'I was so brainwashed': The 1980s doomsday cult that ensnared the young and beautiful

Led by an enigmatic New York socialite who claimed to be an alien in human form, Eternal Values boasted an elite membership. Now one of its most high-profile ex-followers, former male supermodel Hoyt Richards, is telling his story.

Few people have lived a double life like Hoyt Richards. Back in the 1980s, this classically handsome Princeton graduate was fronting ad campaigns for luxury brands like Ralph Lauren, Dunhill and Donna Karan. Though he has since branched out into acting, film-making and public speaking, Richards is still regularly described as "the world's first male supermodel".

He looked like the epitome of quietly confident masculinity, but when he wasn't jetting somewhere exotic to be photographed by Richard Avedon or Steven Meisel, Richards was a devoted member of a shadowy spiritual cult called Eternal Values. Though it was the subject of a 1990 Vanity Fair exposé by journalist Marie Brenner, Eternal Values has since been roundly forgotten. However, its fascinating origins in the aspirational mid-1980s and slow decline throughout the '90s are now being spotlighted in Bring Me the Beauties: A Model Cult, a gripping and chilling documentary series that premiered on HBO last month.

This is a true story that no one could dream up. Eternal Values' founder, the well-connected but enigmatic Manhattan socialite Frederick von Mierers, claimed to be an "alien walk-in": an extraterrestrial from the planet Arcturus who had stepped into a human body to spread a message of enlightenment on Earth. His oft-stated mission was to recruit new Arcturian leaders from the human race before a so-called "pole shift" destroyed the planet in 1999.

In effect, this was a doomsday cult with lashings of added glamour. A master of reinvention who was also an inveterate social climber, Von Mierers liked to surround himself with bright young things like models and ambitious young professionals. Strictly speaking, he didn't just want beauties, but anyone who could improve his reputation and financial fortunes.

Born Fred Meyers in working-class Brooklyn – though few knew his true identity at the time – he built his following and the cult’s fortune by selling personalised psychic "life readings" on cassette tape and bespoke gem subscriptions. The prices were high, but Von Mierers claimed his precious stones had healing properties. Jacki Adams, another prominent 1980s supermodel lured in by Eternal Values, told Brenner that she gave the cult leader more than $100,000 (£75,000) for gemstones and apartment renovations he was helping with.

Richards was first targeted by Von Mierers in 1978, nearly a decade before Adams joined Eternal Values in 1987. And he only extricated himself for good in 1999, a full nine years after its founder, whom Richards calls Freddie, died from Aids-related complications. "When Freddie died, I would say that the cult died with him," Richards tells the BBC. "But we carried on in his shadow as this really toxic, dysfunctional family." 

By the time Richards fled Eternal Values in 1999 with help from fellow male supermodel Fabio Lanzoni, membership had dwindled to a few rudderless diehards. Yet to this day, many of Von Mierers’ former followers refuse to believe that they ever were part of a cult.

Richards, now 64, has no such qualms about admitting he was "brainwashed" by Eternal Values' magnetic leader. "I've gone on a 25-year journey of wanting to go more public [about what happened] because I think there's real value in telling this story," Richards says.

Much of this value is rooted in Richards being such an unlikely mark. He had a privileged and loving upbringing in suburban Pennsylvania, but his "cultic relationship" with Eternal Values, as Richards describes it, stopped him speaking to his family for 12 years. He was never a physical prisoner, but he says he remained under Von Mierers' spell even as he was shuttling between Manhattan and Milan for photo shoots.

The series' director Chris Smith – who has previously made documentaries about botched music event Fyre Festival and controversial anti-ageing guru Bryan Johnson – uses Richards' story as a cautionary tale that highlights Von Mierers' charisma and cunning. The future supermodel was just 16 when he was approached on a beach in Nantucket, the upmarket Massachusetts coastal resort where his family spent their summers. Because Von Mierers wanted to present a refined, old-money image, it was precisely the sort of spot he too liked to frequent.

Though Richards had no clue at the time, Von Mierers was grooming him from the start. "Before Freddie would go into one of his [spiritual] diatribes, he would say, 'You're very smart, so you'll get this,'" Richards recalls. "So even though I didn't really understand what he was telling me, I couldn't question it, because he'd given me this compliment."

Von Mierers, who claimed to be an orphan with aristocratic European blood, also began to separate Richards from his peers. "My friends dismissed him as just another eccentric person in Nantucket," Richards says. "But he would look over at them and say, 'You're not like your friends; you're different.' And at 16, that feels like a valid question to consider – like, 'Am I special in some way?' So I went down that rabbit hole."

Three years later, when Richards went to Princeton University in New Jersey to study economics, Von Mierers' Manhattan apartment became a handy party pad. "He was so excited when he heard I was going to an Ivy League college, but he never spoke about his own college years," Richards says.

By this point, Van Mierers was in his mid-thirties, but he concealed his age and true biographical details because they didn't fit his artfully polished persona. Richards learned later that the man born Fred Meyers in Brooklyn used his brief modelling career to reinvent himself as the dazzling Manhattan socialite Frederick von Mierers. He never spoke about his college degree because he didn't have one, but in the 12 years that the two men knew each other, Richards says that "Freddie never once dropped character".

"I've since learned that people with narcissistic personalities, which is how I'd characterise Freddie, tend to self-identify according to the people they surround themselves with," Richards says. "He would always inflate my achievements when he introduced me to someone, I guess because he wanted to make us both look better." 

After Richards graduated from Princeton, Von Mierers introduced him to Joey Hunter, a major player at the world-renowned Ford Modeling Agency, which is now known as Ford Models. Richards' career took off spectacularly when he was plucked from obscurity by Bruce Weber, an influential fashion photographer who has since been accused of sexual assault and misconduct by multiple male models. Weber has always denied these allegations and all cases against him have either been dismissed or settled out of court with no admission of any liability.

Richards admits that he "felt guilty for pursuing a career that I didn't consider spiritual". By the mid-1980s, with the New Age movement gaining traction, Von Mierers' disparate spiritual beliefs linking astrology with ideas borrowed from Eastern mysticism no longer seemed so marginal. He was perfectly placed to exploit Richards' insecurity.

"I thought Freddie was a great teacher and felt proud to generate money for the group," says Richards, who estimates that he gave as much as $4 to 5 million (£3 to 3.7 million) to Eternal Values. Richards says Von Mierers was always "the life and soul of the party", but believes he acquired an extra grooming tool – celebrity – when he was featured in Ruth Montgomery's best-selling 1985 book Aliens Among Us.

In the book, Montgomery corroborated Von Mierers' outlandish backstory by writing that he really was a highly enlightened extraterrestrial who had assumed human form. "I would say we really became a cult when that book came out," Richards says. "And then we built a business around the cult by selling tapes with Freddie's psychic life readings on them. At that point, we were getting letters from people in 45 countries."

Despite Von Mierers' subsequent TV appearances, which Smith deftly weaves into the documentary, Richards estimates that "no more than 100 people" ever became fully fledged members of the cult. Perhaps because of his earning power, Richards was a long-time member of "the inner circle", who slept side-by-side on the floor of Von Mierers' apartment and maintained a strictly celibate lifestyle, at least to begin with.

"We were all in our 20s with hormones raging, so I think Freddie realised it was impossible to stop us [from having sexual urges]," Richards says. At this point, Von Mierers switched tack dramatically and instructed the cult members to start having sex with one another. "It was incredibly unhealthy, especially for the women in this very male-dominated environment," Richards says. Anyone who said no was "slammed" by Von Mierers for being "sexually repressed" and unable to "separate their spirit from their body", he adds.

It later emerged that during his supposedly celibate years, Von Mierers was regularly paying male sex workers. "I was so brainwashed that I bought into his narrative that he was bringing them to the apartment to help them spiritually," Richards says.

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Richards believes Von Mierers maintained his hold over followers by "being able to turn on a dime from kind and nurturing into this strict disciplinarian figure". Cult expert Dr Steven Hassan, the author of Combating Cult Mind Control, says Von Mierers was simply "practising intermittent reinforcement, which is a very powerful behavioural conditioning technique". Essentially, he kept Richards and other followers hooked by mixing heavy criticism with just enough positive encouragement to leave them craving more.

According to Hassan, Von Mierers' abrupt about-turn from imposing abstinence to promoting promiscuity is also a common tactic. "In a cult, it's all about dependency and obedience to the leader, not to any particular principle," he says. "And if you can manipulate somebody's sex drive, you have a big lever over them." 

Some 48 years after Von Mierers approached him in Nantucket, Richards is still reckoning with the cult leader's impact on his life. Happily, he has reconnected with his family and made peace with the fact that Von Mierers helped him to build a highly successful modelling career. "You can't throw the baby out with the bathwater, right?" Richards says sanguinely.

On top of Bring Me the Beauties, a recently announced biopic of Richards will star Nicholas Galitzine, with Gus Van Sant in talks to direct. How much that will focus on Eternal Values or not is unconfirmed, but when it comes to the documentary, Richards hopes his story will help people to question the way they interact with anyone who "really showers them" with attention or flattery. "When you give away your power to someone, whether unconsciously or not, I would characterise that as a 'cultic relationship'," he says. "Not every cultic relationship is abusive like mine was, but they can be unhealthy, and I think it's important to acknowledge that they seem to be part of the human condition."

Bring Me the Beauties: A Model Cult is available to stream on HBO Max now 

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