Devotions with Daniella: Why Every Cult Leader Needs a "Skinny White Woman"

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:01]Daniela, we are reading from the second book of Daniela, The Culting of America, one of my favorite chapters. This is chapter one about charismatic leadership, part two, and his skinny white woman.

[00:00:15]And before all you bros flock to the comments to say, "Oh, read by a skinny white woman." Yeah, that's why I wrote the book.

[00:00:24]The guru isn't usually doing it alone.

[00:00:27]Time and again, when an American cult has come to public attention, often because it's crossed some very clear lines and had victims or bodies to show for it, we find, very near the cult leader, a skinny white woman pulling some of the strings.

[00:00:44]When NXIVM was all over the national news in 2017 to 2018, and it came to light that Allison Mack was one of Keith Raniere's lieutenants who helped with his schemes to groom and sexually abuse women, I was heartbroken. Not sweet Chloe from Smallville, but also intrigued. Why her?

[00:01:04]Why in culty groups did there seem to be so many women like her?

[00:01:09]Thin, white, overly dedicated to the leader, with more access to him and more privileges than most of the other members.

[00:01:18]Outliers exist, as they always do, but the few exceptions only underscore how dominant My own childhood had been very much marked by our leader's death, when his skinny white woman took over as the anointed leader of the cult.

[00:01:34]When the news could speak of nothing other than Jeffrey Epstein and his teenage sex trafficking ring, there she was again, the skinny white woman in the body of Ghislaine Maxwell. I saw her everywhere, in the matriarchs of the Duggar family, in the woman at the center of One Taste, Hollywood's infamous orgasm cult.

[00:01:52]And I started to notice the pattern in so many American culty groups, going all the way back to the beginning of the country.

[00:02:00]What was it about the skinny white woman that made her necessary to the success of the cult leader and his establishment of coercive control?

[00:02:09]I knew instinctively that both her whiteness and her skinniness were important. I could think of countless aunties who fit this description in the communes of my childhood.

[00:02:20]Always close to the highest leaders, plugged deeply into the organizational structure, bullying other women and girls about their behavior, including their weight. Specifically in the Children of God, she was a former Dallas Cowboys cheerleader.

[00:02:36]These women at the top were always white, even though we lived in countries where most people were not white.

[00:02:42]Their significance didn't hit me until a fellow survivor of the Children of God, who's a woman of color, commented on one of my Facebook posts.

[00:02:50]What? Do cult leaders not like voluptuous women or something?

[00:02:54]In that joke, the truth revealed itself.

[00:02:57]Of course, it had nothing to do with the women being voluptuous or not. It was the whiteness that mattered. That was exactly the point.

[00:03:05]I took to TikTok eager to explain my eureka moment and to see if anyone thought it had merit.

[00:03:11]I explained that the cult leader, whether a man or a woman, often has a skinny white woman dedicated to them and [clears throat] playing a very important role in the cult.

[00:03:20]One of her many jobs is to whitewash the sins of the leader to both members and outer society.

[00:03:27]Her power comes from the white supremacist and patriarchal and Christian concept of the pure, chaste white woman.

[00:03:35]Her very presence acts as a civilizing agent in way in a way we've seen white women play throughout history.

[00:03:43]In regular organizations as well, women, often white, often skinny, are let into the leadership in order to whitewash what could be perceived as the sins of the organization.

[00:03:54]With this realization, I also saw that I had played that role in the US Army.

[00:04:01]Thinking I was fighting hard for the equality of women in the military, but in reality, maybe being more of a shield against critical complaint.

[00:04:09]How can the US Army possibly be a toxic place for women if Captain Danielle Mestenek has been so successful there?

[00:04:16]Doing the things they usually only let the boys do.

[00:04:20]In my memoir, I tried to tell a more nuanced story. That I was broken by playing a game never designed for me to win.

[00:04:28]All while trying not to bleed to death from the shards of the glass ceiling I was helping shatter.

[00:04:34]I stopped playing the role of the skinny white woman. Stopped being the perfect proud woman veteran who would never say a critical word.

[00:04:42]I was not afraid of calling out the Army Colonels and Generals and the cult uncles for their bad behavior.

[00:04:49]By letting it all come out, I had let it and myself get ugly.

[00:04:55]Which goes against everything the skinny white woman is supposed to do.

[00:04:59]On social media, my musings about the skinny white woman concept went viral with hundreds, then hundreds of thousands of people liking, saving, and commenting on my posts.

[00:05:11]It turns out I'm not the only one who's noticed her.

[00:05:14]Both in cults and in countless forms of our regular organizations.

[00:05:19]In Cultish, Amanda Montell noted the pattern of power abuse with an older man at the top and by his side a click of fair-skinned 20- and 30-something women who acquiesce to exchanging their whiteness and sexuality for a few more grains of power.

[00:05:38]Artist and anti-racism educator Amanda K. Gross names this dynamic mistress syndrome in her book White Women Get Ready: How Post-traumatic Mistress Syndrome Leads to Ant Terry's.

[00:05:51]And she doesn't pull any punches. You can get that book in my shop, too.

[00:05:55]In her words, "The mistress is not simply an accessory to white supremacy.

[00:05:59]She is its loyal lieutenant, actively maintaining the master's house for her own comfort."

[00:06:05]Gross explains that white women have historically secured their survival and limited power by not by dismantling oppressive systems, but by upholding them, smoothing their brutal edges with a smile, and protecting the very men who built them.

[00:06:22]It She describes the mistress as someone who weaponizes her whiteness and performative vulnerability.

[00:06:28]She shields patriarchal and racist power structures from scrutiny, but also brutalizes people who threaten the status quo.

[00:06:37]It is a pattern that stretches from the blood-soaked cotton fields of the American South to the sterile cubicles of today's corporate cults.

[00:06:45]Mistress syndrome captures exactly the role the skinny white woman plays. She's not a victim, not an innocent bystander.

[00:06:53]She is the system's secret weapon, bought off with scraps of proximity to power in exchange for her loyalty and silence. And please note that all of the skinny white women who were around Donald Trump are now gone.

[00:07:09]Choosing to protect the master's house Oh, and make no mistake, loyalty is a choice. Choosing to protect the master's house while others burn outside is still choosing the master's house.

[00:07:20]As more than one black woman in my life has confided to me, Gross white writes, "If white women would get their act together, oppression wouldn't stand a chance."

[00:07:31]Even when a woman seems to be in power, such as the CEO of a major corporation, or even your #girlboss neighbor who's making bank with her work-from-home scheme, she's still propping up a system ruled by men.

[00:07:45]The authors of Feminism for the 99% a manifesto tells us that this kind of executive feminism enables the forces supporting global capital to portray themselves as progressive while maintaining the status quo.

[00:08:00]The skinny white woman softens the cruel image of capitalism with her perceived sensitivity and nurturing nature.

[00:08:07]In The Trouble with White Women, a counter history of feminism, Kayla Schuller writes, "When shed by the CEO, white women's tears become a commodity, an asset, and a safeguard. Proof that capitalism can have a heart.

[00:08:23]The emotional feminist CEO secures her own likability and cleanses or white washes the means of production at the same time, sanctifying runaway profits with the humanity streaming down her face."

[00:08:37]Through social media conversations and my own research into intersectional feminism, the image of the skinny white woman began to take form. She's the Allison Mack to NXIVM's Keith Raniere, the Ghislaine Maxwell to Jeffrey Epstein, the Melania to Donald Trump, the Rebecca Paltrow to Adam Neumann, and any number of evangelical pastors' wives.

[00:08:58]She is thin because in our culture being skinny is ideal and a visual representation of self-sacrifice.

[00:09:06]More in chapter four on how cult leaders weaponize this desire to be thin.

[00:09:11]She is at once both a role model and proof that the ideal is achievable.

[00:09:16]For those outside the cult, she serves as an attraction or a distraction. In short, she is exactly who you want by your side if you are sex trafficking children as Ghislaine Maxwell and my own cult leader Karen Mama Maria Zerby demonstrated so well.

[00:09:36]You can get signed copies of The Culting of America attached here or listen to me read it to you anywhere you get your audiobooks.