Part Two: David Berg and the Children of God (ft. Ed Helms)
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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 back for part two. Thank you. If it's anything like part one. Wow. Yeah.

It's going to be a lot worse. Strap in. Yeah, it's going to 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, than your season two was. We 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. A deeply immersive, highly produced audio experience. Yeah.

About really important history. It's not just people chatting. Yeah, no. It's not just one of those dumb shows of people chatting about stuff. Yeah, not a chatting. It's, 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, exactly. Otherwise, no one's going to know who Curtis Yarvin is. They're not going to read all of his weird writing. Yeah, we don't want to do like a horror podcast. Yeah.

Yeah. Even though that's probably the most accurate treatment of some of these stories. Yeah. 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. That's true. This is an iHeart podcast. You know what's great about your investment account with the big guys? It's actually a time machine. Log in and Zoom. Welcome back to 1999.

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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 produced. 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 them and assaulting straight up assaulting. Yeah, yeah.

Now, we had talked about he began an affair, first with this 19-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 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 70s.

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? You can't just like pretend it didn't happen. Like, where's Mother Eve? Well, where's the mother to the children of God? Right, right. She seemed pretty important. And he explains to his followers this.

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 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 where it's just the one guy, right?

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 he is now sleeping with. Right. It's often referred to as a harem. Right. That he's got. Right.

And so that 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 like keep people in line with the stuff that's a lot harder to swallow. Um,

Wow.

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. One of these young women later told Rolling Stone that the act of submitting to Berg in this way was described as a revolutionary action in the cult's literature, right? You were helping to overthrow the corrupt and evil government, warmongering government, by sleeping with David Berg. And she said, quote, I was so indoctrinated at the time, I accepted what Berg did sexually without question, right? Yeah.

That this is what we're doing by submitting to him in this way is actually in some way damaging the military industrial complex. Right. Which is interesting.

And it's hard to get yourself into that mind state, but it's important to understand that this is 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 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? Yes, of course. Yeah.

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 first by this is the guy.

One of those different did the term come up first in this context or just the tactic as I'll talk about. There's some debate as to where the term came from. The first like professional, like 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.

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 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? Right.

It's kind of unclear 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 Berg and the Children of God and the Unification Church are kind of

pioneering 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 concerted 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 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.

Like everyone would be like, hey, man, it's amazing that you like did this. You made clothes. If you walked in with like a fresh kill, a giant antelope on your shoulder, like you're going to get love bombed. Right. People are going to be like, oh, my God, you're the best. Right. And they're not doing it cynically. They're doing it gratefully. Because you saved their lives. Right. Yeah. And so like you get 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, right? I'm sure this goes back as a tactic way before, like centuries. Pre-human probably even to some extent, right? Yeah. I mean, not just evolutionarily, I mean, but I mean as a tactic. Right. And even not even as a –

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 some kind of social cohesive group, that love bombing can sort of happen organically. And it's not done – no one is cynically thinking like we're going to love bomb this person. It just is a sort of like –

Thing that happens. Yeah. Like like fraternity initiation or. Right. All these things. Friend groups, families, you know. Yeah. Political affiliations like all these kinds of things. I think that's such an important point because with all of every cult dynamic, there is a non toxic version of it.

That's a reason why the cold dynamic works. And like, yeah, like your, your friend group, you know, when you notice like one of your buddies having a bad time, they've had trouble in work, like, Hey, let's all get together and like really make like, you know, Jim feel better. Right. Like make him know like how much we give a shit about him and stuff. Hold on. Is Jim in trouble? Oh, yeah. Again with Jim. Jesus. Jim's a mess. Honestly, I'm done with Jim. Yeah.

I was also kind of thinking, as you brought this up in terms of like earlier places, in 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. That's some serious love bombing. Right. That would get you addicted to like the making the empire bigger.

Right. Yeah. 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. But you're absolutely correct that like this has been a thing for a spell. Right. 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 your heroine, it's a lot easier to get you to do that.

Right. And that's that's where the children of God are in the early 70s. 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 bombings, non-sexual, but it kind of gels well with like, and now we're all 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, right?

And Karen Zerbe is Berg's first test subject for this new tactic. But as time goes on, initially, you know, she's 19, he's in his 50s. This is he is very much he has a lot of power over her. This is very much an abusive dynamic. As time goes on, Zerbe 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 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. 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. What about his old soulmate? What about the ex-wife? 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 Zerbe Mama Maria. Right. So you've got Mo or Moses, David and Mama Maria leading the children. And how old is she? She's like 2021 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 which she's like a prodigy at cult stuff. Like she gets very good at this very quickly. And, and where is this? Like, are they still bouncing between West Texas and LA? Yes. They are traveling around and all around. They've got a bunch of different States now by this point, by 71, 72, there's hundreds of members. Right. And so they've got like a dozen or more places that they're traveling between. Yeah.

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. 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 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. 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'd gotten prior in their lives. Right.

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 1971, he shaves his head, joins the cult, and starts going by Jonathan.

Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Wait, wait, what was his, what was his name before that? Jeremy Spencer. Jeremy Spencer. Yeah. Switches to Jonathan. Yes. Yes. Jeremy to Jonathan. Very creative name. No lateral move. Look, he's a slide guitarist. He's not writing the songs, you know, we would never gotten silver Springs from Jeremy. So by the time your cult starts poaching members of Fleetwood Mac, it's hard to stay under the radar, right?

Right. And I should know, I looked this up, Jeremy Spencer left the band in 1971, which is six years before Rumors was released. Now, does this mean that if David Berg hadn't started the cult, does this mean we might not have gotten Rumors or we would have gotten 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 much, right? That's literally what I was looking up. I was like, that was my exact question. Yeah, no, he was well ahead of Rumors. Yeah.

Fair enough. And Fleetwood Mac moved around. Their list of musicians changed a crazy amount before they got as famous as they eventually got. Anyway. I wonder if they stayed friends with Jeremy slash Jonathan. Jeremy's into some weird stuff now, man. Yeah. He's not doing as much slide guitar.

So by 1972, 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 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 seems bad. Like it seems like maybe something that you should look into."

You have to remember, though, at this time, number one, cults as a concept aren't as well understood as they're 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 the cult trying to get the warning out.

And it's not yet taking off. Right. It's it's going to start in the mid 70s. 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 70s, he publishes a Moe letter titled I got a split. And he tells his followers that he's taking his inner circle and they're 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. I just want to say I really don't like the phrase Moe letter.

I don't like it. Yeah, the Moe letters, that's what they call them. Not into it. It's kind of spunky. Yeah. It's like, hey, we got another Moe letter. We got another Moe letter. He's hiding from the FBI now. Isn't that cool? It doesn't do it for me. Yeah.

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 if you're going to go underground, I mean he must have caught wind of some like serious implications starting to – there were some walls closing in. Yeah. 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 U.S., 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. I should probably bounce. Because he also flees to London, right? That's when he leaves the U.S. He goes to the U.K. and he's never going to reenter the United States.

And you know they ain't paying taxes. Oh, God, no. At the very least, it's going to be some IRS hell to pay. 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 them 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 made by the fact that one of their first really wealthy followers, who's this British multimillionaire, 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...

It doesn't like force the matter, right? But he does give the cult an empty factory, which they turn in using some of his money into their London headquarters, right? They build it out in the housing. And it's likely, and there's a little bit of speculation from me on this, but this is based on stuff that they do later and codify later as 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? Yeah.

and that this kind 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, that we're building towards. God, this is getting very Epstein-y. Oh my, you have, you have predicted where this is going, Ed. Okay. All right. Yeah. Although Epstein never on this scale, um, at least as far as we know. Um, although I, I will say most of these people are adults at this point. Uh,

By 1973, Berg's growing free love ideas had spread out across the network of communal living spaces in the U.S. and now the U.K. Again, this started in like a decentralized fashion, but in 73, he makes the policy official, publishing his first Moe letter to officially link the children of God to free love. Quote,

And his preaching had taken a more apocalyptic tone by this point. By the end of his time in the U.S., 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 Warren Zevon song. But, you know, he 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. Why not? You know? Like...

The fact that this works causes him to get bolder and he merges this kind of liberatory rhetoric with his preaching. Subsequent Moe letters have titles like revolutionary sex and revolutionary lovemaking and

In Revolutionary Sex, he devotes a lot of time to arguing that the Bible is fine with incest and that marriages of brothers and sisters, 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, right? Wow. Openly preaching incest. Yeah, yeah.

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. 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 context because he's he's got his inner circle that he tests stuff out on before it gets out to the whiter 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, 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 is him 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.

God, how big is, how many people are we talking at this point? We are talking by 1973, 2,400 full-time members, right? So these are people who live in cult housing. They've got 140 housing projects in 40 countries around the world by 1973. 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 buy the literature, right? They'll listen to him, right? Because 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 2,400 person harder core of 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 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. 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 church to be broken up. Husbands and wives are separated from their children. Um,

They are forced to—husbands and 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 to be raised communally away from their parents, right? Yeah.

This is deeply abusive. It's also as a 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? Yeah. It's interesting. Like the, uh, the manipulative payoff of so much cult activity is,

Is clear, like from the outside, it's like like what you just said, it makes perfect sense that you would want to keep cult members from from gaining intimacy 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 are they just sort of – they're so steeped in their own benevolence or belief in their own benevolence that they're just kind of like doing these irrational things and justifying it with insane ways? Yeah.

And it's not the sort of cynical tactic that we see it to be from the outside. You know, Ed, I think that is like in a lot of ways the million-dollar question with this stuff. And like I would be lying if 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 works and what doesn't and are going about things methodically. Maybe 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 all kind of, I think a lot of this is, there's a degree to which he and Zerbe are strategizing some of this. So they are consciously building some tactics. Yeah, but narcissism is a very powerful kind of like just a,

A powerful mechanism for toxic behavior that is sort of not understood by the narcissist themselves. 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, sure. 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, he's like one of those kids that gets drafted at 14 for the NBA. It's like, oh my God, David Berg, you're going to be a cult leading all-star. You can't get drafted at 14 in the NBA. Okay. Sophie's the one who knows about sports here. I shouldn't have even tried. That was embarrassing. Yep. And that's why I'm going to throw to ads right now, Sophie, to distract everyone. There we go.

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Don't let the wrong ingredients knock you down. Fuel your perseverance with Don't Quit Clean Protein Drinks. Get yours now at Safeway or Albertsons. So we're back. So by 73, again, they're in 40 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 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, you know, somewhere in the Balkans, right? Or, you know, in the Canary Islands. Let's head over there now. And he's actually got basically like advanced teams moving out ahead of him, making sure places are set up for him. So a lot of this is very methodical.

In 1974, buoyed by 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 X-Family website, I want to quote like, what 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 as 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 escort servicing.

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 intercontinental pimp, right? Making money for the church that way. And also, obviously this leads to pregnancies. And this, the goal is that these, the kids that come out of these liaisons will be the second generation of the cult. He calls them Jesus babies, right? Wow. Wow. Yeah.

Yeah, they're sex trafficking sounds a lot more fun if you call it flirty fishing. Yes, it does. And to give you an idea of like how big a business this is, by the fall of 1998, records show that the cult kept records that showed that members like female members of the cult had, quote unquote, loved 223,311 fish. What? Yeah. Yeah.

Well, how many people had done that much loving? Several hundred. We have in one case, like we know that Zerbe around this period, just when they're in Tenerife, which is kind of when they start building this tactic, has sex 137 times with 18 different like men on the island as she's sort of like experimenting with how this is going to work. Wow. Yeah. Wait, where's Tenerife? Tenerife.

Tenerife is in the Canary Islands. Okay. Wow. Wow. Yeah. 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 numbers. Right. Um,

He's at least got to be in the running for it at this point. It's just like a startlingly large scale 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 its modern day, because the children of God is still around and he's dead now, they have to address that this happened on their website. And

And they described the tactic not as an active attempt to seduce and manipulate people, but as 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 about him making money in order to fund his lifestyle, right? Like this is – it's a natural evolution of everything that they have been doing and of his need for control. Do we have the Moe letters that – Oh, yes. That sort of kicked this into gear? Yes, yes. Because that would sort of –

That would help clear up any of the spin on the present day website. Yes. So Berg himself in a Moe letter scripturally justified flirty fishing. He quoted 1 John 4, 8, which stated God is love. And then I want to quote from Davidberg.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 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 saved 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 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 the money. I mean, the...

The exchange of money kind of just like negates all of this. Like this is just like – You would –

There are some theological basis for this. Yeah. Like once the money is exchanged, doesn't that just undermine all of it? 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. Mm-hmm.

And they're arguing sex like this is a form of preaching. Why shouldn't they take donations? You know, he missed his true calling. He's a great cult leader. He's a great cult leader. Like among the best. But I will say like he might make an even better lawyer. He could have been an awesome lawyer. This is the interpretation and manipulation of –

text and prose to serve a very specific outcome. And it is a deeply cynical practice. It's so cynical that lawyers are so like the most brilliant lawyers have an uncanny knack for. And I would posit he might have

Have been a better lawyer than a cult leader. Yeah. I also think maybe marketing, like I can almost imagine this is like a Don Draper scene where he's like, let me put them out to you. Yeah. Constitution, but preaching, you know? Yeah. 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 way that we discussed. And what is shocking to me is while they do have these scriptural justifications 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 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.

Wow. Like just hooker. Hooker. The language is just hooker. Yeah. There's literally a hook through her body. Yeah. I am not. That's not us editorializing. That's how they describe it. Wow. It's wild. And a very erotic presentation. I mean, that's just explicitly pornographic. Yes. Yes. Wow. And there's a lot of that.

By the way, I just want to say I do not – I did not mean to impugn the profession of lawyer. The legal profession? I know and love a lot of lawyers. But it is – there is a special talent in that regard. Yeah.

that I was just calling out. You can use that skill for good or for evil, right? Exactly. Thank you. Well said. It's like you can, you could become a cult leader or you could become like a really good actor or musician, right? And make stuff that people love, right? Like the same skills kind of apply. I don't think I could be a cult. If you're implying like actors, I think there's a, there's a,

Well, I don't know. Yeah, I'll give it a try. Yeah, give it a shot. Never too late. There's types of... 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? He's got that kind of people...

loved watch, like following him. Right. Yeah. Like there's that piece of it. Right. And most people who aren't bad are just like, Oh, you know what? Being a rock star is great. I'll just do that. Right. Um, 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. And I, one of the things I found when researching this for an idea of like how direct this is, is a comic book called heaven's girl, right.

which is like it's half illustrated tract and it's half text. Have you ever heard of the Left Behind books? Oh, yeah, sure. Yeah. I mean, it became a TV series. It became a TV series. There's a movie with Nicolas Cage that they made that didn't do well enough to make sequels of. But like, yeah, these are pretty prominent.

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 Antichrist leader comes and takes over. And it's following this like female lead character who is like basically a prophet and transgressor.

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 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 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, 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 that,

And then it, it like structurally means nothing. None of them come to Jesus. She like escape, 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 a result of her doing this. 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. Um,

And it's also just like narratively unnecessary. But this is the kind of way they're talking about it, right? We're like, if you were in this position, the right thing to do is give your body up to be a 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 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 1973, Berg publishes a tract called Come On Ma, Burn Your Braw.

And this is in response, they'd been doing the bra burning thing for 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 young following, exclamation point.

And then continues in lowercase 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. We're as free as Adam and Eve in the garden before they ever sinned. If you're not, you're not fully saved. And yeah, this is like the rhetoric he's sending out 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 70 to 74, you could say. Now, Berg's living underground at this point, as we've talked about. He's got this inner circle that's 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 to the family news, the Colts magazine, praising Berg, who they call dearest precious dad for his lovemaking skills gratuitously. Like, again, I don't, 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. Wow. And, uh,

You know, as time has gone on by the mid-70s, Zerbe 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 Tenerife, she'd again had sex with 18 workers at their hotel and, quote, started a lovemaking revolution amongst the help. It was a totally new ministry for us.

But Zerbe by this point was also a major driving force in cult doctrine. And she kind of seems to have helped Berg decide that he needs an heir, right? He's getting old. And 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? 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. Wow.

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, 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 Zerbe will be the biological mother, right? And I'll raise this kid as a work of art to be the Messiah of mankind, right?

So in 1975, Zerbe, Mother Maria, gets pregnant from a hotel waiter named Carlos. Her son is declared the Messiah by Berg and born on January 25th, 1975.

His name is Richard Peter Rodriguez or Ricky, but he's also called David Ito, like little David. Right. And he's immediately made into an object of worship for the cult. Right. They've got this whole media apparatus at the time and they spin it up to turn him into like a like every aspect of his childhood, into this like drama of like what a what a heroic baby our Messiah is. And he's going to save us from the Antichrist when he grows up.

In what form will this saving take? Will he be sacrificed to God? Will he be a warrior that vanquishes the bad people? I think like a spiritual warrior. Or just a leader. Yeah, 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 a member of the cult. Ricky was the prince. We all grew up reading comic books about his life. Comics, 100 strong, slavishly depicted every detail of Ricky's life as a toddler and were eagerly devoured by the growing ranks of the children of God faithful around the globe. By now numbering more than 3000 members living in 228 communal homes.

So, they've got this kind of media empire built around this kid, and they're 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? Zerbe, his biological mom, is 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 work of art, is

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 raise David Ito, right? And so this kid, this messiah, grows up in luxury and comfort, but he's deeply confused, and he's increasingly abused, right?

And this 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 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 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 immoral to see a child as different from an adult. Right. Right.

Which is going to lead in some very bad directions, right? But again, you see this way, he kind of like drips out what he's going to drop. What's the, explain that, taking that from what he said or from what you just explained. Yeah, so what he's saying is like it's immoral basically to treat your flesh and blood children differently from anyone else, right? Just because they're your kids. From anyone else, not from other children. Yeah, yeah. But when he says children of God, he's talking about everyone.

Right. We're all children of God. I see. I see. Got it. Got it. Got it. Yeah. And so one way you can read that is 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. Right.

So through the 70s, his cult grows to three and then 4,000 full-time members and beyond that, and he continues to push the line that sex is a need like food or water. In the 1980s, 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 has a responsibility to fulfill people's sexual needs, including kids, right?

Oh.

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, about

He publishes a book. He goes to this printing house in Spain, and he has thousands of copies made for all of the different cult installations around the world of The Story of Davidito, which is a 762-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 children.

little Ricky Davidito for the early stages of his childhood. Like it is, it is like there's straight up child pornography in here, right? There's photos of Ricky aged 17 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, right?

That they are, 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, right? In 1985, when Ricky is 10, lists of his sexual availability are published in group homes on what are called sharing schedules, right?

So they are like literally ordering basically people to molest the Messiah, right? And as a result, each other. Because they're now this free love thing. His availability, meaning people can sort of like make appointments to have sex with David. Yep. Davidito. Yes. As he's toured around, right? You can like book that. Oh my God.

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 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, right?

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? Because how could he? You know, this is the only world he's born into. He 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. Yeah, sure. He's picking up on the humanity of, yes, of these people and probably better than they are themselves. Right? Yeah. Cause they've been, they've let themselves become so lost in this thing. And yeah, it's, it's, it's really tragic. Um,

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Don't let the wrong ingredients knock you down. Fuel your perseverance with Don't Quit Clean Protein Drinks. Get yours now at Safeway or Albertsons. And we're back. So, you know, I think it's clear at this point by 1985, David Berg, there's no guardrails. There's no governor or break on this guy. He is doing whatever. And he is completely broken with any reality outside his own desires. Right.

He's enshrined in 1985 child sex abuse as official doctrine among the children of God. And is 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 point. There's so much physical evidence. It's big.

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 1988, right? So three years after this. So,

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, and law enforcement is very sluggish to 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. Jesus Christ. And some of this just has to do with the fact that like,

Child molestation, child pornography were not punished as much in this period as you would expect. Right. And that's just a reality. I mean, even outside of this.

So to quote from Dr. Stephen Kent's study here about like how he kind of rolls this out to the wider cult. In 1985, 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 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. 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, they start producing children's television for a general audience in the mid-80s.

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 much lower production values, obviously, that depicts 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 Life with Grandpa.

Life with Grandpa, what can be more fun? Livin' where there's love for everyone. Learnin' lessons each and every day. Learnin' from the Word of God, the light to guide our way. Life with Grandpa, what can be more fun? That is why we are happy, that is why that we sing. It's because of Jesus, He's everything.

We have a purpose in each new day. Learning how to share and give God's love away. Life with Grandpa, what could be more fun? Living where there's love for everyone. Learning lessons each and every day. Learning from the word of God that likes to guide our way. Life with... All right, I think we're probably, that's enough there. Jesus Christ, yeah. Yeah.

It's like the stuff about like sharing love, all the physical contacts, like you might you wouldn't have caught it on TV in 85. But when you know what's going on, it's like, oh, no, no.

Yeah. Also, very interesting choice to cut away to a puppet cameraman. Yeah. Yeah. Fascinating. Did you notice that? It's a break the fourth wall, but stay within the puppet universe. Yeah. It's so wild. That was – because it was almost like, by the way –

Like filming you is fine too. Like don't – Don't think that's weird. Yeah. Like don't think people pointing cameras at you while you're being intimate with grandpa is weird. That's a really good point. I hadn't even thought of that. But you're absolutely right. It's just sort of like normalizing the presence of a camera operator. Yeah.

Yeah. Because it's within the puppet show. Yes. Yes. That is so weird. And you're right. They are, as I'll talk about later, they do film like –

sex acts between adults and kids. Yeah, that's got to be part of what's going on there. 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 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. I will say the jingle, the song, for a kids show jingle, and speaking as a kid who was

you know, a kid at that time, like that's like a perfect jingle. That's a perfect, that's like a perfect kids show song theme song. Yeah. The production value is like in line, right? It's a small world. Yeah. Yeah. 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. All the more sinister because it's so good and cheerful. Yeah. Yeah.

And they produce multiple shows. There's one called The Lovetts, L-U-V-V-E-T-T-S, made in the Philippines. That's another puppet-like show. And ultimately, Treasure Attic, which I think either starts or at least runs until the early 90s. And it's kind of like a cross between Blue's Clues and Lamb Chop. There's like human beings and puppets together. And it's like, yeah, it's fairly good production values for the time. Yeah.

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 Stone article quotes Berg writing in a Moe letter that, "...I don't know what the hell age has to do with it when God made them 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 to molest their own kids. Yes. Yeah. 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, right? That's – yeah, great point. It's a little bit –

Yeah, it's kind of mob-like in that way. Like once you're complicit, you have to be loyal. Yeah. Or else you're going down. Yeah, the real world will never take you. Now you know what you did to your kids, right? So when Ricky, the Messiah, is 12, Berg appoints an adult woman named Bonnie to be his girlfriend. Right.

Most of what he called raising Ricky seems to have just been making Ricky watch and participate in group sex acts with Berg, right? 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 13, and she and Ricky become friends, right? In part because they're enduring a lot of this together, right?

In 1987, with Berg's insistence, Ricky is made to participate with his like his mother molests him. Right. At Berg's orders and Zerby. Yeah. Zerby. Yes. This is apparently there's debate as to whether or not this is the first time Zerby 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. Right.

And again, Ricky is kind of gradually realizing how bad all this is, but because of the bubble he lives in, it's not immediately clear. In 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 Ito book, but also by his doubts over Berg's increasingly erratic behavior. He was particularly upset with how Berg treated his granddaughter, Mary Berg, known in the family as Minay.

And Berg had started molesting Minay, 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. Would this be Faithy's child or do we know? I think it actually might be Deborah's kid. Okay. I should have checked on that. I don't actually know 100%.

Um, he makes her live in a walk-in closet next to his bedroom. Uh, and when Ricky turns 12, Berg tries to make them have a kid together so that he can continue the family line with the Messiah and like merge their bloodlines. Zerby doesn't like this, right? She feels very like,

Like this, like she's trying to protect like her own importance in the cult and is like very jealous of this kid, his granddaughter who's being abused. Oh, so it's about her. It's not like. Yes. No, no, no, no, no. I was like, oh, that's your line. No, it's about her. She feels threatened by the fact that this girl might become her son's wife. Right. Right.

Um, Donna Irwin, Mene's brother, later told Wilkinson she was worried that Mene would become Moe's next wife. Um, and so, uh, in a family practice called teen training, Mene suffered vicious physical abuse at Zerbe's direction. In Macau, Mene 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 Mene herself.

Wait, Sarah Davidito is like one of Moe's like the women he's got in his harem who's raising Davidito. Right. So she takes on his name as her last name. But but this is all Zerbe's under Zerbe's direction. 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 like he genuinely this this kid he sees is like this. 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 many people.

She is eventually institutionalized as a result of the abuse she endures, right? Like she does not do well psychologically. How the fuck could you, right? And through the, by the late 80s,

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 family's crimes and David Berg's crimes has started to hit the news and get interest from law enforcement. This is when there start to be prosecutions or attempts at prosecutions. Not till the late 80s? Not till the late 80s. Jesus Christ.

1988 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? Which is why the cult ends the flirty fishing practice because people start getting sick, right? This is also when they start to ban, officially ban sex with minors. It's still occurring in parts of the cult, but they make an official like notice that people should stop doing this. And in 1991, increasingly worried about the law coming after him, Berg orders all copies of the books of David Ito destroyed.

This is not enough to stop the criminal investigations, 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 90s, which law enforcement is not super up on. 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. Right.

Um, so by the early 90s, kind of the biggest of these investigations is one in England, which ends with, you know, a lot of information about the torture of kids, including Mene comes out in this case. And the judge who's adjudicating this, the Lord Justice declares that like the cult tortured children and it led to a quote barbaric and cruel situation, which is like you're starting to think, OK, maybe.

a good ruling coming here but then this justice is like but all the evidence shows the cult has been reformed sufficiently so we don't need to do any further legal action dude they learned from their mistakes dude it's fine like what do you mean it's wild it's wild like shocking jesus christ yeah mm-hmm these are these are kids 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

Um, by 1993, yeah, uh, there's not a, unfortunately, like nobody really gets what's coming to them here. Um, with maybe one exception, although that's pretty bleak too, as we're going to get to. So by 1993, the family international, AKA the children of God has more than 12,000 members in 70 countries, uh,

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 Moe letters. Zerbe takes over. She's authoring letters for him as him and is leading the cult, right? She's running everything by 93 because he's so sick. In 1994, Moses David Berg dies aged 75. The cause of death is unknown. He is buried in Portugal.

Zerbe, aka Mama Maria, replaces him and promotes her new lover, a guy named Peter Amsterdam, to co-leader, calling him King Peter. In 1995, 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 see the level of attention they've gotten. Weirdly homophobic. Weirdly homophobic. And Zerbe's 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 the church by this point. There has been a rash of suicides through the 90s of about at least probably around 30 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 lot of vulnerable people in the children of God. And he gets out in the early 2000s. He's 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, I mean, nightmarish abuse. And he becomes obsessed with getting vengeance against the cult leadership.

Specifically, he wants to kill his mother, Karen Zerbe, 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 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 overcomes the

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 as bad as it could be. I mean, and your heart just goes out to Ricky. What happened to Zerby? Oh, she lives a long life. Is she still with us?

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. Like, it's a little hard to say, right? Because we don't know where she is. She's been underground for a long time, but at least her death has not been, like, officially listed, right?

Now, again, we don't know. These people have been living underground and hiding. Cult membership has declined to about 1,400 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. I guess first you'd have to know where this person is located, right? It'd be nice...

Like, why wouldn't Zerbe be, like, on the FBI most wanted list? 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 U.S.,

You know, like, where is she? Like, you can find people trying to figure out, like, where she is. These crimes were perpetrated overseas, too. All over. Yeah. Right. Like, yeah. Like, the FBI, Tenerife, like, what are they going to do about, like, sexual abuse there or whatever? 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. She's got an up-to-date website as of 2024. Oh, yeah. Yeah, no, they maintain their websites. Yeah. Wait, wait, wait, wait, what? Yeah. 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 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 Ito. 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 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 how do you have an up-to-date website 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 um but yeah um okay yeah

Welcome to the family. You know what we're not good at as a species? Accountability. Accountability. That's also one of the sad lessons of Snafu. Like, this is obviously, you know, like, this massive child sex trafficking operation is...

intensely horrifying and tragic and heartbreaking. But you just you see it all across, especially like when it's when it's in in an institutional context, like a cult is a form of an institution. Right. But even in like, you

In season three of Snafu, we talk about how the government poisoned thousands of people during Prohibition. Right. And that was all exposed at the time. No one accountable. Right.

No one. 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 realized what was happening was wrong. And like,

Yeah, it gets real tiring just hearing that over and over again with all of these monsters, with people like Zerby, you know, seeing a guy like Berg die elderly, kind of rich, surrounded by his power. Of natural causes. Presumably natural causes, yeah. Yep. Wow. Anyway, Ed, sorry for this bummer of a story. You know what?

The more we know. The more you know. Yeah. The better off we are. This was a deep dive into a hellhole. Yeah. I'm just going to be honest with you. It's a nightmare. It's a nightmare. Yeah. It started out kind of like these cult stories. You can kind of sit from a distance and be like, look at these idiots. Yeah. And just kind of be snarky. But then when it just starts to get like the reality kicks in, it just –

It's so upsetting. It's terrible. It's super bleak. 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? Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, 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? Also, this is such a sad reminder of the legacy of abuse. Like what abuse, how much abuse carries through generations and that the pain and toxicity of

The damage goes on and on, and it's very heartbreaking. Yeah, yeah. It's this, yeah, the man handing on misery to man. It's this like, and that doesn't like, the fact that Berg was abused doesn't excuse what he does, but you do, you can't not notice the pattern repeated. Sure, sure, sure.

All right. All right. Thanks so much. Thank you. Everyone listen to Snafu 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? I don't know. Just like, let's, let's all be good people. Yeah. Try to be better. Yeah. At least don't be like this guy. Yeah. Don't be like this guy. Don't fall in. Don't get taken in by this guy. Right. And all the different forms he takes around the world. Yep. And thanks for having me. It's always a pleasure. Yeah. All right, everybody. That's the episode. Bye.

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