Heaven's Harlots: My Fifteen Years in a Sex Cult (37 page)

“Actually, I have serious doubts about that, yes. But whether Mo is a Prophet or not doesn’t bother me at all. What bothers me is people taking Mo’s letters as if they were God’s Word. And if you really want to know, I don’t even believe everything in the Bible is God’s Word either. A lot has been tampered with through the ages.”

“Why are you in the Family then?” asked Judah suspiciously.

“I’m in the Family for the community. I’m in here because I still think it’s better than the system. And right this minute, I’m in here because this is where the father of my children is. I lost one child, and I don’t want to lose any more.”

“No wonder you guys are doing so badly. And we were told it was Paolo,” replied Judah, rubbing his chin as if that discovery took a lot of mental effort.

“Well, it’s me. But I’m also the one who got us this house you are living in. And if you want to stay here, I want to know what you think about sex with children.”

“You have no right to come in here and demand us to answer your questions,” shouted Judah. “You made your point. Don’t worry. I won’t touch your precious little girls.” The Family was not free of the bureaucratic problems found in the system.

I wasn’t in this hierarchy, but I still had minimal power in my own house. I spoke to Paolo about my conversation with Judah, but he thought I was imagining things. Since our children slept with us, in our own bedroom, he said we had nothing to worry about. The letters about sex and children did not seem to bother him so much. He said that it wasn’t really having sex. Mo never said to have actual intercourse with children! Like most of us, he probably did not read these perverse letters, but they were there, like a cancer eating any ideals we had left.

Every one I talked to convinced me that I was taking these letters too seriously. I began to think that I really had a problem after all.

But what problem was it? I thought about it for hours as I lay awake in bed at night. I recalled an incident that had happened about a year before, when my mother and sister Karen were visiting me in Italy while we were alone at Paolo’s hometown. Karen mentioned that it was terrible how we let the children run around naked on the beach.

Actually, most of the Europeans do that also. We got into a heated discussion about nudity, and finally she said what was on her mind.

“I read that the adults in your group show their naked body parts to their children, as a way of sex education. Is that true?” Suddenly, as if a window of my past life had been opened, I saw my father showing me his penis.

“Well, what’s so bad about that? Dad used to do it,” I answered.

“oh, you’re disgusting! Dad never did that! You’re just making that up because you’re in this group! You’re sick!” She talked to my mother about this, since my mom and dad had already been separated when she was still a little girl. My mother assured her that it was not true. Coincidentally, my mother also had a severe epileptic attack while she was visiting at this time. I don’t remember if it was before or after this conversation. It bothered me so much that I closed that window to the deep past.

As I lay in bed and recalled this event, I thought perhaps I was afraid of something in my past. Not one of the other adults living with us seemed as concerned about sex and children as I was. I did seem to have a problem with sex. Maybe it was I who was perverted by an evil and sick mind. On the other hand, those who did not like the Mo letters left the Family. What was I doing here anyway?

I had a lot of time to think about it. Soon after my outburst with our new leaders, I was restricted to my room for two hours of extra word time and prayer a day. I welcomed this restriction since I used it to get much needed sleep. But I also did a lot more thinking than praying, and I didn’t read the Bible or Mo letters. Why did I still let leaders tell me what to do? Because I had grown accustomed to it maybe? It was a habit—part of living communally. But why did I live this way? My ideals were gone. My curiosity about a different lifestyle had long been satiated. Like Alice in Wonderland, I had seen enough. My dream was over. I came to the conclusion that I was only in the Family now because Paolo wanted to stay. I had to convince Paolo to leave.

However, Paolo seemed to find life in the Family easier than life in the Italian system. Although he worked hard, he had no rigid work hours, and all responsibilities were shared by a group of adults. If money ran low, we had a choice of going out as witnessing teams to sell tapes or singing in restaurants. Paolo was also convinced that the system was a bad place to raise children. Because of his own traumatic experiences as a child, which had left him and his brother with forms of depression, he did not want his children to have the same condition.

Two of his cousins had died drug-induced deaths. He saw the Family as a haven from a cruel world. He appeared to like having rules and regulations to guide his every act so that he didn’t have to think, make decisions, or take the blame for anything. Even though I know he did not agree with the letters either, he truly believed that his children were safe here.

Unlike Alice, I could not seize the tablecloth in my hands and shake everybody off. This was real life—not a dream! I spent a few months vacillating in my ruminations about who was crazy, I or they. In my weakened state, I was reproached by Judah and his wife for making Paolo use condoms, which I had recently insisted upon, so he stopped using them and I became pregnant immediately.

When I was about three months pregnant, Judah and his family moved to another home. We were expecting a new family soon, and I started cleaning out the bedrooms upstairs in preparation. As I went through the drawers in the children’s rooms, where Judah’s girls had slept, I came across a spiral notebook. I thought I could reuse it for school if there were enough empty pages, so I leafed through it. The name of his oldest girl, who was about eight, was written on the first page. I turned another page, and the drawing leaped up at me as if I had been grabbed around the throat and choked.

There, drawn in pencil, was the replication of a fully erect penis.

I gasped. I shut the book and breathe deeply, trying not to scream.

What had gotten into me? I had seen drawings of penises in Mo letters before. But this was a child’s book. And it appeared to be drawn from looking at a live model. The detail was too precise. I opened the book and frantically searched through the other pages. It was full of penis drawings, at different stages of erection.

“oh my God!” I thought to myself. “Did this happen in my house? Was a little innocent girl taught to draw her daddy’s penis while I was sleeping in the next room? What a horrible person I am. And how much have my own daughters been exposed to?” Athena was seven years old.

Was she included in these lessons?

I took the book as evidence and went to the window to check on the kids. Athena was playing on the swing we had hung under a spreading oak tree. Genvieve was dressed up in her long princess dress, playing at some fantasy about being married to a prince. She had long, curly blond hair, and whenever a small boy visited our home, my four-year-old would make him be a prince. She lived in a fantasy world. Jordan was by the fountain, throwing flowers, leaves, and bugs she found into the pool that had formed from the running fountain water. I couldn’t believe that my precious little ones had been touched by this evil.

From a deep recess in my soul, the part that I had shut off because of a long-ago pain, I had a premonition of repeated history. I did not know what it meant, but I knew I had to protect my children.

Michelangelo was asleep in his cot. At barely a year old, he had been touched by none of this.

And I was never going to let that chance come. I gathered up the children’s passports and hid them in the pages of one of my books. I took the book outside and hid it again in the barn. That evening I confronted Paolo, showing him the horrible notebook drawings.

“We don’t know that these were drawn by her, or that they were even drawn here,” he said, pushing the notebook aside as if to take it out of his sight and so out of his mind.

“Of course, they were drawn by her,” I protested. “And so what if they were not drawn here in this house. This is pornography. What if Athena saw this?”

“You don’t think Athena has seen the Mo letters?” I realized with a gasp how foolish and blinded I had been. What was to stop the children from looking at the Mo books with fully detailed sex organs drawn for the adult readers, or so I wanted to believe. And even the children’s newest comic books from the Family, the much-read Heaven’s Girl series, included the naked man’s body. He was right.

Athena had seen pictures like this.

“But this has been drawn by a little girl! Don’t you see the difference?”

“What are you worried about? They’re gone now!”

“But they’ll send more leaders to us. Paolo, I don’t want my children exposed to this. I’m leaving.”

“Where are you going? And how are you getting there?” Paolo laughed, knowing I could not drive.

“I’m writing my mother. She will send me money to leave Italy. I have the children’s passports, Paolo. I’m leaving.” Paolo’s face dropped.

He looked in the drawer and saw that our passports were gone.

“I’ll find them,” he said weakly.

“No, you won’t. And what can you do? I have proof, just like Jerry did. I can get the kids if we go to court. But I know what it’s like to have a child taken from me, and I won’t put you through that pain, Paolo. I’m leaving, but you can come if you want to.” Paolo softened drastically before my eyes. I knew I would make it out.

“What will I do for work?” asked Paolo. “We’ve been in the Family for years now. I can’t borrow money again from my family. How will we live?” I felt truly sorry for Paolo, especially since I had introduced him to the Family to begin with. But I knew it was Paolo who had decided to go back, so now I would make this decision without my everimposing guilt feelings.

“Are you saying you will leave the Family for good?” I asked.

“I’ll follow you and the kids, not because I want to but because you are making me.” It took a few more weeks to encourage Paolo to do this. A new family had come to the farmhouse, and it seemed like everything would be fine again. Paolo tried to convince me that Judah was a special case, but now that my eyes were opened to the reality of the Mo letters, I saw sexual innuendos everywhere. I was insistent.

Many years later, when we had been out of the Family for years, I asked Paolo why he had wanted to stay in a group where there might have been child abuse.

“I did like everyone else,” he answered without hesitation. “I put it out of my mind. I thought this would never happen to us. We all thought, well, it didn’t happen to us. And living in a community gave me security. I didn’t know how I would get a job if I left or how to support my family. The community gives you security.”

Finally, we left in our RV. Paolo was still complaining about how he was going to support us all. He told the new people that we were only going on a faith trip and we would be back. Every one knew I was having problems.

I was also pregnant, and pregnant women, everyone knew, sometimes act funny.

I didn’t care what they thought of me. I had enough thoughts of my own.

Should I stay with Paolo? He was the father of the kids, after all.

And he was so weak. Maybe I would stay with him until the kids were a little older. At least I would stay until the baby was born. I couldn’t make any decisions now. All I wanted to do was get away.

There were about eighteen thousand members in the Family at that time.

There were now six fewer.

Like a Rolling Stone

Globs of blood were coming out of me as I sat in pain on the toilet seat. There was a blood trail from the bedroom to the bathroom. I felt sick as I looked at my pieces of fetus floating in the pink toilet bowl water. The girls were in the yard playing. Michelangelo was crying in his highchair, waiting for more food. I leaned over, squatted, and pushed hard. There was no use trying to save this now. Maybe God was punishing me for leaving the Family.

“No,” I thought, as I grew dizzy from losing so much blood,“this will be a blessing, not a punishment.” When Paolo arrived back at the trailer, after going out to look for work, I asked him to take me to the hospital. One of the advantages of living in Italy, married to an Italian, was their socialized health care system. I knew I should see a doctor after what had just happened.

“Why?” he asked. “The blood probably washed it all away. These things are natural, you know.”

“I just feel I should go to the doctor, that’s all.” Paolo went down the street and asked his mother to watch the kids while he took me to the hospital.

I was advised to stay overnight and get a D and C, which is a uterus cleansing, the next day. The doctor suggested that I have my tubes tied after he heard I’d had five children and this miscarriage, but Paolo was insistent that I should not do it. He promised to let me use birth control, and I inserted an IUD, which made my menstruation longer and, for the first time in my life, painful. But it was worth it.

With our trailer parked in the garden plot of land that belonged to Paolo’s uncle, we were mainly concerned about bringing in daily income.

Paolo spent a few months selling our leftover Family tapes, while I took the girls out singing. Although Paolo was not happy to be working in the system again, I was thrilled at the limitless possibilities open before me. However, after a few years, I realized that in Italy married women with children already had their place established for them. It was in the home, serving her husband and children.

Since we now were living in Taggia again, and Jerry was living with his family in Nice, Thor was less than an hour from me. A tall, lanky boy at the difficult age of fifteen, Thor often had serious arguments with his father, and he was now free to come to my house whenever he wanted to.

Although the Family always preached that God would punish those who left, I instead felt blessed. With Thor close by, I could see him every weekend, and he soon became an integral part of our little family show group. An agent signed us on to perform at small theaters, but because of the travel involved, and the little financial recompense, I created my own music business. Under the name of “Happy Songs,” I developed a program introducing English to children in elementary school through singing and games. We performed at most of the local schools, and the local paper ran an article on the girls singing in a school, comparing us with the Sound of Music family.