘preys on cancer patients’ and has an ‘indecent interest in girls as young as ten’. It described the cult as ‘socially harmful’ and Benhayon as ‘a charlatan’.
Some of Benhayon’s theories are harmless – followers are instructed to rise at 3am and go to bed by 9pm. Certain actions can be performed only anti-clockwise.
But many of its beliefs are deeply troubling, including the idea that disabled children are being punished for evil in a former life.
Graham remembers Lara once turning to him before the High Court case and asking: ‘Daddy, is apple juice made from red or green apples?’ ‘I was baffled,’ he recalls.
‘Only later did I realise that red apples are not approved by UM.
‘Then Lara started drawing UM symbols – always a triangle or a heart shape with a triangle in it – and I found her wearing a red wrist braid with the symbol on it. She even began using UM phrases.
‘If I had an accident, Lara would say, “It’s your choice, Daddy. Accidents are your choice.” It was becoming very, very strange.’
The restrictive diet and Lara’s constant exhaustion eventually persuaded Graham to approach social services in 2015.
By this stage, Lara was aged four and attending nursery. But the local authority failed to act. Undeterred, Graham decided to take legal action and, having gathered evidence of the cult’s damaging demands over a two-year period, was eventually granted 50-50 access to Lara in June 2017.
Before, Graham and Frances had muddled through informally. This, at least, meant he could protect Lara half of the time.
Under a separate order, Frances also had to promise not to indoctrinate Lara with UM ideas.
But the rulings seemed to be having little effect. Lara became convinced that her father would die of a heart attack because he was not ‘love’ – a phrase used by the cult to describe those who avidly follow its teachings. He remembers: ‘I asked why I would die and she was crying her eyes out. She said, “Because you are not love.” ’
He recalls one day at the start of Lent when Lara was seven and he was mixing pancake batter. To his bemusement, she became agitated as he whisked, before she finally blurted out that he was doing it wrong. He was whisking clockwise instead of anti-clockwise, as she’d been taught by the cult.
‘Lara was in tears and said it would stop us from being reincarnated,’ he said.
Reading her a bedtime story one night, he was surprised to find her completely ignoring him. ‘I am listening to the astral,’ she told him. ‘You will understand some day and you will listen to me, not the spirit that you are looking to right now.’
But it was when Lara told him that Serge ‘was love’ that the devastating effects of the cult finally crystallised in his mind.
Graham moved to apply for a court order seeking sole custody, a move that intensified the struggle with his former partner who, seeking to defend the case, levelled horrifying allegations that he was guilty of sexual abuse against Lara. The courts declared the claims to be false. Lara’s behaviour, meanwhile, became increasingly erratic and hostile. She started hitting her father and trying to run away while in his care. A court hearing last November concluded Lara was indeed ‘at risk of further harm’ but it was only this month that, to his overwhelming relief, the High Court finally granted full custody to Graham and banned Frances from seeing Lara until after the summer, when the situation will be reviewed.
It is a battle which has cost him £60,000 and left him significantly in debt.
He said: ‘My lawyers, Clare Kirby, Will Tyler and Kate Grieve, worked for free from last year. Without that and the support of work, I might have given up and lost Lara for good.’
But his battle is far from over. Indeed, the hardest part – winning back his daughter’s affections – is yet to come. The past few years have left Lara deeply troubled.
‘Last week Lara had a complete meltdown,’ he explained. ‘She said to me, “I’m a mess, Daddy! I don’t want to be like this, I don’t want to be angry with you. I don’t know what’s going on.”’
For now, Graham has taken Lara to live with him at his mother’s home on the coast. It’s as much about a fresh start for them as an attempt to keep physical distance between Lara and her mother.
‘Frances scares me now,’ Graham admits. ‘My opinion has moved from worry and mixed feelings of love to one of horror, at the damage she and UM have caused Lara. I have been left to pick up the pieces. Lara has been offered a chance now – and with it I hope that we can build a new relationship over time.
‘When Lara and I were in the sea together yesterday, she was so happy, she forgot everything and was jumping off my shoulders. It gave me real hope for the future.’
The Mail on Sunday contacted Serge Benhayon and Simon Williams but received no response. Benhayon has previously insisted that UM is not a cult.
During the Australian court case, his lawyer said that UM treatment was ‘not for the improper purpose of groping people’ – and that Benhayon is a person of sincere religious beliefs.