Authors: Don Lattin
Borowik pointed to a series of statements from second-generation members The Family compiled following the murder/suicide and put on the Web site www.myconclusion.comâanother example of the
ongoing Internet war over what happened to Ricky and his peers. Maria, twenty-five and a mother of one, wrote:
It baffles me that some of you who are attacking us so vehemently do not get the point or have completely forgotten what the scriptures have to say about persecution, not to speak of the numerous times we've come out on top and that the Lord has delivered us from attacks such as these. But then again, when I think about it, you are helping to fulfill scriptureâ¦.
Those who think that you will weaken and frighten us and cause us to run are fools. We are not wimps! We will not take this lying down. No sir! You should know better than that. You think you can destroy us? Finish us off? Defeat us? Do you really think you'll win? You're gonna have hell to payâ¦.
Do yourselves a favor and let us live our lives, and go on and live yours. Really, move on! If you don't believe in what we're doing fine, don't. But it's useless to spend the rest of your lives trying to fight us and get us to believe the same as you do, because we never willâ¦.
For the record, I've been living in [World Services] 6½ years, and I've had the privilege of meeting Mama, Peter and many other wonderful people whom you say are some of the so-called “evil abusers.” Sorry, you are so wrong. May God help you for criticizing and accusing them of such terrible deeds!
Emmanuel Thomas, twenty-two, lives in a Brazil, and is a second-generation of The Family International. He wrote:
I have lived in The Family my whole life, just about all of which has been in Brazil being a missionary. I'm married to the most wonderful woman in the world named Rafaela, and I have a son, Calvin who will be turning one very soon. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that The Family International is where I want to live for the rest of my life. I would consider it an honor to live and work for Jesus in The Family for the rest of my life. This is where I want to bring up my son “in the nurture and ad
monition of the Lord.” I know that this is a safe place because it has been a safe place for me. I never suffered abuse or mistreatment of any kind! This is the best place Calvin could grow up in! I am sure of that.
Over the next year, more than 450 Family members would post their testimonies at www.myconclusion.com. They would paint a markedly different picture of what life was like growing up in The Family. Much of this is understandable. Those suffering the worst abuse were the older members of the second-generationâthose born between 1972 and 1980. Even The Family's toughest critics will admit that minors living in the sect now are much less likely to experience sexual abuse than those in the late seventies and eighties. It also mattered where children grew up and under what level of leadership. Some Family colonies were loving homesâlove in the best sense of the word. Others were ruled over by serial child predators.
Perhaps the main factor in the child abuse equation was simply thisâhow close one was to David Berg. Ricky was close. Davida was close. Merry Berg was close. One of Peter Amsterdam's sons, Jon-A, did not spend that much time around the Endtime Prophet, or even his own father. But he was Ricky's age and did spend time at the infamous Victor Camp in Macao. He wrote:
I knew both [Sue] and Ricky, and still cannot quite comprehend the needless death that took place. It's not every day someone you knew well was murdered, and rarer still, someone you knew who just four years earlier seemed like a normal individual, change to the point where he'd be willing to take the life of someone as sweet and harmless as [Sue]. I'm telling you, everyone reading this has done more harm to others through unloving acts than [Sue]. She was truly an angel.
I would say that my life was not that typical of a young person in The Family. Because of who my parents were, much was expected of me, and as a kid, naturally I resented that fact. I recognize now that it was to be expected. Any child with prominent parents, in any walk of life, has more expected of him than othersâ¦.
I also went through my share of disciplinary type programs, such as the “Victor programs”âone in Japan and one in Peru. Both of those were typical of the types of programs used by The Family in some parts of the world in those days. In my opinion, these programs were no more harsh then their counterparts in secular society. There was silence restriction, extra labor and some corporal punishmentâall to be expected from that type of system. These programs have not been used in The Family for many yearsâmost likely for good reasons. However, considering that disciplinary boot-camp type programs are still actively used throughout the secular and Christian world today, I fail to see how one could be so up in arms about their previous use in The Familyâ¦.
The one program I was in that I would consider excessive by way of corporal punishment and hard labor, was the DT [detention teen] program in Macao during the late '80s. There were under ten young people admitted to that program, so its use was certainly not widespread, nor was this program duplicated elsewhere. I know for a fact that half of the participants are still in The Family, and the other half have left. Those who were negatively affected by this program, I personally feel sorry for. I don't think some of the things that went on were justified or necessary, and I consider it a failed experiment at best. It's something I feel was unfortunate, but I lived through it, and I've put it behind me. And most importantly, I forgave those who I feel wronged me. That's what I consider the bottom line here: it's about forgiveness! In life, you have to forgive people, just as you need to be forgiven.
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One problem with relying on e-mail postings and the Internet to tell “the other side” of Ricky's story was that one can't be certain who actually authored those statements and under what circumstances they were written. Shepherds could be telling rank-and-file members what to write. Nevertheless, it is important to hear those voices. What happens inside a religious cult often lies somewhere between the horror stories of apostates and the happy tales of current devotees.
In the weeks following the slaying of Sue Kauten and the suicide of Ricky Rodriguez, five second-generation members sat down for interviews at a Mexican restaurant in Old Town San Diego.
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Justin Paone, twenty-eight, was one of the five. He was born to Family missionaries in Venezuela and grew up in communal homes across South America. “My upbringing was different, but I'm very proud of my parents and my upbringing,” Paone said. “I know a lot of these people who are bitter and are fighting against us now. A lot of times it's situations in their personal families. They get all worked up about it and generalize it over the whole Family. It makes us all suffer.”
John Orcutt, twenty-six, was born in Italy, the third of nine children. Growing up, he lived in Argentina, India, Thailand, Puerto Rico, and the United States before going out on his own as a Family missionary in Hungary. He was not surprised by the post-Ricky wave of negative news coverage about his religious movement. “Persecution is part of our lives,” he said. “You read news articles and meet people who don't like you, but in a way it motivates me more.”
“They said Jesus hung out with whores,” he added. “If they said those things about Jesus, they are definitely going to say those things about his followers.”
Orcutt, Paone, and the others around the table worked for Activated Ministries in Escondido, which produces books, periodicals, and musical products sold by Family missionaries around the world. They were accompanied by Cassandra Mooney, fifty-two, one of the directors of Activated Ministries and a member of The Family for thirty-three years.
Mooney raised two daughters in the movement, both of whom now serve as missionaries in Mexico. “I love my girls and would never let anyone touch them,” she said. “I was in The Family five and a half years until I had sexâand that was with my husband. We were prudish in a sense. I was a very wild hippie before I joined The Family, so that was a big change for me.”
Mooney concedes that changed in the late seventies, when Berg directed his female followers to practice flirty fishing. Asked whether she ever engaged in flirty fishing (or FFing), Mooney replied, “Very little.”
“When it first started happening, we were in Beirut, Lebanon, which was a difficult place to do it,” Mooney said. “FFing was going out and meeting lonely people and witnessing to them. If it happened that we had an attraction or wanted to have sex, our religion did not forbid that. It wasn't prostitution. It was witnessing.”
Several of the younger Family members around the table defended the sect's ongoing practice of sexual sharing among adult members, arguing that sex is just a small part of the equation and blown out of proportion by the news media and their critics.
“Why can't the law of love expand to all of your life? What's wrong with God and sex mixing?” asked Grace Galambos, who at age twenty was the youngest member at the interview session. “God created sex.”
Paula Braaten, twenty-four, also defended the teachings.
“Do we live the Law of Love? Yes. The core of the Law of Love is to love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and to love your neighbor as yourself,” she said. “If you want to have sex with other people, you can do whatever you want.”
Just a couple weeks before Paula Braaten and her coworkers gathered in that Mexican restaurant, a larger group of second-generation Family folksâmost of them apostatesâjoined together in San Diego for a memorial service for another one of the brethren who had killed himself.
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His name was Abe Braaten, and he was Paula Braaten's brother-in-law.
He died on December 14, 2004âthree weeks before the deaths of Ricky and Sueâafter falling from the roof of a building in Kobe, Japan. Abe was twenty-seven. Some of his family and friends, including one who saw him moments before the fall, say his death was another suicide of an abused child.
At the memorial, Daniel Roselle produced a list of twenty-five second-generation members of The Family who had allegedly committed suicide during the past ten years. “We're dropping like flies,” said Roselle, repeating a line Ricky quoted in his video. “There is a lot of anger out there. I'm not worried about more violence against others. But I am worried about more suicides.”
Ricky's profanity-laced video was still fresh in people's mindsâas was his call to arms to the second generation.
“It's a war now between us and our parents,” said John LaMattery, twenty-seven, who met Braaten in Japan when both boys were fourteen years old. He is also Jim LaMattery's nephew. “This is the cream of the crop coming back to get them.”
Abe Braaten's Japanese-born mother, Yumiko “Phoenix” Taniguchi, is one of the top leaders in The Family International.
On the night of December 14, 2004, Braaten and a friend, Sam McNair, were kicking back in McNair's apartment in Kobe, Japan. Their wives were at Braaten's place with the kids, just a five-minute drive away.
Sam and Abe had knocked back a beer or two and were watching a movie on
TV
.
“All of a sudden,” McNair said, “he was like âSam, um, I'm not feeling so good. My heart is pumping real fast.' And I felt his heart and, swear to God, I never felt anything like that before. It was beating super fast. It was that quick. At that point, I thought he was having a panic attack.”
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Abe's mother, Phoenix Taniguchi, says it is not clear whether or not her son committed suicide. “Since no one was with him at the very moment when this happened, we were not sure exactly how it happened, whether he actually jumped or fell. We heard that shortly before he fell he'd drunk quite a bit, which seemed to affect him heavily,” she wrote in a eulogy for her son.
The eulogy, entitled “Notice of my son Abe's Graduation” was originally posted on a members-only Family Web site. It ended with a purported message from Jesus, which read in part:
Abe is asking that his death be a testimony to those who will hear, that it's very dangerous to be foolish and light-hearted and take risks. He asks that this message be spread so that his death be not in vain. Abe did many things in his life that he regretted and he did many things that he didn't really plan to do but he just slipped. Well, this was the biggest slip yet and it cost him his life. It's such a sad thing that his earthly life had to be cut short,
prematurely, because of the consequences of his actions, but please look on the other side of the tapestry and see the beauty and the wonders of eternal life that awaited Abe the minute his physical life was finished. He had a crown waiting for him and he had a reward waiting for him, for all the good things that he did in his life, all the times he was a testimony of My love and salvation, all the times he gave love sacrificially and tried to follow My ways.
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Other close relatives to Abe blame The Family for his death. Like many young people who grew up in The Family, Braaten had trouble adjusting to life in the real world.
“Yeah, he talked about suicide when he was living with us,” said Braaten's sister, China Taniguchi. “This is the thing about Abeâevery time it came close to his birthday, he would get supernegative. Just like, âOh my God, I'm already at this age, and I'm still doing nothingâ¦. What am I going to do with my life?'”
China (pronounced Chee-na) said her brotherâwho left The Family in 2000âwas seen as an especially rebellious teenager and was sent off to The Family's Victor Program for re-education. “I mean, I barely saw my brother because he was always shipped off to some other place to learn some lessonsâto get âvictory' over some problem he had. It makes me so mad. I think that had a lot to do with the problems with self-esteem.”
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