Janaki Jitchotvisut
INSIDER
September 19, 2018
Many people think of cults as strictly religious, but that's not always the case. And though most people don't want to believe it, given the right circumstances, it can be easy to fall prey to a cult.
Still, there's hope — and here are 10 stories of people who say they successfully escaped from a cult.
Maude Julien wrote a memoir about how her father created a "three-person family cult."
In 1936, Louis Didier, a 34-year-old businessman in northern France, convinced a poor couple to let him take in their 6-year-old daughter named Jeannine. By 1957, Didier had married Jeannine and he decided they were to have a child together. They had a girl they named Maude Julien.
Julien describes how her father attempted to make her into a "superhuman" child. In the time between the first and second World Wars, he would experiment on her. Around the age of 6, he would ply her with whiskey and then command her to do complicated tasks. He also regularly made her hold onto electric fences with her hands or kept her in a basement in the darkness with bells on her sweater so he would know if she moved.
He also reasoned that since musicians survived concentration camps, his daughter needed to learn as many musical instruments as possible. That's eventually how she escaped; a music tutor convinced her father to send the formerly homeschooled Maude away to "a harsh school" to continue her music training.
Today, Julien is 60 years old and is a psychotherapist. She went on to write a memoir about her experiences titled "The Only Girl in the World."
The entire Phoenix family of actors — River, Joaquin, Rain, Liberty, and Summer — spent part of their childhoods as members of The Children of God.
In 2014, Joaquin Phoenix sat down for an interview with Playboy and talked about growing up in The Children of God.
"My parents had a religious experience and felt strongly about it. They wanted to share that with other people who wanted to talk about their experience with religion," he said. "These friends were like, 'Oh, we believe in Jesus as well.' I think my parents thought they'd found a community that shared their ideals."
But according to Phoenix, that wasn't the case and the group was actually a cult.
"Cults rarely advertise themselves as such," he continued. "It's usually someone saying, 'We're like-minded people. This is a community,' but I think the moment my parents realized there was something more to it, they got out."
In reviewing a biography of the tragically short life of Joaquin's brother River Phoenix, LA Weekly wrote that Children of God "infamously encouraged both incest and adultery." The parents constantly preached the Children of God word to any who would listen in Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela — while the Phoenix kids begged from locals since families in the cult were responsible for providing their own food.
The family eventually left. In Joaquin's interview with Playboy, he said that he could see the cult's beliefs and actions evolving in a disturbing way.
Rose McGowan also spent her childhood growing up as a member of The Children of God.
For the first nine years of her life, Rose McGowan says she and her family were a part of a Children of God branch in the beautiful Italian countryside. According to McGowan, her dad was a leader in the branch — not just a run-of-the-mill member.
The Children of God believed strongly in both an imminent apocalypse and also free love. McGowan told People that when the Children of God started heavily pushing the idea of child-adult sexual relations, her father left and took her with him.
McGowan talked to People magazine about her family's escape.
"My dad, Nat, Daisy and I escaped with my dad's other wife in the middle of the night," she said. "I remember running through a cornfield in thunder and lightning, holding my dad's hand and running as fast as I could to keep up with him … [The cult] sent people to find us. I remember a man trying to break in with a hammer."
Michael Young grew up as a member of The Family International, the name that The Children of God chose after it was rebranded.
The Children of God later rebranded and changed its name to the Family of Love, and later The Family International after it had been labeled a cult and was investigated by the FBI and Interpol.
Speaking to the Guardian, Michael Young — who was born in 1992 — recalled his experiences with the group being a street preacher as a child on the streets of Monterrey, Mexico.
Although Young told the Guardian that he himself was not sexually abused, he saw other children who were — especially young girls. He told the Guardian, "It definitely wasn't a safe place to grow up, especially if you were a girl. Close friends of mine growing up were abused and raped."
The Children of God founder David Berg died in 1994, but his widow Karen Zerby continued the group's mission. Under her guidance, in 2009, The Family International announced that the apocalypse was no longer imminent — and suggested that members might want to start thinking about the future.
In the Guardian piece, Young and other former members describe how hard it was the acclimate back to normal life and move on after leaving.
The Family International still exists today, but no longer encourages communal living — and as of 2017, counted around 2,500 members in total spread across 80 countries.
Anna LeBaron was one of over 50 children born to Ervil LeBaron — who was dubbed "the Mormon Manson" because he was accused of murdering dissenters.
Anna LeBaron wrote a book and gave numerous interviews about how she escaped from her fundamentalist father's cult at the age of 13.
Her father, Ervil LeBaron, was the leader of the Church of the Lamb of God, a fundamentalist offshoot of Mormonism that kept up the practice of polygamy after the main church abandoned it in 1890.
Over his lifetime, Anna's father would marry 13 women and father over 50 children. Anyone who challenged LeBaron was allegedly subject to the abandoned Mormon doctrine called "blood atonement" that said killing "sinners" could "cleanse them of evil." LeBaron's murder plots reportedly started with his older brother, Joel, and allegedly continued even after he went to prison in 1979.
By 1981, he had died while still in prison, but his followers were still killing in his name.
In 1988, the Four O'Clock Murders shocked America when family members were gunned down within minutes of each other on the same day, all allegedly on LeBaron's orders. Mark Chynoweth, who hadhelped Anna escape from the Church of the Lamb of God, was one of the victims.
Since then, Anna says the family is slowly healing and has moved beyond its dark past.
"I have five grown children and if me telling my story was to put me in any danger, or anybody that I loved and cared about, I would never have done this at all," she told the BBC. "I believe that is 100% in the past and there is no danger at all for me."
Author Rebecca Stott left the Exclusive Brethren in the UK with her family when she was 8 years old.
Rebecca Stott's family belonged to The Exclusive Brethren, which believed in the Rapture, extreme adherence to very strict rules, and as little mingling with the outside world as possible. Stott said women and girls were expected to be completely subservient, quiet, and keep their heads covered and hair long.
If followers failed to adhere to the rules, minister higher-ups would visit and interrogate them, and sometimes isolate them for extended periods of time, she said.
In 1970, a scandal rocked the Brethren when one of the cult's leaders — a 70-year-old man named Jim Taylor, Jr. — was found in bed with a 30-something younger woman in the group who was married to someone else. A group of around 8,000 Brethren worldwide splintered off from the main group — and Stott's parents and several other close relatives were part of that splinter faction.
Not long after, Stott's father decided that the family should enter the real world and disengage from the cult altogether. While they'd been part of the Brethren, Stott didn't watch TV, read newspapers, listen to secular music, or see movies — the entire family was largely out of touch with the culture of the time. Suddenly being thrust back into the world was a huge adjustment.
Stott wrote in an essay for Elle that she tells her children "to think for themselves, to ask questions and to stand up when they see something unfair."
Rachel Jeffs is the daughter of self-described "prophet" of The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints Church, Warren Jeffs. She left in 2015.
Rachel is one of Warren Jeffs' 53 children by 78 wives — at least one of whom was as young as 12 when she was forced into marriage.
Rachel says her father started sexually abusing her when she was 8 years old — and she told her mother about it when she was 10. After her mother confronted Warren Jeffs about it, he still kept it up, even forcing Rachel to look at pornography while out at bookstores, she said.
Her father may have believed in taking young girls as wives for himself — but he didn't marry Rachel off until she was 18.
"Right before I got married was when he started marrying 16-year-olds," she told A&E. "And he actually married one 15-year-old right before I got married. I knew it was wrong, I knew in my heart. I felt bad for these girls — they were my age, they're little girls. I remember thinking that it was gross, but I couldn't really do anything about it."
Warren Jeffs was convicted in 2011 for aggravated sexual assault on a 12-year-old girl and sexual assault of a 15-year-old girl that he claimed were both his "spiritual wives" and was sentenced to life plus 20 years in prison. Even so, he still controls the FLDS church.
It was after Warren punished Rachel by forcing her to live apart from her children for seven months that she finally left the church. The alleged crime: Warren accused Rachel of having had sex with her husband while she was pregnant.
Wallace Jeffs, the half-brother of Warren Jeffs, also left the FLDS.
After he saw his half-brother Warren — the self-proclaimed FLDS prophet and church leader — marry an 11-year-old girl, Wallace Jeffs says he knew he had to protect his children, he told Religion News Service.
He worked with the FBI to gather evidence against his half-brother and wanted to fight for custody of his children. Standard practice in the FLDS held that men could forfeit their plural wives and children to the church if they stepped out of line.
His family managed to all leave the FLDS after he did, according to the Religion News Service. Some of them don't currently talk to Wallace, but he says he's happy that they're at least free of the cult and rebuilding their lives.
Carli McConkey joined a group called Life Integration Programmes in 1996 that she says was a cult. She won a defamation suit brought forward by the group's leader in 2014.
While attending the Mind Body Spirit Festival in Sydney, Australia, after university graduation in 1996, Carli McConkey found herself drawn to a booth for Life Integration Programmes (LIP). The first seminar was free, but after that, she had to pay more and more if she wanted to continue taking these courses.
The group was lead by a woman named Natasha Lakaev, a registered psychologist, according to NRM Digital. Sleep deprivation, food deprivation, removal of personal identification documentation, siphoning of all personal finances to complete courses, isolation from friends and family members, and a constant barrage of carefully selected information were all methods the organization reportedly used to keep its followers in line.
In the late 1990s, LIP changed its name to Universal Knowledge. McConkey said she experienced physical abuse at the hands of Lakaev multiple times and was told to give more and more money.
McConkey finally left with her three children in 2009 and was able to reconnect with her parents. She has since written a self-published book about her experience as well as given interviews to the press. In 2014, McConkey and her ex-husband Michael Greene won the defamation case against them brought forward by Lakaev.
Claire Ashman says she survived two cults — starting from childhood indoctrination and later moving on to the Order of St. Charbel.
Claire Ashman grew up in a rural area of Victoria, Australia, in a very strict Catholic family who were members of the Society of St. Pius X — a sect that the Catholic Church does not currently recognize. When she was 15, a 27-year-old family friend named Tony started showing interest in her and the two later married.
It was Tony who became interested in the Order of St. Charbel, according to Claire, and she says despite her reservations, they joined.
The group was founded by William "Little Pebble" Kamm. He tried to get Claire to join the Royal House of David, which she said consisted of Kamm marrying 12 young virgins called "Queens" and 72 "Princesses" who could be married to other men but would bear him "mystical babies."
Kamm was later convicted and sent to prison after claiming that the Virgin Mary told him to repopulate the Earth with two 15-year-old girls, according to News.Com.Au. Kamm ended up serving nine years of a maximum 10-year sentence for his crimes and is believed to have fathered over 20 children, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.
Claire said she started to think about leaving after learning what a cult was from a book called "The Beautiful Side of Evil" by Johanna Michaelsen. In 2006, she left with her children. She now writes and gives presentations in hopes of helping others free themselves from cult indoctrination — as well as educating people about the signs to look forto keep those they love safe from cults.
https://www.thisisinsider.com/stories-of-people-who-say-they-left-cults-2018-8
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