Member of Sect Testifies of Deprogramming Abuse

A 23-year-old woman Tuesday gave a wrenching description of the injuries and emotional abuse she said she suffered after being abducted last May by her family and a self-proclaimed cult deprogrammer in an effort to snatch her from a San Diego-based religious group.

Testifying in Vista Municipal Court on the first day of a preliminary hearing, Ginger Brown said she had warned her parents months before not to kidnap her, urging them instead to accept her devotion to the group, Great Among the Nations.

“I told them that if they did anything to harm me in any way . . . then I’d take them to the fullest extent of the law,” Brown testified, outlining the events leading up to her abduction outside the Encinitas real estate office where she worked.

Injuries ‘Overstated’

But attorneys for the five people charged with kidnaping Brown, including her parents and sister, have maintained that the bruises and cuts suffered by the young woman were mostly self-inflicted as she struggled to regain her freedom during the abduction and deprogramming process.

“We certainly feel (the injuries and abuse) are being overstated,” said Saul Wright, an attorney representing the father, Earle Brown.

In what could be a blow to the defense, Judge Michael Burley indicated he will not allow the religious tenets of Great Among the Nations to become an issue in the case.

“A person’s religious beliefs alone cannot be grounds for taking for deprogramming,” Burley said. “There has to be a threat of immediate physical harm” for a kidnaping to be considered justified.

Wright, however, argued that the spiritual underpinnings of the group are paramount to the defense’s effort to determine whether Great Among the Nations “is a bona fide religion” or if its leader, Benjamin Altschul, is “a religious nut.”

Those remarks prompted an angry response from Deputy Dist. Atty. Gary Remple after the hearing.

Comparison to Salem

“I want Mr. Wright to explain what a bona fide religion is,” Remple told reporters in a courthouse hallway. “I haven’t heard a statement like that in a hundred years. . . . It was done in Salem once upon a time.”

As the preliminary hearing wound on in Vista, another member of the fundamental Bible study group, Dina Geerling, 38, announced to the press and police Tuesday in San Diego that she had been successfully deprogrammed at the behest of her parents.

Geerling held a news conference to denounce what she said are the cult-like practices of the group and Altschul. She then went to a San Diego police station to tell detectives she did not plan to press kidnaping charges against her abductors.

“She said it was not a kidnaping, but an act of love, a rescue,” Detective David Morris said. “She’s thankful for what they did.”

Morris said Geerling told him during a 50-minute meeting that Altschul is “totally controlling” the 17-member group, convincing the members that outsiders are evil, and monitoring basic activities such as telephone calls.

Moreover, Geerling said, Alt-schul had advocated that Ginger Brown and other members press charges against relatives if they were seized and held for deprogramming, the detective said.

A Spiritual Foundation

During the preliminary hearing Tuesday, however, Ginger Brown said she is pressing ahead with the kidnaping case on her own free will.

She painted a picture of Great Among the Nations as a small, tight-knit Christian Bible study and evangelism ministry that holds no sway over her emotions or decisions, but provides a spiritual foundation for her life.

Critics, among them former members, have characterized the group as a cult whose members finance what they say is the lavish life style of Altschul.

Brown’s case is being pressed against her parents, Earle Brown, 57, and Dorothy Rae Brown, 57, and a sister, Holly Rae Brown, 24, all of Santa Cruz; Hank Erler, 22, in whose Escondido home Ginger Brown was allegedly held for five days, and Cliff Daniels, 34, of Los Angeles, a deprogrammer who has publicly said he attempted to “rescue” Brown from the group.

Brown testified that she was raised as a church-going person, encouraged by her parents to take part in religious activities ranging from Campus Crusade for Christ to the choir.

In 1986, she became involved with Altschul’s group, and promptly decided after her sophomore year at UC San Diego to drop out and devote her energy to the group.

Showed Up Unannounced

By the summer of 1987, Brown said, she grew concerned about being kidnaped for a deprogramming attempt when her parents suddenly showed up at her doorstep unannounced one day.

Brown asked them if they were in the San Diego area to participate in a rumored meeting between parents of several group members and a local television station in an attempt to drum up publicity to “break up the ministry,” she testified. Her parents, however, said they “just wanted to go for a ride” and ended up visiting her, Brown said.

Later, Brown watched a televised news segment on Great Among the Nations and saw her parents on the program.

Although angry and upset by that apparent betrayal, Brown decided to quit her job as a secretary and move back to Santa Cruz in an effort to hammer out a reconciliation with her parents, she said.

“I wanted to explain to them my position in the ministry. But each time I’d try to explain, they would clam up,” Brown said, adding that she felt her parents had been swayed by Daniels to believe the religious group was a cult.

“Now they were trying to direct me on how I would live, work, believe, act,” Brown said.

Shadowed by Van

After she learned that her parents were continuing to conspire against the group, Brown returned to San Diego and moved into an apartment with another woman who belonged to the group, she said.

After being shadowed by a mysterious van for several days, Brown said, she was jumped on May 12, 1988, by a large man who herded her down an embankment and into a waiting van manned by her father.

Tears welling in her eyes and her voice choking, Brown described how she was struck across the face, spit on and forced flat to the floor of the van during the trip to a remote house in rural northern Escondido. She said one of the abductors beat her head four times against the floor and told her to stop screaming or he would kill her.

At the house, Brown was forced to sleep on the floor or was confined to a second-floor bedroom while constantly guarded, she said. Her parents, sister, Daniels and Erler all participated in the deprogramming effort, she said.

Brown said her father at one point threatened to break her leg and that her mother refused her requests for a doctor’s attention, instead giving her Tylenol. Through it all, she said, her parents insisted they were “doing this because we love you.”

Daniels, meanwhile, threatened her by suggesting that “my arms and legs were like twigs and he could snap them no problem,” Brown said.

Refused to Submit

Brown refused to submit to their deprogramming attempts.

“I was so angry that I was being held, I didn’t feel I had any obligation to sit and speak rationally to these crooks,” she testified.

Eventually, she was told she would be taken home, Brown said. The young woman said she was blindfolded and led out to a van. After pulling off the blindfold, Brown said, she gave her father directions to the Encinitas sheriff’s station, but he pulled a fast U-turn when he reached the driveway.

“I told him this was his opportunity to turn himself in, that a judge might go lighter on him,” Brown testified.

She said she screamed and tried to get out of the van as it sped down the roadway, while her mother held down the door lock and scratched her neck. Finally, however, her father pulled off the road and let her go, Brown said.