Warning: The following story contains descriptions of domestic violence and emotional abuse.
In February 2021, cult horror director Richard Stanley reached out to screenwriter Scarlett Amaris for the first time in years. “I realise nothing I do or say can ever readily make up for my past actions,” he wrote in an email, a screenshot of which The Daily Beast has reviewed, “but reach out to you now, hat in hand, to try and offer some small recompense.”
From 2009 to 2014, Amaris and Stanley lived together in an old house in Montségur, France. In October 2014, Amaris filed a report with French police, a copy of which The Daily Beast has reviewed, alleging that Stanley had assaulted her multiple times during their relationship. In March of 2021, she detailed her allegations on her blog, while another woman—we’ll call her “Nicole”—came forward to the police and in public with her own accusations against the director.
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Stanley has denied the women’s claims and called Amaris’ allegations “damnable lies,” claiming he has witnesses and evidence that could “fully discredit” them. He has also filed “moral harassment” charges against Amaris and Nicole in French court, and detailed his crusade against his accusers on his blog, in video interviews, and on Facebook.
But what Stanley doesn’t appear to have disclosed to his fans is that a third woman, whom we’ll call “Rebecca,” has also accused him of domestic violence. She filed a lawsuit against him in French court in February 2021—weeks before Amaris went public with her own allegations.
When reached for comment, Stanley repeated his denial of Amaris’ and Nicole’s allegations and called them a “cruel attempt to prohibit me from pursuing my work as a writer and feature film director.” He added: “I have always treated other people, co-workers, family members and those ladies with whom I have had the honour to be romantically involved with the highest respect.” He did not answer or acknowledge The Daily Beast’s questions regarding Rebecca or her case but provided testimonials from 11 friends and acquaintances vouching for his character.
Stanley’s moral harassment charges against Amaris and Nicole—both witnesses in the French case—appear to have helped stall the proceedings. Meanwhile, he’s publicly impugned Amaris and Nicole’s motivations for coming forward for months, calling them “witches” and implying that there’s a large international conspiracy against him. A post from last June on Stanley’s official website proclaims the director’s innocence and claims, among many other things, that Amaris and Nicole “stand accused of falsely manipulating popular opinion for financial gain.”
All the while, Stanley seems to have avoided publicly mentioning Rebecca—apparently giving his fans the impression that Amaris and Nicole (whom he’s named in multiple social media posts) are his only accusers.
Public prosecutor Géraldine Labialle confirmed in an email to The Daily Beast that at this point, “there are two separate cases: one initiated by Mr. Stanley by civil action, the other by the public prosecutor.”
Olivier Mouysset, the public prosecutor in Foix (where Amaris filed her charges with police) confirmed by email both that she’d made the report and that “the person implicated by the complainant”—in other words, Stanley—“was the subject, on the instructions of a public prosecutor, of a reminder of the law (this is a alternative measure to prosecution, that is to say a decision taken without a prior hearing) on December 23, 2015.”
Amaris said she chose to publish her allegations on her blog on the same day that she first spoke with the plaintiff in the French case against Stanley, whose identity is known to The Daily Beast. At the time, Amaris said, “I was in a really, really good place that I had fought hard to make”—both personally and financially. Upon hearing about Rebecca’s case and later speaking with her about it directly, however, she felt immense guilt “that I had not been brave enough to stand up and say, ‘This guy’s a monster. And this is what he did to me.’”
Multiple sources who spoke to The Daily Beast described Stanley’s alleged capacity for manipulation. A source who knew the director platonically for more than a decade before cutting ties told The Daily Beast that he can be “very adept in moderating his output if he wants. … He can tell the story ambiguously enough that you get a certain idea which suits his cause. But if you watch him, you might find some discrepancies.”
The 56-year-old Stanley got his start in music videos and documentaries before he made his debut as a horror director. His first two features, Hardware (1990) and Dust Devil (1992), became cult hits, but his career sputtered in the mid-1990s when he got fired from The Island of Dr. Moreau days into filming.
The theatrical ouster would become all the more notorious thanks to anecdotes about the banned director sneaking back onto the set after taking up residence in the Australian jungle—a saga detailed in the 2014 documentary Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau. Over the past several years, Stanley has established himself as a historical expert and guide in Montségur and its surrounding area, which he calls “the Zone.”
Whispers that Stanley might be violent seem to date back decades. In culture journalist David Hughes’ 2001 book The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made, Stanley admitted that before he arrived in Australia to shoot The Island of Dr. Moreau, star Marlon Brando caught wind of a rumor that, in Hughes words, Stanley “had gone crazy on the set, assaulted a member of the crew and even punched his girlfriend, Kate.”
Hughes quotes Stanley as telling him: “Of course, Brando’s immediate response was to phone Kate and say, ‘Is this true?’ She said, ‘No, of course not.’”
Kate, whose full name is known to The Daily Beast, could not be reached for comment. Stanley did not acknowledge The Daily Beast’s request for comment about the anecdote.
Stanley began work on Hardware directly after his 1990 documentary Voice of the Moon—which captured the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. In various interviews over the years, Stanley has discussed how he and his crew got caught in the Battle of Jalalabad; he attributes his survival, in part, to the large amount of LSD he’d taken during that battle in a moment of resignation.
“But the side effect was that I was really functionally insane by the time I got back to London,” Stanley said during an interview conducted last February and posted to YouTube in October. “My psyche was not in a good shape, and under normal circumstances I should probably have been given psychiatric help. But instead … I ended up making Hardware instead.”
During an appearance on Alec Baldwin’s podcast last August, Stanley told his host that “Hardware is what I had in place of therapy as my way of working out the PTSD.”
Immo Horn—a longtime collaborator of Stanley’s who, among many other projects, filmed Voice of the Moon and worked on Dust Devil as second unit director—told The Daily Beast that during his time working with Stanley, he never knew the director to have issues with the crew. He described Stanley as “basically an insomniac who is also a workaholic” and noted that while the director’s ethos “kind of pushed the crew to their limits” on Dust Devil, Stanley “managed to inspire people to do their best and to kind of really go for it.”
“And everybody, more or less, if they didn’t fall over, were happy to do so.”
Although he didn’t recall this happening regularly, Horn said that “on one or two occasions,” Stanley “could get pretty upset... sort of screaming fits and throwing things.”
Horn did not respond to The Daily Beast’s follow-up email asking if he was aware of allegations of intimate partner violence against Stanley during or after their work together.
Emelia Weavind (credited on IMDb as Emelia Roux), a set dresser from Dust Devil, said in an email that she was “quite good friends with Richard” during the production. She wrote that working on the film was “crazy and insane, but in a very good way”—and that ultimately, it was one of “the best film experiences” of her career. (This seems to be at odds with how Stanley talks about the production. Speaking with Alec Baldwin in August, he said, “I was convinced that Dust Devil was the worst fucking thing that could happen to anyone. It was really a thousand miles of rough road and a nightmare experience beyond hell.”)
When asked in a follow-up email if she was aware of any domestic violence allegations against Stanley before or after the production, Weavind replied, “I have honestly not heard of any such abuse allegations against Richard Stanley, in pre production, filming or post production.”
Weavind recalled that Stanley sometimes helped her dress the sets in the film—and that on one occasion, they painted a bedroom set with pig’s blood and intestines obtained from a butcher. “Needless to say, we were not very popular when SFX set fire to the room, and the blood smelled terrible,” she wrote. “It certainly was very freaky, but that it was supposed to be, for the atmosphere. I liked his crazy ideas and he liked mine.
“I remember him as an unique individual,” she wrote, “talented and a little crazy, I mean, wearing those black and military uniforms in the crazy heat of the desert.”
Amaris says she met Stanley on Myspace in 2007, after he’d retreated from the mainstream film world post-Moreau and begun spending more time in Montségur. Once the last stronghold of a Christian heretic sect called the Cathars (and supposed onetime resting place of the Holy Grail), the French town is nestled in the foothills of the Southern Pyrenees. It’s rural and remote and foggy—119 people lived there as of 2019—and while there is no supermarket in Montségur, Amaris noted that a good number tourists in the area believe themselves to be incarnations of a Cathar high priestess, Esclarmonde de Foix.
The area Stanley calls “the Zone” is steeped in the esoteric, as well as conspiracy theories. Rennes-le-Château, about 33 miles northeast of Montségur by car, saw its star rise with the publication of Dan Brown’s blockbuster novel The Da Vinci Code. The village of Bugarach, a 40-mile drive east from Montségur, made news in 2012 as the one place that would supposedly survive the Mayan apocalypse and is a hot spot for alleged UFO sightings. For a time, the famed astrologer and magician Nostradamus supposedly lived about a 34-mile drive away northeast from Montségur, in Alet-les-Bains.
Cathar country seems to be a place where history remains up for interpretation, and some debate. In his 2000 book The Perfect Heresy, journalist and author Stephen O’Shea writes that generations of researchers—and, as he put it, “fabulists, cranks, wishful thinkers and romantics”—have embellished the legacy of the Cathars and their history over time. “The Cathars are now a protean bunch, ready to transform into just about anything that a questing soul could desire,” O’Shea wrote. The Nazis conducted extensive research into the area and the supposed “Pyrenean Grail,” and a generation later, the place was overrun by hippies who venerated the vegetarian, supposedly feminist, anti-marriage, pro-“free love” Cathars.
“That kind of weird, New Age, spiritual narcissistic community has absolutely shielded [Stanley] and provided for him,” Amaris said. She later added that she believes the entertainment industry has done the same.
By the time Amaris met Stanley, he had gone on to direct a couple of documentaries (The Secret Glory in 2001 and The White Darkness in 2002) as well as a handful of independent short films. But he hadn’t made a narrative feature since Moreau.
About a month after she and Stanley first met, Amaris said she made a two-week trip to Montségur. One night during that trip, the two climbed to the ruins of the Château de Montségur during a lunar eclipse, where she recalled they witnessed a supernatural phenomenon. The then-couple documented their experience in their film L’autre Monde (The Otherworld), which debuted in 2013.
Early on, Amaris recalled that Stanley seemed like her dream partner—someone who shared her passion for history and magic and writing. “I always said he’s kind of like a black star,” she said. “He exudes a certain kind of gravitational pull.”
But living with Stanley, as described by Amaris, was “like being on eggshells all the time.” On multiple occasions, she told police in 2014, Stanley physically assaulted her. “He considers me his slave,” Amaris told police in French, through a translator. “I have to do whatever he tells me; otherwise, he mistreats me. If I tell him no, he starts screaming and goes crazy.”
Then would come the apologies, Amaris told The Daily Beast—and the promises to get help, and the often-repeated plea, “It’s you and me against the world.”
“One of the ways he ensnared me,” Amaris remembered, was by saying things like, “You’re so smart. I need help with writing. You’re so intuitive. You’re so psychic. You get me. I’m this misunderstood genius who needs your help. We’re gonna be the darlings of the indie film world. I will give you a film career. ... We will be the guardians of the castle. The White Lady showed herself to me and you. We are the special ones. We’re the chosen ones.”
It was just after they’d finished shooting their first collaboration—a short film called “Mother of Toads” that debuted as part of the horror anthology The Theatre Bizarre (2011)—when Amaris alleges that Stanley first assaulted her. (Although Amaris told police that Stanley had assaulted her multiple times, she described only the last of these alleged incidents in detail during her report; from the police transcript, it appears police did not ask for further elaboration on the rest.) “The more that his career started to roll,” she told The Daily Beast, “the more scary he became.” In his response to The Daily Beast, Stanley denied that he’d struck Amaris.
The source who has known Stanley for a long time platonically recalled observing Stanley being irate and taking his anger out on Amaris like a “bickering child” during the production of “Mother of Toads.” At the same time, they got the impression that the director was “being very careful about the words he chose to use” in their presence as a third party.
While she was with Stanley, Amaris said she worked as his assistant; multiple sources told The Daily Beast that Stanley relies on his romantic partners to manage his everyday life. Stanley allegedly does not drive, and despite having lived in France for more than a decade, multiple sources said he has not learned French. “Last I checked, he didn’t know how to log into his French bank account,” the source who’s known Stanley platonically for years told The Daily Beast.
Katherine “Kt” Mehrers told The Daily Beast that she first met Amaris and Stanley in 2009 when she accompanied her husband (who’d met Stanley online) to visit the director in Montségur that September. She said the visit came just months before filming on “Mother of Toads” began, and while she did not witness any major altercations, Mehrers said there were a couple “indications” that something was off.
“It wouldn’t have been what [Stanley] said,” she explained, “but it would have been a tone of voice—a little bit like instructing staff when he was talking to Scarlett.” Mehrers told The Daily Beast that Amaris described alleged incidents of Stanley’s violence to her while the two were still together.
Mehrers had previously considered it a red flag that Stanley seemed to think it was perfectly acceptable to keep a Nazi signet ring he’d received during his research into the reportedly “anti-Nazi” SS officer Otto Rahn—whose life the director explored in his 2001 documentary The Secret Glory. Amaris also mentioned the ring and alleged that Stanley also owns an SS officer’s uniform for “Moag”—a doll Stanley named after the “benign, maleficent in-house daemon” whom he says has been his “invisible playmate and boon companion since childhood.” The Daily Beast has reviewed photos of the doll wearing the uniform, which includes a red armband emblazoned with a swastika. The photos were allegedly not taken in Stanley’s home, or by Stanley himself.
Stanley’s 2010 ebook, Shadow of the Grail — Magic and Mystery at Montsegur, also includes a photo of the director raising his straightened right arm into the air in a gesture that appears to be a Nazi “Sieg Heil.” Stanley did not respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment about the ring, “Moag” and the uniform, or the gesture he makes in his ebook. The director also claims in that ebook to have successfully treated his mother’s lymphoma with “meteor blood” secreted from “bleeding stones” found in the region—a claim he repeated in an interview last winter.
Amaris’ blog post describes multiple alleged instances of violence, including the one just after they wrapped “Mother of Toads.” She wrote that when Stanley thought she’d lost some books they had been using as props, “I awoke to see him standing over me, shaking in rage, foaming at the mouth, screaming about his books that I had supposedly lost. When I asked him what he was talking about, he launched at me, hitting me in the mouth and scratching my throat.” In a “Statement of Facts” from 2021 that Stanley shared in response to The Daily Beast’s request for comment, he claimed the item in question was a Tarot deck given to him by his late mother and denied that he struck Amaris.
On a separate occasion, Amaris wrote, she was trying to leave Stanley when he allegedly caught her and “managed to knock me out in the upstairs bathroom. I came to as he was dragging me down the stairs by my hair.” He then allegedly trapped her in the room with him before “telling me for hours what a waste of space I was and that he was going to kill me.”
“I have never been so scared in my life,” Amaris continued in her post. “I don’t know how to describe it other than some part of me died that day.” Stanley’s 2021 document denied the incident, citing Amaris’ participation in a film festival soon afterward and claiming that she “danced the night away.”
(Amaris denied this to The Daily Beast. She said that the film festival was days after the alleged incident and alleged that Stanley had hit her on the back of the head, not the face; she recalled having bruises on the back of her head, her back, and her arms. She said she cut her hair shorter, as seen in videos from the event, so that Stanley could not repeat the alleged act.)
Right after that, Amaris wrote, she attended a film festival in London with Stanley. It was upon their return from the festival that Stanley allegedly assaulted her in a car—the incident Amaris discussed in detail with police. She told officers that the director had grabbed her by the hair before repeatedly slamming her head against a car dashboard and subsequently tried to strangle her. Stanley’s document claimed the two were in an argument, and that Amaris had pulled the car over. He said the two grappled over the rental keys and contended that she “flew at” him first. He noted that he was never prosecuted over the incident. (Amaris vehemently denies that she “flew at” Stanley first.)
The Daily Beast spoke with a source from Montségur who once saw Amaris emerge from the home she and Stanley shared with bruises on her forehead and strangle marks around her throat. They said Stanley admitted to having hurt Amaris when confronted, although it took some interrogation. After they prodded Stanley further, the source said he admitted it was not the first time he’d done so. Stanley, they added, did not seem to display any remorse. Stanley did not acknowledge or respond to this allegation.
“He’s hollow,” Mehrers said, and he acts like a “classic narcissist” with “a deep hatred of women.”
After gaining Amaris’ permission at the time, the source from Montségur said they alerted people in town of what they’d allegedly seen—an effort that apparently went nowhere. “If it would have been olden times,” the source said, “he would have been chased out of the town.”
A doctor’s record dated days before Amaris’ police report indicates that Amaris presented with two hematomas, an edema of the left index finger, “multiple cutaneous erosions of the neck … with multiple wounds by scratching of the nape of the neck and opposite the right trapezium,” and an “emotional state of shock.”
Michele Bigler, a friend who’s known Amaris since college, recalled that Amaris returned from France looking very thin, and with just one carry-on bag. “She was not the person that I knew at all,” Bigler recalled. “She was like a deer in the headlights.”
Looking back on her relationship with Stanley, Amaris said, “I did not understand that this was a man who did not love me—that was giving me lip service and was erasing every boundary, every line I had, very systematically, until there was nothing of me left.” She compared the progressive dissolution of her boundaries to “little, tiny erasers.”
“You notice, but you don't notice. And then it's okay—and it’s another little eraser. It’s something that builds over time. Then all of a sudden you're like, ‘Oh my gosh, what the fuck happened?’”
In addition to her allegations of physical and emotional abuse, Amaris said that Stanley spent months during their relationship wearing down her resistance toward taking nude photographs. She said he would often accuse her of being frigid, hating her own body, or of being ashamed of her femininity and sexuality—and less exciting than previous girlfriends whom he’d claim never had such a boundary.
During his fits of rage, on the other hand, Amaris recalled that Stanley would at times denigrate her body before saying things like that she should die or get cancer.
Amaris also suggests that Stanley has, in the past, distributed explicit images of her without consent. In June 2015, an attorney (whose engagement letter The Daily Beast has reviewed) sent Stanley a cease-and-desist email on Amaris’ behalf, describing her as a “victim of the non-consensual online postings of photographs and other related content.” In emails sent to the U.S. Consulate in France between 2014 and 2015, Amaris discussed both her initial police report against Stanley and the subsequent matter of his allegedly leaking the photos. The Daily Beast has also reviewed screenshots of take-down emails Amaris sent to various websites concerning the unapproved use of her likeness.
Stanley did not specifically respond to The Daily Beast’s questions regarding these allegations.
It took years for Amaris to rebuild her life when she returned to the U.S., and disentangling herself from Stanley proved difficult. “He burned every fucking bridge I had,” Amaris said. “He made it so I could work nowhere.”
In all of their work together, Stanley had been the bigger name—the one who would be chosen over her, should things prove too acrimonious. Even though she’d moved thousands of miles away, Amaris’ livelihood felt dependent on her ex.
For a while, bereft of other options, Amaris said she tried to maintain professional ties with Stanley—albeit on very specific conditions. “I was already scared enough as it was,” Amaris said. “And I was super fucked up, too—he’d been abusing me for years.” When SpectreVision stepped in to produce their long-gestating final collaboration Color Out of Space—which starred Nicolas Cage and became a cult horror hit of 2019—Amaris said she stipulated that her address could not be on any documents for the film and that an intermediary of her choosing would facilitate any necessary communication between herself and Stanley. (A source confirmed this to The Daily Beast.)
In his initial email to Amaris in February 2021, Stanley wrote, “We really pulled something out of the bag with ‘COLOR’ - something that almost made all the pain and turmoil worthwhile - something that probably couldn’t have happened any other way - something you should be rightly proud of.” He claimed a “multinational” had reached out to him in the hopes of expanding their film into a series. Amaris replied asking for specifics about the proposed project and said that based on Stanley’s response, she’d determined that he lacked the necessary insight into the television development process. (The Daily Beast has reviewed screenshots of both messages.) Amaris said she did not respond after that.
Weeks later, Stanley sent a follow-up in which he told his ex that he was the target of a “sting.”
“If strangers or people who claim to be my friends, former friends, girlfriends or otherwise attempt to contact you, gain your sympathy or ask you to testify against me,” Stanley wrote, “make certain you have a lawyer present and know that anything you say will be recorded and used against me in the media… These next few days until March 16th are crucial.” (The Daily Beast has reviewed a screenshot of the email and the previous one from February, as well as the police report Amaris subsequently filed in the US for “annoying emails” in 2021.)
Stanley’s March email also contained an ominous warning: “whatever you do,” Stanley wrote to Amaris, “don’t trust” Nicole.
In March of 2021, in between his February and March emails to Amaris, Stanley reached out to Nicole after what he described as “a long silence.”
“I have not left the sorcerous tower that has become my headquarters in the heart of the Zone for more than a year now,” Stanley wrote in a Facebook message, a screenshot of which has been reviewed by The Daily Beast, “and have taken a step back from the so-called ‘real’ world.”
Stanley went on to describe a Cathar prophecy he claimed would soon fall due, and he referred to Rebecca as his “current partner.” She’d filed her domestic violence lawsuit more than a week before Stanley sent the message.
Rebecca declined an interview with The Daily Beast, stating that she was too emotionally shaken. But Amaris, who chose to come forward publicly after finding out about Rebecca’s case and is now participating in the case as a witness, claims that their experiences are so similar “it’s horrifying.”
When Nicole indicated in a message back to Stanley that she believed his messages contained “lies,” his manner seemed to shift. “I don’t appreciate your tone of voice, M’Lady,” Stanley wrote in a screen captured reply. “This situation is a lot bigger than either of us and has more moving parts than you know. Be cautious how you proceed, tread very lightly and don’t get too involved.”
A source close to Nicole said that like Amaris, Nicole spoke with Rebecca directly before she came forward publicly—in her case, with a comment on Amaris’ post about Stanley on Facebook that detailed her own allegations against him. (The post has since been deleted.) Days later, Nicole filed her report with police. A copy of her police report indicates that she told officers she’d chosen to come forward at that time because she’d found out that Stanley’s alleged behavior had “continued with the other women.”
“I would like that to stop,” she said in French through a translator.
Labialle did not respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment regarding Nicole’s police report.
Nicole declined to speak to The Daily Beast for fear of reprisal. In a screenshot of her now-deleted Facebook post from March 2021, she writes that Stanley first invited her to visit in Montségur just one week after Amaris left in 2014. “He invited me to come and stay,” she wrote, “showering me in romantic gestures and fascinating stories. He needed a new cash cow/victim. I learnt later that he regurgitates the same stories and love bombed us all in the same manner before the abuse and rage started.”
According to a copy of her police report, Nicole told authorities that she and Stanley had first met 23 years before he invited her to Montségur, so she’d felt safe visiting. From there, she told police that she and Stanley dated intermittently for about a year. Although Nicole stated that Stanley never physically struck her, she told police that he did abuse her psychologically—including, she said, by telling her that she was a nobody, that she had to be killed, and that he would find someone to rape her. He would then apologize, Nicole told police according to the report, and insist that he didn’t mean it.
A source close to Nicole told The Daily Beast that Stanley would throw her things around the room and stomp on them. In addition to apologizing afterward, they said Stanley would gaslight Nicole by claiming she’d somehow provoked the behavior.
“Richard likes to scare people,” Nicole told police through a French translator, “and he can change his behavior with a snap of his fingers.”
Nicole told police that during their relationship, Stanley manipulated her into performing sexual acts. A source close to Nicole told The Daily Beast that during their relationship, he tried to coerce her into having sex with someone he knew—an allegation Amaris made about her own relationship with Stanley. (Stanley did not specifically respond to these allegations but told The Daily Beast that he believes Nicole to be “the source” of “the harassment I have been forced to endure.” He stated his intention “to prove this in court, where this case belongs.”)
In an email to Amaris, a forwarded version of which The Daily Beast has reviewed, a fourth woman (who got in touch with Amaris through a mutual friend) wrote that “everything he did, or tried to do to you... he also did, or tried to do to me.”
The woman wrote that on one occasion, Stanley had called her “rape meat” and tried to hold her hostage inside the house. “What terrifies me the most about Richard more than his violence (which is terrifying enough) are his lies,” she wrote. “And the way he can warp reality and twist it into whatever he believes it to be, so everyone around him believes it.”
After she left Stanley, the woman wrote that people she’d thought were her friends began “turning against me, joining forces with him, and telling me not to go to the police, but just to leave.”
“If you have any advice at all... I would be so relieved and grateful to hear it,” the woman concluded. “I feel like I am in a nightmare.”
Stanley did not respond specifically to the allegations contained in the forwarded email. When reached for comment, the woman told The Daily Beast by email that she and Stanley cohabitated for almost three years and shared both a personal and professional relationship. She told The Daily Beast that she is “not a victim” and that Stanley “never was violent towards me.” She attributed her earlier issues with Stanley, in part, to his “PTSD.”
“I have forgiven Richard for what went wrong in our relationship, and he has forgiven me,” the woman wrote. “This was a personal and private decision, and something I would have liked to have happened without the glare of public opinion and without having to explain it to anyone.”
She continued: “It is a very abnormal situation to come out of a relationship with someone you truly loved and then to not even be able to grieve before being plunged into defending ones [sic] position in a public hate campaign. That is why I have said nothing. I needed my privacy to process my relationship ending in peace. But I have never had it.”
“I would not have stayed and tolerated the dark if I had not seen and loved the light,” the woman wrote.
In a follow-up email, the woman wrote, “Regarding the other allegations; every relationship has its ups and downs, and it is not for me to comment on what happened between Richard and other women. If abuse and violence did occur, then as I have said, it is for the courts to decide what to do, not the courts of public opinion.”
“I am not standing by Richard,” she added. “I am standing by what I feel is right.”
After the women came forward with their accusations of abuse, Richard Stanley hit back hard.
In court, Stanley has filed moral harassment charges against Amaris and Nicole—both witnesses in Rebecca’s case—and defamation charges against an unnamed person “X.” This move appears to have contributed to stalling Rebecca’s court case. A jugement correctionnel from a hearing in the case last April states that the proceedings have been put on hold due in part to “another proceeding in progress before the examining magistrate for acts of defamation or slanderous denunciation.”
And last May, Stanley told his followers in a public Facebook post that the French Court had decided he had “no case” to answer. He included a scanned court document listing his charges against Amaris, Nicole, and “person ‘X.’”
While Stanley has rallied his supporters against Amaris and Nicole by name for months, he never seems to publicly mention Rebecca or her pending court case against him. In January of last year, Stanley shared the news that his supporters could make direct donations to his “campaign fund” to support his “long march towards justice.” His post included the hashtag #charityforwitchraftvictims. In a Facebook comment from last March (a screenshot of which two sources have provided to The Daily Beast) the director wrote, “The allegations against me are wholly fabricated. There are no charges against me and no legal case.”
In comments and posts on social media, Stanley’s fans can be seen expressing their belief that the director has been exonerated or acquitted, or that his allegations have been, as one fan put it on a recent Instagram post from SpectreVision, “proven false since May”—when Stanley posted the charges he’d filed against Amaris and Nicole claiming the French court had determined he had “no case” to answer.
But Amaris emphasized to The Daily Beast that nothing has been decided in Rebecca’s case. Public prosecutor Labialle told The Daily Beast that an investigation is underway and will take “at least one year” to conclude.
While Rebecca’s case apparently remains stagnant in court, Stanley has been hard at work posting on Facebook and giving interviews about his research, his “war against witches,” and the conspiracy theory he claims unites the two.
For years, the director has aligned his public image with the fallen Cathars—vegetarian pacifists who died for their beliefs. During the previously mentioned interview conducted this February and posted to YouTube in October, Stanley said he believes he’s become “the PR person for both HP Lovecraft’s Old Ones … and whatever force it is that the Grail represents—whatever that force is in Montségur, the Dame Blanche, the Deesse, The White Lady, the puissance, the true sovereignty of the land.”
In a Facebook post from 2013, an associate of Stanley’s refers to him and Amaris (who was still with him at the time) as the “Master Guardians” of Montségur. Amaris recalled that at one point after she left, Stanley tried to coax her back to Montségur so they could, in his words, “tend to our faithful.”
“Now he uses the ‘White Lady’ as, he’s the favorite one—the chosen one who is still there,” Amaris said. “I’m the one who was run off the mountain. So I’m ‘the witch.’”
Another woman set to testify in Rebecca’s case told The Daily Beast that during an extended visit to her home, Stanley asked her to be his girlfriend and move in with him in France so that they could form their own religion and become the “new King and Queen of Occitania.” Stanley did not respond to this allegation.
March 16, 2021, the date Stanley called “crucial” in his email last spring to Amaris, marked the 777th anniversary of the day the Château de Montségur fell in 1244. In podcasts and in Facebook posts, Stanley has named Amaris and his other accusers’ allegations “the 777 attack”—seemingly a reference to the Cathars’ brutal demise and the supposed prophecy predicting their return.
In emails, on Facebook, and in podcasts, Stanley has repeated the prophecy: On March 16, 1321, The Romans—who saw the Cathars as a threat to the supremacy of the Catholic Church—infamously burned hundreds of Cathars alive in a bonfire. The Cathars accepted their fate and burned while holding sprigs of laurel in their hands. The last of the Cathars’ spiritual elite, Guillem Belibaste, is said to have delivered a prophecy that day when he was killed: The good men and women would return in 700 years when the laurel grows green again.
Stanley has compared his accusers directly to the Roman Inquisitors said to have incinerated the Cathars. In his post about the French court case last May, in which he posted a scanned copy of his charges against Amaris and Nicole, he claimed they both “stand accused of using tactics similar to the Inquisitors in days of old to incite further false allegations from their victims and the use of ‘coercive control techniques’ designed to induce a state of murderous mass hysteria among their numerous all-too-willing on-line followers.”
In addition to his public Facebook page and his blog, Stanley has marshaled support from the closed Facebook group, Terra Umbra—where he appears to have mobilized his most devoted fans on his behalf. In a public Facebook post from last spring, Stanley thanked the “Terra Umbra Action Committee” for helping him get his “headquarters … back on-line” and securing his digital archive—“including the vital digital evidence on which the 777 case turns.”
“We’ve got to expose these people,” the director writes in a separate screenshotted comment in Terra Umbra, provided to The Daily Beast by two separate sources. “Pace yourselves,” he writes in a separate post, a screenshot of which The Daily Beast has reviewed, “be duly guarded in your statements and avoid posting anything that might be misconstrued as potential slander.”
A Terra Umbra group member writes in another post, “One idea I have for Richard to get his side of the story out, is to contact one of the many pop cultural oriented YouTube channels who are critical towards cancel culture.” (Two sources provided screenshots of the post to The Daily Beast.)
In recent interviews posted on YouTube and elsewhere, Stanley has drawn parallels between modern “cancel culture” and the Cathars’ genocide at the hands of the Catholic Church. In a January 2022 YouTube interview titled “Cancel Culture & The Cathars,” Stanley lamented that these days, “You can essentially make someone cease to exist by erasing their existence from the technosphere—which is what cancel culture is all about. And they did the same with the Cathars.”
Stanley has also claimed that he’s being set up by an international conspiracy against him, Lovecraft, Otto Rahn, and the “Pyrenean Grail” that supposedly traces back to Hollywood.
In his email to Amaris in March of 2021, Stanley wrote that there are “far worse people in this world than myself who are working hard to frame and destroy me in order to derail the neo-Cathar/neo-pagan movement - not to mention the Lovecraft franchise.” And during a video interview with The Outer Realm this September, Stanley suggested that “the 777 attack” had effectively “canceled” the History Channel series Lost Relics of the Knights Templar—on which he has appeared.
“When the attacks were launched against the History Channel, they were very specifically bullied into re-editing the first season of Lost Relics in order to omit any mention of Montsegur, the Pyrenean Grail, or the Cathars, or obviously myself,” Stanley said.
Representatives for A+E Networks, which owns the History Channel, did not respond to The Daily Beast’s requests for comment.
Stanley claimed during that interview that Lost Relics “now trails a body count,” citing as one example Anneke Koremans—who’s written novels that include Otto Rahn as a fictionalized character and appeared on Lost Relics. A GoFundMe for Koremans’ cancer treatment is dated from 2020—months before any of the women came forward to publicly accuse Stanley. The director did not acknowledge Koremans’ cancer during his interview but said she was “bullied to death.”
During that Outer Realm conversation, Stanley also mentioned both Amaris and Nicole by name. (He did not mention Rebecca.) The director alleged that Nicole was “basically responsible for the attacks” on various Lost Relics personalities, including the late Koremans, and that she’d goaded Amaris into “writing a fully mendacious blog attacking myself.” In a screenshotted Facebook comment from the closed group Terra Umbra provided by two sources, Stanley calls Nicole “the ring leader.” The woman who emailed Amaris but has since reconciled with Stanley echoed Stanley’s sentiment in her follow-up email to The Daily Beast.
In his posts about the so-called “777 attack,” Stanley’s language can veer toward the gladiatorial.
“This is a fight to the death,” Stanley wrote in a screenshotted Terra Umbra comment provided by two sources. “I can’t reveal why but we have 7 days to set this right. I’m standing strong and fighting to take these mofos down.”
Last November, on his birthday, Stanley shared a post from a fan who called out Elijah Wood’s production shingle SpectreVision, which produced Color Out of Space, for severing their ties to the director over “false allegations.” He then reiterated his defamation charges against Amaris and Nicole—which Amaris noted anyone can file—and claimed that both women have been “recommended for psychiatric evaluation.”
Both Amaris and a source close to Nicole deny that this is the case; the jugement correctionnel from this April makes no mention of psychiatric evaluations. Stanley did not acknowledge The Daily Beast’s request for documentation to substantiate this allegation.
“It would take Elijah Wood five minutes to apologise or tactfully acknowledge he has been mislead [sic],” Stanley wrote. “How about it, ‘Lij ? Ready to move on ?”
For months, Stanley has teased an upcoming, feature-length documentary about his “war against witches.” On The Outer Realm last September, Stanley said the doc “continues all the way through to the court battle with the witches and the point when our opponents left court looking extremely crushed and angry.”
When he returned to Outer Realm on Dec. 1, Stanley said the doc would debut in two to three months as a “feature length documentation of the ongoing war here in the Zone.” He added that the release of his “Holy Grail book,” The Last Crusade—originally due out soon after last Halloween, as he’d told the show in September—has been “blocked by a number of crazy forces, one of them being the escalating cost of paper thanks to the war in the Ukraine.”
Kalle Kinnunen, co-writer and producer of the documentary Stanley was apparently referring to, told The Daily Beast that the project is “certainly not” coming out in a couple of months. He and the director, Otso Tiainen, also said that the project is not exclusively about Stanley or his case.
In an emailed statement regarding the film’s current scope, director Tiainen told The Daily Beast, “Shadowland is a documentary about people who don’t feel at home in modern society and have found refuge in this remote region in the South of France. It’s the story of how an ancient mystery religion and the search for the Holy Grail bring people together, and how that spell is broken. Mr. Stanley is one of the central personalities.”
The documentary crew was filming on the courthouse steps at the hearing in April, and as Stanley noted on Outer Realm, they were also present on March 16, 2021—the day Amaris’ blog came out, and the day Stanley claims to have endured a cyber attack that included his phone and bank account being hacked. When asked if he’d seen any definitive indication that this was the case, Kinnunen said he had not. Stanley did not acknowledge The Daily Beast’s request for documentation or evidence to support his claim.
The source who knew Stanley for years but never dated him told The Daily Beast they believe that Stanley “wants to tell people that he is being persecuted like the Cathars, and he wants to be seen as a #MeToo martyr also, because he thinks it provides him a sort of ‘get out of jail free’ card.”
Such a thing would be impossible to prove. But it does call to mind a passage of Stanley’s 2010 ebook, Shadow of the Grail — Magic and Mystery at Montsegur. At one point, Stanley describes his encounter with “the immortal Esclarmonde, the ‘light of the world,’” as a “bit like waking from a dream.”
“No way in hell the matrix can quite reassert itself after something like that,” Stanley writes. “It was as if I’d finally been forgiven, for what I don't know, handed the get out of jail for free card I’d been waiting for all along.”
