By Todd Dever
The Wave Magazine
April 6 - 15, 2005
We all take great pride in the Bay Area’s tradition of leading the world in technology, wine, culture and progressive politics … but there’s one more field in which we lead the globe, though it’s rarely celebrated. For the past 40 years, the Bay Area has been the world’s top breeding ground for totally whacked-out, bizarro, kinky, freakazoid cults.
We’ve handpicked what we believe are the worst of the most bizarre cults with ties to the Bay Area and presented their stories below. But don’t think for a moment that crazy cults are a thing of the past, the unfortunate hangover of the hippie era. “Since I started my work in 1982, the cult phenomenon has just been growing and growing and growing,” says full-time cult basher Rick Ross, who runs the Rick Ross Institute, a non-profit anti-cult foundation he founded after watching his grandmother get duped by a scam cult. “I can’t think of any time in the last 20 years that it’s been bigger than it is right now. I think America has become increasingly religious, and we’re at the most religious point in our nation’s history. People are searching for answers, a sense of community and belonging. These groups seem to provide that and [cults are] becoming an ever-increasing phenomenon in America.”
THE FELLOWSHIP OF FRIENDS
www.apollo.org
Founder: Robert Earl Burton
History: Founded as a non-profit church in 1971 by a former elementary school teacher and San Jose State alum, FoF members believe their leader is “an angel in a man’s body,” whose spiritual authority is trumped only by Jesus Christ. Followers also believe that Burton has the ability to speak with up to 44 other angels, including Benjamin Franklin. Burton is renowned for his strange rules (no swimming, smoking or jokes are allowed – and homosexuality was banned until 1993, despite Burton’s allegedly renowned appetite for men) and even stranger predictions (though he was wrong about predicting a 1998 earthquake that would destroy California, he sticks by his claim that a nuclear holocaust will ruin the earth in ’06 and only FoF members will be spared). More than 600 FoF members live on their infamous Yuba County vineyard known as Apollo, where they produce up to 40,000 cases of wine per year under the Renaissance Vineyard and Emery [sic: "Renaissance Vineyard and Winery"] labels. Their award-winning wine is so respected in the industry that it has been served to the Prince of Wales, former president George H. W. Bush, at one of Ronald Reagan’s birthday parties, and the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco sells the Renaissance Cabernet 1996 for $10 a glass.
Sex scandal: Though the church is more noted for tax evasion (they’re currently paying off more than $2 million in back taxes), the FoF was slapped with a $5 million lawsuit in 1996 by a former member who claimed he was brainwashed and sexually abused by Burton. The suit stated the church was a front for Burton’s “voracious appetite for perverted sexual pleasure and elegant lifestyle.” The case was settled out of court for an undisclosed amount.
