Was I In A Cult? - Children of God PT1: Sex Cult Math

Episode Date: September 7, 2026

Daniella Mestyanek Young was born three generations deep into the Children of God, yet somehow, that was only the beginning.  She would go on to become a US Army intelligence officer, help make history for women in combat, become Harvard educated in organizational psychology, and write two books. But first, she had to survive her childhood. In Part One, Daniella takes us inside the Children of God world she was born into: child labor, child performers, massive communes, David Berg's increasingly deranged teachings, and a family history so complicated Daniella has a name for it... sex cult math. And one rainy day at 12 years old, one casual comment from her mother about glasses changed what Daniella thought she knew about her own family forever. _________ FOLLOW DANIELLAHer website → Knitting Cult Lady Instagram → @daniellamyoung_ YouTube → @KnittingCultLady Her books, Uncultured and The Culting of America → here FOLLOW US Instagram → @wasiinacult TikTok → @wasiinacult SUPPORT THE SHOW Join our Patreon! Ad-free episodes, bonus content, behind-the-scenes conversations, and our forever gratitude. HAVE A CULTY STORY? Email us → [e-mail] SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! Larineco offers gum that actually makes your teeth stronger. Up to 50% off → buylarine.com/wasiinacult

The views and opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the hosts and guests, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Lipson or its affiliates. Guest accounts or personal recollections shared from their own perspectives. References to specific individuals, organizations, or groups are presented as commentary, opinion, and personal experience and should not be interpreted as definitive statement of fact. This podcast is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. Hey listeners. heads up, this episode contains descriptions of child sexual abuse,

child marriage, and the exploitation of children. So as always, please take care while listening. Thanks. The number one response I get when I tell people I was raised in a cult is, you don't seem like a cult survivor. And then the number one response I get when I tell people I'm a veteran is you don't seem like a veteran. And it's like, how many do you know?

Because I promised you, you've met a lot of cult survivors in the U.S., but you probably just didn't know. And I'm a pretty common cult survivor. Have the same drive and passion and also the same autoimmune disorders and breaking down from trauma and delayed adolescence. It's all there. It's all there.

Welcome back to our show. Was I an occult? I'm Liz Ayakousy. And I'm Tyner-Eason. And we are thrilled. We are over the moon to be here with you all on this very fine Labor Day. The day dedicated,

to all the many women out there who somehow managed to eject a tiny human from their body. My God, I'm just so grateful there is a day dedicated to you. I'm going to correct you on that list. That is not the labor that is referenced in Labor Day. Labor Day is about workers. Now, for all of you international listeners, Labor Day grew out of the late 1800s labor movement when workers were fighting for crazy things like not having to work a 12-hour day or on weekends or in unsafe working conditions.

Rob, that doesn't sound like something you know about, right? I've been down here in the podcast minds all year long, scratching the walls for content, whatever content I can pull out of the coal-pox rocks. You look good, though. I think the pale skin and the scraggly long beard and the uncut nails. And the withering body slowly decaying underneath that cotton shirt. I've got kind of a dust smoky eye look going on right now, and it's really alluring. Well, it's a good thing there's no labor movement now.

Labority actually makes today's episode weirdly appropriate because one thing our guest said that really stuck out to me when I was interviewing her was that, you know, everybody gets hung up on the abuse and the crazy beliefs and the crazy cult leader. when you're talking about cults. But she was saying that like underneath all that cult behavior, all of that, really all cults, she points out that cults are really all about labor and obviously free labor. Right. Because coal leaders, well, they're cheap and they're lazy and they're emotionally broken A-holes. That is why. Exactly.

So thank you to Labor Day for helping give people more of work-life balance. And thank you to call. for exploiting people's desire to just want to be better and possibly helpful. Thank you, cults. Speaking of Colts, today's episode features Danielle M.Sgionic Young, the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, uncultured, a memoir of cults, war, and belonging. This book details her childhood growing up three generations deep in the heinous cult,

the children of God. Now, one might call her cult royalty, if that were, such a thing, which I suppose it's not. But she moves on to the next unexpected chapter of her life. She joins the U.S. Army, where she began recognizing some unsettling similarities between the cult she just left, Children of God, and the institution in which she'd enlisted. And she didn't just join the Army, Tyler, okay? She didn't just join.

She became an intelligence officer. She rose to captain. she was deployed twice to Afghanistan, was one of the first women in the U.S. Army's history to be deliberately sent into ground combat operations alongside traditionally all-male units. And I'm getting a little head of story here, so I'm not going to actually tell you guys what she did there.

But her work was part of this groundbreaking period that helped pave the way for women to serve in combat roles across the military. So, true to form to our guests, on this show. She is, I don't know, can I call her the ultimate badass? I think I just did. Yeah, she's pretty badass. I mean, she's like out there on the front

lines. Literally and figuratively, because her new book, which is co-written with Amy Reed, is The Colting of America. What makes a cult and why we love them? Why do we love them? Good question. I don't know. This basically asks people to stop

obsessing over whether something is or isn't a cult and start looking at the actual tactics groups used to control us. Daniela is Harvard trained in organizational psychology and she is better known online as the knitting cult lady. She is incredibly knowledgeable.

So we are now going to kindly shut the fuck up and let her break it all down. Yes, we are the heck of a story, man. This is really podcast platinum for all you people out there are lucky enough to listen. Not toot our own horn.

I'm tooting our collective horns. Yeah. Our horned. Tud our horn. Yeah. True. Please welcome today's wonderful, wonderful,

tube worthy guest. Toot toot. All aboard. All aboard. Please welcome today's wonderful guest, Daniela Young. My name is Daniela. and I was born three generations into the children of God cult.

I'm the author of two books, a book called Uncultured about growing up in the cult and then going into the cult of the U.S. Army because they do parallel the two experiences. And I have most recently published a research book called The Coulting of America, and that is my cult tactics book. And I'm known on the internet as Knitting Cult Lady, where we knit and talk about bad guys and co-operating. of tactics in all of their forms. If I tell people my background story, they would be like, oh my God, that is so extreme. And then just tell me a story of their own that was like a very similar kind of extreme story. And so I have 20 years of talking to Americans and experiencing America in all these different ways. And to me it was pretty obvious that there was a whole ton of y'all that were raised in sort of extreme environments

or had extreme experiences with coercive control, especially when we learn about single family cults and one-one cults, which in other contexts might be called an abusive relationship. I'm from one of the most extreme and recognizable cults, the children of God, right? We know this, and for those who might think it sounds familiar, it was the pedophile cults, right?

I always say the most important thing is that I was third generation, which means that my mom was a child who was born and raised in the cult as well. She was pregnant with me by 14, and her dad was one of the main financiers of the cults. And in fact, his boss was the one who impregnated his 14-year-old daughter. And so if you're wondering if my father is older than my grandfather, the answer is yes. And that's what I call sex cult math. I just feel like that story gives such a good example of the craziness that was the children of God.

Oh, the craziness that it was this damned cult, children of God. We have done a few episodes on the Children of God. And oddly enough and sadly enough, each one gets. just worse than the one prior. Now, Children of God was led by a very traumatized and deranged pedophile named David Berg. David Berg, we've said that name before. He was born in 1919 into a family of professional evangelists. Now, her mother, I did a little deep dive into her background because I was curious, and then

the deeper I dove... The more she submitted in the rough edit. It was like a term paper. It was like 12 pages of... It was not 12 pages. Because this woman is fascinating. So we meet her, right? She's an evangelist.

Well, guess what? She wasn't always that way, okay? So Virginia comes from a very wealthy family. They lived in various states in America. Her father was Dr. John Lincoln Brandt. He was a reverend. He was an author. He was a corporate president.

And he was a highly sought-after lecturer. Now, Virginia being the token preacher's daughter, she was expected to follow in the faith of her father. But she also was expected to go to college because they were of the upper echelon of society. So she ends up going to Texas Christian University. TCU. Go horn frogs. Of course. But instead of it solidifying her faith in God, it did the opposite.

So she quickly dropped the whole preacher's kid persona and became, well, how do I say this? a party girl, a socialite. So then when she's 20, okay, her mother dies, unexpectedly young, and her father remarries only seven months later. Well, that is when Virginia's built up resentment toward God and religion and all of her doubts that she's had her whole life, she doubles down and she becomes an unapologetic atheist. Way ahead of her time.

Now this part is a bit cray. It's cry. It's Craig. You say it, give it, give it, give it to me, Tyler. I thought to give it a T.C. You cry. That's cry. Okay. So Virginia eventually gets married to one Bruce Bogart, who's reportedly a relative of the famous after Humphrey Bogart, but it's kind of unclear what the relation is. Okay, so you guys, this lady is balzy.

Okay. Okay. Her dad throws her this high society engagement party with all of the wealthiest folks of the day. This batty at her own engagement. party. Okay, she meets this Swedish immigrant from Iowa. He had been hired to, you know, entertain the rich folk. And this singer, this guy sang the very famous at the time wedding song entitled, Oh, Promise Me, very popular, and we can actually play it legally because it's over 100 years old. No copyright. Take that, Spotify. In your face.

We'll take our love together to some sky Where we can be alone and faithly new And find the hollows where those flowers grew We'll also be playing other hit songs like She'll be coming around the mountain Oh, that's a good one Or Chattanooga Choochoochoochoo is a good one Jingle bells

All fair use Call her a got my mama So apparently, as Virginia is listening to this Swedish crooner croon, she falls head over heels in love. And this girl runs away with the singer at her own engagement party and elopes. What? Marries him. What? Yeah.

That takes balls. Never underestimate the power of the lead singer. So this guy's name, Mr. Kruner, is Homer, Emmanuel. Berg. Yes, this is David Berg's father. So, out of these two rebels, these runaway rebels, become highly prominent evangelists. Well, Virginia's father, he's wealthy, is probably pretty coercive. He's pretty persuasive. He basically strong arms slash bribes Halmer to attend seminary school and become a pastor.

And I'm sure Virginia was pissed. She's like, no, bro, I didn't just run away with the singer at my engagement party. so that he could become my dad, but he did. Yeah, he did. He became a pastor. Meanwhile, Virginia remained an atheist. And then in 1911, they had a child. And within months of the birth, Virginia fell.

She broke her back, which left her partially paralyzed and bedridden for several years. So around 1918, after her husband had been praying. And praying. And praying. Today, Virginia finally gives in. And she also prays. And according to her, she awakens one day miraculously healed. By God.

And thus Virginia the preacher is born. So she and her husband, well, they become a team, a preaching team. But because of the power of 1930s radio, it is Virginia who becomes the famous one. Yes, for 15 years she had a radio program. It was called Meditation Moments. And guess what, guys? I found a clip of that too. Welcome to meditation moments, and God bless you.

The place where we find the guidance of the Lord is in the secret place of prayer. And we've called your attention a number of times to Matthew 6.6. But thou, when thou prayest enter into thine inner chamber and having shut the door, pray to thy father which is in secret, and thy father which seeth in secret shall recompense. leave. So Virginia and her husband went on to have two more children. The third was David. And apparently, becoming God's messenger and maybe because of 15 years on the radio,

Virginia turns into a bit of an abusive a-hole. There's that a-hole word again. Bringing it back. Yeah, this is true. According to David Berg, as a young child, he masturbated compulsively. And his mother discovered him doing it apparently at the age of six, and she threatened his penis with a knife and said she's going to cut it off if he don't cease. Rob just actually lost his penis.

It went up inside. Traveled up into his body and ran away for the rest of his life. That's sad. A little six-year-old, that's sad. It's awful. It's actually awful. And there were also accounts that she would force him to masturbate in front of his father and finish, as punishment.

So, if nothing else, this gives you just a crumb of insight into the deeply fucked up world that he grew up in. It was a collection played brimming with shame and sexual repression all in the name of, well, religion. Amen.

And then he takes all that trauma into his own preaching when he also becomes an ordained minister and tries to follow in the footsteps of his parents. But when his mother dies in 1968, he finds a group that doesn't reject him, like many of the others

before, and more importantly, they don't know him as Virginia Berg's son. These are a group of hippies, surfers, runaway kids, all in Huntington Beach, California. And thus begins teens for Christ, which within a year becomes

the children of God. The way that survivors or joiners will try to tell it is like in the beginning it was all about love, faith, and Jesus. No, it wasn't. No, he was always messed up. His mother was horrifically abusive, evangelical revivalists, and it was always bad from the beginning. But they were able to hide that for about the first decade from a lot of the rank and file people. So my grandfather had a bad LSD trip one day in L.A. where he met Satan. And so the next day, he's sitting in a park with his head in his hands, wondering what to do with his life, as I presume one does when they meet Satan. And along come,

these four happy, smiling children of God. And he never looks back. And I always like to point out there that they were walking through the park looking for the guy with his head in its hands, right? So he's 22, I think he'd already been to college, which was pretty rare for children of God joiners, was on his way to becoming a CPA. And he brings his then 18-year-old girlfriend, Margarita, who's from Texas. And Margarita had a very checkered adolescence. And essentially, her mother was just so happy that her troubled daughter had gotten sober, gotten off drugs, and was with these happy, wholesome Jesus people, that she gave them a house in Dallas, Texas,

which was a very nice house where Berg himself lived, while all of his followers lived much less fancy out on a big ranch. And then my grandfather became one of the very important finance people. And when I say finance people, I mean, they lived in Switzerland in order to do the books for this criminal organization. My great-grandmother's name, Mrs. Ingersoll, was very known in the group, in the mythology of how it started. And so by the time I am growing up,

my great-grandmother was important, my grandfather was important. So, yeah, so both sides was like royalty. And, yeah, so my grandmother, when my mom was about six was really when things started to turn sexual and Berg was putting all these revelations out and talking about how he wished he had had sex with his mother and talking about raising sexually liberated children and my grandmother Margarita was like, no, I'm not doing this. And, you know, there's two versions of the story.

version I heard was she had trouble getting pregnant, and so she prayed the Samuel prayer, which means she told God that if he gave her a child, she would give that child back to God. And so when she decided to backslide and leave the organization, she just willingly left her six-year-old daughter with her dad. And then when I finally, 30-something years later, met Margarita and her grown daughters. The story was exactly the opposite, which was she told her husband that she was thinking about leaving, and then the next day her husband and her oldest daughter were gone, and she never saw them again. And I do tend to believe that one. So from that day on, my mom is growing up and not even with her father. She was pretty early on, dropped off through just another family

to be part of their family. And this was a very common thing when your parent was important. But the children of God did have a very specific policy that you did whatever you needed to do to keep the children in the organization and being spirited away to another country was a big part of that.

By the 80s, Berg was living in complete hiding, super secret. None of his followers knew where he lived. or knew what he looked like. They would literally cover his face in every photo with a big lion's head because he was the lion of Judah. So the first time that most of us ever saw him,

this man who was the most important man in every day of our lives, the first time we ever saw his face was when he died. But that was not the case for my mom. My mom grew up in the communes very closely supporting the leader and when she was 13

was when David Berg summons 14 daughters of his leaders to the commune, and these girls ranged from the ages of 14 to 3, and they included his own daughter and his own granddaughter, and then he married them. And there was a whole marriage ceremony

with rings. You know, he wrapped the rings of the really young ones in tape, so that they could wear them for their whole lives, wear the adult ring and then just take off a few layers as they grew up. And the mother of the three-year-old ran the ceremony. By far majority of members of the children of God had no idea this ever happened and will call us liars when we say there was child marriage,

but we have pictures. But it was this symbolic thing where they were marrying Jesus and committing to the family. But of course, there was love up time afterwards. And they lived with him for months while he was training them to be spiritual followers of Jesus. And then when that was done, my mom is sent off to another commune that processes all of the literature that he produces. He produced about 300,000 pages of spewing nonsense in his life, Mo Letters. and so my mom was one of the major secretaries from that age until she was 25-ish.

So at this point, she's 13, but she very quickly becomes pregnant. And so at this point in the children of God, they have decided that 12-year-olds are adults. And Berg says, God made girls to menstruate around 12 or 13 years old, which means that's when he intended for them to start having babies. when she turned 12, father toasts her with a glass of wine for becoming an adult, and then the aunties ask her to make a list of the men

she would like to share with. And they had this thing called the sharing schedule, which was the leaders of the commune would literally make schedules of who was sleeping with whom that week. And that was the thing they tried to call free love, which I call forced father. Pollyamory. So she's pregnant at the age of 15 from a fully grown man. And that baby was, of course, Daniela. And that's when they realized, I guess, for the first time that this could be very problematic,

right? That, like, my actual existence was proof of bad stuff going on. So, like, in theory, if there was a raid of our commune, something we were always programmed and prepared for, if police started asking, whose child is this, you know, and they started to become afraid of that. So by the age of 16, she is quickly married off to an 18-year-old boy and has one baby with him, and then that marriage doesn't last. And by the time she's 20, she is again married off to a man who is 40 and who had seven children. And this was all over the world. So I was born in the Philippines. Then I was born in the Philippines. was in Japan and then I was in Peru and then we were in Brazil and then we would remain in Brazil for about a decade and she's still married to this man. They're out of the cult and they have

six children together and in case the listeners are wondering, I have 25 siblings in sex cult math. Okay, so we're just going to pause Daniela's wonderful cult story for a second because there's something she explains in her new book that really makes sense of not just the world she grew up in, but a lot of groups we talk about on this particular show. So pause on the fascinating cult story for the moment and press play on smart, helpful cult stuff. This is something I look at in the book, which has been called total institutions. And total institutions are places where like situated people live and work, removed from the greater world for an extended period of time, with some kind of like formal overlay or batch life, right?

Schedules and everyone eats the same meals, does the same stuff. One of my favorite examples to explain a total institution that we've all experienced in a tiny way is an airplane in flight. We're all on that plane, on pool footing, until we get down and we're following these people's rules. And we've, like, agreed to do it and to let ourselves be constrained. The thing that young people give up when they join total institutions is the time of life that you're supposed to be discovering yourself, because that is a bit limited when you join. One of total institutions can be military barracks. They can be jails.

They can be British royal family, big households separated from the world. You know, there's a scholar who argues that fraternity life should be looked at through the law. lens of total institution. And so one of the things about that is you're going into a rigid system with rigid rules and a kind of requirement for more similarity amongst people, including one of the things that happens when we're removed in a small group is social norms start to matter a lot more and fitting in starts to matter a lot more. That's why it's easier to address however you want in New York city than in Midland, Texas. But yet in America and in language, we only are willing to call something a cult when it has blown up, right? When it's in the media, when we can measure the damage

in bodies, it's like, I don't feel like I have to spend so much time defining cults, although I have and that's what the whole book is about, but it's more about breaking down the individual tactics. So in the culting of America, I have my 10-part organizational psychology model that I have built that these are 10 things that cults do. And then I'm going to show them to you

in recognized cults like the Children of God or Scientology nexium, but then I'm also going to show them to you in the United States military, and then I'm also going to show them to you in regular American group. And it's intended to be a guide to help you understand groups that have hurt you in the past, groups that are hurting you now, so that you can avoid groups that are going to hurt you in the future. Because there's always going to be predators.

Like we're never going to define all of the cults. But their tactics are all the same. And I think that once you can recognize those and once you can, again, put them into language, they stop having as much power over you. So that is what I hope for people, that this is like a handbook, to help them as they deconstruct, but then to also help them avoid very real pain in the future. Avoid very real pain in the future. I mean, that's really the point, right? I hope you all took notes.

And now back to our badass cult story. Something that is not really shown in the book. And it's not something that I've never said out loud. You know, I was a child actor from the age of one to 10. The Children of God had a huge, huge media program run in part by Jeremy Spencer of Fleetwood Mac. And of course, he was quite a skilled musician. He was also quite a skilled drawing artist, which is the thing a lot of people don't know. So him and my dad both were artists and music artists for the cult.

And so growing up, I was working as a child actress. Everyone knew who I was because I was in all of these videos that literally everyone in our lives watched. So it was very like, you know, you feel special. But when you look back at it, the specialness was just extra bad stuff. I mean, when I watched that quiet on set documentary, I'm like, that's my same life. I just wasn't getting paid. I was just being told that this was for God. And this extends to almost all of the children in the children of God.

And it's a really important point that cults are about labor. People get so stuck on the child abuse or whatever crazy things they believed that they don't understand why. And the why was the labor. We were trafficked in plain sight all over the world. The Children of God was an entertainment organization, right? It was a criminal organization that produced entertainment products, videos, tapes, CDs, all of the stuff, and sold millions around the world.

And the Children of God ultimately created their own army of about 7,000 children. And that's what we were. You know, we were physical labor in the cult. So every day we would get up, we would sit through hours. of religious stuff. And then we would do Jesus job time, J.JTs, where it was just physical labor, cleaning, clearing sugarcane fields, and the like.

So the children and the teenagers very much kept the commune going, but then we were also the show. Almost every commune had a singing team, and you would be taken out to raise money. And that was such a big part of our life. You know, even after I stopped being used on these videos, I was still being used in person as a performer. And performance is a really brilliant way to traffic children.

Because when you're on stage singing and dancing and smiling and shimmying, nobody's looking at these kids and saying, are they being abused? Right. but we certainly were. Even as good we were as performing, I think, was because that was the only time you got to kind of let go a little bit and be loud and dance.

I mean, we were so isolated from the world other than being brought out to perform. We had some movies from outside, but very controlled, but no television, no music, no books, nothing from the outside world. No toys, no, you know, nothing. When I think about my whole childhood, what stands out to me was just no spontaneous moments of joy. You know, you're just always supposed to be controlled and easy to handle and in Jesus' spirit and standing in lines and being perfect.

You know, we were not allowed to be children, is exactly what it was. Now, we did mention that Daniela wrote the book, The Culting of America, but it comes with a companion workbook. see right here. It's called unculture yourself, a workbook for reclaiming your mind. And I'm just going to read the first part of the intro so you can get an idea. Unculture yourself, a workbook for reclaiming your mind isn't your typical self-help workbook. This interactive companion to the culting of America offers no gold stars, no patronizing affirmations, and definitely no, quote, just think positive platitudes. Instead, this is a space for honesty and reflection. It's not a one-size-fits-all guide to identifying cults, nor is it a place for judgment or shame.

Instead, it will help you reflect on your experiences with groups, organizations, or ideologies so that you may better identify patterns of control, manipulation, and coercion. It's also a creative outlet for processing your complex emotions through journaling. And it goes on from there. But that is a taste. And so really growing up for the first 10 years of my life, it was like what I think growing up in an orphanage or like institution would be, except that my parents were not dead.

My mom was on the same compound as me, but I saw my parents for one hour a day. So every night we would go back to our families for dinner. Huge dining hall, like an army dining facility. Everyone will find your parents. get your food from a serving line. It's about 30 minutes to eat, and then about 30 minutes to an hour

to hang out with them afterwards, and then it was back to the dorms to go to sleep. If I can tell y'all anything, no matter what community you end up in, don't send your children to go sleep in dorms. Like, you know, we had a lot of abuse of the older children abusing the younger children and, et cetera, you know,

playing out the things that were done to them. It was just normal by the time I was five and six. And it never really stopped because there were so many different abusers, you know. It was just such a consistent part of life for so many years. You know, in those first 10 years of my life, I was mostly being raised by like 16 to 18 year old girls. So there were a couple of people who were nice, who were like kind, you know. I say sometimes there were good people in the sex cult too, you know, but no one was able to protect us.

No one was able to inspire us. I don't know that I had anyone that I looked up to. I idolized my mom and that was probably it. You know, my mom was and is a really great person and she was always very kind. She was also always having babies, so we always had a baby in my family. And, oh, and incidentally, my mother was kicked out

of the leadership communes. for having too many children, even though you were supposed to have as many children as you could, but they didn't want to deal with them up on the leadership commune. We would, like, stay at that big commune for about two more years, and then that was when they were like, no more. You had too many babies. So we were just sent out to fend for ourselves.

And fend for ourselves meant Danielle's family leaving the massive leadership communes and ending up in Brazil, where they lived in children of God homes. They're still very much inside the cult, but now with a very different day-to-day life. So when I was 12 years old, we lived in a smaller commune. There were only 25 people who lived there in a single four-bedroom house, and I slept in a room with probably five of my siblings, bunk beds, and triple-bubes. bunk beds are very ubiquitous in the children of God. It was drastically different from the large communes where we slept in dorms with like teenagers who were in charge of us and not with our families at all. So this was like a very big change where we got to actually see my parents every

day and got to sleep with our siblings and not by age. So we'd wake up about six o'clock in the morning when my mom would drop off my two-year-old brother in my bed so that she could go to adult devotions. And I would wake up and take care of the child until seven o'clock when I would have to go make breakfast for all the adults. I would make breakfast. I would wash the dishes. And then I would go be part of teaching my four-year-old brother, who they had decided was just my responsibility to give him an education. And so I would sit him down with his workbooks, try to work on reading, do that for probably another hour, and then would have to go start lunch. And then I would do a lot of the cleaning afterwards. And then in the afternoon, it was like either going out

street performing and begging or just time to work on my own school in between. You know, I just feel so lucky that if I was going to grow up in a cult, I got to grow up in a country as beautiful physically and the people as Brazil. So we never got to celebrate Christmas on Christmas, and we didn't get presents anyway. But that's because we were all working on Christmas when we were out caroling. But Brazilians are some of the friendliest people, if not the friendliest people on Earth. So of course, they're not just going to have children seeing at their door on Christmas. They are going to invite you in and give you a full meal. And this was all the kind of foods that we were not allowed to eat.

And teaching myself Portuguese from the ages of 10 to 14 was really actually fun for me. So, you know, to jump very briefly, like until 1994, we are living in communes of hundreds of people around the world. And then when the leader dies, his wife then takes over. And she starts making changes. She allows the communes to be much smaller. And so people start spreading out on their own. And then it became her version of the cult, but still sort of run through him because they believed they could speak to him in heaven, something that's called charisma by proxy.

She introduces a doctrine called loving Jesus that I just describe as like, spiritual orgies where the adults are making love to Jesus. And things just get like crazier and crazier. And they stopped putting children on the sharing schedules. They made rules that adults were not supposed to have sex with children. And I always say that it's just like, it's surprising to me that so many people actually believe. that just telling the pedophiles not to rape the children did anything.

In my mother's era, it was all out in the open. In my day, I was being taken down to a basement to be punished and being raped instead. You know, I think the interesting thing about sexual abuse of young children is no matter what children know it's wrong. You know, no matter how much you tell them, this is love, this is God, no matter how much, how much you isolate them from the world, children, no, this is not supposed to be happening, you know. And that's very specific to children and like young, prepubescent children.

So I always had that, you know. And very specifically at six years old, when I went through some really serious abuse, which was talked about in the book, I remember being like, nope, if this is love, I'm not doing it. If this is God, I'm not doing it. And if that means I'm going to hell, hell's going to suck, but I'm not doing it.

You know, something about me, I never bought into any of it at all. And I just think I was like, no, your game sounds dumb. I'm not going to play. By the time I start having memories, you know, I'm three or four years old in Peru, and my mom is married to this guy who I call dad. And she's been with him since I was about one. He's my dad on my passport. and so that was my dad.

And by the time I'm five, he's gone. And he was sent off to Russia as soon as the iron curtain fell. And then from there, he left the children of God. So we couldn't like see him or have contact with him because he was a backslider. And I just always thought that's who my dad was. We didn't really talk about him. Like my sister and I would talk about him when we were. were by ourselves and we would be like, oh, maybe dad will come back someday or whatever, you know.

But like no one ever corrected anything. It was just, this guy was our new dad and we were expected to call him dad right away and that's just how it went. And then I'm 12 years old. We're out on like a walk with my mom canning in the neighborhood collecting used goods from people. And remember, it starts raining and I wear glasses. So I'm like trying to keep up with everyone, but also clean off my glasses. And my mom, when I run to catch up, she just looks at me very casually. And she's like, well, at least you're lucky. You don't have coat bottle glasses like your sister Claire.

And I'm like, huh? I don't have a sister named Claire. And she's like, what? Yes, you do. Blah, blah, blah. And my middle name is Claire for this reason. Because that was another thing. Like, everyone was having sex with everyone.

So the children just belonged to whatever family the mother was in. And the thing is, it was so well known who my father was. And all of his children were also famous acting children in just in the Japan version instead of in the Brazil version. And we all have this really big, fluffy, blonde hair. and everybody knew that I was his kid except me. And I guess it just, it never occurred to my mom that you have to repeat something to a two-year-old or they're just not going to know. So that was when I just found out and it was just this very mind-bending, weird thing.

Okay, so just to keep the dad straight here because even Tyler, was confused. And I'm never confused. Ever. I didn't like that feeling, Liz. Help me out. Yeah, I know. It's uncomfortable for you.

Here's that goes. Danielle's biological father, as we now know, was her grandfather's boss. Okay? So as she said in the beginning, my father is older than my grandfather, sex cult math, right? But as we now know, she didn't know that for much of her life. So, see, her mother married another man sometime after she had given birth to Danielle. So as far as Daniela knew that man, the one her mother married, was her dad, her real dad. And then her mother and this man went on to have more children together,

and Daniela always assumed that she and all of her siblings all shared the same father. Got it? No, I'm still a bit hazy on it. Let's just say that cult math is a subject I might not pass. Fail. F for fail. And then the other thing. is I was like, oh, he's so old.

As soon as she said it, I knew he was my dad because there was one picture in my baby photo album of my mom with me sitting next to this old guy. You know, it was like 43 or something at the time. I was just like, that's not right. A 14-year-old in a perfect world would never get pregnant by a man that old. I didn't have the language,

so I'm not like 100% sure I thought like that was. rape, but I definitely got to, oh, I shouldn't exist, right? Like in a good world where bad things don't happen, I would not exist. And I remember being like, oh, I'm so happy. I never had a crush on my brother who was the popular TV star in our world who everyone had a crush on. And so I very early on was like, I don't know now how many siblings I have around the children of God. Like, that means I can never grow up and get married because how will I know? That's not a sibling of mine, right? Like, we have a way to track it.

It definitely affected me when I found out because I was like, oh, like, I don't really know who I am anymore. I feel like it's kind of this repeated thing in my book where I realize I shouldn't exist and in high school I am told I don't exist. And so then I spend the next years really trying to prove that I exist, you know, up to becoming a captain in the army and like making history for women and then also getting back to I don't want to exist again. So that was just like a really big theme for me. It just confirmed for me at 12 years old that like, yep, I'm getting out of here as soon as I can. And that, that my friends, is where we leave you.

today, but only for today. On sex cult math. Imagine the amount of cognitive dissonance you have to be living in, to think that it's just totally fine to just not tell your daughter who her biological dad is, or that there's all these other kids out there that are her actual siblings that... She knows. She's just playing with and hanging out with and seeing on TV and not telling them, I don't know. I don't know either, Liz.

But next week, we will take you into the second half of Danielle's story. when her children of God ends. Spoiler alert, yes, I know, I spoiled it, but then her life with the systemites, as they call it, begins. Which includes a quick stop, a brief layover in the United States Army with a few deployments to Afghanistan as an intelligence officer. And, you know, helping make history for women in combat. No big deal. Just a Wednesday for our Daniela. And then, of course, we take you all the way up to today. And of course, there's also some very smart cult stuff. I was 15 and being faced with losing literally everything in my life, experts have said that leaving a cult or high control group is like as close to death as we can probably imagine.

And so I was wavering and this is when my mom, who was also born and raised in the cult, pregnant with me by 14, takes me on a walk outside the commune. And it's just like, go, just go. Thank you, Daniela. Thank you, Daniela. We have the links to all of her books and socials and all that stuff in the show notes. Highly recommend getting your hands on her memoir

if you haven't yet. Yeah, and if you love this show, and I know you do, because you've made it this far, but you hate the ads. Well, become a Patreon member. And you get every episode ad free. Patreon members,

They really do help make this show. So truly, you know, you're out there. You know, we love you. Thank you. But you'd still get the Cape Ron ads on the Patreon page. It's true. Capron. And thank you to you to you.

Thank you to you. And thank you to you. To you. All of you, our loyal listeners. We know you guys get to choose how you spend your time. And we are very grateful that once a week, you choose to spend some of it with us. And on that note,

give me some, oh, promise me, Rob. And a beautiful tune. Now, all of you go back to honoring the laborers of this world. And if you find yourself doing a bunch of free labor, well, you just might be in a cult. Right. Blood has changed since the 1800s and nine to five, five days a week isn't really the deal anymore. I mean, no one really stops work at five, right?

I think we all need to strike again. We need to walk out of the sweatshop. I used to be all about the four-day work week, you know, like, ah, three-day weekend, but that was before I had child. So I'm not going to get behind the three-day weekend anymore because kids, I propose four-day work week, definitely, two-day weekend, and Friday is official parent day. Where your kid goes to school. You don't have to go to work, and you just get to do you for the whole day every week.

No work, no parenting, just, you know, you in the spa, or you in the beach, or you in the mountains, or you in a nap. I don't care. Imagine let's join together. Liz, you're a trendsetter, and I think in 100 years from now, they'll look back and say thank you for,

parent day. You know, my son, my son was like, how come there's no kids day? There's mother's day and there's father's day and there's no kids day. And we're like, every day is kid day. That's what we told him. We're like, every day is kid's day. And he was like, I want a kid's day. We said, all right, you can have a kid's day. And we said it like a month in, and he just kept saying, when's kid day? And we said, on kid day, you can, you don't have to have manners. If you want to eat with your hands, eat with your hands. And he said, I want to have a party. And he, we had all his friends over and we made a big pot of spaghetti. And we made a big pot of and we went outside and they just ate spaghetti with their hands and meatballs.

And they threw the spaghetti at each other and just all over the driveway and the house and the backyard and on the fence. And that was our kids day. That's so cute. Kids day. Yeah. You're already taking the attention away from parent day, Tyler. It sounds a little similar to my parent day plans, to be honest.

Thank you, everyone, for joining us. Credits. Credits, you know who it is. It's me, it's Lais, it's Rob. Right, we host, we edit, we do all the stuff. We work past five.