One figure who has been unaccounted for the last several years as the so-called Zizian cult took a violent turn, Gwen Danielson, was rumored online to have taken her own life. Her father confirms that is not the case.

As this week brought news of the East Coast arrests of three key players in the group we continue to call the Zizians — though they may not use this term to describe themselves — the Chronicle has been tracking down the parents of several members who have been especially disturbed by recent events. One of those parents is Brett Danielson, the father of Gwen Danielson, who has been absent from the group for several years and was thought to be possibly deceased.

In fact, Danielson appears to have done a disappearing act not unlike the one attempted by the group's apparent leader Ziz, aka Jack LaSota. LaSota faked her own death in San Francisco Bay with the help of friends in August 2022, which led to an obituary being posted in her native Alaska. But when Solano County authorities were investigating the attempted murder of 80-year-old Curtis Lind in November 2022, they found LaSota alive and well in Vallejo.

Within two months, LaSota would be under arrest in Pennsylvania in connection with the deaths of two people, the parents of another group member, Michelle Zajko.

Danielson and LaSota had been close, and as vegan trans women with a passion for the rationalist movement they were together trying to create a like-minded community that LaSota had imagined, living cheaply on boats in the Bay Area. Danielson joined LaSota in sailing a rusted tugboat down to Half Moon Bay from Alaska in the summer of 2017, as reported on by the Chronicle earlier this month — the idea for which originated with Danielson living on a sailboat in the Berkeley Marina in 2016, around the time the two met at a rationalist meet-up.

In 2018, one of the movement's leaders, Anna Salamon, the president and cofounder of the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR) says that she first began feeling afraid of LaSota, whom she referred to as Ziz, during a retreat. She described Ziz repeatedly asking to have one-on-one conversations with her — Ziz was there as a student, and Salamon a part-time instructor — and said that some of these conversations were uncomfortably intense. It was around this time that a rift formed, and Ziz began gathering others around her and her own version of rationalist thought — which included spurious beliefs about the hemispheres of the brain, decision theory, and notions of good and bad.

Both LaSota and Danielson would end up starting blogs in 2019 and 2020, respectively, laying out their thoughts and grievances toward Salamon and others. Danielson's was called Everything to Save It — which may refer to the rationalist movement itself.

It was in November 2019 that Danielson, LaSota, Emma Borhanian, and Somni Leatham showed up in Guy Fawkes masks at a CFAR reunion event in Sonoma County, and were allegedly menacing adults and children there. They were arrested — the Chronicle wrote about the arrests and the bizarre protest, noting that "The suspects were allegedly uncooperative and spoke incoherently," and "investigators had to rely on fingerprints to identify them."

Shortly after this protest, the group set up camp in box trucks on Lind's property in Vallejo — Lind had met them in Half Moon Bay where he had a large boat, and offered them space in his RV lot for $2,000 per month. Not long after the pandemic began, they stopped paying rent, Lind said, and cited COVID moratoriums on evictions as reason why they would not be leaving.

Danielson was the group's "mouthpiece" at the time, according to the Chronicle's reporting, but would become estranged from them sometime after 2020, and before the attempt on Lind's life.

"This is a situation where some people apparently turned what was meant to be an intellectual group into a violent group with some extreme views, and it’s made it dangerous for people who got into it for a good reason," says Danielson's father, speaking to the Chronicle. "I would love to see this come to resolution where at least she and anyone else that really wants to do good in that group can kind of be free of the trouble behind them and move forward.”

This week, Brett Danielson tells the Chronicle that he is relieved to hear about the arrest of LaSota in Maryland, saying that he hopes it means his daughter will return from a self-imposed exile. According to the father, she has been living off the grid, "working construction jobs under a fake name," apparently fearful of violence.

LaSota, Zajko, and Bay Area native Daniel Blank are in custody in Allegany County, Maryland and being held without bail. They are considered persons of interest in the murder of Zajko's parents in December 2022, and in the murder of a border patrol agent in Vermont last month. Separately last month, another figure who has disavowed any connection to LaSota, 22-year-old Maximillian Snyder, was arrested for fatally stabbing Lind in Vallejo.

"This is something that’s been scary," Brett Danielson tells the paper. "Hopefully they will spend a fair amount of time behind bars."

Previously: Arrests of Alleged 'Zizian' Cult Members Came After Another Dispute With a Landlord

Top image: A 2019 photo of Danielson via the Sonoma County Sheriff's Office