Meet Abigail Berry

Abigail included this brief profile of herself in a book proposal she wrote in 2013.

I was born into the cult known as the Children of God or The Family, which I fled alone at eighteen in Argentina with the clothes on my back and sixty dollars.  After a year in hiding, during which I was nearly murdered, I came to the United States, where I had not lived since I was a baby. Defying my lack of schooling, I earned an education starting with a GED and culminating with an Ivy League law degree.  As an associate at top New York law firms, I worked on complex, high-profile debt financing transactions. 

My J.D. is from Columbia Law School, where I was a Stone Scholar in my final year.  During my first semester there, the New York Times published my letter to the editor about religion correspondent Laurie Goodstein’s 1998 front-page article on child abuse in the Hare Krishnas. 

Previously, I graduated from Butler University with a B.A. and the Philosophy Prize and studied French Literature at the Masters’ level with New York University in Paris.  I am currently pursuing a Certificate in Creative Writing with an emphasis in creative nonfiction at UCLA Extension and writing my memoir, I’LL NEVER NOT TELL.  The title of my memoir is a line from a poem by Jean Gallagher titled Ovidian Psalm: On What Turns One Into a Bird (Procne and Philomel).

I was one of the first escapees to bear witness in court cases to the child abuse perpetrated by the cult on me and my contemporaries. In connection with these cases I was also interviewed for a number of newspaper, magazine and television reports such as the TV program “Now with Tom Brokaw and Katie Couric.”  My acts of resistance would later earn me words of support from other childhood survivors of The Family such an internet post comparing the few survivors who bore witness, like me, to Rosa Parks for our generation of survivors.  I recently received a message on Facebook along with a friend request from a survivor of The Family twelve years my junior and living halfway around the world, exclaiming: “Holy crap, you’re THE Abigail Berry! I wish I had known that [when we met]…it just gives me a couple dozen extra levels of respect for you.”

Yitzhak Zuckerman, a Holocaust survivor involved in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, famously said “If you could lick my heart, it would poison you.”  But people with whom I share the details of my story who were never in the cult often observe that it’s a wonder not only that I am alive but that I have such a positive outlook on life and other people despite my experiences. I was humbled when one of them, a partner at the law firm many consider the United States‘ most prestigious, marveled after hearing my story: “you’re a titan.”

I see in my story the determination to escape of a real-life Papillon, the will to survive of an Aaron Ralston (who wrote 127 Hours: Between a Rock and a Hard Place) and the drive to thrive and bear witness of an Elizabeth Smart (whose story is told in Bringing Elizabeth Home: A Journey of Faith and Hope).  My tenacity for picking myself up after each stumble along the road is sui generis.