Lo and behold, he was flipping through a local paper when he saw an ad for a woman who "ran bars," in Access parlance. The woman turned out to be Douglas's stepdaughter, Shannon, who discovered that this sad, chiseled man was actually a prodigy. He had a gift for healing that he wasn't even aware of. He took the Access Foundation and Level One classes, and then Douglas went to see him. He asked Heer to start facilitating Level Three classes, something the chiropractor hadn't anticipated. Douglas recounted one of these early visits in a 2004 class:

"Just talk to my body and do what it tells you," Douglas said he told Heer. "And I knew that he could do that. And so he started doing this stuff, and I started twitching all over the table, and when I got up, I went, 'Holy shit, what did you just do? That was the most phenomenal thing I've ever experienced.' And that session changed my life. And that session changed his life, too."

Before long, Heer moved into Douglas's home and became Access's number-two man.

With his hint of vulnerability, impeccable taste in clothes and awesome hair, Heer was an immediate hit. Based on some accounts by former Accessories, the man has magic fingers. When he runs bars at Access workshops, with only his fingertips on a woman's head, he has been known to induce orgasm.

Heer certainly helped with the eye-candy aspect, but based on the earlier classes reviewed by the Press, this wasn't the only appealing part of Access workshops. These weren't stodgy affairs; there were no pedantic lectures or church-like solemnity. They were fun, lively explorations of what it means to be a humanoid. When Douglas wasn't spouting Access catchphrases like "binary occlusions" and "nucleated spheres," he was dropping the F-bomb, sharing funny anecdotes and encouraging healthy debate. Heer could keep things light with impressions of his family members or a random joke about his penis. To someone who doesn't believe in past lives, metaphysics or magical healing, the classes might seem flaky, but benign enough.

But based on more recent writings and accounts from later classes, Access has taken a distinctive turn.

One woman, whom we'll call Tammy because she didn't want her name used, told the Press that Douglas was "verbally abusive" at a workshop she attended within the past year.

"I was horrified by his style of facilitating — which is shaming," Tammy says, later comparing Douglas's style to Heer's. "I mean, Dain is really sweet and openhearted, and Gary can be really vicious...I think he has a lot of unresolved anger toward women...He would talk very disparagingly about his ex-wives and how they did this to him and that to him. He just sounded like a victim the way he talked about it."

Tammy says he showed a real dark side, referring to his ex-wives as "controlling bitches," and sharing an anecdote about how he dealt with a little girl who picked on his daughter Grace when she was a child: "Gary told us that he pulled the little girl aside and he called her a little cunt." (Douglas's first wife, Laurie Alexander, a minister and life coach in Santa Barbara, told the Press that she loves Gary. "He's a great guy, really good person, really lots of integrity...That's all I can say." His second wife, Patricia O'Hara, also praised Douglas and Access to the Press, which is odd, since Douglas told a group of Accessories in 2004 that, because of her, "You were not allowed to talk about Access in the house." Douglas meekly bowed to her demands, as in all aspects of the marriage: "I said nothing...I just made the money and gave it to her." To illustrate what an emasculating shrew she was, he told a story of how she chided him in front of Heer and other dinner guests one evening, snidely asking him if he remembered to turn off the barbecue grill because he had forgotten to the last time. At this point in Douglas's story, Heer chimed in about how he was even more upset than Douglas, saying, "She was about to get kicked in the cunt.")

Tammy says that Douglas's rantings were so different from the Access teachings that appealed to her in the first place, explaining that "I'm grappling with that, because I don't want to throw it out completely — because there are good things."

Another former Accessory, whom we'll call Liz, said she left the group after noticing what she called a darker streak in Douglas's teachings. What had started out as a call for "oneness" and just generally being a better person, led by a genuinely sweet man who had empathy for others, had taken a dark turn — especially in how he spoke about women. Simply put, Liz says Douglas's "perspective on women lacks development." She says he didn't think women were inferior; he just wanted to focus more on helping men explore their consciousness. (She says the only female who had any sway over Douglas was his biological daughter, Grace. In Liz's estimation, Douglas's stepdaughter Shannon threw herself into Access and worked hard for Douglas's approval, while Grace walked on water.)