Dragged Into the Light

<p><strong style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>IPPY Awards Silver Medalist (True Crime) 2022</strong></p><p><strong style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>As Seen on VICE TV's <em>The Devil You Know</em> Season 2</strong></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>Ohio housewife Sherry Shriner grew to prominence as a social media cult leader flourishing in the era of conspiracy theories and the 9/11 Truther movement.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>She preached the virtues of mysterious orgone energy and Christian prayer as defensive shields against the forces of darkness including Lucifer and his demons; reptilian shape-shifters masquerading as human elites; the New World Order; cell phone towers; even hostile UFOs that flamed out over her home visible only as shooting stars.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>Amazingly she built a coterie of passionate devotees. The more outrageous the lie the more fervent their belief.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>In 2017 she told follower Steven Mineo that his girlfriend Barbara Rogers was a witch who would kill him. A month later Steven was dead and Barbara was in jail charged with his murder.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>Steven's death proved Sherry's divinity to her followers but in reality he was just the latest casualty in a string of online trolling attacks that had left an earlier believer dead of suicide and still more cast into the outer darkness of cyberspace.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>Journalist Tony Russo follows Sherry Shriner's cult digs into its bizarre beliefs and reports on the shredded lives and reputations surrounding an otherwise nondescript woman who transformed herself into a web-based evangelist.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>The incredible story is documented in dogged reporting surviving internet chats and transcripts and voluminous police records.</span></p><p></p>