Who Trolled Amber? - Dangerous Memories: Episode 2 - The Seagull

Episode Date: July 9, 2024

Fipsi starts to question what really happened in the soft pink room, and how to help her friends who are still on their journeys with Anne Craig. But for one of them it’s already too late, as she makes a series of life altering decisions.To find out more about Tortoise:Download the Tortoise app - for a listening experience curated by our journalistsSubscribe to Tortoise+ on Apple Podcasts for early access and ad-free contentBecome a member and get access to all of Tortoise's premium audio offerings and moreIf you want to get in touch with us directly about a story, or tell us more about the stories you want to hear about contact [e-mail] and reported by Grace Hughes-Hallett & Gary MarshallProducer: Gary MarshallAdditional reporting and production: Imogen HarperAdditional editing: Claudia Williams Sound design and original composition: Tom KinsellaTheme music: Far Gone (Don’t Leave) by Pictish TrailPodcast artwork: Lola WilliamsCommissioning editor: Basia CummingsExecutive producer: Ceri Thomas Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Just a warning before we start. This episode contains references to child abuse and to sexual assault. I cannot believe it. I found it. Will you read me the email you sent her? Yes. This is so surreal. I'm just going to grab my glasses, I'm a bit on the blind side. I cannot believe it, there's going to be lots of stuff about Anne too.

Are you ready? I'm ready. I'm with Phypsey in her East London flat, we're sitting at her kitchen table and she's scrolling through old emails on her laptop from the time in her life that she spent with the healer Anne Craig. We recorded our conversation over a couple of days in the autumn of 2023. Like everyone I've talked to for this investigation, she had a lot to get off her chest. It's not really the sort of story you can fit into one afternoon. It was the first time she'd really relived her experience in this way. She told family and

friends but never in this depth. So once she started, I was part of a holistic therapy cult. The words began to pour out and on my second visit she discovered something she thought she'd lost. Her name is Anne Craig and she tells people that she breaks them down and builds them back together. It's an email she wrote detailing her experience with Anne from start to finish. On her website she states eight sessions as the ideal amount, but I saw her twice a month for two years with no signs on her part of slowing down.

The fact is, I got out two years in, that was that. It's okay for me, sure, I must have some leftover trauma, I'm sure of that, but what I'm most afraid of is my friends who still go and see her. And I'm looking for help to help my friends who I love. So Phypsey got out, but this experience wasn't over for her because a question was beginning to form in her head. What is it that I've just got out of?

And how can I get my friends out before they go deeper? It's the same question that's been driving me through these conversations. What was Anne Craig really trying to do? And why was she doing it? But by the time Phypsey was asking this question, for another young woman, it was already too late. I'm Grace Hughes-Hallett and from Tortoise, this is Dangerous Memories, episode 2, The Seagull. Let's rewind. The last time you heard of Phypsey in episode one, she was in her fourth session with Anne.

She was years away from writing the email that you just heard. It was during that fourth visit that she let Anne in on her big secret, that she was struggling with her sexuality. And it was then that Anne introduced Phypsy to the idea that there might be something else at play. Something sinister. Something at the root that explained it all. She suggested that Phypsy might have been a victim of sexual abuse. But Phypsy had no memory of being abused. Ann said she'd repressed it. It's a terrifying thought, but one that Ann Craig said they could deal with and unpick, if they work together. So began a series of suggestions that would skew the way that Phypsey looked at the world

and the people closest to her. And things started to escalate outside of the sessions too. Along with a couple of the Florence Art School friends who were also seeing Anne, Phypsey was about to take another step out of her own world and further into Anne's. One of my friends knew a guy who owned this disused pub that was to be demolished at some point in the future and replaced with apartments but he did not want squatters in there so we were like the squatting anti-squatters. So Phypsey and the other two moved into what would become a sort of Anne Craig client commune. It was a big, dilapidated empty pub called the Cow Shed

on Labyrinth Grove in West London. The disused pub itself was on the ground floor. The girls' rooms were on the grubby floor above, and a studio space on the top was where they worked on their art. There was no hot water and unreliable electricity. Maybe not everyone's cup of tea, but Phypsy and her friends were all Bohemian artist types. They found it exciting. I mean, not only were we all seeing Anne,

but we were also painting and making music, and we'd put on exhibitions and gig nights. So how many of you were there? There were at least three of us. And all three of you were seeing Anne Craig? Yes. One of the women who lived in the pub would prefer not to be named in this podcast.

The other was Phypipsy's friend Huey, a close friend from Florence. Fipsy remembers how she felt when she found out Huey was moving in. Huey moved in shortly after I moved in and I was really excited because she was one of my best mates and I couldn't wait to have her there. And she had just started seeing Anne, which made me even more excited because this is like great, part of the inner circle. I don't need to hide anything from her. So that was really nice for me at the time. Huey was a year or two younger than Phypsey, but from a similar world. Posh family, all girls boarding school, and with a passion and talent for painting. Phypsey describes Huey to me as a very kind, good friend, and the life and soul of the party in Florence.

A friend used to say that it looked like a dressing up box had been sick on me. This is Huey. I used to wear you know crazy tights and boots and tutus and waistcoats on a different waistcoat and I don't know different crazy coloured hair. Huey had also been told about this incredible healer lady by friends in Florence. So I left Charles Cecil in December 2009 when I was 22 and I moved back to London and I was this tiny frog spawn in a massive lake and I didn't know who I was and I for some reason just couldn't be the creative person that I'd been in Florence.

And I just felt very lost and I remembered about this you know this woman and I asked my friend if I could have her contact details and I picked up the phone and and just called her. And shortly after that Huey began on her journey to discover the root of her problems. When she moved into the pub in 2010, she'd been seeing Anne Craig for around six months. And Anne seemed pleased that the girls were all living together, all following her guidance under one roof. All three of us were very devoted to the work.

Phypsey told me that by this point, they were all deep in their work with Anne, and would spur each other on. They could talk freely with each other about what was coming up in their sessions. We didn't have to mind our P's and Q's, monitor the kind of extreme stuff that we would be sharing with each other about our own sessions with her. We could speak very authentically about our experiences with Anne without worrying about it. And what kind of things were you talking about? What were the themes and what was the tone? The themes were how all these other people that were living from the head were so poor in spirit and so unenriched and unfulfilled. We had delusions of grandeur in a way. You know,

we were the special ones. We were the ones that didn't need to wear bike helmets because the spirits protected us from accidents. Did she tell you that? Yep. Like Phypsy and a few others from the art school crowd, Huey was going to regular sessions at Anne's house. They'd have a cup of chamomile tea, go up to the pink room, sit on the comfy chairs. They'd get down on the floor with rolls of paper and coloured pens to write things with their left hands for Anne to interpret. Dreams would be analysed for hours and hours on end. But Anne required more from them than just the sessions, and Huey in particular was a very diligent student. She was devoting huge chunks of every day to Anne.

You wake up, write your dream down in the early days and send it to her to analyse. This is how Huey described a typical day. And then she will have sent emails back with questions. So the writing work would be informed by her questions. So you'd write her question and then it's automatic writing. So you'd write with your left hand so quickly that it's just squiggles, but it's your thought process. So squiggle, squiggle, squiggle and all the thoughts pouring out,

but that's where information would come or answers would come or you'd you'd work something out because you're not thinking you're just free flow writing so that's kind of the work involved a lot of writing like that and then you'd go and burn it and release everything you'd written about if emotions came up through the writing I had to deal with it. Burning was a core part of Anne's philosophy. The bad energy disappears into the atmosphere and I have to wonder if there was another reason. Given everything that's happened,

I've wondered whether telling her clients to burn everything is perhaps an indicator of the fact that Anne knew what she was doing was unusual, unorthodox, or that it might even get her in trouble. And that's not the only thing that makes me think that. I've also been told that Anne encouraged some of her clients to move from their usual email accounts to an encrypted email server called Hushmail. Why would a therapist, healer, self-development coach, someone in that position, tell their clients to do that? In those first few months, how many hours a day were you doing this work for Anne? I'd say when I moved into the cowshed I stepped it up because I was more inspired by living with my friends who were working with her and wanting to do well and excel. You know, when you're in your room writing, which is quite lonely, it's comforting that you've got someone next door doing something similar. So it was quite a, yeah, it's just like nice.

Felt very normal. Didn't feel weird in any way. So then I probably would do maybe, I don't know, a couple of hours in the morning and then maybe a couple of hours in the evening. And then in the day I'd be doing art, painting or seeing friends. It was all pretty light at the start. The fact that Huey describes four hours a day of locking herself in her room and doing her homework for Anne as light is pretty revealing. During that time, Phypsey and the others were

encouraged to follow some guidelines from Anne. I remember she also told me to be very careful about other things that I was reading and she discouraged me fervently from reading any newspapers, listening to the radio, reading any other books, in fact reading anything at all. Not all of Anne's clients ended up in the pub and not all ended up seeing her long term and not all of them wanted to speak on the podcast but we have spoken with many of them. Some were spooked by Anne's approach and stopped seeing her after a couple of sessions. Anne's parting message to one of them, you better start

wearing your bike helmet. There are lots of parallels in Huey and Phypsey's stories and there's something they both mentioned to me which I think is important because it feels like a clue to what Anne's goals or intentions might have been. It's a book she gave to both of them. It's called Jonathan Livingston's Seagull. Phypsey described it as a short novella, a parable. About a seagull that is breaking, breaking, literally flying the nest and breaking free from its family unit in order to go against the grain because the seagull has always felt different. So the seagull should live its best life and not

act like the seagull that is expected of it. That was my first segue into being brainwashed, was reading that book and cutting out all other bits of information. What did you see in that book? What did you, what did it make you feel? It made me feel like Anne could see me, funnily enough, and I've never thought about this before, so it's a really good question, but it made me feel validated in some way because she had seen something, it felt as though she had seen something in me and almost in a bespoke manner offered me this book because she knew that I personally would benefit from it. And so when I read it, I felt like I was

Jonathan Livingston Seagull. It acted a bit like a poetic instruction manual. Follow these steps and you too will become the Seagull. It's become a helpful way of thinking about the journey she wanted Phypsy and Huey to embark on. But if it's an insight into Anne's methodology, it still doesn't take me to the why. Once you become the seagull, what's next? For Huey in particular, the book had a real effect. It really stuck with me because being alone and working alone and just dedicating himself to his gift, he reached enlightenment, but he had to give up everyone to do it.

I kept thinking about it, this idea of you have to leave the flock. If you're going to make any change within yourself or find your this idea of you have to leave the flock. If you're going to make any change within yourself or find your true purpose you have to leave the flock. And Anne also talked about, she'd always say we come into the world alone and we leave the world alone and no one wants to see it, no one wants to accept it but we're always alone. And I remember once lying on the floor in my flat, and I just felt, I think I was crying, and I was just terrified about this idea that I was truly alone,

and I had to accept it, and I had to leave everyone, and I definitely didn't know what was coming. It's hard to wrap your head around. Huey was taking it to heart. She was preparing to leave the flock. Why would she follow this hugely upsetting piece of advice without question? It's something that Huey's often brought up in our conversations. She really worries that people will listen to this and think to themselves, oh well this is just a bunch of silly posh girls falling into a silly trap. But Huey thinks there's a significant detail from her own life that it's important to share.

Which she believes is what made her so vulnerable to Anne from the start. When Huey was in her early 20s, living in Florence, she was sexually assaulted, an experience that understandably really affected her. Anne explained to her that that would not have happened to her if she had not been assaulted as a child. And Huey says that Anne focused on this event questioning why this had happened to Huey and if it meant there was something more sinister to uncover about her childhood. It had a profound effect on Huey to hear that from Anne. And remember, she was spending hours and hours with this woman, over weeks, months and years. She was a frog in boiling water. The temperature was rising, but so slowly that she didn't notice. Whatever her ultimate objective, Anne Craig succeeded in the first crucial step.

Whilst drumming in this mantra of isolation and independence, she was simultaneously training them to be entirely dependent on, and answerable to, her. And it's around this time in 2011 that Huey and Phypsey's paths diverged. Despite Phypsey opening up to Anne in her fourth session, months later she was no closer to understanding herself or to getting an answer to her burning question, am I gay? Have you ever heard the Philip Larkin poem that begins, they fuck you up your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. It's really not uncommon for therapists or counselors to be interested in a client's childhood or

in their early relationships with their parents. But Anne seemed to fit see to be singularly focused on that. In all the hours of sessions, whenever she steered the conversation to her sexuality, Anne redirected it back to Phypsey's parents. Anne's entry point was always through my parents. Over time, Phypsey's thinking shifted. Through the work with Anne, an altered version of Phypsey's childhood was being

created. Always through destroying the happy relationship that I had with them, and she would find a way to poison that. And I was so vulnerable, I just took it. It was her family that was the problem. They were the blockage, preventing her from going on her journey to healing. If you remember, I mentioned that Anne's big belief system was centered around people who are from the heart and people who are from the head. Heart equals good, head equals bad. Suddenly, automatically, almost

everyone I know is from the head and therefore automatically a kind of enemy. Us versus them, heart versus head, good versus bad. So it was very easy in that sense once she'd blanketed this hue over everything in my world and life and everyone's world and lives, for me to find it selfish when my friends called me, to find it outrageous if my parents said they wanted to see me because they hadn't seen me for three months, to find it despicable that the same friend has called me three times in a row. How dare they? They are jutting and jabbing into my life.

They are pecking away at my, the work and the journey that I'm on, that I'm trying to do. They are interrupting my healing and they're all from the head. Phypsey pulled away from her parents, her siblings and her friends. She ignored all of their calls. She stopped answering their messages. And over time, the suggestions became darker,

more troubling and harder to ignore and raised the possibility over and over again that Phypsey's parents had sexually abused her when she was a child. There were periods where I worried that I was a victim and that I just hadn't seen it yet. Again with the two sides of my mind. One side telling me what if it's true, what if it's true, what if it's true. And the other side telling me no it's not. How did you land on being sure that it wasn't

true? Gut instinct. Knowledge of myself. The fact that I'd never once questioned that before meeting her. The fact that I'd lived a very happy life up until my grappling with my sexuality. Everything had been great. I'd had a lovely childhood. You know, with really unconditionally loving parents, that's the sad thing is that she totally managed to change the way I saw that for a while. It's just interesting that others fell into that trap and you didn't. I think my gayness saved me.

I was starting to get really, really angry about the fact that every time I brought up my original purpose for going to see her, she would bat it out of the court and just continue to talk about my family, my mother, my father, my grandfather, my great-grandmother, my great-great, this, that, and the other,

and it really started to piss me off. How would you bring it up? I would in a session say something like, Anne, you know, this thing, I'm still worrying about being gay. And then she would say, Phypsy, it's because we still haven't done the work about your mother. We still haven't finished the work on your father. We still haven't finished this, that or the other. She would just deflect, deflect, deflect. And so something in me was like, excuse me, we're still here and you just keep ignoring me. What are you going to do about it?

So that little inner bit of me, the poor tiny gay bit that was just knocking on the door of my consciousness and was just being fervently ignored, was starting to get pissed off. Six months into her time at the Kalshed pub, Fipsy was offered a job. Someone wanted her to travel to Austria and paint. A big commission, it was a big big canvas and I was asked to depict a scene around the dinner table with three brothers who were all adults. So I remember being really nervous to tell Anne that I would be relocating to Vienna for three months

because something in my instinct told me that that would anger her. Fipsy's instinct was right. When she told Anne about this big opportunity, the news did not go down well. She was really annoyed with me. She fought against that trip, big time. Why did she fight against the trip? To Anne's mind, me going away for three months was a huge disservice to the work we were doing,

and a huge disservice to her personally, because what it would mean for her is that she would have to work triply hard to tap into my energy and that was selfish of me. Even though I was still very devoted to her I was starting to get annoyed and I eventually told her look I have to go to Vienna Phypsey bought her ticket and got on the plane leaving Anne behind in London it was like the cutting of the umbilical cord. Because just by virtue of that distance, I didn't speak to her every day.

Without Anne, Fipsy was free to think. And then one day I woke up and I had simply had enough. Enough was enough. I was done. And I just thought, right, I've got to figure this out once and for all. The truth is in me and nobody else Which is important because remember I thought she had the truth. She hadn't helped me So I did just that I sat in the bath I made a bath and I sat in it have to admit I rolled the gigantic joint and

I sat there for five hours simply visualizing my exoskeleton being broken open, my skin, let's say, just my outside self just opening up and for the truth of my sexuality to make itself known to me. And then I woke up the next morning and it was just knowledge and that was it.

I woke up and just realized I'm gay. Guess who the first person was that I told? Anne, fucking Craig. Phypsey called Anne almost immediately. She wanted to tell her more than anyone else that she'd finally arrived at her answer. And thus began the rest of my life. Suddenly I was all in love with life again

and that they literally exactly in this period I started souring against Anne. Anne didn't seem excited for her. With this new knowledge, Fipsy's dependence on Anne had been broken. They had an argument in a session when Fipsy challenged Anne over her interpretation of a dream. Fipsy stopped going to Anne after that and stopped calling her as well. And then a little while later, Anne called Phypsey to say that she thought they should stop seeing each other. That was it. It was over. In the months after her breakup with Anne, once the initial wave of relief had passed, Phypsey started to really think about what she'd just been through. She read a lot and she started comparing her

experience to similar testimony she found online. And the more she read, the more she began to think that she hadn't just escaped a rogue healer, but maybe she had been brainwashed into something more sinister. And a year later, she was sitting at her laptop writing that email. Her name is Anne Craig, and she tells people that she breaks them down and builds them back together. To an expert in cults. It's okay for me, sure, I must have some leftover trauma, I'm sure of that. But what I'm most afraid of is my friends who still go and see her.

And I am looking for help, to help my friends who I love. I need to coax them into a place of trust, but somehow help them understand that they are victims of a sick, disturbing cult masquerading as a compassionate, kind and most of all knowledgeable woman who has contact with the spirit world and at the end of the day always knows best. What can I do? I've wondered if Phypsey's right. Was she sucked into a cult? Maybe not a cult like the ones that might come to mind, the Moonies or Jonestown with hundreds of followers, but then they're not all like that. Sometimes they exist on a smaller scale, hidden from view. What makes them similar

and cultish is how the leader exerts their control. So let's say Anne was using cult tactics. What was it all about? Was it sex? If it had been a male therapist, that probably would have been my first thought, but there's no evidence so far to suggest that. Was it money? She was charging the women around £90 a session, which was a pretty standard London rate for the time. Was it power? Perhaps. But to what end? The only person who knows the answers to these questions is Anne. And we do want to get in touch with her. But some of her former clients are wary about Anne. They've been nervous that she might try and talk them out of appearing on this podcast.

Which is why, for now, Huey is the best way to get closer to the truth. Because if Phypsey managed to escape Anne's web, Huey became completely entangled in it. And in doing so, discovered more about Anne Craig than perhaps anyone. I'm Christina Cotterucci, and this season on Slow Burn. It's called Proposition 6.

The Briggs Initiative. John Briggs is going to fire every gay and lesbian school teacher in California. With so much at stake, young people became activists. We can't let this happen in California. And activists became leaders. My name is Harvey Milk, and I'm here to recruit you. Slow Burn, Season 9, Gaze Against Briggs. Out now, wherever you listen.

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Me and one of my producers went to meet Huey's mum, Sarah, and her stepdad Henry. Sarah is the friend of my dad who told him about this story four years ago, where it all started for me. Henry picked us up from the local station and drove us to his and Sarah's home. Amazing. They live in an enormous 16th century manor house. To get to it, you drive through big gates, past the gate house and through the grounds down a long drive. The house itself looks out over manicured lawns and topiary,

stretching all the way down to a sparkling river below. Sarah came out to greet me and producer Imi on the front lawn when we arrived. Wow! This is amazing! This is amazing. Amazing. How are you? How are you feeling? I'm a bit vulnerable. It's so weird. Hi, me hi. It's so funny, when I said so confidently, you know, I can talk about getting her back, you know, like it's my favourite subject, you know, and I hadn't gone back until last night. And then I started sort of crying and I thought, I can't deal with this tonight. So I've just been trying to go over it this morning.

It's interesting. You're allowed to cry. It's OK. Before we'd even put our bags down, she was offering us plates of homemade cheese biscuits. The biscuits were followed by a lunch that she and her husband Henry had made for us. Cold pea soup, pheasant stew, wine and pavlova. All laid out beautifully at a large garden table on the terrace. And then this table.

So this fell down. Help yourself, Hume. I've got this very good guy who does some forestry around here and he's got this sort of thing. Sarah, her home, her hospitality, exuded warmth and ease of spirit. But as we were setting up our microphones, the weight of this experience for her was clear. Um, actually, one other... Go on. What am I going to call her? I hate using her name. But if I say that woman, that's going to come across really badly.

I always refer to her as AC, but then that doesn't work. You don't like to say her name? Well, do you think it's better if I do? Yes, probably, if you can. Yep. All right. Why don't you like to say it? Well, because it makes her human.

She's got a name. Yeah. Whereas she's inhuman. When Huey first told Sarah about Anne, Sarah felt optimistic. And the main thing I remember her saying was, Mum, she only takes the very special ones. And at the time I thought, well,

obviously Huey's very special, obviously she'd accept Huey. Sarah had benefited from practicing yoga over the years and she thought maybe this is a similar kind of thing. We all need a bit of help. Yoga was great for me and this lady maybe will be great for Huey. And her friends were going. It was a few months in though when Sarah's optimism turned to something else. Huey had told her that she was putting on an art exhibition at the cowshed pub and invited her along. Huey's style was true to life seated portraits in oil.

Sarah was really excited to see her latest work. And there was this pile of dead bodies and so the subjects were very sinister and very gruesome. Of Huey's paintings? Huey's paintings, you know, weren't, you know, lovely portraits anymore. It was, I mean, there was this pile of dead bodies. For a mother it left a worrying mark, signalled a change, a window into what was going on with her daughter. a window into what was going on with her daughter. There were two other girls in the cow shed who, their mothers, you know, were definitely, you know, worried about them. And I think one of the girls may have cut off contact with her mother altogether, I think.

So there was definitely a worry, you know, that something really odd was going on. Something odd was going on. Huey was becoming more engrossed in her work with Anne and closer to the root. Was there a turning point for you when things stopped being such a positive experience? Yeah, which I guess is quite a few months on. And I think in this session it came up that maybe something had happened with a family member. And Anne asked me one evening to ask in my dream,

you know, what happened? So that's what I did. And I had this dream that that was cryptic to me didn't make sense. I was sitting the dream was I was sitting in a flying car and flying above above the sky and I was holding a teddy bear and she called me and she was like, Hugh, I know exactly what's happened to you come for the session. So I went and did the usual, you know, had a cup of tea, went upstairs, sat on the floor, chose a color and started asking. So she'd asked, what happened to you? What did this person do? And I get nothing. I maybe draw

things or get a word, a cryptic word and after, and the sessions, my sessions were quite long. It was sort of like, for like three or four hours. And so I was pretty exhausted and she said, look, I know what happened. Okay, I'll tell you what happened. That your dream and you holding the teddy bear told me that this person already raped you. and that's, that was the first time where anything around sexual abuse had come up. Huey left the session feeling strange. She fell asleep on the bus home and when she woke up her muscles and bones were aching.

And I think at the time it was like, oh maybe this is, this must be real, because I'm feeling so much from it. It's hard to remember the details isn't it, but I was, I just felt very frightened about going home. I don't know if I should go, I'm quite scared. Um, so a lot of mistrust was coming, she's like, you need to go back for Christmas with your family and this will be the last time that you ever have Christmas with them again. So Huey did as instructed. Christmases are a big deal in Sarah and Huey's family. There's lots of drinking and dancing and Huey was usually at the center of it. But this time she stayed

quiet. She observed her family from the sidelines, looked for clues to understand who these people really were and what they were hiding. And then came back from Christmas and that was sort of when I really started to cut them off. And that's when things start to get more unusual, I suppose. I found myself feeling very attached to her and very in need of her because she has these answers that I can't access any other way other than through her. I don't know what was going on in my brain,

but I guess the need to prove that I could be strong meant that I just went along and kind of expelled everyone from my life and around this time a couple of Anne's clients who had been friends of mine stopped working with her. I don't know if it was a really big rejection for Anne but Anne really sort of ramped up her focus on me I felt and I started seeing her once a week and she started saying oh I don't need those women to do this work I don't need them to get to the light. After Christmas Sarah received a letter from Huey.

In it, Huey said she needed time out from Sarah and wouldn't be seeing her for a while. Sarah was panicking now. So despite Huey having asked for space, Sarah tried calling her to ask her directly, what was going on? Was there something she didn't know? And as soon as Huey heard my voice she put the telephone down and I thought oh maybe it was a mistake. So I called from the landline, different number, Huey picks it up, here's my voice,

puts the telephone down and at this, I go into complete panic. And I think I'm pretty sure I just come out of the shower. And I have no idea what sort of undress I was in, but I know I had streaming wet hair. And I just ran out of our flat. At the time, Sarah was staying in a flat she owns in London. She ran out the door to where she knew Huey was living nearby. The door opened and out came Huey.

And I can see it like yesterday. She saw me. She looked very surprised to see me. Her eyes sort of, you know, widened and looked amazed surprised and then they glazed over and they just literally glazed over like a zombie and she walked down the steps got onto her bicycle and I said Huey Huey don't cut me out of your life don't cut me out of your life and don't cut me out of your life. And she bicycled away and that was the last time I saw her in six years. Coming up on dangerous memories.

And I just broke down on her floor and was like please help me. Whatever you do when you go in there do not say my name, do not say that you're worse. Somebody, some kind person gave me the number of a private detective. And then she told me all the kind of things that they'd found out about Anne and... I don't know, just slowly everything was falling into place. And I was like, that's my mother. Why is my mother outside Anne's house? In the past, Anne Craig has issued categorical denials of any wrongdoing. She has denied responsibility for mentally abusing or psychologically manipulating clients. She has said she is the victim of a campaign of harassment. If you're looking to speak to a reputable therapist or know someone

who is, you can search the therapist directory compiled by the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy or BACP. Only registered members accredited by the Professional Standards Authority are listed which ensures they meet high professional and ethical standards and are fully trained and qualified. Just go to bacp.co.uk If you'd like to get in touch with us about your own experience, you can send us an email. It's dangerousmemories.tortusmedia.com Thank you for listening to Dangerous Memories.

If you're enjoying this podcast, you can listen to all episodes today by subscribing to Tortus Plus on Apple podcasts or by downloading the Tortus app. And you can listen to our previous investigations right here on Tortus Investigates. Or to hear more podcasts from our award-winning newsroom, search for Tortoise wherever you get your podcasts. Dangerous Memories was written and reported by me, Grace Hussallat, and by Gary Marshall.

The producer is Gary Marshall. Additional reporting and production from Imogen Harper. Additional editing from Claudia Williams. Fact checking was by Xavier Greenwood. Sound design and original composition from Tom Kinsella. The theme music is Far Gone Don't Leave by Pictish Trail. Podcast artwork by Lola Williams. The commissioning editor was Basher Cummings.

The executive producer was Kerry Thomas. Tortoise. This podcast is sponsored by A Sense of Rebellion, a new podcast from the tech critic Evgeny Morozov, a show we think you'll love. A decade in the making, it explores a fascinating countercultural project and a lab that foreshadows the tech start-ups of the 2000s with all the excesses, flaws, utopian ambitions and truly fascinating characters. Forget the military or Silicon Valley, it turns out that we owe our smart toothbrushes and smart beds to a wild bunch of eccentric hippies from the 1960s.

Toiling in a privately funded, secretive lab, they sought more intimate and personal technologies a whole decade before Steve Jobs. But the military-industrial complex, resistance from corporate America and the larger-than-life personalities who founded the lab got in the way of their ambitions. A Sense of Rebellion is a whirlwind tour through the prehistory of the digital revolution. From LSD and Scientology to AI and the CIA, each episode blends drama, mystery and deep research. Listen to A Sense of Rebellion wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Christina Cotterucci, and this season on Slow Burn. It's called Proposition Six. The Briggs Initiative. John Briggs is going to fire every gay and lesbian school teacher in California. With so much at stake, young people became activists. We can't let this happen in California. And activists became leaders. Slow Burn season 9, Gaze Against Briggs. Out now wherever you listen. Hi, I'm Paul Caruana Galizia, an investigative reporter at Tortoise.

I wanted to let you know about a four-part series I've been working on over the past several months. It is about allegations around the author Neil Gaiman, one of the world's most successful authors. Now, two women, a former nanny and a fan, Alichi sexually assaulted and abused them while they were in consensual relationships with him. He strenuously denies all the allegations. The series raises questions about whether Neil Gaiman had reasonable belief in consent

for sex with these women, given his celebrity and their vulnerability and age. It's called Master, The Allegations Against Neil Gaiman. To listen, just search for the Slow Newscast, wherever you get your podcasts.