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Greg Baer, the founder of Real Love, told his followers to call him Daddy and held them in his lap as if they were babies. Some allege the encounters went far beyond that.
From his sprawling property in the rolling hills of northwest Georgia, Greg Baer built a self-help organization with a deeply human mission.
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“We teach the real meaning of love, replacing anger and confusion with peace and confidence in individual lives and relationships,” reads the website for his group, the Real Love Company.
Baer has written more than a dozen books, hosted hundreds of seminars and released thousands of online videos. He claims to have transformed the lives of more than 450,000 people.
In some ways, he’s an unlikely spiritual guru. Baer was an eye surgeon in the 1990s who, in his own telling, got hooked on drugs and became suicidal, leading him on a search for “genuine happiness.”
His philosophy centers on the concept of unconditional love. Baer believes that most people’s problems stem from being raised by parents unable or unwilling to offer the sort of love that seeks nothing in return.
He himself fills that void, telling his followers to call him Daddy and holding them in his lap as if they were babies. At retreats, attendees would often line up for the opportunity.
Some say the results have been transformative. They broke bad habits, healed broken relationships and became part of a close-knit community that stretched to the U.K. But over the years, Baer’s organization took on cultlike qualities, according to interviews with 10 former members and their relatives.
He acted as the ultimate authority, directing their lives in matters large and small. When they were ready to date. Whom they should marry. Many were encouraged to convert to Mormonism. Some were instructed to cut out family members. They didn’t dare to question or defy him because they feared being pushed out of the community.
A select group of his followers, all women, said they received special attention in the form of extended private time with him at his home. In some of these one-on-one sessions, he’d hold them in his arms — but only after he first instructed them to take off all their clothes.
And in some cases, according to two lawsuits and interviews with four women, he allegedly took things even further.
She grew up in an upscale Maryland suburb, a “little brown girl” trying to find her place in a sea of white kids. The daughter of Indian immigrants, Veena Dinavahi committed herself to excelling at school, soccer, the violin, musicals, mock trial competitions, you name it.
“I was incredibly high-achieving,” she said.
But as she moved through high school, a series of student suicides cast a shadow over her hometown of Severna Park. There was the girl who sat in front of Veena in her calculus class. That girl’s boyfriend. Veena’s childhood best friend.
And on it went, leading Veena to become depressed and suicidal herself.
By the time she enrolled at the College of William & Mary, double-majoring in physics and philosophy, she had attempted suicide multiple times. Her parents were desperate — traditional therapy didn’t appear to be working.
So Veena’s mother turned to the internet, came across a blog post about Real Love and spoke to the woman who wrote it, a mother whose son had been suicidal.
“She told me to call Greg immediately,” Veena’s mother, Ramani Dinavahi, said in an interview. “I was like, ‘Oh my gosh. I found the solution.’”
Veena, then 19, was skeptical but she agreed to a family road trip down south. Baer lived in a large house on a 3-acre property with a pool and lake access in Rome, Georgia.
When she sat across from him for the first time, he said something right off the bat that resonated.
“I know how to be happy. If you want, and only if you really want, I can teach you how.”
By then, Veena had seen so many mental health professionals she had lost count, but none had presented her condition as a choice. So now this burly older man with a commanding voice and a penetrating stare had her full attention.
What he said next was similarly provocative — that her hopelessness stemmed from a lifetime of not feeling loved. Baer told her his personal story of battling drug addiction and depression and how he concluded that true happiness can only be achieved when someone receives unconditional love. It was something that even her parents wouldn’t have been able to provide because they had never been taught how.
When that first session ended, Veena’s head was spinning.
“But that was the first time I felt like maybe there is hope,” she said. “Maybe there is actually a way out.”
She went all in. Veena began talking to Baer multiple times a day. Soon her boyfriend was doing the same. Then came a pregnancy (which Baer blessed), a wedding (which he officiated in his living room) and a Mormon baptism (which he performed).
Veena had been an atheist with dreams of becoming a physicist. But now Baer was directing all aspects of her life, she said, and those dreams disintegrated.
She dropped out of college and gave up on a career in science. She cut off contact with nearly all of her friends. By the time she was 24, she had two kids, no job and was living an isolated housewife existence in Connecticut.
What Veena had for a social life revolved around Real Love. She joined regular conference calls led by Real Love “coaches” certified by Baer and his wife, Donna. She was put on a path to become a coach herself and held one-on-one calls with people in need of counseling. And then Baer asked her to be his “intern” for in-person sessions known as “interventions” — where people traveled to his house and revealed their deepest insecurities.
The “intern” would sit in a corner and take notes. It was a coveted position that also meant she would get her own time with Baer, whom she called or texted nearly every day for guidance.
He told her to call him Daddy. He was constantly saying “I love you.” He was always there when she needed someone to talk to.
“This is what I learned, Daddy,” Veena said in an email to him in March 2017. “I think and think and think and all I want and need is to feel.”
“Bless you, my sweet daughter,” Baer replied. “Yeah, you just need to feel. We didn’t finish the healing, so the thinking gets in the way.”
He signed it: “I love you, Your daddy.”
Despite Daddy’s love, Veena still had suicidal tendencies. On her 25th birthday, she locked herself in her bathroom, grabbed a razor blade and slashed at her arms.
Baer instructed her to come see him in Georgia and be his intern. She needed one-on-one time.
What Veena says happened on that trip would lead her to cut ties with Baer and create a divide among his loyal network of followers.
Baer brought her to his pool house out back, which offered more privacy, and then told her to strip off her clothes, according to Veena. She needed to trust him completely, to feel complete vulnerability. Then she would feel free. Not just free — invincible.
Veena refused. Take off her clothes in front of this older man? Nothing about it felt right.
Baer told her he had done this with others, including a woman who had been sexually abused. Hearing the word “abuse” stirred something inside Veena. If he brought it up so casually, she thought to herself, then this couldn’t be sexual abuse. And this wasn’t just any man — she had been following Greg Baer for seven years and believed he had saved her life.
So she did what Baer asked. Veena stripped down and allowed Baer to hold her while she was naked, she said in an interview and in a lawsuit filed after the incident.
“Mr. Baer then engaged in a lengthy session of unwanted touching,” reads the lawsuit brought in 2019 and later settled, according to court documents viewed by NBC News.
It took more than a year for Veena to conclude that she was abused. That revelation coincided with another that was even more disorienting: Real Love wasn’t a force for good. She came to believe that she had been drawn into a cult, led by a man drunk on the power he exerted over those who sought him out at their lowest moments.
“It felt like a fever had broken,” Veena said.
Baer, now 73, did not respond to multiple emails from NBC News.
A call to a number listed in Real Love public records was answered by a woman who hung up on a reporter. The person who made the voicemail greeting for that number identified herself as Baer’s wife, Donna. NBC News left a message, but it went unreturned.
The self-help industry has been booming for years, raking in billions of dollars with promises to help people transform their lives.
For those looking to cash in, there is almost no barrier to entry. Publishing a book or launching a video series requires no fancy credentials, no formal training, nothing at all really besides some hustle and a decent internet connection.
Baer came to his method of healing broken souls through what he described in his books as trial and error. After his near suicide attempt, he went to drug rehab and then tried different kinds of therapy. When that didn’t work, he gathered people together who were also unhappy and “tried a variety of techniques I’d experienced or read about.”
“Gradually, we eliminated the things that didn’t work, and we discovered some principles that were astonishingly simple and effective,” he wrote in a Real Love book published in 2003.
Baer began spreading his message in radio interviews and at churches, where he felt right at home. He was a Mormon who had gone on a mission to Samoa as a younger man and later served as a leader of his local church, according to an online interview.
He got nonprofit status for the group, making it exempt from federal income tax, and trademarked Real Love. In 2025, the organization reported $106,000 in revenue (in 2015, its reported revenue was $430,000).
It was Baer and his books that drew people into Real Love, but there was also a community of devotees who provided constant support and a sense of belonging. They lived in different parts of the country, but it was not uncommon for their social circles to gradually shrink until they were communicating almost exclusively with other Real Love members who had experienced trauma and were struggling to find their way.
Part of the appeal of Real Love, former members said, was that it didn’t require a significant financial commitment. People in the community would join group video calls for free and work with Real Love “coaches” who would charge their own nominal fees.
It was only when attending group retreats or personal sessions at Baer’s home that they had to pony up large amounts of money — about $500 per day for retreats and upward of $1,000 a day for interventions, former members said.
For many, the hugs from Baer were a highlight. Whether in front of a group or in a one-on-one session with an intern present, “Daddy” would cradle the person in his lap, man or woman, while expressing his love in a low voice. This went on for several years, former members said, before he began instructing some to take off their clothes first.
Steven Hassan, a psychologist who studies cults, said it’s quite common for the leaders of such groups to portray themselves as father figures and to treat their followers as children.
“The age regression phenomenon I’ve seen over and over and over again,” he said. “If you didn’t have a great relationship with your father, to have somebody say, ‘I’m going to give you love like you’ve never had before,’ it’s attractive.”
It’s also, Hassan said, “very stereotypical of destructive cults — this claim that they can give you love like nowhere else.”
Hassan wasn’t aware of the Real Love Company until he was contacted by NBC News and then read Reddit posts about the group and whether it was a cult. He said the leaders of such groups tend to claim absolute authority, create an environment where questioning or defying them is forbidden and indoctrinate followers to distrust those outside the group.
A clear red flag, Hassan said, is a person who promises that they alone can solve your deepest emotional issues.
“No legitimate therapist would ever make any claims like that,” Hassan said.
In the years before Veena was allegedly abused, she had begun writing a fawning book about Baer and how he saved her life.
“I could swear that his eyes are actually twinkling,” Veena wrote in an early draft of the book, describing their initial meeting. “I didn’t even know eyes did that.”
She would share drafts with Baer seeking his input and encouragement. But at one point, she sent him an email that contained a literary agent’s highly critical feedback of her portrayal of Baer.
“He speaks in platitudes and sounds like a caricature of a therapist, as if he’s just making it up as he goes along,” the agent wrote. “He always seems to have an answer for everything, and he frequently seems to have omniscient insight about your life and the world in general.”
Baer replied: “You WERE accurate. So don’t change it. People who have never encountered Real Love are VERY skeptical of its possibility. They can be negative, critical, mocking, and more. I’m used to it.”
Veena might have continued believing Baer to be her savior had she not met another young woman in the Real Love community who also received special attention from him. This woman — whom NBC News is identifying by a pseudonym, Penelope — spoke on the condition of anonymity because she said she has been trying to move past the trauma caused by her time with Real Love and didn’t want the experience to define her online.
Like Veena, Penelope was adrift when she met Baer, in 2016. She learned about him from her own mother, who had become an active member of the community. And it didn’t take long for Baer, or “Daddy” as she began to call him, to also win over the daughter.
“His explanation that anger is rooted in fear was a mind-blowing realization,” Penelope said, “and understanding the fear that motivates all people’s behavior, including the kind that has hurt me in my life.”
Like Veena, her life underwent radical changes in the year after she met Baer.
She moved back to the U.S. from Japan and, with Baer’s coaxing, began to date his son, Ben. She became a Mormon and was baptized at Baer’s church by Baer himself. She and Ben got married a few months later, in a ceremony at a courthouse in Salt Lake City, Utah, followed by one at a temple in Provo.
“My hands were completely off the wheel,” Penelope said. “Someone else was steering.”
Like Veena, she also began to work as an “intern” for Baer, sitting in other people’s personal sessions with him at his home. In July 2017, she was at his house in that capacity, staying in the pool house, when Baer asked if she wanted to take the next step in her journey of emotional healing.
It involved, she said, taking off all her clothes and lying on the bed in Baer’s arms. But that’s not all that happened, according to Penelope.
“While [Penelope] was nude and being held by Mr. Baer, he sucked on her mouth, fondled her, inserted his fingers into her vagina,” reads a lawsuit she later filed against Baer, which was also settled, according to documents viewed by NBC News.
Penelope, who was Baer’s daughter-in-law at the time, said she struggled to process what happened and rarely left her home in the following weeks.
“My mental health tanked,” she said.
But she also grew closer to Veena in the ensuing months and they began confiding in each other.
It was on a video call that they had a lightbulb moment. Veena pulled up a list online of “10 signs you’re in a cult,” and it was like a fog had lifted. They concluded that they had been brainwashed to see Baer as their savior, and that’s why they had rationalized what happened in the pool house for so long.
Immediately afterward, Penelope told her husband, Ben, about the alleged abuse for the first time.
“He was in total shock and horror,” she said.
But there was also someone else for her to tell: her mother.
The call left Kim Grindell disgusted, furious and wracked with guilt. But looking back, she acknowledged that it shouldn’t have come as a surprise.
“I had blinders,” she said. “Serious blinders.”
Kim had gone all in with Real Love after hearing Baer speak at a church event in Northern California. It was the summer of 2013, and Kim was in the throes of an acrimonious breakup and trying to restore order to her chaotic life.
“The way he described human nature and what makes us tick and what leads to us doing poorly,” Kim said, “it felt like truth, and it felt like he was really describing my life.”
She went to Baer’s home in Georgia for two days of therapy. Working with him directly left her convinced that he was a transformative healer.
“He was super sweet and super loving,” she said. “He encouraged me to call him ‘my daddy.’ He said that you never really had a daddy that loved you.”
This resonated deeply with Kim. She grew up in a dysfunctional household where she says drugs and alcohol were abused and sex parties took place. Her father, who was emotionally absent, died when she was 13.
Kim was, in her words, “starving for that fatherly love.”
She became an intern for Baer and always looked forward to being held in his arms for extended periods of time. She eventually asked him if there was anything she could do to help ease the fear that she believed was still holding her back.
There was, Baer told her. At his direction, she took off her top and bra, Kim said, and he held her but didn’t touch her breasts or privates.
“It felt very parental, and it felt very special,” she said.
In hindsight, Kim said, she cherished the experience for another reason.
“I was getting this special attention from him,” she said. “I was pretty desperate for that in my life.”
She now sees it as classic grooming behavior.
It happened one other time, Kim said, and she eventually asked him if there was anything else she could do to experience a “bigger shift.”
Baer brought her to the pool house and instructed her to remove her clothes piece by piece, Kim said. He lay in bed with her, rubbed her back and held her breasts, according to Kim.
“There was no talking me into it — I just did it,” Kim said. “In hindsight, I realized I didn’t feel free to say no to any of it. I had the belief that if I did say no, he would write me off.”
When Kim got the call from her daughter Penelope, she said it jolted her out of what she now describes as a cult mindset.
She spoke to other women in the community and said she heard more stories involving naked holding.
One of those women was Inge Jechart. A mother of two with a doctorate in physics, Inge had been an active Real Love member since a friend recommended Baer around 2005.
“At that time, I was lost and lonely,” she said, describing struggling under the weight of a faltering marriage and a strained relationship with her sons. “I learned how to become a better person and more loving and understanding.”
The first time Baer held her in his lap, Inge was overcome with emotion.
“I just cried,” Inge recalled. “It was such a relief to feel safe and loved. What else do we want in life?”
Following that experience, Inge said, she booked every retreat at his house that she could. And it was there, in 2017, that she said she twice got naked with Baer at his direction.
“We hold our own children when they’re naked to make them feel safe,” Inge said. “For me, that’s what we were doing.”
“And here’s the thing,” she added. “It made a huge difference for me.”
But Inge said Baer fondled her breasts the second time, and that didn’t feel right at all.
“I said, ‘Hey, as a 4-year-old, I wouldn’t have breasts,’” she recalled. “And he stopped.”
Inge said Baer told her he had done it with only one other woman before, and he added in a stern voice: “I don’t talk about this with anyone else.”
“I got the message,” Inge said. “Our community was important to me, and I didn’t want it to blow up, so I kept silent.”
But she said she never considered that he might be engaging in naked holding with younger, more impressionable women like Veena and Penelope.
Kim, Penelope’s mother, said the same.
“It had never crossed my mind that he would ever do this with my daughter,” Kim said. “I was completely blind to that possibility.”
In February 2019, Kim sat down at her computer and began to type an email to Baer.
“Greg what you have done with my daughter…is wrong, hurtful, traumatic and goes against so many gospel principles,” read the email, which was reviewed by NBC News.
“Holding people without clothes on needs to stop, what you are doing is wrong,” it added. “Touching my daughter between her legs when she was naked was wrong — there is no justification for it.”
“I know of 4 women personally who have undressed completely with you, and I don’t know hardly anyone that you spend time with so I conjecture that there are many more,” Kim wrote near the end. “I beg of you…put a stop to this horribly damaging behavior.”
Baer was defiant in his response.
Kim’s daughter was “claiming events that never happened,” he wrote. “And she is supplying lots of details that never happened. And now she is sharing these details with as many people as she can find.”
Kim’s email wasn’t the only scathing message Baer received during this period.
“I am writing to perhaps appeal to your consciences and any integrity you may still have left,” wrote a woman from the U.K. in an email viewed by NBC News. “Shut Real Love down now before it’s too late.”
“Greg you have had sexual dealings with way more women than we initially thought,” the woman added. “That’s not including the naked holding.”
Baer replied with another strong denial.
“Nothing, absolutely nothing, like this is occurring, and people are healing all over the place,” he wrote to the British woman.
After receiving an email from NBC News, the woman declined to be interviewed, citing the lasting emotional toll.
“It’s honestly an incredibly traumatic part of my life, and one I don’t want to revisit,” she wrote. “It’s been 8 years and I haven’t moved on.”
Veena, Penelope and her mother said they all reached out to the police in Baer’s hometown of Rome but were told there was not enough evidence to pursue a sexual abuse case.
The Rome Police Department confirmed to NBC News that it conducted an investigation but said no charges were brought due to “insufficient probable cause.”
The women said they had also reported Baer to their local Mormon churches.
A spokesman for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, widely known as the Mormon church, said it “initiated ecclesiastical proceedings involving this individual beginning in February 2020.”
The process could lead to a member’s excommunication, but the spokesman said he was not authorized to comment on the outcome of the proceedings.
Veena and Penelope filed lawsuits against Baer in Georgia’s Floyd County Superior Court in April 2019. They were settled five months later for $12,000 each. (The attorney who represented Baer, Robert Smalley, declined to comment.)
By then, Veena was adapting to life outside of Real Love. She had already separated from her husband and left the church. While raising her three children, she went back to college. A career in physics no longer interested her. She earned a degree in psychology from Columbia University.
“To help me understand what on earth just happened,” Veena said.
A few years ago, she decided to write what became a very different book than the one originally conceived about her experience in Real Love. She used pseudonyms for the group and for Baer himself, but the account, she said, was drawn from her recollections, emails and journal entries.
“The True Happiness Company” was published last year with the subtitle, “How a Girl Like Me Falls for a Cult Like That.”
Veena hoped that it would help her process what happened and serve as a cautionary tale for others.
“The physical violation is not what unravels me,” she says in the book. “It’s the loss of life experience, the mental and emotional violation of having my young adulthood orchestrated by someone with undue influence over me. It’s the friendships that disintegrated. The career paths unexplored. The opinions he replaced with his own.”
“The changes feel almost imperceptible as they happen,” she added later in the book, “and then suddenly appear extreme in retrospect.”
If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988 or go to 988lifeline.org to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, or visit SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources.
Rich Schapiro is a reporter with the NBC News national security unit.
© 2026 NBCUniversal Media, LLC
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