ANAHEIM, Calif. — The third time Hoyt Richards attempted to leave Eternal Values, the group to which he had given 20 years of his life and more than $4 million, he made it out.

Yet even then, Richards says he didn’t yet understand that he was fleeing a cult, only that he had to go.

“I wish I could say I woke up one night and said, ‘Oh my God, I think this is dangerous, I might be in a cult, I should get the [bleep] out of here,”” Richards says.

“It wasn’t even close to that.”

Richards, now 64, was a 16-year-old boy back then, searching for meaning in his life and a sense of belonging, when he met Frederick Von Mierers on a Nantucket beach one summer near the end of ’70s, he says in director Chris Smith‘s new HBO docuseries, “Bring Me the Beauties: A Model Cult.”

Von Mierers invited Richards into his circle, a sort of summer salon, where the older man entranced his acolytes with his knowledge of astrology, world religions, and New Age beliefs about how the enlightenment he promised might save humanity from coming calamities.

It was innocent enough stuff, Richards says of those early years of Eternal Values, the group took on. At least at first it was.

But within a few years, Eternal Values had changed into something darker, though Richards and most of the other members didn’t see it at the time.

By the mid ’80s, Von Mierers announced he was a “walk-in” alien, literally an entity from a planet called Arcturus, who’d entered his human body to teach the Eternal Values how to save humanity.

Discipline and control of the group’s membership became much stricter, with the attractive, successful people Von Mierers surrounded himself with expected to give all of their earnings to support Eternal Values.

For Richards, widely considered the world’s first male supermodel, his face still familiar to anyone who flipped through the pages of a fashion magazine in the ’80s and ’90s, that led over time to him giving the group more than $4 million, he says.

In 1990, Von Mierers died of AIDS-related illnesses around the same time Vanity Fair published an exposé on him and Eternal Values, which by then was selling overpriced and fraudulently appraised gemstones as cures for the spiritual ills of its members.

None of that changed how Richards felt about his guru and the group and their mission to save the planet.

But then he fell in love.

Triumph of the heart

“Things had gotten so bad it shifted after Frederick died to become like a really bad, dysfunctional family,” he says from his Los Angeles home on a recent Zoom chat. “The group is starting to fracture, half the people had left.

“The guy in charge was just highly abusive,” Richards says. “I think the favoritism that Frederick had shown me over the years, because I was the golden goose, had built up, and I was dealing with a lot of resentment and envy from that preferential treatment.”

While Eternal Values had relocated from New York to a lake house in North Carolina, Richards was still allowed to travel the globe for his high-flying modeling career.

And out there in the world beyond Eternal Values, Richards met someone.

“I had met a girl,” he says. “And you know, we were not allowed to have relationships. So covertly, I still had the apartment in New York, and I was still jet-setting all over the world in my Johnny Supermodel thing.

“She really unlocked my heart, and I started to experience this personal love that had been so frowned upon, and I’m like, ‘This doesn’t feel so bad. This actually feels amazing. She’s really in my corner, and she’s kind of amazing.’ And so I was really conflicted.”

Beyond the budding relationship, Richards also noticed that some of Von Mierer’s predictions of disaster and doom at the end of the millennium weren’t exactly happening.

“Freddie had predicted there were going to be these stores and tidal waves and all these things leading up to this apocalypse,” Richards says. “But I’m sitting in London or Paris, and I’m like, ‘Uh, nothing’s happening.’”

Back in North Carolina, Richards thought he needed to tell the other Eternal Values members that Von Mierers’ timeline seemed to be off.

“And man, I got attacked,” he says. “It’s like I was a blasphemer. Just screaming, ‘How could you go against our leader’s words?’ Just when I thought, ‘Well, it can’t get any worse, I’m like, ‘And also I’ve been seeing somebody.’”

It got worse.

The group dictated a fax for Richards to send to his girlfriend, saying he no longer would see her.

“Couldn’t even call her,” Richards says. “Never talked to her again.”

But the punishment opened something within him.

“That mistreatment of someone else was a really good indicator that unlocked the mind control,” he says of the cruelty that arrived with the fax. “When I saw someone like her who was clearly innocent, had no idea what was going on, being treated in that harsh manner, that was wrong.

“My critical thinking started to come back, and say, ‘I don’t think you really belong here,’” Richards says. “That was where it all kind of started. At the end of that, love is stronger than mind control.”

Unique journeys

Director Chris Smith’s films include “Operation Varsity Blues: The College Admissions Scandal,” the Emmy-winning HBO docuseries “100 Foot Wave,” and the Sundance Film Festival-winning documentary “American Movie.”

He met Richards years ago to interview him for a different film on a cult, though he didn’t end up using him in the final edit.

“He has become a cult expert, and when he shared his story with us, it was one of those things that once you heard it, you couldn’t forget,” Smith says.

About five years ago, Smith went back to Richards with a proposal to do something on him, Von Mierers, and Eternal Values.

“He has spent a lot of his life trying to find something positive to come out of his experience,” Smith says. “I think where he’s landed is by sharing his story; hopefully, it can help other people avoid similar experiences.

Smith’s filmography varies widely. “Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond” is a behind-the-scenes look at Jim Carrey, staying in character as Andy Kaufman, while shooting a biopic about the quirky late comedian. “Fyre” was a look at the promoter of a notorious music festival flop. “The Tiger King,” for which he was a producer, focused on an outlandish, lawbreaking zookeeper.

“It’s always about people that are on a journey or having an experience that is unique,” he says of what he looks for in his work. “Like people that have carved out their own lane is probably the common theme.

“Whether it’s Rick Singer doing it in a nefarious way with the college admissions scandal or a dreamer like Mark Borchardt [the subject of “American Movie”] who’s trying to make a film to better his life, right?

“In every case, they are people that have sort of strayed from the day in, day out where most people reside,” Smith says.

That’s what attracted him to Richards, Von Mierers, and the other members of Eternal Values, he adds. They, like his other subjects, were dreamers — though not all dreamers are alike.

“Hoyt’s dream was not to be the first male supermodel,” Smith says. “His dream was to be the best version of himself. Which in and of itself is interesting. Where people, by and large, are looking out for themselves, it was interesting to look at this group where their aims and goals at the outset were so altruistic.

“There were successful models, Ivy League-educated [people], business professionals. It wasn’t the types of people that an audience might assume would be followers in that sense.”

Fabio to the rescue

The first time Richards fled Eternal Values’ North Carolina headquarters, members of the group showed up at his New York apartment to bring him back.

The second time, he barely made it off the property.

The third time, he was gone for good, spending a week with his parents to begin to mend his fractured family, and then heading across country to Los Angeles, where his friend and fellow model Fabio Lanzoni — yes, that Fabio — gave him safe harbor.

“It was terrifying, and I went into what they call CPTSD, complex post-traumatic stress disorder,” Richards says of his escape. “But luckily, I landed at Fabio’s. Fabio had been one of my oldest, dearest friends, and I didn’t know where to turn. Fabio always had this open-door policy with me.

“He’s like, ‘Oh, come to L.A., you become a celebrity like me,’” Richards says in a very good Fabio-esque accent. “I literally show up at his doorstep, and I’m like a shadow of what he knows, and he could tell something severe had happened.

“And I think it says volumes about the type of man and friend he is that he just said, OK, something bad’s happened, but I know the last thing he needs is for me to ask questions. I’m just going to give him sanctuary and space and when he’s ready he can come talk to me.”

Richards stayed for almost a year, before eventually reconnecting with a former Eternal Values friend who’d left a few years before him. Soon they moved into an apartment together and slowly began unpacking their shared experiences and slowly coming to the awareness that they had, in fact, been part of a cult.

In the years since then, Richards has worked as an actor, writer and producer in film, but his heart’s work is in sharing his journey through 20 years in what he calls a “cultic relationship” with Von Mierers and Eternal Values.

“That word ‘cult’ is so triggering as far as the way the media’s painted cults over the years, like Jonestown or the Moonies or Charlie Manson,” he says. “There’s such crazy gravitas of what you think, like, ‘What are you guys doing? Sacrificing babies?’ So it’s a hole to dig out of when I say I was in a cult for 20 years.

“But if I say a cultic relationship, what I’m referring to is that framework where, in essence, you’ve unconsciously given your power away to someone else,” Richards says. “And it can become that unhealthy power dynamic where that person, now you’re seeing their approval, and they can potentially control and abuse you through that.”

He has tried to talk with his former friends and Eternal Values members, some of whom agree it was a cult, some of whom do not.

“People resist that and want to say, ‘Oh, it was just another step on my spiritual path,’” Richards says. “And like, yeah, from a 10,000-foot cosmic point of view, maybe that’s accurate. But what about the abuse? What about the [bleeping] abuse?”

So he tells his story, over and over again, choosing not to shove down the memories of his time in the group but to share as much and often as he can.

“I’m going to talk about this,” Richards says. “And if people are going to look at me sideways, so be it. But I’ve got to be transparent because this hiding and being secretive, [bleep] that.”

After a quick pause, Richards laughs and continues.

“I mean, initially I was out of control,” he says. “It would come up like the first sentence. I’d hop in a cab and be like, ‘Yeah, I need to go to 48th and Second — did I tell you I was in a cult? Yeah, 20 years!’

“They’re like, ‘TMI, dude, TMI. What the heck’s going on?’ So I had to learn that there’s a more appropriate way to handle that than blurt it out.

“But that was just part of the process.”

Postscript

As the call winds down, we ask where he is in his life, both in terms of his home and his recovery today.

“I live in L.A.,” Richards answers. “My fiancée, actually, the girl who I met who unlocked my heart, we’re getting married in September. That’s an amazing love story that took twists and turns but has a very happy ending.

“I think when you’ve gone through something like this, the idea of trying to unpack your life for someone is daunting,” he says. “So that she has seen me at my worst, that’s an incredible asset. And she’s stuck with me.

“We seemed to start and stop, and it seemed like every decade we’d find each other, try again. And then get to our 60s, and we’re like, ‘What are we doing? Come on. We love each other, we’ll find a way to work this out.

“And it’s been magical, and so that’s been really wonderful.”

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