Deepfake warned it and come out of nowhere.
It was allowed to spread, while governments dragged their feet and tech companies shrugged.
“"I'm staring at myself in this video that I know I haven't made."”
"This is what it looks like to feel violated." This season, on understood. If you follow the trail, who does it lead to? These images they would like hunting me, and the biggest platform was Mr. Deepfake's understood. Deepfake porn empire.
Available now on CBC Listen, or wherever you get your podcast. This is a CBC podcast.
This story takes place in the heart of the Canadian prairies.
In a tiny village barely larger than a hamlet, not even big enough to be classified as a town.
“It's surrounded by farmland, so flat, and so vast.”
They say you can see the weather coming three days away. But this story is about a storm. No one saw coming. It was Thursday, September 14th. Got a text message from somebody local saying, "Oh, I hear that there's this person coming to rich mound."
Shauna saying is telling me about the day that everything changed in rich mound Saskatchewan.
Population just over 100. And over the course of the weekend, then it was confirmed that yes, these RVs showed up at the school, and this Romana did you know is at the school. Romana did a low. Over the past few years, Romana had built a following online, becoming one of the most influential conspiracy theorists in North America.
She calls herself the Queen of Canada. I address you today as you're Commander-in-Chief and Queen. Now, here she was, pulling into Shauna's little village, right into the school where Shauna had been a teacher for 23 years. We drove by. I took pictures and video on my phone,
seeing that, okay, here are these RVs with all the labeling on it. In her royal majesty, Queen Romana did you low kingdom of Canada. Romana had arrived with a dozen or so followers, members of her group, her cult, the kingdom of Canada. They drove into the school grounds in RVs with images of Romana's face and their flag on the side. The followers poured out and matching purple and white uniforms.
Some had hats that said security on them, and they were filming or photographing anyone who went by. Some were in their 30s, but most of the group were older in their 50s or 60s. I have also said that there is no more politics and no more politicians. They'd followed her to Richmond, drawn in by her strange mix of conspiracies, QAnon, Antivax, the sovereign citizen movement, even ideas that drift far beyond the fringe.
Your DNAs were manipulated and unplugged by the evil aliens that came to plan Earth's 300,000 plus years ago. But she doesn't just preach, she threatens anyone who stands in her way. You will receive knock-one, but two bullets on your forehead for each child that you have harmed. Shana wondered, why were they here? I was just flabbergasted to think that like really something like this exists, there's a person driving around Canada who claims to be the queen,
and she's still driving around. But Shana quickly learned, the queen wasn't still driving around. She and her convoy had taken over the school. They weren't leaving. And Richmond wasn't about to let that happen, not without a fight. I'm Rachel Brown, and this is the cult queen of Canada, from CBC's uncover, the story of a small town and the cult that toured in half. At the so-one, the queen comes to town.
“So the first time I visited Richmond was in 2024, and honestly I was a bit nervous. I'd been investigating”
the story myself for a few months, and I'd heard that this cult was unpredictable, possibly armed,
That the locals here were increasingly on edge.
myself, all that was hard to believe. It's a very small town just a few blocks and there's a
community center, a post office, that post office doubles as the convenient store and liquor store. The town is that small. There's no restaurant, there's no bar, there's not even a coffee shop.
“You have to leave town to even get gas. I wouldn't call Richmond Quaint, it's practical,”
industrial, but there's a sort of stoic prairie charm to it. The whole town takes just a couple of minutes to drive from end to end, and I don't see a single person. It strikes me that more people
live in my condo building than in this entire town. We're pulling past what looks like a museum,
and there's a church and welcome Rachel Brown. Is that me? There's a sign that says welcome Rachel Brown. That's weird. Interesting. I thought I'd been laying low in advance of this trip, but I guess word gets around and a town this small. I've been an investigative journalist for 10 years, reporting on religion, extremism, and conspiracies. I've worked for news outlets around the world, including vice, global news, and the BBC. The story of Richmond grabbed me because it
feels like a little social experiment for the moment we're living in. Richmond is like a Petri dish, out in the middle of nowhere, where extremism, misinformation, and conspiracy theories are all swirling together in one small town. Richmond welcomes you. There's a sign in front of it. It looks like an old arena. There's a few houses, small bungalows, and up at the end, we're now pulling up to the school. This is where Romana and her group are. All around the town is farmland and highway
out to the horizon. It's an hour to the nearest city, medicine hat. The Royal Canadian mounted
“police are about an hour away too. You need to be able to rely on your neighbors out here. If that”
trust is lost, things could go sideways, fast. But I think you could consider yourself pretty lucky if you had a neighbor like Shanna Sane. Since the cult's arrival, she's become the local cult expert. Like a studious teacher, doing hours of homework on them to the point that her in laws even rib her about it. She's my first stop on my tour of Richmond, and she will not stop feeding me.
Shanna is in her 60s, with a tidy silver pixie cut and sharp blue eyes. She flies around her home
like a hummingbird. She's always doing a million things at any given moment. Watching her grandkids
“tending to her farm and cooking. Shanna, ask you, for you what makes Richmond Richmond.”
So I moved here to teach decades ago, and it was a thriving community, and the people would all pull together for the big events. When I first moved to, there was a lot happening with community functions, skating, rink was active, and the curling rink was active. The school was very active. They had the men's baseball team, the Richmond rockets, and every may-long weekend, there was a huge ball tournament, and teams would come that used to be a big deal.
Richmond was thriving. In the 1980s and '90s, it was a bit of a boom town. The reason Richmond is flourishing is natural gas. There was money in oil and gas. Housing sprung up, and it became the flourishing, close-knit, little farming community, Shanna fell in love with. But by the 2000s, the oil and gas business slowed down. Unlike a lot of rural towns in Canada,
Richmond's population got smaller. Shanna's school shrank, and by 2008, it shuddered all together. It was a K-12 school, and in our last year of operations, we had only 55 students from kindergarten to grade 12. After the school closed, the building sat empty, abandoned for years.
After that, the grocery store ended up being demolished, the curling rink clo...
what was here before. But for Shanna, Richmond is still her home. I love being out in the country.
“I love the peace, the solitude that we can enjoy a campfire at night. You can see the stars in the”
sky. We go into our little village and there's no line up at the credit union. I mean, if one person is ahead of you, that's a line up for us, right? So enjoying just the comfort and the convenience of knowing everybody in your town. That comfort was shattered. After the Queen arrived at the school where Shanna had spent her whole career. Now, her school is unrecognizable. There's a fence around the perimeter covered in no trespassing signs. What is going on with the fencing? Well,
they clearly need it for security because the people of Richmond are so evil. Whoever put it up is no fencer. They painted over the school mural. The cult even destroyed the beloved school sign. What was the school sign that said Richmond School with a U, like a YOU, personally in it,
because people always misspelled and miss pronounced Richmond. They've, you know, glanced at it and
call it Richmond, right? Romana posts a video of herself narrating as her followers drill into the
“sign. The word school when spelled back word is loose, which I believe is a German word”
for dumb down. So we want to make sure people have the understanding that this is no longer a school of place to dumb down people. Now, the sign reads Command Center Saskatchewan. For Shanna, this takeover felt personal. Absolutely personal and horrifying. I mean, losing the school was a big heartbreak for lots of us here. I mean, this is the job that I took leaving university and then I taught here for 23 years until that school closed. I mean,
it's a huge part of me. It feels like, you know, like, it's been defaced. And the most intimidating part was Shanna had no idea who these people were and what they could be up to inside the school. We heard from some locals that when they tried to approach the group,
“the cult members would just stand there, filming them and refusing to speak. So Shanna decided”
to find out what she could online. She headed to her computer to start trying to research like, "Who is this and what's going on?" And I couldn't believe what I was reading.
If, like, Shanna, you'd never heard of Romana detailo or her kingdom of Canada before that first
Google search might overwhelm you. Well, what's this, what's this, what's this? Romana is not your typical cult leader. She's short, middle-aged with spiky, salt-and-pepper hair, often dresses in business casual pantsuits and sneakers, more like the manager of a department store, not the leader of a cult or a country. She guides her followers through online videos where she repeats the classic QAnon talking points, that there is a cabal of Satan worshipping,
democratic elites running a child's sex trafficking ring, and that Donald Trump is working behind the scenes to dismantle it. And she cast herself as a Canadian equivalent. "The people who have pointed me are the light hatch and the US military. The same group of people who have helped President Trump." And after crowning herself Queen, Romana tells her followers she has abolished old Canadian laws in favor of her royal decrees. Queen Romana is in power
and we're not paying any more bills, utilities are free. But for Shanna, the thing that alarms her more than all of this is Romana's following. Romana had more than 70,000 followers on telegram, an encrypted messaging app, and she had allegedly encouraged them to take violent action on her behalf before. "I did start to become fearful when I learned of the story of the police station in Peterborough." Peterborough is a city east of Toronto. That's where a couple years earlier,
Romana's followers attempted a citizens arrest of the local police. The whole thing turned into this violent, ugly brawl between her followers and the cops. A number of her followers were arrested. Her followers showed up there with specifically that aim in mind, right? This is what she's telling us to do so we will do this. So yes, I was fearful that who are all these crazy people all over Canada and United States? Are they going to come here now? And what's going to happen?
Shanna wasn't the only person in town doing research and getting worried.
were scared too. They wanted this group out of their town and they were all voicing their concerns
“to one man. I don't know if I can say bullshit. You can let it rip. Yeah, it is a lot of bullshit.”
The pressure was put on us right away, like even the good people were on us, like in a mode, get them out, get them out. Meet Richman's mayor, Brad Miller. He's in his 60s, tall with white hair. Brad's a hunter, a fisherman. An outdoorsy guy. I don't watch my one man, I watch like for those zero. I like all those bush shows. I'm trying to live it out in this bush. Brad spent decades working in oil and gas. Then he became a traveling meat salesman
for a local butcher called cattle boss. And like a lot of the town, he's a former player for
the Richman rockets. And that's football. No baseball. Hardball, yeah. Hardball. Yeah.
But beyond that tough exterior, he's a softie. He loves watching Lord of the Rings. He liked Lord of the Rings so much. Oh, yeah. My family loves Lord of the Rings.
“And he's certainly not your slick press-trained politician type. You weren't super comfortable”
as a public speaker. No, not at all. Maybe a bit nervous or just not. Oh, nervous and seen whatever, whatever, or some different word. And my voice was jittery, like wicked jittery. In fact, because of all the romance drama, he feels he's gotten a lot better at public speaking. Well, I took me from a one, two, a hundred in public speaking. And your feelings come out a little more, too. But when he signed up to be mayor,
he had no idea what he was getting into. I've lived here approximately 35 years. And I'm the mayor of Richman for the last three and a half years. And I took on a job thinking it would be just a perfect setting and just do some really good budgeting and bringing some new things with the townspeople, whatever. He was just trying to enjoy a little trip out of town when the Queen arrived.
Me and my wife finally got away on a camping trip. Two days into it, I got a phone call and
somebody said, "Do you know the Queen this year?" Then I found out about it and I thought it was just a joke, whatever. But by the time Brad gets back to Richman, he finds out this is no joke. The people in town are worried. There was a 12-year boy that came to my step and he said, "Oh, Brad, I'm scared." He said when the lights were on that school and when we drove by, I get scared every night. Rumors were flying about just how dangerous this group might be.
Brad's constituents told me how worried they were. Well, we saw the place being barricaded. And all of the no trespassing signs and the fences were the people standing on guard 24 hours a day. Photographing us as we went by. There is a picture of Romana's RV and she's got a shotgun and shotgun shells. Yeah, they're definitely armed. I'm sure they are. I'd stake my peachx on it. As somebody told me it was a cult and the word cult just scared that my cheese is a Abby.
And some of the locals had even started approaching the cult to tell them off. Told them to get the fuck out of my village that they weren't wanted here. And they didn't like that. The pressure for Brad to act was overwhelming. I mean, it sounds like your phone's ringing off the hook. You're still getting text. Like it's kind of taken over your life. Yeah, it is and it's not a good thing, really. It's
“started to build up. Yeah, yep. Like it's nonstop, right?”
Can you stop it? Rich mound wanted the cult out and so did Brad, but he wasn't sure what he could do as mayor. If I wouldn't have been mayor, like I'm a hunter fishman, I go out. I don't scare easy, whatever. I didn't have no kids here. If I had kids here, I would have been worked up. And I went over there and probably kicked the fence stuff. Brad wasn't about to start anything,
but he was frustrated and feeling stuck. Soishana Sane, who was following the cults moves online and getting increasingly nervous. Then, Shana saw a post that terrified her. Romano was advertising to her massive online following that she was hosting an event, a meet and greet in Rich mound on October 14th, 2023, just a few weeks out. All of her followers were invited to come to town for a ceremony to sweren oath of sovereignty to Romano. Well, who's going to come? Are there,
you know, some really committed, devoted followers who really hate the idea of anybody not supporting her who are going to come with swords and guns and whatever? Mayor Brad was on the same page.
It's not maybe what's here.
They worried. Was this event going to get violent? Like what happened in Peterborough? Or maybe worse?
“Will more of her followers move into the school? They felt they needed to take a stand.”
Something to get the town united against the cult and stop them settling in before Rich mound became their permanent home. Then, Shana got an idea, a protest to coincide with Romano's meet and
greet. Had you ever protested before? Never. She got the word out and other locals got on board.
But then, just days before the protest, phones across Rich mound painted, including Shana's, an email from an unknown sender. It was a death threat. Dr. Swartz was based down in a pool of blood, a renowned scientist killed in a murderous frenzy, a very gruesome and disturbing scene. Persons of interest obsessed with role playing and the
“occult. "We're here now, I can smell blood." From Sony Music Entertainment and Em William Phelps”
LLC, Fatal Fantasy, available now on the bench, search for Fatal Fantasy wherever you get your podcasts.
Just days before the protest, Shana received a threatening email. And here it is, Shana
saying you have been served and you are to immediately stop in capital letters with your abuse of power, with your corrupt reign of unleashed terror. The military is very aware you are the ringleader who started this reign of terror act accordingly. Now, that's just the introduction, right? Then, here's one, two, three, four pages. The group threatened to publicly execute Shana and harm her children and grandchildren if she didn't stop her reign of unleashed terror. Signed and sealed
by We The People in brackets, every living man, every living lady, every living baby boy,
“and every living baby girl of the Kingdom of Canada. Were you fearful that you could be targeted?”
Absolutely, yes, because not knowing who are her followers out there, right? There's nothing
stopping a bunch of whack-a-doodles from come into rich mound and going to go look for this Shana saying because she's clearly in charge of all the terrorism against Ramana in rich mound. Mayor Brad got one, too. And then I read through and I thought, yeah, it's a joke, whatever, then they said, we will execute you in front of your children, your grandchildren, stuff like that. The local firefighters, the paramedics, even some teachers at a nearby school got the same
threats. Brad and his council compiled the death threat emails and sent them to the Royal Canadian-mounted police. The RCMP would have to come out and at least investigate the school now. But then, nothing happened. And is that not enough to lay charges? It's a death threat. I don't know. I don't know. I don't get it anymore. According to Shana, the RCMP said they couldn't take any action on the emails because they couldn't prove that
the cult had sent them. I reached out to the RCMP and they declined my request for an interview. So Shana and Brad's protest was back on, but now with even more urgency. Their enemy had gone from a group of strangers with wacky beliefs to a collective who knew their names and wanted them out of the way. And I have put myself at risk, which doesn't make my children happy. They are warning me, like, take a step back. But on the other hand, how can I just sit here and do nothing when
the police are not doing anything to help us? October 14th, 2023, the day of Romana's meet and greet at the school and the rich man counter-protest. Shana arrived at the meeting point, the baseball diamond beside the school. She watched as Romana's followers started pulling up, dozens of them, some older, some younger, with license plates from around the country, all driving in to swear their sovereignty to Queen
Romana. And there was one vehicle and it was a family I was shocked to see that there was a man in his wife and two young kids. Cult members who were on security detail stood guard on the other side of the fence, filming everything. Then the RCMP started to arrive. The same RCMP
Who didn't do anything about the execution letters were now showing up in dro...
It's pretty horrifying when you have a little village where before this, most people didn't
“even lock their doors at night. When you get 30 or 40 or more vehicles coming to the school,”
which now looks like a compound, and there are 45 to 50 police officers set up outside our little fire hall. It's pretty intimidating to see that kind of setup. But then to her enormous relief, Shana's fellow protester started arriving as well. In uni vans and trucks, some in farm tractors, people pulled out of rich, mound driveways or drove in from surrounding towns. They all gathered at the baseball diamond
and started circling around the school, honking and honking some more. Somebody had a megaphone, maybe there were two. The media descended, local, national, international. The cult conspiracy theorist group has sent out cease and disist letters.
“Hundreds of people stage a protest angry with the newest inhabitants of which mountain to”
sketch with. They interviewed Shana, who acted as a town spokesperson. The second tired of walking
around and having a cell phone pop up and be in your face and on your license plate of your vehicle, like, "For what? What do you need that for?" An independent reporter from nearby medicine hat live streamed all day. "They got the loud horns, they got all the noise because I didn't that is pretty loud." Locals turned up with signs. Leave and take your sheep. Government of Saskatchewan, we need your help. You're not our queen. Hit the road.
One local told me her signs were censored. "I prefer my signs, but I get told I couldn't put them out there. What were they?" "Fuck off and die. They're all over my truck."
Someone drove up in a semi. "They brought up the beast. Holy, great fight. That's awesome."
As the day went on, the group of protesters grew and grew. It was like 50 to 100 cars, circling. Grand trucks. Combines. It doesn't get more country bumpkin with people driving these ridiculous farm vehicles around. Yeah. That's Steve. A local who got the group organized to make even more noise. I said, "Okay, let's angle park in front of the school and then it was like an orchestra conductor and I said, "Okay, everybody." It was like,
"Ahhh." And all the boards are creating this like dissonance when we did that for probably a good 25-minute straight. But after a while, they'd honked just so much that car horns started blowing out. That gave Steve an idea. "I'm like, "Okay, I go to the shop, pull open the big overhead door and I pull out the raised car. It is a hot run Mustang GT. It is a 1982 chassis with a 1993 body on it with a 347 stroke or 8.8 gears in the back 5-speed transmission.
Hot rod big GT 40 heads on it and bigger that there's not a step." So it's noisy. This car is loud. So I pulled it up in front of the school and then I was thumb-bought it, but it was so noisy for the people behind me and it would echo between the farm to the north and the school. It's deafening. It shakes your chest. There are windows in vibrate and then the police are like, "Did you ensure your race car for the roads?" I'm like, "You know I didn't." They're like,
"They're at home." The RCMP were doing more than checking insurance. They set up checkpoints at both ends of town, meaning every car in and out was questioned. The protest wore on, their presence grew. My former colleague Mac Lamaroo was there covering the protest for vice. He was amazed at the numbers. "There was a shitload of cops there. With long arms,
rifles, they're working on units there. They were definitely launching like small drones in the air. There was plain clothes, RCMP officers who were the most obvious cops I've ever seen because everybody knows everybody in this town. And all of this sudden, you know, there's just like two people walking around in cackies and everyone's like, "Oh those are the cops." The town must have doubled in size that day. The RCMP didn't show up after the execution
“letters, but now they were swarming rich mound. What did they think was going to happen?”
Outside, the protest was deafening, but inside the school's gym, the sounds of horns were
Distant home.
like this event that's life-streamed around the world. This is rich mound. It's a catch-and-one.
“The room is full. It looks like maybe 40, maybe 50 people are in there.”
And they're not just there to meet Romana, but to swear in both of sovereignty. Romana hands out loyalty money, her own special currency, and new kingdom of Canada passports for them too. The followers squeeze together to get in frame for the Oath ceremony to be broadcast. You can see two kids in the front of the crowd, who Romana calls VIPs of the VIPs. You can hear the voice of one kid echo a little later than the rest.
You can hear the voice of one kid. In the front of the crowd, you can hear the voice of one kid.
Outside, the mood of the protest has shifted from cathartic to tense. The cult members on security detail had been walking the perimeter and filming protesters all day. And the folks that are on the cult side there, they're getting more and more paranoid. But as this independent journalist from medicine hat noticed, there was an edge to them now. And it doesn't look like they're going to be able to handle this protest going on by the
folks around here. Things are getting needed.
Then, a shone looked around at her protest. She noticed something curious.
Not everyone in town turned out to the event. In fact, there was one rich-man local who had been actively defending the cult. Oh, who's that? That's Melinda on the other side of the rope. Ranting and raving with the cult and with her phone in everybody's face, videoing everybody who was within inches of her. Okay, Melinda's with the cult. Melinda Fisher, you're going to hear that name again. She vehemently opposed the protest in
Richmond. It turns out, Richmond isn't the close-knit small town I'd imagined. It's divided into factions that date back years before the Queen arrived. But to see locals supporting the cult? For Shana, this development was unnerving.
“If Richmond isn't united against the cult, will they ever get them out?”
While all this is happening, the protest ramps up. It was scary because they were on top of the school standing there watching us photographing us. Their local supporters wrote in the streets harassing us, giving us the finger, screaming at us. Steve, owner of the hotrod, looked at the horizon and said he noticed the police were preparing for the worst. They had set up snipers, like specifically trained for long distance snipers, and you can see them.
A tense feeling washed over the protest. It was out this point that people started to wonder how this was going to end. The cult members inside the fence were cornered. The protesters were only getting louder and a lot of people started asking the same question. Could it be another
“waco? There's people here like all this land in another waco. A waco of Texas happening here?”
Waco, Texas, 1993. The branched of idiots, a doomsday cult led by David Carrash, had been stockpiling weapons in their compound in waco. federal agents raided the compound in the cult resisted. What followed was a 51 day standoff. It ended in a brutal shootout. Then the compound erupted into flames. When all was said and done, more than 80 people were killed including four federal agents. Rich Mt locals looked around at the protest on folding and wondered
if that was going to happen here. It's a waco Texas stuff. It's scary, you know, who knows what's going to happen? Are they going to stockpile weapons and make this place scary? No, nobody knew. And I think the police didn't know either. The RCMP, which is why they showed up. But when Steve,
The hotrod guy looked around, he didn't think of waco Texas.
You guys familiar with Antelope? Yeah, Wild Wild Country. Yeah. The Rajneeshis. Yes, the Rajneeshis.
Like a lot of us, Steve had seen Wild Wild Country. The Netflix doc series about the small town in Oregon that got taken over by the Rajneeshis cult. That cult stockpiled ammunition, poison the population. The FBI got involved. All in an effort to drive out the locals and take
“over the town. Was Rich Mt going to be the next waco or Antelope or something else entirely?”
They're using the Canadian people. The people of the Republic are there, love rats.
And these actions will not go unpunished. Either way, a storm had arrived in Rich Mt and it wasn't leaving anytime soon. Because, as the town would soon discover, the cult had been summoned by one of their own. I purchased property at the end of 2017 and I invited Queen Roman and team to come to Rich Mt.
“This season on the Cal Queen of Canada. If they want to come over and beat me up or shoot”
me or whatever, by all means, I'll do it. We meet the families who have lost loved ones to Romanna.
We've all tried to help my dad with it, but he just wouldn't listen. People leave this so much and it just breaks my heart. Follow an election where everything hangs in the balance. Here's a fresh reality check that they are planning something for our upcoming election in November. And go inside the battle for Rich Mt. I want to tear it down. I want
“to burn it to the ground. Know this inside the Republic, the penalty for crime,”
against humanity, and treason is death. I told him flat out, there's going to be a civil war in the Southwest if we don't get something going or any like people are fed up. You can binge all episodes of the Colt Queen of Canada early on the CBC True Crime YouTube channel, or for early and ad-free listening, subscribe to the CBC True Crime Premium channel on Apple Podcasts, just click on the link in the show description. The Colt Queen of Canada is a production of
new metric media and news entertainment for CBC Podcasts. The show is hosted by me, Rachel Brown. It's written and produced by Pippa John Stone and Rachel Brown. The series producer is Chris Kelly, sound design and original music by Mark Angley. Our senior producer is Jeff Turner. Our digital producer is Emily Cannell. The series was developed by Chris Kelly, Courtney Dobbins and Rachel Brown. For new metric media, the executive producer is Marc Montefiora,
the vice president of podcast or Chris Kelly and Pat Kelly. For Muse Entertainment, the executive producers are Courtney Dobbins and Jonas Purpose. For CBC, the executive producers are Cecil Fernandez and Chris Oak. Tonya Springer is the senior manager, an RF Naurani is the director of CBC Podcasts.
