A woman who was born into a sex cult and given up as a wife to the leader when she was only three years old has opened up about the horrifying acts she witnessed. Serena Kelley, now 40, was a poster child when she was just a toddler for 'the Children of God', a religious organisation founded by David Berg that has widely been denounced as a cult.
The group, which at one point had bases across the globe including the Philippines and Japan, encouraged promiscuity between members and believed children become adults at the mere age of 12. Serena was handed over as a wife to David Berg, who was known as Father David by her mother Sara, who was a leading member of the organisation.
From there on, she was raised by strangers and was given the cult name of Mary Dear. Comics were made by the organisation about her childhood and Serena became a celebrity figure among the followers of the Children of God.
She says her importance in the cult isolated her from the other children but not the adults who took part in massive group sex involving multiple adults and would walk around naked in front of her when she was just a child. Serena, who now works as a trauma recovery specialist, said: "I was born in David Berg's house, and from the start I was raised and controlled by him from before I was even born.
"Shortly after my mother moved to his compound, she was pregnant with me. He decided he was going to document my entire life from before I was born. They wrote publications documenting my mother's pregnancy and he named me Serena and Mary-Dear, which became my cult name.
"There was a series called 'Life with Grandpa' which was like a kids' comic book series and they wrote stories about my mother's pregnancy and how they were going to raise me. Another called 'Lifelines' documented my entire birth, so David Berg kind of planned my entire life from before I was born."
At the age of three, Serena was taken from her mother to be raised by other high-profile members of the cult while her mum went on to become one of the organisation's top leaders. Serena claims the cult was supposed to spread a message of spiritual revolution and happiness but had a much more sinister and disturbing culture behind it.
Several celebrity members including actor Joaquin Phoenix and his late brother joined with their family when they were children but left in outrage over certain practices. Hollywood actress Rosie McGowan also grew up in the cult but her parents left when the group started 'advocating child-sex'.
Founded by David Berg in 1968, the popular cult grew and the height of it's success, it had 13,000 members in 130 communities across the world. One of the key foundations of the Children of God 'family' was sex.
Berg managed to brainwash his thousands of followers that the end of the world was approaching and the only way they could be spared was through sex and orgasms. Under his rules, women had to make themselves readily available to any man who decided they wanted to have sex one of them.
Berg then issued one of his disgusting follow up doctrines which he called the Law of Love -it stated anyone within the cult could have sex with anyone else, including children.
Serena from Austin, Texas, continued: "I think the most famous story from my very early childhood with Berg was when I was given to him as a child bride by my mother, so she brought me to him after I turned three - just after my third birthday.
"She put me on his lap and he kissed me and he gave a whole speech about how I'm going to be his forever and we're having a union. Things that don't make sense to a three-year-old. Then he gave me a ring and the ring was quite big, but what he had done was wrapped tape around the band to make it thick enough to fit on my finger and he told me to always wear the ring and take tape off as I got older so the ring would always fit me.
"It's pretty sick he thought that far ahead into the future. He had already been married to multiple other teenage girls, I happened to be the youngest at three."
Serena was subjected to a lot of sexual abuse as a child within the cult under the new Law of love which allowed children to become objects of sex.
She alleged: "There were orgies in Berg's house all the time, many times I'd be left alone to wander the house by myself because there'd be drunken orgies in the living room. I'd be swimming in the pool and there would be orgies at the other end of the pool."
She told how Berg lived in a separate house but would come over for play sessions in which they'd have to call him 'Grandpa'. She recalls that one of the most awful things was the 'terrible' smell about him which she later learned was alcohol.
Relieving those awful sessions, she said: "It was mostly kissing and cuddling in the bed, very inappropriate things. There were other kids including his own daughter and his granddaughter, my older sister, there were a lot of girls that were subjected to this.
"Berg believed that we should follow bible rules, so in the bible they believe that a child becomes an adult at 12. Berg literally said when you're 12 you're an adult now so you're going to start having sex with adults, and start living like an adult so working, having adult responsibilities. The 12-year-old girls would look after me.
"They were considered old enough to do that, and they would have to have sex with adults."
Serena was only-four years old at the time so was spared from that sort of abuse but was still made to film inappropriate strip-tease videos for Berg.
She claims: "Berg liked to watch little girls strip on camera, the houses we were in always hand basements and dark rooms with filming equipment, and they would dress us up in either like a ballerina costume or a Hawaiian costume with a lay and flowers, always things very feminine, and we were told to dance and take the clothes off.
"They would put music on and make us dance. Of course, me being three or four, I had no idea what the hell was going on. So I'd see my older sister, who is seven years older than me, by the time I was four she was 10 or 11-years-old already, so she was used to this treatment.
"When I cried, I would get punished for it. I'd be thrown into a dark room or miss food or something, get beaten. That was kind of my way out.
"It sounds insane to say either strip naked or get beaten, but they were my choices - it was things like that, you learned how to survive by choosing whatever was the less painful option for you as a child."
Karen Zerby, a senior member of the cult who was known as Mama Maria went on to replace Berg after his death and also gave up her child Ricky Rodriquez up to the cult.
Ricky was handed over to Berg and cared for by a team of nannies who were told to 'raise him for sex almost from birth' Evil Berg died in 1994 but his title was filled immediately by his lover, Karen Zerby.
Her son left the cult in 2001 after years of child sex abuse took it's toll on him and he plotted revenge on the people who allowed it to happen. In January 2005, he tracked down Angela Smith, one of his carers who had been involved in his abuse as a child and stabbed her to death in apartment before driving home and tragically shooting himself in the head.
Before he carried out the act, Rodriguez filmed himself to explain his actions which he sent to a friend and was released in the aftermath of the deaths. It included pictures of the sickening acts against the little boy and was sent to Children Of God communes around the world.
Selena's experience was similar to Rodriguez's in the sense that she was also isolated from the other kids while in Berg's house.
She said: "I was considered secret because I was in the cult publications and raised with Berg, and my mother was a top leader, so I was treated differently to other kids. In Japan, I didn't mind because the commune was 300 people, and we just appeared there in the middle of the night.
"Many times when there would be visitors to the compound I would be in my classes with other kids and they would take me into a basement and hide me because I was secret, they didn't want people from the outside world knowing who I was or who my family was, because of my status with Berg.
"For me at that point, I understood that I was different to the other kids, the other families, but I had some level of protection or secrecy still which I suppose made me feel safer because I knew I wouldn't have to do a lot of things and because of my extremely traumatic experiences with videos as a child I was terrified of being in front of the camera.
"At the time I didn't mind being different from the others, it probably served me in a way."
Gradually people started leaving the cult including the Phoenix Family who left the Children of God in protest to the 'Flirty Fishing' policy where Berg sent out women to meet men in clubs and go back to their hotel rooms for paid sex.
Serena described their work as 'pimping' and claims it wasn't long after that he 'figured out her could pimp the women that he could pimp the children as well'. Talking about his parents, Joaquin Phoenix said in an interview with Vanity Fair: "They got some letter, or however it came, some suggestion of that, and they were like, 'f**k this, we're outta here'."
Rose McGowan's father was a leader of the Italian chapter of the cult, and she claimed she learned to 'take myself out of the situation' through 'astral projection'. In the end, she and her family managed to 'escape' in the dead of the night while the cult tried to hunt them down.
Berg would issue precise instructions to cult members about sexual activity rules which encouraged them to pretend Jesus was present while they were having sex, according to Jo Thornely's book Zealot. A 'Mo Letter' was written by the Children of God which contained a list of things devotees could say to Jesus while they pretended you were making love to him.
This formed part of a publication known as 'Good News' written by Berg and Zerby was followed up by an explicit three-part series called "Loving Jesus". Serena said that it was mandatory that all 15-year-olds in the cult read these publications.
The sick group was formed in the 1960s and by 1977 had 130 communities around the world, but by the mid-1980s the cult changed its name to The Family after its practices fell under the spotlight of authorities. Berg was living in seclusion and dictating his teachings through letters and photos which depicted children having sex with adults.
He went on the run in 1993 and died a year later aged 74.
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