Please note that in this episode there will be a graphic description of an invasive procedure.

Listen at your own discretion.

By a.

Large group of people is praying in Portuguese.

They're all dressed.

In white and seem to be in the main hall of a social club or a community center.

But this isn't a normal spiritual gathering.

An invasive medical procedure is about to take place.

This homemade video is focused on a man who's standing on a small stage.

He's also dressed in white, with people huddled around him.

He's in his late sixties, with thinning brown hair and a stocky build.

There's a point where you can see his demeanor change.

His blue eyes row wide and his movements get slower.

He's no longer himself.

John, He tells the crowd.

He's now channeling the spirit of a well known doctor who died in the nineteen forties.

The man who I'll call the doctor.

At a certain point turns to three people behind him on stage.

They're holding metal trays.

And seem to be his assistance.

Right next to them, there's this one guy who sticks out.

He's standing stiff as a board up against.

The back wall with his eyes closed tight, as if he's bracing himself for something.

The doctor reaches into one of the trays with his bare hand and picks up a long pair.

Of surgical scissors.

He uses them to grab a piece of gauze and dips it in water.

He then goes up to his patient, the guy standing against the wall with his eyes closed.

What happens next is as bizarre as it is disturbing.

The doctor tells his patient to open his eyes and tilts his head back with his hand.

He then shoves the scissors all the way up his patient's nose and starts twisting them like he's unscrewing the top off a bottle, Twisting, twisting, twisting, sliding the scissors deeper as he continues to twist.

All this time, the patient is grimacing, mouth wide open, but he's not making a sound.

Then, all of a sudden.

The doctor pulls the scissors out of the patient's nose, letting out a tiny stream of blood.

The patient is placed in a metal wheelchair, and as he's whisked away, you see a smile spread across his face.

The video you just heard is from two thousand and nine, but there are countless more online recorded over the span of decades.

They feature similar procedures, all performed by the same man, the renowned spiritual healer Choau Dedos John of God.

A man who claims to work miracles and heal the sick.

He says he's a faith healer and people from all over the world flocked to see him.

He had healed the wives of ministers, presidents and politicians, and honors of big companies, and they.

Were Even Oprah has gone to see him.

Over the past four decades, John of God says he's treated millions of people.

John of God claims to be a medium capable of channeling spirits with tremendous powers, powers that can heal cancer and help people walk again.

The treatment he offers can be invasive, like putting scissors up a patient's nose or scraping their eye with a knife, but more often, the spirits have him conduct invisible surgeries, which he can do on many people at the same time without ever touching them.

This might sound crazy or very fringe, but I can assure you it is not.

Celebrities, Supreme Court judges, lawyers, and doctors.

Thousands of people have traveled to see John of God at his quote spiritual hospital in southeast Brazil, and not just from other parts of the country, but from as far as Germany, Australia and the United States.

Desperate, that's what I was weighing, freaking eighty pounds with a child to raise.

No doctor figured it out what was wrong with me?

Any dangeres YAKAMAI me.

Nobody told me they were going to cure my father.

No doctor, neurologists, neurosurgeon, no one say.

They could kill him.

Get put on the plat.

We went to the hospital, We went to multiple doctors.

They couldn't figure out what was actually the problem.

I went there, you're playing with your belief because you really want to live.

All you have is faith.

Faith.

My name is Martina Castro.

I've been an audio journalist for twenty years, and while reporting this story, I've meditated a lot on that word faith and on its power.

I'd say I'm a spiritual person.

I'm both skeptical of anything that sounds too good to be true and I like to leave room for the unexplainable.

If I were desperate to heal myself or someone I love, I can absolutely imagine myself getting on an airplane to the middle of nowhere to find a miracle cure.

But what this story has gotten me to wonder is not about what gets us to have faith in a given thing or a given person, but how long are we willing to hold and keep that faith even when we can feel something is not right.

I simply thought that Juan's work was spiritual when I first went there.

I had no idea that there was a secret behind all of this.

Over the course of this series, you'll learn how John of God became a celebrated healer at the center of an international movement, all while behind the scenes, dark secrets started to come out.

Intimidation.

He would always say, what you think, they'll believe me or you or he will.

See fraud, sexual abuse, and mysterious deaths.

It's very difficult and it's very also lonely.

One small person gainst God.

From Exactly Right Media and Adonde Media, this is two faced John of God Episode one, The Last Hope O lad.

Oh Father.

This is me speaking broken Portuguese with a woman named Annaboula.

Despite our language barrier and spotty zoom connection, Annaboula immediately came across as vivacious, warm and confident, she asked we only use her first name to protect her family.

An Abaula ended up seeing John of God out of desperation, but not for herself, for her father.

Around two thousand and six, Anaballa's father was diagnosed with late stage brain cancer.

After many surgeries, doctors said there was nothing else they could do for him.

He was in a wheelchair and a lot of pain.

He couldn't even swallow.

So Anna Paula turned to their faith as a last hope.

It was thank you for spiritA.

I've always been a spirituist my entire life.

I was born in a spiritist home, and I grew up with relatives performing spiritual surgeries healing.

According to Annabaula's beliefs, spirits are non physical beings that can interact with us.

It just so.

Happens that Brazil is said to have the largest concentration of spiritists in the world.

And it was this spiritual community that first introduced Anapaula to John of God.

People said very little about John of God, but always with a lot of a lot of respect and the certainty of a cure or some spiritual healing.

So I remember he had written some books and I bought them from father.

In one of those books, an Aballa's father read about a man whom John of God cured, a man who had brain cancer.

When my father read that, he said, I want to be Joan of God's next miracle by jakabad All.

My father had just become a grandfather and he wanted to see his grandson grow up.

He formed Abaijan, and so we went to a Badiana.

Abadiana that's the small rural town in the middle of Brazil where John of God founded what he calls his spiritual Hospital.

Abadiena has about seventeen thousand residents, and it's an hour and a half drive from.

The country's capital, Brasilia.

Many describe it as a town you drive through to get somewhere else.

A major highway cuts it in half, with most of the residents and local businesses on one side and the spiritual hospital, or the Gasa on the other.

The GASA is short for Casa the Dominacio de Loyola, or House of Saint Ignatius of Loyola.

Anna Baula's inability to heal her father through traditional medicine is what led her to this place, along with thousands of.

Others, people in desperate situations.

They were dying and they had irrevocably fatal diseases.

Then there were people like Michael Baylot.

He first visited the GASA from the US because his girlfriend at the time was very sick.

Doctors were not able to help her, so they traveled to Brazil to see healers that Michael had read about, and they ended up at the CASA.

That's when Michael felt like he witnessed something really incredible happening.

There.

He met people who said John of God cured their cancer after treatment.

Some people were able to walk again after years of being in wheelchairs.

Some people said their tumors disappeared.

This is real.

This guy's actually doing surgery and it's a miracle.

I never believe that miracles were real until that point.

So Michael decides to stay and live in Abadianya.

When I arrived there, I had been going through about a five year period in my life where I was having a big spiritual awakening.

So my frame of mind when I arrived there was very positive and very open, and I was very altruistic also, so this situation looked like, my God, this is there's nobody else in the world that's ever done this, and I want to be a part of it.

I want to help people.

Look at all the people.

He's helped millions of people, and he did it for free, so it just sounded really enticing.

Soon after moving to Abadianya, Michael became a tour guide to help other people from the US travel.

There many people that went there and said, I have stage four cancer and it's Mostaticizing him in agony every day helped me.

I had several clients like that.

But then there was this other group of people.

About a third of the people that came, or a quarter of them, they were just spiritual tourists.

They'd heard about this guy and they wanted to have an experience.

So a lot of people would go there and just say, can you help me on my spiritual path?

So in this middle of nowhere town, in the middle of Brazil, you had these various groups of people coming together, people who were really sick and desperate for a cure, volunteers and spiritual tourists who wanted to be part of this experience, and tour guides like Michael, who were helping both of those groups travel to Abadiana and navigate the culture the language and the town.

They came together around John of God's mission to bring spiritual healing to thousands of people from around the world.

I felt I was part of a very, a big, miraculous event that was going to change the world.

The experience at the Gasa takes place three days a week.

It begins when you set foot in the town, and Abaula says, from the moment you get there, it's impossible not to get drawn in.

Oh clear, mylee.

The vibe there was just a wonderful vibe.

I used to say that it was a little piece of heaven on the earth.

First of all, imagine that around seven am you start to see tour buses arrive and hundreds of people start to fill the streets, all walking toward the Gasa.

Everyone there was wearing white, so white pants, whatshirts, wat dresses, the whole town.

That's Tim Elliott, a journalist from Australia.

He went to Abadiena in two thousand and four.

He says, in addition to wearing white, you'd see some people walking barefoot.

These things were encouraged by John of God so that you could free up your energy to the spirits and to also absorb their healing more easily.

And people are blissed out.

Yeah, Like they're pretty they're pretty stoked to be they're pretty happy to be walking around in his presence, you know, and about to see him.

Tim admits he went to Abadianya feeling very skeptical about John of God.

So I thought it's going to be rubbish, right, But then when you get there and you have literally thousands of people in white milling around and everyone tells you how they've been saved by this person.

After a while, I was like, well, can all these people be wrong?

Like is it possible?

Like maybe maybe they're right, maybe they have been saved.

And they're all like, I'll show you my medical papers, I'll show you my x rays, all that sort of stuff.

The first person Tim met at the GASA was actually one of those people who claimed it to have been cured.

She was also from Australia.

And she had gone there because who she had.

I think.

She said she had some degenerated disease in her back and so she was finding it really hard to walk.

And she swore to me that she, you know, she was made better, and that she could throw her cane away and she basically regarded it as a miracle, what had happened as a miracle, and said to me, oh, he is pure love, you know.

He he that's what he is.

The power he radiates is like something from out of space.

It's unbelievable.

Eli representa pilar.

He represented a pillar of a labor of love by hundreds of thousands of people in Jimidia.

Jupe Sauce.

Marcellos Toduto first arrived at the Casa back in nineteen ninety eight, much like the woman Tim just described, to seek treatment for an illness.

In Marcello's case, it was to treat his scoliosis, but Marcello had another reason.

He wanted to meet Juau, John of God.

He was very interested in houning him his own spiritual gifts.

Marcelo ended up staying at the Gasa to work side by side with Joau as a medium himself, and ended up being part of his community for almost two decades.

Yeah, yeah, vioma siste macha sagarti.

He says.

The routine at the GASA on visiting days was pretty much the same over the years.

People would congregate in a big central hall that resembles an open air church.

Where each person is given a number.

Depending on whether your first timer coming for a follow up visit or requesting a physical surgery like the scissors up the nose, you're called to a different line.

The day starts with some announcements, then everyone recites a series of Christian prayers, sometimes in three or four different languages.

Marcelo says, once people are told to line up, there are three main rooms where the treatment takes place.

A primeda sala.

So the first room was the large center room in Tokxicador.

There was where with the talk to find the pain and dancer energies that everyone brought to that space.

In this first room, everyone sits and prays or meditates.

Mediums are also sitting in this room meditating, mixed in with people who are waiting to see John of God.

The goal is to clean everyone's energies so that by the time people see Joao it will be easier for him to diagnose and treat them.

In Talla ra komosi FOSSi.

So it was if we were going to compare it with a cart.

The idea was like a car.

Was the person goes through the first room and receives a heavier cleaning.

The music and noises you hear in the background are from a homemade video that was filmed in the second room at the Casa.

This is where you actually line up to see John of God.

Tim Elliott, the journalist, stood in that line.

There's a massive queue, like I'm talking, a huge queue that sort of snakes around the whole compound, leads into this private room that he has he sometimes occupies, and you walk along, you shuffle along.

He sits at the head of this room, surrounded by crystals and followers who sort of usher people toward him as you're walking there.

All the while, hundreds of people are sitting on either side of you meditating.

And they're meant to be sort of harnessing this huge spiritual energy that it's kind of like spiritual base load power that you know, Ja'o can then tap into to perform these incredible, you know, these miraculous deeds that he pulls off.

So you walk through this room and you can feel you can feel, you know, if you have hundreds of people meditating in one room, there is an energy that comes out of that.

There's no doubt about that.

So by the time you meet him, acceptible and primed for something, to believe that someone has power.

Right.

Sometimes I would walk in that chain of prayers on that line, and it seemed like I was just in the scene.

Do you know when you're walking through calm waves in the scene, I felt like I was walking in the middle of the waves.

It was a very good thing.

It was a very good feeling.

It was peace, had all my.

Delicious aramas, fresh air, very pleasant music and meditation music like calm religious music.

So it was like it really was a little piece of heaven.

The cell.

And all of this is happening before you've even talked to John of God.

It's designed to be this way because, according to John of God and other spiritist leaders, your illness is essentially a manifestation of problems with your energy.

So as a medium, Marcello says he doesn't treat the illness, he treats what causes the illness.

Four que nontra biog Because in a healing work, when it's in fact a spiritual healing work, the idea is not to make people get cured of all their physical ills.

The idea is to make people come out profoundly more aware of themselves, more spiritualized, and transformed in their way of being, feeling, enacting with each other.

And this activates the mechanisms of the person's immune, physical, and spiritual system to see the healing process and perhaps eliminate physical illness.

Belinda physic.

It can take hours to get through the line that Tim and Anambaula and all the first time visitors have to stand in before they get their moment with John of God.

But Tim says, you can see him while you're waiting.

He didn't say a lot.

He was a big guy physically, a big guy, so he had a presence.

Finally Tim got to the front of the line and it was his turn to meet Joao for the first time.

So I got to the head of the room and I think I took his hand briefly, and his eyes rolled back into his head and his hand fluttered.

So at this point, John of God is channeling a spirit or entity as they're also called as a medium.

His gift is to be able to embody these spirits that diagnose and treat people through him.

So technically, in that moment, he isn't himself, he is the entity.

And then you're usher on your way and right literally you made him for it would have been I don't know, ten seconds max.

So in those ten thirty seconds, he might send you to meditate or to take a bath in a waterfall they had on the property.

He might send you to the third room.

That's where John of God conducts invisible surgeries on a large group of people at the same time, without ever touching them.

If you wanted a physical surgery, you had to request one when you arrived, and they happened in the middle of the day.

But more commonly, John of God would scribble down a prescription for you on a piece of paper, telling you how many bottles of blessed water or passion flower herbs to buy at a shop on the property.

All the pills were the same, but they were said to be blessed by the spirits to treat your specific problem.

And that's how it goes person after person.

But when Annabaula meets John of God for the first time, it goes a little differently.

To die into imagine that we would pass by the entity and the medium would give me crystals, give me ken those, give me presents and roses.

Again, when Annapaulla says the entity she's referring to John of God when he's in a trance.

When she calls him the medium, that's when he's himself and not channeling a spirit.

She thinks that she and her father were treated differently from the moment they arrived in Abadianya.

Because her father was a well known and respected lawyer, she could tell people were going above and beyond to make them feel comfortable.

An Abaula and her father saw John of God many times that year, and her father actually started to get better.

He was able to swallow again, and with the help of physical therapists, he even started taking a few steps after being confined for many months to a wheelchair.

So she and her father decided to move to Abadianya full time for a few months.

No, several times I visited John of God and he would congratulate me on my father.

He would ask me to go to his office, and I'll always go either with my father's assistant or with my father, But I never went alone.

Until one day Annapolla ended up at the casa by herself.

She sat down in the meditation room as usual to pray, and she took off her shoes as recommended by the community there.

So I was there barefoot, with my feet on the ground, feeling all that energy, the energy of the place, with my eyes closed, and I felt a hand on my shoulder.

When I opened my eyes, it was John of God, and he called me to come to his office.

I've been to his office several times, never alone.

He would even close the door, but this time I went alone, and as soon as I entered, not only he closed it, but he locked it.

With a key.

Nathan Molt.

At that moment, I felt bad.

He said that he was going to do healing work for my father.

An Abaula felt uncomfortable.

Something was not right, but she also wanted to believe what he told her, that this was a special spiritual treatment to heal her father.

So she did as she was told.

But what would happen in that room that day was far from the kind of spiritual experience she had hoped for.

Not mad, no doctor, neurologist, neurosurgeon, no one said they could cure my father.

But he said, I'm going to cure your father.

You don't get it.

This is a healing treatment and it's your energy.

Yes, and you represent your father, and I believed it.

How did this happen?

How did you gain an almost blind trust from his followers.

In the next episode, we learned how Joel they shared the Faiah, became Joel de Dell's John of God, this almost mythical leader of extreme power and influence.

It is simply demonst true.

He has always been very pleased to be the greatest healing in the world.

Least i espress vida.

Vanity is expressed there.

So very quickly they learned that they had to protect him and protect the possibility of him to cure people, you know, to run the business.

It's a business, and everyone around him knew that they were part of the business.

And then there was a moment that was the crowning of the expansion of the movement.

Of course, when Oprah Winfrey went.

To Two Faced John of God on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever.

You get your podcasts.

There you can also find this show en Espanol just look for dos Garas Juan de Dios.

Two Faced John of God is a production of Exactly Right Media and Adonde Media, hosted and written by myself Martina Castro.

Our senior producer is Mariano Baschela, reporting and fact checking by Iluisa Trajano.

Production assistance and research by Giovanna Romano Sanchez, sound designed by Mauricio Mendoza and our mastering engineer is Martine Grus.

Original music was composed by Mariana Romano.

The artwork is by Vanessa Lilac.

Anna Paula was interpreted by Giovanna Romano Sanchez and Luciano Miranda by Andres Gavacherro for.

Exactly Right Media.

The executive producers are Karen Kilgariff, Georgia hard Stark and Danielle Kramer, with consulting producer Lilli Ladowig and associate producer Jay Elias.

A special thank you to Michael Baylott for giving us permission to use audio from his recordings at the GASA.

He recently published a book about his time there, called Cult of John The Secret Life of Joual Deduce