Adam Driver’s mother-in-law was allegedly a teacher in a New York cult

• Cynthia Mae, 67, the mother of Adam Driver’s wife Joan Tucker, was allegedly teaching a class at the Odyssey Study Group (OSG) in New York City.
• The alleged cult was founded in San Francisco by actress Sharon Gans and her playwright husband Alex Horn and resumed in New York in the 1980s.
• Guns died of Covid-related complications at age 85 in January 2021

Adam Driver’s mother-in-law was reportedly once a teacher in an alleged New York City cult that pressures its members to commit emotional abuse, adultery, child abuse and forced labor. is accused of

Cynthia Mae, 67, the mother of Driver’s wife Joanne Tucker, is said to have hosted a lecture for the Odyssey Study Group (OSG).

However, he pointed out that he still had doubts about her being involved, and clarified that Driver and Tucker were not involved with the group.

The group is said to have been founded in San Francisco in the 1970s by “Slaughterhouse Five” actress Sharon Gans and her playwright husband Alex Horn, and relaunched in New York in the 1980s under a different name.

After Gunns died of Covid-related complications in January 2021, several former members of the group, including Schneider, “lectured” for “$400 a month” to fund the leader’s extravagant lifestyle. was forced to pay

Schneider, now 62, joined the group in 1989 and married May within months on Gunn’s orders, according to his new book Manhattan Cult Story: Sex, Crime, Chaos, and Survival Beliefs. According to “A Story of Incredible Trueness”.

Schneider spoke to the US Sun about the cult, which it suspects is emotionally abusive, physically abusive, homophobic, racist, and child-abusing.

He argued that Gunns force people to reveal their greatest anxieties and fears, so others can verbally attack and anger them.

Schneider also spoke about how his situation is “not as bad as others.”

“She let a gay person marry a straight person, because of course she believed in non-existent homosexual conversions, and sometimes broke marriages.

“I didn’t realize how bad it was until I was 10 or 15 years old, but how mercilessly she treats people and how they hurt someone’s life instead of trying to make it better.” I finally saw it.

“But my whole life was trapped in that group and I couldn’t get out.

“I was so scared to leave.”

Schneider’s arraigned marriage to May lasted until 2009 when the pair divorced. and son-in-law, actor Adam Driver, said he had “no involvement”.

“Nothing,” Schneider said. “I know Adam and Joan very well. They are my daughter-in-law and son-in-law.”

“They are not involved in it. [but] I think Joanne knows Sharon. “But they were all totally uninvolved and didn’t like their children Sharon.”

“They all hated her,” he added. “They all hated her.”

As for May, Schneider said she doubts she’s still involved.

“I doubt if she’s still involved,” Schneider said. He may have gone out to

“And there are other things that make me think she’s not there anymore,” he added.

In 2021, the alleged cult purchased a $925,000 hideout in upstate New York and allegedly forced people to work around the clock.

“They let the members do all the work,” a source told the Post in July 2022. unpaid. concentration.people are taken there [Margaretville] without knowing where they are going.

Later that year, two women sued the group, claiming they had to pay to work as unpaid housekeepers, cooks and assistants for Gans and her husband.

Stephanie Rosenberg and Marjorie Hochman filed a lawsuit in Manhattan Supreme Court on Monday against the Odyssey Study Group, which advertised itself as a study group but is actually a cult.

The lawsuit also names actress Gunns’ estate manager.

Two women who defected in 2019 and 2016 with their husbands at the Plaza Hotel, where they had been paying a monthly membership fee of $400 since 2005.

Rosenberg and Hochman say they witnessed physical and emotional abuse, child abuse, sexual abuse, private adoptions, arranged marriages, and financial crimes while in Gunns’ group.

Examples of more serious allegations are not detailed in the lawsuit on page 21.

“Through methods traditionally used by cults to groom, intimidate, undermine, gaslight and exploit their victims, the OSG coerced and deceived its members,” the complaint states. It is stated.

“Cult members have made defendant Sharon Gunns and others very wealthy.”

The two women who filed the lawsuit and other members allegedly worked as much as 80 hours a week and paid for groceries and other items out of their own pockets as part of their participation in the group.

Gunns won an Obie Award for Best Actress in 1966 for her performance in Soon Jack November. She then appeared in her 1972 film version of Slaughterhouse Five. She died in January at the age of 85.

Gunns and her husband, Alex Horn, left San Francisco in the late 1970s after a similar allegation was published in the San Francisco Chronicle in December 1978 regarding their first group, the Theater of All Possibilities.

Members of the Theater of All Possibilities told Chronicle and San Francisco officials that they paid thousands of dollars to learn the techniques of Russian philosophers George Ivanovich Gurdjieff and PD Ouspensky.

Members of that group said they were beaten if they didn’t sell enough dinner show tickets to people they were told to confront in the street.

They also claimed child neglect because they were left behind the scenes while their parents rehearsed or performed “countless other chores.”

According to the New York Post, Gans and her husband reportedly believed that the road to self-development involved labor and intentional pain.

According to the Post, after the San Francisco debacle, Sharon and her husband set up shop in New York in the early 1980s, eventually using the money raised from the subjects to buy an $8.5 million apartment at Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel. was completed.