After being arrested in connection with a years-long, country-spanning string of murders, the alleged leader of a “Roko’s Basilisk” cult is insisting she hasn’t done anything wrong — and that she should be granted access to a vegan diet.
As the San Fransisco Chronicle reports, Jack “Ziz” LaSota spoke ramblingly during her Maryland bail hearing last week that occurred after two young alleged “Zizians” were apprehended for a pair of slayings that took place in California and Vermont.
“I haven’t done anything wrong,” LaSota told a judge during the February 18 hearing. “I shouldn’t be here.”
A militant vegan whose animal rights beliefs are at the center of her writings — as does the concept of “Roko’s Basilisk,” a hypothetical artificial superintelligence that would retroactively torture anyone who didn’t help it come into existence — the 33-year-old former tech worker also begged Judge Erich Bean, the jurist presiding over her hearing, to give her food she could eat.
“I must… I might starve to death,” Ziz told the judge. “I need… I need the jail to have a vegan diet. It’s more important than this hearing is.”
LaSota went on to claim that she was being starved and suggested that a jail chaplain had denied her request for a vegan diet as some form of religious persecution. As a result, LaSota contended, she was delirious from malnutrition, which was part of her argument for being granted bail.
“I think the idea that I [may] be mentally impaired for a month at proceedings because I’m in a state of starvation or that somebody with a particular majority religion would be deciding whether my religious beliefs are real… it’s not right,” she said.
After LaSota’s imploring, the judge told her that her mother had managed to find a way to get her some vegan food while she awaits trial.
“I hope so,” she replied. “I meant what I said about mental impairment. I’m in, maybe, a mild state of delirium.”
LaSota is allegedly quite familiar with inducing delirium. On her blog, per Vox and other outlets, Ziz promoted what’s known as “unihemispheric sleep” or UHS, a dangerous practice where one attempts to sleep with only one half of their brain, the other half remaining awake and alert. A lengthy explainer on the Zizians claims, per insider accounts, that the group’s alleged leader uses UHS to manipulate people and induce in them a “vulnerable psychological state” — a useful tool for any aspiring cult leader.
Ultimately, LaSota’s bail request was denied because, as Bean put it, the “circumstances are odd at best, concerning” — perhaps the biggest understatement of 2025 so far.
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