by Don Lattin
Journalists also caught up with Berg in Tenerife, where the prophet was spotted having a fine time. “The man with the white beard in his late 50s was spotted every night with a dozen beautiful women in the upscale bar ‘Los Caprichos’ in Puerto de la Cruz and bought drinks for hundreds of Marks every night. Germans and tourists from other countries flirted with the women, who were ordered to sleep with anyone who looked like they had money.”
One Berg devotee, a twenty-one-year-old nurse from the Italian resort town of Rimini, explained that flirty fishing was not conducted for the money or with lust in her heart. “What I do here has nothing to do with group sex,” she wrote in a letter to her parents. “I don’t sleep with just anyone, only with those that search for Jesus. What could be better than to give my life and my body to Jesus.”18
It was soon time to get out of Tenerife. In February 1977, a local judge summoned Berg to court. Catholic Church leaders had complained about the sect, prompting a closer look at the visas of these unorthodox American missionaries. At first, Berg held his ground. In early March, the entire Tenerife Family held a prayer vigil outside the courthouse in Orotava to support their spiritual leader. Ricky’s picture—his hands folded in prayer while Berg was in court—was published in the local paper.
Fearing deportation, Berg and Zerby fled the island, leaving Ricky behind with Sara. They followed on a flight to the Portuguese island of Madeira, where the Unit was reunited. It was the beginning of their “gypsy travels.”
Sue Kauten soon joined the family at their hotel on Madeira. Sara now had her own child and initially found herself torn between her spiritual responsibilities for Ricky and her motherly concern for Davida. Sue’s arrival helped The Family get back to Job One—the sexual education of the Prophet Prince.
One night, right after his nap, Ricky, now aged two, joined Sara and Alfred in their bed. “We were all three loving up when Dito looked at me with those big dreamy Canarian black eyes and said, ‘Sara, I yub you!’ He pulled me down to kiss him, then pushed my head down to kiss some more!”19
There was another move in May. Sara, Alfred, and Ricky fled to Lisbon to prepare a new home. But reporters working for Stern had caught up with them, and they wouldn’t stay long.
All five of the inner circle were forced to flee from Portugal in the middle of the night. “Diabolical German news reporters of the vicious anti-Christ [sic] Jewish Stern magazine were right on Dad’s trail and hounding us at our very front door,” Sara wrote.
They would move five times in the next six weeks. Members of the Unit were moving around at a pace even faster than David Berg knew as a child growing up with his itinerant evangelist mother. There was a sudden move to Switzerland, where Ricky learned how to ride a bike; then to the island of Malta, where they lived in a small apartment on the bay; and after the police started an investigation there, onto Sicily and then back to Switzerland. There were immigration officials, local police, or the news media asking too many questions, and The Family was always on the run. In August, at a casino in Lisbon, they were “besieged by antagonistic German reporters by surprise! The whole house was in an emergency security state the next day. Not only were we concerned about the safety of the King and Queen, but also our Little Prince!”20
The reporters’ arrival at their home in Lisbon that day was Ricky’s first real lesson in security training.
“Who’s at the door?” he asked.
“They are people who want to come in, but we don’t want to let them in,” Sara replied.
“What people?”
“They’re mean people who don’t love Jesus and don’t love us because we do love Jesus.”
“Are they sitting outside in the parked car?”
“Yes, they are.”
Then, according to Sara, Ricky said, “They’re mean people and they don’t love Jesus, but we’re not afraid because we have Jesus, and Daddy’s not afraid because he has Jesus!”
At 4: 30 A.M. the next morning, Berg and Zerby slipped out a back door into the night. Then a taxi quietly backed into the driveway of their home to pick up Sara and Ricky and take them to a small downtown hotel.
They moved again in early September—this time to Madrid and then on to a safe house out in the Spanish countryside. But no amount of moving would get in the way of the sexual education of the Prophet Prince. Sometimes, before he went to sleep, Ricky would jabber to his stuffed animals, giving them voices.
“You go fuck Pat, and you go fuck the big girl in the kitchen!”
“Oh, you don’t want to? Oh, OK, I’ll fuck Pat!”21
One day, not long before his third birthday, the Prophet Prince was thumbing through a copy of Playboy magazine. He came to the foldout, turned to Alfred, and said:
“Oh, she’s pretty. What’s her name?”
“Sheila,” Alfred answered.
Ricky asked if he could put her picture on the wall by his bed, just like Daddy, so he could kiss her nipples and pet the Playmate on the foldout. Alfred replied:
“I think Sara’s prettier than her, don’t you?
“No,” Ricky answered
Later that night, the Prophet Prince wanted to take nude photos of Sara in bed. Alfred got a chair for Davidito to stand on and showed him how to work the camera. “He was so excited he could hardly stand it,” Sara recalled.
Sara’s sex play with Davidito varied from night to night. “He’ll sometimes just jump on top of me real quick, hunch away and then jump off again and say, ‘Do you like that, Sara?’ But his usual, more gentle and preferred approach is, ‘Let’s go wash penie,’ and then I know what he really wants.
“Daddy told me he wants Davidito to have all the love he ever needed and wanted and didn’t get,” Sara wrote. “And thank the Lord we can enjoy sharing real ‘loving up’ together. It all comes about so sweet and naturally that it makes me wonder what all we must’ve missed in our own childhood. It’s wonderful to be able to pour into the children all your ‘dreams-come-true.’”22
Ricky celebrated his sixth birthday, and Davida turned five during the Unit’s eight-month stay at an old farmhouse in Puyricard, a hamlet in the south of France. Berg would spend most of his time in a trailer behind the house with Zerby, a tape recorder, and a bottle of wine. “Basically, every word he said was recorded,” one staffer recalled. “If you were walking around in the yard with him, you have to take a tape recorder. And God help you if you screwed up and didn’t turn it on.”23
Berg would come down to the farmhouse on most nights for the evening meal. “Dinner could go on for hours,” recalled one regular guest. “Berg was a religious drunk. You listened to him. It was stream of consciousness. It would be about something he’d been reading. If someone had been bad in the group, you’d hear a rant about that. If he was in a good mood he’d start singing a song or want to hang around and play with the kids.”24
That’s an adult recollection. Davida has her own memories of what it was like when David Berg decided to play with the kids. More than two decades later, as an adult living in New York, Davida offered her own firsthand memories of what it was like living as a child with the Endtime Prophet, a man she called “Grandpa.”
According to Davida, Berg sexually fondled her on many occasions and performed oral sex on her when she was a child. “Growing up in the Unit, there was absolutely nothing wrong with adults having sexual interaction with children. The whole thing was encouraged,” Davida said. “As Grandpa put it, ‘God created us to enjoy it at a young age so I don’t see why age should have anything to do with it.’ Grandpa was the mouthpiece of God. Everything he did was done in the name of Jesus and, therefore, it couldn’t be wrong.”25
Grandpa loved to watch Davida dance. One day at the farmhouse in France her performance was staged against a backdrop of palm trees and a bucolic blue lagoon. Davida stood before the stage set and struck a sexy pose. She was five years old. She was topless and had a gauzy sarong tied about her waist. She had one arm on her hip and the other se
ductively raised behind her head.
For Grandpa, it was a Kodak moment. No one knew it at the time, but this photo would later illustrate the final page of The Story of Davidito—right above a caption describing Sara’s daughter as “Dancing Davida, the Hawaiian Hula Honey.”
“Our children have learned that this dancing is not only for fun, but it’s for Jesus,” Sara wrote. “Isn’t it wonderful how the Lord made so many events in our life for Him so exciting and just so much fun! Hallelujah.”26
Davida’s dance may have been exciting, but it was not for just the Lord. It was for Grandpa Berg, a man who loved to watch videotapes of young girls performing sexy dances. They were taped and sent to him from Family colonies all around the world. But the dance of Davida was the most exciting. She wasn’t just on the TV screen. She was right there in the flesh, ready to be sent to the Endtime Prophet’s bed whenever Grandpa was in the mood.
Dozens of these family photos illustrate The Story of Davidito, but there’s something especially eerie about this family scrapbook. The heads of all the family members are covered over with drawings of their hair and facial features. They are half photograph, half cartoon. And they are always smiling.
Their faces were altered for security reasons. No one was to recognize the members of the inner circle—not even Family members who were sent The Story of Davidito as their child care manual. But the concealment of Ricky’s and Davida’s identities went much deeper. They were to have no personal identity. Ricky was Davidito—prophecy embodied. Davida was a child sexuality liberated. They were not raised to be normal children. They were born to be exemplars of the great child care revolution of David Berg.
No one knows better than Davida what Ricky went through as a child. She lived with him and the Unit until she was eleven years old and he was twelve. Growing up, Davida had no concept of “sexual abuse.” Going off with Grandpa or another man was “love up” time. As she remembers it, members of her Family would get together in a gathering that could begin as a meeting or celebration and end up as a disco and an orgy. “We were all naked and getting molested when we were four or five years old. Everybody was having sex, and the kids would get involved.”27
Davida’s earliest memories in the Unit involve moving and moving and then moving again. Her childhood was spent on the run. She and Ricky traveled across Europe, to South Africa, and finally to the Far East. They were always moving, yet never really leaving the cocoon that was the Unit. “We never had other interactions with kids. We’d see them on the streets or at the zoo,” she said. “It was us, Grandpa [Berg], Maria [Zerby], my mom and dad and immediate staff—security, cooks, secretaries, writers, and editors.”
It would be a few more years before the teachings of the Endtime Prophet would be made flesh. Merry Berg, the child born to Shula and Aaron Berg, would be brought back to the Unit. Merry was a few years older than Ricky and Davida. She was the first to sexually come of age. Her presence was needed to make the teachings flesh.
While Davida called David Berg “Grandpa,” she was not actually related to him by blood. Merry, on the other hand, was the daughter of Aaron and the biological granddaughter of David Berg. But there was no need to worry about incest. This was the gospel of revolutionary sex. What was good in the heart of the prophet was right in the eyes of the Lord.
“To the pure,” as Berg liked to say, “all things are pure!”
7
Teen Terror
ANTIPOLO, PHILIPPINES
February 1987 – Sunflower Street
Children of God in the south of France in the seventies. Standing front and center are Merry Berg and Don Irwin.
RICKY, THE SPIRITUAL son of David Berg, was twelve.
Merry Berg, the Endtime Prophet’s biological granddaughter, was fourteen.
In the gospel according to Grandpa, it was time for them to make a baby, to continue his dynasty, to make the teachings flesh.
David Berg had not seen his granddaughter since 1972, when Shula and Aaron and the infant Merry left the Endtime Prophet’s hideout in London. Berg had christened Merry with the biblical name “Mene Mene,” from an Old Testament story about how the Prophet Daniel interpreted strange writings on a wall that foretold the destruction of Belshazzar and his kingdom.1
As would often be the case, Berg was half-right. Merry Berg would play a key role in the destruction of a kingdom. It would not be the kingdom of Belshazzar, but the kingdom of Berg. In the process, Merry would nearly destroy herself and help inspire Ricky to embark on a murderous rampage of revenge.
Hundreds of kids were born into The Family during the seventies, but none of them were made to live out the Endtime Prophet’s teachings like Ricky, Davida, Merry, and Zerby’s daughter, Christina Teresa Zerby. Christina, called “Techi” in The Family, was born in the south of France on March 19, 1979. Her biological father was Michael Sweeney, a one-time Berg insider who would soon be ousted in a power struggle among the prophet’s top lieutenants.2
During the eighties, the Unit remained on the run. They were in France until June 1981, when Berg predicted a nuclear holocaust would soon devastate Europe and North America. They moved to Cape Town, South Africa, to escape the coming horror.
Membership in The Family—always hard to determine with any certainty—peaked by the early eighties. Several thousand members left in 1978 and 1979 as Berg’s teachings got more bizarre and leadership struggles broke out in various parts of the world. In 1978, before the wave of defections, The Family claimed 8,000 members. Only about ten percent of them were living in the United States, but babies kept being born in colonies around the world. The number of children born into The Family peaked in 1983 when the sect reported 746 births in a single year. Nearly half of the reported membership was children.3
Berg and his staff—now called “World Services”—moved from South Africa to the Philippines in 1982. They stayed at the Admiral Hotel in Manila and then moved into a house in Greenhills, San Juan, a wealthy Manila subdivision. They rented some cottages at the Tropicana Hotel Resort in southern Manila for a few months. They then found a more permanent headquarters at a hilltop hideout in Antipolo, in an exclusive development overlooking the sprawling capital city.
Merry was summoned to join Grandpa in the Philippines in late 1983. There were now four children in the Unit. Ricky was eight, Davida was six, and Techi was four when eleven-year-old Merry arrived. Here’s how Ricky, referring to Merry as “Mene,” remembered that time in the Philippines:
After she arrived, things started changing for us…. It raised the standard considerably for us, and made it harder to keep up.
Maria [Zerby] and Sara [Davida’s mother] were obsessed with their image and the reflection we cast on it. We not only had to be “good kids,” but we had to be the best! After all, we were “Grandpa and Maria’s kids.” We were supposed to be super-kids, commissioned with taking over The Family when Berg died, and leading God’s Endtime Army through the Great Tribulation!
If we were going to be able to do that, then why on earth shouldn’t they expect Techi to keep up with someone like Mene who was only seven or eight years older than she was, and certainly hadn’t had “as good training”?
We still were kids, and we wanted to play with our toys and just have fun, instead of worrying about watching all our actions and making a good impression on our teachers.
Mene didn’t seem to be interested in playing games and playing with toys. She didn’t seem to view school and “Word Time” as something to endure, as we did. She was always held up as the example for us to follow, and we started resenting her for being smarter, more liked, and the center of attention, mainly from Berg.4
Merry’s life of sexual molestation and abuse started when she was seven years old and sent to the sect’s “Music with Meaning” camp in Greece. Music with Meaning was a Family radio program translated into seven languages and broadcast on radio stations in dozens of countries between 1976 and 1984, making it one of The Family’s most
successful operations. Girls sent to the camp were supposed to be recording Christian songs and learning that part of The Family’s music ministry. But their duties also included starring in those erotic dance videos David Berg loved so much.
Shula agreed to let Merry attend the program with two of her friends. “They wanted to be there and sing. I felt like that was what Aaron would have wanted—to have his daughter used with music,” Shula said. “It was supposed to be temporary.”
Merry’s sexual abuse intensified when she was sent from Greece to the Philippines to be with Grandpa. She would later testify before a British court that she was repeatedly fondled and abused by her grandfather during her four years in the Philippines.
In a 1995 judgement in a British custody case involving another child in The Family, Lord Justice Alan Ward wrote that Merry was called to Berg’s quarters and sexually molested “on a number of occasions.”
“He was invariably impotent,” Ward wrote. “They did not have sexual intercourse, though he once tried to penetrate her, so there is no evidence of incest strictly defined. He did rupture her hymen with his finger. They had oral sex that was oral sex by him on her.”5
Merry told the British court that Berg even staged a mock marriage ceremony, gave Merry a silver ring, and proclaimed, “I, David, now wed thee.” Unable to consummate the incestuous marriage, Berg turned to Ricky, his spiritual son.
“Berg was looking in some warped way to carry on his line through Ricky and Merry,” explained Merry’s brother, Don Irwin. “He seized on this idea that Ricky should start having dates with Merry.”6
This forced sexual relationship between Merry, aged fourteen, and Ricky, aged twelve, was acknowledged in one of the most incriminating documents ever produced by The Family. Years before Ward began his lengthy proceedings in the British custody case, Family leaders issued a letter entitled “The Last State? The Dangers of Demonism!”