May 25, 2025 • 34 mins
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FIND BEXY'S WORK HERE - Bexy Cameron (@cameron_film) • Instagram photos and videos
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello listeners and or welcome to you this special re
release series of the live talks that I have recorded
at crime Con UK. As we are so close to
the event in London now on the seventh and eighth
of June twenty twenty five, I thought it would be
a great opportunity to re upload the talks that I've
done previously at this event. For those of you that
(00:22):
have been tuning in for a while, these talks might
be familiar to you, but for those who are new
to the show, here is a taste of what you
can expect from crime Con UK across the weekend in London.
We will also be in Manchester in September and I
hope to be doing a talk at this event too.
This year, I am lucky enough to be on a
panel with Laura Richards no Less talking about coercive control
(00:46):
and cult. You can buy your tickets at crimecon dot
co dot uk and use the code cult cult at
the checkout for ten percent off your tickets. Patrons also
receive a fifteen percent discount code so you can contact
me for directly. Crime Con UK, sponsored by True Crime,
is the UK's biggest true crime event, advocating for survivors,
(01:10):
victims and policy change in the UK. I really can't
wait for this weekend and I hope to see you there.
I hope you enjoy these re uploads and get in
touch let me know what you think and if you'll
be there for the weekend. Hello listeners, and welcome to
this extra special episode coming to you from Glasgow's very
(01:30):
swanky Big Light Recording Studio. A massive thank you to Brian,
Fiona and the Big Light team for having us ahead
of tomorrow's Crime Con. And thank you to Nancy and
her team at Crime Con, CBS Reality and Bonnier Books
for allowing us this space to talk about a very
important subject and making all of this work possible. But
(01:51):
let's not delay any longer. Hello Bexy and welcome to
the show.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
Hi, thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
Would you like to start by introducing your self to
the listeners?
Speaker 2 (02:01):
Sure? So, I am a documentary maker an author. I'm
also known as a sex cult girl, which is slightly
less academic or fancy, but yeah, I was born into
a cult called the Children of God, which was, you know,
fancily known as a sex cult. Shall we say that
(02:23):
one of those ones from the seventies where kind of
anything went and then went really horribly wrong. So yeah,
I became a documentary maker mainly because I wanted to
get into that topic, but into many more after that,
and that's why I'm here today.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
You are a woman that wears many hats. You've just
completed a postgraduate course which is a huge and excellent achievement,
and you've also been doing work with Alexander Stain and
Ranking for the Family Survival Trust. I believe, how does
that all come together?
Speaker 2 (02:56):
Well, I mean it's still coming together, but it's a
really nice way of kind of looking looking at something
which is really important but also quite dark, which is
coercive control within cults. So what we're trying to do,
and hopefully this is something that we're going to be
pulling off, is we are working with the Family Survival Trust,
as you said, and Ranking one of the UK's most
prolific photographers to create an exhibition around this topic. So
(03:19):
we're looking at people who joined cults, people who were
born into them, and who've experienced all of these nuanced, weird, wonderful,
horrific traumatic experiences and trying to understand what kind of
joins them up what divides us, what gives people that
sense of other and also what you know makes sense
for people outside of the cult world as well. So
(03:41):
how that will work in a physical sense is like
photography that's never been seen before from childhoods in groups,
you know, understanding the rituals, that kind of thing. But
it will culminate as an exhibition and then hopefully what
we're trying to do is actually get legislation changed in
the UK for how cults and so control works within
(04:01):
the UK, because I think it's really easy to get
kind of distracted, if you like, by cults because they
are so weird and sensationalist, and they have things like
exorcisms and you know, bizarre beliefs and really bad outfits
a lot of the time, so you can get distracted
by that without actually realizing what is the thing at
the nucleus of this that is actually really dangerous. And
(04:25):
sometimes it's not the beliefs at all, it's just something
much more simple, which is people trying to control you.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
That sounds like such an incredible and exciting project, And
I love how you've just talked about the nucleus of
the issue. I talk about this sometimes in my lengthy
episodes interviews with people that are two to three hours long,
which unfortunately we don't have today, and a lot of
the time, the reason the episodes is so long is
(04:53):
because to understand one major part of a person's experience,
whether that be something like being branded or being physically
imprisoned in a room or something, to understand that particular experience,
you have to look at the whole picture and say,
(05:14):
how did we get to this point? And I think
that that's a really difficult thing to try and translate
to wider society. And it's definitely a journey that I'm
still on and there are things that I am learning
today about the Children of God despite reading multiple memoirs
and interviewing various individuals who have had experiences within that group.
(05:38):
So would you like to start us off with a
sort of overview and timeline of the Children of God?
Speaker 2 (05:47):
Yeah, I mean it's really difficult with the Children of
God because I think with a lot of cults, you know,
they become known for one thing, and I think if
you look at the Children of God, the thing that
they're known for is the sexual practices and belief. So
they had a practice called flirty fishing, which was basically
sending the mums out to be to prostitute themselves. I
don't like to use the words kind of sex worker.
(06:08):
It doesn't feel right when it's more akin to human trafficking,
which is where it was, and that exploitative nature, so
it doesn't have that same kind of sense of agency.
And I know I'm kind of mudging the waters a
little bit, but so those are the things that it's
known for. Is known for sanctioning sex with children, pedophilia,
and known for the prostitution of the mothers in the
(06:31):
name of Jesus. So quite wild beliefs, if you like,
and quite dangerous, deviant, exploitative beliefs. But how it started out,
and in the same way that if we were going
to look at coerci of control in relationships, nobody starts
out by dating a bastard part of my French. But
you know, you start out by dating somebody that's quite nice,
and then slowly but surely it starts to become something
(06:54):
else when you're in that kind of controlling relationship. And
I think that cults are very similar. So my parents
when they join, they join in nineteen seventy two, and
it was you know, the Jesus Freak Revolution that was
sweeping across the States. It was flower power, it was
the riots, it was Vietnam War. Society was in a
position where probably not too dissimilar for now. Everyone was
kind of scared and the politicians were lying to everyone,
(07:15):
which no surprise, but it was a very fearful time
and a lot of people were wondering how are we
going to actually get through this? And his nuclear war
just about to happen, and a lot of people were saying,
stop the world, I want to get off. My parents
were included with that. So I look at that time
period and I see the cult that was then. And
if you look at the photographs of early children of God,
they all look really cool. They look like hipsters, they
(07:37):
look like bands, they have long hair, they've quite you know,
awesome outfits. They're all young, and you can imagine if
you were of that time period, like David Berg was
in his I think like late fifties early sixties at
the time, but he was sending his kids out to recruit.
He started off by making peanut butter sandwiches and Huntington
Beach and like recruiting that way. But he was doing
(07:58):
it with the help of his teenage young adult children.
So in that kind of, you know, drawing kind of
similarities from the kind of Epstein type thing where you
use younger people to be your recruitment people. So I
think that like at that time period, I can understand
why people did join. It was a revolution for Jesus,
and it was dramatic and it was powerful. But how
(08:19):
quickly it turned from that into something which was really
dark and dangerous and deviant and wasn't about revolution for
Jesus and definitely wasn't just about you know, being counterculture.
I mean it was the space of like four years.
So by the time that nineteen seventy four rolled around,
he was already like thirty, fishing had already started in
earnest and he was and I think that Child Bride,
(08:40):
which was his big kind of decree on what you could,
you know, have sexual abuse of children, which was being
sanctioned by him and also documented by him. I mean,
the children God essentially created a handbook for how to
molest children, printed with photographs and gave it to their followers.
So my parents had been in the group for four
years by that point, so you might sit and think
(09:02):
to yourself, how did you get from being in this
wild hippie cult to something where you were actually physically
handed this book in black and white that I read
as a child growing up and not understand how completely
messed up this was. And when we talk about things
like conditioning and brainwashing and stuff like that, and I
don't like the term brainwashing because I think it kind
(09:23):
of eradicates people of some of the agency that they
might have had in situations, and also of the responsibility
that they should have had in situations. I think that
conditioning is something that is really is really prevalent within cults.
But on the day that that happened, that this child
Bride document came out from David Berg, Moses, David whatever
(09:46):
you want to call him, two thirds or maybe it
was a third, Actually it might have been a third.
A third of the children of God left, so people
did know. People did read it and go, this is
too far. My parents weren't them, but people did know.
So you still have to think that there is a
level of agency that is being you know, that's being
(10:09):
carried out within groups in the same way that you
know a woman in a dangerous relationship might finally get
to that point. You know, they say it's like seven
times that it takes you to leave a controlling partner,
and it's like there's something that will make you go,
this is too much. Maybe the abuse turns to the children,
but it's something which turns the light on for you.
So yeah, it's unfortunately it didn't work out like that
(10:31):
for my parents, but it is. I do find it
quite shocking, even as someone who grew up in that group,
to see how quickly that happened. It wasn't decades, it
was a matter of four to six years.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
And as somebody that grew up in that environment, there's
still that need and want to understand how that happened.
And I think that that is something that individuals that
haven't experienced cults want to do as well, want to
understand how do you go from A to B and why.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
Do people stay.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
But the really tricky thing, which you've mentioned in everything
you just said so wonderfully is the convoluted stuff that
comes with moral injury, personal responsibility, and things like coercive
control and conditioning. How much blame is to be put
on first generation individuals and people that joined certain groups,
(11:25):
and how much of it should be looked at and
inspected through the lens of course of control. And I
really appreciated the parts in your book where you were
trying to work through all of those things and understand,
you know, your parent's decisions and why they did or
didn't do certain things. So I don't know if there's
(11:49):
a way you've managed to look at those two things
or whether you can't really pull them apart.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
I mean, it's a really difficult thing because you want
to look at things from multiple angles, but you have
to accept the fact that you are. You contain multitudes
within you. You know, I contained a chart, I contained
a child within me who was traumatized my parents. I
contain an adult within me who understands how the structures
of cults work and how they break down family dynamics,
and how there is no family dynamic within the cult,
because the cult itself is the family. And once you
(12:15):
start getting into the kind of muddy waters of that,
you can always find a way to turn everybody into
a victim. Within these groups, however, there is people who
made the decision to be there, and there are people
who were born into it, and there are people who
are vulnerable and there are people who were definitely like
I call my father a career cultist, which I don't
know if it's an actual term, but I kind of
(12:35):
love it, where you know, they essentially join something, they
see a kind of real route to power within it,
and how they can kind of become quite you know,
exploit it for themselves, where there are other people who
are just being completely exploited within these groups. So I
think that there are nuances, and you know, a lot
of people say things like, well, your mother, for example,
(12:55):
she was a victim. She was to a point, but
there was also a point where she wasn't you know.
There's a point where my parents became and this also
kind of complicates it, but my parents became the pr
face for the children of God within the United Kingdom
and Europe. So when I think about when people ask
me big questions like have you forgiven your parents? There
(13:16):
is a part of me that it's not up to
me to forgive to people who allowed the sexual abuse
and physical abuse and psychological abuse of thousands of children
within Europe and the United well within Europe at that
time to go under the radar. I can't forgive that
because it's not for me to forgive. I can forgive
them for what they specifically did to me, but their sins,
(13:38):
if you like, if we're going to get biblical, which
why not, we're here now, their sins are so much
greater than what happened to me. So like you know,
I can be like, yeah, Mom and Dad, I forgive you.
I would be saying that for myself, not for them,
if we're being honest. But what they did and how
they managed to put this kind of polite, kind of
like British accented face onto a group that was doing
(14:02):
horrific things and they're still in it now, it becomes
very muddy. When do we start calling somebody going going
from being a victim to being the exploiter, you know.
And we can look at this again. It's through the
lenses that aren't anywhere anything to do with cults. We
can look at it again, Epstein, We can look at
it again, you know, like R. Kelly. We can look
(14:23):
at it across the board with people where the victims
were were also became the exploiters at some point. So
it is complicated. But if we want to make it
really simple, and I like to the simple terms for
me are always if you're a child and you didn't
have a choice, and you didn't make the decision to
be there, then you're the one that needs to be protected.
(14:43):
If you, as an adult, had that autonomous moment and
that decision and you gave yourself that like, oh that
there is enlightenment and purpose, good for you. Believe what
you want. But if a child is being harmed within
the makings of your belief, they're not on my watch, ma'am.
So for me, that's when it becomes a bit more simple.
But yeah, it's it is a complicated topic, for sure.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
It's so complicated, and it's it's not binary. It's on
like an ever changing, shifting spectrum, and there's so many
different things to contemplate on an individual case to case basis.
And when you consider the magnitude of individuals that have
had a cartic experience, and then you picture the magnitude
of individuals that have brushed upon or experienced coercive control,
(15:50):
it's kind of mind blowing that this isn't more.
Speaker 3 (15:53):
Of a of a subject of discussion, which is why
it's so great to hear that you're partnering with I
would say the UK's leading charity on supporting individuals who
have been been victimized or exploited under the guise of
course of control being the family Survival Trust.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
And I don't want to focus too much on David Berg.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
I do want to ask you a question.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
Do you this is one of those big questions.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
Do you believe that he.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
Had a goal of exploiting miners when he set up
the Children of God? Because it happened so fast. He
was a prolific pedophile. And I just always wonder, you know,
not did he know he was starting.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
A cult or you know, oh, did they know they were.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
Going to become a serial killer. I'm just wondering what
you think personally on whether he always wanted to have
access to vulnerable children.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
So I think that again, if we look at it
from the big, big lens of cult leaders in general,
and it's the kind of chicken and egg thing where
like if I again putting it into a really simple
kind of analogy, if you like or whatever a metaphor,
and never I never get those two right. You look
at somebody who goes into Hollywood, for example, and they
might start out as a normal person and then they
(17:10):
are surrounded by people that are enablers and saying yes
them all the time, and then you end up with
somebody like twenty years later that it's unrecognizable as almost
a human being because their morals, their sense of self
have been so eroded that they become you know, people
call more kinds of horrible names because they just don't
know how to be because as human beings, we are
hardwired to need to have boundaries and people saying no
(17:30):
to us and calling us out on our stuff constantly.
So like, I think that you can see smaller versions
of that happening all the time, whether it might be
CEOs or pop stars, whatever, it happens all the time
where you're like, how did you get like this? Like
when did you start like demanding X and Y and
z and treating people like they are dirt on your shoes.
So you can see it happening all the time. However,
(17:53):
I think that there are certain cult leaders that it
started out to do good and they became like that
where they became eroded and and they saw an opportunity
or money power sex corrupt in any scenario, money power
sex corrupt, especially with Western upbringing and the idea of
the individual and the idea of I and me. You know,
we've all met no offense to anyone listening, but like
(18:15):
a white shaman who's like, you know, spent like you know,
two weeks in Peru and they've come back and they're
trying to change the world, and you're like, that's super cool.
But if you still have your like sense of ego
that you grew up with and you don't have that
kind of imbibed vibe and feeling of you just being
a channeled, and this could go very horribly wrong.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
Very very yeah that you say you want to heal
the world.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
Exactly that it's like you're a channel bro, and that's it.
But I digress. Like I think with David Berg specifically,
and I wanted to kind of just give an overview
before going into him specifically, he abused his daughters long
before he was in the Children of God, you know,
when he was a pastor and he had his first
(18:58):
church long before or any like the Flower Pow and
all the rest of it. He was, you know, kicked
out of that church because of sexual deviancy. So this
is a man that already had a predilection for that
long before he started the Children of God. I think
that what he saw was like there were two things
that happened that, like his daughter talks about in her book.
(19:20):
One was David Broke's mother died, and it was like
his last kind of sense of like morals and to
be a good person was kind of stripped away with that,
as in, like, right, this is my time to just
go for it. They had a bit of a strange relationship,
very colodependent, et cetera. And I think that with the
you know, he tried to transform himself when the seventies happened,
(19:41):
you know, the late sixties seventies happened. He grew his hair,
you know, he changed his outfit, he became his work,
spoken different languages, like as in, he learned the vernacular
of the hippies, and he really wanted to become this
other person. And I think that he saw an avenue
to get to what he wanted. And I think that
he was biding his time to see how far he
could put it and exploit it. I think his first
(20:02):
port of call was to be seen as like a deity,
and then after that it was all the rest of it.
And because he just kept being able to get away
with more and more and more and there was nothing
that he couldn't get away with it. When you look
at what he did and what he was capable of,
the man did everything that you possibly pretty much can
besides actually kill within the group, everything else was pretty
(20:22):
much there. So I think that he might not have
had it as his grand like you know, PowerPoint scheme
or whatever, but it definitely was a means to an
end to him for all of those types of corruption,
if you like.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
You mentioned something at the beginning of.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
Our talk about.
Speaker 1 (20:42):
People whose lights are on and people whose lights aren't on,
and I feel like your light was on from the
beginning in your book Cult Following, which everybody should go
and read because it's incredible. Or he can listen to
Beccy narrate it herself on audible, which is great because
you get singing in the round, you get you get
(21:03):
seen sounds coming in, you get the American accents. It's
it's great.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
It's all in there.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
And you always had this idea as a as a child,
from from what I gathered from from your work your
work was that you knew it wasn't right and that
something in the group was was wrong, and you know,
(21:31):
feeling certain things, thinking certain things, but then still being
part of this group, and and a lot of the
the difficult thoughts and feelings that that children have expressed
growing up in these environments, especially not having much access
at all to the outside world and your light stays on,
(21:52):
you know, you never fully buy into any of the stuff.
I think there's a lot of residuals sort of Oh,
if I break the rules, I might be harmed by
you know, one of the aunties or uncles, but there's
not really you're biding your time until you can leave.
Speaker 2 (22:14):
Basically. Yeah, definitely after the age of like nine ten,
for sure, it was like that. And I think a
lot of sorry, a lot of that credit needs to
go to kind of having older siblings, Like I don't
know if you're familiar with the kind of Alice Miller
psychology around like children and the benevolent witness, right where
like the difference between somebody growing up who's in an
abusive environment that can be completely normal ish let's not
(22:36):
say completely that's again a big term, and somebody that
might turn out to be have sociopathic tendencies or really violent.
All the rest of it is having a benevolent witness
in your corner, somebody that is telling you that what's
happening to you isn't right. And if you don't have that,
then you might start to believe that what's happening to you,
whether it's psychological, physical, or sexual abuse, is actually okay.
(22:56):
And we definitely had that in older siblings, and I
think my older siblings had contact with my grandparents at
the very beginning, and I feel like it was something
that was passed down. I don't want to say through generations,
like you know, six years between us, nine years between us,
but it was something that was imbibed in then and
then was given to us. And I'll be eternally grateful
for that, because a lot of kids didn't have it
and didn't realize that that potentially what was happening wasn't okay.
(23:20):
But I do think that children are actually born with
that natural belief that think to understand from just a
primal perspective whether something is all right for them or not,
you know, like is this hug for me or is
that hug for you? That doesn't mean we're not still
not going to trust the person that's harming us. We
see that all the time with child abuse cases, you know,
your kids are still completely trusting a parent that's putting
(23:42):
cigarettes out on them, for example, and stuff like that.
So it is there's a duality, for sure. There's a
double bind to it, for sure. But yeah, I think
for me having like my brothers and sisters around me
that I'm one or twelve, and we were this pack
that protected each other and loved each other, and we
had each other's back all the time, and we you
(24:03):
know that we we always knew that it wasn't us
versus them. It wasn't like you know, even in an
environment where they were trying to break down the family
and if you read the book and you know, turners
against each other and like constantly having us grass on
each other, snitch on each other, whatever the word you
want to use is. And how somehow we still always
knew that the love was there and it's still I mean,
(24:25):
it's still there today. I mean my I've got eight
siblings that live in London and we meet up all
the time. We talk probably every five minutes, and we
still play all the cult games that we grew up on,
which most of the time, the you know, it's around
one one thing, which will be like a potato since
that's all we had to create games out of. And
trust me, you can make a lot of games out
of a singular potato. Don't ask where they're put.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
But versatile, very very versatile.
Speaker 2 (24:51):
But honestly like so I do. I did. I did
kind of see it in lots of ways for what
it was. But I did also have breakdowns when I
was child, Like I think I was maybe ten years
old when I actually thought that I was losing my
mind and going mad because I was just like, I've
got to give in to this. I've got to give
in to this world that I'm in it. If I don't,
everyone else has, you know, especially at that point because
(25:14):
i'd been on silence restriction. I've been put on this discipline,
which was me being silent for eleven months, so just
under a year. I wasn't allowed to look at anyone
or communicate with my hands, wasn't allowed to talk to
anybody except for one person who was like the leader
Mary Malaysia of our of the group at that point.
So at that point, I really did lose my mind
(25:37):
to the point where I was like, I've got to
give in and I need to figure out a way
to just start towing the line because I can't continue
to fight against this. I mean, I was a baby
when you think about it like that, that's a kid, kid,
It's not even a teenager. So there were points when
I look back that were really, really scary, and I
(25:58):
I did lose my way because how could not. I
didn't have enough outside contact or understanding to realize that
what I was poessentially being sold was a big, giant,
steaming pile of crap.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
And I love the parts where you have those moments
of clarity and you think, this is exactly what you
just said it was. You know, this is the load
of horseshit, and it comes through occasionally and a tiny,
little rebellious, little Becksy's voice coming through through the narrative
of the book as well. And the work that you've
(26:35):
done around documentary making filmmaking since your escape and exit
from the Children of God has taken on a role
of understanding, discovering, investigation work into.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
Various other cults.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
I wonder if you feel like that's your calling, if
you feel well, you know, not in a religious sense,
but more so, is this what you have fallen into
and feel like you should be doing, or is it
something that people keep coming to you saying, becksy, we
leed you on this.
Speaker 2 (27:08):
It's interesting one actually because like when I first left,
I mean I left when I was fifteen, and when
I only started doing this work and this kind of
investigative stuff, because I spent the first ten years of
being out of the Children of God completely pretending it
hadn't happened and never speaking about it. And I had
invented this entire other kind of like reality for myself,
and I abandoned it, and nobody knew, none of my
(27:31):
friends knew. Like by the time I was twenty seven
years old and I was you know, I was already creative,
a creative director. I was like running around, you know,
getting wasted the whole time, living what I thought was
a really good life. And it's the minute I would
go to sleep or close my eyes, I was literally
right back in the colt. I was right back at
the fires of armageddon, and I could not escape it.
And it was only because of the fact that I
(27:52):
knew that I couldn't shake it off that I actually
had to start facing it. So I think that you know,
there's that saying like deal with your shit before your
shit deals with you. And it was really a case
of that where I was like I didn't want to
get into it, and I definitely did not want to
get into my parents and that whole mess and be like, oh,
let's dig around in the past. If I could have
left it and never seen it again, that would have
been amazing. But just stuff doesn't work out like that.
(28:14):
You know, trauma that isn't dealt with turns into some
pretty hideous stuff. So I started just by trying to
understand a bit more about myself to begin with, like
why did I leave? Who, what would what were the
big what were the big moments for me? And then
it was like, actually, I don't want to look at
my parents and I don't want to look at the
children of God, Like I didn't want to look at
any of that because it was my life. I knew
(28:35):
enough about it. But I was like, maybe I can
understand them through other people, which a lot of people
at the time were like, why would you do that?
It's clear that the route is A to B and
I was like, no, I need to do the rest
of the alphabet first, and then I'll come back to
that potentially never, hopefully never. So that's why I, you know,
went to the States, bought a truck, lived in this truck,
(28:58):
and I did this over four years, joined ten cults,
and during that time, I was like living in everything
from like armageddonist cults, so you know, the ones you know,
to like trying to get into ones that channel aliens
to you know, people that think they can think they
can heal you with their penis, which I think is
probably most cult leaders, whether they say that or not.
You know, if I had a nickel for every time
(29:20):
I heard that one. But yeah, so, and I really
just wanted to understand what it was that combined them,
you know. And people at the time were like, you're
trying to retraumatize yourself, and I didn't believe that. But
of course I did actually retraumatize myself in lots of ways.
But I also did have fifteen years worth of being
(29:41):
a of being in a cult that was actually really
good experience for me, being able to split into two
entirely different people, one extern or one internal, which I
know we all do. We all experience things in multiple
versions of ourselves in each second that we're alive, but
to have that as kind of an experience. I was
worried about myself before I went, and actually once I
was out there, I realized that I was okay. But
(30:06):
it didn't make it easy and it didn't make it
any less scary, but it did make it feel worthwhile
to do what I was doing. And I think when
I look back on it, like it's really helped me understand.
But one of the biggest things that I would say
that I've kind of gained out of it is I had,
like some of the kids that I met when I
was in Rose Creek, who were, you know, eight, ten,
(30:30):
twelve at the time, get in touch with me. Was
it last year? Maybe last year? Like just one of
them instagrammed me and they were like, your visit and
like this is their words. I'm not going to try
and take responsibility, but they were like, your visit has
kind of changed the trajectory of our lives because when
you came and stayed with us, our mom was going,
(30:50):
why are we being told to change our children's behavior
because there's essentially a reporter here, a documentary maker here,
and they were pretending to do school, and they were
pretending like that they they have this entirely different life
and she saw this facade, and we talked about a
light switching on, and that was her moment where her
light switched on. And these kids said to me that
after we'd left, they'd like broken into the one of
(31:11):
the adults offices and got on their computer and tried
to contact us, and there was this whole thing where
they were like, you know, I was like, I was
in bits in my living room, like with pas my
my husband, and I was just like talking to her
on Instagram, and she was just like with like, my
mom left, she started up her own company. She was,
there's five five kids, my mom left, she started up
(31:31):
her own company. I'm doing my ged, this, that and
the other. And I was just balling my eyes out,
just being like and I'm not saying that she wouldn't
have had that moment if we weren't there. I cannot
take responsibility for what that woman has done, which I
think is actually amazing. Like she left her husband, she
was in a really vulnerable position. I mean, she had
little kids, five of them, and to go out and
just be like, no, not anymore, I'm gonna, you know,
(31:54):
take them all out. I mean honestly, like it was
I get goosebumps thinking about it now, just because you
know that for me was one of those moments where
I was like, if that is the only thing that's
happened because of this journey, then it was worth it,
like completely worth it.
Speaker 1 (32:09):
Absolutely. That is such an incredible and really kind of
emotional invoking story. I can't imagine how it must have
felt for you to receive those Instagram messages. And I
think it just goes to show that the work that
is happening around cult awareness and cult education is making waves,
it's making changes. More of it needs to happen. We've
(32:30):
got incredible voices at the forefront of that, Becksy being
one of them, and I am so thankful for you
coming to join me this weekend to speak to people
about the subject of cult's coercive control and hopefully we
sell out all the copies of your book and then
loads of people that are listening now head over to
Audible and get an ebook version. So before we finished today,
(32:52):
I just wanted to say again massive thank you to
Brian and Fiona for letting us use this space at
the Big Light Studios.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
Very swinky. Oh it's so fats, isn't it.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
I've never heard myself like this before.
Speaker 2 (33:04):
Now I'm normally recording under a duvet, so this is
really fancy.
Speaker 1 (33:09):
And tomorrow we will be on the big stage speaking
to everybody in a bit more detail about Bechxsy's experiences,
your life, your work, your documentary, your book, and all
the creative ventures that you've been on and will continue
to be on. Far past our conversation tomorrow. I am
so excited for this weekend.
Speaker 2 (33:30):
Thank you so a mine. Thanks Kasey.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
That is the end of this week's bonus episode with
Bexy Cameron, Survivor of the Children of God. To find
a copy of Bexsey's memoir Cult Following, you can follow
the links in the episode description for tickets to Crime
Con UK twenty twenty four. You can also follow the
links in the episode description. To get in touch with me.
You can find me at Cult Vault Podcast at gmail
(33:54):
dot com or follow me on Twitter and Instagram at
Court Vault Pod. I'm your speaker case see host of
the Colt Vault podcast.
Hello listeners and or welcome to you this special re
release series of the live talks that I have recorded
at crime Con UK. As we are so close to
the event in London now on the seventh and eighth
of June twenty twenty five, I thought it would be
a great opportunity to re upload the talks that I've
done previously at this event. For those of you that
(00:22):
have been tuning in for a while, these talks might
be familiar to you, but for those who are new
to the show, here is a taste of what you
can expect from crime Con UK across the weekend in London.
We will also be in Manchester in September and I
hope to be doing a talk at this event too.
This year, I am lucky enough to be on a
panel with Laura Richards no Less talking about coercive control
(00:46):
and cult. You can buy your tickets at crimecon dot
co dot uk and use the code cult cult at
the checkout for ten percent off your tickets. Patrons also
receive a fifteen percent discount code so you can contact
me for directly. Crime Con UK, sponsored by True Crime,
is the UK's biggest true crime event, advocating for survivors,
(01:10):
victims and policy change in the UK. I really can't
wait for this weekend and I hope to see you there.
I hope you enjoy these re uploads and get in
touch let me know what you think and if you'll
be there for the weekend. Hello listeners, and welcome to
this extra special episode coming to you from Glasgow's very
(01:30):
swanky Big Light Recording Studio. A massive thank you to Brian,
Fiona and the Big Light team for having us ahead
of tomorrow's Crime Con. And thank you to Nancy and
her team at Crime Con, CBS Reality and Bonnier Books
for allowing us this space to talk about a very
important subject and making all of this work possible. But
(01:51):
let's not delay any longer. Hello Bexy and welcome to
the show.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
Hi, thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
Would you like to start by introducing your self to
the listeners?
Speaker 2 (02:01):
Sure? So, I am a documentary maker an author. I'm
also known as a sex cult girl, which is slightly
less academic or fancy, but yeah, I was born into
a cult called the Children of God, which was, you know,
fancily known as a sex cult. Shall we say that
(02:23):
one of those ones from the seventies where kind of
anything went and then went really horribly wrong. So yeah,
I became a documentary maker mainly because I wanted to
get into that topic, but into many more after that,
and that's why I'm here today.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
You are a woman that wears many hats. You've just
completed a postgraduate course which is a huge and excellent achievement,
and you've also been doing work with Alexander Stain and
Ranking for the Family Survival Trust. I believe, how does
that all come together?
Speaker 2 (02:56):
Well, I mean it's still coming together, but it's a
really nice way of kind of looking looking at something
which is really important but also quite dark, which is
coercive control within cults. So what we're trying to do,
and hopefully this is something that we're going to be
pulling off, is we are working with the Family Survival Trust,
as you said, and Ranking one of the UK's most
prolific photographers to create an exhibition around this topic. So
(03:19):
we're looking at people who joined cults, people who were
born into them, and who've experienced all of these nuanced, weird, wonderful,
horrific traumatic experiences and trying to understand what kind of
joins them up what divides us, what gives people that
sense of other and also what you know makes sense
for people outside of the cult world as well. So
(03:41):
how that will work in a physical sense is like
photography that's never been seen before from childhoods in groups,
you know, understanding the rituals, that kind of thing. But
it will culminate as an exhibition and then hopefully what
we're trying to do is actually get legislation changed in
the UK for how cults and so control works within
(04:01):
the UK, because I think it's really easy to get
kind of distracted, if you like, by cults because they
are so weird and sensationalist, and they have things like
exorcisms and you know, bizarre beliefs and really bad outfits
a lot of the time, so you can get distracted
by that without actually realizing what is the thing at
the nucleus of this that is actually really dangerous. And
(04:25):
sometimes it's not the beliefs at all, it's just something
much more simple, which is people trying to control you.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
That sounds like such an incredible and exciting project, And
I love how you've just talked about the nucleus of
the issue. I talk about this sometimes in my lengthy
episodes interviews with people that are two to three hours long,
which unfortunately we don't have today, and a lot of
the time, the reason the episodes is so long is
(04:53):
because to understand one major part of a person's experience,
whether that be something like being branded or being physically
imprisoned in a room or something, to understand that particular experience,
you have to look at the whole picture and say,
(05:14):
how did we get to this point? And I think
that that's a really difficult thing to try and translate
to wider society. And it's definitely a journey that I'm
still on and there are things that I am learning
today about the Children of God despite reading multiple memoirs
and interviewing various individuals who have had experiences within that group.
(05:38):
So would you like to start us off with a
sort of overview and timeline of the Children of God?
Speaker 2 (05:47):
Yeah, I mean it's really difficult with the Children of
God because I think with a lot of cults, you know,
they become known for one thing, and I think if
you look at the Children of God, the thing that
they're known for is the sexual practices and belief. So
they had a practice called flirty fishing, which was basically
sending the mums out to be to prostitute themselves. I
don't like to use the words kind of sex worker.
(06:08):
It doesn't feel right when it's more akin to human trafficking,
which is where it was, and that exploitative nature, so
it doesn't have that same kind of sense of agency.
And I know I'm kind of mudging the waters a
little bit, but so those are the things that it's
known for. Is known for sanctioning sex with children, pedophilia,
and known for the prostitution of the mothers in the
(06:31):
name of Jesus. So quite wild beliefs, if you like,
and quite dangerous, deviant, exploitative beliefs. But how it started out,
and in the same way that if we were going
to look at coerci of control in relationships, nobody starts
out by dating a bastard part of my French. But
you know, you start out by dating somebody that's quite nice,
and then slowly but surely it starts to become something
(06:54):
else when you're in that kind of controlling relationship. And
I think that cults are very similar. So my parents
when they join, they join in nineteen seventy two, and
it was you know, the Jesus Freak Revolution that was
sweeping across the States. It was flower power, it was
the riots, it was Vietnam War. Society was in a
position where probably not too dissimilar for now. Everyone was
kind of scared and the politicians were lying to everyone,
(07:15):
which no surprise, but it was a very fearful time
and a lot of people were wondering how are we
going to actually get through this? And his nuclear war
just about to happen, and a lot of people were saying,
stop the world, I want to get off. My parents
were included with that. So I look at that time
period and I see the cult that was then. And
if you look at the photographs of early children of God,
they all look really cool. They look like hipsters, they
(07:37):
look like bands, they have long hair, they've quite you know,
awesome outfits. They're all young, and you can imagine if
you were of that time period, like David Berg was
in his I think like late fifties early sixties at
the time, but he was sending his kids out to recruit.
He started off by making peanut butter sandwiches and Huntington
Beach and like recruiting that way. But he was doing
(07:58):
it with the help of his teenage young adult children.
So in that kind of, you know, drawing kind of
similarities from the kind of Epstein type thing where you
use younger people to be your recruitment people. So I
think that like at that time period, I can understand
why people did join. It was a revolution for Jesus,
and it was dramatic and it was powerful. But how
(08:19):
quickly it turned from that into something which was really
dark and dangerous and deviant and wasn't about revolution for
Jesus and definitely wasn't just about you know, being counterculture.
I mean it was the space of like four years.
So by the time that nineteen seventy four rolled around,
he was already like thirty, fishing had already started in
earnest and he was and I think that Child Bride,
(08:40):
which was his big kind of decree on what you could,
you know, have sexual abuse of children, which was being
sanctioned by him and also documented by him. I mean,
the children God essentially created a handbook for how to
molest children, printed with photographs and gave it to their followers.
So my parents had been in the group for four
years by that point, so you might sit and think
(09:02):
to yourself, how did you get from being in this
wild hippie cult to something where you were actually physically
handed this book in black and white that I read
as a child growing up and not understand how completely
messed up this was. And when we talk about things
like conditioning and brainwashing and stuff like that, and I
don't like the term brainwashing because I think it kind
(09:23):
of eradicates people of some of the agency that they
might have had in situations, and also of the responsibility
that they should have had in situations. I think that
conditioning is something that is really is really prevalent within cults.
But on the day that that happened, that this child
Bride document came out from David Berg, Moses, David whatever
(09:46):
you want to call him, two thirds or maybe it
was a third, Actually it might have been a third.
A third of the children of God left, so people
did know. People did read it and go, this is
too far. My parents weren't them, but people did know.
So you still have to think that there is a
level of agency that is being you know, that's being
(10:09):
carried out within groups in the same way that you
know a woman in a dangerous relationship might finally get
to that point. You know, they say it's like seven
times that it takes you to leave a controlling partner,
and it's like there's something that will make you go,
this is too much. Maybe the abuse turns to the children,
but it's something which turns the light on for you.
So yeah, it's unfortunately it didn't work out like that
(10:31):
for my parents, but it is. I do find it
quite shocking, even as someone who grew up in that group,
to see how quickly that happened. It wasn't decades, it
was a matter of four to six years.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
And as somebody that grew up in that environment, there's
still that need and want to understand how that happened.
And I think that that is something that individuals that
haven't experienced cults want to do as well, want to
understand how do you go from A to B and why.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
Do people stay.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
But the really tricky thing, which you've mentioned in everything
you just said so wonderfully is the convoluted stuff that
comes with moral injury, personal responsibility, and things like coercive
control and conditioning. How much blame is to be put
on first generation individuals and people that joined certain groups,
(11:25):
and how much of it should be looked at and
inspected through the lens of course of control. And I
really appreciated the parts in your book where you were
trying to work through all of those things and understand,
you know, your parent's decisions and why they did or
didn't do certain things. So I don't know if there's
(11:49):
a way you've managed to look at those two things
or whether you can't really pull them apart.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
I mean, it's a really difficult thing because you want
to look at things from multiple angles, but you have
to accept the fact that you are. You contain multitudes
within you. You know, I contained a chart, I contained
a child within me who was traumatized my parents. I
contain an adult within me who understands how the structures
of cults work and how they break down family dynamics,
and how there is no family dynamic within the cult,
because the cult itself is the family. And once you
(12:15):
start getting into the kind of muddy waters of that,
you can always find a way to turn everybody into
a victim. Within these groups, however, there is people who
made the decision to be there, and there are people
who were born into it, and there are people who
are vulnerable and there are people who were definitely like
I call my father a career cultist, which I don't
know if it's an actual term, but I kind of
(12:35):
love it, where you know, they essentially join something, they
see a kind of real route to power within it,
and how they can kind of become quite you know,
exploit it for themselves, where there are other people who
are just being completely exploited within these groups. So I
think that there are nuances, and you know, a lot
of people say things like, well, your mother, for example,
(12:55):
she was a victim. She was to a point, but
there was also a point where she wasn't you know.
There's a point where my parents became and this also
kind of complicates it, but my parents became the pr
face for the children of God within the United Kingdom
and Europe. So when I think about when people ask
me big questions like have you forgiven your parents? There
(13:16):
is a part of me that it's not up to
me to forgive to people who allowed the sexual abuse
and physical abuse and psychological abuse of thousands of children
within Europe and the United well within Europe at that
time to go under the radar. I can't forgive that
because it's not for me to forgive. I can forgive
them for what they specifically did to me, but their sins,
(13:38):
if you like, if we're going to get biblical, which
why not, we're here now, their sins are so much
greater than what happened to me. So like you know,
I can be like, yeah, Mom and Dad, I forgive you.
I would be saying that for myself, not for them,
if we're being honest. But what they did and how
they managed to put this kind of polite, kind of
like British accented face onto a group that was doing
(14:02):
horrific things and they're still in it now, it becomes
very muddy. When do we start calling somebody going going
from being a victim to being the exploiter, you know.
And we can look at this again. It's through the
lenses that aren't anywhere anything to do with cults. We
can look at it again, Epstein, We can look at
it again, you know, like R. Kelly. We can look
(14:23):
at it across the board with people where the victims
were were also became the exploiters at some point. So
it is complicated. But if we want to make it
really simple, and I like to the simple terms for
me are always if you're a child and you didn't
have a choice, and you didn't make the decision to
be there, then you're the one that needs to be protected.
(14:43):
If you, as an adult, had that autonomous moment and
that decision and you gave yourself that like, oh that
there is enlightenment and purpose, good for you. Believe what
you want. But if a child is being harmed within
the makings of your belief, they're not on my watch, ma'am.
So for me, that's when it becomes a bit more simple.
But yeah, it's it is a complicated topic, for sure.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
It's so complicated, and it's it's not binary. It's on
like an ever changing, shifting spectrum, and there's so many
different things to contemplate on an individual case to case basis.
And when you consider the magnitude of individuals that have
had a cartic experience, and then you picture the magnitude
of individuals that have brushed upon or experienced coercive control,
(15:50):
it's kind of mind blowing that this isn't more.
Speaker 3 (15:53):
Of a of a subject of discussion, which is why
it's so great to hear that you're partnering with I
would say the UK's leading charity on supporting individuals who
have been been victimized or exploited under the guise of
course of control being the family Survival Trust.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
And I don't want to focus too much on David Berg.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
I do want to ask you a question.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
Do you this is one of those big questions.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
Do you believe that he.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
Had a goal of exploiting miners when he set up
the Children of God? Because it happened so fast. He
was a prolific pedophile. And I just always wonder, you know,
not did he know he was starting.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
A cult or you know, oh, did they know they were.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
Going to become a serial killer. I'm just wondering what
you think personally on whether he always wanted to have
access to vulnerable children.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
So I think that again, if we look at it
from the big, big lens of cult leaders in general,
and it's the kind of chicken and egg thing where
like if I again putting it into a really simple
kind of analogy, if you like or whatever a metaphor,
and never I never get those two right. You look
at somebody who goes into Hollywood, for example, and they
might start out as a normal person and then they
(17:10):
are surrounded by people that are enablers and saying yes
them all the time, and then you end up with
somebody like twenty years later that it's unrecognizable as almost
a human being because their morals, their sense of self
have been so eroded that they become you know, people
call more kinds of horrible names because they just don't
know how to be because as human beings, we are
hardwired to need to have boundaries and people saying no
(17:30):
to us and calling us out on our stuff constantly.
So like, I think that you can see smaller versions
of that happening all the time, whether it might be
CEOs or pop stars, whatever, it happens all the time
where you're like, how did you get like this? Like
when did you start like demanding X and Y and
z and treating people like they are dirt on your shoes.
So you can see it happening all the time. However,
(17:53):
I think that there are certain cult leaders that it
started out to do good and they became like that
where they became eroded and and they saw an opportunity
or money power sex corrupt in any scenario, money power
sex corrupt, especially with Western upbringing and the idea of
the individual and the idea of I and me. You know,
we've all met no offense to anyone listening, but like
(18:15):
a white shaman who's like, you know, spent like you know,
two weeks in Peru and they've come back and they're
trying to change the world, and you're like, that's super cool.
But if you still have your like sense of ego
that you grew up with and you don't have that
kind of imbibed vibe and feeling of you just being
a channeled, and this could go very horribly wrong.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
Very very yeah that you say you want to heal
the world.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
Exactly that it's like you're a channel bro, and that's it.
But I digress. Like I think with David Berg specifically,
and I wanted to kind of just give an overview
before going into him specifically, he abused his daughters long
before he was in the Children of God, you know,
when he was a pastor and he had his first
(18:58):
church long before or any like the Flower Pow and
all the rest of it. He was, you know, kicked
out of that church because of sexual deviancy. So this
is a man that already had a predilection for that
long before he started the Children of God. I think
that what he saw was like there were two things
that happened that, like his daughter talks about in her book.
(19:20):
One was David Broke's mother died, and it was like
his last kind of sense of like morals and to
be a good person was kind of stripped away with that,
as in, like, right, this is my time to just
go for it. They had a bit of a strange relationship,
very colodependent, et cetera. And I think that with the
you know, he tried to transform himself when the seventies happened,
(19:41):
you know, the late sixties seventies happened. He grew his hair,
you know, he changed his outfit, he became his work,
spoken different languages, like as in, he learned the vernacular
of the hippies, and he really wanted to become this
other person. And I think that he saw an avenue
to get to what he wanted. And I think that
he was biding his time to see how far he
could put it and exploit it. I think his first
(20:02):
port of call was to be seen as like a deity,
and then after that it was all the rest of it.
And because he just kept being able to get away
with more and more and more and there was nothing
that he couldn't get away with it. When you look
at what he did and what he was capable of,
the man did everything that you possibly pretty much can
besides actually kill within the group, everything else was pretty
(20:22):
much there. So I think that he might not have
had it as his grand like you know, PowerPoint scheme
or whatever, but it definitely was a means to an
end to him for all of those types of corruption,
if you like.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
You mentioned something at the beginning of.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
Our talk about.
Speaker 1 (20:42):
People whose lights are on and people whose lights aren't on,
and I feel like your light was on from the
beginning in your book Cult Following, which everybody should go
and read because it's incredible. Or he can listen to
Beccy narrate it herself on audible, which is great because
you get singing in the round, you get you get
(21:03):
seen sounds coming in, you get the American accents. It's
it's great.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
It's all in there.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
And you always had this idea as a as a child,
from from what I gathered from from your work your
work was that you knew it wasn't right and that
something in the group was was wrong, and you know,
(21:31):
feeling certain things, thinking certain things, but then still being
part of this group, and and a lot of the
the difficult thoughts and feelings that that children have expressed
growing up in these environments, especially not having much access
at all to the outside world and your light stays on,
(21:52):
you know, you never fully buy into any of the stuff.
I think there's a lot of residuals sort of Oh,
if I break the rules, I might be harmed by
you know, one of the aunties or uncles, but there's
not really you're biding your time until you can leave.
Speaker 2 (22:14):
Basically. Yeah, definitely after the age of like nine ten,
for sure, it was like that. And I think a
lot of sorry, a lot of that credit needs to
go to kind of having older siblings, Like I don't
know if you're familiar with the kind of Alice Miller
psychology around like children and the benevolent witness, right where
like the difference between somebody growing up who's in an
abusive environment that can be completely normal ish let's not
(22:36):
say completely that's again a big term, and somebody that
might turn out to be have sociopathic tendencies or really violent.
All the rest of it is having a benevolent witness
in your corner, somebody that is telling you that what's
happening to you isn't right. And if you don't have that,
then you might start to believe that what's happening to you,
whether it's psychological, physical, or sexual abuse, is actually okay.
(22:56):
And we definitely had that in older siblings, and I
think my older siblings had contact with my grandparents at
the very beginning, and I feel like it was something
that was passed down. I don't want to say through generations,
like you know, six years between us, nine years between us,
but it was something that was imbibed in then and
then was given to us. And I'll be eternally grateful
for that, because a lot of kids didn't have it
and didn't realize that that potentially what was happening wasn't okay.
(23:20):
But I do think that children are actually born with
that natural belief that think to understand from just a
primal perspective whether something is all right for them or not,
you know, like is this hug for me or is
that hug for you? That doesn't mean we're not still
not going to trust the person that's harming us. We
see that all the time with child abuse cases, you know,
your kids are still completely trusting a parent that's putting
(23:42):
cigarettes out on them, for example, and stuff like that.
So it is there's a duality, for sure. There's a
double bind to it, for sure. But yeah, I think
for me having like my brothers and sisters around me
that I'm one or twelve, and we were this pack
that protected each other and loved each other, and we
had each other's back all the time, and we you
(24:03):
know that we we always knew that it wasn't us
versus them. It wasn't like you know, even in an
environment where they were trying to break down the family
and if you read the book and you know, turners
against each other and like constantly having us grass on
each other, snitch on each other, whatever the word you
want to use is. And how somehow we still always
knew that the love was there and it's still I mean,
(24:25):
it's still there today. I mean my I've got eight
siblings that live in London and we meet up all
the time. We talk probably every five minutes, and we
still play all the cult games that we grew up on,
which most of the time, the you know, it's around
one one thing, which will be like a potato since
that's all we had to create games out of. And
trust me, you can make a lot of games out
of a singular potato. Don't ask where they're put.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
But versatile, very very versatile.
Speaker 2 (24:51):
But honestly like so I do. I did. I did
kind of see it in lots of ways for what
it was. But I did also have breakdowns when I
was child, Like I think I was maybe ten years
old when I actually thought that I was losing my
mind and going mad because I was just like, I've
got to give in to this. I've got to give
in to this world that I'm in it. If I don't,
everyone else has, you know, especially at that point because
(25:14):
i'd been on silence restriction. I've been put on this discipline,
which was me being silent for eleven months, so just
under a year. I wasn't allowed to look at anyone
or communicate with my hands, wasn't allowed to talk to
anybody except for one person who was like the leader
Mary Malaysia of our of the group at that point.
So at that point, I really did lose my mind
(25:37):
to the point where I was like, I've got to
give in and I need to figure out a way
to just start towing the line because I can't continue
to fight against this. I mean, I was a baby
when you think about it like that, that's a kid, kid,
It's not even a teenager. So there were points when
I look back that were really, really scary, and I
(25:58):
I did lose my way because how could not. I
didn't have enough outside contact or understanding to realize that
what I was poessentially being sold was a big, giant,
steaming pile of crap.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
And I love the parts where you have those moments
of clarity and you think, this is exactly what you
just said it was. You know, this is the load
of horseshit, and it comes through occasionally and a tiny,
little rebellious, little Becksy's voice coming through through the narrative
of the book as well. And the work that you've
(26:35):
done around documentary making filmmaking since your escape and exit
from the Children of God has taken on a role
of understanding, discovering, investigation work into.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
Various other cults.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
I wonder if you feel like that's your calling, if
you feel well, you know, not in a religious sense,
but more so, is this what you have fallen into
and feel like you should be doing, or is it
something that people keep coming to you saying, becksy, we
leed you on this.
Speaker 2 (27:08):
It's interesting one actually because like when I first left,
I mean I left when I was fifteen, and when
I only started doing this work and this kind of
investigative stuff, because I spent the first ten years of
being out of the Children of God completely pretending it
hadn't happened and never speaking about it. And I had
invented this entire other kind of like reality for myself,
and I abandoned it, and nobody knew, none of my
(27:31):
friends knew. Like by the time I was twenty seven
years old and I was you know, I was already creative,
a creative director. I was like running around, you know,
getting wasted the whole time, living what I thought was
a really good life. And it's the minute I would
go to sleep or close my eyes, I was literally
right back in the colt. I was right back at
the fires of armageddon, and I could not escape it.
And it was only because of the fact that I
(27:52):
knew that I couldn't shake it off that I actually
had to start facing it. So I think that you know,
there's that saying like deal with your shit before your
shit deals with you. And it was really a case
of that where I was like I didn't want to
get into it, and I definitely did not want to
get into my parents and that whole mess and be like, oh,
let's dig around in the past. If I could have
left it and never seen it again, that would have
been amazing. But just stuff doesn't work out like that.
(28:14):
You know, trauma that isn't dealt with turns into some
pretty hideous stuff. So I started just by trying to
understand a bit more about myself to begin with, like
why did I leave? Who, what would what were the
big what were the big moments for me? And then
it was like, actually, I don't want to look at
my parents and I don't want to look at the
children of God, Like I didn't want to look at
any of that because it was my life. I knew
(28:35):
enough about it. But I was like, maybe I can
understand them through other people, which a lot of people
at the time were like, why would you do that?
It's clear that the route is A to B and
I was like, no, I need to do the rest
of the alphabet first, and then I'll come back to
that potentially never, hopefully never. So that's why I, you know,
went to the States, bought a truck, lived in this truck,
(28:58):
and I did this over four years, joined ten cults,
and during that time, I was like living in everything
from like armageddonist cults, so you know, the ones you know,
to like trying to get into ones that channel aliens
to you know, people that think they can think they
can heal you with their penis, which I think is
probably most cult leaders, whether they say that or not.
You know, if I had a nickel for every time
(29:20):
I heard that one. But yeah, so, and I really
just wanted to understand what it was that combined them,
you know. And people at the time were like, you're
trying to retraumatize yourself, and I didn't believe that. But
of course I did actually retraumatize myself in lots of ways.
But I also did have fifteen years worth of being
(29:41):
a of being in a cult that was actually really
good experience for me, being able to split into two
entirely different people, one extern or one internal, which I
know we all do. We all experience things in multiple
versions of ourselves in each second that we're alive, but
to have that as kind of an experience. I was
worried about myself before I went, and actually once I
was out there, I realized that I was okay. But
(30:06):
it didn't make it easy and it didn't make it
any less scary, but it did make it feel worthwhile
to do what I was doing. And I think when
I look back on it, like it's really helped me understand.
But one of the biggest things that I would say
that I've kind of gained out of it is I had,
like some of the kids that I met when I
was in Rose Creek, who were, you know, eight, ten,
(30:30):
twelve at the time, get in touch with me. Was
it last year? Maybe last year? Like just one of
them instagrammed me and they were like, your visit and
like this is their words. I'm not going to try
and take responsibility, but they were like, your visit has
kind of changed the trajectory of our lives because when
you came and stayed with us, our mom was going,
(30:50):
why are we being told to change our children's behavior
because there's essentially a reporter here, a documentary maker here,
and they were pretending to do school, and they were
pretending like that they they have this entirely different life
and she saw this facade, and we talked about a
light switching on, and that was her moment where her
light switched on. And these kids said to me that
after we'd left, they'd like broken into the one of
(31:11):
the adults offices and got on their computer and tried
to contact us, and there was this whole thing where
they were like, you know, I was like, I was
in bits in my living room, like with pas my
my husband, and I was just like talking to her
on Instagram, and she was just like with like, my
mom left, she started up her own company. She was,
there's five five kids, my mom left, she started up
(31:31):
her own company. I'm doing my ged, this, that and
the other. And I was just balling my eyes out,
just being like and I'm not saying that she wouldn't
have had that moment if we weren't there. I cannot
take responsibility for what that woman has done, which I
think is actually amazing. Like she left her husband, she
was in a really vulnerable position. I mean, she had
little kids, five of them, and to go out and
just be like, no, not anymore, I'm gonna, you know,
(31:54):
take them all out. I mean honestly, like it was
I get goosebumps thinking about it now, just because you
know that for me was one of those moments where
I was like, if that is the only thing that's
happened because of this journey, then it was worth it,
like completely worth it.
Speaker 1 (32:09):
Absolutely. That is such an incredible and really kind of
emotional invoking story. I can't imagine how it must have
felt for you to receive those Instagram messages. And I
think it just goes to show that the work that
is happening around cult awareness and cult education is making waves,
it's making changes. More of it needs to happen. We've
(32:30):
got incredible voices at the forefront of that, Becksy being
one of them, and I am so thankful for you
coming to join me this weekend to speak to people
about the subject of cult's coercive control and hopefully we
sell out all the copies of your book and then
loads of people that are listening now head over to
Audible and get an ebook version. So before we finished today,
(32:52):
I just wanted to say again massive thank you to
Brian and Fiona for letting us use this space at
the Big Light Studios.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
Very swinky. Oh it's so fats, isn't it.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
I've never heard myself like this before.
Speaker 2 (33:04):
Now I'm normally recording under a duvet, so this is
really fancy.
Speaker 1 (33:09):
And tomorrow we will be on the big stage speaking
to everybody in a bit more detail about Bechxsy's experiences,
your life, your work, your documentary, your book, and all
the creative ventures that you've been on and will continue
to be on. Far past our conversation tomorrow. I am
so excited for this weekend.
Speaker 2 (33:30):
Thank you so a mine. Thanks Kasey.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
That is the end of this week's bonus episode with
Bexy Cameron, Survivor of the Children of God. To find
a copy of Bexsey's memoir Cult Following, you can follow
the links in the episode description for tickets to Crime
Con UK twenty twenty four. You can also follow the
links in the episode description. To get in touch with me.
You can find me at Cult Vault Podcast at gmail
(33:54):
dot com or follow me on Twitter and Instagram at
Court Vault Pod. I'm your speaker case see host of
the Colt Vault podcast.
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