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Judith Eve Lipton

Samara Lane (center left) and her father, Kurt Benshoof, with two other former members of the New Gnostic Church. Inset: church leader James King.

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• James King
• Barbara Loran
• Kurt Benshoof
• Chiropractic
• Alternative Health Care

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Last Dec. 30, Samara Lane sat across from her parents in a booth at the 13 Coins restaurant in Seattle. James King was beside her. Lane was 17 years old and a high-school student. Her parents were in their mid-30s. King was 47 years old then, balding, with graying hair. For more than a decade, he had been a kind of guru to the family.

"Why don't you tell them?" King said to Lane.

"Do you want me to tell them about the plan?" Lane asked.

King said that she should.

"Well, when I turn 18," Lane said, "James and I are going to get married, have kids, and move to Montana or Chile."

"You may not see much of Samara," King said to Lane's parents. "The first year we are married, we're going to travel."

Lane's mother, who asked not to be identified for this article, was bowled over. She was a member of King's group, the New Gnostic Church. It is a church with no meeting house but perhaps as many as 100 members in Washington. King promotes an ideology of creating "heaven on Earth" through methods, say former members, derived from self-empowerment movements and Scientology.

Some former members call the church a cult and accuse King of brainwashing them and others. They say they went along with "the process," as King calls it, because it helped them clean out what they regarded as mental garbage. He helped them deal with issues. In return, they were to give money and their trust to King.

Lane's mother felt that King was betraying that trust. She knew that the guru at that time had a wife in central Washington and a longtime mistress in Bellevue, and that he had had sex with some female members of the group over the past 15 years. She was appalled by King and her daughter's plan.

"James, you are always saying to women, 'You've always wanted me,'" she recalls telling him. "That confuses grown women. What do you think that does to a 17-year-old? None of these women want you!"

James King

Both Lane's mother and Kurt Benshoof, her father, had suspected for weeks that something was going on between King and their daughter. Since November, Samara Lane had regularly visited King and his mistress, Barbara Loran, 44, a chiropractor and naturopath, at Loran's home in Bellevue. Confronted earlier in December by Lane's mother, King insisted that his interest in her daughter was strictly platonic. But within weeks of the meeting at the restaurant, Lane admitted to her parents that she had been having sex with King, whose group she'd belonged to since she was 13, and with Loran, who had long been her primary provider of medical care. After this admission, Lane's parents had Lane "deprogrammed" by a cult expert and contacted authorities.

As a result, the King County Sheriff's Office has opened a criminal investigation of King and Loran for allegedly having sex with a minor. Also, both are under investigation by the state Department of Health for allegedly violating state medical regulations.

Meanwhile, King's church seems to be falling apart. In the wake of Lane's experience, Benshoof estimates, some 40 members have left King's group. Some are speaking openly about their experience in the New Gnostic Church—after years of barely acknowledging its existence, even to close relatives. They also are reckoning with themselves over why they fell into King's grip in the first place.

'The Process'

Little is known about King and the New Gnostic Church beyond accounts of former members and King's writings. King did not respond to multiple inquiries by Seattle Weekly for an interview. The church's Web site is no longer operational. But at least a partial picture of the man can be derived from what 13 former members have told Seattle Weekly and from as many affidavits written by former members, which were prepared for a recent custody case and have been submitted to the sheriff's office.

King moved to Washington in the late 1980s. Former members say he has said that he formerly lived in the San Francisco Bay Area and he has worked for the Church of Scientology. King wore REI clothes and sandals and listened to pop musician Meredith Brooks.

The late '80s and early '90s were a time of a peculiar spiritual rebirth. Charismatic Christianity was on the rise. So, too, were New Age groups and the self-empowerment movement. Some groups were organized around a central figure, or guru, who defined the group's principles, as opposed to relying on new interpretations of ancient religious tomes. Here, the emphasis was on learning about your soul and self to a point where you were in charge of your existence rather than being whipsawed by external factors. For New Gnostic Church members, King was the guide on a journey to the center of their selves.

He told them that humans are their own gods, capable of "godlife," as he called it, and are creators of every moment of their existence. Few people, he claimed, could enter this charmed circle of existence. Others were hampered by issues with depression, issues with sex, issues with other humans, issues with self-growth. Interpreting experiences through this cloak of issues was an inauthentic way to be human, King taught. The answer was to strip these issues away.