Karen Zerby

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Karen Elva Zerby (born in Camden, New Jersey on 31 July 1946) is the current leader of the Children of God, a new religious movement. She legally changed her name to Katherine Rianna Smith in 1997, and uses the pseudonyms Maria David, Maria Berg, Maria Fontaine, Mama Maria and Queen Maria.

Zerby joined the group, then called Teens for Christ, in 1969. After becoming a private secretary to David Berg, the group's founder, a relationship started between the two. Eventually Berg left his first wife Jane Miller and Zerby became his common-law wife. Soon after leaving Miller, Berg told the group about a prophecy called "The Old Church and the New Church", which was widely seen as his justification for leaving his first wife. ^[1]

In 1975 while living in Tenerife, Zerby had a son Ricky Rodriguez (known within The Family as Davidito). While not Berg's son, he was thought of as an adopted son. Ricky's childhood was recorded in a book called The Story of Davidito, which was meant to be an example to other members on how to raise their children. The book is controversial for its encouragement of adult/child sexual contact. ^[2] In January 2005, Zerby's son Ricky murdered former group member Angela Smith, who had been involved in his upbringing and at one time served as Zerby's executive secretary. Hours later Ricky committed suicide. ^[3]

With David Berg's health declining in the later years of his life, Zerby began to take a leadership role within the group. Upon his death in October 1994, she assumed the spiritual leadership of the group and soon after married her long-time partner, Steven Douglas Kelly (legally changed his name to Christopher Smith, and is known in the group as Peter Amsterdam or King Peter).

A consistent trait throughout the history of The Family has been their aversion to government oversight and extreme secrecy surrounding leadership and finances. In recent years, Steven Kelly has carried pictures of Karen Zerby with him on travels to show members, since most had never seen a picture of their spiritual leader prior to this. Although, by now, most of the group's members have seen photographs or video footage of Karen Zerby and Steven Kelly, their identities and location are still heavily guarded by members working closest to them. Recent photographs or video footage of Karen Zerby were not readily available even to fulltime members of The Family until March 2005, when several recent photographs were leaked online. ^[4] This marked the first time that recent photographs of Karen Zerby were made available to the public in nearly 30 years.

[edit] References

↑ House, H. Wayne (2000). Charts of Cults, Sects, and Religious Movements. Zondervan Publishing Company. ISBN 0-310-38551-2.
↑ Lewis, James R. (2004). Controversial New Religions Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-515683-8.
↑ Murder and Suicide Reviving Claims of Child Abuse in Cult - Laurie Goodstein writing for the New York Times (published January 15, 2005)
↑ Photos of family leaders from Xfamily.org