A man who claims to be the brother of Gloriavale resident Dove Love, has spoken out against the "cult" community saying his sister never wanted to marry her now-husband.
Dove Love was the star of the latest instalment of Gloriavale documentaries which focused on her marriage to Watchful Steadfast.
A man claiming to be Gloriavale resident Dove Love's brother has spoken out https://t.co/47b1xWGfxG
— nzherald (@nzherald) August 1, 2016
But after hearing ZM's Fletch, Vaughan and Megan discussing the show, a listener called Jeremy rang the station claiming to be Dove Love's brother.
Jeremy said he left the community about four months ago and was now living, working and attending church in Timaru.
He was in Gloriavale for the wedding but only in the background because "obviously they don't show anyone who's against Gloriavale".
Speaking to ZM, Jeremy said he had actually asked to stay in the community, but was shown the door when he began to spread the truth.
"I was asking them if I could stay there because I'm married with a baby and they ended up saying 'no you cant,'" he recalled.
"I said, 'I'm not going' and they were like 'well, we're not going to feed you, you're not going to have a place to stay, you're not going to have any work, how are you going to live here?'"
When he still refused to leave, he was called "a trespasser", despite having lived there his entire life.
"I was just saying...that things they were saying in there to people were lies. And that's obviously why they try to stop you from having contact with the outside world, because you find out the truth about a lot of things and then you take that back and start spreading that around and...people start leaving."
He said he was upset that his sister was still in Gloriavale and that she had married Watchful Stedfast, but his attempts to contact her had been thwarted by the community.
"I know that she didn't want to marry him - they're just told that it's God's will. Basically anything that the leaders say is God's will and they've got to do that or they're going to hell," Jeremy said.
"Girls are taught to submit," he said.
Now he says the only reason he would go back to the place he admits is "a cult", would be to see his family and spread the truth.
"Your whole life you're told in there that the world is a big, bad, evil place...a lot of it is fear," Jeremy said.
"You're told so many times and the longer you're out here the more you see just how many lies you were told."
