Actor Michael Douglas, 82, says he once talked his way out of a cult’s threat to kill him, recounting the ordeal during an appearance on “The Joe Rogan Experience.”
Douglas told Rogan that cult members invited him to a dinner, telling him to bring a “lady friend” along. The evening, he said, was designed to build toward “a cathartic moment, being all together, kind of an emotional moment.”
“We got to dessert, and they said, ‘We’ve been trying to reach you, and you just don’t get it. You don’t get it. So, you’re going to have to be eliminated,'” Douglas recalled.
When Rogan asked what exactly he was failing to “get,” Douglas said the group wanted him “to join, to give yourself up, to be part of it.”
“They were going to whack me,” he said. “I remember there was a long silence, and I said, ‘Well, you’ve done it, haven’t you?’ And they said, ‘Yeah,’ … and a big, long pause.”
Douglas said his date at the dinner began crying and “peeing in her pants,” and that both of them believed they were about to be killed. Instead, the group let him leave.
“Then I said, ‘I’m going to leave now,’ and they said, ‘Yeah, you better,'” Douglas said, adding that any sudden movement on his part could have changed the outcome. “It’s strange. I’ve never had many experiences, but there’s numbness. … Kind of this whole numbness just comes over you, or it did in my case. Just was frozen.”
Douglas identified the group as being led by Mel Lyman and said he reported the incident to police afterward. He also described living for a time in a commune called Mountain Drive in Santa Barbara, California, during what he called his “hippie days,” describing it as “organic” and informal.
Memoir details family struggles
The cult story surfaced as Douglas promotes his new memoir, “One Helluva Ride,” which also covers heavy drug and alcohol use, affairs, and a “rehab or divorce” ultimatum from his first wife, Diandra.
In the book, Douglas describes his father, Hollywood star Kirk Douglas, as “a flawed man with a ferocious temper and a burning ambition.” He wrote that his father’s temper frightened him and his brother Joel, recalling Kirk saying, “I yell and scream because I care,” and noting that Joel bore the brunt of it.
Douglas also wrote at length about his son Cameron’s addiction, which played out partly in New York. He said Cameron became addicted to cocaine and heroin, dealt methamphetamine, and once carried a Glock for protection, flashing the weapon at a drugstore in an incident that nearly led police to shoot him.
At one point, Douglas wrote, he arranged for two large men to help abduct Cameron and force him into rehab.
“When we came back, I asked to hold the leash. Cam figured it out. He looked at me, like, ‘Dad, how could you?’ Like I had broken his heart. Again,” Douglas wrote.
Cameron resisted once he realized what was happening, and Douglas abandoned the plan. Cameron later served seven years in prison following a federal drug case; Douglas wrote that a heroin relapse behind bars led a judge to add 4½ years to his sentence, and that Cameron spent two years in solitary confinement.
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