The Backstory: Celebrity Cult Life: No Food or Water . . But Plenty of Sex

Connection is as strong a need as air. For folks that can’t find it, there have been plenty of cults that offer community, acceptance, and love. But it all comes at a price.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
All right. We all want to feel connected, right, and
at least most of us do. Sometimes we live for
outsiders to help us find those answers, and that's where
cults find their members. Some control you with sex, some
by gaslighting you about your past or other vulnerabilities. And
there's even one that tells you you can survive with
no food and no water just by breathing and paying

(00:23):
them to tell you how to do it. I'm Patty
Steele movie stars who grew up in cults. That's next
on the backstory. The backstory is back, okay. If we're
being honest, most of us have gone through times when
we feel i don't know, disconnected from family, friends, maybe

(00:45):
even society in general. It's a crappy feeling, right, but
we generally get over it or at least find a
way to deal with it. Maybe we even learn something
from it. But some folks look for somebody else to
fix the upset, and that's where where cults find their customers.
You need to feel a sense of belonging, a structure,

(01:05):
of being part of a family. Come on, hop on board.
Actress Michelle Pfeiffer was just twenty years old when she
moved to La Pretty quickly. She met a couple who
she describes as kind of personal trainers, and they believed
in breath arianism. Yeah, that's the idea that we can
all live without food or water. She says. They were

(01:28):
very controlling. I wasn't living with them, but I was
there a lot, and they pushed me to come more
since I had to pay every time I showed up.
It was financially very draining. She says. It wasn't until
she was helping her then husband Peter Horton do research
on another cult for a movie he was doing that

(01:48):
she realized what was going on. She says, I was
in one. It was total psychological manipulation. Actress Glenn Close
had a similar experience. When she was just seven years old,
her dad, doctor William Close, joined a conservative religious group
called Moral Rearmament and then moved his entire family to

(02:09):
the group's headquarters in Switzerland. They lived there for fifteen years.
She says it was basically a cult. There were a
lot of rules, a lot of control. It was awful,
and she says the damage it did to her psyche
has made it impossible for her to form lasting, loving relationships.
But now we come to an even more disturbing group,

(02:32):
with several other well known Hollywood types who were dragged
into it as children. By the time Joaquin Phoenix was
born in the mid nineteen seventies, his parents, Arlen and
John Lee Phoenix, were already members of the religious cult
Children of God. The Phoenix family constantly moved with the cult,
living in communes in Latin America, including Venezuela and Puerto Rico.

(02:57):
By the time he was three years old, his parents
were considered archbishops of Venezuela and Trinidad for the group.
Joaquin says his parents joined innocently, that they were idealists
looking for a sense of safety and family, but that
when they realized there was something more sinister going on,
they got out. He said they decided to jump ship

(03:18):
after they found out about the group's sex recruitment tactics.
But what damage had been done to the Phoenix kids.
Joaquin's older brother, River Phoenix, talked about the terrible impact
of those early years, and when he died of a
drug overdose in nineteen ninety three, it prompted more media
interest in the family's past with the Children of God.

(03:41):
The movement originally started out in the nineteen sixties, led
by this guy named David Berg who grew up in
a very religious Christian family. But again, it was the
sixties and he saw a chance to incorporate his Christian
beliefs into a more modern, loving, free spirited lifestyle movement.
It grew like wildfire, and he re christened the group

(04:04):
from Teens for Christ to the Children of God. In
his eyes, it was all about a community that emphasized love, acceptance,
and a utopian vision of communal living. But you know
where this is going, right, It got really dark. Actress
Rose McGowan also spent some of her childhood in Children

(04:25):
of God. She says, like in most cults, you're cut
off from your outside family. Plus there were no newspapers,
no TV. You're kept in the dark, so you'll obey.
But you went on to say, I remember watching how
the men were with the women, and even at a
very young age, I decided I didn't want to be
like those women. They were basically there to serve the

(04:48):
men sexually, and the men were allowed to have more
than one wife. How did she finally escape, Well, when
she was nine, her dad heard that the group was
starting to advocate sex between adults and children, and they
literally fled the scene. Thank God. Berg says he was
being directed by divine revelations, and by the early nineteen

(05:10):
seventies he was advocating something called flirty fishing, which involved
women in the group seducing outside men to join, a
lot of times trading sex for money or influence. He
said this was the best way for them to spread
their message of love. Even more disturbing was the evidence
of systematic child abuse. He said it was all about

(05:34):
spiritual enlightenment and breaking societal taboos. But what Burg advocated
in the way of abuse left lifelong scars on scores
of children in the cult. So how did Berg's reign
end well? As members began to leave, a lot of
them spoke out and gave horrific, detailed accounts of what

(05:54):
they'd been through. Berg was totally paranoid and extremely strategic.
He managed to hide in locations like Portugal away from
extradition treaties. As law enforcements stormed and raided communal homes
around the world, they arrested some adults and temporarily removed children,

(06:14):
but Berg made sure he was never in a location
that turned hot, so he was never arrested. David Berg
finally died in nineteen ninety four, still secluded in Portugal,
never facing justice. What happened to the group, It's still
out there. After David's death, his wife, Kim Zurbi took
over and renamed the group The Family International. She's going

(06:38):
to be seventy nine years old this month, and she
says the group has renounced their old ways, that they're
now simply a loose network of religious communities that are
all about humanitarian and spiritual work. From their peak of
about ten thousand members in one hundred and seventy countries,
they're down to just fourteen hundred in eighty countries. But

(07:00):
where's the accountability for that past? People want what cults
claim to offer community, meaning and purpose, structure and comfort,
but at what cost. Hope you're enjoying The Backstory with
Patty Steele. Please leave a review and follow or subscribe
for free to get new episodes delivered automatically. Also feel

(07:22):
free to dm me if you have a story you'd
like me to cover. On Facebook, It's Patty Steele and
on Instagram Real Patty Steele. I'm Patty Steele. The Backstory
is a production of iHeartMedia, Premiere Networks, the Elvis Durand Group,
and Steel Trap Productions. Our producer is Doug Fraser. Our

(07:43):
writer Jake Kushner. We have new episodes every Tuesday and Friday.
Feel free to reach out to me with comments and
even story suggestions on Instagram at Real Patty Steele and
on Facebook at Patty Steele. Thanks for listening to the
backstory with Patty Steele, the piece of history you didn't
know you needed to know.