The Dr. Peter Breggin Hour

← The Dr. Peter Breggin Hour29 jul · 57 min

Dr. Peter Breggin - 7-29-26

Dr. Peter Breggin - 7-29-2629 jul57 min

Dr. Juliette Engel is a living witness and victim of some of the most vile hidden Intelligence programs ever devised. She has survived and even thrived since her brutal childhood, going on to offer brave eyewitness testimony to the depravity that can result when persons in power decide that they can violate any morals and acceptable behavior in the pursuit of control. The justification, as warped as it can be, is to say that we must sacrifice some people/children in order to preserve the greater good.

From being delivered by her parents into the arms of CIA handlers at the age of six, to meeting Jeffrey Epstein on the San Juan Islands in the 1980s, when he was talking of buying islands in the Caribbean, Dr. Engel has encountered evil and survived.

On this week’s “Breggin Hour,” Peter and I had the privilege of sitting with Dr. Juliette Engel. At 77, she carries herself with a quiet radiance that Peter described as angelic. After hearing her story, I understood why. What was done to her as a child would have broken most people. What she has done with her life since then is a testament to the best of the human spirit.

Juliette was born into a family of OSS, CIA, and NSA operatives. At the age of six, in 1955, her own father sold her into the MKUltra Monarch program. There she endured mind control, satanic ritual abuse, and the deliberate fracturing of a child’s mind through repeated trauma. The program’s goal was to create a dissociated, highly controllable person—someone who could later be used as a prostitute or intelligence asset. She was trained in what she calls “sex magick,” prepared for a future of exploitation.

She escaped at seventeen. With no memory of her childhood, she put herself through university and medical school and became a physician in Seattle. For decades the past remained locked away. Only later, in her sixties, after twenty years of extraordinary humanitarian work in Russia, did she begin the long, painful process of opening those sealed rooms in her mind.

What she discovered there is almost unbearable. Yet she has chosen to tell it—first in her memoir *Sparky: Surviving Sex Magick as I Lived It*, written from the magical thinking of the ten-year-old child she once was, and later in *Angels Over Moscow*, the story of her twenty years building an underground railroad for trafficking victims across the former Soviet Union.

While working to improve medical care for children in Russian orphanages, Juliette uncovered a trafficking network that moved young girls to Scandinavia and the United States. She followed the trail. What she found changed the course of her life. With the MiraMed Institute and the Angel Coalition she founded, she helped create a network of villagers, police, educators, journalists, and officials who rescued more than 70,000 children and young women. She did this at great personal risk, often traveling alone through dangerous territory. She did it because she knew, in a way few of us can, what it means to be a child with no one coming to save you.

In our conversation, she spoke of creating “Sparky”—an internal role model, a tough, courageous little girl warrior she invented at age ten because she had no trustworthy adults. Sparky was everything Juliette longed to be: strong, pretty, smart, able to stand up for herself and others. That imagined self became her compass. Decades later, when Jeffrey Epstein and his brother approached her at a private gathering on the San Juan Islands—offering her a house, naming the exact amount in her bank account, inviting her into their world—something deep inside said no. She credits Sparky. The protective programming that had once kept her silent also, in that moment, kept her safe.

She spoke, too, of the suicide programs that are deliberately installed in survivors—the overwhelming voices that rise up when a person begins to remember or to speak. She has faced them more than once. She has learned to recognize the attack when it comes and to pu