Alleged Deprogramming Target Testifies Captors Hurt Her

Ginger Brown told a Vista Superior Court jury Tuesday of injuries she said were suffered at the hands of her father and others in their alleged kidnaping and deprogramming attempt, but defense attorneys branded her testimony and behavior on the witness stand as rehearsed and phony.

During her daylong testimony, Brown, 24, said her father, Earle Brown, forcibly held her on the floor of a getaway van after the abduction and later threatened to break her leg if she didn’t cooperate with their efforts to get her to renounce her affiliation to the group known as Great Among the Nations.

“He said, ‘Ginger, you know me. . . . You know I can break your legs,” she told the jurors, crying. “He grabbed it, squeezed it. Then a guy said, ‘Earl, don’t do it,’ and he let go.”

Breaking into sobs, she added, “And I think my mom was watching.”

Earlier, when asked to estimate the speed at which the van was driven after she was taken, she began to cry and said, “‘Very fast.”

The show of emotion was ridiculed later by her father’s attorney, Saul Wright.

“Her crying is turned on and off at the wrong times,” Wright said outside the courtroom. “It’s a master performance, almost like she has a script of when she’s supposed to cry--but that she slipped up once and so she cried later to make up for it.

“This is the greatest rehearsal of testimony I’ve ever seen,” Wright said. “I was following along by reading the transcripts from her preliminary hearing, and she was responding exactly the same, word for word. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

While her sister testified, Holly Brown--another of the five defendants--wrote “phony crying” and “she’s lying” on her note pad, and shook her head from side to side during some of the testimony.

Wright said he will eventually call Earle Brown to the witness stand to explain the deprogramming efforts in his own words--testimony, Wright said, that Ginger Brown inflicted injuries on herself “by battering herself against the wall” of the house where she was held in Escondido.

The defense claims that Ginger Brown baited her parents to kidnap her so she could then sue them for monetary damages to help finance Great Among the Nations, which critics say is a cult led by Benjamin Altschul, who leads a comfortable life style in Coronado financed by the so-called love offerings of his 17 followers.

Altschul and group members say Great Among the Nations is a fundamental Christian Bible study group and evangelism ministry.

During her testimony and with the aid of color photographs, Brown described various injuries she said she received during the abduction and her five days in captivity.

The photographs showed bruises to her head and hip as well as cuts and abrasions to her knee, calf and feet.

She said she was unable to fend off her abductor, a man she identified by name as Steve Bronc who has not been arrested, who grabbed her as she was trying to get into her car after work May 12 outside an Encinitas real estate office.

“I screamed and I ran,” she said. “It was a horror scream, a terror scream. I never heard my voice sound like that.”

She was hit on the jaw and ended up on the floor of the getaway van. She next remembered her father on one side of her, holding her down on the van’s floor.

“My dad was squeezing on me. He bent my thumb back very hard. He was speaking--but not to me. He said, ‘Gosh, she’s strong. It’s hard to hold her.’ ”

At another time, she said, her father hit her across the face with his fist, and she responded by biting her father on the shoulder.

Someone else in the van grabbed her hair and pounded her head on the floor four times, she said. Brown was taken to the Escondido home of Hank Erler, another defendant, where she was confronted by Cliff Daniels, the fifth defendant and a self-described deprogrammer.

“He wanted me to agree with him that the lies he was saying about the church were real,” Brown said. “He wanted me to renounce my faith and join his team.”

The five defendants--Earle Brown; his wife, Dorothy; their daughter, Holly; Erler and Daniels--are charged with kidnaping, false imprisonment and battery during the first phase of the trial. Later, they will be tried in front of the same jury on related conspiracy charges.

Cross-examination of Ginger Brown is expected to begin today. Thursday, defense attorneys will privately view videotapes of Brown made by fellow group members after the incident. Trial testimony will resume next Wednesday.