Children of God / The Family International

Overview

The Children of God was a religious cult founded in 1968 by David Brandt Berg in Huntington Beach, California. What began as a small ministry targeting hippies and runaways eventually grew into a global organization operating in more than sixty countries, with an estimated 15,000 full-time members at its peak. The group rebranded multiple times — first as the Family of Love, then the Family, and finally The Family International — each name change coinciding with efforts to distance itself from mounting scandal.

The conspiracy elements of the Children of God story are not speculative. They are documented across court records, government investigations, journalistic exposés, and the testimonies of hundreds of former members. The organization systematically used sex as a tool for recruitment and fundraising. It produced and distributed internal publications that normalized the sexual abuse of children. It operated a decentralized network across dozens of nations specifically designed to evade law enforcement. Its leadership destroyed incriminating documents when investigations closed in. And when founder David Berg died in 1994, his body was cremated and his death location kept secret — a final act of concealment by an organization built on secrecy.

This article is classified as confirmed. The core allegations — institutionalized sexual exploitation of women and children, global evasion of legal accountability, and systematic destruction of evidence — are established facts supported by court findings, government investigations in multiple countries, and the group’s own internal literature.

David Berg and the Origins

David Brandt Berg was born in 1919 in Oakland, California, into a family of traveling evangelists. His mother, Virginia Brandt Berg, was a radio preacher with a following in the American Southwest. Berg himself drifted through various ministry roles and odd jobs before finding his calling in 1968, when he began preaching to hippies and surfers near Huntington Beach. His message was simple and effective: drop out of mainstream society, reject the establishment, and follow Jesus through him.

Berg was charismatic in the way that cult leaders often are — not polished, but intense and certain. He called himself “Moses David,” later shortened to “Mo,” and communicated with his growing flock primarily through written dispatches called “Mo Letters.” These letters, which eventually numbered in the thousands, were the doctrinal backbone of the movement. In the early years, they contained fairly standard evangelical content mixed with countercultural anti-establishment rhetoric. But as Berg’s control over his followers solidified, the Mo Letters grew increasingly bizarre and sexually explicit.

By the early 1970s, Berg had established a communal living structure in which members surrendered personal property, cut ties with family, and devoted themselves entirely to the group. The Children of God grew rapidly, absorbing young people who were alienated from mainstream American life. Berg relocated frequently, eventually settling in Europe and then retreating into total seclusion. From the mid-1970s until his death in 1994, he governed the movement entirely through Mo Letters, never appearing publicly. Only his closest inner circle knew his location at any given time.

His theology evolved into something unrecognizable from mainstream Christianity. Berg taught that God’s love was fundamentally sexual, that conventional sexual morality was a tool of Satan, and that sharing one’s body was the highest form of spiritual devotion. These ideas were not abstract theology. They became organizational policy.

Flirty Fishing

In 1974, Berg introduced what he called “Flirty Fishing” — abbreviated as “FFing” in internal literature. The doctrine held that female members should use sexual attraction, and ultimately sex itself, to recruit new members and win converts. Berg framed it in biblical language, comparing his female followers to fishers of men who used themselves as bait. In practice, it was institutionalized prostitution with a theological veneer.

Women were dispatched to bars, nightclubs, hotels, and diplomatic events in cities across Europe, Asia, and South America. They were instructed to target wealthy men, politicians, and anyone who could provide the group with money, protection, or influence. Internal records kept by the organization — later obtained by researchers and journalists — tracked the sexual encounters in chilling bureaucratic detail. One set of statistics from 1988 reported that members had engaged in 223,989 “Flirty Fishing” encounters over the life of the program.

Former members have described the coercion behind the practice. Women who resisted were told they were failing God. Social pressure within the tightly controlled communes made refusal nearly impossible. Some women contracted sexually transmitted diseases. Others became pregnant by men they had been ordered to seduce. The children born from these encounters were absorbed into the group.

Berg officially ended Flirty Fishing in 1987, citing the AIDS epidemic as the reason. The decision was framed internally as a practical health measure, not a moral reckoning. By that point, the sexual culture FFing had created was deeply embedded in the organization.

The Global Network

One of the most consequential aspects of the Children of God was its organizational structure, which appeared purpose-built to evade accountability. The group operated in over sixty countries simultaneously, with members constantly rotating between locations. When law enforcement or media scrutiny intensified in one country, members simply relocated to another. Communities in Argentina, Brazil, India, Japan, Thailand, the Philippines, and dozens of other nations provided an ever-shifting geography of refuge.

The group’s decentralized structure made it difficult for any single government to investigate comprehensively. There was no central headquarters to raid, no single jurisdiction with authority over the whole operation. Berg communicated through Mo Letters distributed through a network of trusted couriers. Financial flows were opaque. Children born within the group often lacked birth certificates or had documents from multiple countries.

Some former members and investigative journalists have raised questions about whether the group received protection — or at least tolerance — from intelligence agencies in certain countries. The Children of God operated freely in nations where other religious groups faced severe restrictions. Members have alleged that the group’s presence in certain Latin American and Southeast Asian countries during the Cold War coincided with strategic interests of Western intelligence services, and that the group’s willingness to provide sexual access to local officials and diplomats may have purchased a degree of official protection. These allegations remain unproven but are consistent with the documented patterns of Flirty Fishing targeting politically connected individuals.

What is not in dispute is that the group’s transnational structure allowed it to operate for decades with minimal legal consequences, despite allegations of abuse that surfaced as early as the mid-1970s.

Child Abuse Allegations

The sexual abuse of children within the Children of God is the darkest chapter of the organization’s history, and the most extensively documented. The evidence does not come solely from the testimonies of survivors, though those testimonies number in the hundreds. It comes from the group’s own publications.

David Berg’s Mo Letters explicitly endorsed sexual contact between adults and children. In letters with titles like “The Devil Hates Sex” and “The Law of Love,” Berg argued that children were sexual beings and that physical affection between adults and minors was natural and godly. He wrote approvingly of adult-child sexual contact and criticized the “system” — his term for mainstream society — for criminalizing it.

The most notorious of these publications was “The Story of Davidito,” a book-length document produced in 1982 about the upbringing of Ricky Rodriguez, the child of Berg’s partner Karen Zerby. The publication, distributed to thousands of members as a child-rearing guide, included photographs and detailed descriptions of sexual acts performed on Rodriguez as a toddler and young child by his adult caregivers. It was presented not as abuse but as a model for how children in the group should be raised.

Former members who grew up in the Children of God have described a culture in which sexual abuse was pervasive and normalized. Children were raised communally, often separated from their biological parents, and subjected to sexual contact by multiple adults. Education was minimal or nonexistent. Discipline was severe — a practice called “silence restriction” isolated children for weeks or months, forbidding them from speaking. Older children who questioned the group’s practices or attempted to leave were subjected to intensive re-indoctrination sessions.

Government investigations in multiple countries confirmed these accounts. In 1993, police in Argentina, France, Spain, and Australia conducted coordinated raids on Children of God communities. Argentine authorities found evidence of child abuse and removed over a hundred children from the group’s custody. A 1995 British court ruling by Lord Justice Ward, in a custody case involving a former member, found that Berg had been guilty of “ichery” and that the group had “ichorous practices” — using more direct language, the judge concluded that the organization had institutionalized child sexual abuse. The ruling described the Mo Letters as promoting “sexual contact between adults and children” and characterized the group’s founder as someone who had sanctioned and encouraged the abuse of minors.

In response to mounting legal pressure during the 1990s, the group undertook a systematic campaign of document destruction. Former members and investigators have reported that communities were ordered to burn Mo Letters, internal records, and photographic materials that could serve as evidence. The organization also began publicly disavowing Berg’s most explicitly pro-pedophilia writings, claiming they had been misinterpreted or that the practices they described had been discontinued. This disavowal came only after the writings had been distributed for over a decade.

Celebrity Survivors

Several people who grew up in the Children of God went on to prominent careers in entertainment, and their public accounts of life within the group brought mainstream attention to an organization that had largely operated in obscurity.

The Phoenix family — parents John Lee and Arlyn Bottom, along with their children River, Rain, Joaquin, Liberty, and Summer — were members of the Children of God throughout the mid-to-late 1970s. The family traveled through Central and South America as part of the group before leaving around 1978. They changed their surname to Phoenix to symbolize a new beginning. River Phoenix, who became one of the most acclaimed young actors of his generation before his death from a drug overdose in 1993, spoke publicly about being sexually abused within the cult. In a 1991 interview, he disclosed that he had his first sexual experience at age four while in the group. Joaquin Phoenix has spoken less directly about his time in the organization but has described his family’s period in the group as deeply damaging.

Rose McGowan, the actress and activist who later became one of the central figures in the #MeToo movement, spent her early childhood in the Children of God in Italy. Her father ran the group’s Italian chapter. McGowan has described growing up in an environment of extreme control and sexualization, and has said that her experience in the cult shaped her later activism against sexual predators in Hollywood. She left the group with her father at age nine.

The actor and musician Jeremy Spencer, a founding member of Fleetwood Mac, left the band abruptly in 1971 to join the Children of God and remained a member for decades. His departure from one of the world’s most successful rock bands to join an obscure religious commune was, at the time, one of the highest-profile defections to the group.

The Ricky Rodriguez Tragedy

The story of Ricky Rodriguez is the most harrowing single narrative to emerge from the Children of God, and it encapsulates the organization’s failure — or refusal — to reckon with what it had done to its children.

Rodriguez was born in 1975 in Tenerife, Spain, the son of Karen Zerby (known within the group as “Mama Maria”) and a Flirty Fishing convert. Berg adopted Rodriguez as his spiritual heir and christened him “Davidito” — little David. He was raised in Berg’s inner household, groomed from infancy to eventually lead the movement.

But Rodriguez’s childhood was also the subject of the group’s most damning publication. “The Story of Davidito,” circulated widely within the organization, documented in explicit detail and photographs the sexual abuse Rodriguez suffered at the hands of his nannies and caregivers, including a woman named Sara Davidito (Angela Smith). The publication presented this abuse as joyful and educational.

Rodriguez left the group as a young adult and spent years struggling to build a life outside the only world he had known. He worked as an electrician in Tucson, Arizona, and connected with other former members — known as “second generation” survivors — through online communities. Many of these survivors were attempting to pursue legal action against the group’s leadership, but the destruction of records, the scattering of witnesses across dozens of countries, and the difficulty of prosecuting decades-old abuse across international borders made the legal path nearly impossible.

Rodriguez became increasingly consumed by anger and a desire for accountability that the legal system could not provide. On January 8, 2005, he lured Angela Smith — one of his childhood abusers — to his apartment in Tucson and stabbed her to death. He then drove to Blythe, California, and shot himself. He was 29 years old.

Before the murder-suicide, Rodriguez recorded a video in which he described the abuse he had suffered, displayed the knife and gun he intended to use, and expressed his frustration that his mother and other leaders of the group would never face justice. The video, which circulated widely online after his death, brought renewed public attention to the Children of God and the unresolved suffering of its second generation.

Karen Zerby, Rodriguez’s mother and Berg’s successor as leader of The Family International, remained in hiding. She has never been criminally charged.

Attempts at Justice

Legal accountability for the Children of God has been, by nearly any measure, a failure. Despite documented evidence of systematic child sexual abuse spanning decades and continents, no senior leader of the organization has ever been convicted.

The 1993 coordinated raids in Argentina, France, Spain, and Australia resulted in children being temporarily removed from the group’s custody, but criminal prosecutions largely stalled. In France, two members were convicted in 1999 of lesser charges. In most other jurisdictions, cases were dropped due to insufficient evidence — much of it having been destroyed by the organization — or jurisdictional complications arising from the group’s transnational structure.

The 1995 British court ruling by Lord Justice Ward remains the most comprehensive judicial assessment of the organization. While the ruling was devastating in its findings about the group’s practices, it was a family court custody decision, not a criminal prosecution. It did not result in criminal charges against any leader.

David Berg died on October 1, 1994, in an undisclosed location. His body was cremated. The group did not publicly acknowledge his death for months. To this day, the location where Berg spent his final years and where he died has never been confirmed. Leadership passed to Karen Zerby, who continued to govern the organization from hiding.

The Family International officially dissolved in 2010, announcing that it would transition from a communal organization to an online network. By that time, its membership had dwindled significantly. Former members and advocacy groups have argued that the dissolution was a final evasion — a way to formally end the legal entity that could be held liable while its leadership remained untouched.

Several civil lawsuits filed by former members in the United States have been settled out of court or dismissed on statute of limitations grounds. The passage of time, the destruction of records, the deaths of key witnesses, and the international dispersion of both perpetrators and victims have combined to make comprehensive legal accountability effectively impossible.

Timeline

• 1968 — David Berg founds the Children of God in Huntington Beach, California, preaching to hippies and runaways
• 1969-1971 — The group grows rapidly across the United States, establishing communal homes
• 1971 — Jeremy Spencer of Fleetwood Mac joins the group; New York Attorney General launches first investigation
• 1972 — Berg relocates to Europe, begins governing entirely through Mo Letters
• 1974 — Berg introduces Flirty Fishing doctrine, instructing women to use sex for recruitment
• 1975 — Ricky Rodriguez born to Karen Zerby and a Flirty Fishing recruit
• Late 1970s — The Phoenix family (including young River and Joaquin) are members, traveling through Central and South America
• 1978 — The Phoenix family leaves the group; multiple families begin defecting amid growing concern over sexual practices
• 1978 — The group rebrands as the Family of Love to distance itself from negative press
• 1982 — “The Story of Davidito” published internally, documenting and normalizing the sexual abuse of Ricky Rodriguez
• 1987 — Berg officially ends Flirty Fishing, citing the AIDS epidemic
• 1993 — Coordinated police raids in Argentina, France, Spain, and Australia; children removed from group custody
• 1994 — David Berg dies on October 1 in an undisclosed location; body cremated; death concealed for months
• 1995 — British Lord Justice Ward rules in custody case that the group institutionalized child sexual abuse
• 1999 — Two members convicted in France on charges related to the group’s activities
• 2005 — Ricky Rodriguez murders Angela Smith and kills himself on January 8; his video testimony brings renewed attention to the group
• 2010 — The Family International officially dissolves as a communal organization

Sources & Further Reading

• Kent, Stephen A. “Lustful Prophet: A Psychosexual Historical Study of the Children of God’s Leader, David Berg.” Cultic Studies Review, 1994.
• Williams, Miriam. Heaven’s Harlots: My Fifteen Years as a Sacred Prostitute in the Children of God Cult. William Morrow, 1998.
• Jones, Celeste, Kristina Jones, and Juliana Buhring. Not Without My Sister: The True Story of Three Girls Violated and Betrayed by Those They Trusted. HarperElement, 2007.
• Chancellor, James D. Life in The Family: An Oral History of the Children of God. Syracuse University Press, 2000.
• Ward, Lord Justice. Judgment in the Matter of ST (A Minor). Royal Courts of Justice, London, 1995.
• Davis, Deborah (Linda Berg). The Children of God: The Inside Story. Zondervan, 1984.
• HBO. Children of God: Lost and Found. Documentary, directed by Noah Thomson, 2007.
• Allen, John. “The Family and the Fishermen.” Rolling Stone, 2005.
• Kent, Stephen A. “Brainwashing in Scientology’s Rehabilitation Project Force (RPF).” Cultic Studies Journal, 1997.

Related Theories

• Elite Pedophile Rings — The Children of God case is one of the most extensively documented examples of an organization that systematically abused children across international borders while evading prosecution. It is frequently cited in broader discussions of institutional child abuse and the mechanisms by which powerful organizations avoid accountability.
• Jonestown / Peoples Temple — Another American-born religious movement that relocated internationally, exercised extreme control over members, and ended in tragedy. The parallels between Jim Jones and David Berg — charismatic leaders who isolated their followers, demanded total obedience, and used sexuality as a tool of control — are well documented by cult researchers.