Heaven's Harlots: My Fifteen Years in a Sex Cult (19 page)

Define love. Define hurt. What is the meaning? And so on. Instead, I answered with a simple “We were both in the Family, and it’s too long to explain.”

After my initiation with Flavio, I had a battle within myself over using sexual favors to lure converts to the Family. Whether I was rationalizing or not, I finally concluded that I was helping the men I loved through a sexual channel. I personally believed in Jesus’ salvation message, and even if these men had not asked Jesus into their heart, at least they had heard the message. One day they would remember. However, I gradually came to realize that the leaders seemed to be using sex as a tool to gain powerful friends and contacts, and my husband felt that fishing was a last resort for pulling someone into the fellowship of God’s family. The purpose of fishing was in continual flux.

Flirty Fishing in the Kingdom

Sexual favors to strangers was fast becoming our main method of witnessing about the Lord. Even our work on stage took second place to going to the top Parisian nightclubs and picking up men who seemed interested in what we were offering. The showgirls had an easy time meeting the rich and famous, so they began to go out regularly with a fisherman by their side. After Cal grew tired of sitting around in clubs until three in the morning, he started to let me go with a regular fishing team, as long as he could make the final decisions on which men I slept with. If the male leader who was with us thought a man was potentially worthy of our special gift of love, I was instructed to make a date with him, letting him know I would bring my husband along. That sounds odd to Americans, of course, but the French were not as surprised as I had thought they would be.

Most of the men I went to bed with while I was married to Cal met my husband first. I truly believe that our motives were generally to be able to reach a stratum of men we would never meet elsewhere. We still went singing to make money, and as far as I know, we did not receive any money from the men we met at the clubs during the early years.

Other than the witnessing motivation, we wanted to meet men who were influential and who could help us politically or in our music business.

Sometimes I would pass the fish on to other women in my group, since I had no desire to give sex to all the men drawn to me. That left me free to go on the dance floor. Dancing had become my only personal mode of self-expression, and moving to music had a mantralike effect on me. I liked dancing alone, and the crowded disco floor offered an absurd opportunity to pretend I was by myself for a few minutes. It was a chance to be free from the Family’s constant control and the pressure of perpetual witnessing. To this day, I use dancing as an escape mechanism.

Since we usually went out with groups of four or five girls, and only one fisherman, the brothers had to take turns in the role. Being a fisherman was not necessarily a desirable task. Basically, a fisherman looked like a pimp, coming into a club with a group of girls who immediately went around picking up guys. Cal soon realized that I came to the club because I enjoyed dancing, not to have sex with other men, and I think that made it easier on him. Since we went out at night, while Thor was away at school or in bed watched by a sister, it did not take time away from my son. It was the perfect job for a Family mother.

During the day, the women who had gone out the night before were excused from work duties, witnessing, or practice, so I used this free time to take the metro out to the school to see Thor.

During the early days of using sex as a lure, the primary goal was to convince the man to ask Jesus into his heart. That could often be accomplished without going to bed with him, and I knew it well. I only went to bed with those men who were hardened to what we thought of as the Spirit of God working through us. Most of them were ready to accept Jesus after a few close dances. I often talked incessantly about Jesus and God’s Love while dancing, especially in the early days.

If the man asked for a second dance, he knew what we were preaching, so that would establish him as potentially interested in the Lord.

During subsequent dances, I talked less and let the man touch me more, and the French men are not shy about touching, neither are French women embarrassed to be touched. I could not help but notice that our French sisters took a lot more men to bed than I did. During the course of an evening, I invited the men to come and sit at our table so I could introduce them to my friends. Sometimes, another woman would take over, especially if a man spoke only French. I preferred letting a French sister witness to him then. On other occasions, the male in our group would engage in a discussion with the man, and often they became friends in one evening. In fact, Cal started a few lasting friendships with men I had lured to our table. Hopefully, by the end of the evening, the man had heard the full salvation message, which is basically the same simple message taught by the evangelical Christian faith, Believe that you are a sinner, that Jesus died for your sins, and that he can give you salvation so you can again be united with God and go to heaven. The proof of one’s belief was to verbally ask Jesus into your heart, which was merely an outward sign that you believed. I would venture to say that more than half of the thousands of men we talked to in clubs asked Jesus into their hearts. Of course, whether they really meant anything by repeating this simple prayer is open to debate, however, we were always optimistic.

If a man argued or showed absolute disinterest in this message, we usually let him go at that point and looked for another dance partner.

However, many of these same men would come back to our table on a later occasion and would not argue this time, we assumed that they had thought it over and liked our message now.

Actually, giving sex to a man often depended on who the fisherman was at the time. Some of the higher leaders, who had been with Mo at clubs, gave the girls to the men very easily, even if the men already had asked Jesus into their hearts. “Give him a treat,” they chuckled. “He deserves it.” Or they would say the man needed more proof of God’s Love, so go to bed with him. The middle leaders, who were afraid of doing something wrong, were more careful about giving the women away.

Mo was very interested in the statistical information on this new method, and the Family began keeping detailed fishing statistics, such as number of fish witnessed to, fish loved, and fish saved. Women had regular reports to fill out at the end of each night, and they were collected, tabulated, and sent in to our headquarters in Switzerland, called World Service.

Every month, these report forms were filled out by our home leader and sent along with our tithe (10 percent of all the home’s income) and our monetary gifts for the worldwide work. Soon “it” testimonies from around the world started to appear in the Family NelPs magazine. Some told of the “trials and victories” experienced by husbands and wives as they obeyed Mo and started sharing sexually, others told of hardened middle-aged businessmen, a group we had never reached before, who asked Jesus into their hearts and changed their lives, seeming proof that this method worked. Just as any new theory is supported by tangible examples, the idea of recruiting through sex was supported by these testimonies, and within a few years the method had become part of our everyday existence.

Around the time our sexual recruitment practices were evolving in the mid-1970s, Mo wrote a series of letters in which he condemned Israel’s position against the Arab nations. Still indignant over the disappointing reception he had received on his visit to Israel in 1971, he told us in a letter titled “Breakdown” that it had been his heart’s desire to establish a Christian work there. He wrote us that “after two thousand years of knowledge of Jesus Christ, [Israel] is still in rebellion! If any nation on earth is without excuse—the Jews are. ‘…Ye do always reject the Holy Ghost.’” (66, 16). I have since come to believe that this was merely a temper tantrum on Mo’s part due to his not being recognized by his formerly beloved Jews, since he claimed to be “a Christian Jew.” Irritated by his unsuccessful attempt to establish a colony in Israel, Mo later became enthralled by Muammar Qaddafi, the terrorist leader of Libya. It was a bizarre relationship, which was not understood by many of the group’s members with whom I spoke.

Most of us in the Family were far too busy to keep up with Mo’s confusing line of political reasoning. We were the peasants, the proletariat too busy supporting the kingdom to spend time in reading, research, and reflection on the Mo letters such as “Israel Invaded,” published in 1973. In it, Mo predicted that Israel would be invaded and conquered by the Soviet Union, Libya, and other Arab nations, and he prophesied (supposedly God speaks in King James language), “Therefore I will rise up and destroy the *** who calleth thyself Israel, O ye children of the devil, and I will return my land unto them whom I have given it, that they may be forgiven from the ***, O ye enemies of the Almighty and ye crucifiers of the Son of God and ye rejecters of thy King!” (“Israel Invaded” 281, 63). Mo insisted the message about Israel be distributed on every street in the world, which instantly caused trouble for our homes, especially in Paris. We tried to soften the anti-Semitic overtones by placing the Israel letters beside testimonies about our missionary work in India in the literature we gave out to the public. However, once Mo started on a radical topic, he stayed with it until the message became redundant. Now his new pro-Arab position had reached the most powerful leaders of the Muslim world.

Qaddafi invited Mo and his family to be his guests in Libya. In June of 1975 Mo published a new letter documenting the visit. That signaled the end for Les Enfants de Dieu Show Group. All of our producers were Jewish, and they immediately withdrew support.

Around this time, most of the Show Group felt it was time to go on to other things anyway. We had been singing, dancing, recording, and performing for four years. We had produced a number of records and albums, performed in every major city in France, and appeared on nationwide TV and radio almost weekly. France had heard our message, and besides, due to the Israel letters, our days in France were numbered, so we all began looking for new mission fields. Even though many successful projects we started were destroyed by Mo’s letters, we had become accustomed to deceiving ourselves that this meant it was not God’s Will to continue there.

During our quiet periods, the leaders sent out teams from the Show Group to sell leftover albums. We went two by two on what we called “faith trips,” which meant we were given no money, just fifty to a hundred records to sell. We usually did quite well, since records brought in more funds than Mo letters.

On one of those trips, I went with my dance partner, Jonathan, to the south of France. Jon was one of my all-time favorite brothers.

Admitting to homosexual tendencies before he joined the Family, he was now married and had children. Jon was more fun to be with than anyone else I knew. He was clever, witty, not too serious, and best -of all, always ready for adventure. A tall, slim, and very refined looking young man, Jon somehow managed to be dressed in the latest fashion and always looked impeccable, from his well-trimmed hair to manicured hands and pressed shirts. He usually added a long, flowing scarf to his attire for additional flair.

As my dance partner, Jon could invent new steps during a major performance to cover any mistakes I made. Jon always told me to just keep on going, no matter what happens.

When Jon and I took a faith trip to the south of France to sell one hundred records, we planned to go to nightclubs along the CBte d’Azur.

If we sold all our records, Jon wanted to go to Rome. I didn’t really think we would sell them all. Besides, Thor was at the school during the week and I wanted to be home before the weekend. However, we sold all our records on our first day on the CBte d’Azur.

Jon and I were standing on a deserted St. -Tropez road late at night when he reminded me that I had promised to go to Rome if we sold out.

I agreed we’d go if we got a ride there that night. Rome was more than three hundred miles away.

We waited for more than ten minutes for the first vehicle to appear.

Finally, a red car came around the corner slowly and stopped for us.

“DoPe Pai?” asked the man behind the wheel of a flashy sports car.

“Roma,” answered Jon.

“Si, si. I too.” The Italian spoke little English, but Jon knew enough Italian to find out that the driver was indeed going straight to Rome, and he would take us.

I squeezed into the tiny backseat and fell asleep before we were out of France. When I woke up, we were in Rome. We stayed at the Family colony, where Jon’s old friend lived, for three days, and sold Italian literature on the streets to make money for us to take a train back to Paris, in time for me to see Thor on the weekend.

Back in Paris, I couldn’t stop dreaming about the beauty of the CBte dAzur. Although I never visited art museums, I fell in love with the living, natural art of the sea, the coast, and the lovely Provincial scenery. In a few weeks, I convinced Cal to take another faith trip down there with me.

This time, the trip was not as easy. Cal and I had trouble acquiring a ride out of Paris, and at nightfall we found ourselves in a tiny village near Grenoble with no place to sleep. A large, muscular man with a thick German accent offered to let us stay at his farmhouse in the country.

Cal and I suspected nothing as we rode with the man into an even more deserted area. He pulled up next to a dilapidated and isolated building that looked more like a shed than a farmhouse.

“Let me make you something to eat,” he insisted as he led us into a room cluttered with newspapers and articles of clothes. We felt obligated to comply, but both Cal and I were becoming uncertain of the man’s motives, especially when he started drinking large quantities of alcohol. We began to suspect he was a madman, and we were no less fearful when he finally told us the story of who he was.

“See all these newspapers around?” he said. “Well, they talk about the terrorist acts that have been happening in Germany. Have you read about it?” We didn’t follow the news very much and responded in the negative.