A Year and a Court Fight Later, Brown Family Still Torn

They talk, still, of reconciliation. But Ginger Brown and her parents, Earle and Dorothy Brown, seem as distant to each other today as they were a year ago, when a Vista Superior Court jury was asked to resolve one of the most unusual cases ever to be played out in a San Diego courtroom.

Should parents be convicted of kidnaping, assault and false imprisonment if they try to forcibly remove an adult child from a religious organization they believe to be a cult that has sapped their daughter of her free will?

Ultimately, the jury couldn’t decide. And last Jan. 12, Judge David B. Moon threw the case out of court, saying he wondered why the parents ever were prosecuted as supposed criminals.

The district attorney’s office decided not to appeal Moon’s decision, and several months later, Ginger Brown withdrew her own $2.75-million civil lawsuit against her parents.

Today, Ginger Brown remains active with the 15-member, Coronado-based Great Among the Nations, helping develop its plans for a television ministry. She says an apology from her parents is a requisite for reconciliation.

One of the minor players in the trial lost his job. The deprogrammer boasts that he is still in the business--and has “snatched” 15 more people in the past year from cults. The attorney for Earle Brown now concedes he is morally opposed to the very thing his client did. And, conversely, the deputy district attorney who prosecuted the elder Browns says he would do the same thing he accused the Browns of doing, given similar circumstances.

The case had a profound effect on a handful of lives. A year later, they look back on it, some with a new perspective.

THE BACKGROUND

Ginger Brown was a 20-year-old UC San Diego music student in 1985 when she joined Great Among the Nations, a fledgling Bible study group attractive to college-age people and led by Benjamin Altschul, a book salesman-turned-minister.

Parents of the young adult members claimed that their children had undergone dramatic personality changes after joining Altschul’s group, and some--contending the group was a cult--took their children out of it, sometimes forcibly. Altschul and his core members said they were simply a fundamental Christian group with strong convictions to their ministry and their apostle-like communal lifestyle.

On May 12, 1988, Ginger Brown, then 22, was leaving her job in Encinitas when she was grabbed in the nearby parking lot, taken to a home in Escondido and subjected to five days of attempted deprogramming. She refused to disavow her allegiance to Altschul, and was released by her abductors and returned to Encinitas.

The following January, five people were charged by the district attorney’s office for kidnaping, assault and false imprisonment: Brown’s parents, her sister Holly, Hank Erler--in whose mother’s home the deprogramming effort occurred-- and Cliff Daniels, the Los Angeles-based deprogrammer who was hired by the Browns to “rescue” their daughter.

The defense argued that Ginger Brown needed to be taken out of the group for her own good and safety; the prosecutor charged that her parents and Daniels were themselves guilty of trying to program an adult away from her chosen brand of Christian faith.

The trial attracted national attention; ultimately, the jury acquitted some of the five on lesser charges and could not agree on a verdict for the others.

Lawyers on both sides said the case boiled down to whether jurors could apply the letter of kidnap law to parents who believed they were acting in the best interests of their child.

Said the judge at the time he dismissed the case:

“This jury heard a functional equivalent of a judicial, in-court confession (of abduction). (And) it did hear a rather tragic story of a daughter’s alienation from her family.”

THE PARENTS

Earle and Dorothy Brown, both 59, continue to live in Santa Cruz and to talk of reconciliation with their daughter--but maintain they have done nothing requiring an apology.

And they say that, although they won’t try again to physically remove their youngest of four daughters from Altschul’s organization, they still hope that someday she will return home, on her own.

“We tried to free her from this guy who was dominating her,” said Earle Brown, who risked losing his top-secret security clearance as an engineer for an aerospace firm if he was convicted of even a misdemeanor in the abduction of his daughter.

“There’s nothing more we can do, physically. At least we tried. We were put on exhibit (in a courtroom). And the jury felt we weren’t such bad people as the district attorney represented to them.

“We feel Ginger is still our Ginger, underneath. I don’t feel Ginger is absolutely lost and gone,” Brown said, pausing. “Man oh man, I’d like to say she’d be part of the family, part of the world, someday. You have to hope and have faith.”

Brown said he doesn’t look for apologies--from his daughter or himself.

“She is instantly forgiven. She has nothing to be sorry for. In true Christian love, you don’t hold hatred, and you don’t force someone to apologize. You don’t ask someone to grovel. You accept the person, for who they are, for whatever they did.”

Dorothy Brown, who works part time as a laundress for a Christian retreat camp, still weeps over the estrangement of her daughter--an emotional trauma that, she says, hasn’t been diluted in the year since the trial.

“I think about her day and night,” she said.

“I called her on her birthday (in December). There was no warmth to her voice, and there just wasn’t much conversation. She said she wanted me to apologize to her (church) brothers and sisters and her pastor, but I didn’t do anything to them. We talked for about five minutes. She didn’t even thank me for calling. She just said, ‘I have to go now. Goodby.’ And she hung up.”

The elder Browns said a neighborhood girl, for whom Ginger once baby-sat, sent a pair of earrings to Ginger for Christmas--and that Ginger returned them. She wrote the parents of the girl a short letter, accusing them of “trying to disrupt her pure Christian life,” Earle Brown said.

THE SISTER

Holly Brown, 26, says she has “accepted the fact that my sister is gone, and we don’t have a relationship anymore.”

“Other people get estranged from their families, but this one was so abrupt, so dramatic--and so public,” she said. “For my dad, there’s a lingering hurt, but I think he’s decided it’s time to move on with his life. My mom, though, feels Ginger can come back home at any moment, and I don’t think she wants to do anything, or say anything, that would jeopardize any lines of communication between them.

“But I don’t see anything to jeopardize.”

These days, Holly is helping to design accounting software and pursuing her semiprofessional career as an opera singer in the San Francisco Bay Area. But she said she hasn’t given up on her sister.

“I wouldn’t say I’ve thrown up both hands in resignation,” she said. “I’m getting on with my life, but the door is still open for Ginger.”

THE DEPROGRAMMER

Cliff Daniels, 35, the deprogrammer, was accused by Judge Moon of hiding behind the parents when he, if anyone, should have been held accountable for his role.

Since the trial a year ago, Daniels said, he has “snatched” 15 more people from organizations around the United States that he defines as cults.

He charges from $20,000 to $25,000 for a “rescue,” which includes researching the family’s and organization’s histories and backgrounds, a week of surveillance on the targeted group and the member to be deprogrammed, the actual “snatching,” five days of deprogramming at a “safe house,” 10 days of follow-up counseling with a clinical psychologist, and a year of follow-up counseling by himself.

Is he qualified?

“In this field, I’m qualified,” he said. “There is no degree. They don’t teach you to do what I do in college. Pastors hire me. So do psychologists and psychiatrists.”

“I never got out of the business,” he said of his unadvertised deprogramming. He is not listed in the phone book, and his services are promoted by word of mouth, among parents who have hired him. “And I’m booked up to July.

“I’m doing bigger and more exciting cases” since the Brown case, he said. “I’m doing double-snatches. I did a family of four in Mississippi, and I did a double-snatch of brothers in Los Angeles. They were picked up simultaneously. All of them have been successful. You haven’t seen my name in any newspapers.

“And all the groups I’m dealing with,” he said, “could be carbon copies of Great Among the Nations. Small, pseudo-Christian groups of up to 30 people, who have been brainwashed by their leader. They’ve turned over their possessions to him, they work for him, and they live in fear of being damned to hell if they wrong him or leave him.”

Daniels said that, in the past 13 years, he has taken 251 people out of cults--and that all but five cases have been successes. Ginger Brown, he said, was one of his failures. And hers was one of three cases in which he ended up in court. He’s never been convicted of a crime--and he doesn’t think he should be.

“Every time I do a kidnaping, it’s reported. Then the family calls the police, and the victim calls the police, and they tell them that there was no kidnaping, that everything is OK, and that it was a family affair.

“And, if it were up to the police, I don’t think I would have been arrested in San Diego,” he said.

“If you believe something is right, you do it. I believe this is right, and I am willing to stand trial when I have to. But I haven’t yet spent a day in jail. Even, when we have been defenseless, we have still won in court.”

THE ACCOMPLICE

The lowest-profile participant in the Ginger Brown abduction was Hank Erler, 24, who was in his mother’s Escondido home while the deprogramming effort was under way.

Today, Erler, who lost his job as a car salesman because of the demands of the trial, reconditions Corvettes.

“A whole year of my life came to a halt, and the Ginger Brown case still eats at me,” he said. “It still bothers me. I still picture Mr. and Mrs. Brown holding each other and crying, and until they’re all together again as a family, I will never be as happy as I could be.”

He said he participated in the scheme because Daniels previously had rescued his older sister from a cult.

“If it was my own daughter, I know for a fact I would do it again,” said Erler, whose wife gave birth to the couple’s daughter within days of the case’s dismissal.

THE DAUGHTER

Armed with television equipment valued in the tens of thousands of dollars, Ginger Brown, now 25, heads efforts to record and edit broadcast-quality tapes featuring the teachings of Benjamin Altschul. Someday, she and Altschul promise, he will be on television, for all to see and hear.

She says she has experienced a “miracle” because she no longer holds any hate toward her parents for having taken her. And reconciliation can occur, she says, if her parents apologize for their actions, and if “they could take a big pencil eraser and erase everything they did against me and my pastor and my church. But how do they do that? I don’t know.”

She doesn’t realistically expect a reunification with her parents.

“I can’t orchestrate it step by step,” she said. “Certain elements would have to be present. First of all, truth between me and them, and honesty and, of course, Jesus being in the middle of this.

“I’ve been speaking very encouraging Christian words to my mom when she calls--very hopeful, caring and loving words. I’m doing all I can. I’ve asked her to take a look at what she has done, and to just confess that it’s not right, and to begin to accept me as a daughter.”

She said she hasn’t called her parents on her own initiative or visited them in Santa Cruz. “Why should I? When I speak to her, she gets upset and cries and hangs up.”

She said she would like her parents to take pride in her accomplishments in learning professional-level television workings. “I want my dad to bust his buttons in pride over his Ginger, and for my mom to share in that joy. I look forward to that, and for them to stop slandering.”

THE PASTOR

Benjamin Altschul says he continues to preach, having been invited to meet with several congregations in Sweden and Norway and, more recently, leading prayer and healing services at a church in San Diego he declined to identify--for fear, he said, that its members would be accused of being cult members under his control.

Altschul remains sensitive to allegations that he is a cult leader.

“There are detractors who, for more than three years, have made accusations that this is a cult, that people are being brain-controlled by the pastor, Benjamin Altschul, which is to the contrary to what we are--a Christian organization embracing the Christian faith.”

Altschul talked of salvaging broken marriages through counseling, and of the successful healing services he said he has conducted. He said he is bothered by criticism that he has elevated himself to something supernatural.

“Make sure you say these things (healings) in such a way that people don’t think I’m saying I am God. I am not. I am not crazy. I am very normal.”

THE ATTORNEYS

Neither of the two primary attorneys in the case is second-guessing his handling of it, but each admits to holding a philosophy that seemingly runs contrary to the positions they maintained in the courtroom.

Saul Wright, who defended Earle Brown, concedes today that Ginger Brown probably had good grounds for a civil lawsuit against her parents--a lawsuit that she in fact filed but then withdrew after Wright accused her in court of trying to financially mine her parents for the sake of Great Among the Nations.

Based on his own preparation for the trial, Wright now says, he is today morally opposed to parents trying to abduct their adult children--even though he defended his client of those very charges.

“I have concluded that, if I raised my own children and taught them to think on their own, then if they joined a religious organization that I was philosophically opposed to, I wouldn’t have the right to yank them out, if they were of majority (age) and if they weren’t in imminent physical danger,” he said.

“This case was legally unique--a situation where there was a technical violation of the law. But the law wasn’t prepared to receive a case like this. The law just hasn’t caught up with deprogramming and the dynamics associated with parents trying to rescue their children.”

Wright won’t have to defend any more such cases. Once a deputy district attorney in San Diego, and for the past 20 years a criminal defense attorney here, Wright recently accepted a job as an assistant district attorney for a rural Northern California county, and will now be a prosecutor.

Meanwhile, the prosecutor in the Ginger Brown case says he probably would do what the Browns did if he were in a similar situation.

“I’d do whatever I felt was necessary, as a parent,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Gary Rempel. “And, if I violated the law, I’d either try to change the law or accept the consequences of my action.”

Said Rempel of the year anniversary of the trial that resolved nothing:

“A year later, Ginger is still with her group, and, guess what, they haven’t swallowed any Kool-Aid. And the parents are still without their daughter.”