Jesus Freaks (24 page)

The Family was a machine built to spread the message of David Berg. But this enterprise was not just about the reproduction of religious tracts. It was the reproduction of
human beings
to embody and spread the word. It's not hard to find women in The Family with six, eight, ten, thirteen children. What did they call babies produced from “flirty fishing”? What did they call them when the biological fathers would disappear? They called them “Jesus babies.” David Berg was the fisherman. His sacred whores were the bait. The babies were the harvest.

Central to David Berg's arrogance was his willingness to use people as means to an end. This was especially true for his own children and grandchildren. Berg sexually abused two generations of his own progeny, but that was not the worst of it. He used them—he engineered them—to fulfill his own self-serving prophecy.

It happened to Ricky. It also happened to Merry Berg.

In the summer of 2005, Merry was locked up at the Las Colinas Detention Facility in Santee, a town east of San Diego, where she was
being held on charges of driving while intoxicated. According to her brother and her mother, Merry was addicted to speed and working as a prostitute in southern California.

It had been eighteen years since Berg terrorized his granddaughter during those exorcism sessions in the Philippines. If she tried to leave The Family, Berg warned her then, “the only way you could make it is to be a whore!

“You wouldn't even be a FFer. You wouldn't even be doing it for God. You'd just be doing it for a living. You'd probably end up on drugs—a drug demon possessed, alcoholic, diseased whore and soon dead! Now is that what you want!”

“No sir!” Merry replied.
⁶

In a letter from jail, and in a series of phone conversations after her release, Merry told me she was trying to forget her childhood in The Family. Merry wanted to live in the moment, not dwell on the past. “I am so not in the mood to discuss that shit,” she said in her letter. “I'm much more interested in life in the present and making the most of it and new experiences, despite the down times. I love real life in America, especially nonreligious, open minded life in San Diego, CA. I have a kick-ass life now.”

Later, on the phone after her release from jail, Merry delivered a series of speedy, stream-of-consciousness monologues about how she had lost her wallet or lost her cell phone or was worried that her relationship with her boyfriend might be over. One night she called me at 1
A.M.
to see if I would drive from San Francisco to San Diego (a ten-hour drive) that morning and take her to the jail where her boyfriend was incarcerated. Another night she called to hold the phone up to some stereo speakers to play songs that would explain her feelings. One song was “American Life” by Madonna: “I tried to be a mess, I tried to be the best, I guess I did it wrong, That's why I wrote this song.”

Over the course of two or three hours on the phone with Merry, the subject of David Berg only came up once. “Grandpa,” she said. “I used to idolize him, but I'd kill him now too. Taking out his ridiculous style on everybody. That poor kid [Ricky] never had a chance. He was supposed to be this and that and ended up nothing.”

As for her memories of being sexually involved with Ricky in the Philippines, Merry said, “He was too young. We were having some good sex, and then they told me that he was old enough to get me pregnant. And that was it for me.”

Then there's Davida. She left The Family in 1996, when she was twenty years old and working as a missionary in Russia. That was also where she reunited with Ricky for the first time in nearly ten years. They hadn't seen each other since back in the Philippines.

“We both got very disillusioned in Russia,” Davida told me. “This was the first time Ricky was really in the field. In Russia, the circumstances were so extreme. We were in this home in the middle of winter. It was ten below zero, and we had to hoof it to raise support. I was nineteen and he was twenty. We were in Odessa, the most godforsaken, crime-ridden city. It was Sodom and frickin' Gomorrah—the most evil spot in all of Russia where all the gangsters and crime lords and drug lords hang out. We are stuck in this home with six young people, including a pregnant woman.

“We are supposed to be giving out humanitarian aid to orphanages and hospitals, but we are so broke we are eating boiled beets and hard bread and potatoes for weeks at a time. For a while there was no electricity and the apartment was freezing cold. We'd try to raise support, but in Russia there is no middle class. There are the crime lords and the poor.”

It was the first time Ricky really got a sense of what it was like to be a rank-and-file member of The Family, working countless hours to raise money—and then sending ten percent of it back to “World Services” to support Berg, Zerby, and their staff.

“We had lived in luxury and seclusion in the Unit, but we were living off these people and their tithes. These people in The Family are on the streets ten hours a day begging and singing and are barely getting by.”

They were both fed up with Russia, but Ricky had the option of moving back to the comfort and safety of the Unit, which at the time was located at a beachfront mansion on the coast of Portugal. Davida didn't have that choice, but she was young, attractive, and knew how
to sexually please members of the opposite sex. “I met some rich guy who was very cool in Russia. I had somebody to look out for me. Rick had nowhere to go. He couldn't just live on the streets there.”

Davida stayed a few months in Russia, then headed to London to stay with another second-generation defector. Her new roommate was working in gentlemen's clubs in London. She taught Davida how to strip. When her British visa expired, Davida took her new trade to the Big Apple. She arrived with $2,000. She got a room at the YMCA, went for an audition, and was hired on the spot. Perhaps it was Davida's “destiny.” She had been an erotic dancer since she was born.

When we last spoke, Davida told me she'd had it with the exotic dance business. She wanted to do something else with her life. “I'm trying to go to school,” she said. “I'd love to go and study culinary arts. But I can't afford to take time off to go to school. I got to pay my rent. It's like I'm stuck in a vicious cycle. Imagine being molested your whole life by adults—taught that you have to be submissive to every adult man. That is your only experience with adult men. Then ending up on the streets in Russia. I wake up in the morning and ask myself, ‘What am I doing?' I have no life. I can't find the happy ending.”

This has been a dark story. There are no heroes or heroines. I've struggled to find someone who rose above it all and found justice and redemption. Then I got a phone call from a woman who grew up in The Family. She is not in the book. She never knew Ricky Rodriguez or David Berg, but she suffered horrible sexual abuse as a young girl and teenager. I hadn't heard from her in many months. For a while, I had thought she could be my example of someone who overcame the horrors of the past and found redemption. She had nothing when she left The Family and returned to the United States. She wound up with an advanced degree and a satisfying, well-paying job. We never had a formal interview, but I talked to her enough to realize she was still an emotionally damaged woman. Then late one night, out of the blue, she called me as I was working on this conclusion.

At first, I wasn't sure why she called. She sounded very depressed—and perhaps drunk. We talked for about twenty minutes. Ricky was right, she said. There is no justice. Right before she hung up, she told
me she was going to die soon. I asked her what she meant. She told me she was thinking about killing herself. Then she hung up.

This is not an unusual event in the circle of Family survivors, but it was a bit unsettling for me. I called a few people who knew the woman much better than I did and told them to give her a call. One of them was Don Irwin, the brother of Merry Berg, another second-generation source with whom I had not spoken to for many months.

Researching a book like this involves the collection of thousands of pieces of paper and bits of information. After getting off the phone with Don Irwin, and being assured that someone would check up on the woman who called me that night, I remembered that I had saved a text of the eulogy Don Irwin gave at a memorial service held for Ricky in San Diego.

“Many of us grew up hearing constant lip service to love,” Irwin said to the congregation of second-generation survivors. “We all learn to love in different ways…. Allow me to tell you how all of
you
have taught me about love…. When there were young people who you did not even know, but you knew of their pain because some of it was your own,
you
showed love. You provided a place for them to meet and know that they were not alone.”
⁷

Around the time Ricky was born, Berg began calling his flock The Family of Love. Irwin's eulogy reminded me that none of us ever really leave our families, including the second generation of this Family. All we can do is find new ways to be a family. In a story as dark as this one, we have to take our hope and find our redemption wherever we can. Someone who grew up in The Family reached out that night and comforted the suicidal woman who called me. She got some help. She survived. In the end, there was still a little love and still a little family in The Family of Love.

MANY OF THE CHARACTERS
in this story initially did not want to be interviewed. Some of them had something to hide, but most were simply people who did not want to resurrect the pain that comes with reliving their past. Others thought they should be paid for their stories. They felt like they had already been exploited in life. Why should they allow someone writing a book or making a movie to use them again? Their families and their church had raised them as spiritual commodities. Why should they put themselves through
that
again?

No one in this book was paid to tell their story, but there are people in all of the above categories who—in the end—agreed to be interviewed, as well as people who chose not to talk to me. I respect the decisions of those who declined to cooperate, and I thank all of those who made a leap of faith and chose to trust me with their stories. High on the latter list are Shula Berg, Don Irwin, Davida Kelley, Rosemary Kanspedos, Elixcia Munumel, and Tiago Rugely.

Most of the current leaders in The Family International declined to be interviewed, but I would like to thank Family spokeswoman Claire Borowik for obtaining the organization's permission to publish many of the photographs in the book. Many of the source documents used to tell the story were unearthed by the diligent work of the people behind the screen at the Web sites www.exfamily.org, www.xfamily.org, and www.movingon.org.

I also thank my editor at HarperOne, Eric Brandt, for his light touch and deep insight; his colleague, Kris Ashley, who does her job with patience and grace; copyeditor Laurie Dunne; and Deputy Publisher Mark Tauber, whose friendship and longtime support of my work is greatly appreciated. I also thank my former editors and colleagues at the
San Francisco Chronicle
, who saw the potential in this story from the very beginning and gave me the time and space to tell it while it was still news.

Special thanks to Steve Proctor, George Csicsery, Richard Brzustowicz, Ginny McPartland, Cheryl Daniels Shohan, and to my literary agent, Amy Rennert, all of whom read early drafts of the manuscript and made helpful suggestions.

Final thanks go to my wife, Laura Thomas, who tempers the critical eye of a journalist with the loving support of a life partner.

DAVID “MOSES” BERG
released hundreds of missives known as “Mo Letters” between 1969 and his death in 1994. Many of them were based on edited audiotapes of lectures and conversations with his leading disciples. Berg continued to issue communiqués from the grave via Family members who purported to receive posthumous revelations from the Endtime Prophet. Some of the Mo Letters were secret, private communiqués only meant to be seen by top leaders in The Family. Others were intended for distribution to the general public. They were published and reprinted both individually and in various formats and collections over the years.

Family leaders later attempted to destroy all copies of certain controversial letters or expunge objectionable material from them. Early letters were not numbered, and the numbering system in later years was not always consistent.

My research was based on original Mo Letters saved by early devotees, reprints issued by The Family, and a bound collection of original letters found in the rare books collection of the Graduate Theological Union library in Berkeley, California. (The volume containing the most controversial letters had been stolen from the library.)

In recent years, many Mo Letters have been posted on various Web sites run by The Family (www.thefamily.org/ourfounder/ourfounder.htm) and critics of The Family (www.xfamily.org/index.php/Mo_Letters). Whenever possible, I attempted to check the text against the earliest available version of the letter.