Cults Inside Out: How People Get in and Can Get Out Read online

  After six long days of searching the compound, agents walked away with a collection of computers, photographs, and various records, all of which would prove to be pivotal evidence in coming criminal prosecutions.181 Authorities removed more than four hundred children from the polygamist compound. This move included children ranging in age from infants to teenage mothers. “In my opinion, this is the largest endeavor we’ve ever been involved with in the state of Texas… This is about children who are at imminent risk of harm, children we believe have been abused or neglected,” Child Protective Services (CPS) spokeswoman Marleigh Meisner explained.182

  But in June a judge in San Angelo, Texas, ordered CPS to return all the children. Judge Barbara Walther stated in her order that Texas officials had exceeded their authority by removing the children from the compound.183 The raid and ongoing expenses regarding the children’s care and related litigation had cost the state of Texas more than $14 million. Questions were raised about this expense to taxpayers and the net results of the action. Krista Piferrer, deputy press secretary to the governor, responded, “Any action taken to protect children is never misguided.”184 The raid did lead to the prosecution of polygamist leaders. Authorities seized almost a thousand boxes of evidence and six terabytes of digital files, which provided overwhelming evidence in the subsequent criminal cases. All eleven men arrested at the YFZ were convicted of child sex and bigamy charges, and all received prison sentences.185

  During the sentencing phase of the Texas trial of Warren Jeffs, the jury heard testimony from Jeffs’ nephew that his uncle had raped him when he was five. The little boy had been told the rape was “God’s will.” Jeffs also had sex with twelve- and fifteen-year-old girls he took as his so-called celestial wives.186 Warren Jeffs was sentenced to a term of life plus twenty years in prison. The Texas Third District Court of Appeals later denied his appeal in 2012.

  Many FLDS members have disavowed Jeffs due to his criminal convictions.187 Warren Jeffs, however, remains the official leader of the FLDS and, acting from prison, has ordered FLDS members excommunicated and exiled. Jeffs has purged perhaps as many as one thousand FLDS members over loyalty issues since his incarceration.188 In one of his most bizarre edicts from prison, Jeffs said fifteen remaining loyal men were “appointed…procreators” for the entire FLDS community, while others should be seen as simply “caretakers.” After Jeffs’ pronouncement was read, three hundred FLDS members walked out of the meeting in protest.189

  Meanwhile, additional prosecutions of key polygamist leaders and lawsuits have been filed against the FLDS. The US Department of Justice has filed a major civil rights lawsuit, accusing FLDS-dominated police and utility companies in Colorado City and Hildale of religious bias against nonmembers.190 The FLDS appears to be gradually dissolving through a death by a thousand cuts.

  Dr. Bruce Perry is the senior fellow of the Child Trauma Academy in Houston and an adjunct professor at the Feinberg School of Medicine of Northwestern University in Chicago. He has researched the impact of trauma, specifically trauma concerning children in groups called “cults.” Perry treated the children released from the Davidian compound in Waco before its fiery end, and Texas authorities also consulted him regarding the minor children of polygamists—minor children taken into custody. In an interview the researcher explained that children raised in such an environment may not understand their situation and may simply think, “My parents are right.” Perry, however, noted the state’s compelling legal interest. “You cannot have sex with 12-year-olds.”191

  2005—Children of God (“The Family”) Suicides of Child Abuse Victims

  In January 2005 Ricky Rodriquez stabbed to death his former nanny, fifty-one-year-old Angela Smith, in Tucson, Arizona. The twenty-nine-year-old then drove to Blythe, California, where he committed suicide in his car. Rodriquez and Smith both had ties to a notorious religious sect known as the Children of God (COG), which later changed its name to Family International.192

  Before Rodriquez killed himself, he made a video explaining his actions. In what would become his final testimony, the young man recalled years of sexual abuse and parental alienation, which he endured as a child growing up in the COG. His wife told the media that Smith “was one of his nannies and she sexually abused him.”193 Rodriquez explained in his video, “It happened to thousands of us—some worse than others. My mother is going to pay for that. If I don’t get her…I will keep hunting her in the next life.”194 “How can you do that to kids? How can you do that to kids and sleep at night?” he asked.195

  Rodriquez’s mother, Karen Zerby, was the wife of David Berg, the founder of the COG. Berg, who became Rodriquez’s stepfather, was known to his followers as “Moses David, God’s Endtime Prophet.” He supposedly received revelation “directly from heaven.”196 Witnesses, however, said Berg was a pedophile and voracious sexual predator who molested children, including members of his own family. Karen Zerby was also reportedly seen having sexual intercourse with her son, Ricky Rodriquez, when the boy was only eleven.197

  David Berg explicitly taught his followers to sexualize their children. COG members also reportedly engaged in group sex. Women in the group were encouraged to raise money and recruit new members using sex as a lure, which COG called “flirty fishing.” This activity provided a path eventually leading to prostitution. COG sent out women as “God’s whores” or “hookers for Jesus” to raise money for the group.198

  After Berg’s death in 1994, his widow became the official “prophet” or “Queen” of the group, she was often called “Mama Maria.” According to Claire Browik, an official spokesperson for Family International, at the time of Rodriquez’s death, Family International included “4,000 children and 4,000 adult members” who lived in “718 communal houses” within “100 countries.”199

  The systemic sexual abuse David Berg mandated within COG is well documented through the published group literature, which contained Berg’s instructions and teachings. This paper trail included what was known as the “Mo Letters,” letters of communication from David Berg.200 COG would later send out “purge notices,” instructing its members to destroy any potentially damaging evidence its previous publications had provided. Much of this literature, however, remains intact.201

  Throughout the 1990s authorities in Argentina, Australia, France, and Spain repeatedly investigated COG. Some of its members were jailed, but there were no convictions of top leaders.202 Frustration with the failure of authorities to stop the Family haunted Ricky Rodriquez. “There’s this need that I have. It’s not a want. It’s a need for revenge. It’s a need for justice, because I can’t go on like this,” he said.203

  The legacy of COG includes many suicides and shattered lives. The Rodriguez murder/suicide effectively served to focus attention on the group’s sordid history and on the young lives its practices destroyed. A former member told the press, “We’re dropping like flies,” and recounted twenty-five second-generation members of the Family International/Children of God who had allegedly committed suicide in recent years. Another ex-member raised in the group said Rodriquez “was the poster child for us kids.”204 Another said, “I understand why children who grew up in the Family would want to kill themselves and why they would want to kill their mothers.”205 This statement keenly reflects the emotional ambivalence of many COG kids concerning their parents, who had initiated and/or raised them in the group.

  Children in COG were reportedly put through a “detention and retraining program involving sleep deprivation, starvation, manual labor, silence restrictions and forced isolation.”206 Many who left COG expressed anger and resentment regarding the actions or continuing group loyalty of their parents. “It’s a war now between ourselves and our parents,” one second-generation former member said.207

  Some ex-members of COG fell into substance abuse as an apparent means of numbing their psychological and emotional pain. Ricky Dupuy left the sect in 1992 and died of an intentional drug overdose in 1996. He wrote in a journal
before his death, “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.”208

  The most reported-about death of a second-generation ex-member was the demise of Oscar-nominated actor River Phoenix, the brother of actor Joaquin Phoenix. He died of a drug overdose in 1993 at the age of twenty-three.209 Details Magazine reported that River Phoenix said he lost his virginity in COG at the age of four. “I blocked it all out,” he said and later claimed that “I was completely celibate from 10 to 14.” The Phoenix family reportedly left the group before River Phoenix turned seven.210 After his death Phoenix was posthumously quoted, offering his opinion of COG. “They’re disgusting…They’re ruining people’s lives,” the actor said.211

  COG has repeatedly claimed that it abandoned its abusive practices. In 2007 a spokesperson for the group said its “policy for the protection of minors was adopted in 1986. We regret that prior to the adoption of this policy, cases occurred where minors were exposed to sexually inappropriate behavior between 1978 and 1986.”212 In a 2005 news report, however, ex-members raised in the group refuted such claims. Kristina Jones, who was twenty-eight in 2005, stated, “By the time I was 12, I’d had sexual relations, against my will, with about 20 men and older boys. I was told it was ‘sharing God’s love.’ That’s how life was for me—adults having sex with children. It was the cult’s Law of Love policy, the only life I’d ever known, and I didn’t question it.” Other former members provided similar testimony of the ongoing sexual abuse of minor children after 1986.213

  Andrew Stone, a former member of the Family, explained, “This is essentially an organization that to this day is still composed of people who committed crimes against children.” Former members say the Family has also established front organizations to launder its money. Stone claimed that leaders like Rodriquez’s mother, Karen Zerby, live in the “lap of luxury.”214

  In a 1995 British court ruling that involved child custody tied to the group, Lord Justice Alan Ward wrote that the leaders of the Family must “denounce David Berg.” Ward further wrote that they should “acknowledge that through his writings [Berg] was personally responsible for children in The Family having been subjected to sexually inappropriate behavior; that it is now recognized that it was not just a mistake to have written as he did but wrong to have done so; and that as a result children have been harmed by their experiences.”215

  The Family leadership has never officially denounced David Berg publicly.

  2005—Colonia Dignidad Arrest of Cult Leader for Child Abuse

  In March 2005 the former leader of a “German-Chilean religious cult” was arrested in a fashionable suburb of Buenos Aires, Argentina. The eighty-three-year old German citizen was Paul Schaefer, a convicted pedophile, who had been a fugitive hiding from Chilean authorities for eight years. Schaefer had been convicted in absentia in 2004 for the sexual abuse of more than two dozen minor children in Chile. Twenty-two members of the cult were also criminally convicted for covering up that abuse.216

  Paul Schaefer was born in Sieberg, Germany, and was once a member of the Nazi youth movement. During World War II he served as a medic in the German army. In 1959 the Nazi turned preacher was fascinated by the teachings of controversial American Pentecostal preacher William Branham, a charismatic speaker who had gained popularity in the United States during the 1940s.217 Schaefer’s following grew in Germany, and he created a charitable organization that included an orphanage. It wasn’t long, however, before Schaefer was accused of sexually abusing children under his care.

  Schaefer fled Germany with many of his followers and ended up in Chile. In 1961 Jorge Alessandri, the Chilean president, granted Schaefer permission to create a tax-exempt organization called the Dignidad Beneficent Society.218 Within a massive fifty-five-square-mile property near the town of Parral, at the foot of the Andes Mountains, Paul Schaefer created his own kingdom called Colonia Dignidad. He preached an “apocalyptic, anti-Communist and anti-Semitic creed,” and hundreds of disciples “worshipped him as a god.”219

  Within his isolated domain Schaefer, known as Permanent Uncle, controlled virtually every aspect of daily life. He approved every engagement, managed every marriage, and required the group to collectively raise children. Men, women, and children were segregated and forced to live in separate dormitories in the Dignidad compound. According to court records, Schaefer also chose the children he sexually abused, which were typically boys between the ages of eight and twelve.220

  Members of the community were forced to take daily doses of tranquilizer drugs. They weren’t allowed to listen to the radio, read newspapers, or even walk alone. They always walked in pairs. According to Schaefer, Satan created women, but God made men. No one was allowed to have sexual relations except Schaefer. The boys’ housing was conveniently situated next to his private cottage. Schaefer’s daily routine included choosing one of the boys to spend the night with him.221

  The three hundred members living in the compound typically worked eighteen hours a day for little more than room and board. “Most of us did not know what money was until Schaeffer ran away,” one of his victims told the press.222 The people were “programmed like robots and were treated as slaves, robbed of their own human rights,” said psychiatrist Luis Peebles, who was once held within the compound as a political prisoner during the 1970s. Human rights groups say Schaefer cooperated closely with Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet and that political prisoners of the Pinochet regime like Peebles were held in dungeons below the Dignidad compound.223

  For more than thirty years, Schaefer ruled over his cult kingdom. Lawsuits filed against the Dignidad organization or Schaefer for tax fraud, kidnapping, and the rape of minors were repeatedly dismissed due to “lack of evidence.” Officials ignored the testimony of ex-members for decades. Paul Schaefer reportedly relied on a powerful network of judges, politicians, officials, police, military commanders, and businessman, who benefited from him or his organization in some way. Reportedly that network repeatedly protected its own as well as Schaefer’s interests.224

  When Chile returned to democratic government, Schaefer’s corrupt network of influence slowly began to crumble. Finally in 1998 the grievances of families who lived near Colonia Dignidad were heard. Paul Schaefer was charged for sexually abusing twenty-six boys, who had been lured into the community by its free school and clinic.225 Permanent Uncle then quickly vanished. He delegated his power over the compound to subordinates.226

  In June 2005 Chilean officials found a cache of machine guns and rocket launchers at the Dignidad compound. Interior minister Jorge Correa said, “What’s been discovered so far is of a dimension that can only be explained in a military context. We’re talking about a large arsenal and I must stress that it’s going to end up being the largest ever found in private hands in the life and history of Chile.”227 In August of the same year, Chilean officials took over the assets of the Dignidad organization, and control of the group compound was handed over to a court-appointed attorney.228

  In 2006 former followers of Paul Schaefer published a full-page apology in the prominent Chilean newspaper El Mercurio. They asked for forgiveness for forty years of abuses and human rights violations. The apology read in part, “Since we have been liberated from the domination of Paul Schaefer we have come to understand that our community lived its religious faith as a hermetic sect, which accepted the transformation of the personalities of its members and made them incapable of making decisions contrary to his wishes as sole leader. Soon after we started and amid confessions of sin only to him, Schaefer came to know each of us completely, and he took advantage of that to dominate the community. Cutting us off from the outside world and forcing us to sever relations with our families and relatives, he was able to establish absolute control.” A copy of the apology was also sent to Michelle Bachelet, the Chilean president.229

  T
he following month, in May 2006, Paul Schaefer was sentenced to twenty years in prison and ordered to pay reparations to his victims. A lawyer for the victims said that the cult leader’s conviction was the end of “40 years of impunity and [meant] justice for all the victims who, at the time, had no way to tell how they had been victimized.”230 Schaefer was later sentenced to three more years in prison for weapons violations in 2008.231

  Paul Schaefer died in a prison hospital in April 2010. He was eighty-nine.232

  In February 2013 six former leaders of Colonia Dignidad surrendered themselves to Chilean authorities. A month earlier Chile’s supreme court found Gerard Mucke Koschitzke, Kurt Schnellenkamp Nelaismisckies, Gunter Schaffrik Bruckmann, and Dennys Alvear Henríquez, members of Schaefer’s “iron circle,” guilty of “various crimes of sexual abuse, rape of minors and abduction of minors.” The men will serve eleven-year prison sentences. Judge Hernán González of the Talca Court of Appeals announced that a total of nineteen individuals convicted of cult-related crimes in January must surrender and serve their sentences.233

  Allegedly Hartmutt Hopp, reportedly Schaeffer’s “right hand man,” escaped Chile and fled to Germany with millions of dollars taken from the Dignidad community. Chilean authorities have applied for his extradition. More than one hundred members of the Dignidad group eventually drifted back to Germany. Others remained behind in the Chilean compound, which is now called “Villa Baviera.” They hope to eventually turn it into a financially viable community again. Just like many of the former members of the Children of God, second-generation survivors of Dignidad are reportedly deeply traumatized because of the horrible childhood Schaefer imposed on them.234