Rose McGowan And The Children Of God
PinterestRose McGowan narrowly escaped an abusive sex cult as a child.
Rose McGowan found Hollywood success with film classics like Scream and the hit television show Charmed. And she is one of the highest-profile actors to have contributed to the #MeToo movement in 2017, with her rape accusation against producer Harvey Weinstein ultimately leading to his imprisonment.
But McGowan had experienced trauma long before that, having spent her childhood in the abusive Children of God cult.
Formed by preacher David Brandt Berg in 1968, the Children of God had 19,000 members across the globe. McGowan herself was born into its strictures, which demanded living in communes and not attending school. The cult not only fostered a deep distrust of institutions but forced its women to recruit men through sex.
“I remember watching how the cult’s men were with the women, and at a very early age I decided I did not want to be like those women,” recalled McGowan. “They were basically there to serve the men sexually. The women would go to bars and lures — they called it flirty fishing.”
Berg himself was accused of raping his own children, while his daughter defined the group as a “worldwide prostitution network” in her memoir. When Berg began preaching child-adult sex to his followers, McGowan’s father realized he had put his children in danger. He fled with his three kids and one of his wives in tow.
Boris Spremo/Toronto Star/Getty ImagesChildren of God members celebrating in Toronto, Canada in 1972.
“We had to leave on the sly. My dad, Nat, Daisy and I escaped with my dad’s other wife in the middle of the night. I remember running through a cornfield in thunder and lightning, holding my dad’s hand and running as fast as I could to keep up with him,” she said.
“We hid in an old stone house and had to boil pots of hot water to take baths. [The cult] sent people to find us. I remember a man trying to break in with a hammer.”
Fortunately, the family narrowly escaped. McGowan never forgot her volatile upbringing, however, and would find purpose as an adult advocate of women worldwide. Ultimately, McGowan escaped Berg’s cult only to be abused by Weinstein in 1997.
While was convicted of rape in 2020 and sentenced to 23 years in prison, Berg evaded the FBI, fled to Portugal, and died in 1994.
“There’s a trail of some very damaged children that were in this group,” said McGowan. “As strong as I like to think I’ve always been, I’m sure I could have been broken. I know I got out by the skin of my teeth.”
