Over the next two decades, von Mierers drew Richards into one of the most unlikely and revealing cult stories of the late 20th century. A self-styled prophet who claimed to have traveled to Earth from the distant star Arcturus, von Mierers recruited models, young professionals, and New York socialites into a group he called Eternal Values—drawing them in through charisma, flattery, and the promise of spiritual purpose, then holding them through psychological pressure, public humiliation, and escalating demands for total loyalty. Richards, meanwhile, became one of the most photographed male models of his generation, appearing in campaigns for Versace, Valentino, and Ralph Lauren and working with Richard Avedon and Helmut Newton. He also gave the group millions of dollars from his earnings and nearly 20 years of his life.
Now, documentarian Chris Smith brings the story to HBO with Bring Me the Beauties, a three-part docuseries premiering June 1. Richards’ account anchors the series, which traces Eternal Values from its glittery Manhattan origins through its unraveling in a North Carolina farmhouse, and asks a question that reaches beyond the cult itself: how does a person surrender their mind without realizing it is happening?
“His family had an extensive archive of his upbringing,” Smith says. “You couldn’t have a more ideal, idyllic American family. And there was just nothing in that that would make you think this person was a candidate to end up in a group like this.”
Hoyt Richards pictured in Bring Me the Beauties —Courtesy of HBO
Von Mierers told his followers that they had arrived on Earth from Arcturus—a star in the constellation Boötes, roughly 37 light-years from the sun—which he regarded as the spiritual center of the universe. Destiny had chosen them, he said, to prepare humanity for a coming planetary catastrophe. The pole shift would arrive by 1999. Eternal Values would survive it; everyone else, largely, would not. Deep in North Carolina’s Smoky Mountains, he had already identified the land where alien spacecraft would one day land to carry his group through the tribulation in rejuvenation chambers.
Richards now describes, with the clarity he’s spent decades earning, a process of incremental surrender. The group encouraged awareness and emotional discipline, discouraged alcohol and drugs, and demanded celibacy in its early years. Its social world drew people close and kept them there. Members watched one another constantly. When someone stepped out of line—or when von Mierers decided they had—he deployed what the group called “slamming sessions”: hours of shouting, degradation, and public dressing-down. Von Mierers framed the sessions as spiritual correction. Richards now understands them as mechanisms of control.
The man behind the lens
A still from the docuseries —Courtesy of HBOSmith came to the story the way many of the best documentary subjects find their directors: by chance. He was interviewing Richards for an unrelated project when Richards began talking, and the questions kept coming because the story kept unfolding. Four or five days of shooting passed before Smith felt he had what he needed.
“Sometimes you can look at cult stories and not see much commonality between yourself and the people who were involved,” Smith says. “Hoyt is so well-spoken, so present. He doesn’t seem like what we imagine a cult member to be. That changes the whole thing. Suddenly you realize that something like this could happen to anyone.”
At the height of his modeling career, flying transatlantic and staying in five-star hotels, Richards returned to New York and slept on a mat on the floor of a cult apartment, seeing no contradiction. Each success he had on the runway, he privately credited to the group, certain their spiritual work was driving it. That belief made the cult feel not like a constraint but a secret advantage. “I became my own worst enemy because I so fell in love with the narrative,” he says.
An undated photo of Hoyt Richards —Courtesy of HBO
Von Mierers’ death left the group without a clear leader, and when Fritz Diekmann—a TV executive and Eternal Values members—moved to fill that void, it split the group in two. Within six months, Richards’ side of the group staged a mutiny, locked Diekmann in his apartment, and forced him to relinquish control. Then the group turned on Richards.
He had also been carrying on a relationship, secretly, with a woman named Donna. When he finally confessed that relationship and his doubts to the group, nine weeks of nightly sessions followed, along with menial labor and a shaved head that killed any chance of modeling work. His nickname was “Dipsh-t.” The humiliation cut deepest in what it did to his sense of self: he left not in anger but in a fog of resigned shame, writing a note that he was quitting.
Finding his way back
In 2002, Richards’ lawyers settled with the remaining group members, liquidated Eternal Values’ assets, and the organization effectively ceased to exist. By then, Richards’ mother was dying of cancer. He hadn’t seen her in 12 years; when he returned, she wore a wig from hair loss due to the chemotherapy. He became her primary caretaker in the months before her death, and the two found their way back to each other in the time that remained. That reconciliation, and the ones that followed with his siblings, formed the other piece of his recovery. In some ways, it was the harder part.
In September, Richards will marry Donna, the woman whose existence he once hid from the group for four years. He talks about Eternal Values with the clarity of someone who turned two decades of confusion into hard-won understanding, more purposeful than bitter. He doesn’t hesitate when asked what he would say if he could somehow speak to the younger version of himself who first found belonging in Eternal Values. “This is not going to be a fun ride, but it’s going to be a journey that’s going to teach you lessons that you’ll be so grateful for,” he says. “So just don’t give up on yourself. Trust that when it starts to make sense, you’ll actually be grateful you went through it.”
In archival footage, von Mierers still carries a faintly recognizable presence: commanding in his attention, acting as the most singular person in the room. The series lets that charisma linger on screen long enough for viewers to feel its pull before understanding what it eventually cost its victims. “If you don’t know these people exist, you’re really vulnerable to them,” Richards says. “And if you don’t think this thing can happen to you, you’re sitting in the same chair that I sat in when it happened to me.”He had once been that certain. That is the real devastation at the heart of Bring Me the Beauties: the certainty that you are safe is often what keeps danger hidden in plain sight.
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