Eternal Values – A documentary revisits how Hoyt Richards—once fashion’s celebrated “golden boy”—spent nights reporting to a Manhattan cult leader, Frederick Von Mierers, who claimed extraterrestrial origins while exploiting vulnerable followers through secrecy, intimidation,
When Hoyt Richards walked out into fashion’s bright air, the world treated him like royalty. But when the shoots ended and the hotels emptied out, he didn’t go home to freedom. He went back to a Manhattan orbit where members slept side by side on mats. surrendered their earnings to the group. and phoned in detailed reports about their thoughts and daily behavior.
That split life is at the center of HBO’s Bring Me the Beauties. director Chris Smith’s documentary about Hoyt’s journey through the fashion industry and into Frederick’s orbit. The film captures a double life that lasted for more than a decade: an international male supermodel by day. an obedient cult member by night.
At the edge of that world sat a cult leader who never stopped claiming the extraordinary. The man followers called Frederick Von Mierers—born Frederick Myers. the son of a Brooklyn dry cleaner—presented himself as something larger than a con artist. He told people he was an alien consciousness from the star Arcturus inhabiting a human body.
He also built a convincing social mask. Frederick listed himself in the Social Register. implied ties to the Vanderbilts. and claimed he had inherited millions through a godmother connected to the Kress family fortune. None of it was true. People who knew his real background would shout “Freddie Myers!” across the floor at Studio 54 just to watch him flinch.
His followers. mostly men with some women. were often attractive figures from the fashion world—people who looked chosen even when they were being targeted. Frederick preached detachment from worldly concerns while selling gemstones at enormous markups. claiming God’s thoughts condensed themselves into crystal form. He held seminars at a Park Avenue church. He broadcast his teachings on Manhattan public access television in the wee hours of the morning. after Robin Byrd and before dawn.
Long before HBO’s cameras arrived, the legal pressure had already begun to tighten. By the time journalist Marie Brenner profiled Frederick in Vanity Fair in March 1990, Manhattan prosecutors were already investigating his operation. Brenner estimated Frederick had sold nearly $2 million worth of gemstones using fraudulent appraisals from jewelers on West 47th Street.
Frederick died the same month the story appeared. having concealed an AIDS diagnosis while continuing to see male prostitutes near his East 54th Street apartment. The group. which called itself Eternal Values. survived him—mutating after his death from Upper East Side spiritual theater into something harsher and more paranoid.
The documentary only hints at how long Frederick had been running his playbook and how far it reached. His operation began in the late 1970s. By the time 16-year-old Hoyt encountered him on Nantucket in 1981. Frederick had already spent several years moving through New York society. collecting beautiful. vulnerable young people arriving in Manhattan and hoping to become someone larger than themselves.
Hoyt’s entry into Frederick’s world came with a small, vivid ritual. Frederick drew a yin-yang symbol in the sand and told the teenager he possessed a higher destiny. Hoyt later described it less as persuasion than emotional engulfment. “Rather than asking. ‘Who is this person who acts like they know me when I just met them?’ — which is the important question — I was just lost in it. ” he said. “We all like being told we’re special.”.
Frederick’s power worked partly because he offered two versions of himself at once: a cosmic figure making extraterrestrial claims. and a highly convincing Upper East Side sophisticate who seemed entirely plausible in rooms full of wealth and glamour. People who accepted the alien mythology had already surrendered skepticism—and had become ripe for recruitment.
He cultivated legitimacy with real names. Billy Baldwin. the dean of American interior design. became a key legitimizing figure in Frederick’s orbit. and Frederick dropped Baldwin’s name constantly. As Frederick’s mythology deepened. his personal presentation grew stranger over time—Robert Redford-esque before the facelifts and self-mythologizing transformed him into something more unsettling.
Richard Dupont described how it felt to face him up close. Richard was one of the Dupont twins, fixtures at Studio 54 and Andy Warhol’s Factory. He said Frederick was the most frightening person he had ever met. “He was the most frightening person I have ever met in my life. and I’ve met some very dangerous people. ” Richard said.
Richard first encountered Frederick in the menswear department at Bloomingdale’s in 1977. He had come into the city from Connecticut with his mother for a weekend of shopping and theater. While she was at Kenneth Salon getting her hair done, he wandered uptown alone. A very handsome. very tanned older man approached him and introduced himself as Frederick Von Mierers. saying he was a Ford model. a decorator. and a member of New York society.
Richard remembers Frederick seeming glamorous, worldly, and completely at ease inside the city’s adult universe. He called Frederick the following weekend and was invited to stay at Frederick’s apartment on East 54th Street. Richard later recalled what happened immediately after opening the door. “Take your shoes off,” Frederick told him, explaining that the marble floors had just been cleaned. Then Frederick told the teenager to remove his jeans because the oils from the fabric could damage the silk sofas. Richard stood there in Brooks Brothers boxer shorts inside a Billy Baldwin-designed apartment while Frederick served tea and sandwiches from William Poll.
Two days later, Richard woke up alone. A note instructed him to leave before Frederick returned. On the train back to Connecticut. Richard replayed the weekend in his mind. wondering whether he had been raped and whether a boy could even be raped. By the time he reached Southport, he decided not to think about it anymore.
Years later, after moving to New York, he ran into Frederick again at Studio 54. Frederick began pursuing him aggressively. Richard warned people about him. “Nobody listened.”
Richard’s twin brother Robert also had his own encounter—and his version confirms that the personal costs were not limited to one person. Robert did not tell Richard what happened; the brothers never discussed their sexual histories. Robert moved into Frederick’s apartment for several months in 1979. He said Frederick gave him acid and subjected him to repeated sexual abuse. Robert eventually fled after growing jealous over another young man Frederick became involved with—a soap opera actor from One Life to Live.
Robert now says, “Freddie was evil,” and adds, “Everyone knew it. You saw it in his eyes.”
Even decades later, the number stays lodged in their memories. Fifty years later, both brothers still remember Frederick’s phone number by heart. “Plaza 53530,” Robert said, recounting it instinctively. “Wow. Maybe he put a trance on us.”
For Hoyt, the cult’s hold intensified as his public career surged. After a few years, Frederick walked him into the office of Ford Models president Joey Hunter, who signed him immediately. Hoyt became one of the defining faces of late 1980s fashion. Bruce Weber, Richard Avedon, and Helmut Newton all photographed him. A 58-page spread in the Italian magazine Mondo Uomo helped establish him internationally. and designers and photographers liked him because he could project softness and authority at the same time.
He moved through rooms filled with Linda Evangelista, Cindy Crawford, and Naomi Campbell, along with private fittings, hotel suites, European nightclubs, and endless flights between New York, Milan, and Paris. But the people around him didn’t understand where he returned at night—behind glass.
After shoots, after parties, after dinners, while others disappeared into nightlife, romance, cocaine, and celebrity, Hoyt came back to Frederick. He flew home to a Manhattan apartment where multiple members slept side by side on mats. surrendered their earnings to the group. and phoned in detailed reports about their thoughts and daily behavior. Romantic relationships were discouraged. Independent identity gradually became suspect. “I fell so in love with the narrative,” Hoyt said, describing the mythology Frederick built around him. “that I started self-censoring to preserve it.”.
That narrative came with an end-date. Because Frederick hammered it into the group’s consciousness, members believed the world would end in 1999. He promised spacecraft would descend before global destruction and airlift the chosen into rejuvenation chambers, guiding them into the next age.
Hoyt, raised on Star Wars and Spielberg, initially found the mythology thrilling. But as Frederick’s death came and time kept moving, the predictions started to collide with reality.
After Frederick died in 1990, the group lost the charismatic center holding the mythology together. The surviving members relocated to North Carolina near Asheville. Frederick had begun constructing a pink marble estate because he believed the Blue Ridge Mountains would survive the apocalypse. The house was built with funds provided by Hoyt’s salary. and he was allowed to keep very little of it for himself.
As the calendar moved toward Frederick’s predicted doomsday. the remaining members—by then just the men—stockpiled food. guns. and gold while waiting for civilization to collapse. Hoyt’s own travels began to contradict the prophecies. “I’m still jetting around at Europe, Paris, Milan, Stockholm, whatever,” he recalled. “And I’m looking around and going. ‘Well. all the signs that he had told us were going to lead up to this thing. the storms. the earthquakes. the tidal waves — none of that’s happening. and certainly the economies aren’t collapsing. governments aren’t falling apart. So I got up the courage to go back to say. ‘If nothing else. I think the timeline’s off.’ And that’s when I got attacked.”.
The new leader answered that doubt with humiliation. Hoyt remembered it clearly. “He would say: ‘I just wish you had the guts to kill yourself,’ ” Hoyt said. “It would put me out of my misery.”
At that point, Hoyt began contemplating suicide. He later compared leaving to a battered partner’s logic—staying in the harm because the mind tries to make sense of it. Leaving the group eventually felt less like rebellion than mercy. “It’s like the battered partner who keeps thinking: ‘They’re having to spend all this time screaming at me because of what I’m doing to them. ’ ” Hoyt said.
Then, on July 3, 1999, Hoyt made a call that changed his life—he called Fabio. The two men had worked together at Ford Models. Fabio bought him a plane ticket to Los Angeles immediately. let him stay at his house for 18 months. and handed him the keys to one of his Porsches. In the years that followed. Hoyt described the friendship as becoming one of the first genuinely unconditional relationships he’d experienced in decades.
Not everyone was able to step out of the wreckage the way Hoyt did. Jacki Adams, a female Ford model who escaped Eternal Values, later became the main whistleblower in the Vanity Fair exposé. “The Vanity Fair article more or less killed Jacki’s career,” Hoyt said. “And for me, it catapulted mine.”
The industry’s attention became its own strange cycle. Even as Hoyt faced the consequences of his involvement, the cultural fascination around it helped turn into more bookings. His career and celebrity grew.
He learned that victimhood and complicity can overlap. He did not recruit himself into the cult. but he also ignored warning signs. rationalized contradictions. and benefited professionally while others paid the price for telling the truth. “It’s like being a drunk driver who runs someone off the road,” Hoyt said. “You can say, ‘I was drunk’ — but you’re still accountable.”.
Chris Smith. Bring Me the Beauties director and an executive producer of Tiger King. said the detail that affected him most was the contradiction embodied by the man everyone believed was simply beautiful and successful. Smith described Frederick as publicly embodying beauty, status, and aspiration while privately surrendering almost every element of personal autonomy. “I’ve never found cult stories that interesting,” Smith said. “But this one felt different because of the dual life — the split between the public image and the private reality.”.
Smith added that from the outside, former cult members didn’t appear marked by what they’d been through. “If you met any of them,” Smith said of the people who once lived under Frederick’s control, “you would never think they had this experience in their past.”
Today, Hoyt works as a cult exit counselor helping families recover loved ones from high-control groups. He is engaged to Donna Flagg, a dancer and choreographer whom the cult pressured him to abandon decades ago.
When he talks about manipulation now, he speaks with the precision of someone mapping terrain he once survived. “Love-bombing, isolation, the teaching of self-distrust,” he lists. “But the pilot light never goes out,” he says of the critical thinking cults try to extinguish. “It gets turned down so low, you can’t see it. But it never goes out.”.
Bring Me the Beauties premiered on June 1, and the story—told through Hoyt’s double life—keeps pulling the spotlight back to the same question: how does someone built from charm and status become dangerous enough to disappear people from themselves?
Hoyt Richards Frederick Von Mierers Eternal Values cult Bring Me the Beauties HBO male supermodel cult fashion industry Vanity Fair Marie Brenner Richard Dupont Robert Dupont Jacki Adams Fabio Chris Smith