Go Along To Get Along (They've Got You Already)

"On March 30, 1994, a woman walked into Rose Bay police station, and made a complaint of sexual assault against Stephen Mutch, then a Liberal MP in the NSW upper house.

The woman remained vague on the timing of the assault, saying it had happened some time between March and May 1978, when she was 18. But she was very clear on the details: Mutch had visited her at her parents' home, pushed her onto the bed and, amid much swearing and struggling, sexually assaulted her.

Mutch denied the allegations, which, due to incorrect court records, were soon being reported as having involved a girl under the age of 16. The 38-year-old MP was set to face court in March 1995, just three days before the state election, in what TV news bulletins described as a 'bombshell' for John Fahey's government.

'It was a disaster,' Mutch says now. 'It was the worst thing that someone could say about you, and it was totally and utterly fabricated.'

What wasn't known at the time, but can now be revealed, was that the woman making the allegations belonged to Kenja, a self-empowerment group that many consider to be a cult, against which Mutch had been speaking out in Parliament for some time.

The Herald attempted to contact the woman, who is living in Victoria, but she did not return calls. The woman's mother, however, was clear. 'Stephen didn't do anything,' she says. 'Of course he didn't. The accusation was an awful thing in his life, and I naturally blame my daughter. But in a way I can't, because she wasn't in her right mind.'

But it seems other members were also asked to lie. 'Jan said to me, "You have to fight lies with lies",' says Su Germain, a former Kenjan.

Germain had been a member of Kenja since 1982. In a statement to police in 2006, she talked about processing sessions in which 50 people would be naked together in a room. Dyers would talk about 'clearing sexual energies', and insisted it was 'better to be naked so that you weren't hiding behind an identity'.

Germain remembers a particular one-on-one nude session with Dyers in Kenja's George Street centre, when she spotted, with some alarm, a Vaseline jar sitting on the table beside her.

The pressure to please was overwhelming. 'It was high treason not to go along with the prevailing ideas within the group,' Bevin Hudson says. 'Anyone out of step was not just out of step with Kenja but also with the magical spiritual universe.'"

-- Tim Elliott, with another demonstration of how cults roll - it's never as simple as "the truth will set you free" - with each act driving the gullible further from their imaginary "magical spiritual universe", and straight to The Sydney Morning Herald.