10 Families Who Escaped Cults

Actress Rose McGowan was born in the idyllic Italian countryside—however, it didn’t stay that way. Her parents were members of the Children of God sect, now infamous for a “free love” philosophy that condoned adult-child sexual relationships. When she was 9 years old, her father feared Rose might be abused, and the family fled to the United States. "My dad was strong enough to realize that this hippie love had gone south,” she recalled to People in 2011.

In 2003, realizing that her 14-year-old daughter Betty would soon be forced to marry if she didn’t act, Carolyn Jessop fled the polygamous Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS) sect led by Warren Jeffs with her children. However, Betty had a difficult time acclimating to life outside the Texas compound, and eventually returned when she turned 18. Among the many reasons for returning, Carolyn said her father was a big one: "Betty's entire world was her father. She loved her father, and out of 54 of his children, she was his princess," Carolyn told Oprah in 2009.

Earlier this year, Ruby Jessop managed to break free of the Fundamental Church of Latter Day SaintsFLDS with her six children, leading to a probe of the marshal’s office that has jurisdiction over the sect to see if they turned a blind eye or assisted polygamous activity. At 14, Jessop had been forced to marry her brother-in-law against her will. According to Tom Horne, the attorney general of Arizona, women who wanted to leave the cult would not be allowed: "What they do is say, 'Everybody watch her so she won't run away.' Then she can't leave," Horne said, according to Fox News. "Women who wanted to escape have been forcibly held by the marshals against their will."

Searching for deeper meaning in life, British mother of three Sam Domingo found Scientology when she was 21. Not only did it seem to give her purpose, but she’d also heard about how stars like Tom Cruise, John Travolta and Juliette Lewis had embraced the religion. However, when disobedience led to bizarre punishments, such as being forced to dig a hole in the ice-cold ground for two weeks—she realized she needed to leave with her children. She walked away in 2009, and soon after her husband followed when they insisted he cut off communication with his wife and three daughters.

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Actors Joaquin Phoenix and the late River Phoenix, along with their sister Rain, were brought up in the Children of God sect when their parents were searching for a better way of life. Their mother had been raised in the Bronx, N.Y., and did not want her children to fear while growing up. The family left the group in 1977, fed up by their inappropriate sexual practices, which they did not condone. "It might have become a cult, but when we were there it was a really religious community," Joaquin explained in 2001, according to Yahoo! Movies.

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Even as a child, Taylor Stevens knew she wasn’t supposed to talk to non-sect members about what went on inside the “nomadic” Children of God cult. She was married off young to the only other boy around her age in the area, and the two were sent to Africa to set up a nonprofit and bring supplies to people in the region. Eventually the married couple made a pact to leave the cult, taking a year and a half to make arrangements. Taylor had one child and was pregnant with her second when she escaped at the age of 30. “I will never forget how elated I felt the first morning I woke up in our own small apartment, finally free of the eyes that had been watching and judging me my entire life,” she told Vogue.

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When she was 14 years old, Astra Woodcraft signed a “billion-year contract” with Scientology’s militaristic order Sea Org. At 15, she married a 22-year-old man in Las Vegas with parental consent and endured several years of physical and sexual abuse at the hands of sect members. When members were told not to get pregnant or else be turned out of the cult, Astra conceived a child as a means of escape. After being told to have an abortion, Astra fled. She started a new life with her daughter, Kate, in 1998, becoming a vocal opponent of The Church of Scientology.

It took Kristyn Decker 42 years of jealousy, “self-loathing” and a suicide attempt to acknowledge how wrong the life of a polygamist felt, and another eight years to gain enough courage to divorce her husband and take her seven children out of the sect. With the help of a therapist, she began to rebuild a new life after 50 years under polygamy’s power. “Discovering who I was outside of polygamy became a wondrous adventure,” she wrote on xoJane. "I learned that to love and honor myself meant validating all of my feelings—not discarding them as vile distractions to overcome."

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Susan Ray Schmidt was married at age 15, the sixth wife of a polygamist Mormon man. Although life with the other wives was civil, Susan was tormented by relentless jealousy in her shared marriage, the poverty of living with 40 children, and the “sacred intimacy only [her] husband could give” was missing. After 8 years and 5 children with her husband, she walked away, hoping her kids would never have to endure life in the polygamous sect. She remarried soon after, and found Christianity outside the fundamentalist cult. Susan remained wed until her second husband died suddenly 29 years into their marriage.

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After being sent to live with her relatives at age 12 following years of abuse by her stepfather, Catrina Jeffrey was forced to join her uncle’s satanic cult. He made her have sex with up to a dozen older men a month from the time she was 15 until she turned 24. Finally, after giving birth to three children, she courageously ran away to a women’s refuge. “They were my life, and having them was the only thing that kept me going,” Catrina said of her kids, according to the Mirror. “I loved my children so much and didn’t want them to experience the kind of life I’d had.”

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