Heaven's Harlots: My Fifteen Years in a Sex Cult (28 page)

“Adnan wants both you and me to meet him in his hotel suite later,” said Breeze when we were alone. We discussed it with Timothy, who thought that was okay, since Adnan was our biggest fish, but Sharon asked me what I thought. I was in seventh heaven because of the love and care I had received from both Adnan and Salim. I knew Salim was with his wife this evening, and I thought maybe he had set this up. It was okay with me.

Sharon and Timothy went home, and Breeze and I went to Adnan’s suite.

He was not there when we arrived, but she had a key. We sat in the luxurious living room, looking at each other in silence. I knew she was concerned about something.

“Do you really want to do this?” she asked.

“You don’t want me to, do you?” I responded, wondering why not.

“No, I don’t think it will be good for Adnan to start this kind of thing.” She said this with an expression that I intuitively read as “Please don’t do it, I don’t want you to.” I never understood why, but I respected her choice.

“Okay. I’ll write him a note saying that I am not staying because of my attachment to Salim. Does that sound legitimate?”

“Yes,” said Breeze with a thankful smile. “I love you.”

Adnan found my little note amusing, and he never asked me to be with him again. He sometimes poked fun at my romantic relationship with Salim. I thought that perhaps Salim had told him something about us, but in retrospect, I think I always acted like I was romantically involved. Salim was my surrogate father, boyfriend, and lover.

For a short time, he fulfilled every male role that was lacking in my life. All this from a man I never even kissed.

Now that we had the wealthiest fish in Monte Carlo, we could be choosier as to whom we went to bed with. After Timothy and Sharon’s second baby was born, Breeze and I pretty much became our own fishermen.

We had been in Monte Carlo over two years now, and we knew who were the locals and the passing tourists. The easy criterion we had for all new fish was—if they don’t stay in the Hotel de Paris they probably won’t “need” sex. This line of reasoning was consistent with Mo’s emphasis on the rich being the most neglected group of people spiritually. Of course, exceptions were made for those who owned mansions on the Cote d’Azur, or had a yacht in the port, but the tourists or passing casino players were usually only given a verbal witness. For those who came back to Monte Carlo to see us again, we sometimes gave a sample of God’s Love with a date or one night of sex. These were the ones who sometimes fell in love, until they finally realized what we were doing.

Someone who held a possessive love for me was Leopoldo, a short, stocky, balding, and very jovial Italian man who had inherited a title and money from his family. Living in his own villa when he was in Monte Carlo, he drove around in his flashy Rolls-Royce, which I suspect bolstered a weak self-confidence. I engaged in a relationship with him that lasted nearly two years. Although he was quite religious, very loving, and usually possessive, I never understood if he really loved me or my spirit of recklessness.

Leo often took me to Rome with him on business trips. Sometimes I took my son, Thor, and we would spend the days visiting the famous Roman sights, such as the Piazza Espagna, the Coliseum, the Vatican, and the Catacombs. These outings were an invaluable cultural experience for both of us, and I only worried that Thor, at six years old, was too young to remember them.

During my solo trips to visit Leo in his Rome apartment, I spent a lot of time witnessing to him. After making love, we read the Bible together, and I explained our interpretation of various verses. Leo seemed to really love the Lord, and he willingly asked Jesus into his heart when I told him what this meant.

That night we were watching television in his bedroom in Rome.

Leo was a dedicated Catholic, but he had never read the Bible very much, so I had been sharing Bible passages with him for months. It was rather late and I had my Bible in my hands, reading verses out loud to him while he surfed the available TV stations. Finally, he switched off the TV and asked me what it meant to be saved.

There were many analogies I could have used, but I chose the one that I knew Leo could relate to best.

“It’s like connecting to electricity,” I answered. “Think of your life without electricity—no lights, no TV, no hot water. Having Jesus in your heart is like having electricity in your spiritual life. “

“I’ll do it,” he said, seeming to be genuinely interested.

We held hands and he repeated after me a prayer that I had been taught since I was a little girl, and I had now repeated with hundreds of people.

“Jesus, I know I am a sinner and cannot have eternal salvation without you. Please forgive my sins. Come into my heart and set me free from sin.” This was my reward for giving up my life and body. The Bible said, and I believed, that this simple prayer and belief in Jesus was the way to salvation. If this was true, how could such a puny thing as giving sex limit me from leading a person to salvation? These busy, important men obviously needed the intimacy that a sexual relationship provides in order to open up to the message of Jesus’ Love. And when someone like Leo sincerely asked Jesus into his heart, it provided me with the inspiration and motivation to keep giving.

Leo also asked me to accompany him on a vacation he was planning with some friends. I only found out at the airport that we were going to Bangkok, Thailand.

Until we arrived in Bangkok, I never really knew the level of wealth that Leo was accustomed to, and I thought a little less of him because of his seeming insensitivity to the extreme poverty at the doorstep of his lavish holiday home. Leaving the air-conditioned, plush-carpeted, and richly decorated hallways of the hotel, I stepped out into a typical Bangkok street, sweltering and humid and filled with noise, with entire families living on the sidewalks. Thailand is the country of silk and precious jewels, say the travel brochures, but I did not know, having lived so long in a bubble, that it also attracted tourists looking for sex and cheap prostitutes.

My bubble burst as I walked the streets of Bangkok. In some areas, *** large block of text missing apparently *** mensely. This disproved my theory that because I took my sexual role more spiritually than did the other girls, I did not experience orgasm.

But with Spyros that night, it was different. He struck a chord that had not been touched for a long time. I often thought about why this happened on that particular night, because it never happened again with the same intensity. Maybe it was the pot in the air, or maybe someone had slipped me something, although I doubt both of those reasons.

There was nothing particularly special about Spyros or what he did either.

Also, Spyros was the first male of my age whom I had been with in a long time, he was outside the Family, and I did not think of him as a “rich fish.” These factors combined might have allowed me a brief repose from my inhibiting, missionarylike hold on my emotions.

I awoke before he did, and with the light peeking in through the thick, tightly closed curtains, I looked for a piece of paper on which to write him the note that might start him on the path toward God’s Kingdom.

There on the desk, among other paraphernalia from the evening, was the necklace he had taken off before getting in bed. Holding it toward a small stream of light, I read the inscription. My dream shattered and joined the invisible particles that glittered in the light like diamonds of dust, for the name on the medallion told me that Spyros was no ordinary rich boy, he was the son of one of the wealthiest and most famous Greek families in the world, the Niarchoses. I suddenly realized that for Spyros to forsake all and follow God would not be like a camel going through the eye of the needle, it would be more like trying to split an atom with a butter knife. The soul of such a one, raised in the oppressor’s world without an inkling of the People’s reality, would take a lifetime, perhaps a few lifetimes, to come to a desire for the Truth.

This is what I thought— not what Mo taught. Our intentions for Kashoggi, a much older man, had always been that he would be a “king,” one who helped our group financially while we ministered to him spiritually. I had been hoping that Spyros would become a disciple, but now, knowing of his extreme wealth, I had no hope for that. Some of my early, radical training suddenly resurfaced. I didn’t put this thought into words, that would be sacrilegious in our religion, because God’s Spirit could perform miracles on anyone. But I dropped the idea of fishing Spyros into the Family and accepted that if nothing else, at least he got witnessed to.

Spyros remained a friend, and although he proved to be the epitome of the spoiled rich kid, he still had a humble attitude to anyone who seemed to have more inner strength than he. If I ever saw him in a club or restaurant, I walked over, said hello, and usually sat down to meet the people at his table. Poor Spyros was so well educated in etiquette, yet he never knew what to do when he saw me. One evening I asked Breeze to sing him a song that she had written, which I thought appropriate for Spyros. He was sitting with Ringo that night. Breeze started her song, and Ringo made unflattering remarks. Finally, without listening to the words that Breeze was singing, Ringo started mimicking Breeze, but interspersing words like “We love you Spyros, because you are so rich.”

“You are such a fool!” I screamed at him, terribly hurt that he would make fun of Breeze. “Why don’t you just shut up and listen to the words? You might learn something, having never written a good song yourself.”

Ringo laughed ridiculously, but Spyros was offended by my outburst.

He took me aside and said that I could not talk like that to Ringo.

“Why not?” I asked, still angry that Ringo had questioned our motives and laid them on the same low level as his own might have been.

“Well, because of who he is. Who do you think you are to talk that way to him?”

“Who does he think he is to talk that way to God’s servants?” I retorted.

I was always sorry for Spyros after that evening. I realized now beyond a shadow of a doubt the inverse relationship between material and spiritual riches. I was getting a little sick of all this decadence myself.

Life was not always heavenly living in God’s Kingdom within the world’s kingdom. I usually drank more than I ate, and when I was completely sober, I sometimes cried myself to sleep. Even though both Sharon and Breeze loved me more than anyone had ever loved me in my life, I knew that if I was not loyal to the Family, I would lose that love immediately. Once I locked myself in the bathroom, sobbing because I felt no one understood me, and I only came out, in shame, after everyone assured me that they also felt that way sometimes. Even so, I knew I was different. When top leaders came by our home, I shunned them, fearing to be in their revealing light, which exposed my every evil doubt.

Just as the process of internalizing Mo’s doctrine of sexual sharing and sacred prostitution had been gradual, so my reawakening was an extremely slow process. Accepting the Family’s values was made much easier because everyone around me, even my husband, accepted them, but discovering my own concept of morality was so much more difficult since I was basically on my own. I had rejected the world’s conventional moral standards, which seemed hypocritical to me, but if I did not embrace the Family’s, what did I have? I was just beginning to think that I might find, on my own, a universal morality, but the thought was frightening, and terribly lonely. Of course, there were probably many others in the Family who at times had similar thoughts, including my own husband though he didn’t tell me. No one shared such thoughts. We were conditioned to believe that they were of the devil. They would lead you out of the Family! And we were right—if you kept thinking that way, you left!

By the winter of 1979-80, we could feel that things were winding down.

No one could express what was happening, but there was a general feeling of change around the corner.

One morning I came home to hear that Sharon, now pregnant with her third baby, had been kept all night in the Monte Carlo police station.

She had been picked up while she was waiting for Breeze in the Loews Hotel lobby. Searching her guitar case, the police found copies of Mo letters, among them the controversial anti-Israeli literature.

These were the letters predicting the invasion of Israel by a united Arab front and condemning the Western world for supporting Israeli expansion. There were many people of Jewish origin in our group, and we understood these letters as ire against the “state” of Israel, not Jews themselves, however, they were considered by those outside the group as evidence of an anti-Semitic stance. We understood Mo’s allegiance with Qaddafi as a means to provide us with inside connections to an eventual “Antichrist government.” Whether we did not want to jeopardize our good standing with the Arabs, or whether Mo actually changed his views on the Jews, is still a debate. In any case, the accusation of being anti-Semitic was never addressed by our leaders, many of whom were Jewish themselves.

The police questioned Sharon, fingerprinted her, and sent her home in the morning with instructions that she should not return to Monaco.

She was told to send the rest of us down to the station for questioning.

We decided to obey police orders, it sounds odd that we had to consider this, but we had lived outside the world’s rules and regulations for so long that only Family orders mattered. Timothy went first, so that Sharon would not be left alone with the children. After he returned, Breeze and I went. The officers seemed amused when we walked in.

After waiting the obligatory time so that we understood who was in control and how much respect they had for us, we were given mug shots, fingerprinted, and then questioned separately. I was questioned by an older, more mature officer who looked like he never told jokes.

“We know of your every move here in Monaco, ever since you came three years ago,” he said, glaring at me as if I had tried to hide my whereabouts from him.