At the end of a single road on New Zealand's West Coast, in a valley folded between dark ranges, several hundred people live as one body. They own nothing. They marry whom they are told. The women wear blue and cover their hair. For half a century the country called it strange and looked away.
It was not strange. It was dangerous.
Into Gloriavale is the definitive account of New Zealand's most notorious religious community - the work of one man who walked away from a plane crash convinced God had chosen him, built a kingdom in the bush, and ruled it absolutely until the day he died. Both of the men who led Gloriavale, the founder and his anointed successor, would be convicted of sexually abusing the young people in their care. Between them they led the community for its entire existence. Between them, the law extracted less than a single year behind bars.
Drawing on court judgments, the findings of a Royal Commission, and the testimony of those who escaped, Daniel Beckett traces the rise and unravelling of a community held together by fear: the children put to work before they could read; the women a court would finally rule were never volunteers and never free; the son who walked out to save his children; the brother who stayed, and did not survive it.
This is a story about the thin line between faith and control - how a place can look beautiful and benevolent on its surface and be merciless underneath, and how the people raised inside it can come to love the very walls that hold them. It is about the journalists, the courts, and above all the leavers who finally forced a country to look.
An independent, unofficial examination of the community at the heart of the documentary that has brought Gloriavale back to the world's attention.
The valley kept its secrets for fifty years. Not any more.
