Jesus Freaks

by Don Lattin

  Her alleged abusers included a stepfather, Phillip Slown, who she says repeatedly molested her in Thailand, where her mother was serving as a missionary for The Family International. According to an investigative report by the San Diego County Department of Social Services, the girl “experienced multiple incidents of sexual abuse with numerous men.”

  “This group has advocated sexual activity with minors as a pathway to God,” the report found. “Her mother continues to interact with this religious group and she encouraged sexual behavior between her daughter and three men as recently as March 1997.”6

  Slown went on to start a charity known as From the Heart to help “at-risk youth.” It was based in San Francisco between 1997 and 1999—during which time the organization received more than $70,000 in donations collected by The Family Care Foundation.

  “They did a really good job with drug addicts and street kids, but I haven’t heard from them in a long time,” Corley said. Slown could not be reached for comment, and his San Francisco phone number had been disconnected.

  One of those accusing Slown of child molestation is Kristianity LaMattery, born in Laredo, Texas, on April 18, 1976. Kristianity was the child of Jim LaMattery, the convert who had joined The Family in San Diego in the summer of 1971 and later crossed paths in Sweden with Aaron and Shula Berg. But by the time Kristianity was born, Jim had separated from his wife, Donna. By then, some of Berg’s offbeat teachings about sex and the Bible had filtered down to disciples in communes around the world. “I kept going on about, ‘Hey, that’s not what the Bible says.’ They didn’t like that. But here I am in love with this woman, and I have her child and this was going to be my career in life.”7

  Jim and his family were kicked out of the Scandinavian mission and put on a plane back to Texas. Jim had had enough. He was out. Donna remained a true believer, and their marriage ended.

  LaMattery would eventually win a custody battle for Kristianity and his other daughter, but it would be eighteen years before he ever saw them again. He was unaware that his brother—a sibling Jim had recruited into The Family—took Kerinina and Kristianity to Mexico and then Thailand. Their mother would go on to have nine children by seven different men—including one with Jim’s brother.

  Kristianity LaMattery was eight years old when she got her first lesson in flirty fishing. She and her sister were taken into the shower by their mother and given some detailed instructions on feminine hygiene. Here’s how Kristianity recalls their conversation:

  “Mommy has to sleep with a lot men, honey, and it’s important that she keep clean.”

  “Why?”

  “Because God is asking me to.”

  “But what if they are all fat and ugly?”

  “You just pray to the Lord, dear, and he will give you the strength to do it.”8

  Donna’s motherly advice may seem bizarre, but it is important to hear it with the ears of a child who knows no other way of life.

  Growing up, Kristianity said, the abuse never seemed like abuse. “If Mommy does it, then it was normal.” When Kristi was around age seven or eight, her mother moved the two girls back to Texas. Donna was now mated to two different sect members, including Slown. They were all raising money to go to Thailand.

  “We had this fish that would lay me on the back couch and molest and rape me,” Kristi recalled. “A lot of the fish weren’t people who’d actually join [the sect]. Many fish had things to donate—housing, clothes, and food—and got sex in return.”9

  Eventually, Donna, the two girls, and Slown moved to Chiang Mai, a town in northern Thailand. During the day, Kristi would go out with singing teams to sell Christian books, posters, and tapes.

  “We never really did any missionary work. We just sold products and begged,” she said. “You were placed on teams depending on how pretty and cute you were. My sales pitch was, ‘Hi, my name is Kristi and we’re missionaries with a nondenominational organization trying to raise money for a really good cause.’”

  At night it was a different story. According to Kristi, Slown would have the girls sleep in bed with him. “He’d lie in bed and masturbate himself,” she said. “When we’d shower with him, he’d have us masturbate him.”

  Amid rising complaints of child sexual abuse in The Family, sect leaders issued new guidelines in 1986 that were supposed to stop the molestation. “They sent visiting shepherds out to talk to the teen girls,” said Kristi, who was in Thailand when the shepherds arrived. “They said if I felt something wasn’t done to me in love, I could tell them about it. I told them.”

  The shepherds talked to Slown. “Then they told me he was all better, and that I had to talk to him about it,” Kristi said. “He said, ‘You feel like I’ve done things that haven’t been in love. But I love you, sweetie. Let’s pray.’” The abuse, Kristi says, did not end.

  Donna separated from Slown in 1990. Two years later, when Kristi was sixteen, Donna and her children moved to Galva, a small town in Illinois. Donna was no longer a full-time missionary with The Family, and Kristi was finally getting a taste of life in the real world. Her mom let her take a job in the local convenience store, where Kristi met Alan, the store’s eighteen-year-old assistant manager. “He really liked me, and I started witnessing to him. He was a fundamentalist Christian, so we got along great. We were all gung-ho for the Bible and the Lord,” Kristi said. “My mom’s thing was to get him hooked. I started having sex with him, and he freaked because he was a regular fundamentalist Christian.”

  Alan eventually realized that his new girlfriend had grown up in the notorious cult called The Family. His shocked family urged Kristi to leave the sect. “That was the first time I ever heard anyone talk that way about the group I’d grown up in,” she said. “They explained what rape was, and I realized that was what had happened, and why I felt so horrible about it.” Alan and Kristi moved to Chicago to live with Alan’s sister, who encouraged Kristi to find her biological father.

  Kristi found Jim LaMattery in San Diego, where he was working as a real estate agent.

  “Somehow, I always knew she would come of age, rebel against her mother, and find me,” LaMattery said.

  Soon after their 1993 reunion, Jim LaMattery reconnected with his older daughter, Kerenina. Then, in 1997, one of Kristi’s younger sisters, sixteen-year-old Miriam, went to San Diego to stay with Kristi.

  Miriam was the child born to Donna and Jim’s brother, John, which makes her Jim’s niece and both sisters and cousins to Kerenina and Kristi. In San Diego, Miriam turned out to be too much for her sister Kristi to handle. The sixteen-year-old wound up living in several teen shelters, one of which brought her to the attention of child welfare workers with the San Diego County Department of Social Services.

  After interviewing family members, county social workers concluded that Phillip Slown had sexually abused Miriam from 1986 to 1990. In a March 4, 1998, report, the county also determined that Miriam’s mother sexually abused her by “having sex in front of the child” and telling her that she should “show men God’s love” by having sex with them. In her interview with child protective services, Donna denied she knew of any sexual abuse of her children. But she admitted that “there was a lot of sexual freedom among the adults” in Family colonies and “some people will make mistakes in large groups.”10

  “Flirty fishing is not against the Bible,” Donna told the social worker. “The Bible clearly states to love thy neighbor as thyself.”

  Donna conceded that her children “did receive harsh discipline from Phil” and that Miriam told her Slown was sexually abusing her. She also told the social worker that she and Slown had some “real fights,” including one over him beating another one of his stepdaughters for wetting the bed. Nevertheless, Donna said, “It is hard for me to believe that he [Phil Slown] would sexually abuse the kids.”

  Another alleged molester funded by The Family Care Foundation was mentioned in the lengthy child custody decision rendered in England in 1995 by Justice Ward. The deci
sion names “Paul P.—Josiah” as a member of the sect’s Music with Meaning team in Greece. “He corrupted and abused the young girls who were part of the singing and dancing troupe,” Ward writes.

  Penn and other former members said Ward is referring to Family member Paul Peloquin, known in the cult as “Josiah.” One of his accusers is Celeste Jones, the girl who was with Merry Berg at the Music with Meaning camp. Peloquin was later funded by The Family Care Foundation for a project in Africa called “Focus on Kidz.” He could not be reached for comment.

  Celeste Jones and Merry Berg were among the young girls filmed performing erotic dances at the Music with Meaning camp in Greece. “When I was five, we were already watching these videos being made of adult women dancing,” Celeste said. “Then one of the adult men would say, ‘Oh. Why don’t you do a dance for me?’ Sometimes it was just play. Other times I felt uncomfortable. It depended on the person.”11

  Celeste was most uncomfortable with Paul Peloquin, one of the instructors and cameramen at Music with Meaning. “They’d have these orgies in an army tent at night. People naked and dancing. For me, the abuse didn’t so much happen there. All of us would be running around and pinching the adults’ bottoms and silly things like that. For me the abuse was in private. It was by Paul Peloquin. He was the main one. It went on until I was about ten to eleven years old.”

  Corley said he was not aware of the abuse allegations against Slown and Peloquin. But Corley did acknowledge that Ricky was living at the foundation compound in the year 2000. “Ricky was never part of The Family Care Foundation,” Corley said. “He passed through briefly.”

  Yet it was at the foundation’s Dulzura headquarters in the summer of 2000 that Ricky first announced that he was leaving The Family. “After I got to the States,” Ricky would later write, “I decided to leave The Family and get a job. I didn’t even know how to open a bank account or write a check, make up a resume or how to lie about having a high school education. It was very discouraging.”12 He revealed his intentions to Jonathan Thompson, his roommate in Dulzura, about two weeks before he told Grant Montgomery. “I was not planning on leaving at the time. I was playing the role of the reformer,” Jonathan said. “We talked about Family policies we didn’t agree with—like restrictions on the kind of music we could hear.”

  Ricky later told Grant he was leaving, and Grant called everyone to a meeting to announce the news. He talked about how hard and disheartening it would be for all the kids who’d grown up reading the “Life with Grandpa” stories.

  Ricky had hoped to transfer to a Family colony in Mexico with Elixcia, who had gone to England to live with her father, one of the top Family leaders in Britain. Ricky talked his mother into buying a car so he could drive down to his new assignment in Mexico. She didn’t trust him enough to just send the money, so she had Grant Montgomery buy the car and turn it over to Ricky.

  Instead of taking the car down to Mexico, Ricky sold it and used the money to fly back to England and meet up with Elixcia. For a few months, Family leaders thought they might be able to keep Ricky in the fold. But before he left San Diego, the Prophet Prince began meeting with some angry second-generation defectors. He was starting to see the toll The Family’s teaching had taken on other people his age. In a May 2000 letter to his mother and Peter Amsterdam, Ricky wrote:

  You are unable to see how you have hurt so many people’s faith [with] prophecies that are not only ludicrous, but obviously the figment of some misguided person’s imagination…. You’re poking your finger in God’s eye time and time again whenever you badger and condemn His little ones. One of these days God will judge you for it and when that time comes I certainly wouldn’t want to be in your shoes….

  There’s a lot of lost and broken young people still out here in The Family who haven’t left yet. They need love; they need acceptance. What they don’t need is for someone like you to take them on some kind of guilt trip, making them feel worthless just because they’re not “on board” with your pride trip….

  I’m not looking for a fight with you, but if you push me, believe me, you’ll have a nice one, and using the techniques learned by your example over the years, I guarantee it won’t be “fair.” Just forget all that crap about me writing some kind of sniveling back-pedaling “explanation” to The Family about how committed I am now/again to your BS, because it’s not going to happen.13

  Ricky and Elixcia had not officially left The Family, but they were clearly on the way out. In September, they flew to Venezuela to stay with Elixcia’s mother and work out problems with Elixcia’s passport.

  “We found out later that the main reason the home [in Venezuela] agreed to let us come there was because they wanted us to take care of their kids,” Ricky explained. “After a while I wrote my mom and asked if she could send us $400 a month to help with our home and puppet show ministry. She agreed.”

  In November, Ricky revealed that he was thinking about announcing for a second time that he was leaving The Family. He told Gabe Martin, a longtime Family insider, that he decided long ago that he would not take any leadership role in the organization. “I knew everything there was to know about jumping through the right hoops and playing the game correctly,” Ricky said. “But I had to act different parts and play different roles all my life, and I was just plain tired of it!”14

  One month later, in December 2000, Ricky gave the first indication that he might take violent revenge against his mother and Peter Amsterdam. He wrote in a letter to James Penn:

  I am one of those people who have suppressed my feelings and emotions all my life. I didn’t appreciate being treated like a commodity by my mother or having to swallow Peter’s bullshit. But I tried to stay on the fence all these years because I just wasn’t sure what the truth was, and I wanted to be sure before I went one way or the other.

  These feelings of anger have not gone away, in fact they grew stronger even though I tried to push them away and sit on them. Now I’m beginning to get in touch with my emotions and feelings that I have hidden away for so long. To tell you the truth, I’m finding little love there, only hate for my mother and Queen Peter…. Some days I have come so close to snapping and going back to their compound—but not for a social visit, and not as a repentant prodigal, but as an avenger.15

  Over the Christmas 2000 holiday, Ricky found respite house-sitting an old friend’s place outside Vancouver, not far from where he’d lived during his teenage years. He planned to have Elixcia join him in Seattle, settle down, and start to live a normal life—whatever that was. Ricky had made his final break, and he used the time in Vancouver to write his official resignation letter informing Zerby that he and Elixcia were leaving The Family.

  We cannot continue to condone or be party to what we feel is an abusive, manipulative organization that teaches false doctrine. You have deceived people and led them away from the truth in almost every way imaginable, and worst of all, when they are no longer useful to you, they are discarded. You have devoured God’s sheep, ruining people’s lives by propagating false doctrines and advocating harmful practices in the name of God, and as far as I can see, show no regret or remorse. I could talk for hours about it all, but what’s the use? You’ll never change.16

  Ricky knew that publicly denouncing his mother and Peter Amsterdam would end any financial assistance he had been getting. He learned that The Family had given “severance pay” to some insiders who left the fold. Some might call it “hush money.” Ricky decided he deserved the same. He asked for $36,000 so that he and Elixcia could “make the transition out of the cult.”

  In his private resignation letter to his mother, dated January 16, 2001, Ricky reminded Zerby that he has “not shared the knowledge I have of the many wrongs and abuses I witnessed while growing up.

  “I have not tried to make the talk-show circuit or sell my story to the newspapers,” he wrote. “I haven’t tried to turn The Family or anybody else against you and that does not have to change. I see no reason why we c
an’t work this out in a civil manner, but don’t jerk me around, because this is for real.”17

  Ricky and Elixcia started getting a monthly stipend from Zerby. The money stopped coming in 2002. That spring, Ricky broke his public silence, wrote an essay entitled “Gospel of Rebellion,” and posted it on the Internet.

  Berg used the Bible as a means to get what he wanted, and nothing more. Whenever something in the scriptures would conflict with what he wanted to believe or do, he would either twist it around, or simply reject it as being a personal interpretation of the author, or non-applicable in light of his special “End-Time Prophet” anointing. We were taught to accept his interpretations of verses as truth, and gloss over any scriptures that would cast any doubt on his beliefs.

  Because of Berg’s very small ego, he would slip easily to the depths of despair whenever he would hear any news report or read any article that had anything negative to say about him. He would get depressed for weeks at a time, and would drink so much at night that Maria [Zerby] thought it was going to kill him. So Maria tried to protect him from any hearing about any “negative” publicity or news at all.

  I think Maria realized maybe more than anyone else how little of Berg’s beliefs and actions were actually based on the Bible at all, because she was the one who was closest to him. But of course, that didn’t stop her one bit from doing anything she could to hold onto that power and control that they had over people.18

  About two weeks later, Ricky posted a second article entitled “Life with Grandpa” on www.movingon.org, a Web site for second-generation Family defectors. Much of that posting was about what happened to Merry and Davida and other girls in the Philippines.