Bexy Cameron - Cult Following: My Escape and Return to the Children of God

First published in the UK by Manilla Press

An imprint of Bonnier Books UK

The Plaza, 535 Kings Road, London, SW10 0SZ

Owned by Bonnier Books

Sveavgen 56, Stockholm, Sweden

Hardback 9781-7-86580-92-4

Trade Paperback 978-1-786580-93-1

Ebook 978-1-786580-94-8

All rights reserved. No part of the publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted or circulated in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing of the publisher.

A CIP catalogue of this book is available from the British Library.

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Copyright Bexy Cameron, 2021

Bexy Cameron has asserted her moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright holders of material reproduced in this book, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers would be glad to hear from them.

This book is a work of non-fiction, based on the life, experiences and

recollections of Bexy Cameron. Certain details in this story, including names, have been changed to protect identity and privacy.

Manilla Press is an imprint of Bonnier Books UK

www.bonnierbooks.co.uk

This book is dedicated to the kids I grew up with.

To the ones whove flourished, the ones still in trauma, the ones who have struggled, the ones who made it, and the beautiful souls that decided that this world, and that pain, was not for them anymore.

See you on the other side.

Contents

Tell Me Everything: 15 Years After

Please, tell me everything.

I have heard this in the pub, at 4am at house parties, at my desk at work. The person asking could be a friend, sometimes its a complete stranger. It can come from a face filled with pity, one wet with excitement, from one thats serious, or even well meaning.

Tell me everything comes when people find out that Im a Sex Cult Girl.

And its why I sit here now, in this truck, 15 years after I left the Children of God, parked under an Arizonan night full of stars. Its what drove me to this vast stretch of desert, why Im surrounded by the ticking sounds of an engine cooling and the shallow night breaths of Sofi, my friend and fellow filmmaker, asleep behind me. Its what made me leave my home in London, my brothers and sisters, and my job, to re-join the world of religious communes and cults.

The words tell me everything supercharge my brain in an instant, explosions of memories, while physically I become vacant, mute. Not because Im afraid of sharing darkness, or my history, or even because this might be the moment where I could completely change in your eyes. Its just that a chat in the pub, or in the witching hours at an afterparty, or over a cup of whatever at work doesnt provide the space, time or depth to tell someone everything. What I was born into was as banal as it was unbelievable, as traumatic as it was my ordinary, as complex as it was controlled. And, perhaps I have just described growing up, perhaps our childhoods have more similarities than we know.

And even though I have achieved more than the 15-year-old me leaving the gates of a cult could ever have imagined, I still feel like an imposter. Maybe now more than ever. Sitting here, more than 5,000 miles from home, after joining yogic communes, Armageddonist tribes and cosmologists in Sedona, battling my demons and myself, four months into a journey that seems far from over.

So, to tell you everything, what could I give you in five minutes that might reveal what it was like being raised in a Sex Cult?

Do you want to hear about a generation of kids, fuelled by the war in Vietnam, who genuinely believed that the world was coming to an end? Or the charismatic leader who gave them purpose, rescuing them from the families they didnt fit into, from drug addiction or maybe just the horror of being middle class and normal?

Or do you want to hear about my exorcism? About when the moms became glorified prostitutes for Jesus? About my parents going on every media channel in the UK and beyond to defend a group that abused thousands of children? Or would you prefer to hear about the summers I spent running like a feral child with my brothers in Africa? The hot, hot days napping on cold floors in India when I felt like I was in a normal family? Would it help to know that where we come from, my childhood is considered a lucky one, that my sisters and I talk about how fortunate we are because Dad isnt a paedophile?

Would any of this really give you an idea of who I am, or the world I grew up in? You would get fractions of it all, sure. But out-of-context splinters like these could pull you further away from both me and what a story like this could reveal about our basic human need for connection and purpose, about surviving our childhoods, about the gifts that trauma can bring, and maybe at some point, what we, actually ... hopefully, what I, could learn about forgiveness.

But as my fingers stroke this very real dashboard, my frame to this very real adventure through America, I still cant quite wrap my head around how all of that brought me here. Of course, I know its to try and understand my parents, to figure out my tangled history with a cult that did so much damage and to get a little closer to my truth but still, it seems, sitting here, a pretty batshit idea.

I would love for you to think that Im a warrior rising out of the ashes of a cult, or a hero righting the wrongs of the past, or a filmmaker with a master plan. I would even settle for you thinking Im an objective person, able to give unskewed versions of what I see, the secrets I reveal, or the things I experience. But the truth is, I really have no idea what Im doing.

The ticking of the engine slows, the smell of petrol fades as my mind escapes from the front seat of the truck. I rise above myself, parked up in the desert, flying higher and higher until my Ford pickup becomes a tiny dot in a massive expanse of emptiness. The unknown. High above a truck that feels like its taking me through time, space, faith, trauma and healing. A truck that is my wings on a road trip of meltdowns, breakdowns, meth cooks, monks and soap-making Armageddonists.

All in the hope that by the end of this journey, I can tell you everything.

Prophets That Prey: 1968

He was a prophet.

He was a paedophile.

He was a dictator.

He was Grandpa.

David Berg, Dad. Father David, Moses David. The King ... These are some of the names of the Leader of the Children of God, the cult I was born and raised in until the age of 15. I didnt even know what he looked like until I was a teenager. Us kids called him Grandpa. His identity was so secret that, instead of photos, we grew up with drawings of him. Cartoons. Like a dictatorship, surrounded and commanded by an overlord that you cannot touch or see. We read his new writings every single day. Everything he did was recorded. His dreams. His declarations. His bowel movements. Yes, they would write down how and when he would take a shit and we would read about it.

Looking back through adult eyes, I see him as a dogmatic, sexually motivated, gibberish-talking, narcissistic, corrupt, dangerous pervert. As a child, to me, he was all-powerful, confusing, but also boring in a way that a fish doesnt know its in water: he was our ordinary, he was everywhere, but his unstable mind could change our lives within an instant. Understanding him is difficult. He was not a handsome Charles Manson, or even a David Koresh, he was a balding, grey-haired, sunken-eyed man born in 1919, who somehow managed to persuade thousands of people to forsake their lives and follow him. Including one woman from a tiny village in Derbyshire and a man from a seaside town in Kent.