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Daily Mirror
Daily Mirror
World
John Bett

Inside sick celebrity sex cult - child brides, forced prostitution and mass orgies

A woman who was born into a cult and given up as a wife to the leader when she was just three has opened up about the horrors she witnessed.

Serena Kelley, 40, was a poster child for the Children of God - a religious organisation founded by David Berg that has widely been denounced as a cult.

The group, which at one stage had bases all over the world including the Philippines and Japan, encouraged promiscuity between members and believed that children became adults of the age at 12.

Serena was given as a wife to David Berg - aka Father David - by her mother, Sara, who was a leading member of the organisation.

Serena was then raised by strangers and even given a cult name, Mary Dear. Comics were made by the organisation about her childhood, and Serena became a quasi-celebrity amongst the followers of the Children of God.

This, she says, isolated her from the other children but not from the adults - who took part in mass orgies and would walk around in the nude in front of her when she was just a small child.

Serena was the poster child for the organisation (serkelley/Instagram)

Do you remember the Children of God? Let us know in the comments...

Serena, who now works as a trauma recovery specialist, said: "I was born in David Berg's house, and from the start I was raised and controlled by him from before I was even born.

"Shortly after my mother moved to his compound, she was pregnant with me. He decided he was going to document my entire life from before I was born. They wrote publications documenting my mother's pregnancy and he named me Serena and Mary-Dear, which became my cult name.

"In the publications, which were passed out to cult followers, they talked about Sara and she was pregnant with Mary Dear and Mary Dear was going to be the new baby and part of the chosen ones in Berg's household.

"There was a series called 'Life with Grandpa' which was like a kids' comic book series and they wrote stories about my mother's pregnancy and how they were going to raise me.

"Another called 'Lifelines' documented my entire birth, so David Berg kind of planned my entire life from before I was born."

Aged just three, Serena was taken from her mother to be raised by other high-profile members of the cult while her mum went on to become one of the organisation's top leaders.

Serena's mum, Sara, with cult leader David Berg (Serena Kelley)

The Children of God was supposed to spread a message of spiritual revolution and happiness but Serena claims the cult was hiding a sinister and disturbing culture.

It has had several celebrity members including actor Joaquin Phoenix and his tragic brother River, who joined with the rest of their family when they were children but left in outrage over certain practices. Hollywood actress Rose McGowan also grew up in the cult and said her family left when the group started 'advocating child-adult sex'.

Founded by David Berg in 1968, the dark secrets behind the commune have been laid bare in the years since his death.

The popularity of the cult soon grew, and at its height it had 13,000 members in 130 communities around the world.

One of the cornerstones of the Children Of God 'family' was sex.

The Children of God even made a comic book about Serena as a child (Serena Kelley)
Serena's cult name was 'Mary Dear' (Serena Kelley)

Berg managed to convince his thousands of followers that the end of the world was coming and the only way they could gain salvation was through sex and orgasms.

Women had to make themselves freely available to any man who wanted to have sex with them.

And then Berg issued one of his doctrines - The Law Of Love.

It stated that anyone within the cult could have sex with anyone else, including children.

Serena from Austin, Texas, continued: "I think the most famous story from my very early childhood with Berg was when I was given to him as a child bride by my mother, so she brought me to him after I turned three - just after my third birthday.

"She put me on his lap and he kissed me and he gave a whole speech about how I'm going to be his forever and we're having a union. Things that don't make sense to a three-year-old.

Serena as a baby with her mother in the Philippines (Serena Kelley)
Serena was separated from mum Sara when she was three (Serena Kelley)

"Then he gave me a ring and the ring was quite big, but what he had done was wrapped tape around the band to make it thick enough to fit on my finger and he told me to always wear the ring and take tape off as I got older so the ring would always fit me.

"It's pretty sick he thought that far ahead into the future.

"He had already been married to multiple other teenage girls, I happened to be the youngest at three. There were other girls aged 12 to 15 who had been given the ring, it's a heart with two hands holding it."

Even though women had always been objects of sex within the cult, initially children were considered to be off-limits but that changed with the Law of Love.

Serena alleged: "In Berg's house I was subjected to a lot of sexual abuse, both for myself and what I witnessed. There were orgies in Berg's house all the time, many times I'd be left alone to wander the house by myself because there'd be drunken orgies in the living room.

"I'd be swimming in the pool and there would be orgies at the other end of the pool. There was nakedness and sexuality all around me.

"We were in the Philippines and the women would walk around naked or topless, and the men would walk around in boxers."

She told how Berg lived in a separate house but would come over for play sessions in which they'd have to call him 'Grandpa'.

What struck her most was the 'terrible' smell about him, which she later recognised to be alcohol.

Relieving those awful sessions, she said: "It was mostly kissing and cuddling in the bed, very inappropriate things.

"There were other kids including his own daughter and his granddaughter, my older sister, there were a lot of girls that were subjected to this.

"Berg believed that we should follow bible rules, so in the bible they believe that a child becomes an adult at 12.

"Berg literally said when you're 12 you're an adult now so you're going to start having sex with adults, and start living like an adult so working, having adult responsibilities. The 12-year-old girls would look after me.

"They were considered old enough to do that, and they would have to have sex with adults."

David Berg used his position to abuse women and children (davidberg.org)

Because Serena was just four-years-old at the time, she was spared from that branch of abuse, but said she was still made to take part in inappropriate strip-tease videos for Berg.

For the adults, Berg introduced "FF-ing" on the West Coast of the US, or Flirty Fishing, where he sent out women to meet men in clubs and go back to their hotel rooms for paid sex.

This sex work was described as "pimping" by Serena, who claims that it wasn't long after he "figured out her could pimp the women that he could pimp the children as well".

She claims: "Berg liked to watch little girls strip on camera, the houses we were in always hand basements and dark rooms with filming equipment, and they would dress us up in either like a ballerina costume or a Hawaiian costume with a lay and flowers, always things very feminine, and we were told to dance and take the clothes off.

"They would put music on and make us dance. Of course, me being three or four, I had no idea what the hell was going on. So I'd see my older sister, who is seven years older than me, by the time I was four she was 10 or 11-years-old already, so she was used to this treatment.

"Sometimes I would follow along what the others were doing, what she was doing, and sometimes I would get scared and freeze and start crying.

"When I cried, I would get punished for it. I'd be thrown into a dark room or miss food or something, get beaten. That was kind of my way out.

The ring that David Berg gave to his child wives (Serena Kelley)
Serena lived in the cult until she was an adult (Serena Kelley)

"It sounds insane to say either strip naked or get beaten, but they were my choices - it was things like that, you learned how to survive by choosing whatever was the less painful option for you as a child."

Karen Zerby, a senior member of the cult who was known as Mama Maria and went on to replace Berg after his death, also gave her child, Ricky Rodriquez, up to the cult.

Ricky was given to Berg and was cared for by a team of nannies who were told to "raise him for sex almost from birth".

Founder Berg died in 1994 but his place as leader was immediately filled by his lover, Karen Zerby.

But the damage done to her son from years of child sex abuse took its toll on Rodriguez.

He left the cult in 2001 but never forgot what had happened to him.

In January 2005, he traced Angela Smith, one of his carers who had been involved in his abuse as a child.

Now Serena helps others deal with trauma (serkelley/Instagram)

He stabbed her to death in her apartment before driving home and shooting himself in the head.

Before he carried out the murder-suicide, Rodriguez filmed a missive explaining his actions, which he posted to a friend and was released in the aftermath of the deaths.

It included pictures of the sickening acts against the little boy and was sent to Children Of God communes around the world.

Selena's experience was similar to Rodriguez's in that while in Berg's house she was also isolated from the other kids.

She continued: "I was raised extremely secluded in Berg's compound, there were maybe only 40 people in there. When we moved to Japan, I was still considered what they called 'Selah',

"I was considered secret because I was in the cult publications and raised with Berg, and my mother was a top leader, so I was treated differently to other kids.

"In Japan, I didn't mind because the commune was 300 people, and we just appeared there in the middle of the night.

"Many times when there would be visitors to the compound I would be in my classes with other kids and they would take me into a basement and hide me because I was secret, they didn't want people from the outside world knowing who I was or who my family was, because of my status with Berg.

"For me at that point, I understood that I was different to the other kids, the other families, but I had some level of protection or secrecy still which I suppose made me feel safer because I knew I wouldn't have to do a lot of things and because of my extremely traumatic experiences with videos as a child I was terrified of being in front of the camera.

"In the end, I wasn't allowed to be in the videos because they were handed out to all the cult members and I was still considered secret.

"At the time I didn't mind being different from the others, it probably served me in a way."

But that all ended when she was sent to Brazil where her mum was the leader of South America. Berg stayed behind in Japan.

With everyone knowing her status in the cult, she found it hard to make friends and felt even more alone.

Serena was just three-years-old when she was given as a wife to cult-leader David Berg (Serena Kelley)

Gradually, people started leaving.

The Phoenix family left the Children of God in protest to the Flirty Fishing policy.

Talking about his parents, Joaquin Phoenix said in an interview with Vanity Fair: "They got some letter, or however it came, some suggestion of that, and they were like, 'f**k this, we're outta here'."

Actor River Phoenix, who died from a drug overdose when he was just 23, also accused the organisation of "ruining people's lives".

Rose McGowan's father was a leader of the Italian chapter of the cult, and she claimed she learned to "take myself out of the situation" through "astral projection".

In the end, she escaped with her family in the dead of night when they'd had enough.

She said in an interview: "We had to leave on the sly. My dad, Nat, Daisy and I escaped with my dad's other wife in the middle of the night.

"I remember running through a cornfield in thunder and lightning, holding my dad's hand and running as fast as I could to keep up with him.

"We hid in an old stone house and had to boil pots of hot water to take baths. [The cult] sent people to find us. I remember a man trying to break in with a hammer."

Berg, who died in 1994, would issue precise instructions to those loyal to the Children of God cult about sexual activity, according to Jo Thornely's book Zealot.

It took Serena years to deal with her grief (serkelley/Instagram)

Followers were encouraged to imagine Jesus was present when they were having sex.

A 'Mo Letter' was written by the Children of God which contained a list of things devotees could say to Jesus while they pretended you were making love to him.

This formed part of a publication known as 'Good News' written by David Berg and Karen Zerby, and was followed up by an explicit three-part series called "Loving Jesus".

Serena said these publications became required reading for all 15-year-olds in the cult and included sexual phrases such as "I receive your love, Lord, with open arms and open legs" and "flood me with your seeds".

A book written about the cult alleges Berg was fine with female homosexuality, but described two men making love to one another as "distasteful".

The author wrote: "Women - whether they felt like it or not - were required to share themselves sexually with other men in the Children of God homes. It was considered a duty, and a duty that was only required of women.

"Within the Children of God, adult men only had sex when they wanted to, but very frequently, adult women had sex when they didn't want to and with people they did not want to have sex with."

The group was formed in the 1960s and by 1977 had 130 communities around the world, but by the mid-1980s the cult changed its name to The Family after its practices fell under the ­spotlight of authorities.

Berg was living in ­seclusion and dictating his teachings through ­letters and photos which ­depicted ­children ­having sex with adults.

He went on the run in 1993 and died a year later aged 74.

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