New to this site? This page walks you through the Liana Shanti record in the order that makes it easiest to follow. Everything here links to court filings, sworn testimony, and primary sources you can verify yourself.
1. Who is Liana Shanti?
Liane Wilson, who operates online as Liana Shanti, is a Hawaii-based Instagram influencer who markets herself as a psychic, spiritual teacher, and certified nutritionist. In 2019 she was charged with federal bankruptcy fraud and subsequently convicted. Start with Who is Liana Shanti? for the overview.
Baseline: what she claimed in 2022. In the same period as the relocations described in section 2, Wilson’s own website presented her as a psychic. Her “Meet Liana” page opened its list of labels with “psychic” and said she had been “Psychic since childhood” (Wayback Machine copy, June 27, 2022). Her home page offered paid private sessions through a “Schedule a Session” button (home page, May 8, 2022; booking page, June 27, 2022). Former members later described, under oath, “psychic” question-and-answer sessions “during which she affirmed or confirmed abuse narratives for students” (ECF 84-2 ¶ 27).
Both came down. The “Schedule a Session” button is on her home page as late as September 16, 2022 and gone by December 27, 2022. The morning after The Daily Beast published its investigation (section 3), the “Meet Liana” page no longer used the word “psychic” at all (Wayback Machine copy, March 4, 2023). See I See Dead People for the psychic claim set against the court record. What she told her sentencing judge in 2023 about those sessions, and what the record shows, is set out in J.S.’s Letter to the Court.
Her claims, set against the record → Liana Shanti, Truth-Teller? — What She Said vs. the Record
Liane Wilson built her brand on telling the truth. This page takes her at her word — and sets her own claims beside the documented court record.
2. The Great Migration
In late 2021, women in Wilson’s private online community began relocating to states Wilson deemed “safe.” Some moved across the United States with their children. Others left Canada with their children and did not return — in some cases after what was presented to the other parent as a holiday trip, and in most cases without that parent’s consent.
The fullest account is in the court record itself: when Wilson’s probation came under review, twenty-three family impact statements were filed with the federal court as Document 87 (April 20, 2023, redacted as filed). One father wrote: “December 19, 2021. [She] took my daughters and crossed the Canadian border with her current husband … and went to Florida (according to Liana Florida is a ‘safe state’). I did not give my consent to do this.” (PageID.556.)
A grandmother, whose granddaughters were moved to Florida during the same season: “This wasn’t a vacation, it was abduction.” (PageID.553.) Grandparents of another child taken across the border that same week wrote that “the police and other agencies such as Edmonton child protection services, RCMP and the Hague convention, were of no help as they felt that because the child was with her mother she was not in immediate danger.” (PageID.603.)
Another father: “[She] abducted my children and I haven’t seen them in 16 months.” (PageID.557.) The pattern was not limited to Canadians: a North Carolina father wrote that in December 2021 the mother of his five-year-old “moved 1200 miles away to Texas with our daughter behind my back with the urging of Liana” — he recovered the child only through an emergency custody order. (PageID.600.)
The letters describe the same machinery behind each departure: accusations of abuse used to sever families. One father recounted his ex-wife sending her parents an email “accusing them of being complacent of sexual abuse,” then making their daughters read it — adding, “This is a pattern of Liana Shanti’s students, to cut out family.” (PageID.556.) And the letters record how the isolated families finally found each other: “In April of 2022, an Instagram page was started about Liana Shanti being labelled a cult. Until this point, I thought I was the only one going through losing my children to the country and moving without consent.” (PageID.557.)
Read the full story: The Great Migration →
3. The Jennings Brown investigation (March 2023)
As the families connected through 2022, they ran into a wall: they did not know who “Liana Shanti” was. The persona was an assumed identity — as The Daily Beast later put it, her “avatar and selfies present her as an ageless, airbrushed nymph-like model”; in 2018, Wilson “decided to give Liana a face — what appears to be a heavily filtered mystical version of herself,” and she “has never posted videos of herself.” Detractors eventually matched the alias to Liane Wilson through a photograph in a local Kauai publication.
In March 2023, journalist Jennings Brown published the investigation that blew the story open: “The Mysterious ‘Sisterhood’ Tearing Families Apart” (The Daily Beast). Drawing on “[s]ix former Liana followers and 19 people who say their families were destroyed,” it published leaked transcripts of the paid private chats. In one exchange quoted in the article, a follower asks: “Who sexually abused me?” Wilson’s answer: “Your grandfather.” The article reports that members asked if their children had been abused and Wilson “almost always provides definitive clarity and affirmation about the alleged abuse.”
One former member, “Amber,” told The Daily Beast the readings led her to question her children — “I did the coaching thing… I started to believe it myself” — and to report her ex-husband to child protective services, which “found no evidence he was harming the children.” The article also documented what one former member called the “Great Migration”: by her count, of about 180 followers, “about 38 of them moved to places [Wilson] deemed safe.”
4. The criminal conviction — in the court’s own words
United States v. Wilson, No. 1:19-cr-00105 (U.S. District Court, Hawaii). In her 2011 Chapter 7 bankruptcy, Wilson declared $1,840,277.75 in liabilities (In re Wilson, No. 11-01392, Dkt. 1, p. 17). The federal indictment charged that she and a co-defendant concealed from the bankruptcy trustee “cashier’s checks from the sale of a diamond ring, a long-term disability insurance policy and a claim made on the long-term disability policy, and business assets of Rawganic Vegan” (Doc. 1). In May 2021 she pleaded guilty to that indictment, agreeing that she “is in fact guilty of Concealment of Bankruptcy Assets as charged in the Indictment,” and admitted that the $42,000 received from the sale of a five-carat diamond ring was never disclosed to the bankruptcy court (Doc. 43, ¶¶ 6, 8). In December 2021 she was sentenced to five years’ probation and a $21,000 fine, with a condition giving her probation officer access to any requested financial records.
That conviction is what put a federal judge between Wilson and her followers. After the Daily Beast investigation, her probation officer received complaints that she had “induced” people “to leave their families, remove their children from their homes, and take other uncharacteristic actions” — and the court called her to a status conference on April 24, 2023, where Judge Susan Oki Mollway questioned Wilson directly and raised ordering a notice “placed prominently” on her web pages and social media: “Under the name of Liane Wilson, I was convicted of bankruptcy fraud.” (Doc. 89, Tr. 6.)
You can read the full docket on CourtListener, a public legal archive run by the non-profit Free Law Project — nothing on that site is controlled by us.
Read the fuller account: From Bankruptcy Fraud to the Probation Review →
5. The two criminal-case documents to read first
Document 87 — the victim letters (April 2023). Twenty-three family impact statements filed with the court at her probation review, redacted as filed. At least three describe the same pattern: Canadian mothers, all paying students, taking children across the U.S. border without the other parent’s consent.
Document 132 — J.M.’s statement of facts (April 2024). A signed statement of facts from an eight-year paying member, sent to the U.S. Attorney’s Office and her probation officer, alleging that Wilson’s July 2023 filing at her probation review contained false statements — with invoices attached. Full page: J.M.’s Statement to the Court.
6. The civil case she filed — and what the court found
The litigation began in Hawaii state court. On December 6, 2022, Wilson and her “company” filed a defamation suit on Kauai — Liana Shanti Enterprises and Liana Shanti v. Paula Haygarth, Byron Horvath, Jane Does 1–10, and John Does 1–10, Civ. No. 5CCV-22-0000107 (Hawaii Fifth Circuit; read the original complaint). The two named defendants were not former members: they are Canadian family members of women inside her community. The complaint blamed anonymous social-media accounts and alleged Wilson had received death threats — a claim examined against the litigation record in The Death Threats That Disappeared.
In 2025 the case moved to federal court as Life Mastery Network LLC v. Haygarth, No. 1:25-cv-00297 (D. Haw.) — full docket on CourtListener. The court’s May 22, 2026 omnibus order sent the case to a jury and found Wilson’s sworn denial that she created the “Exposing Family Abuse” website to be in “diametric inconsistency” with her own August 2023 criminal-case filing — her answer to the families who had just told the court about the border crossings — in which she cast herself as an advocate for abuse victims and proudly discussed creating the site as her “advocacy platform.”
On August 13, 2026, after a two-week trial in Honolulu, the jury returned a unanimous verdict against Wilson’s company and awarded the defendants $40.1 million. Full account: The Verdict.
7. Sworn declarations from former members
Two more former members filed sworn declarations in the civil case in March 2026: a different eight-year member who describes how critics were expelled and slandered so that “no complaints” existed on paper, and a member who paid Wilson $111,110 and never received the promised deliverables. Wilson moved to strike both declarations; the court refused.
8. The Instagram campaign
Alongside the litigation, Wilson ran a years-long Instagram campaign against anyone who challenged her: the parents, siblings, relatives and friends of members who tried to intervene, and former members who left and went on the record — including the eight-year member in section 5, who told the U.S. Attorney’s Office the public attacks on her began the moment she left, and a former student, J.S., whom — according to a sworn declaration in the civil case — Wilson had students attack online and tag his employer “with the aim of getting him fired from his job.” His letter to her sentencing judge, and her reply, are set out in J.S.’s Letter to the Court.
Her posts from 2021 to 2025 — eighteen documented examples are reproduced here — include public accusations of child abuse and kidnapping against named private individuals, hashtags identifying targets by name and city, and repeated promises of “divine justice” against them. The accusations ran in a mirror: while her posts branded critics as family cults, kidnappers and child abusers, the parental abductions actually described to a federal court — the border crossings in the April 2023 victim letters (section 5) — came as a result from inside her own community. Her central claim — that she received recorded death threats — is examined against the litigation record in The Death Threats That Disappeared.
9. What the experts say
Three experts assessed the operation in the Daily Beast investigation. Cult-intervention specialist Joe Szimhart said Wilson fits the “description of a cult leader”. Sociologist Janja Lalich: “It’s got all the hallmarks of a cult group, in my opinion.” Licensed therapist Steve Hassan, applying his BITE model: “Liana Shanti fits the definition of an authoritarian destructive cult.” Then see how those tactics played out in her own words: The Instagram Campaign, 2023–2024.
10. Media coverage
Beyond the Sisterhood investigation, Jennings Brown’s follow-ups covered Wilson being summoned to court (“Mysterious Guru Summoned to Court After Beast Investigation,” April 2023) and the judge’s questioning (“Federal Judge Grills Liana Shanti in Court,” April 2023). The Sensibly Speaking Podcast ran a two-hour investigation with cult experts. Find it all under Press & Podcasts.
The most extensive coverage is the newest: THE INSTASCAMMER, an eleven-part audio documentary on Wilson from Kacey Baker’s The Cult Vault, released in full on August 31, 2026 — by its own description “based on interviews, recordings, documents and public records,” in which family members and former members tell their own accounts. It is free on Spreaker and Audible, and indexed with the rest of the coverage under Press & Podcasts.
11. If you or someone you love is involved
Start with Living Inside a Cult and Survivor Reporting Help. You are not alone, and you are not the first to leave.
Sources for the Liana Shanti record
Every link on this page leads to a primary document in the Liana Shanti record — a court filing, a sworn declaration, or published reporting.
- United States v. Wilson, No. 1:19-cr-00105 (D. Haw.) — full docket on CourtListener
- U.S. v. Wilson, Doc. 87 — Family Impact Statements (23 letters, redacted as filed), filed Apr. 20, 2023 — CourtListener
- U.S. v. Wilson, Doc. 89 — Transcript of Proceedings, Status Conference before Judge Susan Oki Mollway, held Apr. 24, 2023 (the child named in the proceedings is redacted in our copy) — PDF
- U.S. v. Wilson, Doc. 132 — Statement of Facts, filed Apr. 18, 2024 — CourtListener
- U.S. v. Wilson, Docs. 144–146 — Probation Office memorandum (144), Government response (145), and Order denying early termination of probation, June 20, 2025 (146)
- Liana Shanti Enterprises and Liana Shanti v. Haygarth et al., Civ. No. 5CCV-22-0000107 (Haw. 5th Cir.), Complaint, filed Dec. 6, 2022 — PDF
- Life Mastery Network LLC v. Haygarth, No. 1:25-cv-00297 (D. Haw.) — full docket on CourtListener
- LMN v. Haygarth, ECF 84-2 — Declaration of eight-year former member, filed Mar. 27, 2026 — CourtListener
- LMN v. Haygarth, ECF 84-3 — Declaration of former member, filed Mar. 27, 2026 — CourtListener
- LMN v. Haygarth, ECF 92 — Omnibus Order, May 22, 2026 — CourtListener
- Jennings Brown, “The Mysterious ‘Sisterhood’ Tearing Families Apart,” The Daily Beast, Mar. 3, 2023 — via Yahoo News
- Jennings Brown, “Mysterious Guru Summoned to Court After Beast Investigation,” The Daily Beast, Apr. 2023 — via Yahoo News
- Jennings Brown, “Federal Judge Grills Mysterious Guru Accused of Breaking Up Families,” The Daily Beast, Apr. 2023 — via Yahoo News
See the site-wide Source Index for every document cited on this site.