The Real Love Company made her feel whole. Then ‘Daddy’ said to strip naked.

From his sprawling property in the rolling hills of northwest Georgia, Greg Baer built a self-help organization with a deeply human mission. “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. Veena 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