Authors: Don Lattin
Khadafi didn't take the bait, and the royal family moved on. There was a trip with mommy and daddy to a villa on the Italian coast and a train ride to Barcelona in August 1975. They were back on Tenerife in September to move into a larger house to accommodate the
ever-growing staff needed to serve the royal family. The new house had a red-tiled roof, swimming pool, and large walled garden with palm trees. It was located on the edge of a village where Carlos was raised, El Barrio del Durazno, in the lush green valley of Orotava.
Perhaps Berg thought that being closer to the family of his son's biological father would ease tension over the unusual family arrangement. It did not. Carlos and his family were distancing themselves from the inner circle. The handsome waiter even started talking about marrying his childhood sweetheart. “Dad became so indignant he threatened to blast them all away at our next family fiesta for not loving their new family member, Davidito,” wrote Sara, who like other disciples now referred to Berg as “Dad.” “Because of their final decision to reject Davidito, the Lord said later in Prophecy that the family would be cursed.”
10
Sara recounted all this in her
Story of Davidito
, published by The Family in 1982. It's a strange book, full of advice on such everyday matters as child nutrition, teaching toddlers to read, and clothing suggestions for small children. Berg's personal experience is often used as the model. “Dad [Berg] never liked putting on tight turtlenecks because of having to wear them as a child,” Sara advised. “His mother probably forced them over his head, and they always gave him an uncomfortable feeling of claustrophobia.”
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But it was not the helpful hints on dressing children that would make
The Story of Davidito
the most controversial publication in the history of The Family. The most explosive and embarrassing sections of the book were the pages devoted to the young prophet's sexual education. It began early, when he was an infant in Tenerife. Sara writes:
He gets quite excited when I wash his bottom and his penie gets real big and hard. I kiss it all over till he gets so excited he bursts into laughter and spreads his legs open for more. I wonder what it's going to be like when he begins to talk and asks for more? When playing on the floor he'll oftentimes spread his legs open for me to kiss his penis (what we call his “penie”). He got to where he liked it so much he'd pull people by the hand down
onto the floor and would spread his legs apart for “the treatment.” So we had to explain to him that there are a lot more important things in life than just sex, and a time and a place for everything!
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What is most extraordinary about
The Story of Davidito
is the innocence with which sexual acts between adults and children are described and photographed. Sara writes about sex play with toddlers on one page, then nonchalantly jumps into a discussion of how Ricky's stamp collection is “a tremendous teaching aid in geography.”
Children learn by imitation, and for the children in The Family, that was the way to teach toddlers sex education. Kids were encouraged to watch their parents make love and then try it themselves. After a while, however, even Sara began rethinking that parenting tip. “Davidito is jealous when Alfred [Sara's husband] and I begin loving up and tries to pull us apart, so the best thing for now is that we just not make love in front of him. Davidito loves to watch Dave and Sally [two other staff members] go at it, though. He begins to pant and bounce along with them, then sits down in exhaustion with a big sigh when it's all over, just like he's been through it too! Praise the Lord!”
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Ricky got a sex partner closer to his age when Sara gave birth to her own child, Davida Maria Kelley. She was fourteen months younger than the Prophet Prince, but within a year of her birth was engaged with simulated sex acts with her older playmate. Ricky would watch couples make love by the pool and imitate the action with Davida, whose name is pronounced “Da-VEE-dah.” The same kind of sex play went on at night when the children would sleep in the same bed with their adult caregivers. Sara writes of how Ricky was at first jealous of her baby daughter, but jokes about how “he finally found something he thinks the baby is good for.” When Sara first told Berg and Zerby how Ricky would climb on the bed, crawl up on Davida, and start humping away, they didn't believe her. “They both love it, really,” she told them. “Dad and Maria [Zerby] came to see for themselves, and sure enough, Davidito once again climbed on top of Davida and began banging away with a big smile!”
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Berg's theories about childhood sexuality were being put into practice. He was finally getting back at his mother for publicly chastising him for playing with himself.
“Children should be taught that their sexual parts are just as good as the rest of their body and that sexual activities, feelings and pleasure are no more evil than eating or other physical functions or exercise,” Berg wrote. “The prohibitive and condemnatory attitudes toward sex of our overly religious so-called âChristian' Western culture has produced generations of over-sexed children with an abnormal desire for sex and an absolutely manic craze for everything sexual due to their early sexual frustrations. Only in the present hippie generation have young people finally returned to a more normal attitude toward sex.”
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In
The Story of Davidito
, Sara did not merely describe the sex play between the eighteen-month-old Prophet Prince and his five-month-old consort. The most explicit chapter of her book, “My Little Fish,” includes nude photos of Ricky and his mother striking sensual poses in bedâalong with snapshots of Ricky “banging away” on top of Davida.
At the time, Berg was certainly not the only advocate for allowing sexual play among children and teenagers. Berg was writing in 1973âwhen attitudes toward human sexuality and sex education were changing. One example was a book entitled
Show Me!: A Picture Book on Sex for Children and Parents
, published in 1974 by St. Martin's Press. It was widely available in bookstores until the late seventies, when new laws were passed prohibiting the display of photographs of sexual acts involving children under sixteen years of age.
Show Me!
was much more explicit in its presentation than
The Story of Davidito.
On the other hand, St. Martin's Press had already pulled
Show Me!
from the stores by 1982, the year The Family published
The Story of Davidito
. Even back in 1973, when Berg wrote his treatise “Revolutionary Sex,” he insisted that his followers conceal their hands-on experiments in childhood sexual education. Children in The Family were taught never to reveal their sexual play to outsiders.
“It must be made very clear to your children that such sexual freedom must never be indulged in or practiced openly in the presence of visitors, strangers or uninitiated relatives and friends who have
not been properly re-educated in the revolutionary sexual freedom of natural living! In other words, you will not be able to indulge in such God-given freedoms in the presence of the average Systemite or even new disciples or their children or those who have not yet been properly educated in the liberty-loving ways of God's revolutionary naturist.”
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Actually, it didn't take long for the Systemites in Tenerife to go after the Endtime Prophet for his freewheeling sexual teachings. Sensational press coverage of The Family had forced Berg and his followers to flee the United States. Now the European press, especially the German magazine
Stern
, was onto the story. Reporters staked out the villa that an Italian count had turned over to the cult. “In this estate, surrounded by olive trees and terraced vineyards, the sect has its operational headquarters, which is top secretâknown only to a handful of people,”
Stern
reported.
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Journalists also caught up with Berg in Tenerife, where the prophet was spotted having a fine time. “The man with the white beard in his late 50s was spotted every night with a dozen beautiful women in the upscale bar âLos Caprichos' in Puerto de la Cruz and bought drinks for hundreds of Marks every night. Germans and tourists from other countries flirted with the women, who were ordered to sleep with anyone who looked like they had money.”
One Berg devotee, a twenty-one-year-old nurse from the Italian resort town of Rimini, explained that flirty fishing was not conducted for the money or with lust in her heart. “What I do here has nothing to do with group sex,” she wrote in a letter to her parents. “I don't sleep with just anyone, only with those that search for Jesus. What could be better than to give my life and my body to Jesus.”
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It was soon time to get out of Tenerife. In February 1977, a local judge summoned Berg to court. Catholic Church leaders had complained about the sect, prompting a closer look at the visas of these unorthodox American missionaries. At first, Berg held his ground. In early March, the entire Tenerife Family held a prayer vigil outside the courthouse in Orotava to support their spiritual leader. Ricky's pictureâhis hands folded in prayer while Berg was in courtâwas published in the local paper.
Fearing deportation, Berg and Zerby fled the island, leaving Ricky behind with Sara. They followed on a flight to the Portuguese island of Madeira, where the Unit was reunited. It was the beginning of their “gypsy travels.”
Sue Kauten soon joined the family at their hotel on Madeira. Sara now had her own child and initially found herself torn between her spiritual responsibilities for Ricky and her motherly concern for Davida. Sue's arrival helped The Family get back to Job Oneâthe sexual education of the Prophet Prince.
One night, right after his nap, Ricky, now aged two, joined Sara and Alfred in their bed. “We were all three loving up when Dito looked at me with those big dreamy Canarian black eyes and said, âSara, I yub you!' He pulled me down to kiss him, then pushed my head down to kiss some more!”
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There was another move in May. Sara, Alfred, and Ricky fled to Lisbon to prepare a new home. But reporters working for
Stern
had caught up with them, and they wouldn't stay long.
All five of the inner circle were forced to flee from Portugal in the middle of the night. “Diabolical German news reporters of the vicious anti-Christ [sic] Jewish
Stern
magazine were right on Dad's trail and hounding us at our very front door,” Sara wrote.
They would move five times in the next six weeks. Members of the Unit were moving around at a pace even faster than David Berg knew as a child growing up with his itinerant evangelist mother. There was a sudden move to Switzerland, where Ricky learned how to ride a bike; then to the island of Malta, where they lived in a small apartment on the bay; and after the police started an investigation there, onto Sicily and then back to Switzerland. There were immigration officials, local police, or the news media asking too many questions, and The Family was always on the run. In August, at a casino in Lisbon, they were “besieged by antagonistic German reporters by surprise! The whole house was in an emergency security state the next day. Not only were we concerned about the safety of the King and Queen, but also our Little Prince!”
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The reporters' arrival at their home in Lisbon that day was Ricky's first real lesson in security training.
“Who's at the door?” he asked.
“They are people who want to come in, but we don't want to let them in,” Sara replied.
“What people?”
“They're mean people who don't love Jesus and don't love us because we
do
love Jesus.”
“Are they sitting outside in the parked car?”
“Yes, they are.”
Then, according to Sara, Ricky said, “They're mean people and they don't love Jesus, but we're not afraid because we have
Jesus
, and Daddy's not afraid because
he
has Jesus!”
At 4: 30
A.M.
the next morning, Berg and Zerby slipped out a back door into the night. Then a taxi quietly backed into the driveway of their home to pick up Sara and Ricky and take them to a small downtown hotel.
They moved again in early Septemberâthis time to Madrid and then on to a safe house out in the Spanish countryside. But no amount of moving would get in the way of the sexual education of the Prophet Prince. Sometimes, before he went to sleep, Ricky would jabber to his stuffed animals, giving them voices.
“You go fuck Pat, and you go fuck the big girl in the kitchen!”
“Oh, you don't want to? Oh, OK, I'll fuck Pat!”
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One day, not long before his third birthday, the Prophet Prince was thumbing through a copy of
Playboy
magazine. He came to the foldout, turned to Alfred, and said:
“Oh, she's pretty. What's her name?”
“Sheila,” Alfred answered.
Ricky asked if he could put her picture on the wall by his bed, just like Daddy, so he could kiss her nipples and pet the Playmate on the foldout. Alfred replied:
“I think Sara's prettier than her, don't you?
“No,” Ricky answered
Later that night, the Prophet Prince wanted to take nude photos of Sara in bed. Alfred got a chair for Davidito to stand on and showed him how to work the camera. “He was so excited he could hardly stand it,” Sara recalled.
Sara's sex play with Davidito varied from night to night. “He'll sometimes just jump on top of me real quick, hunch away and then jump off again and say, âDo you like that, Sara?' But his usual, more gentle and preferred approach is, âLet's go wash penie,' and then I know what he really wants.
“Daddy told me he wants Davidito to have all the love he ever needed and wanted and didn't get,” Sara wrote. “And thank the Lord we can enjoy sharing real âloving up' together. It all comes about so sweet and naturally that it makes me wonder what all we must've missed in our own childhood. It's wonderful to be able to pour into the children all your âdreams-come-true.'”
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