I was a naive teenager, desperate for belonging. But my "home" for
30 years turned out to be a house of horror. I left the Children of God in the early 2000s. It took a
long time to come out of the haze of those 30 years, but when I did, I
was appalled by my former self.
One of the most common questions people
ask is: How could you be part of such a thing? And how could you stay?
For years — as I came to grips with my own guilt, remorse and shame — I
asked myself the same things. In 2003, my eldest son, then an adult,
sent me a link to a thorough three-year investigation into the COG as
part of a child custody case filed with the High Court in England in the
early 1990s, and I learned that, according to these court records, I
was not alone in the horrors I’d experienced.