Jesus Freaks

by Don Lattin

  “Why can’t the law of love expand to all of your life? What’s wrong with God and sex mixing?” asked Grace Galambos, who at age twenty was the youngest member at the interview session. “God created sex.”

  Paula Braaten, twenty-four, also defended the teachings.

  “Do we live the Law of Love? Yes. The core of the Law of Love is to love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and to love your neighbor as yourself,” she said. “If you want to have sex with other people, you can do whatever you want.”

  Just a couple weeks before Paula Braaten and her coworkers gathered in that Mexican restaurant, a larger group of second-generation Family folks—most of them apostates—joined together in San Diego for a memorial service for another one of the brethren who had killed himself.6

  His name was Abe Braaten, and he was Paula Braaten’s brother-in-law.

  He died on December 14, 2004—three weeks before the deaths of Ricky and Sue—after falling from the roof of a building in Kobe, Japan. Abe was twenty-seven. Some of his family and friends, including one who saw him moments before the fall, say his death was another suicide of an abused child.

  At the memorial, Daniel Roselle produced a list of twenty-five second-generation members of The Family who had allegedly committed suicide during the past ten years. “We’re dropping like flies,” said Roselle, repeating a line Ricky quoted in his video. “There is a lot of anger out there. I’m not worried about more violence against others. But I am worried about more suicides.”

  Ricky’s profanity-laced video was still fresh in people’s minds—as was his call to arms to the second generation.

  “It’s a war now between us and our parents,” said John LaMattery, twenty-seven, who met Braaten in Japan when both boys were fourteen years old. He is also Jim LaMattery’s nephew. “This is the cream of the crop coming back to get them.”

  Abe Braaten’s Japanese-born mother, Yumiko “Phoenix” Taniguchi, is one of the top leaders in The Family International.

  On the night of December 14, 2004, Braaten and a friend, Sam McNair, were kicking back in McNair’s apartment in Kobe, Japan. Their wives were at Braaten’s place with the kids, just a five-minute drive away.

  Sam and Abe had knocked back a beer or two and were watching a movie on TV.

  “All of a sudden,” McNair said, “he was like ‘Sam, um, I’m not feeling so good. My heart is pumping real fast.’ And I felt his heart and, swear to God, I never felt anything like that before. It was beating super fast. It was that quick. At that point, I thought he was having a panic attack.”7

  Abe’s mother, Phoenix Taniguchi, says it is not clear whether or not her son committed suicide. “Since no one was with him at the very moment when this happened, we were not sure exactly how it happened, whether he actually jumped or fell. We heard that shortly before he fell he’d drunk quite a bit, which seemed to affect him heavily,” she wrote in a eulogy for her son.

  The eulogy, entitled “Notice of my son Abe’s Graduation” was originally posted on a members-only Family Web site. It ended with a purported message from Jesus, which read in part:

  Abe is asking that his death be a testimony to those who will hear, that it’s very dangerous to be foolish and light-hearted and take risks. He asks that this message be spread so that his death be not in vain. Abe did many things in his life that he regretted and he did many things that he didn’t really plan to do but he just slipped. Well, this was the biggest slip yet and it cost him his life. It’s such a sad thing that his earthly life had to be cut short, prematurely, because of the consequences of his actions, but please look on the other side of the tapestry and see the beauty and the wonders of eternal life that awaited Abe the minute his physical life was finished. He had a crown waiting for him and he had a reward waiting for him, for all the good things that he did in his life, all the times he was a testimony of My love and salvation, all the times he gave love sacrificially and tried to follow My ways.8

  Other close relatives to Abe blame The Family for his death. Like many young people who grew up in The Family, Braaten had trouble adjusting to life in the real world.

  “Yeah, he talked about suicide when he was living with us,” said Braaten’s sister, China Taniguchi. “This is the thing about Abe—every time it came close to his birthday, he would get supernegative. Just like, ‘Oh my God, I’m already at this age, and I’m still doing nothing…. What am I going to do with my life?’”

  China (pronounced Chee-na) said her brother—who left The Family in 2000—was seen as an especially rebellious teenager and was sent off to The Family’s Victor Program for re-education. “I mean, I barely saw my brother because he was always shipped off to some other place to learn some lessons—to get ‘victory’ over some problem he had. It makes me so mad. I think that had a lot to do with the problems with self-esteem.”9

  On that December night in Kobe, Braaten was really flipping out, McNair recalled. He got tense. Then cold. McNair gave him a blanket, and Braaten curled up into it. “He started getting more and more negative, and then started saying, ‘I gotta go. I gotta go.’ He was getting incoherent and mumbling ‘Moses…David…mind control.’

  “I said, ‘Abe. Don’t be talking about that now. Let’s do something else.’ I turned on the lights and tried to make him comfortable. I didn’t know what was going on. I was just doing my best not to freak out.”

  McNair blocked the door so that his panicking friend couldn’t get out of his apartment, but Braaten jumped out the first-floor window and ran down the street. Minutes later, he climbed to the top of a four-story building a few blocks away and leapt to his death.

  China Taniguchi said her brother’s death, followed so closely by Rodriguez’s suicide, was a wake-up call for the second generation.

  “Ricky was the poster child for us kids,” she said.

  There were other tragedies on other continents—other suicides that fit the pattern.

  Josh was eighteen years old when he left The Family. Three years later, he sat down at his brother’s desk in Show Low, Arizona, and shot himself in the head. His brother, Chris, found the body. There was still color in Josh’s cheeks and the smell of gunpowder in the air.

  Josh left two handwritten notes, one addressed to his young sons and one to his siblings. “He did not leave a note for our parents, and I’m sure there was a reason for this,” Chris wrote in a remembrance of his brother. “Sometimes I wonder what they think about at night…. But they have their God, and their religion to cling to—the same God and religious beliefs that they placed above their children.”

  Chris asked that his and his brother’s last name not be used. But he told me that Josh—like Ricky—had a hard time adjusting to life outside The Family and that may have contributed to his death on January 26, 1999.

  Adding to Josh’s troubles, his brother said, was Josh’s participation in the Victor Program. “Josh was part of a detention and retraining program involving sleep deprivation, food deprivation, manual labor, silence restriction, and isolation,” Chris said.

  Other family members cite different reasons for Josh’s suicide. In an e-mail sent to Family spokeswoman Claire Borowik, Josh’s father wrote, “As is normal when such a thing happens, there are countless questions of why. Why didn’t we see it coming? What could we have done to prevent it? Who is to blame for it?”

  Josh’s father says his son was depressed following a fight with his wife, adding that Josh’s history of drug use contributed to his troubles. “Josh was facing the pressures of parenthood, supporting his family, and a new move all at once,” his father wrote. “It was a lot of pressure, and he started using drugs again at this time.”

  Second-generation members of The Family were not the only ones taking their own lives.

  Rick Dupuy was seventeen when he joined The Family in Tucson in 1969. He left the sect in 1992 and died of an intentional drug overdose in Loa, Utah, on June 2, 1996. He was forty-four.

  Dupuy was not born into the sect,
and his name is not on a list of suicides provided by defectors. But in many ways, his story is the same.

  “He had three severe suicide attempts,” said Marina Sarran, a friend and lover who was fifteen years old when she joined The Family in Italy in 1977. “He felt like a freak. He couldn’t think straight,” she said of the period after he defected. “He’d say ‘my life is over.’ He was a lot like Ricky Rodriguez. He had fantasies about getting an AK–47 and taking out Karen Zerby and Peter Amsterdam.”

  In 1993, Dupuy emerged as a leading defector and source of information about abusive practices inside The Family. At the time, Dupuy revealed that many young cult members had been sent to the Victor Program. He called the retraining center an “oppressive and brutal system of thought reform” subjecting inmates to “mental, psychological, and even physical abuse.”

  Dupuy appeared on Larry King Live in 1993 to debate officials of the sect. At one point, the officials denied that there were policies and doctrines that encourage molestation of children. Asked by King how he knew there were such policies, Dupuy replied, “because I was ordered in the group to have sex with a ten-year-old by the leadership of the group.”

  “Did you?” King asked.

  “Yes,” Dupuy replied. “It was to get me in so deep that I would be afraid to ever come out and speak against the group.”

  Dupuy later testified before Justice Ward in the British child-custody case. He told the judge that he and another adult man had been asked by the child-care directors at a Family home in the Dominican Republic in November 1983 to allow two girls to masturbate them.

  In his 1995 court decision, Lord Justice Alan Ward concluded that Dupuy had, in fact, been “asked to share with girls who were only ten and eleven years old. The little girl presented herself in a sarong with no panties. She masturbated him.”

  Ward identified the two girls as the daughters of two high-ranking leaders of The Family.

  Sarran said Dupuy had been haunted for the last three years of his life by the abuse he committed, his confession on the Larry King show, and the years of his life wasted in The Family.

  Before killing himself in 1996, Dupuy made the following entry on the last page of his journal: “What have I done with my life? Wasted it in the insanity of some maniacal bunch of pathological deviates…. Some things are worse than death, and my continued existence in this unspeakable state is one of them.”

  They say the truth will set you free, but Marina Sarran isn’t so sure.

  “Telling the truth,” she said, “can destroy you.”10

  Borowik, The Family spokeswoman, questioned whether there are really that many suicides in the second generation. “We have examined the list posted of supposed suicides and have found several instances where the deaths were definitely not suicides, or were unconfirmed as police could not ascertain if the death was accidental or not.”

  In a written statement, Borowik said The Family was aware of only ten suicides among former members over the past thirteen years. She said that 32,000 people had been in The Family over the past thirty-five years and that its full-time membership in early 2005 stood at around 8,000. “We have even been accused of causing River Phoenix’s death,” Borowik said, “even though he had left The Family at five and been involved in a world of drugs.”

  Phoenix, a promising actor and perhaps the most famous person born into The Family, died in 1993 of a drug overdose. He was twenty-three.

  One year earlier, Ben Farnsworth, a teenager who was raised in The Family and sent to one of the sect’s re-education camps, jumped to his death from a building in Hong Kong. His suicide inspired Zerby to write a letter to Farnsworth’s father. His death, The Family leader insisted, would be a wake-up call that would keep other second-generation members from committing suicide. “Even in his death, Ben is going to have a very good effect on The Family,” Zerby wrote. “I think it’s going to have wonderful repercussions with our teens being very greatly strengthened by this.”

  Conclusion

  Family recruits pray at their Los Angeles mission in the late seventies.

  NEARLY THIRTEEN YEARS after Karen Zerby wrote that letter to Ben Farnsworth’s father, telling him how his son’s suicide would only strengthen other teens in The Family, Zerby’s own son wrote a letter about his own suicide. It was not addressed to Zerby. Ricky sent his suicide note to Mark and Denise Flynn, the Tucson couple who gave him a job and welcomed him into their lives. Ricky’s handwritten letter thanked them for all they did for him in the last few months of his life. He apologized for never telling them who he really was and how hard he was struggling with his past. “My one regret,” he wrote, “is deserting you or hurting you in any way.

  “I come from an extremely abusive cult and have tried in the four years I’ve been out to figure out what ‘normal’ life is like, and how I can be a part of it…. I guess I haven’t done that bad. But that’s on the surface. Emotionally, it’s gotten harder every day I’ve been out. I’ve become more and more angry at all the sick perverts who to this day are not the least bit sorry for the thousands of little kids that they have repeatedly raped, molested, and methodically tortured for many years. To me, these people are the worst of the worst, and unfortunately, my evil mother is the head of it!”

  Ricky went on to tell the Flynns how he had been “hunting down some of the leadership for some time now in the hopes of getting ahold of my mother, because as with most cults, you cut off the head and the body dies. I have been trying to run from my past for years, but now it’s time for me to take a stand against this evil.”

  In the end, Ricky could neither run from his past nor escape his destiny. He could never escape the twisted prophecies of David Berg and his own mother.

  Six months after Ricky killed Sue Kauten and took his own life, Karen Zerby issued another letter to The Family about murder-suicide. It was entitled “Questions and Answers on Angela and Ricky’s Death, Persecution, and Other Issues.” It was published in the June 2005 edition of “Good News,” The Family’s internal newsletter sent out to trusted members. Zerby, writing as “Maria,” took questions sent in from members and passed them on to Jesus. In other words, Zerby’s answers were the Lord’s answers.

  “Regarding what Ricky did,” one question began. “It really leaves me wondering why he embraced the dark side so completely. Was there something dark in his past that made him go that far?”1

  This may have been a real question from a real member of The Family, or it may have been a question Zerby and Amsterdam thought they had to address. Either way, it’s a good question to ask a woman accused of having sex with her suicidal son.

  Was there something dark in his past?

  Jesus, speaking through Zerby, said there was not.

  “No, there was nothing dark in his past that made him go as far as he did. It was not Ricky’s early years or some hidden thing in his past that drove him to do what he did. It was his ‘present’ that drove him. It was his choice to hold onto his pride and rebellion and follow the dark, evil voices.”

  “Ricky had a great calling,” Jesus/Zerby said. “He struggled with accepting it, not necessarily because he didn’t want to accomplish the great things that were awaiting him, but because he didn’t want to pay the price that came with the calling. He didn’t mind the crown, but he did mind the ‘cross’—the sacrifice. Surrendering to My will, yielding, humbling yourself, and following My Word is not easy for any of you, but it is possible.”

  Karen Zerby declined to be interviewed for this book, as did Peter Amsterdam, Sara Kelley, Christina “Techi” Zerby, and several other key Family loyalists. They were firsthand witnesses to the childhood events described in this book by other firsthand witnesses, including Davida Kelley, Elixcia Munumel, Merry Berg, and her mother, Shula. No doubt, Zerby’s memories and interpretation as to what happened to Ricky, Davida, and Merry would be very different.

  When she declined my interview requests, Family spokeswoman Claire Borowik suggested I tal
k instead to Gary Shepherd, the sympathetic sociologist who interviewed the nineteen-year-old version of Ricky. Shepherd is the Oakland University scholar who authored the 1994 assessment with psychologist Lawrence Lilliston, the report that found Ricky suffered “no evidence of long-term negative effects” from child sexual abuse. Borowik sent me a partial transcript from an interview The Family had conducted with Shepherd a few months after the murder/suicide. Not surprisingly, the sociologist’s interpretation of Ricky’s actions are much like those expressed by Karen Zerby and Peter Amsterdam—that Ricky was fine until he came under the influence of angry and alienated defectors from the second generation.

  “My guess is that Ricky, or Davidito, was very depressed,” Shepherd said. “I think he did fall in with bad company who clearly influenced a lot of his ideas and feelings towards The Family. He seemed to have a strong sense of having been wronged growing up in The Family. He clearly stated that he was seeking revenge. That was his motive. He wanted revenge for what he had perceived as mistreatment growing up. Now I wasn’t there when he was growing up. I have had conversations with many people who knew Davidito at various points in his life within The Family, some growing up right in World Services with him. And their accounts of him are that he was a sweet kid then, and he certainly never outwardly manifested to them the kind of hostility and the kind of anger that he was expressing as an adult.”2

  In my interview, I asked Shepherd if he still believed that Ricky was not sexually abused when he grew up in The Family. After all, we now have the accounts and pictures of adult-children sex play in The Story of Davidito. We have testimony from Merry Berg and Davida Kelley. We have Ricky’s own account of what happened inside the Unit.

  So I asked Shepherd:

  “Was Ricky sexually abused? What explanation do you have for the events of January 2005?”

  “Remember that there is very little that I concretely know about his experience, but I don’t believe that he was the target of any abuse,” Shepherd replied. “During his time growing up in The Family, I don’t think he sensed that anything was going wrong. My guess is that he began to reassess his experience later—to reinterpret what was going on after the fact. But at the time he didn’t have a sense he was living in some depraved environment. There’s an assumption that merely being exposed to things has this corrosive effect. But if sexual activity is seen as normal and enjoyable then that doesn’t have an independent effect to create emotional disturbance. You reinterpret that experience, and then you become upset. Now you are defining that experience with another set of norms.”