Karen Zerby

Karen Elva Zerby (born July 31, 1946) is the former leader of The Family International, a cult founded by her former husband David Berg as the “Children of God”, proven in court to have promoted and enacted sexual abuse of adults and children, including prostitution as a means of proselytizing. She is also referred to by her followers as Maria, “Mama” Maria, Maria David, Maria Fontaine, and “Queen” Maria.

Biography

Zerby was raised in evangelical Pentecostalism. Her father was a Nazarene minister, and she is credited with bringing the "fundamental Pentecostal principle of being 'Spirit-led'" into the movement she eventually came to lead.

She joined the group, then called Teens for Christ, in 1969. Trained as a stenographer, she became the personal secretary to David Berg, the group's founder, and was instrumental in transcribing his classes. He later separated from his first wife, Jane, and Zerby became his wife. Berg openly explained this to his followers via a missive called "The Old Church and the New Church".

By the mid 1980s, Zerby began to issue religious edicts of her own: following criminal court-proven accounts of physical and sexual abuse of adults and children, mostly unpaid prostitution in order to gain new members, she forbade sexual activity in 1984 for new members until they had been in the group for six months. However, the cult publications by her husband, David Brandt Berg, and herself as his secretary, were only made available to new members after these six months or later, in which the sexual methods that had been used to recruit them and also sexual abuse of children were pervertedly described and promoted as being godly and proof of being radically devoted to God and Jesus.