The Facts. — why this exists

Mission.

Document — in public, on the same search terms, with a citation on every sentence — the doctrines, practices, and recent reporting the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church spends real money to soften. Family separation. Allegations of abuse. Defamation suits against critics. Tax and charity regulators at the door. Not vibes: footnotes. Every page a pull request away.

How we source every claim →

The problem we’re fighting.

Since the 2020s rebrand, the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church (PBCC, formerly the Exclusive Brethren) has built an industrial public-relations operation: a polished microsite, a steady cadence of press releases, dedicated communications staff in multiple countries, and a suite of outward-facing philanthropy brands (Rapid Relief Team, OneSchool Global, Universal Business Team).

The result is that anyone searching “Plymouth Brethren”, “Exclusive Brethren”, or “is the Plymouth Brethren a cult” lands first on pages written by the fellowship’s own communications team. Sourced, public-record accounts — produced by academics¹, parliamentary inquiries², investigative journalists³⁴, and survivors — get pushed down the page.

That would be a public-information problem on its own. It is a more serious one given what the rebrand is covering for: documented family separation, allegations of sexual and physical abuse within the fellowship, defamation and injunction proceedings against journalists and ex-members, and a 2024 Australian Tax Office raid on UBT offices. This site is the counterweight.

Our response.

Sourced facts over adjectives. We do not call the PBCC a cult. We describe, sentence by sentence, a documented Doctrine of Separation⁵⁶ and the practices it produces: restrictions on meals, accommodation, marriage, business, and schooling with non-members; the practice of withdrawing from members who depart; a global leadership structure under the current “Man of God”⁷⁸. Readers draw their own conclusion.

Name what’s in the reporting. Abuse allegations, defamation suits against critics, and regulatory action are not subtext — they are the current public record. Where the record carries the claim, we carry it too, with the same citation. Where we cannot yet pin a public URL to a severity claim, we mark it ⚠︎ on the page and open the row in FACTS.md. We do not invent citations^⚠︎.

Mirror the structure, invert the content. This site structurally mirrors the PBCC’s public site so that Google indexes it against the same search terms. The copy is original, the facts are sourced, the perspective is inverted.

Survivor-first, in-site. First-person testimony is editorial work, not decoration. It will live on this site, under consent controls we publish — on-record by explicit written consent, reviewed by the contributor before it ships, removable at their request, and never used for a joke. See Stories for the intake process.

Open by design. The repository is public on GitHub. Every change is a commit. Every claim maps to a row in the public FACTS.md file. Corrections, new sources, and additional facts come in as issues and pull requests. Anyone can read the full editorial history.

What we will do.

Document PBCC doctrine and practice on the pages that rank for those search terms.
Footnote every factual claim to a public source.
Publish abuse-allegation reporting, defamation and injunction proceedings against journalists and ex-members, regulatory findings, and parliamentary-inquiry history as they land.
Host first-person survivor testimony on this site, under written consent, and signpost external cult-recovery resources.
Accept corrections in public. If we get a fact wrong, the fix is a pull request away.
Update pages when sources change; mark every page with a visible last-modified date.

What we will not do.

Out identifiable private members of the PBCC who have not chosen to be public.
Use survivors’ stories without their explicit, on-record, written consent.
Fabricate, estimate, or guess at citations. Unsourced claims ship with a visible source-pending marker or do not ship.
Mix registers on a single page. Pages are either openly parodic (Register C) or plainspoken journalistic (Register B).
Make jokes at survivors’ expense. The subject of every critical sentence is the fellowship’s rebrand or its leadership; never a former member.
Reuse PBCC photography. Every image here is original or licensed stock.

How to contribute.

This project welcomes contributions from researchers, journalists, ex-members, counsel, and anyone who finds a factual error. The lightest-weight way in is a GitHub issue; the heaviest is a fully-drafted pull request.

File a correction — for a factual error on any page.
Contribute a fact — for a sourced claim you think belongs on the site.
Request a source — for a claim we’ve marked as source-pending.
Send a confidential tip — when a GitHub issue is not appropriate.
Survivors: on-record testimony intake is described at Stories. We do not publish identifiable testimony without explicit written consent.

Who’s behind this.

This site is maintained by Trent Waskey, a contributor to ABC Four Corners’ “Big Brethren” follow-up reporting, alongside anyone who contributes on GitHub.

This project is independent. It is not affiliated with the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church, any successor to the former Exclusive Brethren, or any other religious organisation.

Sources and methodology.

Every factual claim on the site carries a numbered superscript linking to an outside source. The numbered links resolve through a typed registry at src/lib/sources.ts, which is the single place where URLs live. No page hardcodes a citation URL.

The registry is seeded from the public FACTS.md intake file. A claim reaches the site only after its FACTS.md row is promoted to one of:

✓ Verified — two independent sources, or one primary (court ruling, inquiry, or regulator finding) plus one journalism source.
🏹 Single source — acceptable for uncontested factual matters (dates, locations, leadership succession). Borderline for severity claims.
🔴 Source pending — the claim is true but we cannot yet pin a public citation. Such claims ship with a visible ⚠︎ marker, not a hidden gap.

Anyone can read EDITORIAL_GUIDE.md for the full voice and sourcing rules, open an issue to challenge any row in FACTS.md, or submit a PR updating a source URL.