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In Reply to: New York Times Article posted by me on January 15, 2005 at 00:37:46:
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Murder and Suicide Reviving Claims of Child Abuse in Cult
January 15, 2005
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Growing up in the 1970's in a religious cult known around
the world as the Children of God, Ricky Rodriguez was
revered as "the prince." The group's leaders were his
mother and stepfather, and they taught that their son would
guide them all when the End Times came.
He was so special that his unconventional upbringing - by a
collection of often-topless young nannies - was chronicled
in "The Davidito Book," which was distributed to cult
members as a how-to guide for rearing children. And
children the cult had in multitudes.
Last Saturday in Tucson, Mr. Rodriguez, now 29, invited a
former nanny, Angela Smith, to go to dinner. He took Ms.
Smith to his apartment, stabbed her to death, went to his
Chevrolet, drove west across the California border to a
small desert town, Blythe, and called his wife on his
cellphone to explain why he had killed Ms. Smith, the
police in both states and Mr. Rodriguez's wife said.
Then with one shot from a semiautomatic handgun, the police
said, he ended his life.
The group lives on. What was known as a 60's cult that
attracted members like the parents of the actor River
Phoenix and Jeremy Spencer, the Fleetwood Mac guitarist, is
now called the Family International.
A spokesman in Washington, Claire Borowik, described the
organization as a Christian fellowship with 4,000 children
and 4,000 adult members who lived in 718 communal houses in
100 countries. The group sends aid workers and missionaries
to disasters like the recent tsunami. Its musical troupe,
the Family Singers, have at various times sung in the White
House.
But Mr. Rodriguez's murder-suicide is reviving accusations
by former members about routine physical, emotional and
sexual abuse that they say they experienced as children.
There is evidence of the practices in documents that the
cult's leaders consider so damaging that they acknowledge
they twice sent out "purge notices" to their followers with
explicit directions about which pages to burn, which
photographs to white-out and which to excise with Exacto
knives.
Mr. Rodriguez recorded a videotape the night before he
killed Ms. Smith and committed suicide. The video, which
was provided to The New York Times by Mr. Rodriguez's wife,
was taped in his apartment in Tucson and shows him loading
a gun and showing off other weapons.
He said he saw himself as a vigilante avenging children
like him and his sisters who had been subject to rapes and
beatings.
"There's this need that I have," he said. "It's not a want.
It's a need for revenge. It's a need for justice, because I
can't go on like this."
Mr. Rodriguez is not the only suicide among people reared
in the Children of God. Some former members who keep in
touch with one another through a Web site, movingon.org,
say that in the last 13 years at least 25 young people
reared in the cult have committed suicide.
In response to questions, the Family strongly insisted in
an e-mail message from Ms. Borowik that the formers members
were intentionally inflating the count by including
accidents, overdoses and people who are alive.
For the Family International, the latest murder-suicide
threatens to revive a past that Ms. Borowik said she
thought the organization had put behind it. The Family
announced in 1986 that it had changed its guidelines and
would excommunicate anyone who had sexual contact with
children, she said.
The group survived investigations into child abuse in
Argentina, Australia, France and Spain in the 90's.
Although some members were briefly jailed, there were no
convictions of top leaders.
Ms. Borowik attributed Mr. Rodriguez's crime not to his
past, but to his current "peers." She said that when he
left the group in 2000, he came in contact with former
members who are "virulent vitriolic apostates, which we
have a small circle of, who want to do damage to our
movement."
They failed to point him in "positive directions," she
said.
Mr. Rodriguez's mother, Karen Zerby, known as the Queen or
Mama Maria, still leads the Family. Her whereabouts and
travel schedule are kept secret, even from most group
members, Ms. Borowik said, "because of her spiritual
ministry to so many people."
Ms. Zerby refused an interview request submitted to Ms.
Borowik.
Mr. Rodriguez's wife, Elixcia Munumel, from whom he had
recently separated, said he had spent the last few years
trying to find his mother and his half-sister, Techi. He
wanted to see his mother prosecuted for child abuse, and to
free Techi from the group, Ms. Munumel said.
She said that Mr. Rodriguez had moved to Tucson because he
had heard that his mother and half-sister had stopped
through there on Christmas 2003 to see his grandparents,
who run an old-age home there and that he hoped they might
visit again.
"He always wanted to do something to make right his
mother's wrong," said Ms. Munumel, who left the Family with
Mr. Rodriguez and is studying for a nursing degree. "He
felt he owed it to all of those who never got justice.
"I'm not justifying what he did and I'm not saying it was
right, because it was a life that was taken. But I want
people to understand that what he did was out of pain and
hurt and years of that pain building up and not being able
to have that weight lifted."
The founder of the Children of God was David Brandt Berg, a
son of Pentecostal evangelists. In the late 60's, he
attracted a group of hippie followers who styled themselves
as revolutionary Jesus freaks.
Ms. Zerby was his second wife. Promoting a gospel of free
love, Mr. Berg urged his female followers to go out and
offer sex to lure converts, according to histories of the
organization. He called it "flirty fishing."
The group hopscotched the globe, and its history has been
well documented by scholars. Internal documents that former
members provided this last week also fill in details.
In the Canary Islands, Ms. Zerby gave birth to Ricky, whom
the group called Davidito. Church documents show that the
father was a handsome hotel clerk in Tenerife. Mr. Berg
adopted the baby, but he was cared for day to day by a
coterie of young female members, including Ms. Smith, the
nanny who was killed.
"The Davidito Book" was written by a nanny known as Sara,
and it was among the documents that the leaders ordered
purged. But some former members saved their copies and sent
e-mail excerpts to one another this week in an effort to
fathom Mr. Rodriguez's violence.
In several pages of the book that former members sent to
The Times, the toddler Ricky is described or else pictured
as watching intercourse and orgies, fondling his nanny's
breasts and having his genitals fondled. All that is
recounted in a tone of amusement and delight.
Ms. Borowik, the spokeswoman, said in a lengthy telephone
interview that Mr. Rodriguez had been reared in an
atmosphere similar to "a nudist colony," where sexual
freedoms were taken for granted. She cited scholars who
said the sexual practices appeared to cause no harm to the
children and a psychologist who evaluated Ricky as a
teenager and found him well adjusted.
"He was never taken advantage of," she said. "Rather he was
allowed to explore his sexuality freely. He was allowed to
explore as a young boy what comes naturally, and usually in
our society, we do not allow such exploration."
In interviews this last week, more than a dozen people who
grew up in the cult gave detailed accusations about
experiencing or witnessing sex abuse of minors.
"At the time, I didn't think of it as abuse," Peter
Frouman, 29, of Austin, Tex., who left in 1987, said in a
sentiment echoed by many others. "I had no concept that
normal people didn't do this sort of thing. I thought it
was perfectly normal for parents to have sex with their
children, and children to have sex with each other and with
adults.
"When I was 11, I had sex with a 28-year-old woman, and it
was with the approval of everyone in the room. I found out
later that my mom was watching."
In 2002, Mr. Rodriguez posted a memoir on the movingon Web
site saying Mr. Berg, who died in 1994, had sexually abused
his granddaughter and daughters. In Mr. Rodriguez's
account, the group's founding father came off as a
debauched pedophile and his mother as cold and violent
toward the children.
Mr. Rodriguez, like others, gravitated to other former
members who seemed the only others who could understand the
strange world that they had inhabited. Some discussed
whether they could work through the legal system to lock up
their former abusers. But many said they despaired.
Tracking down people was difficult. Pseudonyms were the
standard in the Family, and members often changed their
names. They live in isolated, often clandestine, communes
all over the globe.
"It happened everywhere - in the Philippines, Japan,
Greece," said Celeste Jones, a former member in England.
"So where do you go for legal redress?"
Mr. Rodriguez called Ms. Jones in the 24 hours before the
killing, saying he could not go on. "I was telling him,
"Things will be taken seriously,' but he didn't believe
it," Ms. Jones said.
The police said the last telephone call that Mr. Rodriguez
made was to his wife, Ms. Munumel. She said he told her he
that had done something very wrong, to avenge not himself,
but his sisters. He then asked her to call the police in
Tucson because he had killed a former nanny.
Ms. Munumel said, "He said the hardest thing for him had
been that as she was dying, she didn't understand what she
had done wrong."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/15/national/15cult.html?ex=1106768051&ei=1&en=26ab9d1cb7533bd0
