My mom, the cult leader: ‘She told us what to wear, when to pray, how we would have sex. We were prisoners’

Deborah Green was a charismatic woman who established a ‘free love ministry’ in California, claiming to be a vessel for God. She was also a controlling, cruel sadist. Her daughter Sarah talks about her terrifying upbringing – and dramatic escape

Sarah Green realised things weren’t right in the religious community where she was raised when her mother forced three of its members to live in a locked shed. All three were women, disowned by their husbands, and forced to live off scraps of food. Her mother, Deborah Green, said they had been judged by God and this was their punishment. One of the women, an old family friend called Maura, was made to wear a white sackcloth dress and renamed Forsaken. The other two women were renamed Barren and Despised.

Sarah is a strong, striking woman with a keen sense of irony and a joyous cackle of a laugh. But now she’s in tears. “I felt sickened to my gut. Even though I’d been groomed and my mom told me, ‘I’m God’s oracle, so therefore I hear what God wants for everybody, and this is what they have to go through because they’re sinning’, it didn’t make sense to me.” She sniffs back her tears. “Sorry, I’m getting emotional. So when they locked the people in the shed, I’d sneak them food. I just didn’t understand why Maura, who was part of our membership, had kids, all of a sudden was being forced to live like an animal and do the most degrading things. I didn’t understand why.” Sarah is wailing, as if she’s been transported back to the little girl she was at the time. “What had she done? I didn’t see anything, and I grew up around them. So from that moment you lived in fear, because you could be the next person on the chopping block.” Sarah eventually discovered that Maura’s sin was that she had refused to beat her children.

Deborah Green was born in California and originally called Lila Carter. She was a straight-A student and became a communist at Sacramento State College. Deborah met her husband and Sarah’s father, Jim Green, in a hippy commune in California. Then they found God through the charismatic Pentecostal church Christ Gospel, and became missionaries. They moved to Mexico, working first in an orphanage and then a Christian college. During the day at the college, Sarah and her younger brother Josh were looked after by an 18-year-old male student. Every afternoon, he put Josh, then aged two, down for a nap and took Sarah for a walk. One day he took her to the empty school church, exposed himself and told her to touch him. He did this for a few weeks and then raped the four-year-old Sarah. Deborah, who was still going by the name Lila, discovered what had happened after finding blood in Sarah’s knickers.

Horrified, the family packed their bags and left the college and Christ Gospel to find a true God. They led a nomadic lifestyle, travelling through Mexico and Central America. Despite the trauma of the rape, Sarah says in her early years, family life was relatively functional. “We were always dirt poor because we were missionaries. But my mom was nurturing. She taught me how to cook and sew. She was an average mom in the early days.” Sarah attended regular schools, was sociable, and loved pushing herself academically, as her mother had done. But in 1981, Deborah told the family that she was now hearing directly from God. “She was given prophecies and I slowly watched my mom deteriorate into … I don’t know how to describe it.” She settles on “craziness”, but that somehow sounds too benign.

Her parents founded Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps (ACMTC) in Sacramento, California. Initially, it was known as Free Love Ministries, although she no longer believed in the hippy concept of free love and there was little that was loving about ACMTC. She relinquished the name Lila, taking Deborah from the soldier-prophet in the Old Testament’s Book of Judges. ACMTC was run like an army, and Deborah and Jim were the generals. She wore a white beret, and white military uniform with a white polo neck and a huge beige garrison belt. Deborah was both style icon and brutal cult leader.

Deborah had endured a difficult childhood. She grew up in poverty, despised her parents, and lost her beloved younger brother Carlo to lung cancer at the age of 21. She never fitted in with her family. For one thing, she looked so different from her siblings. They were blond, freckled and white. Deborah had an olive complexion, sharp cheekbones, a gap between her two front teeth and black hair. Her father, who was largely absent, claimed to be Native American. Relatives on her mother’s side bullied her, calling her a “dirty squaw” and beating her. She decided to embrace the difference. Deborah began to see herself as special. When Maura first met her she found her beguiling. She was mesmerised by her beauty, intensity of feeling and profound insight. As for Sarah, she only saw in her mother a profound ability to manipulate people; an extraordinary capacity to convince others of her “calling”.

In 1983, at the age of 10, Sarah was taken out of school to be educated on the campus. Initially, regular subjects were taught – but not for long. “The teacher was part of the cult, so it was weird. For a little while, we had science and geography, and then it just became the Bible. And you can only read the Bible so many times!”

While Deborah was the leader, Jim disciplined Sarah and Josh at their mother’s behest. He was in awe of Deborah, “like a love-sick puppy”, according to Sarah, and totally submissive to her. When Deborah demanded the children got beaten, they got beaten good and proper. “He was the one who slapped you on the back of the head, or switched you, or beat you with a belt.” Sarah’s story is told in detail in The Oracle’s Daughter: A Woman’s Escape From Her Mother’s Cult, a book about ACMTC and the Greens written by Harrison Hill. In the book, Hill says Sarah was whipped into submission by her father. “There were some pretty treacherous times,” Sarah says. “I  assumed it was normal that your kids got beat with a belt.” Her parents also disciplined her by withdrawing food. “At times we were eating out of trash cans.”

* * *

Sarah is at home in Hawaii when we speak by video link. A youthful 53, she now lives on eight acres of land with her partner and 30 roosters and 40 hens. She eventually went to work on Wall Street for an engineering firm, then became an estate manager for a Hollywood star, and is now retraining in landscape design. But recovery has been a slow and painful process, and she knows she’s not quite there yet. “That’s why I cry a lot!” she laughs through her tears. “I’ve come a long way, but I still see therapists and psychologists. It’s a form of PTSD.”

When she was 14, her mother tried to force her into a marriage with a male member of the church. Sarah had barely started menstruating. She told her mother that she was just a child and it was illegal. “My mom said, ‘You have to do what God wants. And God has told me he wants you to have multiple children.’” Under pressure, the next morning she agreed, and Deborah announced the engagement to the group. “I couldn’t see a way out,” she says. One day soon after, her husband-to-be trapped her in a corner of the woodwork shop, wrapped his arms around her and told her she couldn’t run from him. She grabbed a blade. “I slit him from wrist to elbow, and I said, ‘If you ever touch me again I will kill you.’ I was 14! I knew it was wrong. A grown-assed man forcing himself on me. I just wasn’t having it.”

After this incident, Sarah was separated from the rest of the community and she tried to kill herself by taking an overdose. “My mom refused to let me go to the hospital because she was afraid I’d tell what was going on.” When another member of the community asked her mother for Sarah’s hand in marriage, she again tried to take her own life. “I was being hunted like a piece of meat, so I was like, ‘Nope I’m going to end my life right now.’” She didn’t succeed, so then tried to starve herself to death.

In 1988, Maura, the former family friend who had been enslaved and renamed Forsaken, escaped from ACMTC and sued for intentional infliction of emotional distress, deceit, false imprisonment and negligence. In 1989, Sacramento county superior court ordered the movement to pay Maura $1.2m. ACMTC went on the run, travelling through Oregon, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Arizona before ending up in New Mexico, where they bought ranch land in Fence Lake, a rural area in the middle of nowhere. In Fence Lake, ACMTC built a compound to live on. The further they moved, the more reckless Deborah became. Children went uneducated, their illnesses untreated. Deborah, who had once revelled in her promiscuity, now railed against sins of the flesh.

At 17, Sarah was forced to marry Peter Green, a man formerly known as Mike Brandon. Peter’s parents had paid for the properties where ACMTC was now located – Klamath Falls, a small logging city in southern Oregon. Sarah had done so much damage to her body that she assumed she would not be able to have children. But at the age of 21, she became pregnant with Josiah. At 23, she gave birth to Isaiah. It was after this that Deborah’s behaviour became even more extreme.

ACMTC had been partly inspired by the 18th-century Shakers, a church that broke away from the Quakers, and was known for its members’ ecstatic shaking worship and celibacy. Deborah didn’t enforce celibacy, but encouraged it. However, this meant ACMTC did not grow organically. Deborah’s solution was to adopt children, but legal adoption wasn’t feasible when they were on the run. So she devised a plan. They would support struggling young mothers in African countries by paying to take their babies and bring them up as their own in America. In other words, she had come up with an international trafficking scheme.

In 1997, Deborah and Jim went on a mission trip to Nigeria, Ghana, Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda. In Uganda, they met a pregnant 16-year-old called Ruth who asked for their blessing. Ruth told Deborah that her mother had recently died and with that had gone her dream of going to culinary school. She said that she had got involved with an older man after her mother’s death, and her pregnancy was the result. Deborah told her the best way of making things right with God was to give the baby to ACMTC, which would give her enough money to go to culinary school. When Deborah returned home, she explained her plans to Sarah and told her she would have to collect the baby once it was born, because she was the only person who could pass for a new mother as she was still lactating and could breastfeed.

Deborah told Sarah that the baby was their blessing. “Being a mom myself, I couldn’t imagine the sacrifice this mother was making. I don’t know the extent of the lies my parents told her. I’m just a vessel to make this happen, and that’s what you do.” When she talks about the horrors of the past, she often does so in the present tense.

Did she think of it as trafficking or as an act of God? “I didn’t think it was trafficking. I didn’t even know it was wrong. I’d never met these people and went over to receive this ‘blessing’.” Sarah says she was terrified of taking the baby out of Uganda, and even more terrified that she wouldn’t manage to. “I was scared to death. I’m in another country all by myself, scared I’m going to fail this mission, I’m going to get caught and get the mother in trouble, I’m going to get in trouble, I’m never going to see my own kids again. But I knew if I failed at this it was even worse. So you don’t fail. You do what you have to do to make this thing happen at any cost.”

Sure enough, she successfully got through passport control, despite the strange looks, boarded the plane and brought the baby, known in the book as Trinity, into the US. For the next two years, Sarah brought her up and loved her as her own, alongside her two biological children. But life was unbearable for her. She was trapped with a man she hated, in a community she loathed.

Sarah begged her mother to let her leave briefly to do a course in midwifery in Seattle. She argued that if they were going to have more babies on the commune, they’d need the skills to support them in their early weeks. Her mother refused to let her go. Sarah was desperate. By now, she was on the verge of having an affair with Anthony, a newcomer staying temporarily at Fence Lake before heading to Canada. They went on long walks together and held hands. She hatched a plan to escape with him but knew it was too dangerous to take the children. This is a decision that haunted her then, and still does to this day. “It was excruciating. I didn’t know where I was going or what I was going to, so I thought, I’m not going to drag three kids into that situation. I’m not going to do what my parents did to me my whole life. Whether it was right or wrong, I did what I thought was best.”

Sarah knew she wasn’t running away for love, she was running to escape the cult and her parents. She and Anthony managed to leave and had the briefest of relationships before going their separate ways; he to Canada, she to Seattle. She didn’t realise she wouldn’t be able to get on the midwifery course because she had no qualifications. Sarah ended up homeless. “I didn’t have a shelter, I had nothing. I slept on cardboard.” Even without her children and a roof over her head, she found it preferable to life with ACMTC. She was free to talk to people and make friends for the first time since she was 10 years old and attended school.

Before long she was holding down two jobs in Seattle – working in a cafe and doing laundry for a local gym. Eventually, she could afford to rent a room. “Getting an empty room and a sleeping bag was the most pivotal moment of my life. That was like, I’ve made it! Woah! I could take a shower every day and didn’t need to worry about being molested by weirdos, and I could go home when I wanted.”

What was liberty like? “Oh my God, I don’t think the average person realises how much freedom we have day to day, even if you’re super poor. When we lived on the compound, we were told what to wear, when to pray, how we would have sex with our partners or not have sex, what to eat and what not to eat and when. We were prisoners. Being able to buy a shitty cup of ramen and eat it on my own and not have anybody judge me for it, or tell me it’s not God’s will, or be able to wear a pair of jeans when it’s freezing. Just the smallest things.”

She met Geoff, a man who made her feel safe and loved. Sarah moved in with him and soon found herself pregnant. In April 2002, she decided it was time to return to the compound to collect her three children – Josiah, Isaiah and Trinity. By now her baby daughter, Ellexis, was 11 months old. Sarah was in a good place – stable, in what seemed to be a healthy relationship, and making a living. “I felt if I’d proved that I could offer a positive, nurturing environment, then my mom would be OK with me taking my own kids. Boy, was I wrong!”

After two years apart, the children’s reaction to Sarah’s appearance was mixed. “Josiah didn’t want anything to do with me. He was so angry and bitter that I left. My other son did talk to me, and Trinity just latched on to me and I latched on to her.” Even if the children had begged to live with Sarah, Deborah would not have consented. She told her daughter that the children belonged to the community, and that if she wouldn’t submit to her and the will of God she had to leave. That was the last time she saw Josiah and Isaiah.

Deborah saw herself as invincible and unchallengeable. “She thought she was God’s daughter; the direct conduit to God. Almost like an umbilical cord. So whatever she says is what happens.”

Sarah returned to Seattle with Ellexis. She and Geoff had another baby, a son called Jeremiah. But the relationship didn’t last. In 2007, she met a Frenchman called Xavier, they got married and enjoyed a good relationship for most of the 11 years they were together. Meanwhile, her career was developing, and she moved to New York to work on Wall Street and then to run the estate of the Hollywood actor. She had managed to get her life back on track by putting her family and ACMTC to the back of her mind. Or at least as far back as it would go.

* * *

It was 2016 when she started getting phone messages from police in New Mexico saying they were building a criminal case around her parents and that they needed to talk to her. Sarah thought the messages were spam and ignored them, not least because a huge part of her recovery was down to keeping her parents out of her life. “I didn’t want anything to do with these psychos. I hadn’t been involved with them for years. Like God, just make them go away. Then I heard a long message saying, ‘We need to talk to you about your parents and Trinity, and we’re going to send you a subpoena so we need your address.’ And I was like, what the hell is a subpoena.” She soon discovered what it was, and that there was no getting out of talking to the police.

She also discovered the seriousness of the crimes her parents and other members of the commune were being investigated for – sexual abuse of children within the commune; child abuse and neglect; physical abuse involving minors; and offences related to human trafficking. Sarah was shocked by the allegations, not least because she had left her children with her parents. Some of the sexual abuse charges related to Trinity.

In 2017, Deborah Green was charged with crimes including kidnapping, child abuse and sexual penetration of a child under 13. Jim Green was charged with multiple counts of child abuse. Peter Green was charged with 100 counts of sexual penetration of a child under 13 and pleaded not guilty.

Three years earlier, in 2014, a 12-year-old boy in the community called Enoch Miller had got terrible flu. Deborah said he was pretending to be ill, that he was a rebel, and denied him food as punishment for his sins. When he deteriorated, she accepted he was sick, saying that he would live if he repented, “and if he doesn’t, he belongs to God”. A year earlier, Enoch’s father Brian had been “judged” by Deborah and banished from the group. His mother Stacey appeared to be too scared of Deborah to send Enoch to hospital.

Enoch died and was buried on the compound. His death went unrecorded. Brian only discovered that Enoch had passed away two years later, when he was told by police. After he died, the Greens feared a raid from the police. Family photos and memorabilia belonging to Stacey were placed in plastic trunks and buried by Jim, and Stacey and her family were sent away from the compound by Deborah to live in a town called Truth or Consequences in New Mexico. Enoch’s body was exhumed in 2016, and his death was finally reported to the authorities. Stacey insisted it was her decision not to take Enoch to hospital and that Deborah was not to blame. Deborah, Jim and Stacey were charged with child abuse resulting in death and failure to report a death.

By 2017, ACMTC was a gun-toting, lawless, rightwing cult, espousing fiercely homophobic and Islamophobic views. I ask Sarah what shocked her most about her discoveries. She doesn’t know where to start. “Finding out that Enoch didn’t get medical attention when he got sick, and then they buried him on the property, burned all of his items, and erased him like he didn’t even exist on this Earth.” She gulps. “When I went back to try to get my kids, he was a baby. And the guns. We never had any guns. And half the male members were having incest with the kids. That was a no-no when I was there. Disgusting. Gross. That all happened after I left.”

And then there was the treatment of Trinity. Of all the children, none was treated as badly as the girl who had been trafficked from Uganda. After breaking her femur at the age of eight in an accident in 2006, she was removed from the commune and placed in foster care. She subsequently alleged that Deborah and Peter Green had sexually abused her. “What they did to her makes me sick inside,” Sarah says. “When I think about it, I want to vomit. For days at a time, my mom would make her eat out of a dog bowl, and then if she threw it up she’d make her eat her own vomit. She beat her constantly for nothing.” For once, Sarah asks if we can change the subject. “I can’t talk about it because I just sob.”

Sarah feared that she would be charged with trafficking Trinity from Uganda, but prosecutors ruled that she was a victim of her parents’ crimes. She ended up giving evidence against her mother. “When I stood up in court in 2018 and faced her, she looked at me as if I didn’t exist. I was so afraid of her, I was sick to my stomach. I thought if I got in front of her, the power she held over me for so long was going to come back and I wouldn’t be able to tell the truth.”

But she did tell the truth, and in September 2018 Deborah Green was found guilty of three charges of child rape, two counts of kidnapping and one count of child abuse, for which she was sentenced to 72 years in jail. She was given another 18 years for the abuse of Enoch Miller leading to his death – a charge she did not contest. Jim Green was sentenced to 10 years in prison after not contesting the child abuse charges and his role in Enoch’s death. Enoch’s mother Stacey took a plea deal for her role in his death and was sentenced to nine years in prison.

After Peter Green had spent more than two years in prison, the sex abuse charges were dismissed due to a lack of evidence and he was placed on house arrest in 2020 in relation to other charges. In August 2022, he pleaded guilty to two counts of third-degree nonsexual child abuse for his role in Trinity’s mistreatment, and is on unsupervised probation until 7 September.

How did Sarah feel when she heard the verdict about her mother? She holds her arm in the air triumphantly, exhales loudly and weeps. “I woke up after the trial finished, Friday morning, and I got a call from the DA saying, ‘It’s done, she got 72 years.’ I cried like a baby. I thought she might get out of it again. She’s such a manipulator – the queen of manipulation. And the fact that it finally stuck was a huge burden lifted.”

Finally, Sarah was at peace with herself, living in Hawaii, running marathons (48 and counting), reconnected with Trinity, and happy that she’d managed to stand up to her mother. She’d even tried to reconcile with her father Jim, whom she regarded more as a weak-willed victim of her mother than a brutal perpetrator. “I wrote to him and said, ‘Dad, when you get out it’s not going to be easy for you to find housing or a job because you’re a convicted person,’ and I said, ‘How would you feel about coming to live with me? I’ll try to help you immerse back into society and get a job.’”

That’s incredibly forgiving, I say, why did you do that? “Even though he was a shitty parent, looking back at the situation, he was an idiot. He fell for this woman who he loved deeply, and that sickening love bond didn’t allow him to be a true person. He’s frail, he’s had a stroke, he was beaten pretty badly in prison. I thought, I’m going to give him that lifeline and hope for the best. He’s still my father.”

How did Jim react to her suggestion? “For a few months he was OK with it. Then all of a sudden I got a letter from him, and I knew she’d got hold of him. He said, ‘Your mom has prophesied this is going to happen, and we just have to wait our time as part of God’s deal.’ After that, I never wrote to him again.”

Sarah’s peace of mind wasn’t to last. In 2019, Deborah, now aged 72, filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus, claiming that her conviction should be overturned because of “exculpatory material that had been intentionally withheld by the state” relating to Trinity’s allegations. In November 2020, Deborah’s convictions were vacated, and a new trial was ordered. She was released from jail in January 2022, and returned to ACMTC’s compound in New Mexico while awaiting a retrial.

And still there was to be another twist. In April 2025, the New Mexico supreme court reinstated Deborah Green’s conviction for child abuse leading to the death of Enoch Miller, for which she still had 14 years of the 18-year sentence to serve. But by now nobody knew where she was. According to Sarah and author Hill, she has gone on the run. Sarah is appalled that this has been allowed to happen, and fearful that she may try to return to her life. “I just don’t want her turning up on my doorstep. I’m like, ‘How d’you let an almost 80-year-old person disappear like that? Come on, people! Do your job! How is that possible?” She’s cackling with laughter, but there’s a hint of desperation in her voice.

I ask why she agreed to participate with Hill’s book about ACMTC. After all, she’s spent so much of her life trying to erase memories of her mother. “I want people to be informed,” she says. “There are so many cults in the US and all over the world that are these secluded communes where people are subjected to horrific lifestyles, and I’m hoping the book will help someone that might be in the same situation as me. I didn’t know I could go to the sheriff’s office and go, ‘Hey, can you come and help me and the kids get out of here?’ because I was so ingrained in fear and so groomed that the law is evil and that you don’t ever ask for help. I want people to have those resources I didn’t have.”

How would she feel if she got a call to say Deborah was dead? “It would be a giant relief.” Because of what she did to her or what she could still do to others? “The latter. I’m strong enough to deal with her now. I’m getting the help that I need. But it’s what she might be subjecting other people to. And if the snake’s head is cut off maybe it will give people the option to seek out a normal life.” She says she had no idea where her sons or brother are, or how involved with the community they are. And then she’s struck by a terrible thought. “God knows how much she has indoctrinated my brother and my boys to carry on her crazy work.”

• The Oracle’s Daughter: A Woman’s Escape From Her Mother’s Cult by Harrison Hill is published on 9 April by The Bridge Street Press at £25. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.