Jesus Freaks

by Don Lattin

  Sara Kelley, a devotee who would emerge as Ricky’s most influential nanny, arrived on the island with her husband, Alfred, on March 19, 1975. She was given a copy of a child care book entitled How to Raise a Brighter Child and told to keep detailed records of the newborn’s activities and handling. “Someday,” Berg told her, “you will be writing his story to share with the whole world.”3

  Sara’s tale would be called The Story of Davidito.

  How do you begin the story of the King and Queen’s little brown prince? We’ve always considered him a King too, not just a prince, because ever since the very early beginning at birth, he was special. I guess that’s the most important thing to emphasize from the start, that he is special, exceptional, and Dad [Berg] has always said to me, “Now remember, honey, he’s different. I’ve known a lot of children and had plenty of my own, but he sure is special, an exceptional child. So don’t expect every baby to be like him. It must be something spiritual.”4

  Ricky had four nannies and teachers in the early years of his life—including Sara Kelley and Sue Kauten, who would go on to serve as his mother’s longtime personal secretary. Sara would have the greatest impact on Ricky’s life. She would chronicle the highly sexualized environment in which he was raised. But decades later, on the other side of the world, Sue Kauten would pay the ultimate price for the child-rearing experiment on the isle of Tenerife.

  It all started as a kind of lark. Sara and Sue were among the first Family staff summoned to Tenerife, a sun-drenched Canary Island known for its tropical parks, beaches, quaint fishing port, and lively nightlife along Veronica’s strip—a street lined with nightclubs full of globe-trotting party animals.

  Tenerife was the third stop on Berg and Zerby’s exile from the United States. The first stop was their failed mission to Israel, where the Endtime Prophet had to scrap his vision for a Family kibbutz. After a brief return to the United States, they flew off to London, where they set up shop in an apartment in Bromley. They started “witnessing” in nightclubs and discotheques.

  It was prime mission territory for Berg, a prophet who definitely liked his drink. Berg soon found that potential converts were more interested in dancing with his young wife than listening to what he had to say about the end of the world. It was here, amid the mirror balls of London’s swinging social scene, that the Lord gave Berg his most infamous revelation.

  Berg was to become God’s pimp. Karen and the rest of his female disciples would be heaven’s harlots. They would bring men to Jesus—and The Family—by selfless acts of sexual sacrifice. Berg gave his erotic evangelists detailed instructions, right down to what they should whisper into the ears of potential converts on the dance floor of discipleship:

  Even when you’re dancing, you meet them at the club and you put your arms around them and you snuggle up to them and you love them up and kiss them, you feel their bodies against you and you feel them getting hard and all you have to say is, “You mean to tell me you don’t believe in God?”

  “Listen, feel me, I am the love of God, I am God’s love for you! I am God’s love because He created me for you. He created me a woman and a woman’s love and a woman’s breasts, my pussy and everything for your pleasure. Doesn’t that prove that God loves you? Why can’t you understand that that proves that God loves you.”5

  “Flirty fishing” originated in London, but it wasn’t until 1976 that Berg sent out a flood of letters to trusted members with explicit illustrations and provocative titles like “God’s Love Slave” and “The FF Explosion.” Even before the letters went out, the flirty fishing crew was creating quite a stir on Tenerife. All these American women were hitting the clubs in low-cut dresses, flirting with men, and talking about Jesus.

  At the time, hardly anyone in The Family knew the whereabouts of their prophet. New members of the team would be flown into Barcelona, met by a trusted insider, and taken aboard a tramp steamer. “You drop off the face of the earth and wind up on this island in the middle of the Atlantic. It was an adventure,” recalled one member of the Tenerife team. “We were all young, in our early twenties. It was an idyllic place. You were living on this tropical island with this big volcano. It was a relatively simple existence, but it was exciting. None of the bad stuff had really kicked in yet. You have a sense that you are chosen to be there. It makes everybody there feel important and special, but it also creates a high level of paranoia.”6

  Mostly, it was just a lot of fun. “It’s not like you were in some conservative backwater. Most of the tourists were northern Europeans who were pretty tolerant of our weirdness. We just came across as other people on holiday. That was our front. There were all these gorgeous girls, and there was David Berg test-driving FFing (pronounced ‘eff-eff-ing’) before unleashing it on the entire Family. It was all pretty amazing.”

  To others, flirty fishing didn’t seem all that strange. Miriam Williams was only seventeen when she met some of Berg’s disciples in Greenwich Village in 1971. She soon went off with them to a commune in upstate New York. “It was a campground with about 300 people,” she said. “People were living together, sharing everything. It was a mixture of Christianity and communism. It appealed to me.”

  Later, as a Family missionary in Europe, Miriam found herself sharing more than her material possessions. “At first, it was just flirting, but if necessary, you’d have sex with men to get them to join,” said Williams. “Most of us weren’t that shocked by it. It wasn’t that much different than the whole hippie, free love thing. We were already having sex with people in the group.”7

  It didn’t take long for the European press to smell a story on Tenerife. Ricky had just celebrated his second birthday when a pair of Swedish journalists came to the island in February 1977. “Our Tenerife Family had their first magazine interview by two Swedish reporters, to whom Dad gave a beautiful witness, and they took lots and lots of pictures of everyone, especially Mommy [Zerby], Daddy [Berg] and Dito [Davidito/Ricky],” Sara wrote. “We were very busy meeting reporters and new people and even stopped on the street by complete strangers.”

  Swedish journalists were the first to publish an infamous photo of the Tenerife flirty fishing crew. The picture, later published in Time magazine in August 1977, and countless times thereafter, shows the Endtime Prophet surrounded by twelve of his holy hookers, all of them with big smiles and visible cleavage. Bearded and beaming beneath his receding hairline, Berg sits in the front row with Sue Kauten and Queen Rachel (an early Family leader) on his right and Zerby on his left.

  Flirty fishing was now in full swing. Berg’s sect rented several homes, including an old villa with a special FFing room. “Some of the girls would come in there. Some would go to the guy’s place if you could trust them. There was a rule you weren’t supposed to sleep with anyone on the first date,” one member of the crew recalled. “Berg ran a tight ship. Everybody had to write reports. ‘Whom did you see? What did you talk about?’ Berg called himself the fisherman. He was a spiritual pimp. He ran this line of girls. He’d say, ‘Ok, we’re going to focus on this guy.’ Either he had money or was considered to be spiritually hungry. Berg would read the reports, then get some revelation.”

  In The Story of Davidito, Sara recalls how she first learned that “FFing” had something to do with Ricky’s not-so-immaculate conception. “The Lord has reminded me many times how Davidito was conceived by the ultimate in love, total sacrifice and total giving,” she wrote in her diary, “and that the Lord is using him to teach us about love.”8

  About six weeks after Sara came to the island, Berg and Zerby had been gone the whole day and well into the night. Ricky spent much of the day out on the porch, bouncing up and down in his new “Johnny-Jump-Up.” Mom and Dad came home around 11: 30 P.M. with a shy, young Canarian named Carlos, the biological father of the Prophet Prince and a waiter in one of the hotels where Zerby and Berg stayed when they first came to Tenerife.

  Berg sat in his chair next to the fireplace of their home, sipping a g
lass of wine and gazing at Carlos with a strange look of affection. Then he moved over and sat beside the young man before taking Karen and the handsome waiter into Ricky’s dimly lit bedroom. They all looked down at the baby asleep on his stomach.

  “What dark hair he has and so brown,” Carlos said.

  “Why not?” Berg replied. “He was born in Spain. He’s Spanish.”

  “So Carlos was the one the Lord had used to give us Davidito!” said Zerby, who had never been sure. “Do you really think so? Do you really think it’s Carlos? Why him?”

  “Honey, he loved you from the first. He loved you the most, he fell so hard for you,” said Berg, raising his wineglass for another toast. “He still loves you, and the Lord wants to bless him.”

  Berg sensed that Karen—not to mention Carlos—was a little uncomfortable with this strange introduction to their son. Berg later spent half the night berating Zerby for not showing enough love toward the biological father of the Prophet Prince during his visit. The next day, they invited the Spanish waiter back to the house after work. Berg told Zerby to put on one of her long, sexy dresses and try, this time, to be more loving toward Carlos. Sara helped prepare the love chamber with candles. It was the first time the new nanny had seen flirty fishing in action. “It was such a beautiful sample and she showed so much love and obedience to the Lord’s words,” Sara wrote in her diary. “They made love on the floor!”9

  Ricky was still an infant when Berg began plotting his next move. One week after Sara chronicled Zerby’s exploits in the love chamber, the couple was off with the baby Ricky to Libya. In the month’s preceding Ricky’s birth, Berg’s disciples around the world had been distributing a tract praising the dictator, entitled “Khadafi’s Third World.” Why this intense interest? Perhaps Berg respected Khadafi’s cocky willingness to stand up against American power, or he was drawn to the Muslim leader after Berg’s rejection by the Israeli government. Maybe he was looking for another hideout from the news media, government investigators, and dismayed parents. And, like other apocalyptic prophets of the mid-seventies, Berg saw shades of the Antichrist in the fiery colonel. Maybe he was someone The Family could use—at least until the Great Tribulation.

  Khadafi didn’t take the bait, and the royal family moved on. There was a trip with mommy and daddy to a villa on the Italian coast and a train ride to Barcelona in August 1975. They were back on Tenerife in September to move into a larger house to accommodate the ever-growing staff needed to serve the royal family. The new house had a red-tiled roof, swimming pool, and large walled garden with palm trees. It was located on the edge of a village where Carlos was raised, El Barrio del Durazno, in the lush green valley of Orotava.

  Perhaps Berg thought that being closer to the family of his son’s biological father would ease tension over the unusual family arrangement. It did not. Carlos and his family were distancing themselves from the inner circle. The handsome waiter even started talking about marrying his childhood sweetheart. “Dad became so indignant he threatened to blast them all away at our next family fiesta for not loving their new family member, Davidito,” wrote Sara, who like other disciples now referred to Berg as “Dad.” “Because of their final decision to reject Davidito, the Lord said later in Prophecy that the family would be cursed.”10

  Sara recounted all this in her Story of Davidito, published by The Family in 1982. It’s a strange book, full of advice on such everyday matters as child nutrition, teaching toddlers to read, and clothing suggestions for small children. Berg’s personal experience is often used as the model. “Dad [Berg] never liked putting on tight turtlenecks because of having to wear them as a child,” Sara advised. “His mother probably forced them over his head, and they always gave him an uncomfortable feeling of claustrophobia.”11

  But it was not the helpful hints on dressing children that would make The Story of Davidito the most controversial publication in the history of The Family. The most explosive and embarrassing sections of the book were the pages devoted to the young prophet’s sexual education. It began early, when he was an infant in Tenerife. Sara writes:

  He gets quite excited when I wash his bottom and his penie gets real big and hard. I kiss it all over till he gets so excited he bursts into laughter and spreads his legs open for more. I wonder what it’s going to be like when he begins to talk and asks for more? When playing on the floor he’ll oftentimes spread his legs open for me to kiss his penis (what we call his “penie”). He got to where he liked it so much he’d pull people by the hand down onto the floor and would spread his legs apart for “the treatment.” So we had to explain to him that there are a lot more important things in life than just sex, and a time and a place for everything!12

  What is most extraordinary about The Story of Davidito is the innocence with which sexual acts between adults and children are described and photographed. Sara writes about sex play with toddlers on one page, then nonchalantly jumps into a discussion of how Ricky’s stamp collection is “a tremendous teaching aid in geography.”

  Children learn by imitation, and for the children in The Family, that was the way to teach toddlers sex education. Kids were encouraged to watch their parents make love and then try it themselves. After a while, however, even Sara began rethinking that parenting tip. “Davidito is jealous when Alfred [Sara’s husband] and I begin loving up and tries to pull us apart, so the best thing for now is that we just not make love in front of him. Davidito loves to watch Dave and Sally [two other staff members] go at it, though. He begins to pant and bounce along with them, then sits down in exhaustion with a big sigh when it’s all over, just like he’s been through it too! Praise the Lord!”13

  Ricky got a sex partner closer to his age when Sara gave birth to her own child, Davida Maria Kelley. She was fourteen months younger than the Prophet Prince, but within a year of her birth was engaged with simulated sex acts with her older playmate. Ricky would watch couples make love by the pool and imitate the action with Davida, whose name is pronounced “Da-VEE-dah.” The same kind of sex play went on at night when the children would sleep in the same bed with their adult caregivers. Sara writes of how Ricky was at first jealous of her baby daughter, but jokes about how “he finally found something he thinks the baby is good for.” When Sara first told Berg and Zerby how Ricky would climb on the bed, crawl up on Davida, and start humping away, they didn’t believe her. “They both love it, really,” she told them. “Dad and Maria [Zerby] came to see for themselves, and sure enough, Davidito once again climbed on top of Davida and began banging away with a big smile!”14

  Berg’s theories about childhood sexuality were being put into practice. He was finally getting back at his mother for publicly chastising him for playing with himself.

  “Children should be taught that their sexual parts are just as good as the rest of their body and that sexual activities, feelings and pleasure are no more evil than eating or other physical functions or exercise,” Berg wrote. “The prohibitive and condemnatory attitudes toward sex of our overly religious so-called ‘Christian’ Western culture has produced generations of over-sexed children with an abnormal desire for sex and an absolutely manic craze for everything sexual due to their early sexual frustrations. Only in the present hippie generation have young people finally returned to a more normal attitude toward sex.”15

  In The Story of Davidito, Sara did not merely describe the sex play between the eighteen-month-old Prophet Prince and his five-month-old consort. The most explicit chapter of her book, “My Little Fish,” includes nude photos of Ricky and his mother striking sensual poses in bed—along with snapshots of Ricky “banging away” on top of Davida.

  At the time, Berg was certainly not the only advocate for allowing sexual play among children and teenagers. Berg was writing in 1973—when attitudes toward human sexuality and sex education were changing. One example was a book entitled Show Me!: A Picture Book on Sex for Children and Parents, published in 1974 by St. Martin’s Press. It was widely available in b
ookstores until the late seventies, when new laws were passed prohibiting the display of photographs of sexual acts involving children under sixteen years of age. Show Me! was much more explicit in its presentation than The Story of Davidito.

  On the other hand, St. Martin’s Press had already pulled Show Me! from the stores by 1982, the year The Family published The Story of Davidito. Even back in 1973, when Berg wrote his treatise “Revolutionary Sex,” he insisted that his followers conceal their hands-on experiments in childhood sexual education. Children in The Family were taught never to reveal their sexual play to outsiders.

  “It must be made very clear to your children that such sexual freedom must never be indulged in or practiced openly in the presence of visitors, strangers or uninitiated relatives and friends who have not been properly re-educated in the revolutionary sexual freedom of natural living! In other words, you will not be able to indulge in such God-given freedoms in the presence of the average Systemite or even new disciples or their children or those who have not yet been properly educated in the liberty-loving ways of God’s revolutionary naturist.”16

  Actually, it didn’t take long for the Systemites in Tenerife to go after the Endtime Prophet for his freewheeling sexual teachings. Sensational press coverage of The Family had forced Berg and his followers to flee the United States. Now the European press, especially the German magazine Stern, was onto the story. Reporters staked out the villa that an Italian count had turned over to the cult. “In this estate, surrounded by olive trees and terraced vineyards, the sect has its operational headquarters, which is top secret—known only to a handful of people,” Stern reported.17