Jesus Freaks (12 page)

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 Japa
nese 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 Berg 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.”

Seeing the Prophet Prince in real life was also a wake-up call for Celeste Jones.

“Ricky and those guys were just being normal boys—telling jokes and being frivolous. There was nothing really bad going on. Then all of a sudden we got herded in and blasted by Peter Amsterdam. We were put on punishment and scrubbing toilets for months.”

For Celeste, the crackdown was another example of the unique style of child abuse in The Family. Yes, there was sexual abuse. Some kids were physically beaten. But in a way the worst abuse was the constant changing of rules and expectations. They were always on edge. David Berg would get a new prophecy or get pissed off about something and everything would change.

“One day you were supposed to have sex, and the next day you weren't even supposed to hold hands. It was all on a whim. It was crazy,” she said. “There was nothing you could grab onto. Then you were separated constantly from who you knew, from your family and friends.”

What happened to Merry Berg was a perfect example.

“They come out with a new letter, and say Merry is possessed by the devil. That letter was shocking. That was not the Merry I knew. It was scary. Then they started looking at us, and you do
not
want to be singled out. It was so driven into us that we represented the future, but we weren't turning out like they thought. So they clamped down really hard.”

Merry's brother, Don Irwin, was living in a “Teen Combo” in Thailand. He had the same feelings and the same fear of being sent to a Victor Camp.

“I told them I wanted to go to university, and next thing I knew I was sitting in a room with three people sitting around me telling me there were going to be complications if I kept up this hankering for worldly knowledge. It just freaked me out. I had no choice. I wasn't
with my biological parents. The only recourse you had was to submit to them, have the demon cast out of you, or get sent to a Victor Camp.”
²¹

Berg's letters about Merry's punishment and Ricky's bad behavior did what they were supposed to do—at least for Don Irwin. They terrified him and kept him from acting out at his Teen Combo in Bangkok. “Any type of somewhat lucid, smart person over the age of twelve who knew how to read and reason could see that if they rebelled they were going to drop their ass into Macao.”