Heaven's Harlots: My Fifteen Years in a Sex Cult (35 page)

I talked to Paolo about using birth control, but he would not hear of it. He warned me that God was against birth control, and dire things could happen to me if I went against God’s Word. He had internalized Family and fundamentalist Christian doctrine much better than I ever did. In addition, since he was the head of the family, and he did not want me using birth control, it was forbidden. I wanted to obey my husband this time, but I secretly tried the rhythm method, counting my days carefully, and avoided having sex on the days that I would be most fertile.

As for Jerry finding out, he was too far away from us to know what we were doing. He had agreed that Thor could come visit us in the summer, so I planned on spending that summer at our trailer in Paolo’s hometown.

This time while we were in the Family, we were on the bottom rung, but we had no leaders over us. We could pretty much do as we pleased as long as we witnessed and sent in our tithe. Living on the Italian Costa Azzurra, we were close enough to the tourist beach towns to sing at cafes and restaurants, which provided us with funds.

When Thor came to visit us on vacations, we discovered that he was a talented musician, having studied music and theory in the French Conservatoire. He became the star of our show. When ever I took him to sing in restaurants along the beach, we made twice the money. I played guitar and sang, while Thor played the accordion or tambourine, and then collected the money. He was a natural-born showman, having been raised in the Show Group, and no one could resist him. He was eleven years old when he started singing with us and virtually never stopped until he struck out on his own. Sometimes he wore odd-looking hats for emphasis and used them to collect the money. We gave him a small percentage of the money to take home, but I was worried about his father finding out. I preempted this by calling Jerry. My ex-husband was a typical musician who would be thrilled to hear that his son had inherited his performing genes. I didn’t think this would risk my seeing Thor, and I was right.

“I wanted to know if you mind if Thor goes out with us?” I asked him on the phone.

“What does he think of it?”

“Well, I took him out a few times, and he likes it.”

“Does he collect?”

“Yes.”

“Well, what do you know. I guess if he doesn’t mind, it’s okay with me. How much do you give him?”

“Ten percent.”

“Ha! I doubt if that will keep him content for long. But if he’s happy with that, it’s okay with me.” Thor played and sang with us for the next couple of years, and each year as he progressed, he was given a bigger cut. He went from playing tambourine to playing guitar. By the time he was fourteen, he was singing and playing guitar, and I was collecting, giving him 50 percent.

But it was worth it. By then we were making two hundred dollars a night.

Jerry moved his family back to Nice when Thor was fourteen, less than an hour from us by car, so my son came to our house almost every weekend as well as all summer. I thought that I must be doing something right now—and oddly enough, I was in the Family. Singing with my teenage son gave me some of the happiest moments of my life.

The fabulous weather allowed tourists to sit in the open cafes by the beach and enjoy the lovely Italian seaside. Thor and I had our regular restaurants and cafes in every town along the coast. We planned our work systematically, making sure we kept good relationships with the restaurant owners by not coming too often, and we hit a different town every night. The more popular resorts, such as San Remo and Diano Marina, were saved for the big nights of Friday and Saturday.

Living a gypsy lifestyle brought us into contact with other Family gypsies. What I liked best about that time during the early 1980s was that all the ambitious leaders had gone to the “mission fields” such as India, South America, and the Far East. Remaining in Europe was the equivalent of staying in the United States, which meant you couldn’t make it as a missionary. No one in Europe bothered us about our spiritual state, and as long as we sent in a decent 10 percent, we were left alone. However, many of the struggling Family homes wanted us to join up with them. As I traveled from home to home, I realized that not only had I previously lived a privileged life in the Family, but I also had a strength that made others want me near them.

Without birth control, I conceived again while Genvieve was still a baby. I felt sorry she would have to grow up so quickly now. When my third daughter, Jordan, was born, eighteen-month-old Genvieve stood next to the two-day-old baby Lying on my bed with her eyes wide open, with her two front fingers stuck in her mouth as usual.

After receiving invitations to live in various homes, we chose to stay in a new home opening in Nice because it was closer to Thor. Around this time, the publications from the Family, which I usually never had time to read, talked about the life and teaching of Davidito, the little boy Mo’s lover had with a fish. The Davidito Series, as these letters were called, explained how the parents themselves, or the nursery workers, should teach the children about sex. One Family publication included a picture of the nursery worker putting Davidito to sleep by fondling him.

Later, Mo issued a statement that he did not approve of sex with minors and renounced any writings saying that he did, claiming that someone else had written that. It was difficult to know what Mo actually did write since he renounced anything that caused trouble.

By this time the Family homes were spread all around the world, and the Mo letters, especially in the area of sex, were followed in varying degrees. Some women in the Family never shared sexually with anyone but their husbands, while some husbands forced their women to do so. I heard stories of wives being physically punished for disobedience, but I never saw this with my own eyes.

It sickened me to read anything that seemed to condone any type of sex with children. In all my travels, I never met a family that actually did this, and I inquired everywhere I went to see what the others thought about the Family’s child-sex education. No one ever admitted to pedophilia. Nevertheless, years later, I heard tearful confessions from ex-Family members who said they or someone they knew molested children under pressure from their leaders. I am thankful that I was not in a home with leaders—not until the very end of my time in the Family.

The brothers and sisters at the Nice home felt the same way I did about teaching children how to engage in sex—that is it was a sick thing to do. When he was younger, Thor had been with children who had been encouraged to explore each other’s bodies, and he did not retain happy memories of this. The idea of showing young children adult sexual organs, and actually teaching them how to use their immature sexual parts in an adult way, was even more perverted. But I could not face this issue at that time. Unfortunately, Paolo and I didn’t talk about it, we avoided the subject altogether. When letters arrived that discussed childhood sex, no one in the home mentioned them. I hardly read any letters now anyway, but lived only to raise my children. We were not even sharing among the adults here in Nice, and I believed that no one made sexual advances toward the children.

Around this time I called Salim to thank him for helping me find my son. I had sent him a thank-you card years earlier, but I had never thanked him in person for his help. I told him I was living in Nice and he immediately made an appointment with me to meet in the Hotel de Paris.

I was extremely nervous. Not only was I five years older, but I had borne three more children since I had last seen Salim, and there was nothing new I had to offer but the same old message. I was surprised when he wanted to make love to this thirty-one-year-old mother of four, who had done little to keep her youth or beauty intact.

“Why do you like being with me?” I asked after a most mundane exchange.

Despite my numerous sexual experiences I had not learned any of the special tricks or unusually stimulating procedures that are rumored to keep men interested. Why did Salim want to see me when he could pay for the best and most beautiful of the elite’s high-class call girls?

“You have a strength that no other woman I know has,” he responded, as if the answer had always been on his tongue ready to fall out.

“What do you mean? You know so many women, some are much stronger and much more sophisticated and experienced than me.”

“That is all outward strength. It is not the same. You can uncover secrets of life. And although it seems like you are weak and submissive, it is only because you choose to be at this time. When I make love to you, I feel strength within me. You are strong!” This was the longest and most revealing piece of personal information that Salim ever gave me.

Salim had always kept a very powerful image before me, and anyone else I saw him with. I was surprised that he had let his guard down, even for a few minutes. I looked at him carefully.

He still had the same iron-clad expression, but his eyes had become softer. He withdrew back into his powerful-man mode, and I did not see him again for years. But the insight that he had shared with me, whether it was true or not, stayed with me forever.

The Nice home, like all pleasant situations in the Family, did not last long. We found ourselves on the road again, this time traveling with our family in an old RV to one of my favorite cities, Venice. There we found a deserted farmhouse in the milk-producing region of Pordenone.

I was sent to the owner of the house, a wealthy industrialist who had bought the property on a whim and later decided that raising cows was not his cup of tea. He flatly refused to even rent the house to us, although we had suggested he give it to us free in order to keep it from being vandalized and lie in disrepair. We had been taught never to take no for an answer, and I went back to him about half a dozen times. Each time he became more friendly, and as I showed him our photo album full of pictures of the children and me singing in nursing homes and hospitals, he softened a bit. After more than a month of persuading and bargaining, he agreed to let us live in the house rent-free, and we agreed to refurbish the old place and bring it back to life.

“I don’t really care if the house tumbles to the ground,” he said. “I don’t need the income from it, and I don’t ever plan to sell it either. But I don’t want you guys causing any trouble out there.”

Paolo and I invited another couple and their children to help us fix up the grand old stone farmhouse. We quickly learned that this area of Italy was a provisioner’s paradise. There were factories of every kind all over the place, and we established regular contacts with Benetton clothes, Parmalat milk, cheese, and yogurt, and many others. We literally remodeled the house with supplies we got for free, but it was labor-intensive work. I spent most of my waking hours, when not physically involved with the children, scraping, cleaning, and painting the old walls and beamed ceilings.

There was no central heat or indoor toilets. The large kitchen had a huge wooden stove, and the enormous living room, covering half the downstairs, had a fireplace with seats on the side, so you felt as if you were sitting inside the fire. However, it did little to heat up the rest of the house. There was one other room downstairs, which had a private entrance and no heat at all. Upstairs were four large bedrooms and a center hallway large enough to serve as a den. There we placed an oil heater that we had procured from a factory in the area.

Walking out on the back patio from any of the downstairs rooms, one was greeted with the beautiful Friulian pastureland. A cement sink with a water pump constantly gave us fresh springwater that had a sulfurous taste, but was sanitary and healthy. My daughter Jordan spent hours at this pump, drinking and playing in the water. The barn, which was in terrible disrepair, housed old machinery, and eventually we filled it with chickens. it was a pastoral dream come true for an old nature lover like myself, but unfortunately, I could never be completely happy. Thor was farther away from me now, which meant he could only come for the summer, and I was still not happily married. Knowing that bad marriages happen to the best of people, I consoled myself by raising my children with all the energy and love I found available.

All my children started learning to recognize letters from the time they could talk. Athena was already a proficient reader at the age of four, and she often helped me to teach phonics to her sisters. I also taught them to dance and sing, and we performed at hospitals, schools, and nursing homes regularly. Different Family members visited us periodically, and some stayed on indefinitely. The house was big, and extra Family members usually meant more hands to do the work, and more income. That was until we were graced by the presence of “leaders. ” One day they finally arrived—my old nemesis from Germany, Naomi, and her husband, Samson.

As I suspected, Naomi and Samson stayed only a few months before moving on to their mission field, but not before they almost ruined the open access I had with my son. As usual, Thor came to visit me in the summer. Although Naomi had suggested that the presence of a “systemite” kid might be a bad influence on their sheltered children, I insisted on this one, and they eventually acted as if they had heard from the Lord to allow him to come. When they saw how much income he generated through singing with me in Venice, they quickly changed their minds about him being a systemite and tried to recruit him back into the Family. Of course, Thor, at thirteen, was much too smart, and had been too indoctrinated by his father on the evils of cults, to even consider this invitation. But the strange behavior of his mother, who lived with people in her own house who told her literally what to do every minute, was confusing to him. I tried to explain that I believed in communal living, and one took the evil with the good, until the evil became too much. At his young and tender age, he was forced to struggle with the dissonance of the moral dilemma between idealism and the corruption of absolute power. Even though Jerry eventually realized that I was back in the Family, he believed that Thor was mature enough for exposure to a radical ideology he once believed in himself. I had talked with Jerry back in Nice, before I left for Venice and Pordenone, and wanted to bring Thor with me. He agreed, but told me that he knew we were back in the Family.