Dancing for the Devil: The 7M TikTok Cult—a three-part documentary premiering on Netflix today—opens with a story that captured the imagination of millions on TikTok. For years, Miranda Wilking (now known as Miranda Derrick) and her sister, Melanie, had posted clips in which they performed viral dances, amassing between 2 and 3 million followers. But in early 2021, Miranda suddenly disappeared from the feed. Fans wondered about her mysterious absence until February of 2022, when Melanie and her parents posted a video alleging that Miranda had been brainwashed by a man named Robert Shinn. They claimed that Miranda and 10 other young professional dancers were trapped in a cult posing as a talent management company called 7M.
Director Derek Doneen (The Price of Freedom) began reporting and shooting shortly after the Wilking family first posted its accusations on TikTok; he was brought on by co-executive producer Jess Acevedo, who is active in the dance community. “This was more urgent for me because the story is continuing to unfold,” Doneen told Vanity Fair, adding that nonfiction filmmakers rarely get access to subjects as their lives change in real time. The series is not an academic exploration; it’s reporting on families trying to save their children and escaped followers’ efforts to rebuild their lives. In the second episode, though, Doneen does travel back in time—because, unsurprisingly, 7M is not Shinn’s first controversial endeavor.
The documentary covers how Shinn founded Shekinah Church—which is not affiliated with other organizations by the same name—in 1994, after leaving a medical career in Canada and immigrating to the United States. Viewers learn about the church’s early years from a different Melanie, a Korean American immigrant who attended services as a teenager. When she and her sister Priscylla joined Shekinah more than 20 years ago, there were only about 15 congregants, mostly comprised of Shinn’s family. The church convinced the girls to live in its housing, moved them around every six to eight months, and eventually separated them. It allegedly prevented them from visiting one another and controlled what and when they ate. After Shinn told Melanie she would have to “pay” her “price” by becoming his mistress, she says, she orchestrated an escape. That was more than a decade ago. (Shinn did not respond to Vanity Fair’s request for comment. As stated at the end of the docuseries, Shinn has denied the allegations against him, including those of sexual abuse, no criminal charges have been brought against him, and the civil lawsuit—the claims of which he and his codefendants have denied—is ongoing.)
When Doneen began shooting, Priscylla was still a member of the church. But during production, she escaped—and, after much trust-building, joined the project. With incredible strength and composure, she details her slow descent into powerlessness and alleged continual rape at Shinn’s whim. Thanks to her participation, viewers witness some of the true costs of membership in a cult-like group. “When you get out of a situation like that, you’re not free,” explains Acevedo, the series’ co-executive producer. One exchange in particular about a child’s birthday party lays bare the impossibility of reentering society and maintaining healthy relationships after being drawn into an organization like Shekinah—a raw and heartrending scene even for those who are deeply familiar with media about cults.
Although women continue to come forward with stories of alleged physical abuse, much about Shinn, 7M, and Shekinah remains anonymous or off the record. More known at this time are details of Shinn’s alleged financial exploitations. Over the years, his businesses have included a cafe, two mortgage companies, two flower shops, and two real estate companies, all of which were run by church members. According to Priscylla, the mortgage and real estate companies brought in more than 1 million dollars in commissions in 2021. As a broker, she was responsible for much of that business—but, she claims in the series, she wasn’t allowed to touch her bank account, and was instead given an allowance of $80 every two weeks. In a 2013 lawsuit, former church member Jung Hee Lee alleges she was forced to work 40 hours per week, but was not allowed access to her checking account, and instead received a stipend of $30 per week from the church. Lee ultimately won the lawsuit and was awarded $9,215 in unpaid wages and damages.
Such employment arrangements have long been a hallmark of high-control groups. In a 2012 court case, for example, former Scientology member and minister Marc Headley alleged that he was paid 39 cents an hour for work that netted a 7,400% profit for the church. He contended that the church violated the Trafficking Victims Protection Act by psychologically coercing him to provide labor. The church asserted, however, that the claim failed to establish a genuine issue of material fact. The court dismissed the case.
Almost all high-control groups are money-making endeavors. Another hallmark is that they prey on those who are already economically unstable. Following the Jonestown massacre in 1978, a congressional investigation determined that Jim Jones had recruited most of his followers from “poor ghetto neighborhoods.” Melanie says as much of Shinn. “He targeted young people and put them to work,” she explains in the series. “They were okay with it because they were never rich to begin with. They came from a low-income, immigrant family. And he would work their asses off.”
Around 2018, James “BDash” Derrick—a krump dancer of growing renown—began producing social media content with a videographer named Isaiah Shinn, who happens to be Robert’s son. About a year later, Derrick began recommending Isaiah to other dancers in his community.
Before long, the dancers were attending services at Shekinah. As one explains in the series, Robert overheard them expressing frustration with their managers. He learned how many followers they had on social media, then offered to manage them himself.
It was an easy sell to budding artists, as former 7M client and Shekinah follower Kailea Gray explains in the series. “A lot of young men and women travel to LA with their big dream of being onstage and get wrapped up in a lot of things that aren’t fair for them. They don’t get paid enough. They get overworked…. There’s not a lot of opportunity and a lot of dancers. They are seeing Robert’s house, watching him drive these luxury cars. That’s why a place like Shekinah can look so alluring.”
Eventually, Shinn encouraged his “clients” to move into homes he owned. The series details how he began controlling with whom they danced and which songs they used for their choreography. Their musical choices shifted from avante-garde tracks to classic pop hits, such as Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” and the Beach Boys’ “Surfin’ Safari.” When the dancers booked gigs, Shinn took a 20% management fee—more or less the industry standard. But in addition, he’d take another 30% in church donations, according to the documentary. Former member and client Aubrey Fisher explains in the series that due to various other fees imposed by Shinn, artists sometimes received only 20% of their earnings—before taxes, which, of course, often hover around 20%.
By January 2021, Miranda Wilking—who is now married to Derrick, and has taken his last name—had grown increasingly distant from her family. She refused to return to Michigan for her grandfather’s funeral. Her parents, Dean and Kelly Wilking, flew to California to beg her to reconsider. As Dean and Kelly recount in the Netflix series, Miranda tried to get away from them and said, “I don’t know, I’ll see if I can come to the funeral.”
They inquired, “Who do you have to ask?”
She replied, “I need to ask someone closer to God than you.”
A teary Dean explains on camera that is the moment he knew she was gone.
Cult experts and sociologists argue that anyone can be susceptible to cult membership and indoctrination. Still, there are certain contextual patterns. Typically, people join such groups during moments of transition, when they are unmoored. This is why high-control groups recruit on college campuses, and why you hear of people joining after divorces or the loss of loved ones or jobs. Economic instability also leaves people unmoored. Cults prey on those facing hardship, those most eager to believe promises of relief, and, therefore, most susceptible to a con.
Sociologists have also long argued that cult activity increases during major social transitions. Between 1975 and 2020, 50 trillion dollars moved from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%. As of 2018, Steve K. D. Eichel, former president and current board member of the International Cultic Studies Association, estimated the number of destructive groups in the United States, a.k.a. cults, to be around 10,000. America is now in a golden age of cults, buffeted not only by demographic changes and technological revolution but also by accelerating financial struggle. In Dancing for the Devil, one former member describes his dance community as “perfect prey.”
“In the past 40 years we have seen major social changes,” explains Eichel. “Add to that the growing disparity in economic wealth and power, and now those disgruntled feelings are intensified. The relationship between disgruntled peoples and the growth of authoritarian movements, including cults, has long been understood.”
Rick Alan Ross, founder and executive director of the Cult Education Institute, points out that “It was an economic depression in Germany and accompanying despair which provided Adolf Hitler the premise he needed to recruit an entire nation into the most destructive personality cult in modern history.”
In fact, there is much overlap between political extremism and quasi-religious high-control groups, which are all considered “millennial” movements (in the doomsday sense of the word). One commonality among these groups is folie à groupe, or shared psychosis in which pathological symptoms spread within a tight-knit group through emotional bonds. As the series lays out, Shinn’s followers share a number of extreme beliefs, among them that he is a man of God, that abandoning one’s family will secure entry into heaven, and that succumbing to Shin’s sexual whims grows one closer to God.
Forensic psychologist and author of Profile of a Nation: Trump’s Mind, America’s Soul, Bandy X. Lee has written extensively about folie à groupe. When asked how to combat the spread of extremism in America, she first recommends “fixing the socioeconomic conditions that gave rise to psychological vulnerability to these influences in the first place.” In other words, if you remove the prey, you remove the predator.
Still, there are more immediate concerns, particularly for the Wilkings. Doneen warns in Dancing for the Devil that Priscylla’s past and current struggles are “a cautionary tale for what might be happening to Miranda—or what might happen if her parents and sister aren’t able to get her out.”
More Great Stories From Vanity Fair
All the Highlights From the 2024 Cannes Film Festival
Cover Star Ayo Edebiri Is Making Hollywood Her Playground
Why It Took Decades to Bring the Masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude to the Screen
Griffin Dunne on the Tragic Death That Reshaped His Family
Hamptonites Are Losing It Over the Congestion Pricing Program
Bibbidi Bobbidi Who Will Disney’s Next CEO Be?
Donald Trump’s Campaign Threatens Legal Action Over Apprentice Movie
The Vatican’s Secret Role in the Science of IVF
Listen to VF’s Still Watching Podcast Hosts and the Bridgerton Cast Dish on Season 3
The post Dancing for the Devil: The 7M TikTok Cult Depicts a Dangerous Group in Real Time appeared first on Vanity Fair.