What is the current thinking on how much effect hypnosis can actually have on people? My understanding is that it increases suggestibility, but doesn’t actually turn people into the totally pliant zombies you see in fiction.
My guess would be that if this had been investigated and reported more scrupulously, it might have just been a fairly banal case of sexual abuse, with the typical features of abuse cases (coercion, deception, power disparity, instructions to keep silent etc.) Also, the article doesn’t explicitly say – as far as I can tell – that he actually hypnotized the victims, only that he had an “almost hypnotic power” over them.
