In his 2007 HBO documentary The Children of God:  Lost and Found, Noah Thompson talked to his mother over the telephone about the cult.  His mother, still in the Family International, tried to avoid many of the issues raised by her son, and when confronted directly often took a party line stance, denying flat out that anything untoward could have happened:

[Noah] Mom, I’m trying to make this documentary, and I need some help so I can tell all sides of the story.

[Mom] I really don’t want to be part of that.  You know what, son?  Every single report on television or in the newspaper about the Family is all negative. 

[Noah] I just want to let you know, I want to air some things out and just get, you know, your perspective on the Family, you know, and why you joined, you know, and really have your voice heard on the film.

[Mom] (long pause) I don’t think that’s what God wants you to do.  And if you betray us like that, there’s not going to be any family.*

Thompson’s mother has already set the dynamic:  say positive things about us, or we will consider what you say as betrayal.  Moreover, she issues a vague threat should he go ahead with his documentary, based on her interpretation of God’s intention.  Of course, here, the will of the Almighty seems tantamount to the PR concerns of the cult.

Thompson finds even more resistance from his mom when talking about the sexual aspects of cult life.  She wants to know if he will mention anything about Flirty Fishing, to which he replies:

[Noah] FF-ing, Flirty Fishing, will be acknowledged, because it was a extremely--it was a huge part of the Family doctrine, you know what I mean?  And it went on, for what, ten years? So I’m going to have to talk about that.  And--

[Mom] And you’re going to take me as a slut?

Despite its hostility, his mother’s response at least acknowledged that the practice went on, and that she participated in it.  When Noah voiced his own experiences, however, she quickly went into denial.

[Noah] You know, as I look back at my childhood you were gone, you know, for a substantial amount.  I’ve slept with plenty of my nannies.

[Mom] Excuse me?

[Noah]  I’ve slept with plenty of my nannies. 

[Mom]  I’m sorry.  I don’t believe that.

[Noah]  You sleep in a room.  You jump in bed with some nanny.  You roll around fucking naked, and that’s how it went down.  That’s how it went down.  Then you’d get up and you’d go to breakfast.  I mean that’s how commonplace it was. 

[Mom]  Why didn’t anybody tell me?  Why didn’t you tell me?…We are not child abusers.  Daddy was not a child abuser.  I am not a child abuser.  We would not let child abuse happen to our children.”

In an early post in this series, I pointed out, using David Berg’s own words, the cult’s position on honesty.  For the most part, they were against it, and even made lying to protect the group a point of sacred policy.  So, I would see the denial by Thompson’s mother in that light.  After all, there were numerous witnesses to the childhood sexual abuse.

Just as they starred in Berg’s idealized child rearing publications, his own brood played the leading role in his exposure as a pervert.  His eldest biological child, Linda Berg Davis (Deborah) led the charge in her 1984 memoir The Children of God:  The Inside Story.  Among other things, she claimed that, as a young girl, a drunken David Berg would try to wake her up in the middle of the night for sex.  Feigning sleep, he would give up, and then molest his younger daughter, Faith.**  As she explained to ABC’s 20/20, “My dad was just an evil personality that was not hearing from God at all.”

Later, Merry Berg would affirm that CoG adults frequently abused children, including her.  Moreover, her worst offender was none other than her Grandpa.  As she told NBC News in 1993: 

They’ll be, now,  ‘Now smile children’ if they put the kids on a show, or singing for someone.  And they may be beating them, and abusing them in the back room, like they were to me.  When I was nine-years old, they were sexually abusing me….

They put this silver ring on my hand, and they, he said, ‘I now wed thee,’ you know, ‘I David now wed thee.’  And I was now supposed to be one of his wives, and I was his grandchild.”

According to her and Davida Kelley, Berg ordered Merry, then twelve, to lose her virginity by bedding her younger quasi-brother, Ricky Rodriguez.  In truth, he wanted Ricky to knock her up that night.  Because Berg regarded Rodriguez as his heir-apparent, he felt that a union with his biological granddaughter might bind the lad more to him--for only then would they have a common “blood” interest. 

Rodriguez and Kelley (right) corroborated each other’s claim that Berg and Karen Zerby would take them to bed.  Moreover, they both said that Berg expected Ricky to have sex with his mother, while Davida performed sex acts on David.  As she told CNN:

He [Berg] was a sick fucking pedophile. He was just a sick fucking pervert.  He interpreted, like, the law of love and the Bible and religion into his own little sick perverted way, and that meant being able to violate, and abuse anyone and everyone….

You were only required to have actual intimate intercourse with David Berg once you were, like, the mature age of, like, twelve….

I actually witnessed Karen Zerby having intercourse with her own son, Ricky Rodriguez, at age eleven.

Natalie Raynes, a friend of Rodriguez, characterized molestation as typical within the CoG.  As she wrote in a January 2006 article for the Australian edition of Cosmopolitan:

If someone touched you, you had no choice but to let them or they’d abuse you or a person you cared about in front of you, which was even worse.

By the time I was ten, we were living in Poland.  I was being abused by someone every single day.  They’d shove fingers inside me or else get me to ‘pleasure’ them (as they called it).  They didn’t believe in condoms and when you started your period they stopped having intercourse with you, but still did everything else.  The cult also didn’t believe in doctors so I’m lucky that I never got an STI.

She also wrote that non-compliance to abuse led to more vicious punishment, or as phrased in the previous post, “discipline”:

At nine, I was sent to a ‘Victor Camp,’ which was like a concentration camp for the cult’s rebellious kids.  I thought there’d be lots of other kids, but it was just me and one other boy.  We were badly beaten, drilled with cult doctrines around the clock and made to clean up after everybody else.  I was also on a ‘silence restriction,’ so I was forbidden to speak one word for three months or more.

I felt like there must have been something terribly wrong with me that I was definitely going to hell because I didn't like people touching me.

Although born into the cult, Merry, unlike most of the second-generation CoG members, did not grow up completely under its guidance.  Her first real contact with it came when she accepted an invitation to visit her grandfather at his secret location.  For most of us, the opportunity to meet a grandparent is a no-brainer decision.  Unfortunately for her, it was a tremendous mistake, which trapped her inside the cult.  And, because she didn’t grow up in it, she knew that the lives of most of her peers on the outside differed vastly from those within the CoG colonies.  Upon turning fourteen, she protested their ways, and the incestuous rape by her grandfather. 

The cult’s “discipline” of Merry was exceedingly harsh, consisting of nasty verbal and sexual abuse and torture in an effort to “exorcise her demons.”  Moreover, the cult openly admitted to it’s brutal treatment of her in a Mo Letter titled “The Last State?--The Dangers of Demonism!” (DO, dated March 1987).  Here, Berg recorded his tirade against the girl, punctuated by numerous slaps to the face, with the promise of starvation ("fasting") and more severe “discipline” to come. 

In commentary to the previous post, Shrinky noted the lack of official or community concern about obvious criminal activity that included the rape of children.  As we will see, the CoG/Family of Love enjoyed a number of political connections, and they could very well have shielded themselves from prosecution.  But that protection began to break down during the 1990s.  As more and more authorities commenced investigations against them for charges ranging from tax fraud to child pornography to kidnapping, the group defended themselves the best they could.  On one front, they engaged in PR, depicting the investigations and subsequent raids as “persecutions.” 

On another front, they tried to destroy evidence of past crimes by re-writing their history.  It’s in this vein that the Pub Purges, a systemic effort to root out controversial DO and other sensitive materials from their libraries, occurred. Likewise, they issued a 1992 statement on child abuse, claiming that they (a) loved their children; (b) neither condoned nor tolerated abuse of any kind; (c) abuse existing in the cult might have been done by some individuals acting on their own in violation of their beliefs; (d) there was no evidence to the contrary; (e) that most of the most controversial beliefs stemmed from their time as the Children of God, but were excised when the group reorganized as The Family of Love; (f) most of their sexually based ministries officially ended in 1987 because of the AIDS crisis; and (f) they really, really, loved their children:***

It has come to our attention that serious accusations of sexual misconduct involving children are being made against members of our fellowships, principally by some disaffected former members who are working in conjunction with various anti-cult organizations.  In the absence of any medical or other tangible evidence to support these allegations, our adversaries have produced some rather extreme and outdated examples of literature published in the past by some in our former fellowships, maintaining that such literature accurately reflects the present lifestyle and practices of our membership.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Therefore, we feel it necessary to confront and deal with this issue directly, in order to provide objective observers with an opportunity to hear all facts regarding this matter, that they may draw their own conclusions. [emphasis original]

Now, I could cite more court-quality evidence of rampant childhood physical and sexual abuse occurring within the CoG.  But if I documented a substantial portion, they would easily dwarf the current total contents of this blog.  Therefore, the testimony of victims is overwhelming, consistent, redundant--in other words, the best type of eyewitness evidence one could present.  On the other hand, the CoG/FoL flatly denied that any abuse existed.  Despite the fact Berg wrote ML’s and True Komix encouraging childhood sex; despite the fact they filmed and photographed children in stripteases and other sexually provocative circumstances; and despite the fact that leadership instructed members to lie to authorities in the case of trouble the Family International would seem to expect us to accept their indignant vehemence as evidence of religious persecution.

Under those circumstances, whom would you believe?  The Family International, or its disgruntled former members?

In case you had just a brief notion to answer the former, let me point this out:  the 1992 document said, “From that point on (1985), any adult member found guilty of having any kind of sexual contact with a minor was excommunicated from our fellowships.”  Problem is, Merry Berg was born in 1972, and her abuse continued until she left the group, at age eighteen, in 1990.  That’s five years of non-excommunicated folks, including the founder.  Raynes was born in 1983, and her abuse continued until 1999, when she left.  Yet she said (as have many others) that molestation was rampant in the cult long after this 1985 deadline, and those children who put up resistance to it faced “discipline.”

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*From the context it’s difficult to ascertain whether she means there won’t be any more Family International, or if she means that the Thompson family itself will cease to exist.

**While it appears to be common knowledge within the cult that they maintained an incestuous relationship for decades, Faith and David flatly denied the accusation. 

***As mentioned in a previous post, the Children of God reorganized as the Family  of Love in 1987, but the organization has always existed under various aliases.  In order to cut down on confusion, I’m referring to all of these entities and incarnations as the Children of God, unless there is a specific reason to single out another name.