Authors: Don Lattin
Jesus Freaks (11 page)
Ricky celebrated his sixth birthday, and Davida turned five during the Unit's eight-month stay at an old farmhouse in Puyricard, a hamlet in the south of France. Berg would spend most of his time in a trailer behind the house with Zerby, a tape recorder, and a bottle of wine. “Basically, every word he said was recorded,” one staffer recalled. “If you were walking around in the yard with him, you have to take a tape recorder. And God help you if you screwed up and didn't turn it on.”
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Berg would come down to the farmhouse on most nights for the evening meal. “Dinner could go on for hours,” recalled one regular guest. “Berg was a religious drunk. You listened to him. It was stream of consciousness. It would be about something he'd been reading. If someone had been bad in the group, you'd hear a rant about that. If he was in a good mood he'd start singing a song or want to hang around and play with the kids.”
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That's an adult recollection. Davida has her own memories of what it was like when David Berg decided to play with the kids. More than two decades later, as an adult living in New York, Davida offered her own firsthand memories of what it was like living as a child with the Endtime Prophet, a man she called “Grandpa.”
According to Davida, Berg sexually fondled her on many occasions and performed oral sex on her when she was a child. “Growing up in the Unit, there was absolutely nothing wrong with adults having sexual interaction with children. The whole thing was encouraged,” Davida said. “As Grandpa put it, âGod created us to enjoy it at a young age so I don't see why age should have anything to do with it.'
Grandpa was the mouthpiece of God. Everything he did was done in the name of Jesus and, therefore, it couldn't be wrong.”
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Grandpa loved to watch Davida dance. One day at the farmhouse in France her performance was staged against a backdrop of palm trees and a bucolic blue lagoon. Davida stood before the stage set and struck a sexy pose. She was five years old. She was topless and had a gauzy sarong tied about her waist. She had one arm on her hip and the other seductively raised behind her head.
For Grandpa, it was a Kodak moment. No one knew it at the time, but this photo would later illustrate the final page of
The Story of Daviditoâ
right above a caption describing Sara's daughter as “Dancing Davida, the Hawaiian Hula Honey.”
“Our children have learned that this dancing is not only for fun, but it's for Jesus,” Sara wrote. “Isn't it wonderful how the Lord made so many events in our life for Him so exciting and just so much fun! Hallelujah.”
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Davida's dance may have been exciting, but it was not for just the Lord. It was for Grandpa Berg, a man who loved to watch videotapes of young girls performing sexy dances. They were taped and sent to him from Family colonies all around the world. But the dance of Davida was the most exciting. She wasn't just on the
TV
screen. She was right there in the flesh, ready to be sent to the Endtime Prophet's bed whenever Grandpa was in the mood.
Dozens of these family photos illustrate
The Story of Davidito
, but there's something especially eerie about this family scrapbook. The heads of all the family members are covered over with drawings of their hair and facial features. They are half photograph, half cartoon. And they are always smiling.
Their faces were altered for security reasons. No one was to recognize the members of the inner circleânot even Family members who were sent
The Story of Davidito
as their child care manual. But the concealment of Ricky's and Davida's identities went much deeper. They were to have no personal identity. Ricky was Daviditoâprophecy embodied. Davida was a child sexuality liberated. They were not raised to be normal children. They were born to be exemplars of the great child care revolution of David Berg.
No one knows better than Davida what Ricky went through as a child. She lived with him and the Unit until she was eleven years old and he was twelve. Growing up, Davida had no concept of “sexual abuse.” Going off with Grandpa or another man was “love up” time. As she remembers it, members of her Family would get together in a gathering that could begin as a meeting or celebration and end up as a disco and an orgy. “We were all naked and getting molested when we were four or five years old. Everybody was having sex, and the kids would get involved.”
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Davida's earliest memories in the Unit involve moving and moving and then moving again. Her childhood was spent on the run. She and Ricky traveled across Europe, to South Africa, and finally to the Far East. They were always moving, yet never really leaving the cocoon that was the Unit. “We never had other interactions with kids. We'd see them on the streets or at the zoo,” she said. “It was us, Grandpa [Berg], Maria [Zerby], my mom and dad and immediate staffâsecurity, cooks, secretaries, writers, and editors.”
It would be a few more years before the teachings of the Endtime Prophet would be made flesh. Merry Berg, the child born to Shula and Aaron Berg, would be brought back to the Unit. Merry was a few years older than Ricky and Davida. She was the first to sexually come of age. Her presence was needed to make the teachings flesh.
While Davida called David Berg “Grandpa,” she was not actually related to him by blood. Merry, on the other hand, was the daughter of Aaron and the biological granddaughter of David Berg. But there was no need to worry about incest. This was the gospel of revolutionary sex. What was good in the heart of the prophet was right in the eyes of the Lord.
“To the pure,” as Berg liked to say, “all things are pure!”
Children of God in the south of France in the seventies. Standing front and center are Merry Berg and Don Irwin.
RICKY, THE SPIRITUAL
son of David Berg, was twelve.
Merry Berg, the Endtime Prophet's biological granddaughter, was fourteen.
In the gospel according to Grandpa, it was time for them to make a baby, to continue his dynasty, to make the teachings flesh.
David Berg had not seen his granddaughter since 1972, when Shula and Aaron and the infant Merry left the Endtime Prophet's hideout in London. Berg had christened Merry with the biblical name “Mene Mene,” from an Old Testament story about how the Prophet Daniel interpreted strange writings on a wall that foretold the destruction of Belshazzar and his kingdom.
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As would often be the case, Berg was half-right. Merry Berg
would
play a key role in the destruction of a kingdom. It would not be the kingdom of Belshazzar, but the kingdom of Berg. In the process, Merry would nearly destroy herself and help inspire Ricky to embark on a murderous rampage of revenge.
Hundreds of kids were born into The Family during the seventies, but none of them were made to live out the Endtime Prophet's teachings like Ricky, Davida, Merry, and Zerby's daughter, Christina
Teresa Zerby. Christina, called “Techi” in The Family, was born in the south of France on March 19, 1979. Her biological father was Michael Sweeney, a one-time Berg insider who would soon be ousted in a power struggle among the prophet's top lieutenants.
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During the eighties, the Unit remained on the run. They were in France until June 1981, when Berg predicted a nuclear holocaust would soon devastate Europe and North America. They moved to Cape Town, South Africa, to escape the coming horror.
Membership in The Familyâalways hard to determine with any certaintyâpeaked by the early eighties. Several thousand members left in 1978 and 1979 as Berg's teachings got more bizarre and leadership struggles broke out in various parts of the world. In 1978, before the wave of defections, The Family claimed 8,000 members. Only about ten percent of them were living in the United States, but babies kept being born in colonies around the world. The number of children born into The Family peaked in 1983 when the sect reported 746 births in a single year. Nearly half of the reported membership was children.
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Berg and his staffânow called “World Services”âmoved from South Africa to the Philippines in 1982. They stayed at the Admiral Hotel in Manila and then moved into a house in Greenhills, San Juan, a wealthy Manila subdivision. They rented some cottages at the Tropicana Hotel Resort in southern Manila for a few months. They then found a more permanent headquarters at a hilltop hideout in Antipolo, in an exclusive development overlooking the sprawling capital city.
Merry was summoned to join Grandpa in the Philippines in late 1983. There were now four children in the Unit. Ricky was eight, Davida was six, and Techi was four when eleven-year-old Merry arrived. Here's how Ricky, referring to Merry as “Mene,” remembered that time in the Philippines:
After she arrived, things started changing for usâ¦. It raised the standard considerably for us, and made it harder to keep up.
Maria [Zerby] and Sara [Davida's mother] were obsessed with their image and the reflection we cast on it. We not only had to be “good kids,” but we had to be the best! After all, we were “Grandpa and Maria's kids.” We were supposed to be super-kids,
commissioned with taking over The Family when Berg died, and leading God's Endtime Army through the Great Tribulation!
If we were going to be able to do that, then why on earth shouldn't they expect Techi to keep up with someone like Mene who was only seven or eight years older than she was, and certainly hadn't had “as good training”?
We still were kids, and we wanted to play with our toys and just have fun, instead of worrying about watching all our actions and making a good impression on our teachers.
Mene didn't seem to be interested in playing games and playing with toys. She didn't seem to view school and “Word Time” as something to endure, as we did. She was always held up as the example for us to follow, and we started resenting her for being smarter, more liked, and the center of attention, mainly from Berg.
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Merry's life of sexual molestation and abuse started when she was seven years old and sent to the sect's “Music with Meaning” camp in Greece. Music with Meaning was a Family radio program translated into seven languages and broadcast on radio stations in dozens of countries between 1976 and 1984, making it one of The Family's most successful operations. Girls sent to the camp were supposed to be recording Christian songs and learning that part of The Family's music ministry. But their duties also included starring in those erotic dance videos David Berg loved so much.
Shula agreed to let Merry attend the program with two of her friends. “They wanted to be there and sing. I felt like that was what Aaron would have wantedâto have his daughter used with music,” Shula said. “It was supposed to be temporary.”
Merry's sexual abuse intensified when she was sent from Greece to the Philippines to be with Grandpa. She would later testify before a British court that she was repeatedly fondled and abused by her grandfather during her four years in the Philippines.
In a 1995 judgement in a British custody case involving another child in The Family, Lord Justice Alan Ward wrote that Merry was called to Berg's quarters and sexually molested “on a number of occasions.”
“He was invariably impotent,” Ward wrote. “They did not have sexual intercourse, though he once tried to penetrate her, so there is no evidence of incest strictly defined. He did rupture her hymen with his finger. They had oral sex that was oral sex by him on her.”
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Merry told the British court that Berg even staged a mock marriage ceremony, gave Merry a silver ring, and proclaimed, “I, David, now wed thee.” Unable to consummate the incestuous marriage, Berg turned to Ricky, his spiritual son.
“Berg was looking in some warped way to carry on his line through Ricky and Merry,” explained Merry's brother, Don Irwin. “He seized on this idea that Ricky should start having dates with Merry.”
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This forced sexual relationship between Merry, aged fourteen, and Ricky, aged twelve, was acknowledged in one of the most incriminating documents ever produced by The Family. Years before Ward began his lengthy proceedings in the British custody case, Family leaders issued a letter entitled “The Last State? The Dangers of Demonism!”
“[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!”
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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 alcoholicâ¦. 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.
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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.
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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 âmental.' Three of them were completely irrational and were hallucinating. Some of them thought that they were seeing demonsâ¦. Most walked around dazed. I and a few others were the only ones who were not âmental.'”
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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.”
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