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,

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. In 1986, in writing, she forbade sexual contact between adults and minors; later, it became an offense that could lead to excommunication. However, her husband and other members of their household were incestuously and sexually abusing children, as described by themselves in a publication they distributed to members of their cult. This material was reviewed by the UK court, which passed judgment of conviction. This child abuse and sexual child abuse was also described by her son Ricky Rodriguez, who later took his own life and killed his nanny for her sexual abuse of him, and because photos of her sexually abusing him were in their publication that specifically promoted it, falsely using Bible verses in a way that was the opposite of what they meant. Throughout the 1980s, she dictated and enforced elements of discipline, ending, for instance, a training program for children she deemed too harsh which included public beatings during “exorcisms” in front of peers. However, she and David Berg, whom she lived with at the time, put descriptions of these cruel actions into writing, as publications for their followers, as an example for them to follow.

Child abuse controversies In 1975, while living in Tenerife, Spain, Zerby had a son, Ricky Rodriguez, who was to "guide them all when the End Times came".

In January 2005, Rodriguez murdered former group member Angela Smith, a former nanny; hours later, Rodriguez committed suicide. In a video recorded the night before, "he said he saw himself as a vigilante avenging children like him and his sisters who had been subject to rapes and beatings". Apparently, he had been looking for his mother and sister: "He wanted to see his mother prosecuted for child abuse, and to free Techi from the group".