Just ten years ago, Huey was broken, hungry, completely isolated from friends and family, living a life completely at odds with the privilege he had.
Now 37, Hughie is privately educated and beloved by doting family and friends as the life of the party, but she has fallen under the spell of Ann Craig, an inexplicably powerful woman who describes herself as a “self-help guru.”
“My typical day was completely crazy. I’d wake up, write down my dreams, which might take an hour, and then I’d analyse them using the methods Anne taught me, which might take two hours,” Hughie, who didn’t want to give his surname, told Metro.
“At this point, I hadn’t had breakfast yet, so I called her and asked if it was okay for me to eat. If she said no, it meant I was using food to suppress my emotions, which in turn was hindering my ability to heal. So I carried on working for another hour or two.”
“I was really skinny at the time, weighed six stone and the sad thing is I’d never had any issues with eating before but she made me really scared of food.”
The relationship made Hughie anxious and on edge, making her dependent on Anne for all of her daily decisions: when to sleep, when to eat, when to start and finish work, etc. She felt completely isolated and had no control over how she spent her time each day.
Hughie claims that Ann told him that if he quit his job he would get cancer, be raped or suffer some other horrible fate.
“I was not allowed to watch TV, read books or listen to the radio,” she claims. “I had no sugar, salt, dairy or other stimulants in my diet. I subsisted on chickpeas, carrots, grated beets and olive oil.”
Hughie met Ann Craig when he was 22. Ann had a reputation among Hughie’s friends as a “wonderful spiritual healer” but had recently moved to London and felt lost in his new city.
The therapist’s first visit to Anne’s south London home in January 2010 was a positive one. She greeted Hughie warmly and brought her a cup of chamomile tea in her cozy kitchen before taking her upstairs to the therapy room to begin her “treatment.”
The work included dream interpretation, automatic writing, and drawing with her left hand on large pieces of paper, which Anne would analyze and burn “to release bad energy.”
Although Huey had never sought the help of a therapist before, he trusted his therapist and soon began receiving guidance from a life coach.
“Ann was very good at identifying each person’s weaknesses and exploiting them,” she explains. “It’s incredibly appealing to confide all your fears and secrets to someone and be greeted with compassion and warmth and told, when you’re young and impressionable, that you’ll be healed and have a wonderful life ahead of you. I had never met someone so sure and confident, who claimed to have all the answers, and I was looking for that guidance. Little did I know that she was brainwashing me.”
Hughie saw Anne for weekly sessions for £100 – there was no time limit but they could last up to four hours – but the practice soon began to turn sinister. Anne told him she had been orally raped by a family member as a child, a memory Hughie said she had repressed.
Huey alleges that over the years, Ann painted graphic and extreme images of sexual abuse that were completely unfactual and extremely disturbing, as well as planting many more false memories.
After a year of sessions, Huey was told he needed to isolate himself from his family in order to recover. “She said, ‘Come home for Christmas. It’ll be your last Christmas with your family.’ I cut them off, and then I was totally under Anne’s control,” Huey alleges. “She’d say, ‘We come into this world alone, and we leave this world alone.’ And I believed her.”
To her surprise, Anne has told similar stories to other clients. Hughie’s friend Phippsi came to Anne about her struggles with her sexuality, only to be told that she was sexually abused as a child. She is one of several women who share their stories with filmmaker Grace Hughes-Hallett in the six-part Tortoise podcast series, Dangerous Memories.
Another client, Victoria Keyser, also spoke about her treatment at the hands of Anne, telling The Telegraph: “When Anne approached me for treatment for her eating disorder at the age of 20, I became a breeding ground for the abuse of power under the guise of ‘therapy’.”
Like Hughie, Victoria was told by a close family member that she had been sexually abused.
“We uncovered sordid secret after sordid secret – murder, infidelity, unethical and illegal financial dealings. It seemed like literally everyone close to me was hiding some sick secret and trying to harm me,” she told The Telegraph. “Their love was a lie, a sham and they were trying to use me in immoral ways. Every relationship became toxic.”
Huey says her trust in her family was shattered after Anne told her she had been sexually abused as a child. She cut off all ties and moved away, so her family couldn’t find her.
She found a seedy art studio above a car wash, stopped taking calls from friends, and spent all her free time creating art with Ann. After weekly sessions and rent, Hughie had about £20 a week left to live on. Soon she found Ann’s house a haven for comfort.
“It was the middle of winter and I would be invited into her warm, cozy home for hot tea,” Huey recalled. “Ann spoke to me with a gentle voice and was my only source of comfort, homeliness and love.”
The following year, Huey began boarding with a woman named Lee, who looked after him day and night. “I became so dependent on her that I had to let her tell me when to eat, when to sleep, when to finish work. I was like a really weak child,” she recalled.
Hughie continued to believe terrible, completely unfounded things had happened to him, including that his mother, Sarah, had abused him as a baby and taken obscene photographs of him for a paedophile ring.
Meanwhile, Sarah and Hughie’s stepfather, Henry, were going crazy: they contacted the police and hired a private investigator to track down Hughie, who went to Ann’s address after learning that she was a regular visitor.
Sarah tried to track down her daughter three times over a six-year period, but each time the cursed Huey ran away from her. Ann reported Sarah to the police for harassment, and they began an investigation in 2014. Ann was arrested and referred to Child Protective Services, but there was insufficient evidence to prosecute, and no charges were ever filed.
During the police investigation, Ann was forbidden from contacting Huey, but was allowed to keep in touch with others, but by this point Huey’s life had fallen apart.
Anne was cleared of all charges six months later. She contacted Huey, who eventually worked with Anne again for over two years, but the therapist’s powers had weakened.
“I started gigging on the street, making my own money, and becoming independent for the first time,” Huey explains, “and then I was talking to someone on the street about spiritual gurus and how abusive, manipulative and controlling they were. Somehow, something clicked.”
Huey asked Ann to distance herself from him, but she got angry and hung up the phone, and the two never spoke to each other again. However, it took a long time for Huey to truly break free from Ann’s clutches.
When Hughie met his current partner at age 29, he decided he needed to confront his mother about the abuse allegations. Sarah responded to the allegations with patience and compassion, but it took another five years for Hughie to stop believing the lies he’d been told.
Now their relationship has been repaired, but Hughie is left with questions about how Ann gained so much control over his life.
She explains, “Sometimes I think she really did believe everything she was telling us and just didn’t know what she was doing. Other times I’m sure there was a lot of intent and coercion behind her actions, but honestly I don’t know which.”
But to Fipsi, it’s much more clear-cut: She said on the podcast that the women who worked with Anne were “victims of a sick, disturbing cult masquerading as caring, kind, knowledgeable women who always know best.”
Six years of estrangement from her family, plus her time with Anne, took a significant physical and emotional toll on Hughie. “For a long time I felt emotionally trapped in a lot of ways. I care a lot about what other people think, I find social situations quite difficult, I have trouble making decisions and I have a lot of trust and commitment issues,” she explains.
“But the worst thing that happened to me with Anne wasn’t that I rebelled against my family, it was that it exploded inside of me and I began to fear who I was. I’m still recovering from that.”
“Ann put so much pressure on me to dig up the dark memories of the sexual abuse that I began to have horrible intrusive thoughts and fears that I was a bad person. It was just my brain’s way of dealing with stress. It’s one thing to hate and fear your parents, but another to hate and fear yourself.”
“It’s a really dark place,” Huey added.
“People have a good understanding of OCD in terms of the behavior, but not so much about the invisible OCD – the obsessions that stop you from living your life. And I’ve spent years recovering from it.”
Ann Craig’s team’s thoughts
Daniel Jennings, a partner at law firm Shakespeare Martineau, who is representing Mr Craig, told Metro:
“Following a lengthy investigation by the Metropolitan police, all charges against Mr Craig were dropped in 2014.
“Ms. Craig believes this is yet another round of malicious allegations that have been previously made against her, designed to cause her harm and damage. These allegations, and allegations of a similar nature, have continually been presented to Ms. Craig but to date have not been substantiated with factual evidence. For the avoidance of doubt, Ms. Craig strongly denies all of the allegations presented and it is her position that there is no truth to any of the allegations.
“The High Court has previously ruled that allegations against Mr Craig of a similar nature to those alleged in this lawsuit were ‘without merit’.”
“Ms Craig hopes that this will bring to an end the targeted attacks against her which she believes have been orchestrated by a third party and which have caused unprecedented distress and harm to her and her family.”
- “Dangerous Memories” is a six-part investigative series from Tortoise Media. Click here to find out more.
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