When FBI Special Agent Hilda Kogut pulled up at an isolated farmhouse deep in the Catskills in June 1993, she was there to arrest the delusional but charismatic leader of a sinister doomsday cult called “The Family” based in Australia. She had no way of knowing the same cult that was the reason why Julian Assange’s family had to go on the run for years. But Kogut told The Post that what really struck her when arresting Anne Hamilton-Byrne — a once-glamorous yoga teacher who had convinced her New Age disciples that she was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ — and her husband, William Hamilton, in Hurleyville, NY, were her many plastic surgeries. “This was a vain woman,”said Kogut, who was working under the guidance of Australian detectives in a joint operation. “She’d clearly had so many facelifts that her hairline was pushed way back on her head.” But Hamilton-Byrne’s vanity was nothing compared to the years of abuse she perpetrated on more than two dozen helpless and vulnerable babies and young children she illegally adopted between 1968 and 1975 in the Melbourne, Australia, area. Police and the survivors of the cult said she told the kids she was both their mother as well as the reincarnation of Jesus Christ — and that, when the world ended, they would be responsible for re-educating the survivors. Byrne-Hamilton counted more than 500 well-educated doctors, nurses, lawyers, psychiatrists and other professionals as members of The Family, who went along with her deluded and cruel teachings, experts on the cult told The Post.
When Assange, the notorious founder of WikiLeaks whose 12-year incarceration ended last week when he pleaded guilty to one count of violating the Espionage Act, was about 10, his mother, Christine Assange, became romantically involved with a Family cult member and amateur musician named Leif Meynell Hamilton. (Christine and Assange’s birth father, John Shipton, split up when he was a baby and he didn’t see his dad again until he was 25. Christine then married theater actor Brett Assange; Julian took his name and considered him his father, though Christine and Brett divorced when Julian was about 9.) Assange referred to Leif as a “manipulative and violent psychopath” in the 1997 book “Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier.” He called the relationship between his mother and the much younger man “tempestuous” and claimed Leif could be abusive, beating his mother and once punching Assange in the face so hard that his face bled, according to an unauthorized biography. Assange said he attended 37 schools all over Australia after his mother tried to break up with Leif, because he stalked them — allegedly using cult connections to check national databases for their whereabouts. The situation reportedly grew worse when Christine got pregnant by Leif and a bitter custody battle ensued over Assange’s half-brother, who was born sometime around 1980. The Post was unable to locate either Leif or his alleged son. “Eventually, it was a matter of us escaping from him,” Assange has said. “We would cross the country and only then suffer this sinister realization that he had found us. He’d suddenly be back in our lives and this grew to be very heavy. He had this brilliant ability to insinuate himself … I pulled a knife on him, told him to keep back from me; but the relationship with him wasn’t about physical abuse. It was about a certain psychological power he sought to have over us.” That psychological power may have come from what Leif absorbed from The Family and its malevolent leader, whose surname he and other followers adopted. Lex De Man, a former senior investigator with the Victoria, Australia, police, is credited with cracking the mystery of the cult and tracking Hamilton-Byrne to her Catskills hideaway after she went on the lam. He told The Post this week that she was “the most evil woman I have ever known. “This was someone involved with the theft of children, who kept them isolated from the rest of the world and drugged them and injected them with LSD,” De Man said. “She had the people around her under what almost seemed like a spell.” Hamilton-Byrne dyed most of her adopted children’s hair platinum blond so they would look like siblings, cut their hair in matching styles, dressed them identically — and had them drugged with Valium and other sedatives from the time they were toddlers, according to both police and survivors of The Family. Hamilton-Byrne was rarely around the kids but she arranged for female members of the cult, called “aunties,” to care for the children, who were disciplined and punished for the most minor of infractions. They reportedly slept in small dormitories, were often beaten and deprived of food for up to a week — and sometimes waterboarded. Both detectives
