Jesus Freaks by Don Lattin Page B

down to leave the country—that the United States of America was about to face the wrath of God—Jim and Donna didn’t think twice. They took off to a new Family outpost in Denmark, on the site of a vacated Danish army base that had been taken over by a band of European hippies.
    David Berg’s unorthodox ideas about sexual freedom had not yet filtered down to rank-and-file members of The Family. “It was so fundamentalist. It’s hilarious to look back on it now,” Jim recalled. “It was no drugs, no sex. You were strictly there for God, to be a revolutionary for Jesus.”
    Shula, who had just flown into England with Aaron and their baby, was getting a very different view of life in The Family. She was about to have one more close encounter with her horny father-in-law.
    â€œWe had gone to live in Berg’s house in London,” Shula recalled. “I was trying to cook for him and keep this house up while I had Merry, a new baby. It was like a month after having her. I was still healing. One night Aaron sent me into Berg’s room. He and Maria were watching something on TV about the Royal Family. They were really into the Royal Family. He offered me a glass of wine and started kissing me. We didn’t have sex. He told me he had just been with Becky and Rachel [two of Berg’s other wives] and was worn out. I think he was just a drunk and couldn’t get it up. Well, the next night he comes up to me and starts kissing me again and wanting to have sex. I told him, ‘You know, I’m really tired. Can we do it another time?’ It was the truth on my part. Obviously, he took it personally. When I told Aaron that I’d turned Berg down and said I was tired, he couldn’t believe it. Aaron said, ‘What! You didn’t have sex with the prophet!’ Maybe Aaron was trying to get back in his father’s good graces by letting him have sex with me. Berg would play games with his kids—promote one and demote another.” 10
    Aaron was already losing his father’s trust. Having his wife turn Berg down certainly didn’t help his cause. But there were deeper problems. Aaron had long suffered from bouts of depression, and he was once again sinking into that mix of anger and melancholy. He and Shula were sent off to Sweden, where they briefly crossed paths with Jim and Donna LaMattery.
    â€œAaron was flown into Sweden,” LaMattery said. “He was in a world of confusion when he got there, and I was told to babysit him. I knew he had been shifted to me for babysitting duty, but no one told me why. They just said to watch out for him. We had a lake there, and we would go out. He was a great guitar player, but a really miserableguy. Aaron was always a little strange. We would go out to eat and he was always in left field. Back in California, he would go on these crazy expeditions, singing through the streets of LA. But he seemed really depressed and despondent in Sweden.”
    Shula could see her husband was going down into the spiritual spiral of depression. “Aaron knew that his dad did not want us back in England,” she said. “Merry was about nine months old. Aaron was really depressed.”
    After Sweden, Shula, Aaron, and Merry moved into a Family colony in Paris, where the eldest son of the Endtime Prophet continued his descent. One night she saw him writing a long letter to his father. “He was really depressed. I looked over his shoulder to see what he was doing and he was writing about how Jane [Aaron’s mother] would leave him in the house [as a baby], and he’d scream for hours. He put the letter in an envelope, and wrote on it, ‘Goodbye dad. You’re the best dad a son ever had.’ Then he gave it to me to mail. It was a suicide note.”
    Jane Berg, the Endtime Prophet’s long-suffering but ever-loyal wife, was dispatched from London to Paris to deal with her suicidal son. Before she