Game of Thrones’ Hannah Murray Details Hospitalization, Alleged Cult

“‘If I run an evil cult I am the worst cult leader in history,’” Murray alleged Steve wrote in one text to her. “‘I don’t have a compound to put people in. I don’t control people’s sleep or eating patterns. And I tell people to get their own life in order instead of being people’s ‘guru.’’” 

And at the time, Murray was convinced. 

“I had been completely taken in by everything he said,” she wrote. “I believed him. I believed he was not a cult leader. I believed everything he told me.”

While she later received a bipolar disorder diagnosis, Murray admitted she was not out of the words following her stay at the hospital. 

“I did not enter ill and leave well,” she wrote. “I entered extremely psychotic and left somewhat less so.”

Still seeking initiation into Steve’s organization at the time, Murray added, “I had walked out of the ward and straight back into the life that had put me in there.”

Years later, Murray hopes sharing her experience can help prevent others falling prey to the same situation. 

“It’s easy to go, ‘Well, that would never happen to me’, but we do ourselves a disservice when we start saying that, because you don’t know,” Murray told The Guardian last month. “I had no idea I was going to go through any of the things in the book. I would’ve assumed I couldn’t, that I was safe. I was well educated, from a middle-class family; everything should have been fine. I thought, ‘I’m smart. I make good choices.’ Well, I made terrible choices.

As she put it, “It’s important to understand why people do these things, rather than going, ‘Oh, they must be idiots.’ Or, ‘How stupid could you be?’”