A woman who escaped from an infamous s*x cult as a teenager is sharing her chilling story to help encourage other victims to come forward.
Dawn Watson, from Brazil, grew up in the notorious and international sect, The Children of God but dreamed of escaping from the abuse she endured.
During her time in the cult, she was taught how to have s*x at a young age, forced to perform s*x acts on “uncles” and shown images of naked women nailed to crucifixes.
Teenage girls and women were also forced to engage in “flirty fishing” which involved being sent outside of the community to solicit themselves to raise money for the commune.
Hollywood actors Rose McGowan, who became embroiled in the recent sexual harassment scandal surrounding movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, and Joaquin Phoenix were also once members of the cult.
Determined to not live under these rules, Dawn managed to escape from the Children of God – now known as Family International, when she was 13. But her journey to recovery has been a long one, marked with painful memories that have taken far longer to be set free from.
Now 29, Dawn told Barcroft TV: “As you learned to brush your teeth as children, we learned to have s*x: ‘This is what you have to do this is how it happens’.”
“We learned God is love and the way to express God’s love is through sexuality. I never knew anything different from that.”
“I think that no one will truly understand unless you have lived it, what abuse is. And abuse I say in all forms. Abused s*xually, abused emotionally and abuse spiritually.
“My alone time was something I cherished a lot. I think that was my escape.
“I used to have a dog called Midnight and he was the cutest thing and he had a big doghouse and I would sit down in that doghouse for hours and hours and just look at him. And he seemed to understand everything that was going on and it was therapy for me. Because I could talk to him about anything and I knew he wasn’t going to judge me. He wasn’t going to punish me.”
Inside the cult
The Children of God began in 1968 and was founded by David Brandt Berg in Huntington California. By 1972, there were 130 communities of full-time members scattered throughout the world – including Brazil where Dawn was raised.
Purporting himself to be a man of God who wanted to start up a network of global communities of like-minded individuals, Berg had a troubled history.
Hollywood actors Rose McGowan and Joaquin Phoenix has both shared details of their own early childhood experiences in the sect.
Dawn explained: “David Brandt Berg had a lot of darkness inside him. Before he even began this community, he had problems with his own children. He used to abuse his own children. He was kicked out of the church before starting this community because he wanted to have many wives. He didn’t know how to have one woman.”
By the time Dawn was born into the cult, Berg was a shadowy figure who existed to the members through his teachings and status as “Father David”.
But the culture of abuse and hyper-sexuality was still rife. Dawn recalls as a child being exposed to images of naked women nailed to crucifixes, and ‘Hookers for Jesus’ captioned posters, produced by the Children of God.
She explained women and children were encouraged to have alone time with their ‘uncles’ and the cult brainwashed its members into believing that being part of sex acts – even if they were at a young age and didn’t understand what they were doing – was all part of God’s expression of love.
The bizarre act of “flirty fishing”
Dawn said: “I never had any father figure growing up in the community. Not someone that as a man I could relate to and can feel protective of me. I always looked at men and uncles of the community as danger and I wanted to be as far away as I could from them.’
Known as “flirty fishing”, young women were sent outside of the community to solicit themselves, raising money for the commune.
Dawn said: “He convinced the women so much that this was part of a cause and that if you didn’t want to do it if you didn’t have the faith to do it, it was because you were weak spiritually.
“Flirty fishing was from teenagers up. I understood that maybe one day I would have to do it and that, it was something natural and normal and kind of like you should think of yourself as a hero.”
Questioning the ways of the community was frowned upon – and those that did were punished.
Dawn explained: “A lot of the kids would get scotch tape on their mouth as in you don’t talk about things that are not of this culture or our belief systems. We had a spanking room that I was always in and out of.
“I remember one day, we were just kids being kids, and we ended up getting a punishment and I remember I got so many spankings that my whole leg was bruised and I remember going to my mum and saying: ‘Is this love?’
Dawn was born into the cult and lived there with her mother and brother.
She said: “My mum definitely did not know many of the things that were happening; they always put her to go and sing and always gave her so many jobs to do.
“A lot of times women were not taking care of their own children. They were always with uncles and aunties.”
The children in the community weren’t given a real education, further trapping them in the cycle of abuse and brainwashing.
Dawn said: “We weren’t permitted a lot to study or read books or anything that was gonna take our mind away from the education that they were giving us.”
Frustrated with the lack of answers to her questions, Dawn started to sneak out some nights, bringing back her cigars and music.
One of the first songs she ever heard – other than one of the Children of God’s own – was by Eminem.
Making the decision to leave
“Leaving the community and having to figure out life in the outside world was a really difficult, exciting, scary, bunch of different emotions,” says Dawn. Photo / Facebook, Dawn Watson
Dawn couldn’t get rid of the unshakeable feeling that the so-called expressions of love in the community were not right, so she decided, at age 13, to leave.
She said: “I finally got to a point in my life where I needed a way out. I desperately said: ‘You know what? If the outside world is a terrible place if God is going to judge me and kill me and I am going to hell. I really don’t care’.
“Leaving the community and having to figure out life in the outside world was a really difficult, exciting, scary, bunch of different emotions.”
Dawn left behind her mother and brother and spent over three years staying at the homes of various ex-members, in Brazil.
“I jumped from house to house, especially ex-members, people that I had left already and then had the little homes. They would accept me and I would jump from place to place that where people that had left the community,” she said.
“So, it felt familiar but at the same time I still had to interact with people from the outside world.”
Believing she had closed the door on the darkest chapter of her life Dawn was raped when she was 15.
She said: “I experienced rape in one of the houses that I was staying at.
“It was one of my darkest moments and it was at that moment I called up my mum and finally understood that she had found the strength to get out of the community.
“She was able to leave and I was able to come home. It was that feeling of ‘Okay now we can start again and begin to construct a new life and I am not alone in this.'”
Making her own future
Reunited with her family, in the interim years, Dawn studied psychology – a considerable feat given that despite being born in Brazil, she knew no Portuguese when she left Children of God.
However, she still struggled to feel part of the world she’d been shut off from for so long.
Dawn explained: “I still wasn’t comfortable talking about where I had come from. There were a lot of gaps that people couldn’t understand. ‘Why do you have an accent?’ I was born in Brazil, but Portuguese was never my first language.
“Or they would talk about a television series or just normal things that were happening in Brazil. I had no idea. I felt like an alien in this world that I couldn’t connect to anything that people were talking about.
“‘I ended up having to make up a story. Make up different backgrounds of where I came from. So that I can feel like I would fit in. But that began to really make me feel terrible inside like I can never be me.”
In 2014, Dawn sold up most of her possessions to pay for a ticket to Date with Destiny, a self-help event led by entrepreneur and life coach Tony Robbins. There she publicly shared her story for the first time.
Dawn said: “At that moment for me, it was, ‘I’ve been through so much pain, I’ve so much baggage’ I just need to liberate that within me.
“It was a very scary moment of my life but I started to receive e-mails and messages from men and women saying: ‘Your story helped me deal with a pain that I was going through.”
Dawn has been able to rebuild not only her own life but others too. In 2016 she started her own non-profit, Dawn Watson’s Institute.
She said: “I take people that have gone through extreme amounts of pain and I help them go through the process that I’ve gone through in my life of forgiveness of emptying, of owning what they have.
“Helping people start to break the silence within themselves, what they went through. And then they can begin the process of healing.
“I think the way that I relate to my past, it really defines how people will relate to me. I felt like the more I am ashamed of my past, didn’t want to talk about it.
“But now I talk about it as ‘this is me and I am not ashamed of it. This is where I came from.'”
