He called himself Moses David, sometimes just Dad. To the children born inside his movement, he was Grandpa. But the man who founded the Children of God was David Berg, and the love he preached was a license for horrors that would scar generations. I was raised inside that world.
We grew up certain the world would end before we reached adulthood. That meant nothing was planned long-term. Children didn’t need school because, by the time we were teenagers, the apocalypse would have come. What was the point?
The brainwashing was constant, daily, with no letup. We were born into it and knew nothing else. We didn’t stand a chance of having any other mentality than the one being fed to us. It had all seemed so wholesome at the start.
In the late 1960s, David Berg was a down-on-his-luck preacher pushing fifty, a self-styled Jesus freak among the hippies of Huntington Beach, California. He wore cloaks and berets and sunglasses to fit in with the young people he recruited on the beaches with guitars and talk of finding God as the ultimate trip. He had grown up the son of famous evangelical preachers. His mother, Virginia Brandt Berg, had her own radio show.
But Berg’s home life was repressive in ways that might explain a lot. According to his own writings, when she caught him masturbating as a teenager, she made him finish the act while the whole family watched. After decades of failure, he finally found his formula. His disciples were adolescents fleeing the drugs and excess of the sixties.
They were looking for peace and love. He gave them a family, a purpose, a mission to save souls before the end times. Many of them believed they had been saved. One woman was dancing topless in Texas and on her way to commit suicide when she met two members.
She needed a credit card to break into someone’s apartment to do it that day. They were sweet and loving, asked her what was wrong, and held her. She talked to them for a while and put off the suicide. She wound up staying for years.
At first, the group was puritanical. No drugs, no alcohol, no sex outside marriage. But Berg had no doubt that God spoke through him and him alone. He was God’s chosen end-time prophet.
He dictated everything. What we ate, how we dressed, how we acted, our finances. He had control of our minds. He didn’t believe in doctors or medicine.
God was supposed to heal us. When I was a child, I broke my arm and we didn’t go to the hospital for about a week because we prayed over it. When the prayer didn’t work, we found out it was broken and that I had a tumor in my arm. For six months, the adults would lay hands on me in the evenings and rebuke the demons.
Every time I went for an x-ray, I expected it to be healed. It never was. I eventually had to have surgery. Then Berg had a new revelation.
He called it the law of love. God only has one law now, he said. The law of love. The Ten Commandments were done away with.
And that law of love became his excuse for doing whatever he wanted, as long as he claimed it was done with love. That was how he excused having sex with children, being polygamous, and sleeping with whoever he wanted inside the communes. In 1969, Berg abandoned his wife and took his young secretary, Karen Zerby, as his common-law wife. She was twenty-five years younger than him.
They lived in seclusion, away from the communes, and controlled everything through letters, CB radio, and illustrated comic books. He wrote to us constantly. There were the Moses Letters and the Moses Comics. And there was Heaven’s Girl, a series aimed at the children.
It was about a girl who was a superhero to us, persecuted in the last days by the Antichrist’s soldiers. At one point, she is gang-raped by a group of soldiers, and she turns it into an opportunity to win them over to Christ by giving her body willingly. That was what we were expected to do. The teachings said that loving with Christ-like love meant sexualizing children.
That everyone should treat their children to this. And a lot of men made sexual advances toward me and toward many other young girls in the group. It was accepted. David Berg wrote about it and practiced it himself.
If you had the faith and the spirit, you could do it too with your children or with other girls in the home. Then there was flirty fishing. Women were sent into hotels and bars to pick up rich businessmen under the pretext of talking about Jesus, and then they would have sex with them in exchange for financial donations. The group called it religious prostitution.
Some of the women said they didn’t feel like bad girls. They felt like they were on a mission. For others, it required staying drunk every time. And there was more.
Much more. When I was four years old, I was sexually abused on multiple occasions by a man who was looking after the group I was in. I didn’t speak about it for ten years. When I finally told an adult in the home, she told me to get over it and pray and ask Jesus to help me.
That was it. That was the end of the conversation. The communes felt like prison camps. We lived out of little suitcases because we had to be ready to flee at a moment’s notice, either because the police were chasing us or because the Great Tribulation was coming.
The punishments were full-on beatings, not regular spankings. There was always someone designated to do it, someone who instilled a special amount of fear in you. They would wash our mouths out with soap if we said something that wasn’t of Jesus. They took away privileges constantly.
When the authorities raided our communities in Argentina, Australia, and elsewhere, the members were well rehearsed. They would deny everything. Child abuse? They would say there were no sexual relationships between adults and children in the community, and if anyone did anything like that, they would be asked to leave.
We all knew it was a lie. Berg’s illustrated writings went even further. In the late 1970s, he published The Story of Davidito, supposedly a guide to raising children. It was really an instruction manual for pedophiles.
It showed images of a toddler receiving sexual acts. By putting that out, he was telling people this is fine, go ahead and do it. One of the children raised according to those principles was Ricky Rodriguez, born in Tenerife in 1975. He was the son of Karen Zerby and a man she picked up while flirty fishing.
Berg adopted him and raised him like a prince who would inherit the kingdom. At the same time, Ricky was being sexually molested repeatedly. The nanny who cared for him also participated in sexual acts with the child, and it was documented and shared with the entire cult. We knew about it from reading the Davidito book.
Years later, when we saw how much it affected Ricky and how much he hated his parents, it was a wake-up call for many of us. Berg’s own daughter, Linda, eventually wrote a book about the abuses she suffered. His granddaughter, Mary, was taken into his inner circle when she was very young and abused for years. When she became a teenager and started being rebellious, refusing to go along with more abuse, Berg and his group conducted a kind of exorcism to drive the devil out of her.
She lost her mind at his hands. She left the sect and struggled with addiction and life on the street. She began to find some direction and peace. She died in her sleep in 2017.
But the most tragic story of all is Ricky’s. He left the group in 1999 when he was in his twenties. He tried to live a peaceful life with his young wife, who was also a former member. But he couldn’t forget.
He made a plan to kill his mother, Karen Zerby, who had gone into hiding. Instead, he met with his former nanny to interrogate her. Things got out of hand, way out of hand. He stabbed her three times and slit her throat with his Ka-Bar knife.
Then he got in his car, drove to California, and killed himself. That murder-suicide in 2005 was the only murder case directly linked to David Berg and the Children of God, but it was far from the only suicide. Statistically, there were quite a few young people who left the cult and killed themselves. We all knew people personally who did.
David Berg died in 1994 at the age of seventy-five, never arrested, never tried. But his legacy of pain lived on in the children of the Children of God. Leaving was terrifying. The outside world seemed like a horrible place where we would become alcoholics or drug addicts or broke.
They kept us scared. When I finally decided to go, it hit me like a flash of lightning. I could not live one more day of that horrible life. I left without any preparation.
I didn’t know what a CV was, how to look for a job, or how to open a bank account. We were like newborn babies thrown out into the world, completely vulnerable and naive. Many ex-members became victims of crime or fell into abusive relationships. I did too.
The movement didn’t disband. It renamed itself The Family International. It was run by Karen Zerby and a man named Steve Kelly, Berg’s close associate, who go by the pen names Maria Fontaine and Peter Amsterdam. They claimed the group had changed.
They still exist today. In 2008, the leadership apologized to children who had been harmed. They offered counseling with a psychologist. No one requested it.
I would still like to confront Karen Zerby today. I would tell her to be honest, to live her own preaching. She continuously denies her involvement in everything that happened, but she was heavily involved in producing the publications about child sex. Her denial is a double injury.
Still, some who were involved at the highest levels prefer to remember the early days, the good times. One told me it was fun, it was radical, that saving her life was Jesus, not Moses David. For the rest of us, surviving is the best revenge. When you can’t take them to court, you beat them by being happy.
You let them know that whatever they did to us, it doesn’t matter. We’re still here. We’re still going to live. We’re still going to be happy.
And they can’t take that away from us.
