The Flora Family Foundation, an heir to the HP
fortune, gave a Southern California charity with ties to an infamous
evangelical sex cult $61, 500 during the past three years, but a top
foundation official said it never would have made the grants had it
known about the connection.
The donations were made to the Family Care
Foundation, which has extensive links to the Family International,
formerly known as the Children of God.
Those ties were revealed in an article published in
The Chronicle on Sunday.
"We were certainly troubled by the article,'' said
Flora Family Foundation President Stephen Toben. "We have never been
aware of any connection between the Family Care Foundation and the
Family."
Toben said the Flora Family Foundation, based in
Menlo Park and established by the family of HP co-founder William
Hewlett and his wife, Flora, learned about the charity while searching
for groups working on international development projects.
The group has an impressive Web site and didn't
disclose any cult ties on its tax forms, Toben said.
Family Care Foundation Executive Director Larry
Corley flatly denies any ties to the Family sect.
Yet, The Chronicle investigation showed that all six
of the foundation's officers have links to the Family International. And
according to former members, most of the "independent" projects getting
foundation funds are run by members of the Family.
The religious sect was started in the late 1960s by
Oakland native David "Moses" Berg, whose blend of Christian witness and
sexual freedom attracted tens of thousands of devotees in the 1970s. The
cult made headlines with controversial practices, such as using sex to
recruit new members and allowing sexual activity between children,
teenagers and adults.
The Chronicle story has also sparked concern at
Milpitas High School, where two missionaries with ties to the Family
visited a Spanish class last December.
Student Eric Day, a senior, said the two visitors
sang Christmas carols and passed out "pamphlets about accepting Jesus in
your heart'' that included the Web address of the Family International.
"My classmates were put off by it,'' Day said.
"What's up with all this church stuff? We're a public school.''
Day then learned that the missionaries were
affiliated with the Children of God. "I was completely shocked,'' he
said.
One of the missionaries, Ted Rudow III of Menlo Park,
said his Dec. 17 visit to Spanish teacher Kim Marion's class was
"completely innocent."
"It was to celebrate Christmas and witness to the
birth of Jesus,'' said Rudow, who said he had met Marion when they both
worked as missionaries for the Family.
Rudow said the stories of child abuse in the Family
in the 1970s and 1980s were being spread by "apostates" who were
"slinging the mud of false accusations and evil lies" to "destroy this
wonderful Family that I have known and worked with for 33 years.''
Marion did not return phone calls and e-mails
requesting an interview.
But Milpitas High School Principal Chuck Gary said
the school would take disciplinary action against the Spanish teacher.
"This was definitely inappropriate,'' he said. "The
materials handed out were explicitly religious. It was proselytizing.''
New attention has been focused on the Family
International and the Family Care Foundation since a Jan. 8
murder-suicide in Tucson involving 29-year-old Ricky "Davidito"
Rodriguez.
Rodriguez is the estranged son of Karen "Maria" Zerby,
the chief prophet and spiritual leader of the sect, which says it has
8,000 full-time missionaries globally.
Police say Rodriguez murdered Angela Smith, a member
of the Family Care Foundation board of directors and Zerby's onetime
personal secretary, drove across the California border and then shot
himself in the head.
In a video made the night before, Rodriguez had said
he had planned to use Smith to get information as to the whereabouts of
his mother and other sect leaders, whom Rodriguez blamed for years of
sexual abuse that he and other second-generation members suffered while
growing up in the cult.
Internal Revenue Service documents show that the
Family Care Foundation raised close to $10 million in cash and gifts
from 1997 to 2003 for projects around the globe.
The Family Care Foundation has also received
donations through the U.S. government's Combined Federal Campaign, which
allows federal employees to deduct money from their paychecks and donate
it to approved charities.
An official with the program, which is run by the
U.S. Office of Personnel Management, said her office was now reviewing
complaints made about the Family Care Foundation.
The official, who asked that her name not be used,
said the campaign did not keep statistics on how much money it funneled
to individual charities.
In 2003, she said, the campaign raised $250 million
for 15,000 participating charities.
Corley, of the Family Care Foundation, declined to
say how much money his charity received through the federal program.
"We have participated in that for a number of
years,'' he said. "It is a source of income.''
E-mail the writers at
twallack@sfchronicle.com
and dlattin@sfchronicle.com.
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URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/02/12/BAGI3BA7C61.DTL