Jesus Freaks

by Don Lattin

  “[Merry] was having regular dates with [Ricky] and we suggested she should put off [her] interests in other boys and sex, except [Ricky], until she was stronger in the Lord,” the letter states. It goes on to say that Merry “resolved in her own mind that if she couldn’t have the sex and men that she wanted and choose, that she’d get it from the Devil himself!”7

  Merry testified that she was subjected to violent exorcisms to beat the devil out of her. “Many times they would beat me,” she said. “They took my head and beat it against the wall and bruised me. I was helpless and knew nothing else. It all felt like torture and once I fainted, throwing up. They said I was throwing up demons.”

  “Dangers of Demonism” was meant to be a warning to other rebellious teens in the movement. The letter contains the transcript of a recorded conversation between Berg and Merry during one of the violent exorcisms designed to rid her of the Devil’s influence.

  Merry enters Berg’s room in the Philippines and greets Grandpa with a hug and a kiss.

  “Praise the Lord, Honey. How are you? Bless and help her, Lord, as we talk to her about her problems. In Jesus’ name. Thank you, Lord!”

  Suddenly, Berg begins yelling, “Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!” and starts to speak in tongues as he grabs the girl and violently shakes her to emphasize every command.

  “Get out of her, Devil! Get out of her in Jesus’ name! Get out of her! In the name of Jesus, get out of her! Hallelujah! In Jesus’ name! I rebuke you, Satan! Look at me! Get out of there!”

  Berg slaps her in the face.

  “Do you hear me?” Berg yells, slapping her again.

  “Yes sir!” Merry replies.

  “Do you understand what I am talking about?”

  “Yes sir!”

  “That’s what you’re going to get if this thing comes back again!” Berg screams, pushing her back into a chair. “How can you, my own granddaughter, supposed to be one of my saved children? How could you invite Satan in and put curses on others, send little devils to other people? I don’t ever want to hear about that again!”

  Another slap.

  “Is that clear?”

  “Yes sir!”

  Berg goes on to repeatedly berate and threaten his granddaughter. He tells her that her mother, Shula, was insane, as was her father. “If it hadn’t been for the Lord, he would have jumped off the cliff a long time before that,” Berg said.

  “I have a rod here. Will you please bring it to me,” Berg says. “You see this? Pass it to her, let her feel it. I want you to feel this, how heavy it is.”

  Berg is right in his granddaughter’s face.

  “That is a rod! I am going to take this rod to you and I am going to beat you with it the next time any of this stuff comes up. Do you want me to help you know what you’re going to get? Come here, I’ll let you feel it just one time. Bend over.”

  Bergs spanks her with the rod.

  “Did you feel that? Well next time your buttocks are going to be bare and you’re going to really feel it! You’re dangerous. You’re going to go stark raving mad and do something terrible if you keep playing around with those devils.”

  Justice Ward’s 121-page ruling was neither a victory nor a defeat for The Family. The judge said he believed that The Family changed its practices regarding the sexual abuse of minors by the early 1990s. He allowed The Family member involved in the case to retain custody of the child in question. Nevertheless, the public release of testimony by Merry Berg and other second-generation victims painted a damning portrait of life in The Family in the eighties.

  Merry Berg told the judge she had “begun to realize grandfather was a hypocrite who made rules for people which were not necessarily for him. He would write one thing one day and the opposite the next because God was changing. He was very contradictory. He was a chronic alcoholic…. I now look back at his writings as the ravings of a drunk madman.”

  Justice Ward sided with Merry, concluding:

  Who could blame the girl for lacking respect for a man so revered by others when she knew from her personal knowledge that he was foul mouthed, drank too much and sexually abused her? For this she was brutally punished. Her crime was to have yielded to Satan. That led to a time of two months when she had five major exorcisms performed over her.8

  Merry still failed to give Berg the respect he thought he deserved, so she was sent to a “Victor Camp” in Macao, the most notorious of several Family detention camps set up in the late eighties.

  According to The Family publication cited in the Justice Ward’s decision, Macao was supposedly “a voluntary program established to help a small handful of teens who needed more individualized guidance and encouragement to overcome long standing serious personal problems.”

  While in this program, the teens received exceptionally close shepherding in a small personal family atmosphere, with lots of love and prayer, individualized personal training, hours and hours of personal counseling, specialized Word classes that were often spoon-fed to the teens, and a consistent daily schedule of typical boarding school-style discipline, administered with patience, prayer, reasoning and understanding.

  Justice Ward took extensive testimony on the situation in Macao and concluded that The Family’s description of life at the camp was “a travesty of the truth.” He found that “children were subjected to a regime of physical and psychological brutality.” Merry Berg told the judge about another girl at the reform school who was slapped and became so upset that she could not talk properly but was stuttering incoherently. “The reaction of the shepherds was to say that she was possessed of deaf and dumb spirits and so they held an exorcism, talking in tongues over her,” Ward writes.9

  Another teenager sent to Macao told the judge that “most of the children there were shipped in from other countries because they had deep psychological problems as a result of being in The Family. In my opinion, I would call them ‘mental.’ Three of them were completely irrational and were hallucinating. Some of them thought that they were seeing demons…. Most walked around dazed. I and a few others were the only ones who were not ‘mental.’”10

  Among the abusive practices Ward condemns were putting teens on silence restriction, isolation, and hard labor. “The Macao experience is a shameful example of putting into practice the belief that the end justifies the means,” the judge concludes. “The means was a form of physical and mental atrocity mercilessly dished out to young, often already emotionally damaged children. There seems little acknowledgement from the leadership of the abusive nature of that regime. In my judgement, the leadership must stand condemned.”11

  Not surprisingly, Merry Berg’s experience in Macao did not resolve her emotional problems. After her release, she was sent to the United States to live with her grandmother, Jane Berg, and then with Deborah, the Endtime Prophet’s eldest daughter and Merry’s aunt. By the early 1990s, when Merry entered her twenties, she had found enough stability to testify in the British court case and give several media interviews about her abusive upbringing.

  Her public denunciation of the cult prompted Berg and Zerby to unleash a vicious campaign to vilify her among The Family flock. “Why would anyone in The Family accept the word of this crazy girl, who completely yielded herself to the Devil?” Zerby asked in a 1992 letter. “She was fucking the Devil and throwing violent curses on everyone around her, describing these in vivid, gruesome detail!”12

  James Penn, a top-level Family operative who defected in 1999, confesses that he was given “the shameful task” of devising a strategy to undermine Merry Berg’s decision to tell the truth about her abuse. He explains that Berg, Zerby, and Peter Amsterdam—now one of the top two leaders of The Family—were afraid of Merry “not because she was crazy, nor because she was lying, but because she was telling the sordid, shameful truth about the abuse she had personally suffered at their hands.”

  “[Merry] was their worst nightmare come true. Her testimony, fully corroborated in Family publications, validated
the accusations of child abuse, and directly implicated the leader. The usual suspects, weak and immature Family leaders or members, were nowhere to be found. [Merry’s] testimony struck at the man-god, the head and heart of the movement, and threatened to destroy him.”13

  Merry Berg was a great threat to The Family leadership, but she was just one of many second-generation kids hitting their teenage years and causing big problems for The Family. Most adult members joined the sect in their late teens or early twenties, but they were willing converts. Those who couldn’t stomach the unquestioning obedience Berg demanded in the early days had already left the cult or had been kicked out. But here was a new generation of disciples who never had a choice as to whether or not they wanted to be children in The Family. And for the first time in their lives they were starting to realize that difference.

  Teenagers can be a handful, and The Family was running out of hands. “Teen Combos” were set up to centralize the oversight, education, and indoctrination of teenagers. Troublesome kids were sent to Victor Camps for re-indoctrination.

  Many of these kids’ parents had joined the movement to get off drugs or away from their own dysfunctional families. They had no idea how to be parents themselves. So where did they turn for advice? They turned to Sara Kelley, the mother of Davida and Ricky’s primary nanny and sexual playmate. Sara became the Dr. Spock of The Family. Her Story of Davidito became its child care bible.

  “My mother was sent to be a leader in other communities—to teach them about how to be like Grandpa and reprogram everybody,” Davida said. “That’s when I started meeting kids who never saw Grandpa and only read books about us. We were the closest thing to Grandpa they would ever get to. They all knew who I was. I was very famous.”14

  Children in The Family learned to read with a series of “Life with Grandpa” comic books—sanitized stories of what it was like to grow up around the Endtime Prophet. Davida started telling her new friends some real slices of life with Grandpa. “I mentioned something about sex, or being intimate with Grandpa, and my mother immediately freaked out and hushed me up and said, ‘Don’t talk about love-up time. Do not mention that. You do not discuss having sexual conduct with Grandpa, and if you happen to slip up and you say something, the first thing you are going to do is go back to the Unit.’ I’m thinking, ‘Why, is there something wrong with it? You mean people out here don’t fuck their kids? They are not required to have sex with adults?’”

  Davida was sent to a Victor Camp in Japan, and later to another camp in Brazil. “It was a way to reprogram our little heads,” she said. “That is where you would go if you are really bad or rebellious and not wholehearted or have an attitude or dare to be different. If you have independent tendencies, that is condemned. In Japan I got public spankings. I took a banana out of the refrigerator without asking permission. It was a walk-in refrigerator full of bananas and fruit and vegetables. I happened to grab a banana. They made an example. This is what happens to bad, bad naughty girls. They made me drop my pants in front of fifty kids.”

  Davida said Grandpa never had sexual intercourse with her. According to the Endtime Prophet’s own code of sexual morality, girls did not reach the age of maturity until they were twelve years old. Davida and her mother left the Unit when she was eleven, but that didn’t stop Berg from using Davida for his own sexual pleasure while she was still with the Unit. One of his favorite acts, she said, was to perform oral sex on her. “It was very oral,” she said, “and very hands on.”15

  Davida and the Unit were in Manila when the Prophet Prince celebrated his twelfth birthday. Ricky was now old enough to have sexual intercourse with teenage girls and adult women. And, according to Davida, one of those adult women was Karen Zerby, his own mother. “I saw his mother having sexual intercourse with him while I was getting molested by Grandpa in the same bed,” Davida said. “That was disturbing. I’d never seen her [Zerby] have sexual contact with the children.”16

  (Karen Zerby declined to be interviewed for this book, but Family spokeswoman Claire Borowik, called the incest allegation “an absolute lie.”)

  It was in the Philippines that Davida first realized there might be something wrong with sex play with adults. “I went into my mom’s closet and found this book about sexually abused kids. It was a book for kids to read. It said something like, ‘This is wrong. Adults do this because they were abused themselves.’ I was like, ‘Oh my god! You mean adults are not supposed to have sexual contact with kids. I said, ‘Look, mom. This book says its wrong for adults to have sex with kids and that if it happens you should say something.’ My mom said, ‘Where did you find that?’ I remember feeling sick to my stomach. I always knew there was something wrong with being dragged out of our beds at three in the morning and being forced to drink wine and willingly have sexual interaction with Grandpa.”

  Political turmoil in the Philippines forced Berg, Zerby, and the rest of the Unit to find a new base of operations in late 1987. After a brief stay in Tokyo, they moved onto the grounds of the 21st Century International School, known to Family members as Heavenly City School. The complex of buildings in Chiba prefecture would be the headquarters for various projects, including the taping of Family audio/visual products and the re-education of second-generation teens. At times, the population swelled to more than three hundred residents. Berg was at the school less than a year, but long enough for him to write a series of letters on education and Japan, including “The School Vision!” and “It’s Japan’s Hour!”

  Students at The Family’s showplace school were used to getting strange instructions from the resident shepherds, but some of the Japanese marching orders were particularly puzzling. “They told us if we saw someone walking around and didn’t know who they were, we were not supposed to look at them,” recalled Daniel Roselle, a former student. “Not long after that I was cleaning windows and saw this guy with a beard walking a dog. We knew he was Berg, and we knew we weren’t supposed to look.”17

  Heavenly City was also part of the Davidito experiment. Ricky, who had just turned thirteen, was put in the regular Family population, and he was to be carefully observed. Word soon got around the student body that the famous Davidito was in their midst—the boy they had read about for years in “Life with Grandpa” and other children’s literature.

  “One day we saw a boy about twelve or thirteen walking around in baggy jeans,” Daniel recalled. “Ricky has a distinctive look. Everyone was saying, ‘Is that Davidito?’ We called him ‘Petey’ then but we knew who he was. It was ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell.’ He was shy and quiet. He just wanted to be accepted. We’d been told he was this model child, but he just wanted to fit in.”18

  Celeste Jones, who had been one of Merry Berg’s friends at the Music for Meaning camp in Greece, was at Heavenly City School when Ricky arrived. They were both thirteen years old at the time. “He seemed really sweet, but so shy and timid. He had no confidence in himself. He wasn’t very talkative. He didn’t have social skills.”19

  Celeste remembers Ricky as a kind of handyman, coming around fixing things, and almost always accompanied by an adult shepherd. “We all knew who he was, but we couldn’t talk to him. They told us not to. He’d just look at us with this long face.”

  Finally, Ricky’s shepherds eased up and allowed him to mingle with the rest of the kids. The Prophet Prince had a taste of freedom, but it didn’t last long.

  “There were a few guys there who had been in ‘the System’ for a time,” Roselle recalled. “They’d be doing things like break dancing. We thought they were cool, but the leaders saw them as ‘worldly.’ Ricky and I were on the periphery of the cool guys, but then they started cracking down on them, making them clear brush on this hill. It was the kind of physical labor punishment that later became standard at the Victor Camps.”

  Ricky was just starting to hang around with the cool guys when word got back to David Berg. He ordered Ricky back to the Unit and threatened to send him to a Victor Camp. As with Merry B
erg in the Philippines, the threats against Ricky were published in a 1988 letter—this one entitled “Our Teens—The Devil’s Target!”

  “Do you want to be put in detention with some of the bad apples, some sort of detention reformatory colony and have to be locked up in your room at night because you’re such a bad example?” Berg asked Ricky. “If you keep on that trail, boy, I’d rather disown you! Do you hear me?”

  “Yes,” Ricky replied, meekly.

  “Let me tell you, brother, if you ever got into that cesspool of the System and had to go to a System school and see what the Devil’s children are really like, it’s like Hell on Earth. You’d come running back to Mama and Daddy with your tail between you legs, saying, ‘God help me! I don’t ever want to be with people like that again. It’s like living in Hell!’ All those stories he [one of the ‘cool guys’ who had lived outside The Family] is telling you about how wonderful it is, what excitement and blah blah…I’m talking to you! How could you have gotten mixed up with a guy like that?”

  “Well,” Ricky replied. “I guess I just wanted to see what the other side was like.”

  “Why?” Berg countered. “Brother, let me tell you. I was raised around the other side and I know what it was like. It was Hell on Earth!”20

  Berg’s outrage sparked what became known as “the shakeout” at Heavenly City School. “There was this big meeting with Peter Amsterdam and Sara Davidito [Davidita’s mother and Ricky’s chief nanny]. They gave us this long lecture about being cool,” Roselle recalled. “Mostly it was just about listening to ‘System’ music. I was one of the kids called up front. I thought, ‘Me?’ They yelled at us for three hours. I remember Peter Amsterdam telling me to ‘get that smirk off your face.’ I just started crying. And I never saw Ricky after that.”

  Japan was a turning point for Roselle. “Something clicked for me when I saw what happened in Japan. Ricky was a normal kid, but they couldn’t let him be a normal kid. Here was this guy who was going to be our prophet, and he was more desperate to fit in than I was.”