When you hear that someone comes from a religious family, there is a wide range of what that could mean – from going to church twice a week to living in an actual cult.

OP’s friends were sadly raised in the latter kind.

This story isn’t about me but two people I’m friends with. We’ll call one Rae and one Justin. I’m posting this with Justin’s permission, and he’ll probably be reading the thread.

Some background: Rae and Justin grew up in an extremely restrictive, insular religious community that borders on being a cult.

They drifted toward each other due to their shared doubts, and ended up married because of it.

They both read a lot from a young age, even though reading outside of the religion’s material was discouraged, and so both of them grew increasingly skeptical and dissatisfied with their environment due to having this peek into the outside world.

In high school, this shared mindset brought them together, and they started secretly dating. For context, dating was absolutely strictly verboten in this religious community. You went straight from single to married with zero in-between.

So when Justin and Rae’s parents caught them dating, they forced them to get married.

Then they escaped and divorced, but remained friends and even kept living together for a time.

Rae and Justin started living together as husband and wife, but unfortunately for their families, putting those two together doubled their resiliency, and together they cooked up a plan to get out.

They set up a secret bank account at a bank outside the religious community’s influence, since their families had access to their accounts, and everyone who worked at the main bank was also in the same community and gossiped about everyone’s financial transactions.

They started squirreling away money in small amounts the families wouldn’t question being missing from their paychecks. When they were 20, they finally had enough money to start over, and they got out.

They basically left their house in the dead of night with nothing but what could fit in their car and uprooted to live across the country.

Pretty quickly after they moved, they decided to get amicably divorced, since they never wanted to be married anyway. They still lived together for a while, and basically became something between platonic roommates and each other’s only family.

Over time, they started dating other people. Some partners were scared off by the weird relationship between them, but most got it, and understood that Justin and Rae had basically bonded through mutual trauma.

I also met both of them during this time, and we became close friends.

When he was in an accident, though, she was right by his side.

This whole time, both their families and other members of their community were relentlessly harassing them. People were showing up at their house at all hours, and they had reason to believe people were trying to steal their identities over the years, though they’d fortunately both put a freeze on their credit, so nothing ever came of it.

Then Justin had a bad accident. A really bad accident. He was on his bike and a car blew through a stop sign without slowing down and plowed right into him.

He had to be rushed to the hospital and landed in the ICU. Rae was his emergency contact, and I was with her and some other friends when she got the call. I immediately drove her to the hospital with a couple of other people, and she was melting down (understandably).

The hospital staff wouldn’t let us all in when we got there, but they let Rae in.

She came out periodically to let us know what was going on. Justin wasn’t unconscious, but he was totally out of it and didn’t seem to know she was there, probably from the painkillers.

She was convinced he had permanent debilitating brain damage and basically the group of us were just soothing her and reassuring her it would be fine.

A friend of ours who worked at the hospital as an MRI tech was also stopping by when she could on her breaks and calming down Rae.

We’d been there all night and part of the day at this point, and the medical staff was giving us reason to be hopeful.

At least she was until his parents threw her out.

But things got worse.

To this day, no one knows how they found out, but 14 hours after Justin’s accident, his parents, uncles, and grandfather showed up.

They immediately had all of us removed from the ICU, Rae included.

Unfortunately, as his ex-wife, she was no longer his legal next-of-kin and had no rights against his blood family.

She was in a complete panic the rest of them didn’t really understand.

At this point, she was absolutely hysterical and inconsolable. She was convinced Justin’s family would hurt him. I’m ashamed to say all three of us that were there with her thought she was overreacting.

We all knew Rae and Justin had left a messed up situation, but it wasn’t like his own family would do anything to impede his recovery.

She was getting angry with us for trying to calm her down, and tried to explain that according to their religion, she and Justin deserved punishment from God, and only the greatest suffering could prompt repenting and redemption.

She said their families embraced this thinking and wanted them to suffer, because it would prove that they did the wrong thing by leaving, and suffering would drive them back to the fold.

She said as long as Justin was with his family, he wouldn’t be safe.

Our friend who worked for the hospital came and found Rae at that point.

She made Rae swear up and down she wouldn’t tell anyone she told her this, because she could get in deep trouble for releasing privileged information to someone unauthorized, but she’d caught wind that Justin’s parents were aggressively demanding the hospital release him into their care, and they were involving lawyers.

The hospital was currently refusing, because Justin wasn’t stable enough to leave, but our friend warned Rae that as soon as Justin got to be stable, or the lawyers scared the hospital enough, it’s possible the parents would be able to take Justin.

This shocked the rest of us. Realizing his parents were not only willing to remove Justin from the hospital that had saved his life in the condition he was still in, but were actively trying to do it made us really “get” for the first time why Rae was going out of her head with fear.

Knowing that his family would kill him just to prove a point, his ex-wife started calling in tips on all of their dirty laundry.

At this point, Rae snapped into do-or-die mode.

Convinced that Justin was about to literally die if she didn’t act, she decided she would do everything in her power to start a fire at home so that Justin’s family would want to run back to put it out.

And this wasn’t too hard, because she had a lot of dirt on the whole community she came from. Like a madwoman, she started blowing the whistle all over Justin’s family.

• She called the IRS’s fraud hotline and detailed all the ways that the family business was committing tax fraud.
• She submitted an ATF tip about how that same family business was illegally selling firearms without a license and without following any of the proper protocols, and was knowingly selling guns to convicted felons.
• She reported one of Justin’s uncles for owning several guns as a convicted felon.
• She also reported Justin’s mom’s unlicensed day care “business,” which was apparently extremely shady, including having over 30 children packed into one house, with Justin’s mom as the only adult and many of the childcare duties being farmed out to Justin’s 12- and 14-year-old sisters.
• She called CPS on Justin’s uncles and his parents for keeping their children out of school, and for physical abuse in one uncle’s case.

In all of these reports, she provided extensive details.

She finished her calls and emails, and then she waited.

We all waited for several hours, and nothing happened.

He woke up enough to save himself from his weird family, but the chickens she sent out into the wild eventually came home to roost.

Then, miraculously, Justin become lucid enough to understand what was going on and make his own decisions, and he kicked his family out again.

From there began a slow but steady path to recovery.

In all the relief and excitement to see Justin on the mend, we’d almost forgotten about Rae’s campaign of desperation, until a couple of weeks later, when the screaming voicemails started pouring in to both of them.

First, the business was being investigated by the IRS, then it was being investigated for illegal firearms dealing. Then the daycare was getting investigated.

At first, Rae felt a little guilty, but then she was like, “You know what? No regrets. They would have killed Justin.”

From what they’ve been able piece together in the year and a half since this happened, the business has gone under, and the daycare is shuttered. The uncle is six months into a new five-year prison sentence for firearm possession. CPS investigated, which scared the heck out of the family, but nothing really came of it, which is especially sad in the case of the cousins being physically abused.

So now at least the next generation of kids will have more of a shot.

That said, the parents are now too scared to keep the kids home from school, and with the unlicensed daycare shut down, the mom’s not exploiting her daughters’ labor anyway, so she has no incentive to keep them home.

So Justin’s little siblings are at least getting their education.

Justin and Rae are both happy and thriving. Justin unfortunately will never fully recover from the accident. He has some permanent neurological damage that results in tremors.

But he’s pumped to be alive, he can work a full-time job, he can still be pretty physically active, and as far as I’m concerned, he wins.

This is one wild ride for Reddit!

The top comment is a fellow escapee who says Rae did good.

And they say OP was great to see the truth.

Most people have very good reasons for cutting off parents.

Always trust people’s boundaries.

And don’t try to change their minds.

Whew, this was quite the tale.

My heart was in my throat for a while there!

If you thought that was an interesting story, check this one out about a man who created a points system for his inheritance, and a family friend ends up getting almost all of it.