SPEAKER PROFILE
Inspiring Positive Change
What happens when the person who had everything — the Ivy League education, the extraordinary career, the looks, the money, the connections — gives it all away for a lie? And what does it take to bring yourself back?​​
Hoyt Richards spent twenty years living that question from the inside and the next twenty answering it. He is a Princeton graduate and former football player who became one of the most successful male models in the world. At the same time, he spent his peak earning years under rule of a controlling religious group in New York City and then the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina. He was not naive. He was not uneducated. He was not weak. He was a specific kind of human being with a specific kind of hunger, and he encountered a specific kind of person who knew exactly how to manipulate it.​​
In the wake of years believing he was doing good for the world, Hoyt went on to deconstruct the nature of mind control and abuse and now specializes in "cultic" relationships of all kinds. He speaks publicly about manipulation psychology, identity, accountability, love and recovery. In addition, he helps individuals, families and organizations understand and overcome the impact of coercive control dynamics while directing them through the navigation of cultic situations.
His story is not a cautionary tale about cults. It is a story about not knowing who you are, and what happens when someone offers to tell you. He is not teaching from a textbook. He is a man who lived it, survived it, and developed a language to explain the importance of identity, how it is cultivated, but vulnerable, if someone wants to either own it or erase it.
TALKING POINTS
Specialty
.​​Hoyt speaks from experience rather than from an elusive theoretical framework. He offers perspective on a unique psychological architecture he has developed over years of public engagement with this material. Each of his talks is available as a keynote, a workshop, or a panel discussion, and each can be customized in length and emphasis for specific audiences.