Jesus Freaks

by Don Lattin

  That may be so, I replied. But doesn’t our society consider sexual activity between adults and children outside our set of norms?

  “There are societies all over the world where girls are married and have sex at twelve,” Shepherd replied. “There are states where girls can marry at fourteen with parental consent. If a child’s experience of sex is that it is brutal or demeaning, it will have immediate negative effects. But sex in and of itself does not produce psychological harm to young people. There are young people in The Family today who had those experiences who did not leave The Family and who are still committed and devoted. They may have the same experience, but they have a completely different interpretation of that experience.”

  Of course, Ricky was not a typical young person growing up in The Family. Some of his childhood abuse was sexual, but it may just be that the greater burden placed on him was prophetic abuse. Many parents have high expectations for their children, but David Berg and Karen Zerby asked Ricky—playing the role of Davidito—to save the world and die doing it.

  Among the second generation, that was a cross only Ricky had to bear. What made Ricky’s experience different—though not unique—was his intimate knowledge of the real David Berg. That knowledge was shared with Berg’s daughter, Deborah, his granddaughter, Merry, and the Endtime Prophet’s sexual playmate, Davida. They grew up with the wretchedly flawed man behind the Endtime Prophet myth. Most members of The Family never saw David Berg. Until recent years, they never even saw a picture of him. They saw his teachings, but they never saw him.

  It’s not hard to understand what drew disciples into The Family in the late sixties and seventies. It was an era of political rebellion, sexual liberation, and evangelical revival. Berg’s radical critique of the church’s traditional view of sexuality and the human body was the right message at the right time delivered to the right audience. It was also a time of seeking. Many of those who joined The Family were people in need. They were vulnerable. They were at crossroads in their lives. They were looking for alternatives—for a purpose. They wanted to believe in something with all their hearts. Berg offered certainty. He and his shepherds made them feel loved. They felt special.

  David Berg was a deeply flawed human being, as were many of those close to his throne. Berg picked true believers and hung onto those who showed unquestioning loyalty. That boosted their egos—at least for a time. Berg would raise leaders up, then knock them down. He would promise them everything and leave them nothing. He was a believer in his own myth and a master manipulator of those around him. “Like many gurus, Berg found something very bewitching about developing absolute control over people” said David Millikan, the Australian minister and authority on new religious movements. “But this weird thing happens with leaders and followers. You convince someone to crawl across the floor and kiss your feet, but before long you begin to despise that person.”

  Berg’s law of love was not his own creation, nor were the words he would chant while he walked around naked at his sexual sharing parties. To the pure, all things are pure. That line does not carry a Berg copyright. He borrowed it from the Apostle Paul, but Berg didn’t finish the quote. “To the pure, all things are pure,” Paul says, “but to the corrupt and unbelieving, nothing is pure. Their very minds and consciences are corrupted. They profess to know God, but they deny him by their actions. They are detestable, disobedient, unfit for any good work.”3

  To the pure, all things may indeed be pure, but David Berg was not pure. What corrupted Berg and those around him was not his theology of sexual liberation. What destroyed the people in the inner circle were the prophet’s own sexual demons. “There is great irony in Berg’s story,” Millikan said. “When he was working for Fred Jordan in the fifties, going around the country buying airtime on radio stations, he would spend a lot of time with hookers. Later on, he talks about going to strip clubs and masturbating under the table. After the late sixties, he had trouble getting it up. He actually had this visceral distaste for female sexuality. After sex he would get out of bed and compulsively wash himself five times. This is not the behavior of a liberated sexual being.”4

  Millikan is one of several scholars The Family considers sympathetic to their cause. Another authority—one The Family places in the hostile camp—is Stephen Kent, a sociologist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. Kent has done extensive interviews with abused and alienated young people from the second generation. Over the years, Millikan has been given unique access to top Family leaders. These two experts have very different perspectives on The Family, but they agree that Berg’s overbearing mother and childhood sexual trauma are key to understanding the rise and fall of the End-time Prophet.

  Berg’s rise began with the death of his mother—the same woman who threatened to castrate him as a child and called him to Huntington Beach at age fifty to save the hippies. “When he reached his fifties he suddenly found himself leading hundreds, then thousands, of hippies whose ideas of sex were very different from the ones with which he had been reared,” Kent writes. “Berg would ‘work out’ his childhood sexual traumas through the deviant policies and practices that he initiated in the name of God.”5

  David Berg has been dead well over a decade, but his sexual obsessions and twisted prophecy still haunt the lives of those who grew up in his shadow. Ricky’s suicide and Sue Kauten’s slaying are fading memories, footnotes in the story of a band of Jesus freaks that went dangerously awry. Even before the events of January 2005, The Family was a religious movement facing a steady decline in membership. Since the death of its founder, it has been a cult looking for a reason to exist. It claimed 8,000 full-time members in January 2005 and conveniently changed the way it calculates its membership in the months following the murder/suicide. But even if The Family never recruited another convert or made another baby, there are still thousands of people living in the shadow of David Berg. According to their own statistics, more than 13,000 babies were born into The Family between 1971 and 2001. Of course, when they were born and where they were raised determine the darkness of that shadow.

  The Family was a machine built to spread the message of David Berg. But this enterprise was not just about the reproduction of religious tracts. It was the reproduction of human beings to embody and spread the word. It’s not hard to find women in The Family with six, eight, ten, thirteen children. What did they call babies produced from “flirty fishing”? What did they call them when the biological fathers would disappear? They called them “Jesus babies.” David Berg was the fisherman. His sacred whores were the bait. The babies were the harvest.

  Central to David Berg’s arrogance was his willingness to use people as means to an end. This was especially true for his own children and grandchildren. Berg sexually abused two generations of his own progeny, but that was not the worst of it. He used them—he engineered them—to fulfill his own self-serving prophecy.

  It happened to Ricky. It also happened to Merry Berg.

  In the summer of 2005, Merry was locked up at the Las Colinas Detention Facility in Santee, a town east of San Diego, where she was being held on charges of driving while intoxicated. According to her brother and her mother, Merry was addicted to speed and working as a prostitute in southern California.

  It had been eighteen years since Berg terrorized his granddaughter during those exorcism sessions in the Philippines. If she tried to leave The Family, Berg warned her then, “the only way you could make it is to be a whore!

  “You wouldn’t even be a FFer. You wouldn’t even be doing it for God. You’d just be doing it for a living. You’d probably end up on drugs—a drug demon possessed, alcoholic, diseased whore and soon dead! Now is that what you want!”

  “No sir!” Merry replied.6

  In a letter from jail, and in a series of phone conversations after her release, Merry told me she was trying to forget her childhood in The Family. Merry wanted to live in the moment, not dwell on the past. “I am so not in the mood to discuss th
at shit,” she said in her letter. “I’m much more interested in life in the present and making the most of it and new experiences, despite the down times. I love real life in America, especially nonreligious, open minded life in San Diego, CA. I have a kick-ass life now.”

  Later, on the phone after her release from jail, Merry delivered a series of speedy, stream-of-consciousness monologues about how she had lost her wallet or lost her cell phone or was worried that her relationship with her boyfriend might be over. One night she called me at 1 A.M. to see if I would drive from San Francisco to San Diego (a ten-hour drive) that morning and take her to the jail where her boyfriend was incarcerated. Another night she called to hold the phone up to some stereo speakers to play songs that would explain her feelings. One song was “American Life” by Madonna: “I tried to be a mess, I tried to be the best, I guess I did it wrong, That’s why I wrote this song.”

  Over the course of two or three hours on the phone with Merry, the subject of David Berg only came up once. “Grandpa,” she said. “I used to idolize him, but I’d kill him now too. Taking out his ridiculous style on everybody. That poor kid [Ricky] never had a chance. He was supposed to be this and that and ended up nothing.”

  As for her memories of being sexually involved with Ricky in the Philippines, Merry said, “He was too young. We were having some good sex, and then they told me that he was old enough to get me pregnant. And that was it for me.”

  Then there’s Davida. She left The Family in 1996, when she was twenty years old and working as a missionary in Russia. That was also where she reunited with Ricky for the first time in nearly ten years. They hadn’t seen each other since back in the Philippines.

  “We both got very disillusioned in Russia,” Davida told me. “This was the first time Ricky was really in the field. In Russia, the circumstances were so extreme. We were in this home in the middle of winter. It was ten below zero, and we had to hoof it to raise support. I was nineteen and he was twenty. We were in Odessa, the most godforsaken, crime-ridden city. It was Sodom and frickin’ Gomorrah—the most evil spot in all of Russia where all the gangsters and crime lords and drug lords hang out. We are stuck in this home with six young people, including a pregnant woman.

  “We are supposed to be giving out humanitarian aid to orphanages and hospitals, but we are so broke we are eating boiled beets and hard bread and potatoes for weeks at a time. For a while there was no electricity and the apartment was freezing cold. We’d try to raise support, but in Russia there is no middle class. There are the crime lords and the poor.”

  It was the first time Ricky really got a sense of what it was like to be a rank-and-file member of The Family, working countless hours to raise money—and then sending ten percent of it back to “World Services” to support Berg, Zerby, and their staff.

  “We had lived in luxury and seclusion in the Unit, but we were living off these people and their tithes. These people in The Family are on the streets ten hours a day begging and singing and are barely getting by.”

  They were both fed up with Russia, but Ricky had the option of moving back to the comfort and safety of the Unit, which at the time was located at a beachfront mansion on the coast of Portugal. Davida didn’t have that choice, but she was young, attractive, and knew how to sexually please members of the opposite sex. “I met some rich guy who was very cool in Russia. I had somebody to look out for me. Rick had nowhere to go. He couldn’t just live on the streets there.”

  Davida stayed a few months in Russia, then headed to London to stay with another second-generation defector. Her new roommate was working in gentlemen’s clubs in London. She taught Davida how to strip. When her British visa expired, Davida took her new trade to the Big Apple. She arrived with $2,000. She got a room at the YMCA, went for an audition, and was hired on the spot. Perhaps it was Davida’s “destiny.” She had been an erotic dancer since she was born.

  When we last spoke, Davida told me she’d had it with the exotic dance business. She wanted to do something else with her life. “I’m trying to go to school,” she said. “I’d love to go and study culinary arts. But I can’t afford to take time off to go to school. I got to pay my rent. It’s like I’m stuck in a vicious cycle. Imagine being molested your whole life by adults—taught that you have to be submissive to every adult man. That is your only experience with adult men. Then ending up on the streets in Russia. I wake up in the morning and ask myself, ‘What am I doing?’ I have no life. I can’t find the happy ending.”

  This has been a dark story. There are no heroes or heroines. I’ve struggled to find someone who rose above it all and found justice and redemption. Then I got a phone call from a woman who grew up in The Family. She is not in the book. She never knew Ricky Rodriguez or David Berg, but she suffered horrible sexual abuse as a young girl and teenager. I hadn’t heard from her in many months. For a while, I had thought she could be my example of someone who overcame the horrors of the past and found redemption. She had nothing when she left The Family and returned to the United States. She wound up with an advanced degree and a satisfying, well-paying job. We never had a formal interview, but I talked to her enough to realize she was still an emotionally damaged woman. Then late one night, out of the blue, she called me as I was working on this conclusion.

  At first, I wasn’t sure why she called. She sounded very depressed—and perhaps drunk. We talked for about twenty minutes. Ricky was right, she said. There is no justice. Right before she hung up, she told me she was going to die soon. I asked her what she meant. She told me she was thinking about killing herself. Then she hung up.

  This is not an unusual event in the circle of Family survivors, but it was a bit unsettling for me. I called a few people who knew the woman much better than I did and told them to give her a call. One of them was Don Irwin, the brother of Merry Berg, another second-generation source with whom I had not spoken to for many months.

  Researching a book like this involves the collection of thousands of pieces of paper and bits of information. After getting off the phone with Don Irwin, and being assured that someone would check up on the woman who called me that night, I remembered that I had saved a text of the eulogy Don Irwin gave at a memorial service held for Ricky in San Diego.

  “Many of us grew up hearing constant lip service to love,” Irwin said to the congregation of second-generation survivors. “We all learn to love in different ways…. Allow me to tell you how all of you have taught me about love…. When there were young people who you did not even know, but you knew of their pain because some of it was your own, you showed love. You provided a place for them to meet and know that they were not alone.”7

  Around the time Ricky was born, Berg began calling his flock The Family of Love. Irwin’s eulogy reminded me that none of us ever really leave our families, including the second generation of this Family. All we can do is find new ways to be a family. In a story as dark as this one, we have to take our hope and find our redemption wherever we can. Someone who grew up in The Family reached out that night and comforted the suicidal woman who called me. She got some help. She survived. In the end, there was still a little love and still a little family in The Family of Love.

  Acknowledgments

  MANY OF THE CHARACTERS in this story initially did not want to be interviewed. Some of them had something to hide, but most were simply people who did not want to resurrect the pain that comes with reliving their past. Others thought they should be paid for their stories. They felt like they had already been exploited in life. Why should they allow someone writing a book or making a movie to use them again? Their families and their church had raised them as spiritual commodities. Why should they put themselves through that again?

  No one in this book was paid to tell their story, but there are people in all of the above categories who—in the end—agreed to be interviewed, as well as people who chose not to talk to me. I respect the decisions of those who declined to cooperate, and I thank all of those who made a leap of
faith and chose to trust me with their stories. High on the latter list are Shula Berg, Don Irwin, Davida Kelley, Rosemary Kanspedos, Elixcia Munumel, and Tiago Rugely.

  Most of the current leaders in The Family International declined to be interviewed, but I would like to thank Family spokeswoman Claire Borowik for obtaining the organization’s permission to publish many of the photographs in the book. Many of the source documents used to tell the story were unearthed by the diligent work of the people behind the screen at the Web sites www.exfamily.org, www.xfamily.org, and www.movingon.org.

  I also thank my editor at HarperOne, Eric Brandt, for his light touch and deep insight; his colleague, Kris Ashley, who does her job with patience and grace; copyeditor Laurie Dunne; and Deputy Publisher Mark Tauber, whose friendship and longtime support of my work is greatly appreciated. I also thank my former editors and colleagues at the San Francisco Chronicle, who saw the potential in this story from the very beginning and gave me the time and space to tell it while it was still news.

  Special thanks to Steve Proctor, George Csicsery, Richard Brzustowicz, Ginny McPartland, Cheryl Daniels Shohan, and to my literary agent, Amy Rennert, all of whom read early drafts of the manuscript and made helpful suggestions.

  Final thanks go to my wife, Laura Thomas, who tempers the critical eye of a journalist with the loving support of a life partner.