‘Abuse, Fear, and Gaslighting’: Ex-Members on Life in Food Truck Owner’s ‘Cult-Like’ Group

Amber Yanes was a high school senior when her parents met New Age teacher Soulaire Allerai at a health and wellness expo around 2008. They soon began driving two and a half hours each way to attend her “channeling” sessions in Minnesota, where followers would sit in a circle while Allerai embodied a god-like entity known as “G” and delivered spiritual guidance.

In a newly filed court affidavit, Yanes says her father’s involvement with Allerai’s group, Soulful Journey, led him to relocate his children from Iowa to the Minneapolis area in 2009 and sell his stake in his family farm for almost $1.5 million nine years later.

“Over the last 13 years, communication with my family has continuously dwindled,” Yanes claims in the document, adding, “The largest change in my family is that ‘The Journey’ comes first. Always. So much so, that my father has expressed to me that ‘The Journey’ is more important to him than his children.” According to Yanes, her father, Terrance McCabe, spent so much on Allerai’s community that he used food banks to feed his kids.

“It is my concern that he does not feel he can retire due to the financial implications of being in the group,” Yanes writes. “This is incredibly disheartening, as he has worked very hard all of his life. At his age, he deserves to slow down.”

Now McCabe is one-third owner of Bad Rooster, Allerai’s popular food truck, which is embroiled in litigation against two sisters for publicly claiming that the business funds a “cult”—one which they say has caused a years-long rift between them and their mother.

As The Daily Beast reported, Allerai and Bad Rooster filed a defamation suit against Kelly Abedi and Angela Hummelgard soon after Abedi shared a Facebook post claiming Allerai “charges her followers lots of money to speak to ‘God’ and she has actively torn families apart.”

The legal battle aimed at defending the mobile chicken sandwich shop, however, has unleashed some disturbing accusations about the woman behind it.

Last week, seven other people—estranged loved ones of Soulful Journey members and former followers themselves—submitted affidavits backing up the siblings’ characterization of Allerai’s group and described how it impacted their lives and relationships.

Abedi’s lawyer, in a recent filing, pointed out that “truth is an absolute defense to a claim for defamation” and that the latest affidavits will “attest to the truth of the statements at issue.”

Allerai’s spokeswoman Stacy Bettison said she and Bad Rooster would not comment on the string of affidavits. But in a previous statement to The Daily Beast, Bettison said, “The personal attacks on social media, and now in the news media, are patently false and solely designed to harm Soulaire Allerai and Bad Rooster because of the tremendous success and goodwill they have earned over the years. The individuals spreading these lies are trying to find a scapegoat for their own problems.”

“Soulaire Allerai is not a cult leader,” she added, “and she does not brainwash people.”

Some ex-members accused Allerai of controlling their lives.

They include Gretchen West, who says she began living with Allerai and her wife, Laira, in the summer of 2013 before her junior year of high school. She fled once she graduated, she says. “I was hardly allowed to see any friends even when they were approved by Soulaire,” West says in her affidavit. “I was not even allowed to attend my doctor’s appointments alone, including a consultation for antidepressants. They did not want me to look at any colleges outside of Minnesota. They discouraged me from having a close relationship with my mom.”

While her family lived in Maryland, West moved in with Allerai to attend an arts high school in Minnesota. She says her mother paid Allerai for rent and bills but that she stayed in a small office room off the basement and “was extremely sleep deprived and food deprived, and deprived generally of self-care.” The affidavit adds that West was forced to get retail jobs while in school so that she could buy herself basic necessities like food and toiletries.

During her time in the Soulful Journey fold, West says, Allerai hosted a number of “channelings” for “G” and other spirits: “Her entire demeanor would change; facial expressions, tone of voice, posture, facial expressions, when each personality was in her body. The personalities varied in gender, age (3 years old to hundreds of years old), and interests, knowledge and skills.”

“Soulaire claimed that she channeled God and many other masters and so-called enlightened spirits,” West continues. “She said she had lived in other dimensions and on other planets, and that we did too. This was one of the many techniques she used to control us. She claimed she knew our lives on these other planets and in these other dimensions. She used this to influence our decisions in our day to day lives.”

The former member alleges that Soulful Journey offered classes on massage, relationships and intimacy, and “psychic development,” and that Allerai said she was able to “tap in to” a spirit who was a chiropractor, performing weekly chiropractic adjustments on West.

“While in the group there was a complete loss of autonomy and choice,” West adds. “I was extremely depressed and at times, suicidal, due to the treatment I got from Soulaire and Laira and the abusive cycle that is Soulful Journey.”

West says she left because she “wanted to be an individual, attend university, have friendships with people outside the group, express myself, cut my hair, travel, date anyone I wanted, explore hobbies, be able to have a LIFE… be my own person.” She concludes, “They didn’t allow for that in any way.”

Another former follower, Raila Luminae, says she was involved in Allerai’s community for 13 years after meeting her in 2002. At that time, Allerai was known as Lynn Young and ran the Living Faith Spiritual Community in Minnetonka.

In an affidavit, Luminae says the Wednesday night “G” channeling sessions started in members’ homes and moved to a rented basement space before Allerai bought a building in Minnetonka that became the Soulful Journey Wellness Center.

The ex-member describes how participants would sometimes wait for hours for Allerai to arrive, then wait even more “for G to come into her body.” Once the spirit embodied Allerai, it “would teach for an hour or two,” Luminae says. When it was over, members again waited another 30 to 90 minutes in their chairs so as not to “‘break’ the energy of the circle.”

“Initially, I found the teachings from G loving and helpful,” Luminae continues. But she says as time passed, the spiritual teacher’s “message became more about the participants not doing their part for G, Soulaire, and humanity.”

“Soulaire frequently admonished us for ‘only caring about G,’” Luminae alleges. “She made it very clear that she felt unimportant and the group spent increasingly more time and energy trying to make her feel better.”

Eventually, Luminae says, the channeling sessions and classes cost members $150 per week. Allerai also hosted monthly healings where “a group would gather around a massage table and perform an energetic healing on the subject” for $1 per minute.

According to Luminae, members were asked to do unpaid work at the organization’s facility—shampooing rugs, cleaning garages, gardening, and weeding—and to pay the group’s property taxes. Luminae and other members also worked, allegedly unpaid, on two video games that Allerai attempted to launch called “Banonkey Town” and “QD3.”

“For many, many months my husband and I paid the monthly salary for one of the programmers on the QD3 video game,” Luminae says, adding that the checks were written to a business Allerai owned. “We were not reimbursed. We were told that once the game became a success, everyone would benefit and we could make G’s dreams a reality.”

Meanwhile, Allerai allegedly encouraged members to distance themselves from their families because continued contract would jeopardize their spiritual journey. Luminae says that when she was diagnosed with cancer for a second time, Allerai advised her not to tell a soul because her relatives “would hold fear” that could lead to her death.

Luminae claims that Allerai—a self-styled “life strategist,” podcaster, and spiritual director—also began to tell members that they were “bad parents” and warned their children not to listen to them because they were “messed up.”

Anyone who expressed negative thoughts about the group, Luminae adds, would face a type of intervention called a “posse,” where members would sit in a circle and lob questions at the accused detractor for several hours until they acquiesced. “The path of least resistance was to agree with them so that you could finally go home,” Luminae says.

“I left the group in 2015 because I got to a point where I dreaded going to the Wellness Center,” Luminae says. “I realized that I would rather die than keep going there.”

She adds, “It is distressing now to think about the abuse, fear, and gaslighting I suffered while involved with this group.”

The controversy over Allerai’s “cult-like” group started in July, when Abedi and Hummelgard took to social media to leave bad reviews for Bad Rooster, encourage a customer boycott, and ask breweries and festivals to drop the food truck. They claim that after their mother, Mary Ring, joined Allerai’s flock, she divorced her husband, abandoned her children and other relatives and friends, and changed her name to Cianna LaJoie.

Allerai and Bad Rooster are seeking an injunction to stop the sisters from “making false and defamatory statements” about them. In one memorandum, they say the online posts have already cost them business: Four partners have canceled events with the food truck, and “the damage to [their] reputation is already substantial.” A hearing on the request for an injunction is scheduled for next Friday in Hennepin County court.

Abedi and Hummelgard “began a relentless online campaign to defame an award-winning local food truck and its owner, falsely claiming that the food truck supported a cult, abused people, and destroyed families,” the memorandum states. “One online defamatory post gathered hundreds of comments, reactions, and shares. Not content to stop there, the women encouraged anyone who would listen to defame the food truck and leave false reviews regarding purported abuse and cult activity.” (Sometime after Bad Rooster filed its lawsuit, Abedi changed her Facebook post to use the words “cult like group” instead of “cult.”)

In a new affidavit, Abedi shares more about her experience as a member of Allerai’s tribe, saying she joined the group soon after getting out of rehab at 18. Around that time, her mother stopped attending Al-Anon meetings and opted for Allerai’s spiritual circle instead.

Abedi moved into a Minneapolis condo with a fellow adherent named Fraia and began attending “G” channeling sessions.

Once part of the community, she says, Allerai advised her not to associate with a good friend from rehab and also attempted to dissuade her from dating the man who would later become her husband. When Abedi became pregnant, Allerai and Fraia allegedly warned her that she should fear her partner because he was an immigrant from Iran and would take her child away. “I was reminded of this frequently,” she alleges in the document.

And while Abedi began to pull away from Soulful Journey, Ring started to lose contact with family and loved ones, her daughter says. “She stopped hanging out with her girlfriend group,” Abedi’s affidavit alleges. “She stopped coming to family functions like birthday parties or holidays. If she did show up to something it would be with another group member."

Ring skipped her beloved cousin’s funeral and Abedi’s wedding, and backed out of family events if they conflicted with Soulful Journey’s plans, Abedi claims.

She confronted her mom about the spiritual community’s aims, she says. “I asked her if Soulaire was truly channeling ‘God,’ why was ‘God’ choosing to meet with the same group of 30 people, in a basement, in Hopkins, Minnesota for years?” Abedi says. “I asked her if she thought ‘God’ would have more important things to do? I also asked her to consider if ‘God’ would charge an entrance fee to be in its presence.”

Abedi says communication with her mother has been sporadic, and Abedi knows little about Ring’s current situation. “When she divorced my father, she received a settlement of approximately $90,000 for her share of their property,” Abedi’s affidavit alleges. “She also received somewhere around $90,000 in spousal maintenance over about 10 years.”

But when her parents returned to court around 2018 or 2019, Abedi adds, “it appeared my mother could not afford an attorney as she was a self-represented litigant and she stated she was filing for bankruptcy.”

Then, this summer, Bad Rooster shared a Facebook post stating someone in its “family” had died. Abedi grew worried it was Ring who had passed away, she says, and she messaged Bad Rooster multiple times asking if her mom was OK. She also contacted some of Ring’s last known roommates.

In a message, Bad Rooster warned Abedi to “cease and desist” contact, she says, and her mother sent her a text saying she was “getting a taste of [her] own medicine.” Until then, Abedi had never spoken publicly about her family’s pain in connection to Soulful Journey.

For her part, Allerai posted a statement on Bad Rooster’s Facebook page last month, saying, “This country was founded on religious dissent, and simply because my beliefs are something other than the norm does not mean anybody has been mistreated or something untoward happens in this work.”

“Many people drawn to the work we do at Soulful Journey come from toxic families,” Allerai added. “I am not a cult leader, and I do not brainwash people. Those are lies. I teach people to develop healthy relationships.”

Despite unflattering news reports on Bad Rooster’s ties to Soulful Journey, the business continues to post images of customers forming lines to order its sandwiches and wings. And its fans are lavishing praise amid accusations that it bankrolls a “cult.”

“The cult of good chicken and helping out area food shelves is what you have,” one supporter wrote in a Facebook comment. “Something the average person will embrace.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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