Former Access Consciousness members speak out
What is it really like to be part of the Access Consciousness movement? Two former members give a searing account of their experience | WATCH THE VIDEO
Former high-ranking members of global self-help organisation Access Consciousness have claimed one of the group’s male leadership figures “seduced” women who signed up for expensive alternative therapies that they were told would “clear limitations” in their lives.
Perth businesswoman Kerry Purcell, who spent 15 years working closely with senior leadership at Access Consciousness, has told The Weekend Australian that Access Consciousness co-creator Dain Heer “groomed” women to sleep with him and left them “shamed”, while also bullying those he saw as “competition”.
“There was this constant trail of women who were being groomed to have sexual relations with one of the main leaders (Heer),” she said. “I saw hundreds of women walk in and out (of courses); some married, some single, some very young.
She said she witnessed “women … crying, waiting outside his hotel room, waiting outside the function room” where Heer’s courses were taking place.
Ms Purcell travelled the world with the group, often with her young children, and worked closely with another Access Consciousness leader Simone Milasas, an Australian mostly based in Noosa.
Margaret Braunack, who spent over 20 years at Access Consciousness and was one of the first “licensed” facilitators qualified to administer its therapies, said she also personally counselled women who claimed to have been manipulated by Here.
In a video interview with The Weekend Australian, Braunack says: “I had actually introduced a lot of really gorgeous young girls into the organisation through classes that I was facilitating. And then from there, as soon as I moved into the next level, which was to do a class with, say, the founder, Gary Douglas, or, you know, the co creator, Dain … then that’s when I really saw the red flags.
“The seduction of women by Dain … scanning the room when he’d first come into a class and then working on them and then seducing them into his bed.
“And then after that, it was (the women) coming to me looking for facilitation because they felt that they had been totally f**ked over.”
Ms Braunack said the ethos of the organisation was that “people are idiots, just take their money” and claimed the Access Consciousness leadership were motivated by “money, power and control”.
The Weekend Australian Magazine on Saturday revealed intimate accounts from five former members of their experience at Access Consciousness including Ms Purcell and Ms Braunack. Ms Purcell and Ms Braunack shared further details of Heer’s antics in video interviews with The Weekend Australian.
Access Consciousness was founded in the 1990s in the US by former real estate agent Gary Douglas. Heer, a former chiropractor, joined him at the helm in 2001. The group’s third most powerful leader is Milasas, the group’s worldwide business coordinator.
The three leaders have boasted about vast wealth accumulated from using the “tools” of Access Consciousness.
In a video interview, Purcell described bullying and belittling behaviour at the organisation: “People were singled out, publicly abused in front of hundreds of people … children, my children, myself, many men in the room who were in somehow competition or threat to the leaders, were persecuted publicly, just derailed, defiled, humiliated,” she said.
“It’s just so disturbing and horrifying how people have left the organisation in shame and had the amount of grief that they have, or how their life just completely fell apart … and no one was there for them.”
