| No Images? Click here   By Samantha Storey and Nick BaumannThis was a head spinning week for news. Kavanaugh, Florence and Manafort took the headlines, but in the middle of the frenzy, HuffPost published a stunner of an investigation. Meet Colin Garland, a man who presented himself as an intrepid adventurer, a leader of high school and college trips abroad to the jungles of Costa Rica or the wilds of Siberia, but in reality he preyed on young women barely into their teens.In conversations with HuffPost over months, women described how they were initially enchanted by Garland’s energy and flattered by the sustained attention he lavished upon them. He made them feel special. They believed his intentions were pure: He wanted to help, not harm.Until they got older, and the spell wore off. Soon came sex ceremonies and masturbation with crystals. It's a truly bizarre story, and shows how the power of grooming can be used to gain trust and ultimately lead to detrimental relationships.Melissa Jeltsen and Dana Liebelson reported. Here is Melissa on how they got the story, but be sure to read it before you hear about the behind the scenes. There are spoilers galore.What was the seed of this story?I (Melissa) was scrolling through Facebook one day and saw a post by Laura Quinn, who is the younger sister of a friend of mine from high-school. In her post, she described a horrific experience she’d had after traveling overseas, with a man who positioned himself as her spiritual mentor. Then, months later, I noticed other women had begun reaching out to Laura with similar experiences. I told Dana Liebelson, another HuffPost reporter, about the claims, to get her thoughts. We were in the midst of writing another long-term investigative story together. She was intrigued, and we decided it was worth exploring further.Where did you begin with the reporting?When we first started reporting, less than a dozen women had reached out to Laura to share their experiences with Colin Garland. That number later grew to more than three-dozen. We both reached out to women on the list; because I knew Laura and her family personally, we decided Dana would take all interviews with them. We found that many women had kept emails and messages with Garland from that period, which helped back up the claims.What was most challenging?The most difficult part was capturing the complexity of what the women saw as abusive and harmful relationships. (Garland, meanwhile, argued in correspondence that his general relationships were consensual.) There’s nothing inherently wrong with an adult male caring about his female students and mentoring them. But as we learned more about how he operated, we began to identify the ways in which he crossed real boundaries, such as turning conversations explicitly sexual, but bringing up sex in the context of spiritual development, particularly with women in vulnerable positions. Many of these women truly saw him as a wise, spiritual leader, and there was a real power imbalance. From that role, he pursued sex.What was most surprising?How repetitive his behavior was. Dana and I would compare notes with the different women, and they were almost interchangeable. We’ve been getting emails since the story came out from other former students of his, still hitting the same points. We were also surprised to see how much his behavior—and how women responded to him—resembled a cult. He was very successful at building trust through these spectacular claims about magic. The women were really open to believing him. We also thought that Garland would be interested in sitting down with us to explain his side of the story, but despite repeated inquiries, he never did.More must reads you may have missed
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