All Cults are Not Created Equal

All cults are not created equal. Most are relatively harmless. Freedom of religion allows Americans to be fooled, and fooled again, by a never-ending stream of con artists posing as messianic prophets or enlightened gurus.

I’ve been thinking about this as we revisit one of the more disturbing sects I ever covered as a religion reporter on the cult beat. That would be the Children of God/Family International, the subject of my 2007 book, Jesus Freaks — A True Story of Murder and Madness on the Evangelical Edge.

At the same time, I’ve been watching Bring Me the Beauties: A Model Cult, a new three-part HBO documentary. It tells the tale of the almost-laughable “Eternal Values” cult launched in the 1980s by a Brooklyn shyster named Freddy Miers, who recast himself as the Manhattan socialite Frederick von Mierers.

Freddy targeted top New York fashion models with an apocalyptic UFO theology, but like so much in the 1980s, it was really all about the greed. I vaguely remember reading the 1990 Vanity Fair exposé on Miers, which came out just as the supposedly celibate and actually promiscuous gay cult leader died of AIDS.

David “Moses” Berg, the “Endtime Prophet” who founded the Children of God, was infamous in the 1980s, but his sect was born out of the rebellious counterculture spirit of the late 1960s and early 1970s. He was the most-twisted preacher of the Jesus Movement, an evangelical Christian revival that targeted redemption-ready hippies and other lost souls.

Unlike Miers, Berg was shockingly honest about his belief that God had no problem with anyone having sex with anyone, as long as it was done under his version of the “law of love.” (And as long as they weren’t gay or lesbian.) As we detailed in last week’s post, his law of love was used to justify the deployment of “flirty fishing” temptresses to bring new male converts into the fold.

Birth control, however, was immoral, so during the 1970s and 1980s scores (or perhaps hundreds) of “Jesus babies” were born into the Children of God, which became known for awhile as the Family of Love and still exists as The Family International. Between 1970 and the year 2000, Berg and his top lieutenants — always in hiding and on the run — oversaw a vast network of missionary outposts from the Philippines to the former Soviet Union, from Buenos Aires to Mexico City, from Melbourne, Australia to Barcelona, Spain. Depending on your point of view, this was either a global evangelical ministry or an international sex trafficking ring.

Most adults who join spiritual cults do so for the same reasons most adults convert to new religious traditions. They’re dissatisfied with the faith of their forefathers. They’re looking for community and searching for meaning, especially during difficult periods of their lives. They may sign on with a Catholic parish, a Buddhist sangha, a Mormon church, or evangelical TV preacher. “Cults” may be more dishonest in their recruitment methods, have a more authoritarian leadership structure, or revolve more around a single charismatic character, but all religions start as cults or sects.

Children, on the other hand, don’t have this choice. About halfway through my twenty-five-year career as the religion writer at the San Francisco Examiner/Chronicle, I became interested in the stories of children who grew up in religious cults or in the broader counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. That first resulted in a four-part Chronicle series, “Children of a Lesser God,” and a HarperCollins book titled Following Our Bliss.

One of the new religious movements I investigated for both of those projects was the Children of God/Family International. So when a sensational story about that cult broke in early 2005, I was among the best-sourced journalists to tell the tale.

On January 8, 2005, a body of a woman was found in a Tucson, Arizona apartment. She’d been stabbed three times and her throat was slit. It turned out to be the apartment of the most famous “Jesus baby” born into the Children of God. He had been destined to be the prince and future prophet of what Berg had rechristened as the “Family of Love.”

Ricky Rodriguez, known in the cult as “Davidito,” was the spiritual son of David Berg and the biological child of the Family’s second in command, Karen “Maria” Zerby. Ricky’s 1975 birth marked the beginning of the cult’s “flirty fishing” experiment. Female members were sent out on missions to seduce male converts around the world. Some even signed on with escort services to bring their johns to Jesus.

Ricky’s biological father was a Spanish waiter seduced by Zerby on Tenerife, a popular tourist destination in the Canary Islands. As a young man in his twenties, Ricky began to question his apocalyptic role as one of the “two witnesses” mentioned in the New Testament’s Book of Revelation. He eventually left the cult to become one of the leading second-generation defectors trying to expose the sexual and emotional abuse that he and many others experienced growing up in the Family of Love.

In 2004, as he approached his 30th birthday, Ricky began dreaming up a plot to get revenge. The leadership core of the Family, including his mother, had been hiding out for decades. He heard that Zerby would be in Tucson visiting family during the Christmas/New Year’s holiday. His mother’s longtime executive assistant, Sue “Joy” Kauten, was in Tucson and might know his mother’s exact schedule.

Joy agreed to meet with Ricky, who took her back to his Tucson apartment.

Twelve days after Rodriguez slit Joy’s throat, drove across the California border, and killed himself, a haunting videotape he’d left behind shed new light on this tragic murder/suicide. Ricky sent the tape to a friend, who copied it and sent it to me.

On the profanity-laced video shot in his Tucson apartment, Ricky made it clear that his original intention was to torture Joy to get information as to the whereabouts of his mother.

“It happened to thousands of us -- some worse than others,” he said on the tape. “My mother is going to pay for that. If I don’t get her, and life goes on (after death), I will keep hunting her in the next life.”

Throughout much of the tape, Rodriguez loads bullets into magazines for his Glock 23 semiautomatic pistol. He also displays a large knife, along with duct tape, a drill and a soldering iron he intended to use as implements of torture.

In The Family’s own book “The Story of Davidito,” Joy is photographed with the toddler prophet in a seductive shot captioned “Undressing…….for Sue.” In another photo she lies naked and seductive in a bathtub with another of the child’s teenage nannies.

In the 1990s, Joy legally changed her name from Sue Kauten to Angela Smith. It was unclear whether Joy/Sue/Angela was actually tortured, or what information she may have provided. Either way, Ricky never got to his prime target. After slaying Joy, he drove across the California border to the town of Blythe before pulling his silver Chevy Cavalier onto a deserted side street and shooting himself in the head.

Like I said, this was one of the darkest stories I worked on as a cult reporter. For me, it was even worse than the horror that got me started down this path, the People’s Temple/Jonestown tragedy of 1978, when more than 900 followers of the Rev. Jim Jones died in a mass murder/suicide in the South American jungle. I was part of a team of reporters at the San Francisco Examiner that covered Jonestown, including photographer Greg Robinson, who was murdered alongside Congressman Leo Ryan, who had gone to Jonestown and tried to leave with a small group of defectors.

Reporting on the Family of Love was worse, for me, because I spent more than a year interviewing Ricky’s friends and loved ones, including other second generation members who were seriously damaged growing up in the cult. Of course, not everyone who grew up in the Children of God/Family of Love/Family International was devastated by the experience. Some may have even had happy childhoods. But the closer you got to David Berg, the worse it got.

Merry Berg was David’s biological granddaughter, the daughter of his eldest son. Her life of sexual molestation and abuse — by Grandpa and others — started when she was seven years old and sent to the sect’s “Music for Meaning” camp in Greece. We need not revisit all of the horror she experienced in this post. If you can stomach it, the details are in my book. But her abuse included forcing Merry, aged 14, to have sex with Ricky, aged 12, and undergoing a violent exorcism when she began rebelling against her grandfather.

Concerned that Merry’s rebellion was spreading into the second generation of the Children of God, the cult started a “Victor Camp” for them in Macao, the most notorious of several detention and re-education camps set up in the late 1980s.

According to their own statistics, more than 13,000 babies were born into The Family between 1971 and 2001. Of course, when they were born and how they were raised determined the darkness of that shadow. It’s unclear exactly how many were, like Ricky, “Jesus babies” born to Berg’s holy hookers.

In the summer of 2005, when I was doing my reporting for Jesus Freaks, Merry was locked up at the Las Colinas Detention Facility in Santee, a town east of San Diego, where she was being held on charges of driving while intoxicated. According to her brother and her mother, Merry was addicted to speed and working as a prostitute in southern California.

It had been eighteen years since Berg terrorized his granddaughter during notorious exorcism sessions in the Philippines. If she tried to leave The Family, Berg warned her then, “the only way you could make it is to be a whore!”

In a letter from jail, and in a series of phone conversations after her release, Merry told me she was trying to forget her childhood in The Family. Merry wanted to live in the moment, not dwell on the past. “I am so not in the mood to discuss that shit,” she said in her letter. “I’m much more interested in life in the present and making the most of it and new experiences, despite the down times. I love real life in America, especially nonreligious, open minded life in San Diego, CA. I have a kick-ass life now.”

Later, on the phone after her release from jail, Merry delivered a series of speedy, stream-of-consciousness monologues about how she had lost her wallet or lost her cell phone or was worried that her relationship with her boyfriend might be over. One night she called me at 1 A.M. to see if I would drive from San Francisco to San Diego (a ten-hour drive) that morning and take her to the jail where her boyfriend was incarcerated. Another night she called to hold the phone up to some stereo speakers to play songs that would explain her feelings. One song was “American Life” by Madonna: “I tried to be a mess, I tried to be the best, I guess I did it wrong, That’s why I wrote this song.”

Over the course of two or three hours on the phone with Merry, the subject of David Berg only came up once. “Grandpa,” she said. “I used to idolize him, but I’d kill him now too. Taking out his ridiculous style on everybody. That poor kid [Ricky] never had a chance. He was supposed to be this and that and ended up nothing.”

As for her memories of being sexually involved with Ricky in the Philippines, Merry said, “He was too young. We were having some good sex, and then they told me that he was old enough to get me pregnant. And that was it for me.”

There were reports that Merry Berg got sober around the time my book came out, but apparently not for long. She died on December 16, 2017, officially of respiratory failure. She was 45.

Her friends considered this to be her main cause of death: growing up in the shadow of David Berg. One friend said that while Merry did not commit suicide, she knew of roughly 100 former Family members who have taken their own lives, including Ricky “Davidito” Rodriguez. He was 29, just two weeks shy of his 30th birthday.

(Merry’s father, Aaron Berg, the eldest son of the Endtime Prophet, killed himself in Switzerland in 1973. The cult denied it was a suicide and tried to spin it as fulfilling one of David Berg’s prophecies.)

One of the many things that enraged Ricky was that no one was ever brought to justice for the crimes committed by the leaders of this sect. The Family International still exists and is still led by the couple Ricky sought to murder, Karen Zerby and her husband, Peter Amsterdam.

According to its website, the Family has changed and now believes that “every child is precious in God’s eyes and deserves quality and responsible care, and to be loved, nurtured, protected, and enabled to develop their full potential.”

Perhaps, but the fact remains that the Children of God/Family of Love/’Family International was a machine built to spread the message of David Berg. He died in 1994. Zerby and Amsterdam continued that crusade, although there are recent reports that Zerby ha stepped down from day-to-day leadership. This enterprise was not just about the reproduction of outrageously inspired religious tracts or the construction of seemingly compassionate websites. It was about the reproduction of human beings to embody and spread the gospel according to “David Moses.” Central to Berg’s arrogance was his willingness to use people as means to an end. This was especially true for his own children and grandchildren. Berg sexually abused two generations of his own progeny, but that was not the worst of it. He used them—he engineered them— in a tragically failed bid to fulfill his own self-serving prophecy.

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