Part Two: David Berg and the Children of God (ft. Ed Helms)

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the podcast
that you're listening to right now, And this is part
two of our episode on David Berg. So you know
this is a show about the worst people in all
of history. If this is the first episode you're listening to,
don't go listen to part one. Don't be weird, be cool.
Like our guest for this week, Ed Helms, Ed, welcome

(00:24):
back for part two.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
Thank you. If it's anything like part one, Wow, Yeah,
it's gonna be a lot more wrap in.

Speaker 1 (00:34):
Yeah, it's gonna be so much worse than part one. Ed,
But your podcast Snafu gets better every single season, and
you're in season three right now talking about when the
government poisoned a bunch of people during prohibition, which is
also a lot darker actually target than your season two
what we.

Speaker 2 (00:50):
Make it funny, We make it fun, we make it cheeky,
but also it is it's disturbing on a lot of levels,
highly informative, incredibly fun to listen to. It a deeply immersive,
highly produced audio experience about really important history. It's not
just people chatting. Yeah no, it's not just one of
those dumb shows people chatting about stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:13):
Yeah, not a chatting, it's a you know, we're all
in the same business of like, wow, there's a lot
of really dark history people should know. I guess we
have to make some jokes so they'll listen to it. Yeah, Otherwise,
no one's going to know who Curtis Yarvin is. They're
not going to read all of his weird writing.

Speaker 2 (01:29):
Yeah, we don't want to do like a horror podcast. Yeah,
even though that's probably the most accurate treatment of some
of these stories. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:35):
Oh, especially like, yeah, government mass poisoning people. I mean
in season two when you covered like the citizen break
in of the FBI, at least that's like super inspiring,
Like it's one of the coolest things Americans ever did.

Speaker 2 (01:47):
That's true.

Speaker 1 (01:53):
Yeah, we're not talking about one of the coolest things
Americans ever did. We're talking about one of the worst
people this country ever, David Berg, who at this point
is now the leader of a cult called the Children
of God. He has started. It is full on a cult. Now.
He is sexually harassing his followers and forcing them to
dress certain ways. He's sleeping with and or assaulting ones

(02:16):
and assaulting straight up assaulting. Yeah. Now we had talked
about he began an affair, first with this nineteen year
old follower and then with whoever and Mother Eve. His wife, Jane,
does not like the fact that he's suddenly like, you
know what God said, you're the old wine and we
need to get new wine. Right, So she splits she

(02:36):
had been a major leading figure, you know, in the
starting when they were teens for Christ and including during
the transition to being children of God. But she leaves
very suddenly after this at the start of the seventies.
And this takes him explaining, you know, when you're calling
your wife Mother Eve and you're Moses and suddenly she's gone,
you have to, like, you got to address that, right,

(02:58):
You can't just like pretend it did happen, Like where's
Mother Eve?

Speaker 2 (03:01):
Well, where's the mother to the children of God?

Speaker 1 (03:05):
Right? Right? She seemed pretty important. And he explains to
his followers that she had left because or he had
made her leave because she was trying to sabotage him
by convincing him he wasn't a prophet and that he
didn't pray enough. Obviously we know the real reason, but
that's the reason he gives his followers. We had like
a devil infiltrator inside our organization. Now, what started as

(03:28):
a defense of his own polygamy had quickly evolved into
this cult wide practice of free love, or at least
as we talked about. It's not in any of the
ways that the hippies meant it free love, but that's
what Berg calls it. And while there is and this
is something that draws people in, there's a lot less
restriction in the Children of God of what cult members
can do sexually. Right, It's not like the branch Davidians,

(03:50):
where it's just the one guy.

Speaker 2 (03:52):
Right.

Speaker 1 (03:53):
Berg also largely seems to have used the fact that
his followers are increasingly sleeping around with each other as
a safety valve to clamp down on unrest, right, while
he continues to exercise dictatorial control over the rest of
their lives and over the now a number of women
that he is now sleeping with. Right, it's often referred
to as a harem right that he's got. And so

(04:15):
this is kind of like, this is your one little
bit of it's not even really freedom, but it's kind
of the one benefit you get to keep people in
line with the stuff that's a lot harder to swallow.
And he is again, this is not free like Zerbi.
The young woman who he starts having an affair with
is Karen Zerby. That's like the nineteen year old follower who,

(04:35):
three months after he joins he starts sleeping with. He
orders Zerbi to radically change her diet in order to
lose weight. He dictates her hairstyle and what clothing she
wears on a day to day basis. He's exercising like
pretty total control over her life. And as he travels
around the country to new Children of God communal houses
and farms, he's sleeping with whatever young follower he desires.

(04:57):
One of these young women later told Rolling Stone that
the act of admitting to Burg in this way was
described as a revolutionary action in the cults literature. Right,
you were helping to overthrow the corrupt and evil government,
warmongering government by sleeping with David Burke. And she said, quote,
I was so indoctrinated at the time. I accepted what
Berg did sexually without question. Right, that this is what

(05:20):
we're doing by submitting to him in this way is
actually in some way damaging the military industrial complex, right,
which is it's hard to get yourself into that mind state.
But it's important to understand that this is what a
lot why a lot of people justify submitting to him, right, Sure.
And one thing that makes this shift kind of less
of a massive sea change for members of the Children

(05:41):
of God than you might imagine was another practice that
had been part of their doctrine since the teens for
christ Days, and it's have you ever heard of the
term love bombing? Kind of as applied course, this is
where it starts, or one of the two places where
it starts. We're talking about like the very origin of
that as a concerted tactic, right, and the basic idea
behind love bombing was described this is the guy.

Speaker 2 (06:06):
Different. Did the term come up first in this context? Sorry?

Speaker 1 (06:11):
Or just the tactic as I'll talk about. There's some
debate as to where the term came from. The first
professional psychiatrist type figure to describe this was a Margaret
Singer in a book called Colts in Our Mist and
she describes love bombing this way. As soon as any
interest is shown by the recruits, they may be love
bombed by the recruiter or other cult members. This process
of feigning friendship and interest in the recruit was originally

(06:33):
associated with one of the early youth cults, but soon
it was taken up by a number of groups as
part of their program for luring people in. Love Bombing
is a coordinated effort, usually under the direction of leadership,
that involves long term members flooding recruits and newer members
with flattery, verbal seduction, affectionate but usually non sexual touching,
and lots of attention for their every remark. And this

(06:54):
is a common tactic for cults of all kinds today,
and it may have started with the Children of God. Right,
there's debate about this. David Berg's daughter Deborah, and another
early member of the church both write memoirs about their
early days in the church, and they use the term
love bombing in those memoirs. Right, It's kind of unclear

(07:14):
to me, does that mean that this was the first
because that would have been kind of on the timeline
the first time this was practiced. But it's also right
around the time the Unification Church is using a similar tactic,
and the Unification Church is like Singer is the one
who coins the term love bombing to describe what the
Unification Church is doing. So Burg and the Children of
God and the Unification of Church are kind of pioneering

(07:38):
this tactic. And there's some people who will argue that
the term love bombing was first used to describe the
tactic the Children of God were using. Right, there's debate
about this. It's kind of unclear to me. I don't
have enough here to say one way or the other
who's right, but they're both. It's fair to say Berg
is a pioneer of the tactic. He's one of the
very first cult leaders who's using this in a really

(07:59):
concertative way way. And I found there's a website of
former members of the cult called X Family like X
like the letter X family, but it means like you know,
you left the family, which is another name for the cult.
And they note that Singer would go on to theorize
about like why love bombing works with an evolutionary psychologist
named Keith Henson, and their theory was that this was

(08:22):
so effective because there's of this kind of Stone Age
human programming people have. Basically, very early hunter gatherer groups
survived because people who did stuff that helped the whole community,
even if it was hard or dangerous, got praised like
everyoneould be like, hey man, it's amazing that you like
did this.

Speaker 2 (08:40):
You walked in with a with like a fresh kill
a giant antelope on your shoulder, Like you're gonna get
love bombed.

Speaker 1 (08:47):
Right, people are gonna be like, oh my god, you're
the best. Right.

Speaker 2 (08:49):
But when they're not doing it cynically, they're doing it
grateful because you.

Speaker 1 (08:52):
Saved their lives, right, Yeah, And so like you get
this this flood of dopamine when a whole community praises
you at once, and that makes it kind of addictive.
And that's a really effective evolutionary thing. Right, If like
everyone gets addictive to helping the group survive, the group
has better odds of surviving.

Speaker 2 (09:09):
Right. I'm sure this goes back as a tactic wave
of like.

Speaker 1 (09:14):
Century pre human probably even to some extent, right, Like yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (09:18):
I mean not just evolutionarily, I mean but but but yeah,
I mean as a tactic, right, and even not even
as a as a I would I would think that
a lot of people, whether or not they're in a cult,
if they're just in a sort of like uh, some
some kind of social cohesive group, that love bombing can
sort of happen organically and it's not done. No one

(09:41):
no one is, no one is cynically thinking like we're
gonna love bomb this person. It just is a sort
of like thing that happens. Yeah, like like fraternity initiation
or all these things, fringe groups, families, you know, political affiliations,
like all these kinds of things. I think that's such
an important point because with all of every cult dynamic,

(10:02):
there is a non toxic version of it. That's a
reason why the Colt dynamic works. And like, yeah, like.

Speaker 1 (10:09):
Your your friend group, you know when you notice like
one of your buddies is having a bad time they've
had trouble and work like, hey, let's all get together
and like really make like, you know, Jim feel better, right,
like make mi like how much we give a shit
about him and stuff?

Speaker 2 (10:21):
Hold on, is Jim in trouble again?

Speaker 1 (10:26):
With jeh?

Speaker 2 (10:27):
God, damn, Jim's a mass. Honestly, I'm done with Jim.

Speaker 1 (10:31):
I was also kind of thinking, as you brought this up,
in terms of like earlier places and ancient Rome. You know,
when you had a general who was really successful, they
do this thing called a triumph where the whole city
turns out and you're like basically king for a day
and everybody has to praise you.

Speaker 2 (10:45):
That's like so serious love bombing.

Speaker 1 (10:47):
Right, that would get you addicted to like the making
the empire bigger? Right? Yeah, so you're right, like people,
you know, this is neither the Unification Church nor Berg
invented this thing, but they they were the first people
to kind of develop it as a tactic in a
way that got noticed and kind of codified by the
scientific community as like, oh, here's what's going on here, right,

(11:10):
But you're absolutely correct that, like this has been a
thing for a spell, right, And you know what you're
doing here is you're getting people addicted to the group,
and that's a really useful thing. If the next thing
you're going to ask them is, hey, you kind of
got to cut off all your family and friends who
don't join and also sign over your bank accounts, right, Like,
if this is if this is your heroine, it's a

(11:30):
lot easier to get you to do that, right. And
that's that's where the Children of God are in the
early seventies, and that's part of why once more of
this free love rhetoric starts entering and Berg is kind
of he's not giving it away all at once, but
it's starting to drip out. It doesn't seem as much
of a shift because love bombing's non sexual, but it
kind of gells well with like and now we're all

(11:51):
having sex too, right, Like, yeah, you can kind of
get that. And also, you know, sex is habit forming,
so it makes the cult more addictive too, right Like,
all of these things are kind of coming together. And
Karen zerbe is Berg's first test subject for this new tactic.
But as time goes on, he initially you know, she's nineteen,
he's in his fifties. This is he is very much

(12:13):
he has a lot of power over here. This is
very much an abusive dynamic. As time goes on, Zerbi
is very smart, and she takes more and more power
and agency for herself. She's going to wind up leading
the cult in a couple of decades, so that is
a continual process for her. And very quickly she goes
from being this person he is controlling to this person

(12:33):
he is discussing new tactics with and helping to plot
out and implement these new tactics, right and she's accepting
everything he does to her as long as she gets
to hold a position of power in the group. One
former member later described her as having bought into Berg's
new doctrine, heart, mind, body, and soul. Quote, her naivete
was replaced by a recalcitrant fierce loyalty to him, right,

(12:57):
and he's going to be very loyal to her too.
He's she's almost the only person he's ever loyal to
in his life, like in a messed up way, because
neither of them are good people, but they might be soulmates,
like in a really evil way.

Speaker 3 (13:10):
Right, what about his old tolmte? What about that wife?

Speaker 1 (13:13):
What about she is gone, She is out of the picture.
She did not like this cult, so she is she
is away at this point. So once Mother Eve is
gone and Zerbe is kind of the number two at
the cult, she ascends and she takes a new name, Maria.
All traces of Mother Eve are erased from the growing
body of cult literature, and cultists begin calling Zerbi Mama Maria. Right,

(13:37):
so you've got mo or Moses, David and Mama Maria
leading the children again.

Speaker 2 (13:41):
How old is she?

Speaker 1 (13:43):
She's like twenty twenty one at this point. Oh wow, yep,
yep she is again. There's a lot complicated here. She
starts as a victim, but she's also like there's a
degree to what she's like a prodigy at cult stuff,
Like she gets very good at this very quickly.

Speaker 2 (13:57):
And uh, and where is this? Like are they still
bouncing between West Texas and La?

Speaker 1 (14:03):
Yes, they are traveling around and all around. They've got
a bunch of different states now by this point, by
seventy one seventy two, there's hundreds of members, right, and
so they've got like a dozen or more places that
they're traveling between, and they've started drawing attention from national
news that's not entirely positive at this point. Right now,
a lot of the physically coercive stuff, like what we
talked about with the bras, is not widely known yet,

(14:26):
but some of the free love stuff is starting to be.
And this looks like a synthesis of hippie culture and Christianity, right,
which is not fully accurate because it's a lot of
the stuff from hippie culture has been twisted to be
more abusive. But it seems cool, right, And it seems
cooler than maybe a lot of these other kind of
evangelical strains that are picking up stragglers from the hippie movement.

(14:48):
You know, sure, David Berg will control your daily life,
and he'll take your money, but you could be naked
whenever you want, and you can make love freely, right,
which is a lot better deal for some of these
people than they've gotten prior in their lives.

Speaker 2 (14:59):
Right.

Speaker 1 (15:00):
The sex aspect of things separates the children from most
of these other groups, and prominent people start joining. Foremost
among them Jeremy Spencer, the original slide guitarist from Fleetwood Mac.
In nineteen seventy one, he shaves his head, joins the
cult and starts going by Jonathan Wow.

Speaker 2 (15:17):
Yeah wait wait what was his name before then? Jeremy Spencer,
Jeremy Spencer, Yeah, go switches to Jonathan. Yes, yes, Jeremy Jonathan.

Speaker 1 (15:27):
Very creative name, no lateral move. Look, he's a slide guitarist.
He's not writing the songs. You know, we had never
gotten Silver Springs from Jeremy. So by the time your
colt starts poaching members of Fleetwood Mac, it's hard to
stay under the radar, right, And I should know. I
look this up. Jeremy Spencer left the band in nineteen

(15:49):
seventy one, which is six years before Rumors was released.
Now does this mean David Berg started Does this mean
we might not have gotten rumors, or it would have
got a different version of rumors. You know, these are
the kind of historic questions that'll drive you mad if
you dwell on them too.

Speaker 3 (16:06):
Literally, what I was looking up, I was like, that
was my exact question.

Speaker 1 (16:10):
Yeah, No, he was well ahead of rumors. Yeah, and
Fleetwood Mac moved around. They had their list of musicians
changed a crazy amount before they got as famous as
they eventually got.

Speaker 2 (16:21):
Anyway, I wonder if they stayed friends with Jeremy Jonathan.

Speaker 1 (16:26):
Jeremy's into some weird stuff now, man. Yeah, he's not
doing as much slide guitar. So by nineteen seventy two,
you got hundreds and hundreds of young people, and they're
mostly very young, living in dozens of communal homes around
the country and in a couple of other countries. At
this point, people are changing their names, they're cutting off
ties to their families under Berg's orders, and this spawns

(16:48):
a movement, an anti Children of God movement that's mainly
like parents, along with some spouses and other relatives of
cult members who are like, hey, like law enforcement, something
might be going on here, like this, this seems bad,
Like it seems like maybe something that you should look into.
You have to remember though, at this time, number one,
colts is a concept aren't as well understood as they're

(17:11):
going to become. This is kind of the early days
for a lot of popular knowledge and even academic understanding
of cults. And I think what the police would have
said generally is like, well, what, like they're just preaching.
It's like a Christian church. What crime are they committing? Right,
They're not communists or anything, you know, Like, so there's
there's a degree to which you know they're kind of
there's this movement of people who have been hurt by

(17:32):
the cult trying to get the warning out, and it's
not yet taking off, right, it's going to start in
the mid seventies, but Berg kind of anticipates it, right.
He realizes that, like, eventually, the more and more people
I get, the more I will have law enforcement kind
of come down on me, and it's probably time to
go underground. So in the early seventies, he publishes a

(17:54):
mo letter titled I Got a Split, and he tells
his followers that he's taking his inner circle and are
going to live underground. They're going to travel secretly from
cult location to cult location, but they're hiding from the
government now, right, he's kind of preempting, like, I know
there's going to be criminal investigations at some point into
the shit I'm doing.

Speaker 3 (18:12):
I just want to say, I really don't like the
phrase Moe letter.

Speaker 1 (18:15):
I don't like the mo letters. That's what they call him.

Speaker 3 (18:18):
Not into it.

Speaker 2 (18:19):
It's kinda it's kind of spunky. So he's sort of
it's like, we.

Speaker 1 (18:23):
Got another mo letter, we got another MO letter letter.
He's hiding from the FBI. Now, inn't that cool?

Speaker 3 (18:29):
It doesn't do it for me.

Speaker 2 (18:31):
Surely there was some like the way you're sort of
describing it, it sounds like he just sort of sensed that, yes,
maybe he would get investigated. But but if you're going
to go under ground, I mean he must have caught
wind of some like serious implications starting to there's some
walls closing in.

Speaker 1 (18:49):
Yeah, you know, I think some of it is that
he is genuinely he's got a kind of cunning and
he just knows this is where it's going to go.
I do wonder you're looking at like l Ron Hubbard
kind of around this period also flees the US, right,
because he's getting investigated for some stuff and goes to London,
and I wonder how much of it is like him
being like, Oh, at some point that'll happen to me.

(19:09):
I should probably bounce, because he also flees to London, right,
that's yeah, he leaves the US, he goes to the UK,
and he's never going to re enter the United States.

Speaker 2 (19:18):
And you know they ain't paying taxes. Oh god, no,
you know, you know, at the very least there's going
to be some irs hell to pay.

Speaker 1 (19:28):
Yeah, and it's one of those like, yeah, they're a church,
but you're still supposed to file something to at least
let him know what you're not paying on. And I
don't think there's much of that going on. So they
go to the UK with the plan of like, you know,
we're just going to kind of hang out here until
we commit enough crimes here that we have to leave
the UK. Their decision of where to flee was largely

(19:51):
made by the fact that one of their first really
wealthy followers, who's this British multi millionaire. I haven't found
his name in any of the literature, but this very
wealthy British man joins the cult, and because he's powerful,
he doesn't sign over all of his assets, right, and
Berg doesn't it doesn't like force the matter, right, But
he does give the cult an empty factory which they

(20:13):
turn in using some of his money into their London headquarters.

Speaker 2 (20:16):
Right.

Speaker 1 (20:16):
They build it out in the housing. And it's likely
and there's a little bit of speculation for me on this,
but it's this is based on stuff that they do
later and caudify later. Is a tactic that this rich
guy who gives them this London headquarters is rewarded for
what he does by being given access to a lot
of young female cult members, right, And that this kind

(20:38):
of the fact that this works that like, oh, this
really makes this guy into us, I think is going
to it's going to influence something they do later that
we're building towards.

Speaker 2 (20:48):
This is getting very epsteiny.

Speaker 1 (20:50):
Oh my, you have you have predicted where this is going? Okay, Yeah,
although Epstein never on this scale at least as far
as we know, although I will say most of these
people are adults at this point. By nineteen seventy three,
Berg's growing free love ideas had spread out across the
network of communal living spaces in the US and now

(21:12):
the UK. Again. This started in like a decentralized fashion,
But in seventy three he makes the policy official, publishing
his first MO letter to officially link the children of
God to free love quote, thank God for the sexual
liberation movement. It is beginning to relieve us from some
of our former taboos and frustrations of the past. And
his preaching had taken a more apocalyptic tone by this point.

(21:35):
By the end of his time in the US, Berg
had become convinced that California was going to suffer an
apocalyptic earthquake which would send the whole state sliding into
the ocean, like in that War and Zevon song. But
you know, he's also believes that, like, yeah, the world's ending.
The Antichrist is coming, and that's what he's preaching about, right,
And part of his justification for why we need to
adopt sexual liberation is like, hey, the world's about to end.

(21:56):
Why not?

Speaker 2 (21:56):
You know?

Speaker 1 (21:57):
Like the the fact that this works causes him to
get bolder, and he merges this kind of liberatory rhetoric
with his preaching. Subsequent MO letters have titles like Revolutionary
Sex and Revolutionary love Making and Revolutionary Sex. He devotes
a lot of time to arguing that the Bible is
fine with incest, and that marriages of brothers and sisters,

(22:18):
mothers and sons, and even fathers and daughters are okay. Right,
he is not openly preaching pedophilia at this point, but
that's not that far from it.

Speaker 2 (22:27):
Right, Wow, oh yeah, openly preaching incests?

Speaker 1 (22:31):
Yeah yeah, dark.

Speaker 2 (22:33):
I mean, if you're openly preaching incest, you're probably openly
preaching pedophilia, because there's very you're not also saying incest
is fine if you wait till they're of legal age.

Speaker 1 (22:45):
Right, Yeah. And I think that is like there's a
little bit of debate about when he starts because like
we don't have perfect contexts because he's he's got his
inner circle that he tests stuff out on before it
gets out to the whier cult. So there is probably
an extent to which he's starting to talk about the
pedophilia to his inner circle at this point. You know,

(23:05):
that's not perfectly clear, but you see this kind of
thing over and over again, where like he'll start kind
of testing the waters, right, And I think this incest
thing ishim testing the waters with the broader international cult
about like I'm going to start preaching about pedophilia. Right,
But I want to like prep the ground here.

Speaker 2 (23:24):
God, how big is how many people are we talking
at this point?

Speaker 1 (23:27):
We are talking by nineteen seventy three, twenty four hundred
full time members, right, So these are people who live
in cult housing. They've got one hundred and forty housing
projects in forty countries around the world by nineteen seventy three.
Now that's full time members. There's thousands more who haven't joined.
They're not living, they don't follow, but they'll just pract
by the literature, right, they'll listen to him, right, because

(23:50):
he's putting out like radio stuff, he's putting out tapes,
he's putting out comic books, and so they're like fans,
and a lot of the money comes from them. And
then there's this twenty four hundred person harder core of
four full time members, right. And again, the inner circle
he's got gets the most and earliest versions of all
of the like really radical stuff he's preaching, and then

(24:10):
the full time members get stuff a little bit later,
and it takes a lot longer for stuff to percolate
out to the people who are just kind of contributing money,
but they're not members of the church. Right he is.
You know. He puts out a mo letter around this
time called One Wife, which argues that the nuclear family
is ungodly, and he orders any such families within the

(24:31):
church to be broken up. Husbands and wives are separated
from their children. They are forced to Husbands wives are
also separated from each other. So if you like have
a family and you're all living in a communal house together,
husband will be sent to one house and David will
pair him with other women there. A wife will be
sent to a different house, David will pair her with
other men there, and then the kids will be sent

(24:51):
to be raised communally, away from their parents. Right, this
is Eus deeply abusive. It's also as the cult leader,
what's the biggest danger to you? It's that people are
more loyal to their family than you, Right, so you
break up families, you know.

Speaker 2 (25:08):
Yeah, it's interesting, like the manipulative payoff of so much
cult activity is clear, Like from the outside, it's just
like what you just said, it makes perfect sense that
you would want to keep cult members from gaining intimacy

(25:30):
and loyalty to their families because it would undermine their
commitment to him. How clear do you think, Like just
generally speaking, when a cult leader mandates something like that,
do you think they're aware of the reason they're doing
that or they just sort of they're they're so steeped
in their own benevolence or belief in their own benevolence

(25:53):
that they're just kind of like doing these irrational things
and justifying it with insane ways. And it's not the
sort of cynical tactic that we see it to be
from the outside, you know.

Speaker 1 (26:06):
And I think that is like, in a lot of ways,
the million dollar question with this stuff, and like I
would be lying on I said, like, this is definitely
the answer. I'll give you what I think is happening here. Sure,
I think that today because there's a lot of documentation
about different cults in the past, there's a lot of
academic literature on how they work and like why cult
dynamics work. I think a lot of modern cult leaders
are aware of what they're doing and understand technically what

(26:29):
works and what doesn't, and are going about things methodically.
Maybe not not all of them, but a lot of them.
Berg because there's less of that written, I think this
is instinctual to him to some extent. He's got cult
leader instincts, right, and I think he may just this
this all kind of really like, I think a lot
of this is there's a degree to which like he
and Zurbi are strategizing some of this, so they are

(26:51):
consciously building some tactics.

Speaker 2 (26:53):
Yeah, but narcissism is a very powerful kind of like
just a powerful mechan for toxic behavior that is sort
of not understood by the narcissist themselves.

Speaker 1 (27:06):
Yeah, and I think there is a lot of that going. Like,
I don't he's certainly not conscious of the psychological underpinnings
of everything that he's doing. Sure, right, there is planning,
but yeah, I think he is. I think he's kind
of got really good instincts for running a cult, you know,
just like some people have good instincts for I don't know,
different sports or whatever. He's like one of those case
that gets drafted at fourteen for the NBA. It's like,

(27:27):
oh my god, David Berg, you're gonna be a cult
leading All Star.

Speaker 3 (27:31):
You can't get drafted at fourteen in the NBA.

Speaker 1 (27:34):
Okay, Sophie's the one who knows about sports.

Speaker 4 (27:36):
Here.

Speaker 1 (27:36):
I shouldn't have even tried.

Speaker 3 (27:38):
That was embarrassing.

Speaker 1 (27:39):
Yep. And that's why I'm going to throw to ads
right now, Sophie, to distract everyone. There we go, so
we're back. So by seventy three, again they're in forty
different countries around the world, which means Berg and his
inner circle have the freedom to travel underground indefinitely and
move to new established living quarters with his inner circle

(28:02):
in different countries once the law starts to catch on
in one place, so they start to get a hint
that like maybe the UK is about to investigate us.
Let's go to hey. For the last year, we've had
them prepping a house for us in somewhere in the
Balkans right or in the Canary Islands. Let's head over
there now. And he's actually got basically like advanced teams

(28:23):
moving out ahead of him making sure places are set
up for him. So a lot of this is very methodical.
In nineteen seventy four, Bulley'd buy the success they'd experienced
so far. Berg and Zerbe cook up a new tactic
to raise money and increase the numbers of their cult,
and they call it flirty fishing. Per an article on
the ex Family website, I want to quote like what

(28:45):
this is. Flirty fishing was a subset of the family's
love bombing activities and involved the use of sexual attraction
and intercourse to win converts and favors. Female members were
told to be God's whores and hookers for Jesus, and
soon after its launch, a method of witnessing sex was
given to complete strangers in combination with the request of
a donation or for a required fee in line with

(29:07):
escort service.

Speaker 4 (29:08):
Single.

Speaker 1 (29:10):
So this is he has started prostituting the female members
of his cult to raise money. Right, there's both a
degree of this is how if we can find rich people, right,
we can get them to give us a lot of money.
If we can make them fall in love with one
of our members, we can also just he's basically an
innercontinental pimp, right, making money for the church that way.

(29:32):
And also obviously this leads to pregnancies, and the goal
is that the kids that come out of these liaisons
will be the second generation of the cult. He calls
them Jesus babies, right wow.

Speaker 2 (29:44):
Wow, Yeah, the sex trafficking sounds a lot more fun
if you call it flirty fishing.

Speaker 1 (29:53):
Yes, it does. And to give you an idea of
like how big a business this is by the fall
of nineteen ninety eight. Records show that the Colt kept
records that showed that members, like female members of the
cult had quote unquote loved two hundred and twenty three thousand,
three hundred and eleven fish.

Speaker 2 (30:13):
What Yeah, well, how many people had done that much loving? Uh?

Speaker 1 (30:19):
Several hundred? We have in one case, like we know
that Zerbi around this period, just when they're in tiner Reef,
which is kind of when they start building this tactic,
has sex one hundred and thirty seven times with eighteen
different like men on the island as she's sort of
like experimenting with how this is going to work.

Speaker 2 (30:36):
Wow, yeah, wait where's tener Reef.

Speaker 1 (30:39):
Tiner Reef is in the Canary Islands.

Speaker 2 (30:41):
Okay, wow wow Yeah.

Speaker 1 (30:44):
It's it's like the scale of it when you like
put that out is like it's nuts. Like this is
like it I think there's there's a chance here that
like this guy is the most prolific pimp in all
of history, Like there's not there couldn't be that many
people who could compete with that kind of right, He's
at least got to be in the running for it.
At this point. It's just like a startlingly large scale

(31:07):
that they're working on, and this is where a lot
of their money comes from, and it becomes such a
defining practice of the cult that even it's modern day
because that the children have got is still around and
he's dead. Now they have to address that this happened
on their website and they describe the tactic not as
an active attempt to seduce and manipulate people, but as

(31:28):
a response to quote the sexual liberality of the time period,
which quote presented the possibility of trying out a more
personal and intimate form of witnessing. And you know, you
could take that however you want. I think that what's
happening here is this is not about liberation. This is
about number one Berg exercising more control, and it's also

(31:49):
about him making money in order to fund his lifestyle.
Right like this is it's a natural evolution of everything
that they've been doing and of his need for control.

Speaker 2 (31:57):
Do we have the mo letters that, oh, yes, that
sort of kicked this into gears, Yes, that would sort
of that would help clear up any of the spin
on the on the present day website.

Speaker 1 (32:11):
Yes, so Berg himself in a mo letter scripturally justified
flirty fishing. He quoted one John four to eight, which
stated God is Love, and then I want to quote
from David Berg dot com to kind of describe how
he goes in to justify this. Logically, since God is
love and his son Jesus is the physical manifestation and
embodiment of God's love for humanity, then we, as Christian

(32:34):
recipients of that love, are in turn responsible to be
living samples to others of God's great, all encompassing love.
Taking the Apostle Paul's writings literally that save Christians are
dead to the law of Moses. Through faith in Jesus,
Berg arrived at the rather shocking conclusion that Christians were
therefore free, through God's grace to go to great lengths
to show the love of God to others, even as

(32:54):
far as meeting their sexual needs. And that's how they're
describing it. Again, they're charging money for this. But his
attitude is that, like, well, sex is a need like
food or water, and so it's actually unethical if you
refuse to give your body to someone for the church,
right because they need the sex and the church needs

(33:16):
the money.

Speaker 2 (33:17):
I mean, the the exchange of money kind of just
like yeah, like negates all of this, Like this is
just like you would like even if even if you
were to say, like, actually, there are some theological basis
for this. Yeah, like once the money is exchanged, doesn't
that just undermine all of it?

Speaker 1 (33:35):
You would think so, And I think you and I
can say logically it should. But I think here's what's
going on, right, It's normal in this subculture, this evangelical subculture,
for you to go preach the word and take donations
and live off of that. And they're arguing sex like
this is a form of preaching. Why shouldn't they take donations?

Speaker 2 (33:54):
You know, he missed his true calling. He's a great
cult leader, like among the best, but I will say,
like he might make an even better lawyer.

Speaker 1 (34:04):
Is awesome lawyer.

Speaker 2 (34:06):
This is this is the interpretation and manipulation of text
and pros to serve a very specific outcome. And it
is a deeply cynical practice that lawyers are so like
the most brilliant lawyers have an uncanny knack for And

(34:27):
I would posit he might have been a better lawyer
than a goat leader. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (34:32):
I also think maybe marketing, like I could almost imagine
this is like a don draper scene where he's like,
let he puts it out to you institution but preaching,
you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, so obviously yeah he is
he's this is you know, pimping, right, like, that's what
he's doing here. And there's a lot that's that's abusive
about this, but it's all justified kind of in the

(34:54):
way that we discussed. And what is shocking to me
is while they do have these scriptural justification for the
fact that they are now like doing prostitution to fund
the cult, they have these scriptural justifications, but they're also
straight up about what they're doing. The cult has a
newspaper and they publish comic books, including ones that explicitly
advise female members to become hookers for Jesus, and Sophie's

(35:16):
going to show you an image from one of these comics.
It's literally just like because it's it's illustrating flirty fishing.
There's like a woman who's a mermaid. She's got like
a hook through her and she's like holding a man
who's naked by the shoulders and it just says hooker
for Jesus above her.

Speaker 2 (35:31):
Wow, like just hooker, hooker.

Speaker 1 (35:34):
Hooker literally is just hooker.

Speaker 3 (35:37):
Yeah, there's literally a hook through her body.

Speaker 1 (35:40):
Yeah, I am that's not us editorializing. That's how they
describe it. Wow, it's wild.

Speaker 2 (35:47):
And then and a very erotic presentation. I mean that
that's just explicitly pornographic.

Speaker 1 (35:54):
Yes, yes, wow, and there's a lot of that.

Speaker 2 (35:57):
By the way, I just want to say, I do
not I did not mean to impugne the the profession of.

Speaker 1 (36:02):
The leader profession.

Speaker 2 (36:04):
I think I know and love a lot of lawyers,
but it is, uh, there there is a special talent
in that regard that I was just calling out.

Speaker 1 (36:14):
You can use that skill for good or for evil,
right exactly?

Speaker 2 (36:17):
Thank you.

Speaker 1 (36:17):
Well, yeah, it's like you can you could become a
cult leader, or you could become like a really good
actor or a musician, right, and it make stuff that
people love. Right, Like, the same skills kind of apply.

Speaker 2 (36:28):
I don't think I could be a cult if you're
applying like, no, I think there's a there's a well,
I don't know, ye, I'll give it a try.

Speaker 1 (36:38):
Yeah, give it a shot. Like there's types of like
you know, Mick Jagger, if he'd wanted to create a cult,
obviously he never did. I'm not saying he was a
bad person but he could have, right, Like he's got
that kind of like people loved watch like following him, right,
Like there's that piece of it, right, And most people
who aren't bad are just like, oh, you know it,

(36:58):
being a rock star is great, I'll just do that, right.
Some people are like, I need a little more. I
need to absolutely destroy thousands of people's lives, right, yeah,
but there's like, yeah, pieces of it. One of the
things I found when researching this for an idea of
like how direct this is. There's a comic book called
Heaven's Girl, which is like it's half illustrated tract and

(37:19):
it's half text. Have you ever heard of the Left
Behind books? Oh?

Speaker 2 (37:23):
Yeah, sure, yeah, I mean it became a TV series.

Speaker 1 (37:26):
It became a TV series. There's a movie with Nicholas
Cage that they made that it didn't do well enough
to make sequels of, but like, yeah, these are pretty prominent.
It's this is telling the same story right where it's
the apocalypse, right, the Christians get raptured or a lot
of people get raptured. The un style anti christ leader
comes and takes over, and it's following this like female

(37:49):
lead character who is like basically a prophet and trying
to like preach the word of God in this increasingly
this world that's falling apart. There's some kind of racist
panels where like we see see militants in the street
who look like black panthers who are like but anyway,
there's a lot of that kind of stuff at it.
But there's this it's a very normal like left behind
kind of thing where it's like, Okay, so you've got

(38:11):
the Antichrist coming to power and he's cracking down and
punishing all of the Christians, and you've got this lady
who's preaching. And there's a segment in the middle of
it where she gets like arrested by a bunch of
the Antichrist's troops and they're ordered to execute her and
then decide let's rape her instead, and then she decides, no, no, no,

(38:31):
I'm totally down with this. I'll do this to try
to I'll have sex with all of these soldiers to
try to convince them to go to Christ. And so
there's like a descriptive pornographic scene of her having sex
with all these guys and preaching to them, and then
it like structurally means nothing, none of them come to Jesus.

Speaker 2 (38:50):
She like escaped.

Speaker 1 (38:50):
They throw her to a lion, and she escapes because
of God. So it's both like really pornographic, but also
just like unnecessary, like there's there's nothing that happens as.

Speaker 2 (39:00):
You're doing this.

Speaker 1 (39:00):
She doesn't win any souls or save herself. So it's
both this like weirdly gratuitous thing of like, actually, it's
awesome to be a woman in this position. That's very gross,
and it's also just like narratively unnecessary. But this is
the kind of way they're talking about it, right, where
like if you were in this position, the right thing
to do is give your body up to be a

(39:21):
witness for God, right, And that's they're very explicit about it, right.
There's not any kind of like hiding it within the
cult materials. They made a comic book of it, which
I am not showing you pages from because it is
just straight up pornography in a lot of segments here.
And by the way, porn is not forbidden within the
children of God. They are putting it on in a

(39:43):
lot of their communal households. They're showing it to kids,
especially in some of like the internal like closer to
Berg places, so like things are starting to escalate in
this regard right. In nineteen seventy three, Berg publishes a
tract called mon Ma burn your Bra And this is
in response they've been doing the bra burning thing for

(40:04):
a while to a casual follower, so not one of
his full time members, who had like written him a
letter being like, I like a lot of what you
have to say, but I'm kind of uncomfortable with some
of the revolutionary sex stuff. And his response to her
in this tract is wild. First off, in all caps,
he says, we have a sexy god and a sexy
religion and a very sexy leader with an extremely sexy

(40:27):
young following exclamation point, and then continues in lower case letters. Now,
so if you don't like sex, you'd better get out
while you can still save your bra. Salvation sets us
free from the curse of clothing and the shame of nakedness,
whereas free of as Adam and Eve in the garden
before they ever send. If you're not, you're not fully saved.
And yeah, this is like the rhetoric he's sending out

(40:49):
to people not in the cult that like, actually without
the sex stuff, God won't recognize you as one of
his own, like this is a requirement now. So things
have escalated pretty quickly from seventy to seventy four, he
could say now Berg's live in underground at this point.
As we've talked about, he's got this inner circle that's

(41:09):
mostly a harem of young women, which at this point
includes a teenager named Rachel who he had previously conducted
her wedding to a male member of the cult two
years earlier and then took her away from him to
marry himself. He does this a bunch of times, right,
And he's also just picking followers to have sex with
that he doesn't marry, and they're urged to write letters

(41:29):
to the Family News, the Cults magazine, praising Berg, who
they call dearest precious Dad, for his love making skills gratuitously.
Like again, I don't feel the need to quote it.
I can just tell you it's like very pornographic the
way these followers will write about him as dearest dad,
and this is just in their newsletter.

Speaker 2 (41:47):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (41:48):
And you know, as time has gone on, by the
mid seventies, Zerbi has gone from definitely a victim to
definitely a co leader she had started as one of
the most prolific fishers right. Berg had bragged that when
they were in Tenerief, she'd again had sex with eighteen
workers at their hotel and quote started a love making

(42:09):
revolution amongst the help. It was a totally new ministry
for us. But Zurbi by this point was also a
major driving force and culte doctrine, and she kind of
seems to have helped Berg decide that he needs an
air right, he's getting old and needs to he needs
to appoint an heir to lead the cult in its
battle against the Antichrist in case he isn't around for that, right,

(42:32):
And he's got kids, but none of them they're all disappointments.
His son has committed suicide by this point, probably as
a result of the abuse that he endured in the cult,
and none of his you know, he's not going to
give it to his daughters, right like, they're not going
to be leading the cult from him. So he needs
a kid to appoint as messiah. And for whatever reason,

(42:54):
I think just because of how his own kids had
worked out, he decides I shouldn't be the biological father
of this kid, but Zerbi will be the biological mother, right,
and I'll raise this kid as a work of art
to be the Messiah of mankind. So in nineteen seventy five,
zerbi mother and Maria gets pregnant from a hotel waiter

(43:14):
named Carlos. Her son is declared the messiah by Berg
and born on January twenty fifth, nineteen seventy five. His
name is Richard Peter Rodriguez or Ricky, but he's also
called David eto like little David, Right, and he's immediately
made into an object of worship for the cult. Right,

(43:34):
They've got this whole media apparatus at the time, and
they spin it up to turn him into a like
every aspect of his childhood into this like drama of
like a what a heroic baby our messiah is, And
he's going to save us from the Antichrist when he
grows up?

Speaker 2 (43:52):
In what form will this saving take? Will he be
sacrificed to God? Will he be a warrior that vanquishes
the bad people?

Speaker 1 (44:04):
Like I think, like a spiritual warrior, Like he's just
a leader. Yeah, he's got of like he's going to
turn the Antichrist's flock against him and basically pray him away, Right, like,
I think that's kind of the vibe of what's supposed
to happen here. Per that article in Rolling Stone, Ricky
was the prince, and this is them like talking to

(44:25):
a member of the cult. Ricky was the Prince. We
all grew up reading comic books about his life. Comics
hundred strong slavishly depicted every detail of Ricky's life as
a toddler. And we're eagerly devoured by the growing ranks
of the Children of God Faithful around the globe, by
now numbering more than three thousand members living in two
hundred and twenty eight communal homes. So they've got this
kind of media empire built around this kid, and they're

(44:48):
really building him up as he's going to be the future.
He's going to be leading once David dies. But they're
also not actually raising him, right Zurbi. His biological mom
is so so busy running the cult. She's traveling around constantly.
She has no desire to spend time around this kid
or raise him. And Berg, who talked about like, I'm
going to raise this kid. He's going to be my

(45:09):
work of art is mostly having sex, right, So he
doesn't want to spend any time actually teaching this kid
how to like read or whatever. Right, that's not something
David Berg's going to do. So he has the other
young women in his harem raised David eto right. And
so this kid, this Messiah, grows up in luxury and comfort,
but he's deeply confused and he's increasingly abused. And this

(45:32):
is not known to anyone outside of the Colt inner
circle at the time. But as I'd stated, like, Berg
had sexually abused his daughter Faithy and attempted to abuse
his daughter Deborah like earlier in his life, and there's
some evidence that like maybe he had done that at
other points, we don't really know. But now that he's
got Ricky, he becomes increasingly comfortable acting without any guardrails

(45:56):
and pushing his belief that children are sexual beings, right,
that is what he is preaching increasingly to the cult.
In the mo letter One Wife, which I mentioned earlier,
he had noted that it was immoral to love your
flesh and blood kids more than you loved God's children,
of God's family. And you could see how, like initially
you might not pick up on what he's saying. You

(46:17):
might just be him being like, oh well, yeah, I
shouldn't like it's immoral for me to think that my
kids are more important than any other kids, because God
doesn't feel that way. But also what he's saying is that,
like it's a moral to see a child is different
from an adult, right, which is going to lead in
some very bad directions. Right. But again you see this

(46:39):
way he kind of like drips out. I don't think
what he's going to drop.

Speaker 2 (46:42):
What's the explain that taking that from what he said
or from what you just explained.

Speaker 1 (46:50):
Yeah, so what he's saying is like it's immral basically
to treat your flesh and blood children differently from anyone else, right, just.

Speaker 2 (46:56):
Because from anyone else, not from other children. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (47:00):
When he says children of God, he's talking about everyone, right, We're.

Speaker 2 (47:04):
Right, yeah.

Speaker 1 (47:05):
But and so one way you can read that, it's like, oh, yeah,
well God doesn't think my family is more important than
any other family. But also what David's saying is like, no, no, no, literally,
kids are not different from adults, right, And this is
kind of how he's dripping that out to the broader
cult before he kind of comes all the way down
on it.

Speaker 2 (47:23):
Right.

Speaker 1 (47:24):
So through the seventies, his cult grows to three and
then four thousand full time members and beyond that, and
he continues to push the line that sex is a
need like food or water. In the nineteen eighties, with
this groundwork laid, he begins to push the idea that
children born into the cult, which he had begun calling
the family, are not exempt from this right, like everyone

(47:46):
has a responsibility to fulfill people's sexual needs, including kids.
One of the followers in his inner circle, Sarah Kelly,
is among the first members of the cult to understand
what this means. She was in his kind of harem thing,
very successful flirty Fisher, and she was helping to raise
David do But she also has a seven year old
daughter who she gives to David Berg to be a

(48:07):
member of his harem right. And this is kind of
kept secret. He's not telling the broader cult about this yet, right,
And the way he's going to finally reveal how everyone
should be acting is by putting out this book about
his son, the Messiah. He publishes a book, He goes
to this printing house in Spain, and he has thousands

(48:28):
of copies made for all of the different cult installations
around the world of the story of David Do, which
is a seven hundred and sixty two page biography of
his kid, the Messiah, who's not even a teenager yet, right,
and it's meant to act as a manual for how
to raise kids. And this book extensively documents how they
have been sexually abusing little Ricky David Do for the

(48:52):
early stages of his childhood. Like is it is like
there're straight up child pornography in here, right, there's photos
of Ricky aged seven teen months to three years of
age in bed with young women who are naked, and
he has showed being physically coerced into sexual contact with them, right,
Like this is straight up child pornography that they are.

(49:12):
It is now like required reading for everyone in the cult.
And the understanding is you're supposed to do to your
kids what's being done to the Messiah.

Speaker 2 (49:21):
Right.

Speaker 1 (49:22):
In nineteen eighty five, when Ricky is ten, lists of
his sexual availability are published in group hooems on what
are called sharing schedules, So they are like literally ordering
basically people to molest the Messiah, right and as a
result each other because they're now free.

Speaker 2 (49:42):
His availability, meaning people can sort of like make appointments
to have sex with David. Yep, they have David.

Speaker 1 (49:48):
Et do yes as he's toured around, Right, you can
like book that and this is they're doing this with
Like these sharing schedules are for everyone, right, the free
love thing has turned into you are being scheduled and
ordered to have sex with this person at this time, right,
Like that's what they're doing. But they're not. They're including
you know, Ricky and then other kids in the cult

(50:10):
in this, right, So this is we've gotten to like
this is as bad as it can get pretty much, right,
Like that's it. I mean, this is just like nightmare
fuel stuff. Ricky is born into this, and he'll talk
as a young adult once he leaves the cult that like,
I didn't understand that this was bad at first, right,

(50:30):
because how could he? You know, this is the only
world he's born into. Sure, doesn't go to school, he
has no contact with people outside of this, but he
does recognize from a young age that some of these
adults who are ordered to molest him seem uncomfortable. So
he starts to realize, like this seems like there's something
that's not right here.

Speaker 2 (50:47):
Yeah. Sure, he's picking up on the humanity of yes
of these people, and probably better than they are themselves, right.

Speaker 1 (50:56):
Yeah, because they've been they've let themselves become so lost
in this and yeah, it's it's it's really tragic. This
is a bad time to throw to ads. But there's
not going to be a good time in the rest
of this episode and we're back, so you know, I

(51:18):
think it's clear at this point. By nineteen eighty five,
David Berg, there's no guard rails, there's no governor or
break on this guy. He is doing whatever, and he
has completely broken with any reality outside his own desires. Right,
He's enshrined in nineteen eighty five child sex abuse as
official doctrine among the children of God.

Speaker 2 (51:38):
And has this made its way to law enforcement? I mean, like,
are the like this book and the surely people have
defected from the cult at this.

Speaker 3 (51:48):
Point, there's so much physical evidence.

Speaker 1 (51:50):
It's beginning to it's starting to and they're going to
have to officially. The first time they officially deny distributing
child pornography will be or having sex with kids will
be in nineteen eighty eight, right, so three years after this,
so you imagine it is beginning to filter out. This
is a distributed movement it's not clear where everything's happening.
So there's like in law enforcement is very sluggish to

(52:12):
get involved. But yes, stuff is starting to get out,
but it's gonna as a spoiler, they're never really going
to get the hammer dropped on them the way you'd
expect given what's going on here. This is and some
of this just has to do with the fact that
like child molestation and child pornography were not punished as
much in this period as you would expect, right, And

(52:33):
that's just a reality, I mean, even outside of this.
So to quote from a doctor Stephen Kent's study here
about like how he kind of rolls this out to
the whier cult. In nineteen eighty five, an example of
sex between adults and youth occurred in a suggestive illustration
and accompanying text showing Berg in bed with two women,
one of whom was apparently in her mid teens. More

(52:54):
explicit and controversial was the widely circulated publication entitled My
Little Fish, which contained photographs of an adult woman orally
copulating and manually manipulating a boy who was just over
three years old. So again, there's no argument that people
don't know what's going on. Right, like this is child pornography.

(53:14):
And at the same time they're not again, they're not
getting cracked down on yet they're traveling freely around cult
properties across the world, from Europe to Asia to South Africa.
The cult has gotten very wealthy, largely under Zerbe's guidance,
and they've become a media empire, and even outside of
members of the cult or even the religious sect. Right,

(53:34):
they start producing children's television for a general audience in
the mid eighties, the same year that Berg circulated that
child pornography book about his Messiah kid, he starts producing
a TV show called Life with Grandpa, which ran in
different local TV networks. It's like a puppet based show,
almost like a knockoff muppet type deal or whatever, like

(53:57):
much lower production values. Obviously, it picks a sanitized version
of David Berg or Grandpa teaching lessons to children each week.
And it's innocuous at the time, right, it passes for
innocuous at the time, but when you know what we know,
it's much more upsetting. And so he's going to show
you a little clip from this TV show produced by
this cult with like David Berg doing a voice called

(54:19):
Life with Grandpa.

Speaker 2 (54:21):
Live with Grandpa?

Speaker 4 (54:23):
What can be more fun?

Speaker 3 (54:25):
Living where there's love for everyone?

Speaker 1 (54:29):
Learning lessons each and every day, learning from.

Speaker 3 (54:33):
The Word of God in life to guide our way.

Speaker 1 (54:36):
Live with Grandpa?

Speaker 2 (54:38):
What can be more fun? That is why we are happy.

Speaker 1 (54:41):
That is why that we sing.

Speaker 3 (54:44):
It's because of Jesus sees everything.

Speaker 1 (54:47):
We have a purpose in each new day, learning how
to share and give God's love away? Live with Grandpa?
What to be more fun?

Speaker 2 (55:00):
Where their love for everyone?

Speaker 1 (55:03):
Learning lessons each and every.

Speaker 3 (55:06):
Day, learn the Word of God, like to guide our
way with all?

Speaker 1 (55:11):
Right, I think we're probably that's enough, yes, yeah, yeah,
it's up like the stuff about like sharing love all
the physical contacts like you might you wouldn't have caught
it on TV in eighty five, but when you know
what's going on, it's like oh no yeah yeah.

Speaker 2 (55:27):
Also very interesting choice to cut away to a puppet
camera man.

Speaker 1 (55:33):
Yeah, yeah, fascinating close to break the fourth.

Speaker 2 (55:37):
Wall, yeah, but stay within the puppet universe.

Speaker 1 (55:40):
Yeah, it's so wild.

Speaker 2 (55:42):
That was That was because it was almost like by
the way, like filming you is is fine too, yeah,
like like.

Speaker 1 (55:51):
Don't like, don't think that's weird.

Speaker 2 (55:53):
Yeah, like don't think people pointing cameras at you while
you're being intimate with Grandpa is on. Is weird.

Speaker 1 (56:01):
That's a really good point. I didn't even thought of that,
but you're absolutely like.

Speaker 2 (56:04):
It's just sort of like normalizing the presence of a
camera operator. Yeah, because it's within the it's within the
puppet show. Yes, yeah, it is so weird.

Speaker 1 (56:15):
And you're right they are as I'll talk about later.
They do film like sexus between adults and kids, right, yeah,
like that's gotta be part of what's going on there. God,
and I had other clips of this and other shows.
I don't think we really need to see them all.
They're all upsetting in context, but like kind of innocuous
if you don't know what's going on. And there's multiple
TV shows that they make during this period of time.

Speaker 2 (56:37):
I will say that the jingle, the song for a
kid's show jingle and speaking as a kid who was
you know a kid at that time, like that's like
a perfect Jingle's a perfect that's like a perfect kids
show song, theme song?

Speaker 1 (56:54):
Yeah. The production.

Speaker 3 (56:58):
World yeah.

Speaker 1 (57:02):
Yeah, And it's like all of their shows are like that,
where it's like, yeah, this could have just been a
normal TV studio making this right.

Speaker 2 (57:08):
All the more sinister because it's so good and cheerful.

Speaker 1 (57:11):
Yeah, and they produce multiple shows. There's one called The
Lovetts l uvve e t t S made in the Philippines.
That's another puppet like show, an ultimately Treasure Attic, which
I think either starts or at least runs until the
early nineties. And it's kind of like a cross between
Blues Clues and Lamb Chop. There's like there's like human
beings and puppets together and it's like, yeah, it's fairly

(57:35):
good production values for the time. So they're you know,
making actual TV here while they're also running this massive
pimping and child molestation ring. Meanwhile, Berg has made it
explicitly clear to his followers that not only is incest
okay with God, it's actually required right. Peter Wilkinson's Rolling

(57:56):
Stone article quotes Berg writing in a mo letter that
I don't know what the hell age has to do
with it when God made him able to enjoy it
practically from the time they're born. And yeah, he starts
encouraging members to have sex with their children, right, both
like group sex and they're to bless their own kids. Yes, yeah,

(58:18):
it's all I think a lot of this is like
we've got to break every natural boundary right in order
to keep this unnatural thing, this cult going, And in
part because now everyone's complicit.

Speaker 2 (58:29):
Right, that's yeah, a great, great point. It's a little bit.
Uh yeah, it's like it's kind of mob like in
that way, right, like once you're once you're complicit, you
have to be loyal, yeah, or else you're you're going down.

Speaker 1 (58:44):
Yeah, the real world will never take you now, you
know what you did to your kids. Right, So, when
Ricky the Messiah is twelve, Berga points an adult woman
named Bonnie to be his girlfriend. Uh, most of what
he called raising Ricky seems to just been making Ricky
watch and participate in group sex acts with Berg.

Speaker 2 (59:05):
Right.

Speaker 1 (59:06):
There are videos of girls aged nine on up stripping
and dancing for Berg and Ricky. One of these girls, Armindria,
was molested by Berg at age thirteen, and she and
Ricky become friends right, in part because they're enduring a
lot of this together. In nineteen eighty seven, with Berg's insistence,
Ricky is made to participate with his like his mother

(59:28):
molests him right at Berg's orders and Zerby yeah, Zerby, Yes,
this is apparently there's debates whether or not this is
the first time Zerbi like molests a child, But you know,
I don't know that it matters all that much for
our purposes, Like she does this right and again. Ricky

(59:48):
is kind of gradually realizing how bad all this is,
but because of the bubble he lives in, it's not
immediately clear. And that Rolling Stone article, Wilkinson writes, as
he moved through his teen years, Ricky began to feel
weighed down, not just by the unwelcome scrutiny brought upon
him by the distribution of the David Do book, but
also by his doubts over Berg's increasingly erratic behavior. He

(01:00:09):
was particularly upset with how Berg treated his granddaughter Mary Berg,
known in the family as Mine and Berg had started
molesting Manee, his granddaughter when she was like an early
adolescent at a cult facility in the Philippines where they're
producing one of their first children's TV shows.

Speaker 2 (01:00:27):
Is this Would this be Faithe's child or do we know?

Speaker 1 (01:00:31):
I think it actually might be Deborah's kid. Okay, you're right,
I should have checked on I don't actually know one
hundred percent. He makes her live in a walk in
closet next to his bedroom, and when Ricky turns twelve,
Berg tries to make them have a kid together so
that he can continue the family line with the Messiah

(01:00:51):
and like merge their bloodlines. Zerbi doesn't like this, right.
She feels very like like this is like she's trying
to pret like her own importance in the cult and
is like very jealous of this kid, his granddaughter who's
being abused.

Speaker 3 (01:01:06):
Oh so it's about her. It's not like, yes, like
I was like, oh, that's your line.

Speaker 2 (01:01:10):
No, it's she.

Speaker 1 (01:01:11):
Feels threatened by the fact that this girl might become
her son's wife. Right Don Irwin, Many's brother later told
Wilkinson she was worried that Many would become Mohe's next wife,
and so in a family practice called teen training, Many
suffered vicious physical abuse at Zerbe's direction, and macal Many

(01:01:31):
was locked in a room for six months. She was
tied to a bed and beaten, thrown against walls, and
even forced to undergo multiple exorcisms. Sarah Davidito often supervised
the abuse, sometimes assaulting Mane herself. Wait, Sarah david Mito
is like one of Moe's like the women he's got
in his harem who's raising David Eto, Right, so she
takes on his name as her last name.

Speaker 2 (01:01:53):
But this is all Zerby's under Serbi's direction.

Speaker 1 (01:01:57):
Yes, and with the consent of Berg obviously, but yes,
she is directing all of this psychological and physical abuse
of this girl because she's threatened by her. And it's
like it's it's pretty profoundly hideous. There's a great deal
and this is this seems to be like what makes
Ricky really start to realize how bad things are is

(01:02:17):
like he genuinely this kid he sees as like this
other kid is his family, right, That's how he sees it.
And he sees that they're abusing her, and he has
nightmares of seeing her screaming in the basement of different
facilities after being tortured. And that's kind of what's going
to pull him out of it. Is what happens to MiNet.
She is eventually institutionalized as a result of the abuse

(01:02:40):
she endures, right, Like, she does not do well psychologically,
How the fuck could you?

Speaker 4 (01:02:46):
Right?

Speaker 1 (01:02:48):
And through the by the late eighties, you know, this
is kind of the period where both Ricky is starting
to realize how bad things are, and the period at
which the extent of the Families crimes and David Berg's
crimes has started to hit the news and get interest
from law enforcement. Right, this is when there start to
be prosecutions or attempts at prosecutions.

Speaker 3 (01:03:09):
This is not till the late eighties.

Speaker 1 (01:03:11):
Not till the late eighties. Jesus Chris nineteen eighty eight
is when Berg first publicly denies that any kids had
been molested by the church, and he orders a purge
of materials in libraries at cult compounds worldwide. Right, not
all of them, but like a lot of the worst
stuff and kind of the other thing that's happening this
period is this is when the AIDS crisis starts, right,

(01:03:32):
which is why the cult ends the flirty fishing practice
because people start getting sick.

Speaker 2 (01:03:37):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:03:38):
This is also when they start to ban officially ban
sex with miners. It's still occurring in parts of the cult,
but they make an official like notice that people should
stop doing this. And in nineteen ninety one, increasingly worried
about the law coming after him, Berg orders all copies
of the books of David Eto destroyed. This is not

(01:03:58):
enough to stop the criminal investigate which are going on
in multiple countries, including the Philippines, Italy, Australia and Spain.
So kids get removed from these family homes, hundreds of them,
but none of the charges stick because they've done a
fairly good job of destroying the evidence at this point.
They're using like a lot of encrypted online communication in
the early nineties, which law enforcement is not super up on,

(01:04:22):
and none of the charges against Berg stick, none of
the charges against any of the adults who are a
part of this stick. Right, some kids do get out,
but nothing all that big happens as a result of
the investigations. So by the early nineties, kind of the
biggest of these investigations is one in England which ends
with a lot of information about the torture of kids,

(01:04:45):
including many comes out in this case, and the judge
who's judicating this, the Lord Justice, declares that like the
culte tortured children and it led to a quote barbaric
and cruel situation, which is like you're starting to think, Okay,
maybe good ruling coming here, but then this justice is like,
but all the evidence shows the cult has been reformed sufficiently,

(01:05:06):
so we don't need to do any further legal action
they learned from their mistakes. Dude, it's fine, Like it's wild,
it's wild, like she shocks, yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:05:15):
Christ, these our kids.

Speaker 1 (01:05:20):
Yeah, and like they're reading out the stuff I just
read you about, like the abuse this girl endures, and
this judge is like, it's bad. But they seem to
have changed, So I think we're good. By nineteen ninety three, Yeah, Uh,
there's not. Unfortunately, like nobody really gets what's coming to
them here, with maybe one exception, although that's pretty bleak too,

(01:05:41):
is we're gonna get to so. By nineteen ninety three,
the Family International aka the Children of God has more
than twelve thousand members in seventy countries. Berg, however, is
too ill by this point both to engage in the
kind of sexual abuse that he earlier reveled in or
even to write any additional mo letters. Zurbi takes over.
She's authoring for him as him and is leading the

(01:06:03):
cult right, She's running everything by ninety three because he's
so sick. In nineteen ninety four, Moses David Berg dies
aged seventy five. The cause of death is unknown. He
is buried in Portugal. Zerbi aka Mamma Maria replaces him
and promotes her new lover, a guy named Peter Amsterdam,
to co leader, calling him King Peter. In nineteen ninety five,

(01:06:24):
she issues a new directive to the cult. Jesus has
informed her that he wants to literally have sex with
his followers, and they're ordered to visualize this when masturbating.
Male followers are told to imagine themselves as women, which
is an interesting twist to it. So you know this
is both like still messed up, but also you can

(01:06:45):
see the level of weirdly homophobic, and Zerbey is also
not She doesn't have the like the cult's not going
to go for the same kind of abuse they used
to openly because they're scared, right, there's an understanding that
like they've now got too much attention on them, and
she's just kind of trying to ride things out. I
think now Ricky the Messiah has grown increasingly furious at

(01:07:09):
the church. By this point, there has been a rash
of suicides through the nineties of about at least probably
around thirty people, many of whom Ricky had grown up
with and seen abused alongside him, and he eventually finds
the courage to leave the cult. For understandable reasons. He's
never able to get over what was done to him
and what was still being done. He believed to a

(01:07:30):
lot of vulnerable people in the Children of God, and
he gets out in the early two thousands, like he
lives up in the Northwest for a while. He's got
a partner, he's trying to move on, he's trying to
live a life, but he also gets he can't let
go of this like just I mean nightmarish abuse, and
he becomes obsessed with getting vengeance against the cult leadership. Specifically,

(01:07:52):
he wants to kill his mother, Karen zerby Right, but
she's underground and he can't find out where she is,
and he tries a few tactics. He eventually lures her secretary,
Angela Smith, who had been part of the abuse against
him when he was a kid, to his home in
New Mexico, and he tries to get the info about
where Karen Zerbe is out of her and when she

(01:08:12):
doesn't give it to him, he stabs her to death,
and he records a video talking about his plans to
get vengeance. He drives to California, presumably headed to another
cult compound, but ultimately he commits suicide within hours of
committing California in his car. And that's unfortunately, our very
bleak ending for today, right, is like, yeah, it's about

(01:08:35):
as bad as it could be. I mean, and your
heart just goes out to Ricky.

Speaker 3 (01:08:39):
What happened to Zerby?

Speaker 1 (01:08:41):
Oh she lives a long life?

Speaker 2 (01:08:44):
Is she still with us?

Speaker 1 (01:08:48):
I don't believe so. I think she passed on. I
don't remember exactly. Oh no, yeah, yeah, yeah, she is
still officially alive. That's a little hard to say, right
because we don't know where she is. She's been underground
for a long time time, but at least her death
has not been like officially listed. Now again, we don't know,
like these people have been like living underground and hiding.

(01:09:08):
Cult membership has declined to about fourteen hundred individuals worldwide,
it's estimated, So they're kind of running on fumes and
what money they had in savings and investments. But there's
not really any evidence that punishment is going to happen. Like,
I guess first you'd have to know, like where this
person is located, right, Like it'd be nice.

Speaker 2 (01:09:33):
Like why well, why wouldn't ZURBI be like on the
FBI most wanted list.

Speaker 1 (01:09:38):
I mean in part because there's not like a lot
of direct criminal charges. There's a lot of allegations from
all these people. There's extensive reporting from people who have
like done it. But like Karen Zerbe's not in the US,
you know, like where is she? Like you can find
people trying to figure out, like where she is.

Speaker 2 (01:09:56):
Crimes were perpetrated over over too, yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:09:59):
Right, Like yeah, like the FBI Tenerife, Like what are
they going to do about like sexual abuse there or whatever,
which not to like let any law enforcement off the
hook for not prosecuting this, but like you don't know
where this person is, and a lot of these crimes
are committed all over the place.

Speaker 3 (01:10:13):
Just got an up to date website as of twenty twenty.

Speaker 1 (01:10:15):
Oh yeah, yeah, no, they maintain their websites.

Speaker 2 (01:10:18):
Yeah wait wait wait wait what Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:10:20):
The Family International, the Children of God, they maintain all
of their websites. Yeah, Like you can find a lot
of my sources when I'm saying I'm quoting from his biography,
that's from the Children of God and the Family International's websites.
They're just claiming to be like a normal humanitarian church organization. Now,
but like you've got what people like Ricky say, You've

(01:10:41):
got like what all of these victims say, You've got
what Berg's own kids say, and you've got like the
Book of David Edo. There's copies of it, right, it's
been verified, like the child pornography was in there. You
can find clips of it that don't include that, but
do talk about molesting Ricky when he's a kid, like
they're online and stuff. So it's one of those things

(01:11:02):
where there's so much information out but also this person
like it does it is like infuriating that she's just
alive and free, but also I don't like.

Speaker 3 (01:11:14):
How do an up to date website?

Speaker 1 (01:11:16):
How do you yeah, with headshots on it? But like, yeah,
it'd be great if somebody did something like I don't
know how to make them, but yeah, okay, yeah, welcome
to you a family.

Speaker 2 (01:11:30):
You know what we're not good at as a as
a species, accountability. Accountability. That's also one of the sad
lessons of SNAPOO. Like this is obviously uh you know,
like this massive child sex trafficking operation is is so
intensely horrifying and tragic and heartbreaking, but you just you

(01:11:55):
see it all across especially like yeah, when it's when
it's in in an institutional context, like occult is a
form of an institution, right, but even in like you know,
in the in season three of Snaffoo, we talk about
how the government poisoned thousands of people during Prohibition, right,

(01:12:15):
and uh, that was all exposed at the time. No
one accountable, right, no one?

Speaker 1 (01:12:24):
Yeah, I mean we and we could talk about stuff like,
you know, the murder of Fred Hampton and shit, like
there's all of these things where it's like, yeah, we
know what went down and we know it was bad,
and no one's ever been brought to justice because it's
too hard or they have too much money, or it's
it's too much time has passed before we realize what
was happening was wrong, and like, yeah, it's it gets

(01:12:44):
real tiring just hearing that over and over again with
all of these these monsters, with people like Zurbi, you know,
seeing a guy like Berg die elderly, kind of rich,
surrounded by his power natural causes presumably natural causes. Yeah, yep, wow, anyway, ed,
sorry for this bummer of a story.

Speaker 2 (01:13:03):
You know what, the more we know, the more you know. Yeah,
but the better we off we are. This is a
This was a this was a deep dive into a
hell hole. Yeah, I'm just gonna be honest with you.
The night was a nightmare. It just yeah, it started
out kind of like you know, you can these cult stories.
You can kind of sit from a distance and be

(01:13:23):
like idiots, yeah, and just kind of be snarky. But
then it starts when it just starts to get like, yeah,
the reality kicks in. It just it's so upsetting.

Speaker 1 (01:13:33):
It's yeah, super bleak.

Speaker 2 (01:13:37):
Yeah, it's a fascinating subject. Cults are so mystifying, right,
They're just such a wild like what's the evolutionary cause
of cults? It's such a compelling and disturbing facet to humanity.
They've always existed and they always will and what the hell?

Speaker 1 (01:13:58):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, I yeah, I think some of
it's just like some of these dynamics we have that
make us effective as communities also make us very vulnerable
to people who know how to manipulate those aspects of psychology. Right.

Speaker 2 (01:14:12):
Also, the this is such a sad reminder of the
legacy of abuse, like what what abuse? How much abuse
carries through generations, and and that the pain and toxicity
of the damage, the damage goes on and on and

(01:14:34):
it's very heartbreaking.

Speaker 1 (01:14:35):
Yeah yeah, it's this Yeah, the man handing on misery demand,
it's this, like and that doesn't like the fact that
Berg was abuse doesn't excuse what he does. But you do.
You can't not notice the pattern? Repeat? Sure you know
for sure?

Speaker 2 (01:14:51):
All right, thanks so much.

Speaker 1 (01:14:52):
Thank you. Everyone listened to SNAPO Season three out now
season four you're working on. We're all excited for it. Yeah,
anything else you want to plug here at the end.

Speaker 2 (01:15:02):
I don't know, just like, let's all be good people.

Speaker 1 (01:15:05):
Yeah, try to be better. Yeah, at least don't be
like this guy.

Speaker 2 (01:15:10):
Yeah, don't be like this guy. Don't fall in, don't
get taken in by this guy in all the different
forms he takes around the world. And thanks for having me.
It's all your pleasure.

Speaker 1 (01:15:20):
Yeah, all right, everybody. That's the episode. Bye.

Speaker 4 (01:15:28):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 3 (01:15:41):
Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube.

Speaker 1 (01:15:43):
New episodes every.

Speaker 3 (01:15:45):
Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel YouTube dot com.
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Part Two: David Berg and the Children of God (ft. Ed Helms)