Confession: I Let a Cult Ruin My Boss Until He Took His Own Life

My hands won’t stop shaking even now, years later, as I sit in this tiny fibro shack on the outskirts of Wollongong, the rain hammering the tin roof like it’s trying to wash away what I can never scrub from my soul. I am Suzan. Thirty-one years old. Australian-born, but the shame I carry feels older than the country itself. I killed a man. Not with my hands, not with a gun or a knife, but with silence and betrayal and the slow, deliberate twisting of every good thing he ever built. His name was Jake. He was twenty-eight when I met him—brilliant, kind, the kind of young man whose YouTube videos about Bitcoin and smart investing had half a million subscribers hanging on his every word. He gave people hope in a country where the cost of living was crushing dreams. And I took all of it away because I was too terrified to tell the truth.

I still see his face in my nightmares—the way his eyes would light up when he explained blockchain to me over coffee in his Sydney apartment overlooking the harbour. He trusted me completely. I was his personal assistant, fresh out of university with a business degree and a CV full of lies about my past. I told him I’d had a quiet student life. I never mentioned the cult. I never mentioned Alex.

Alex. The name alone makes my stomach drop like I’m falling from the Harbour Bridge. We met in my final year at uni in Melbourne. It wasn’t called a cult back then—at least not to us. It was “The Circle,” a secret group of twenty or so students who met in abandoned warehouses, chanting under black lights, sharing blood oaths and promises of power beyond money. Alex was the leader, twenty-four, magnetic, with eyes that could pin you in place. He said the world owed us everything because we saw through its lies. We ran small scams together—credit card skims, fake investment apps that preyed on desperate uni kids. I was in love the way only a broken nineteen-year-old can be. I let him tattoo a small circle on the inside of my wrist with a razor blade and ink from a ballpoint pen. I let him convince me that rules were for the weak.

Then the police raided one of our meets. Alex got arrested for aggravated assault on a rival who’d tried to expose us. He went to prison for four years. I was expelled quietly, sent home to my parents with a record that I buried under fake names and new cities. I ran to Sydney, changed my number, deleted every trace. I thought I was free.

I wasn’t.

Jake hired me six months after I graduated. His channel was exploding—daily videos on Bitcoin wallets, DeFi strategies, how ordinary Aussies could build wealth in a broken economy. He lived in a sleek apartment in Barangaroo, drove a modest Tesla because he didn’t want to flaunt it, and spent weekends mentoring young traders online for free. “Money should lift people up, not crush them,” he’d say on camera, smiling that boyish grin that made strangers comment “you seem like such a good bloke.” He paid me well, trusted me with his passwords, his bank logins, his private investor emails. I handled his schedule, edited his thumbnails, even replied to fan messages when he was filming. He treated me like family. Once, when my mum was sick back in Melbourne, he bought my plane ticket without asking and told me to take all the time I needed. I cried in the bathroom because no one had ever been that kind to me.

Then one rainy Tuesday evening, as I was loading Jake’s gear into his car after a live stream event in the CBD, I saw him. Alex. Standing across the street under a flickering streetlight, hood up, eyes locked on me like a predator that had finally picked up the scent. He didn’t wave. He just stared. My knees buckled. I knew that look. It was the same one he gave the kid he’d beaten half to death in the warehouse—the one that said “you belong to me.”

He messaged me that night from a burner number. “Found you, little circle girl. Nice ride you’re riding in. Boyfriend? Boss? Doesn’t matter. You owe me four years.”

I met him in a deserted car park behind an old wool store in Pyrmont that early morning., heart slamming so hard I could taste metal. He looked harder, prison tattoos crawling up his neck now, a fresh scar across his cheek. Two other men waited in the shadows—remnants of The Circle, still loyal. Alex grabbed my wrist, thumb pressing exactly on the faded tattoo. “You ran while I rotted. Now you’re living soft with some crypto king. Cute.” His breath smelled of cigarettes and rage. He told me he’d kill me slowly if I didn’t help him. Not just me—my parents too. He had their address. He had photos of my little sister walking to school.

I begged. I cried. I offered him everything. And then I said the words that sealed Jake’s fate: “I can get you money. Lots of it. Just spare me. Let me live and I’ll make you rich enough to start over.”

Alex smiled the way he used to when a scam was about to pay off. He played along. For the first month it felt almost manageable. I had full access to Jake’s trading accounts, his cold wallets, his sponsor payments. I started small—skimming a few thousand here and there from affiliate commissions. I’d log in late at night when Jake was asleep or filming overseas, route the transfers through dummy wallets I set up under fake names, then send the crypto to Alex’s offshore addresses. He’d text me thumbs-up emojis and demands for more. “Double it next week or I visit your pretty boss and tell him who you really are.”

Jake never suspected. He’d pat me on the shoulder and say, “Suzan, you’re a lifesaver. I don’t know what I’d do without you.” I’d smile and feel my soul rot a little more.

But Alex’s demands grew like mould. Soon it wasn’t just money. The Circle wanted back in on the action. They started showing up at Jake’s events—disguised as fans, slipping notes into his merch bags that read “Your assistant has secrets.” Alex wanted Jake’s private investor list so they could run their old scams on a bigger scale. When I hesitated, Alex sent me a video: my parents’ house at night, a dead cat nailed to the front door with a circle carved into its side. Blood still wet. “Next time it’s your sister,” the text said.

I broke. I started forging Jake’s signatures on documents, leaking small bits of his trading strategies to Alex’s group so they could front-run the market and make quick profits. I planted rumours on crypto forums that Jake was about to dump his holdings—fake news that caused tiny dips I could exploit. Jake would come into the office pale, refreshing his charts, muttering, “The market’s acting weird lately. Must be whales.” I’d nod and make him a coffee and hate myself so deeply I wanted to vomit.

Then came the blackmail phase. Alex said the small stuff wasn’t enough anymore. He wanted me to pressure Jake directly. I refused at first. So Alex hacked Jake’s YouTube comments with bots posting gore and death threats aimed at him and his family. Jake started getting calls at mid night. from blocked numbers whispering, “Your PA knows what you did.” He didn’t know what they meant. He started sleeping with the lights on. His videos became shorter, his voice shaky. Subscribers noticed. Comments turned vicious: “Jake seems off lately,” “Is he scamming us?”

I was the one who escalated it to save myself. I created anonymous emails from “concerned investors” accusing Jake of insider trading—using screenshots I’d doctored with my own access. I sent them to his biggest sponsors. When Jake asked me to help investigate the leaks, I cried in front of him and said I was scared too. Then I leaked his home address to Alex’s crew. They started parking outside his building at night, engines idling, headlights cutting through his curtains. Jake installed cameras. They smashed them.

The harassment became a daily terror. One morning Jake found his Tesla keyed with the word “TRAITOR” and a circle scratched deep into the bonnet. Inside the glovebox was a printed photo of me and Alex from uni days, my face circled in red. Jake confronted me in the apartment, voice cracking: “Suzan… what the hell is going on? Do you know these people?” I lied through tears. “I don’t know anything. I swear.” He believed me because he was good. He hugged me and said, “We’ll get through this together.” That hug still burns in my memory like acid.

I kept stealing. Over eight months I funnelled almost $1.4 million in Bitcoin and cash to Alex. Jake’s net worth plummeted as the market turned against him—partly because of the fake rumours I spread. Sponsors pulled out. His channel views halved. He started selling personal items to cover rent. I watched him pack up his streaming setup one night, tears in his eyes, saying, “I just wanted to help people retire early, you know? Give them a fair go.” I nodded and helped him box the lights while my phone buzzed with Alex demanding another transfer.

The death threats turned personal. Alex’s men started following Jake on his morning runs around the Domain. One left a noose hanging from a tree with a note: “Next time it’s real.” Jake’s family in Brisbane begged him to come home. He refused—he didn’t want to bring danger to them. He started drinking. His eyes lost their light. In his last video—filmed in a half-empty apartment—he looked straight into the camera and whispered, “If you’re watching this and you know me… I’m sorry. I don’t know who I hurt but I’m sorry.” The comments were a bloodbath of speculation and cruelty.

I could have stopped it. I could have gone to the police. I could have told Jake everything—about the cult, about Alex, about how I was the leak, the thief, the traitor. But every time I opened my mouth the image of my sister’s face with a circle carved into it flashed behind my eyes. So I stayed silent. I helped destroy him instead.

The final spiral was the worst. Alex wanted one last big score—access to Jake’s main cold wallet holding over $800k in client funds he managed. I refused. Alex sent three men to my flat. They held me down—not sexually, just pure terror—pressed a knife to my throat and made me watch a live video of my parents tied to chairs in their lounge room. “Transfer it or they die tonight.” I did it from my laptop while shaking so hard I could barely type. Jake lost everything the next morning. His channel was demonetised. Banks froze his accounts pending investigation into the “theft.” News outlets ran headlines: “Popular Crypto YouTuber Embezzles Investor Funds?” It was all lies I’d helped plant.

Jake came to me that night, broken. He sat on my couch—yes, he still trusted me enough to come to my place—and sobbed like a child. “I don’t understand, Suzan. Why is this happening? What did I do to deserve this?” I held him while he cried and said nothing. Two days later he was gone. His body was found in a cheap motel in Newcastle. He’d hanged himself with his own belt. The note was short: “I tried to do good. Someone I trusted destroyed me and I’ll never know why. Tell my family I’m sorry. Tell my subscribers the money was never the point.”

I read that note at the inquest. I sat in the back row wearing sunglasses and a beanie, listening to his mother wail. His little brother read a eulogy about how Jake once gave his pocket money to a homeless man. The room was full of young Australians whose lives he’d touched—kids who’d started investing because of him, families who’d paid off mortgages. I threw up in the toilets afterward.

That was two years ago.

I still pay for it every single day. The guilt is a living thing inside me. I can’t hold a job longer than three months because I panic when anyone trusts me with passwords or money. I live on Centrelink and the few cleaning gigs I can get, scrubbing toilets in office blocks at night so I don’t have to look anyone in the eye. My parents won’t speak to me—they know pieces of the story from the news. My sister changed her number after I tried to warn her. I have nightmares where Jake is standing at the end of my bed, rope around his neck, whispering, “Why didn’t you just tell me?” I wake up screaming and claw at my own skin until it bleeds.

I’ve tried therapy. The counsellor says I was a victim of coercion too. I tell her no—I was the weapon. I chose silence over courage. I chose my own survival over an innocent man’s life. Every cent Alex and his cult made off Jake’s ruin is blood money I can never touch. I’ve donated what little I have anonymously to suicide prevention charities in Jake’s name, but it feels like spitting on a grave.

I keep the faded circle tattoo on my wrist covered with long sleeves, but I can still feel it burning. Sometimes I stand on the cliffs at Austinmer Beach at dawn and scream his name into the wind until my throat is raw. The ocean doesn’t answer. It just keeps rolling in, indifferent, the way the world kept turning after he was gone.

Jake never got to see thirty. He never got to marry the girl he’d mentioned once, shyly, over lunch. He never got to watch his subscribers build the lives he dreamed for them. All because I was too scared to be honest. Because I let a monster from my past turn me into a monster too.

If you’re reading this and you knew Jake—his real name wasn’t Jake, but if the details feel familiar—please know this: he was good. Pure. The kind of person Australia needs more of. I took him from you. I took his light and I snuffed it out with my cowardice.

I am genuinely, bone-deep sorry. I would give my own life to undo it, but I can’t. So I live with the weight instead. Every breath I take is borrowed from the man I betrayed. Every quiet moment is haunted by his smile and the sound of that rope creaking.

This is my confession. Not for sympathy. Not for absolution. Just so the truth exists somewhere outside my head. So that maybe, in some small way, Jake’s story isn’t completely erased by the evil I helped unleash.

I’m sorry, Jake. I’m so, so sorry.

I will carry this until the day I die. And even then, I hope you’re waiting on the other side so I can kneel and beg your forgiveness face to face.