Bexy Cameron was born into a sect that was notorious for exploitation and sexual abuse. Now she's written a memoir about what it was like to grow up in a movement founded by a predator – and to go back as an adult to try to understand what made her parents stay. By Hilary Rose.
Growing up, Bexy Cameron didn't exactly know there was something odd about her childhood. She knew that moments of happiness tended to be brief. She remembers sitting on the back of her sister's bike one day, as they cycled along a dusty road in India. She felt happy then, she remembers. Free.
"It's a pure memory," she says today, choosing her words very carefully, "a moment of being without the understanding that I was in a cult." She calls it "an unpolluted memory".
She is more used to memories such as the day in Johannesburg when, aged four, she found piles of cash on the bedside table of a woman she knew as Auntie Beverly and first made the connection between money and sex. This is where the Lord's work happens, she was taught. Cash for Jesus. Or the time in Cape Town, the year after, digging around in the dirt for something that might kill her father. Or the day when she was eight or nine and living in a commune in Hendon, north London, and a man she knew as Uncle Jonathan put her in bed with his son and told her to undress while he watched. She didn't understand what was happening, but she knew it was wrong. She ran.
Cameron was born into the Children of God, the notorious cult that, at its peak, had more than 10,000 members in 130 countries. By the time she escaped at 15 there had been "experiences", she says, alluding darkly to the sexual abuse of children for which the cult became infamous. It was founded in California in 1968 by a self-styled prophet called David Berg, who was referred to as Moses and sent weekly letters dictating exactly how his followers should live their lives. Cameron would like to think the cult was born from pure motives and love, a Sixties desire to change the world. She accepts that some followers might have joined and then lost their way.
"But I also think that a group that is led by a sexually deviant predator paedophile, which is how I look at David Berg – not a prophet – is going to attract people who want to harm kids. What I find so hard to believe is how he tricked that many people into thinking it was OK to raise their kids in this environment: being shown sexual imagery and child pornography I wish I'd never seen."
Cameron, 38, has written a memoir and made a documentary about modern-day cults, optioned for TV by Dakota Johnson and Riley Keough. She drove across America visiting ten cults, trying to understand the perspective of the children who, like her, were born into them. The book is defiantly not a misery memoir; there is nothing of the "poor me" about Bexy Cameron. She doesn't want pity. It's a testament to her determination to survive.
When we meet at her flat in east London, her first concern is whether Nacho the woodle and Raffa the Frenchie can join us (they can). She lives here in Mile End with her fiancé, Paz, a producer, and her friend Maria who, like her, escaped the cult. With her successful career as a film and creative director Cameron is clearly resilient, surviving a childhood that would have sunk many. But she's also fun and quick to laugh. Her home feels happy.
Her childhood was anything but. Families like hers would roam between communes across the world, constantly on the run, existing on handouts begged from shops and cafés. She was nine when she was subjected to her first exorcism, in Birmingham. She vividly remembers the feel of the carpet pressing into her face as the adults held her down. When she was ten she was placed on "silence restriction" and forbidden from speaking for a year to anyone except her assigned "leader". The aim, they said, was to improve her communication with God. Another time she was told to fight her best friend until one of them couldn't get up any more. Television and pop culture were banned. Punishment beatings were common. Her mother comes across in the book as passive, but her father was prone to violent rages. Cameron believes that unlike some in the cult, she was lucky.
"I didn't have to marry my dad. Some girls that we grew up with did. Me and my sisters weren't being flippant when we said, 'We're the lucky ones, 'cos Dad isn't a paedophile.' "
Her parents, Martin and Linda, dated briefly when they were medical students at the University of Leicester. When Linda subsequently heard rumours that Martin had become mixed up in a cult in London, she decided to rescue him. She found him in a room full of hippies, singing and hugging. The Children of God was her purpose in life, they told her. It was where she belonged. Five hours later, she believed them. She had been "turned". Martin and Linda married and went on to have 12 children.
The sixth of those children was Rebecca – Bexy – born in Chesterfield in 1982. She has no idea how many countries she's lived in. Mauritius, South Africa, India, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Swaziland – "All over the shop. It's very easy to slip under the radar."
In the UK they bounced around, as she puts it, from a terraced house in north London to a campsite in Wales, a commune outside Rugby, another in Tewkesbury and two houses in rural Leicestershire. Sometimes they lived in houses with three or four families, which felt "normal-ish". At others they were in remote communes with hundreds of people. The children never went to school – she jokes that she's the last person you'd want on your pub quiz team – but there were daily religious teachings.
Her parents, she alleges, ceded control of their children to the group, which was in thrall to the mysterious Berg. As early as the Seventies he had been on the run, wanted for questioning by the FBI and Interpol about allegations within the cult of rape, incarceration, kidnapping and incest. The hunt only ended in 1994 with his death in Portugal.
"This man, our dictator, could change our lives on a daily basis," she recalls, "from having a toe in the water of the outside world to being completely isolated, hidden away, on the run."
Funding for the cult was through a web of sources, mostly benefactors and the cash and possessions of those who joined. For six months, and against the rules, Cameron's father had a paying job as a fireman in Chesterfield to raise money for a move to India. She thinks that most of the money came from making and selling music videos and tapes of the group singing about the end of the world. Remarkably, people bought them.
"Bizarre, isn't it? They had a record label called Music with Meaning, and in the early days we'd sell them door to door."
Children were the workforce, cooking, cleaning, washing up. Social services visited once or twice, but the children were coached to say they were being "home schooled by loving parents". She can't recall being asked about sexual abuse. Books were banned. One of her brothers, Chad, was beaten when he was caught with a dictionary. "What will you need all those long words for when you are fighting the Antichrist?" the adults shouted. The only subject on the curriculum was the Day of Judgment, which was expected imminently. It was exciting and horrifying and Cameron believed every word. Why wouldn't she? Her parents said so, as did all the adults she met. It was normal. They were normal.
"It's hard," she says now, "to pinpoint an actual moment of realising that we were not."
Her childhood environment was one of promiscuity and sexual desensitisation. The late actor River Phoenix, who was brought up in the cult, said that his first sexual encounter was at the age of four. While still a child, Cameron was taught that it would be her duty to have sex with men, ostensibly in order to turn them into followers. Women were sent out to perform what was known as "flirty fishing" in bars and nightclubs. Sometimes they would take the men back to the commune and if the man was, as Cameron puts it, "of a certain inclination, what happens then?"
Is she saying that children were offered up sexually, for money, to men?
"Not necessarily offered up. But if you involve people that are attracted to a group that is entirely loose with its children and how their children view sex, then it leaves everything open for abuse. Sex incorporated itself into our lives. Sex was expected. We were raised to believe that this was normal."
Her life changed when she was ten and living at a commune in Leicestershire. Every so often one of the children would be offered up for a press interview, coached in what to say to prove that there was nothing illegal going on. The journalist asked a simple question: "What do you want to be when you grow up?" And her world shifted. It had never occurred to her that growing up and living a different kind of life was an option. That day, she realised that she might have a choice.
It was another five years before she escaped. She was 15. The Children of God was now widely referred to, in newspapers and court cases, as a sex cult. She was befriended by Raffa, an 18-year-old mechanic's apprentice, who helped her to come up with a plan. She would bide her time while she earned enough money to pay rent, and then she would run away. She got a bar job in a nightclub, slipping out of the commune after lights out at 9.30pm. But she lasted barely a month before her parents found out.
They were incandescent. The commune debated her fate, and the unanimous verdict was banishment. She was turned out onto the street. She headed for the train station with her few possessions in a bag and, within the hour, she was picked up by a man she describes only as a predator.
"Imagine you're 15," she says now. "You've got no idea of the world. Next thing you're at a train station – what happens next? Predators can smell vulnerability from a mile off. I was raised not to be in that world and all of a sudden I was, and extremely bad things happened."
But she was determined and desperate. She did "whatever was necessary" to survive and eventually rented an apartment in Leicester with two other exiled cult teenagers, one of them her 19-year-old brother. Cameron worked two or three jobs at a time and at one point, penniless, they lived off milk for a month.
"Then," she says, grinning, "there was the other side of it. If you're teenagers and you don't have parents telling you what to do, what are you going to do? Drink, drugs, the lot. We didn't have any guidance and we're not going to die in the fires of Armageddon. Brilliant!"
She did a secretarial course, which led to office jobs. Meanwhile, her parents moved to South Africa with their younger children. For years she was careful not to confront them in case they cut off access to her younger siblings. Only recently did she feel able to do that. She filmed the first meeting with them, five years ago in London, for her documentary. But her mother reminisced about how wonderful it was to give her life to the cult. It was as if, Cameron writes in her book, she was talking about yoga or vegetarianism. Cameron sat in stunned silence.
"I wanted to push them. Shout. Scream. But somehow they still had a power over me that reduced me to being a little girl. And what did that little girl do to survive? She was quiet."
Three years later, she met them again. This time she told them how deeply damaging her childhood had been, and how she had barely survived in the years after they turned her out.
"I just needed them to listen," she says. "I didn't want them to give me an explanation or say they were sorry. I didn't want to get into arguments about what did or didn't happen, because I lived it. I was there. They said they were sorry and I imagine they are, if for nothing else than the fact that they're missing out. That must be devastating in their older years, to have these incredible children they don't see or speak to."
The Children of God has been renamed over the years, but Cameron dismisses it as "just a logo change". Her parents are still a part of "whatever it's called now", but they live a "much more regular" existence. She wonders wistfully why they couldn't always have done that. She and her siblings are entirely estranged from them. Uncle Jonathan and the other abusers and paedophiles of her childhood have so far escaped justice, because they used pseudonyms. There have been a few successful prosecutions in Scotland, France and America, but a generation of children like her has been lost, she says, and there's never been a reckoning.
Yet her life doesn't seem defined by hatred. The constant theme running through it, then and now, is love for her brothers and sisters. All of them have adjusted, painfully, to life in the real world. She has 13 nephews and nieces and wonders aloud how on earth her siblings turned out to be such loving, caring parents after the parenting they had. She answers her own question. Unconditional love. Do the opposite of what was done to them.
"My brothers and sisters are a huge part of my healing. I can't even talk about them without smiling. To have these incredible people, who have gone through the same thing as you, whom you can cry about it with, joke about it with…" She tails off. "Not to be trite, but some of the ways you deal with stuff like this is humour. That's how we dealt with it when we were kids. We still do now."
Book extract
'Watchouts' are what we kids secretly call the adults that you need to 'watch out' for, the people who might look at you for a bit too long or take too much of an interest in disciplining you.
"Uncles" and "Aunties" are what we have to call all of the adults in our homes. It's a sign of respect for our elders. When we first moved to the Hendon Home, our whole family was squeezed into one bedroom, all eight of us kids sleeping on the floor, my parents in a double bed in the middle. My oldest brother Chad (15), then Kris (14), then Kate (13), then Joel (12), then me and then the younger ones: Josh (6), Sam (5) and Baby V (6 months) in the double bed. My oldest sister, Ruth (17), isn't with us any more – she left when she was 14 to go to a teen training camp in Thailand. That was years ago, we haven't seen her since.
"You must be missing your boyfriend," Joel teases me. "Ugh, no!" I say, upset that he would say something like that. But Joel never misses an opportunity to torment me. (And now he uses Uncle Jonathan's son to do it.) "He wasn't my boyfriend, he was gross," I add quietly. "Uncle Jonathan wanted him to be your boyfriend, he wanted you two to Make Loooooove," Joel says, knowing that will upset me. "UGH!" I say, but I know he's right – Uncle Jonathan had been trying to get me to do that with his son. "I think there's something wrong with him," Kate adds.
Kate would know, she knows about these things. "Uncle Jonathan has lots wrong with him," I say quietly. I think back to the many ways he's tried to humiliate us: whacking us with a wooden spoon, the yelling, facing the corner silently, drinking the dishwater if you didn't do the dishes properly and the worst punishment of all – the one where you have to hold your hands behind your head and stay upright on your knees for hours at a time until it feels like your limbs are on fire. Burning all through your thighs and upper arms. If you dropped, the time started from the beginning. "Yes, Uncle Jonathan does, but I am talking about his son," Kate says.
I remember the pressure Jonathan put on me to do things I didn't want to do with his son, the time he put me and him in the same bed and told me to take my clothes off as he watched. Someone had walked in the room and I ran through the door with my clothes bundled in my hand. "He is NOT my boyfriend," I say, stung by both the memory and Joel's suggestion. Kate says kindly, "I told you that he was a Watchout."
"Watchouts" are what we kids secretly call the adults that you need to "watch out" for. You can usually spot them right away. We had become attuned to their behaviours early on. (As an adult, I would later find out that the real name for a Watchout is a pervert or paedophile.) To begin with, older siblings would let you know who they were, but before too long, you could spot them yourself. Watchouts have a couple of tells: they might look at you for a bit too long or take too much of an interest in disciplining you. Sometimes, and these were the most difficult Watchouts to spot, they were the ones that were kinder to you than other adults. But really, those Watchouts were rare. You don't have to be kind to do what you want to do to the children in our homes.
Most homes would have at least one Watchout. If you lived with one, you knew to try not to be in a room alone with them, or get on the wrong side of them. Stay with your pack and stay off their radar. The kids most in danger from the Watchouts were the older children who didn't have brothers and sisters to teach them, or the kids who were from smaller families that didn't have a wolf pack to protect them. The ones that were in the worst situations, of course, were the ones whose own parents were Watchouts. There had been a time when Uncles were allowed to marry their own daughters and some actually did. We are lucky, we are a strong pack – we've always looked out for one another and kept each other safe.
"Uncle Jude wants you." I look up from the giant vat of wheat flakes that I stir for lunch. This cannot be good. A soundless sympathy emanates from my fellow kitchen workers. My feet weigh 1,000kg as I climb the stairs. Small, black plimsolls and unmatched socks, dragging up to Jude's room. The carpet's pattern of roses hides the tread of 40 kids going up and down these stairs every day. But right now, it's just my shoes on these stairs. I'm alone, the house feels silent and still. Knock, knock! My fist bangs on the cream gloss on Jude's door that I am so familiar with, my small hand outlined by the streaks and drips of an amateur brush.
"Come in."
Jude sits at his desk and motions for me to sit on the bed. It's made with the floral bedsheets that I know and hate so well. Light comes through his window, grey clouds unable to hold back streaks of sun that fight their way into this hole of a room. I'll concentrate on that.
"I have news for you." He is smiling as he says this. A smile with nasty secrets. I adjust myself on his bed. Steady. Calm. "I know you're too young in many people's eyes… But we have prayed about it and your parents have prayed about it too. And we have decided that you will be joining the Teens on the Victor programme."
I stay silent, but my mind is ablaze: how can I be on the teen programme? I am ten years old. "Rebekah, your lying, your unyieldingness, your fascination with evil, your resentfulness and constant daydreaming are why you are on this programme.
"You should be glad that we still feel that there is some hope for you." He smiles again, as if this is good news. "Your parents have moved out into a caravan at the back of the house to make room for the Teens who will be joining us and for the new Leaders who are coming to work on the camp."
Now it makes sense. I feel the burn of my tears on my cheeks. As they flow, I feel a flash of joy in his eyes. His face then crinkles with disgust, like he smelt something rotten. "The biggest change for you will be that you are now on Silence Restriction."
I look at him, confused. "On Silence, you cannot communicate with anyone other than me and your assigned Leaders. When I say communicate, I mean no talking, no hand signals, no eye contact. This will give you more time to commune with the Lord."
"For how long?" These words come out without realising. "Rebekah!" A flash of anger shoots out of him. "It's not about the length of time. THAT'S NOT THE POINT, IS IT? You can go." I leave his room as he shouts behind me, "Effective immediately!"
Within a week, 21 young people ranging in age from 10 to 18 take their place on the Victor programme. It's not that many – some of the teen camps that we've heard about house hundreds. Our routines become a severe combination of army training and a spiritual camp. Everything is amplified.
There is a cruelty with this new regime. We used to be told the words, "This hurts me more than it hurts you," when we were being disciplined, but now, it feels like it's open season for the adults to come up with tools that are not just physically violent like the public beatings, but feel like psychological torture – silence restriction, isolation.
But for me, well, I'd rather take a beating a day than be on Silence Restriction. It takes everything away. Silence makes you invisible, disconnected, to walk into a room and for everyone to look away creates a level of daily, underhanded abandonment. To never share a joke, or a story, or even a look with other people. It confirms every day that you are perhaps worthless and meaningless.
I sit in the dining room with an A3 piece of card and a red permanent marker in front of me. I draw big thick red letters that read, "I AM ON SILENCE RESTRICTION." On the other side, it says, "PLEASE DO NOT TALK TO ME."
Extracted from Cult Following: My Escape and Return to the Children of God by Bexy Cameron, which is published by Manilla Press on July 8 .
Written by: Hilary Rose
© The Times of London