Love Has Won – the story of Cult Leader Amy Carlson

The cult we are going to discuss in this blog post is the Love Has Won cult.

This one was started by a woman named Amy Carlson – followers referred to her as Mother God.  I have also seen articles that refer to her as Mom and Momma G.

This cult was relatively small in terms of followers – there were between 12 and 20 full time members who lived in a home with Amy and there were a handful more worldwide – up to 200.

As some background into Amy, she was born on November 30, 1975 in a small town in Kansas.  Her mother is a woman named Linda Haythorne.  Amy was the eldest child of three girls.  Amy’s parents split up when she was a child, and when Amy was 9, her mother remarried and moved to Oklahoma City.  Her parents became embroiled in a custody battle and Amy ended up splitting her time in Kansas and Oklahoma.  Her relationship with her stepmother has been described as difficult.  

“She was the sister I looked up to and wanted to be,” her youngest sister, Chelsea Renninger said.. “She was smart, beautiful, and had an amazing voice.” By all accounts, Amy was popular and charming, but not a dominant personality. Her mother has said: “She was not a leader. That came much later.”

There is a great article by the Rolling Stone, and according to that, she also loved sriracha, Beat Bobby Flay, unicorns and cell phone games.

Amy had been a straight-A student while growing up.  People who knew her said that she grew increasingly ‘out there’ as she got older.  

During the mid 2000s (she would have been in her early 30’s), Amy became obsessed with New Age philosophy.  She posted regularly on the forum lightworkers.org.

I looked up that website and this is the headline for it – Welcome Multidimensional Star Seeds, Rainbow Warriors, Indigo Revolutionaries and all you other Divine Beings!

And Remeber who you are. Remeber why you came. You Chose this! There are no victims here. Are you ready to step into your power? It’s Time to Awaken to the true nature of your your divine essence.  You are not alone. You never have been, the whole force of creation is with you. Step up, Stand Strong, and Keep Shining!

While she was participating in the forum, she met someone named Amerith WhiteEagle.  That person apparently convinced Amy that she was divine.  She also claimed to experience paranormal activity at this time.  

Amy has claimed in the past that she has a relationship with the spirit of Robin Williams.  She has said that Robin is now the Archangel Zadkiel.

One of Amy’s stories about her childhood is about a time when she was four or five years old.

Amy was talking to angels, and her parents had taken her from church to church, seeking insight and advice from pastors. In one instance, she was said to have had an outburst in the middle of a sermon. “The pastor said something that she knew was a lie, since she was Jesus, and she yelled ‘You’re lying!” and had to be removed from church,” said a member of Love Has Won.  Amy’s family have denied this ever took place. 

In 2007, Amy left her husband and their three kids, along with her manager’s job at McDonald’s to move to Colorado where she shacked up with WhiteEagle from the forum.

Her mother has spoken about Amy’s lack of maternal instinct.  She wasn’t very maternal. “She just didn’t have that warmth. She had no problem leaving her children with other people.”

Her friend Tara Flores spoke to Rolling Stone about Amy leaving her family.  “It seemed very sudden,” Flores says. “It was Amerith. And I could tell by the way that he talked. It sounded like the things Amy was saying when she left. She wasn’t even making sense. I couldn’t get through to her. That’s when she completely flipped a switch.”

I have read some articles that say Amy actually got up and walked out of the middle of Thanksgiving dinner, never to return to her family.

The ‘group’ they founded together was known under the name “Galactic Federation of Light”.

In 2007, Amy made internet posts about her belief that she was going to be President one day.  “…And I am cleaning the kitchen, baby just down for a nap…and I feel a tap on my shoulder and a wisk [sic] of air in my left ear…and then I heard a lower toned voice not really even a voice it was like a message a violin would play in its music and it said President of the united states…. I thought what? What in the world does that mean… I dismiss it and then I hear… You are going to be President of the United States.”

They started a YouTube channel in 2009, and there are 2700 videos on there currently.  

WhiteEagle was also known as Father God. Amy referred to him as her ‘twin flame’, which means they were two bodies but had the same soul. 

Followers of Amy believed that she was over 19 billion years old and had lived over 500 lives.   

Amy was apparently in constant conflict with the Cabal.  The Cabal is apparently a bunch of reptilians or extraterrestrials.   This definition of the Cabal comes from Rolling Stone.   They are the global elite, tied to the Illuminati, and they pull the world’s sinister strings, orchestrating the dark sham that is modern life, in which everything from wars to mass shootings and pandemics are all illusory, engineered to keep humanity mired in a state of fear.

Her followers also believed that Amy’s reincarnations included Jesus, Marilyn Monroe, Joan of Arc and Cleopatra.  Donald Trump was apparently her father in one life.  

Amy’s goal was to lead 144,000 believers into the awakened “5D” plane of existence, leaving behind the shackles of the broken “3D world.” Those left behind will be destroyed, and their energies will be “recycled” into the sun.

Amy’s group members used to communicate through Facebook and Skype.  Meetings were held in other countries with group members – Australia, South Africa and Central America.  

When she left her family, she moved to Crestone, Colorado.  I feel like Crestone has a bit of a reputation for housing many people like Amy.

Crestone has everything from Hindu Ashrams to Catholic Monasteries.  The mountain range there is called Sangre de Cristo range which means Blood of Christ.  The range got this name because of the jagged peaks which encircle the area like a crown of thorns.  

Spiritualists and healers, along with extraterrestrial experts go to the area regularly.  They believe the county has concentrated energy and that makes it a prime place for interdimensional portals.

Amy and WhiteEagle started to make many posts online.  They made videos about the Sangre de Cristo mountains and claimed they were actually cloaked star ships. 

They created their own publication called ‘The Galactic Free Press.’   Amy would play the role of an anchorwoman, giving updates on the spiritual events that she said were happening all around her followers.  

Things with Amy’s group at this time were crazy, but generally harmless.  It seemed like a bit of a hippie commune, focused on sex, drugs and peace.  

Over the years, there were a few ‘Father God’ figures that rotated, but there was only ever one Mother God – Amy.

One of the better known ‘Father God’ figures is a man named Miguel Lamboy.  He got together with Amy in 2014.  At the time, Miguel said he suffered from end-stage lung cancer, and had already had one lung removed. 

Followers believed that Amy ‘Mother God’ healed him and cemented their faith in her and the group.  

Love Has Won became a 501(c)(3) non-profit charitable organization in 2019 – all thanks to Miguel’s efforts.  

Group members have said that during this time Amy seemed healthy and energetic on the outside.  They recruited many followers in these years.  She was also known to secretly be a big drinker and would often become aggressive and mean after she imbibed.

In 2018, things took a real turn for Amy. She met a man named Jason Castillo, and he would become the next Father God.

Rolling Stone described Jason as ‘ruggedly handsome’ but I think methy and unhinged is a better description.

“I remember being five years old — maybe six — sitting on the weekends in my grandparents’ house,” Jason told Rolling Stone. “I’d sit on the stairs and look at this picture of Jesus. There was beautiful cracked gilded glass above the lamp in the hallway, and this auburn glow. I would sit there and just stare at Jesus, who was myself.”

They moved to an area called Moffatt in Colorado and changed the group name to ‘Love Has Won’.

Their rented home was in an area named Baca Grande. The area is considered sacred grounds to the Hopi and other Native American tribes, and the couple who developed it in the 1970s agreed to preserve space to bring together different religions to promote harmony and peace after the wife was visited by a prophet.

Permission to settle in the area has to be selectively given. “Love Has Won never would have qualified for any of that,” said Joanna Theriault, who sits on the Baca Grande Property Owners Association board of directors.

Instead, Love Has Won found someone to rent them a house, and observers say the connection was made because a relative of the property owner spent time in the cult.

You may be wondering about the type of people who were interested in joining Love Has won at this time:

There is some info online about a man who left his wife, their two kids and his six-figure job to join Love Has Won.

The man’s name has not been published online as he eventually left the cult and is ‘recovering’, but his wife told the media:

He was interested in political conspiracy theories such as QAnon, the baseless belief that cannibalistic liberal pedophiles run a global child sex trafficking ring. His readings about those conspiracies led him to Love Has Won’s Facebook page because the group mentions them in their videos.

Amy and her followers started offering “etheric surgery”, which cost $88 per session. They claimed that it could remove sickness and “negative energy” from the body.

The Saguache County Sheriff’s Office reported that they had received “many complaints” about Love has Won from families, about “brainwashing” and fraud.

From 2018 onwards, Amy’s drinking increased a lot.  She became ill and often needed to be carried around. 

Love Has Won changed their ‘structure’ around this time.  A group of followers known as the First Contact Ground Crew Team, would video daily updates for hours each day.  The quest of this group was to help Amy assist the world to ascend. . Most were young, and all were enthusiastic, kicking off every video with a group cheer, shouting “Love Has Won,” with lots of enthusiastic clapping.

Amy and Jason rarely appeared in these videos, and Amy eventually stopped entirely showing up.  I am assuming this was due to her alcohol related ill health.  Members had another theory though.    Member Ashley Peluso (aka “Archeia Hope”) explained that Amy couldn’t appear on video, because if she did, the viewers’ bodies would explode, “because her vibration is so high and all of yours is so low.”

On Aug. 1, 2018, viewers were informed that dark witches had attacked Amy. Three weeks later, the audience was told by member Archeia Faith that another assassination attempt had taken place, during which a “sword sliced one of her hearts,” she says in the video. “The etheric have been doing surgery on it for many hours now and Mom is throwing up, diarrhea, she was shaking.”

In September 2018,  an update said that Amy had “processed 99.3” of the world’s negative energy. Her pain was described as reaching “50 out of 10.” 

Miguel Lamboy described her health situation as “very dire,” and said that her body was failing.  Amy was said to be bedridden and eventually paralyzed from the waist down.

In 2019, the tone of the updates from the group became more paranoid.  They said that Amy was under constant attack from dark forces.  One update said that Amy was struck with etheric darts, and another in which her spleen and pancreas were “infiltrated” by the Cabal.

The group became more dark and threatening.  A group member named Adam Haller made a video in 2019 that said “Anyone who tries to fuck with us? We’ll kill you,” he said. “We will fucking kill you, because there’s no time left. And we’ve seen our mom suffer so much. I know that so many people watch these livestreams. I know that there’s rich people out there with millions of dollars who watch these, and how dare you? We’re coming for you.”

To this day, Adam is still a Love Has Won supporter.  He gave this explanation about that statement:

“That statement was spoken with no violent intention, bloodlust, or will to do ill harm, merely a friendly warning to all who refuse to return to the ways of natural law, life, and existence,” he told Rolling Stone “These people will be cut down by the forces of nature and the universe herself.”

Other videos released by Love Has Won members include racist, homophobic and anti Semitic rants.  

Amanda Ray, a self-described victim’s advocate and founder of the watchdog group Rising Above Love Has Won said. “For a non-profit organization that claims to represent love, their actions prove otherwise,” she says. “This is a direct example of a dangerous coercive control group.”

In May 2020, police became involved after a group member was found wandering the wilderness disoriented, naked, and dehydrated, after being described by the group as lacking the “right energy” and being on “the wrong side of the mountain.”  He was found with cactus needles stuck to his feet and his wife has told the media:

“He’d stared at the sun so much he’d burned his eyes terribly,” she said.

“He thought he had ascended the world into this 5D matrix and had done what Mother God and Father God wanted him to do,” she said. “We had to play that game with him. ‘Yes, you did it. You’re done.’”

He’s still healing and he will be for a long time from this,” she said. “He has tons of shame, tons of guilt. He just can’t believe he did what he did. He just can’t fathom it now that his mind is clear.”

The group briefly moved to Kauai, Hawaii in August 2020.  They lasted less than a month there after locals protested.  This hostility was likely due to Amy declaring that she was the Hawaiian god Pele.

“Fuck off!” she said in a video. “I’m Pele, bitch. Don’t push me.”

There is online footage of the protestors lighting driftwood fires and chanting Hawaiian prayers around the rented property the group were staying in.

The mayor of Kauai, Derek Kawakami, intervened and convinced the group to leave the Island They subsequently flew to Kahului Airport on Maui, but were convinced to fly back to Colorado in September 2020.

That same month, Amy told her followers that she had cancer.  Apparently, all of the world’s external suffering had to play out through her body.  She called alcohol her ‘medicine’ and explained that her increased use was due to the pain she was feeling, caused by the rest of the world.  

 In one video, she rails against members for not delivering her tequila promptly enough, asking, “Where is my tequila, you dick whores?”

There was also an incident which is now known as the ‘Chicken Parmesan Saga.’  Amy basically lost her mind when she was given the wrong food.  “My vision was chicken parmesan,” Carlson yells. “So the (expletive) atoms turn around on me and get me meatballs. I didn’t say meatballs. I love meatballs, but I didn’t (expletive) say that. Chicken parmesan!”

Amy’s family appeared on a Dr Phil episode in 2020.  Evidence of Amy’s abuse of animals and children was discussed in the episode.  She allegedly locked a child in a cupboard as a form of punishment and said “You need to surrender. Surrender, now.”

There is a video of Amy with a cat.  Amy can be seen holding the animal under its arms and then lifts it high in the air by the scruff of its neck and holds it there, dangling, until it stops making noise.

Dr Phil also asked Amy about leaving her children behind to move in with Father God.  “For me, I did not abandon my children,” she replied. “I begged my angels. I didn’t want to leave, but they told me I had to fulfill my mission. And I had to make a jump, and I had to make a decision.”

Amy’s sister Tara has spoken about why the family appeared on the show:

“It’s important for us to let everyone know that Amy was a person. She wasn’t a monster.  She’s a victim as well of coercive control. But we didn’t have much of an option for getting her help. Part of me wanting to speak is to bring awareness to that.”

There is some info in the Rolling Stone article about techniques the group used.

In videos and communications posted on YouTube, we see members subjected to hours-long sessions in which they’re criticized by other members in an effort to weed out the negative energies infesting the group. This was sometimes called playing “Find the Whore.” These sessions could involve multiple members calling each other out for behaviors deemed inappropriate, or they might focus on a single member, often reducing them to tears. In cult terminology, this is referred to as the “hot seat technique,” wherein a member is bombarded with accusations and criticisms, eroding their confidence and sense of self.

In October that year, two female followers made a video update about Amy’s health.  “There’s been moments when mom has asked us to take her to a community hospital. Nope,” a follower says. “There’s no way. We know how a hijacking works.”

“And, you can bet your fuckin’ ass that someone in that hospital, whoever it would be, would get hijacked and go straight for Mom, try to do who knows what. They would try to take her to surgery. They would try to do some crazy shit. So, absolutely not.”

Amy had begun to obsessively take colloidal silver.  The group created an online site to sell that product – Gaia’s Whole Healing Essentials.

Colloidal silver is a substance made by suspending silver particles in a liquid, often marketed as a cure-all dietary supplement. Frequent use can cause argyria, wherein one’s skin turns blue. One of the group’s biggest money makers has been etheric surgery, a form of remote energy healing said to cure any and all diseases. As per the “Ascension Guide” that Love Has Won sells — which retails at $22.22 — members are prescribed “grounding tools” to aid in their ascension, which include Sun gazing (literally staring at the Sun), smoking cigarettes (only organic, hand-rolled tobacco), eating red meat at least twice a week, and taking long, cold showers.

You can see in some photos and videos that Amy’s skin was turning a blue-silver colour from all the colloidal silver that she was ingesting.

In 2020, Gaia’s Whole Healing Essentials received a warning letter from the FDA after they claimed colloidal silver could cure Covid.  They left the product for sale but removed that claim from their website. 

Amy was last known to be alive on April 10, 2021.  This is the last time anyone outside the group saw her alive.  The landlord of the property in Shasta, California where the group were renting saw her on that day and said she looked like she was dying.

On April 16, a photo of Jason holding a very dead looking Amy was circulated in the group’s private forums.   Amy was described as either dead or almost dead in the image.  A group member made a livestream that day and said :“Mom is not good. She is very, very, very close. And that’s pretty much all we know. So, pray….She’s slowly, slowly pulling out of her vessel.”

Later on the same day, followers Bobby Leseman and Dylan Woodward offered an update.

Leseman: Mom is going to ascend tonight! Woo!

Woodward: For shizzle, my nizzle.

Amy’s family saw the image and begged authorities to do a wellness check. They called police, ambulance services, fire departments, county sheriffs and a district attorney in the Mount Shasta area to plead for intervention.

“We had well-checks done, turned away. We had ambulances go out, turned away,” her mother Linda said.

Followers allegedly told authorities that Amy had moved to another property.  

On April 17, two followers gave another update and alluded to Amy being gone.  “We don’t get to just stop now. We have to keep going. For Mom. So grateful that she’s not in pain now.  So grateful she’s at peace.”

On April 28, 2021, police finally entered the a in Crestone, Colorado.  The group members had been in California before this and it is believed they transported Amy’s body thousands of miles to return her to her ‘home’.  

There’s crazy body cam footage of them entering the property:

The officers walk through the property to a bedroom, and come across Amy’s mummified body in a shrine.  

This info is from an article by the Independent – An affidavit claimed the body, wrapped up in a sleeping bag and adorned with the aforementioned fairy lights and glitter, was set up as some sort of shrine.  

Saguache County sheriff Dan Warwick told NBC’s Dateline the group was burning sage in the room and covering Ms Carlson in essential oils to “keep the odour down” as they were worshipping her.

“Wow, I mean, it’s just [you] shake and go wow. There’s not much more I can say. I’ve been doing this for 26 years. I used to say I’ve seen it all. I don’t say that anymore,” he said.

I have read some articles that say her eyes had been removed but I am not sure if that is right or if that was due to decomposition?

Investigators searched an SUV on the property and said the backseat was laid down in a position “consistent with someone transporting the mummified remains”.

Her followers told police that Amy had a pulse the whole time, even dispite her advanced level of decomposition. 

They also claim that she occasionally moved her hands.  One follower named Archeia Faith said that shewas eager to see the results of the autopsy, as she suspects it may detail inexplicable phenomena that have never been scientifically documented.

Amy’s followers released this statement after her body was discovered:

“We thank everyone for their Full Surrender to the Divine Plan. Mom will give you the next step in Your Heart in every Present MOMent you’re there, MOM ENTers. The team are respectfully honoring the process law enforcement require and we are grateful for their diligence in protecting Humanity. Mom deeply loves Our law enforcement officers as She does each and everyone of Her children,” it read.

Followers of Amy and Love Has Won were charged in April and May 2021.

Seven of them were charged on the day Amy’s body was found – April 28.  They were charged with suspicion of abuse of a corpse, which carried a maximum sentence of 18 months in prison. They also faced two misdemeanor counts of child abuse.

On May 5, 12th Judicial District Deputy District Attorney Alex Raines said he planned to amend charges to tampering with a deceased human body, which would carry a maximum sentence of 12 years in prison.

We also learned some more at this time about the type of followers that Love Has Won had.

Two women are mothers, who are separated from their children. One of those women is the mother of a 13-year-old girl, who was found in the house with the body and placed under the supervision of the Saguache County Department of Social Services. A defense attorney said she had other children who lived in Pennsylvania.

One man is a former Marine. Four of the six had prior criminal records, mostly for traffic violations and misdemeanors.

After Amy’s death, the group scrambled to ‘re-brand’ themselves.  They took down their website and renamed themselves as ‘5D Full Disclosure’ on Facebook and YouTube.  

They took down their Gaia’s Whole Healing Essentials store – the URL did redirect to motherearthnaturalessentials.org for awhile.  That domain is now parked.  Group members also filed an Article of Amendment in order to change the official name of the LLC to “Mother Nature Natural Essentials LLC.”

Info about the change in group dynamics comes from the Rolling Stone article.

Since core leadership of the group was gone, a power vacuum remained, and the dynamic rapidly changed. The majority of members joined 5D Full Disclosure, where livestreamers are now seen doing things like drinking from Starbucks cups, suggesting increased freedom in terms of how they spend money and what they consume. They’re able to sleep more freely. They aren’t under the direct influence of a divine authority. 5D Full Disclosure members say that this is a natural progression. The idea is that many of the rules and routines for their daily lives that they previously adhered to were designed to help them “shield” Amy from spiritual attacks, but that no longer applies, since Amy has ascended. As such, a slightly more liberal atmosphere has taken hold. Within the larger 5D Full Disclosure group, there are spats and disagreements, but some members liken these to the differences between members of any family, nothing that will ultimately destroy Love Has Won as a whole. Member Lauryn Suarez has referred to this as a “period of crumbling and rebuilding.”

Love Has Won continue to sell etheric surgeries, which they advertise as still being performed by Amy who now lives in the 5th Dimension.

Jason has started his own offshoot group titled ‘Joy Rains’.   His new name is “MotherFatherGod,” and that he is the new God, having unified with Amy’s energy. 

He has made videos about the ‘false team’ (people who stayed with Love Has Won following Amy’s death).  

In one video, he acts particularly unhinged “You were going to starve God, take everything, and go feed your dicks and your pussies,” he said. He claimed that “only four beings out of 8 billion” turned out to be true believers, and asked: “Do I need to reheart you who the fuck I am, children? I’m Father. Who the fuck are you going to go around to Heaven?” (“Reheart” is a Love Has Won term, a replacement for “remind.”)

In September 2021, all criminal charges against Love Has Won members were dropped.

Assistant District Attorney Alex Raines asked a judge to dismiss all the charges during a Sept. 14 hearing, the Valley Courier reported. Defense lawyers also requested that records be sealed, which was approved, it said.

“Our office looked at all the documents and everything that was provided, and from our perspective, the allegations could not be met beyond a reasonable doubt,” Saguache County district attorney Alonzo Payne told Dateline.

Amy’s autopsy was completed and released in December 2021.   Her cause of death was “global decline in the setting of alcohol abuse, anorexia, and chronic colloidal silver ingestion.” 

The report said that Amy who was 5 foot 4 inches tall, weighed 75 pounds.

Examination of her liver tissue confirmed the presence of silver, the report said, from her regular consumption of colloidal silver.

The toxicology report also found the presence of opioids hydromorphone and hydrocodone, as well as ethanol and THC.

No evidence of cancer was found during the autopsy.  Amy had regularly told people she had stage 5 cancer, which is actually not a thing. 

“There’s nothing we can do about Amy now,” her mother told Rolling Stone. “But she was a human being. She was my firstborn. I loved her, and she knew I loved her. Nobody deserves to die the way she did. I want people to understand that this is what can happen to you if you get involved with a cult. I want to warn people about just how dangerous it can become. She was a victim, too.”

SOURCE LIST
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/love-has-won-amy-carlson-mother-god-1254916/

How a Texas mom left her family to become “Mother God,” leader of Colorado’s Love Has Won cult

https://www.insider.com/why-people-join-cults-according-to-therapist-who-treats-survivors-2020-9

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/love-has-won-cult-amy-carlson-b1969246.html

Clips from the Podcast:

https://youtu.be/c9V0JuVfzbo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOOv4Zkgu6s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lixClaCbHk
https://youtu.be/JofOcFP_mzc
https://youtu.be/NA55suMWD4Q