I place my silver high-heeled pump on the makeshift black wooden step leading out onto the TEDx stage and pause to draw in a deep, calming breath. You can do this, my forty-one-year-old-self repeats silently. I ignore the little girl inside my head screaming, Don’t do it! You’ve been keeping this secret for almost two decades. Walk out on that stage and tell your story, and you can never take it back. They will attack you!
I take another deep breath and imagine giving my scared inner child a big hug. We’ll be fine. I don’t want to tell the story I’m going to open with. I hate talking about being abused. I don’t want anyone pitying me or thinking, There’s that weird cult kid. Poor thing, she must be so messed up.
But to show the importance of what I’ve discovered, I have to tell this story, as painful as it is. In the nearly twenty years since I’ve left the Family, I’ve kept my past a secret from all but a handful of people and done everything I could to succeed and fit into society. I’ve wanted people to see the person I’d made of myself: the classy, strong, and happy woman I’ve become—not a victim of a past I could not choose or change.
During that time, I’ve pondered what went wrong. My family created a whole new society in their quest to be the perfect Christian disciples. How could incredibly idealistic, fairly smart people engage in and submit to these terrible abuses? How could people claiming to hear from God and dedicating their entire lives to serving humanity inflict such harm on their children?
I knew my grandfather made the typical mistakes of the guru.
He believed his own press that he was the divinely anointed prophet of God for the End Time. If he was the mouthpiece of God, then his ideas and inclinations were justified as Godly or at least excusable. He surrounded himself with sycophants and yes-people, most notably his second wife, Maria, who encouraged his most outlandish ideas and depravity. He cut himself off from anyone, including his children, who might have challenged his new doctrines.
Rooted in the patriarchal, religious model of control, he was not content to just give his message. He used sophisticated methods, employed by communist revolutions, like self-criticism and public approval or reprimand, to manipulate his followers’ daily lives for “their own good.” This way, he perpetrated his evil on thousands of his followers, among them countless children, as God’s revealed truth.
He accentuated the us vs. them mentality to isolate his followers from outside influence, conditioning them to distrust outsiders as liars and evil so Family members would dismiss inconsistent viewpoints. He made sure people could not acquire enough resources, so they remained dependent economically on the group.
He normalized practices and beliefs that were viewed as aberrant by traditional society (though still widely practiced, like child abuse), by flooding people with images and content that gradually made it less shocking, then accepted, over time. He used the elite mentality to get his followers to isolate themselves into a controlled environment where those practices and beliefs could flourish, unchecked by mainstream disapproval.
I might add that he was not as creative as I once gave him credit for. He drew from the beliefs and attitudes prevalent in his time and gave them his own flair—beliefs that I still find in segments of society today, everything from the subjugation of women, polygamy, the End Time, corporeal punishment, and free sex.
Sifting through these ideas helped me understand a lot about how my grandfather was able to have such power over people, but I still needed to get to the core—the seed of corruption that twisted good intention into abuse.
Particularly because as I talk with my “normal” friends, I start to see how prevalent sexual abuse against women and children is in all levels of society. It is a secret no one wants to look at, or, perhaps, are too afraid to see. Even my mother, one of my sisters, and I had all been the victims of forcible rape in “normal” society.
In May 2018, I finally discovered it.
My life experiences and legal education come together in my personal eureka moment.
I pull out a piece of blank paper and a pen and draw the first circle.
“Aware,” I write in the center—I am an aware, conscious being.
I draw a second circle around the first.
“Body,” I label it. I own my body. This is my most fundamental right.
I, as an aware, conscious being, spirit, whatever you prefer to call it, have a property right in my own body. To use a legal term, my body is my property. Some people bristle at applying the word “property” to the human body because they feel that it demeans the nature of the body; but for me, this designation brings immediate clarity.
From my legal background, I understand that the term “property” doesn’t apply only to inanimate objects or land; it is anything that has value, tangible or intangible. But more importantly, I understand the implications of property ownership far better than I do my relationship to my own body.
I also see the unique position the body holds in the category of “property.” Unlike other types of “property,” such as inanimate objects, we can never give up our fundamental right of ownership in our body so long as we are alive. It is an inalienable right, meaning we cannot be separated from it, it cannot be taken from us, and we cannot give it away.
Without this right of ownership of our own bodies, there would be no moral wrong in slavery, rape, or murder. This is the principle those famous freedom fighters were trying to articulate when they proclaimed that we have the “right to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” They said to King George III, “You don’t own me! I own me!” They messed up by not applying it to all humans.
With my background, this revelation has a very specific implication. I wasn’t being unloving or selfish or a tease when I withheld my body from men. Men had no excuse for groping me or pressuring me. I wasn’t a “bitch” for telling them to keep their hands to themselves. Dressing sexy didn’t excuse a man who is being grabby; and flirting wasn’t an excuse for rape. Just like leaving my wallet on a table or painting my car red isn’t an excuse for stealing it. Theft is theft. My body is mine fully and I have no obligation to make it available to anyone if I don’t freely choose to, without people pressuring me through guilt or God. Full stop.