- The siblings who escaped the Children of God cult
- Mom Sentenced in Deaths of 2 Girls Banished by Doomsday Cult
- MK-ULTRA, the CIA, mind control, Operation Paperclip and the Nazis, the 1995 congressional hearings
The siblings who escaped the Children of God cult
By Mike Farrell BBC Scotland News 3 October 2019
Jonathan Watt and Verity Carter's father was the first man to be convicted of sexual abuse linked to the Children of God cult in Scotland.
The cult started in the US in the 1960s but Jonathan and Verity were brought up under its strict teachings in "communes" around Scotland in the 80s and early 90s.
The cult started in the US in the 1960s but Jonathan and Verity were brought up under its strict teachings in "communes" around Scotland in the 80s and early 90s.
The religious sect, which was also known as The Family, has faced allegations of widespread sexual and physical abuse of children, including sexual violence, incest, and brainwashing.
Last year, Verity and Jonathan's father Alexander Watt was convicted of four charges of sexually abusing his daughter and another child in Renfrewshire and on the east coast of Scotland when they were part of the cult.
Following his conviction, Verity, who is now 39, began to speak out about her ordeal but her younger brother has never publicly discussed his upbringing before.
Jonathan told BBC Scotland's The Nine he was not sexually abused but was the subject of "daily beatings" while growing up in the cult.
He says: "The only way you can sustain a cult is you've got to have total control. You're living in a world inside a world. You've got no contact with the outside world.
"The only way to stop contact is to kill curiosity, and the only way to do that is basically to drill into you from when you were born that you're useless, you're worthless, you're ugly. Unfortunately with a cult like that, where you are outside of the law, it's a safe haven for some abusive, violent adults."
The Children of God began in the United States in the late 1960s and built on the 'free love' philosophy of counter-culture America.
Its founder, David Berg, told members that God was love and love was sex, so there should be no limits, regardless of age or relationship.
By the 1970s Berg's cult claimed to have 10,000 full-time members in 130 communities around the world....
Mom Sentenced in Deaths of 2 Girls Banished by Doomsday Cult
A Colorado woman has received life in prison without parole in the deaths of her daughters who were banished to a car without food or water by members of a doomsday religious group because the girls were thought to have been impure.
By Associated Press, Wire Service Content Oct. 1, 2019
A Colorado woman has received life in prison without parole in the deaths of her daughters who were banished to a car without food or water by members of a doomsday religious group because the girls were thought to have been impure.
By Associated Press, Wire Service Content Oct. 1, 2019
TELLURIDE, Colo. (AP) — A Colorado woman will spend the rest of her life behind bars for killing her two daughters after she and other members of a doomsday religious group banished them to a car without food or water because the girls were thought to have been impure.
Nashika Bramble was sentenced to life in prison without parole Tuesday in the deaths of Makayla Roberts, 10, and Hannah Marshall, 8. She was convicted in July of two counts of first-degree murder.
The sisters' bodies were found in September 2017 in a car parked on a farm near Norwood, a town of about 500 people 30 miles (48 kilometers) west of the Telluride ski resort. Heat, dehydration and starvation killed the girls, and they had been dead for several weeks before their bodies were found, authorities said.
Bramble was a member of a religious group that moved to the property earlier that year, court documents say.
Investigators say they believe the group's spiritual leader, Madani Ceus of Haiti, declared that the two girls were possessed by unclean spirits during a past life and ordered them kept in a car without food or water for days as the others waited for the apocalypse before the 2017 solar eclipse....
