According to the Morning Herald, Sarah died suddenly in 2016 at the age of 46 at home in Melbourne, Australia, after decades of physical and mental health struggles, including a suicide attempt in 2008.

After her escape from the cult, Sarah met her birth mother, the newspaper reported at the time, and she became a student doctor working with refugees and low-income populations in Southeast Asia.

“Sarah was a good person,” Chris Johnston, co-author of the 2016 book The Family, wrote in the newspaper at the time. “She was compassionate and highly intelligent and loved by her friends and family — her real family, not the cult that said it was a family but never was.”

In her book, Sarah explained that it took time for the cult’s survivors to accept that there wouldn’t be retribution for the years of abuse they suffered. “But to get on with life, it has to be accepted that things are not always fair,” she wrote.

“I choose the path of not wasting energy on bitterness at the system or hatred at Anne for what she and her minions have done to me. I prefer to forgive and forget," she continued. "I know the greatest way I can be compensated for and to triumph over my childhood is to succeed in what I am now doing: living life fully and learning what it is to be happy.”