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Cult Getting a New Look, as Former Member Highlights Horrific Child Sex Abuses

Cult Getting a New Look, as Former Member Highlights Horrific Child Sex Abuses

Last updated on: June 30, 2018 at 5:51 pm by Susan Wright

Cult Getting a New Look, as Former Member Highlights Horrific Child Sex Abuses 2018-06-30T17:51:01-04:00 Susan Wright

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2 Peter 2:1 AMP – “But [in those days] false prophets arose among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you, who will subtly introduce destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them, bringing swift destruction on themselves.”

Cults are not a new thing. They’ve been with us through the ages, as people become more desperate, more in search of answers to life’s questions.

I will never understand how it happens. How do people fall prey to the destructive lies of madmen? It’s usually built around some charismatic figure offering them “fulfilment.”

It then becomes very protective and inward-focused.

Some cults are rather benign, but others turn paranoid, and eventually, deadly, such as the Heaven’s Gate cult or the People’s Temple.

The A&E network has been offering a series called “Cults and Extreme Beliefs.” The show covers a different cult each week, and among those profiles offered is the “Children of God” cult, that took hold and flourished in the 1960s and 70s, before scandal forced a name change to “The Family International.”

Christina Babin was once a member of the “Children of God” cult. She was brought up in it, as a child, but at 21 years old, escaped.

She was featured on the A&E series, and recently appeared on “Megyn Kelly Today” to talk about her experience in cult life.

According to Babin, the “Children of God” cult, while seemingly Christ-centered to the outside world, was actually a front for child sex trafficking.

“Daily life was very strict, very structured,” Babin revealed in an interview Tuesday morning on “Megyn Kelly Today,” recollecting her years in the cult. “You woke up, you prayed, you did indoctrination and then you went out on the street and begged for money and food.”

The group practiced Christianity on the surface but what they were really doing was sex trafficking the children as well as practicing incest, Babin said. In a 1973 message by the founder of Children of God, David Berg told members: “We have a sexy God and a sexy religion with a very sexy leader with an extremely sexy young following! If you don’t like sex, you better get out while you can.”

That was the “free love” era of the late 60s and early 70s, so the attitude wasn’t unusual. What’s disgusting is that they did this under the guise of Christianity and were hurting children, in the process.

Babin continued.

“We were trafficked across the world, from country to country, from commune to commune,” Babin said, describing the minors in the cult. “We were moved constantly. They held our passports and I never knew where my parents were. Most of the time they didn’t know where I was.”

A parent that would allow that is not a parent.

Babin also added that adults were told to “teach” the children how to have sex. Even if that involved incest.

She said that she was convinced her mom didn’t know what was happening to her, and was grateful that she was never forced to engage in incestuous acts with her mom.

“The thing that is very interesting is that at 11, I had already been taught that women were sexual objects, that we were supposed to be ‘God’s wh**es,'” she explained. “So it was not that shocking to me that they took me aside and said, ‘Here, we are going to teach you how to have sex because this is part of your training.’ What surprised me was that I didn’t like it and I thought there was something wrong with me, that something was wrong with my heart, my soul, because I didn’t enjoy the thing that David Berg said that I should.”

“Most of these people were brainwashed, they were controlled,” she said. “If they rebelled, they could possibly lose their children and never see them again.”

“You control somebody’s sexuality, you control the most intimate part of their soul and then after that you can ask them to do all kinds of stuff.”

The sickness of the group was played out in old video footage of Babin and other children, as well as cult leader, David Berg’s own granddaughter.

According to the A&E episode featuring the cult, Berg decided to take his granddaughter as a wife, while she was still very young. When she refused, she was punished severely.

Another former member of the cult, a young man named Ricky Rodriguez, suffered greatly in the cult, with disastrous consequences.

He was the stepson of cult leader David Berg, and was hailed as a messiah, the one to one day run the cult. Instead, in 2005 Rodriguez sent a bizarre video to his ex-wife, showing off an array of weaponry, and ranting about all the people he was going to kill.

Most notably, he swore revenge against his mother, Karen Zerby, known as “Mama Maria” and the head of the cult, by that time. He intended to hunt down other members and torture each one, until they told him where his mother was.

His goal was to kill his mother, as revenge for the sexual abuse he suffered as a child. He ended up stabbing to death 51 year old Angela Smith, his former nanny, and one of his alleged abusers, before driving out to the desert in Arizona and shooting himself in the head.

He swore in his video that he would hunt down his mother in the afterlife, if that’s what it took to find her and exact his revenge.

When contacted about the allegations of abuse from multiple former members, the group apologized for any hurt, “real or perceived,” and even acknowledged that minors were exposed to sexually inappropriate behavior between 1978 and 1986. They deny the accounts of widespread, systematic abuse and child sex-trafficking, pointing out that some (possibly in reference to Babin) were out to make money from their claims.

Babin, married, the mother of four and a full-time artist (who says she went through a “lot” of therapy), isn’t the only former member of the cult who has spoken out.

Possibly the most famous ex-member is Rose McGowan, the actress who has also recently been at the center of the Harvey Weinstein case.

Hollywood actress Rose McGowan, like Babin, publicly told PEOPLE in 2011 that she was a member of the group as a child, before fleeing at age 9 because her “dad was strong enough to realize that this hippie love had gone south.”

“There’s a trail of some very damaged children that were in this group,” McGowan said then. “As strong as I like to think I’ve always been, I’m sure I could have been broken. I know I got out by the skin of my teeth.”

The group like to point out that investigations have turned up empty against them, but Babin says that’s because they often operated overseas.

It’s a sick and twisted group that would harm a child, much less traffic in the misery of children.

To do it in the name of God, however, devolves into a new, vicious low.

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