Heaven's Harlots: My Fifteen Years in a Sex Cult (44 page)

1996.

Rose and Bishop, the two former members who started the tradition of yearly reunions, left before the height of sexual activity in the Family. Rose, who had joined in 1969, lived in the same commune (or compound) as Mo during her first years in the group, and was married by him to a man she did not want to marry. Eventually, she left with a husband she chose, but she felt a sense of failure, rejection, and isolation upon leaving the group that had defined her identity. “Nine years of an intense lifestyle and indoctrination can be hard to put behind you,” she contends. She feels that encouragement and support are important for people when they leave a cult, proposing that “sometimes the best person to talk to is someone who has experienced the same things that you have.” She and her husband have now become the connecting source between former members of the Family, borderline members who are contemplating leaving but are not sure what they will do, and those who are still in the Family and whose children are trying to contact them. They would like to see a retreat where families with many children, single parents, and young, inexperienced teens who leave the Family could rest and acquire the resources to tackle the work of living in the real world. The need for such a place became one of their main concerns after hearing the stories of those who left the group in recent years, especially the teens.

Jesse’s mother brought him into the group when he was six years old.

She quickly rose to leadership position, and Jesse lived ten years with what he claims were experiences of sexual and emotional abuse that taught him little about right and wrong. When he left the Family at the age of sixteen, he found it too hard to adjust to society and ended up spending years in prison. Jesse told me that while he was in jail, he was so lonely he wrote to the Family and asked someone to please write him. He received dozens of letters, and after prison, he began visiting their homes again. His mother and sister are still in the cult.

A Family publication numbered GN 480 DO, from October 1991, published a letter from a teen in their group named Tony, also called Zack Attack.

He complained about having a problem with being under constant supervision and restricted from being able to ride “a skateboard or a horse or go ice-skating or roller-skating or even climb a tree.” In response, he received “Dad’s Blast after hearing about Zack Attack,” which stated,“Give him the ultimatum! Tell him, Tonight at our next meeting, you’re going to get up and weep and pray and cry for mercy and grovel on the floor and confess that you’re all wrong in front of all the teenagers and everybody, and beg for mercy.” (“Grumblers Get Out!”

2716).

This was the type of environment that many members were subjected to at what became known as the victor camps. Adults found it hard to leave because of their connections to their children and spouses in the Family, but teens, who had been raised in the group, had nowhere else to go. Even so, some left and tried to locate distant relatives or to make it on their own.

Teddy, Andrew, and their first sister, Shirley, the three oldest children of Jeremy Spencer, whom I took care of when they were young, left the Family on their own. I read about Andrew, who did not use his father’s famous name, in an article from a London paper, and it appeared that he was interested in going to college. However, according to testimony from former COG members, one of Jeremy’s daughters who left the Family now works as a stripper. A case in point is that of River Phoenix, the young actor who died of a drug overdose in 1993. His parents joined the Children of God when River was only a young boy—according to some sources, age two—and they became Family missionaries in Venezuela. Like many COG children, River sang on the streets to help support his family until they left the group and returned to America in 1977. His childhood experiences in the Family certainly must have contributed to what became a troubled adulthood (one author described him as a “disillusioned innocent”) and ended in a drug-induced death at the age of twenty-three.

Hopie, Mo’s second daughter, wrote in a Family-published article on reaction to childhood sex” (1988) that “daddy made me feel good all over…I don’t think it perverted me…but it sure converted me to His call.” She came to America for health reasons after her father’s death, but it was rumored that she was having conflict with the leadership, especially Maria, who had taken Mo’s place. In America, Hopie started living with a former male member of the cult, and they have been together for a while, purportedly out of the Family.

I learned through reunion sources that before coming to America, Hopie had been sent to Siberia by the Family, and while there she established a food supply chain across the Russian wilderness to feed the forgotten starving Siberians. This involved negotiations with Russian officials as well as the Russian mafia, according to her own testimony. In 1996 she called me and asked if I would like to help her in Washington, D. C., with her fund-raising effort for the Russians in Siberia. I declined, but I wished her luck, and I heard she is doing well.

Cal/Jerry, Thor’s father and my first husband, had three daughters and one more son with his second wife (exactly as I had, and pretty much around the same years). Thor is therefore the older brother to six girls and two boys. Cal eventually divorced his wife, and the children live with him in Colorado. We call each other occasionally and are on good terms. While writing this book, I asked him if he would like to relate some of his own story. The following is what Cal wrote to me from his own memory, but his perceptions of the Family, why he joined and why he stayed, were the same as mine. For me, the intentions and motives I had weren’t wrong, and I believe there were many others who were sincere, who held the beauty and light of their personal vision, and stayed hoping to change what the reality was becoming. Many times I thought, I questioned, and doubted things, but we had been conditioned to resist such thoughts, so our behavior became more radical and consequently more fanatical in some. Maybe we were just plain old afraid to “go back out into the world.” Whatever the reason we stayed and obeyed will always be a bit of a mystery. Why people like us join something like this I think is clear—it’s the historical climate of the times. We were idealists,“some of them were dreamers/some of them were fools/they were making plans and dreaming of the future/On the brave and crazy wings of youth/we went flying around in the rain/till our feathers once so fine grew torn and tattered” (“Before the Deluge” by Jackson Brown).

When the whole fishing era started I was pretty anxious. We had been prepared for the ultimate sacrificing of our mates to the crucifix of the bed of love. For months the letters just became more and more specific. I didn’t really have a say the first time. It hurt bad. I felt we had lost something in our union. Our union wasn’t so good at that time because for months the anxiety just built on me seeing clearly where all these new letters were leading. As the months passed I behaved more and more erratic—possessive, fear of losing my most precious loved one. Anyway, I got used to it and persuaded myself that this was the ultimate sacrifice. Then in time we were more manipulative and motives and intentions became less honorable. Within the group the fatherless population grew, bad treatment—bad karma— bad press.

How did I feel about being a pimp for God? At first I had been sincerely persuaded of the power of love—and the attraction of a pretty woman to win souls. There was always a tinge of jealousy and hurt.

Always I participated vicariously, imagining I was the stranger experiencing for the first time the fruits of my wife’s love. It made her more attractive and desirable and therefore I couldn’t wait until she came home to me. My own emotions, however, made me blind and insensitive to her needs and lack of desire toward me—due to fatigue and probably disgust at times because her experience had been distasteful.

To my heart and mind at these times, I hurt because I thought it was me.

“I let you sleep with strangers and you reject me?” It was a problem and created a communication breakdown dividing us.

I believe we were deceived innocents. I hope you don’t carry any guilt feelings from the past. I am sure that all of us who have gone through these things and survived are better people for the experience.

What made me finally leave? It was seeing what happened to poor Sharon.

When I heard about her video, something snapped inside me. Of course I had been thinking of leaving for years by then, but knowing what happened to Sharon, I snapped.

While I was writing this book, Mara, the third in our threesome marriage and Cal’s second wife, called me. She appears to have gone through her own long journey to self-awareness, and she answered my questions with realistic honesty.

I asked Mara to write me more on why she joined the cult and why she stayed during fishing. The following is taken from a letter she wrote me.

I joined this group while deeply into a spiritual search, and what I now know to have mainly been a search for myself, my true values. In the world I saw corruption, where power and money seemed the name of the game, and where I thought there was no room for me.

Why did I accept fishing, in spite of my original disgust at the practice? Certainly because it was challenging and revolutionary, and that word always struck a chord in me. Going beyond morals, transcending the taboo of sexuality in Christianity seemed very appealing. Now that was the intellectual approach, and I must say that my body could never quite follow. I wasn’t free sexually and it made it hard to win people to Jesus that way. Of course, money also being involved made it quite degrading at times.

Looking at it now, I can clearly see my immaturity and lack of confidence, and that I covered up with a display of culture and savoirvivre. I was very proud, often felt smarter than others, but at the same time very inadequate.

More than the beliefs, it’s the human warmth that attracted me in the group, so when I left it wasn’t hard for me to cut emotional ties, and go back to my first spiritual interests in Hinduism and Budthism.

Today I feel so different than during that time of my life, that I feel that I am writing about someone else. I can only assume that the serenity and balance I found today are a fruit of all the questions and deep searching that followed that period. It led me to psychotherapy and now meditation.

Mara, now forty years old and divorced from Cal, lives near her children in Colorado.

My Family My older brother, Steve, has spent most of his life in prison. He currently is finishing a twenty-year sentence for unarmed bank robbery (he reportedly smashed his arm through the teller window and demanded money). No one was hurt but himself, when he cut his arm on the glass, however, since he had already had more than three strikes on his record, he is in the same ward with murderers and rapists. I asked him recently if he ever hurt a person in any of his robberies.

After a few minutes of contemplation, he told me that the only person he ever hurt was me.

“I punched you in the stomach once when we were kids. I think we were wrestling and you kicked me, and it hurt so badly that I punched you. You started crying and I have felt sorry about doing that all my life,” he explained.

Although all my sisters believe in the Christian perspective of God, none have become very “religious.” Perhaps my sister who died in a car accident at the age of twenty would have been. My other sisters all live in Florida, have steady jobs, own their own homes, and seem to be happily married. They are typical Americans and lead typical American lives, however, I will leave it up to the reader to define “typical.”

They do not talk to me often about my time in the Family, and they encourage me to stop talking about it also, so I hope they don’t read this book. Only my sister Ruby, who was in the Family for a short time in Paris and knows how manipulated I had been, understands why I would not want to stay with the father of my children.

Ruby told me years later that when I first joined the Family she was only nine years old, and she had always looked up to me as the big sister. She hated the COG for taking me away and saw that it hurt my mother a lot, so she swore she would get back at the Family for doing this. As she grew up, she watched TV shows about cults and believed that the people in cults were brainwashed, however, when she visited me in Paris, she thought that the Family was just like a group of peace-loving hippies. It was fun in Paris, especially since her sister was in the Show Group and danced on stage. Ruby enjoyed singing on the streets and living with other young people. When she heard about fishing she thought,“I will never do that.” She thought the idea of showing one man God’s love was nice, but she would never do that with lots of men. “I liked their beliefs in the Bible, and their witnessing methods—distributing literature on the streets and singing at cafes. I felt more like an observer and was just having a good time in Paris. But nobody was going to convince me to joinit. I was real careful not to get brainwashed.” My mother continues to live with me as an ever-present grandmother to my children. She visits her other daughters in Florida a few times a year, and talks with her son on the phone every week that he is not in the “hole.” She continues to pray every morning, goes to church weekly, and spends many of her waking hours translating German sermons into English. Although she has come to a few ex-COG reunions, and has met many of my friends who were former members, we do not talk much about the time I spent in the cult.

I divorced Paolo after three years of separation. He runs a profitable business and lives close to our home. He has a good relationship with the children and me, thanks in part to counseling he receives from a men’s group and from his pastor. Paolo feels comfortable in a church environment, and I am happy for him. I am also delighted that he has done so well in his business, something that never happened while he was with me. I often wonder if it was my fault. Although I have written about my bad experiences with Paolo as my husband, now that I am no longer his wife, we both treat each other better. I don’t blame Paolo for anything. In fact, I take the blame for using sex and marriage as a witnessing tool—but in the end, it worked for him. I don’t think that Paolo would be capable of living such a rewarding and constructive life as he now leads had he continued his use of tranquilizers, and stopping them was a prerequisite for marrying me.