A corporate litigation lawyer is suing the estate of an alleged cult leader and her enforcers, claiming he was the victim of a decades-long scheme in which he was manipulated and terrorized into performing thousands of hours of unpaid labor.

Attorney Spencer Lee Schneider says he was first inducted into the group, known as The Odyssey Study Group (OSG), in 1989 when he was a 29-year-old litigation associate. He believed it to be a self-improvement course, but soon found that the late leader Sharon Gans Horn and her deputies controlled almost all aspects of his life.