During my eight months at CHOIR, I met, Jeremy Williams, the man who I would marry a year later. He was there on Nygren credit, after being charged with a felony DUI. One of the rules there was that one was not allowed to talk to the opposite sex without a chaperone present, but this was only strictly enforced for those individuals who were not well liked by the Hinsons. One Sunday morning Jeremy happened to be drying his breakfast plate while I was washing mine, and we exchanged a “good morning”. Bambi Hinson noticed our interaction and called a fire meeting to address the fact that she did not find it appropriate that we were speaking to each other with several people across the room from us and not closely supervising our interaction. She and Eduardo Tabraue both threatened that if they observed us talking again unsupervised by an elder or designee, they would give the Fairbanks Court a false report (saying that Jeremy was breaking the conditions of his 3rd party custody agreement) which would land Jeremy back in prison in Alaska. It was in ways like this that the Hinsons and the other CHOIR elders manipulated us into compliance with their directives.
I had been living at CHOIR for about four months when a young single mom arrived with her two small daughters. Her name was Dani, and she seemed very friendly, kind, and nurturing to her children. One afternoon, she was in our trailer, and Bambi Hinson told her to play a church song on the piano and sing it. She declined and was attending to her children. Bambi told her that she was being rebellious and threatened to spank her if she did not comply. Dani still refused to comply, and Bambi called John Hinson into the room. The Hinsons laid hand on her and started speaking in tongues, demanding that the demon spirits of rebellion and dissention come out of her. They commanded all of us who were in the vicinity to also lay hands on her and speak in tongues over her. The people who were close enough to touch Dani were becoming violent, shoving her head with their hands and pushing her around until she was almost falling over. After a few hours, Bambi said that the demons were strong in Dani, and we would have to keep trying to cast them out every day until God prevailed. That night, Dani fled in the middle of the night with her two daughters. I remember feeling relieved that she and her children were safe.
While living at CHOIR I also met and made friends with a woman in her 60s named Marilyn. She had a great sense of humor and was very kind. She had an adult son who experienced disabilities, who displayed some challenging behaviors related to his disabilities. She and her son, Daniel, came stay at CHOIR for several months, and I observed the way the Hinsons treated them. Bambi consistently humiliated Marilyn in front of other cult members, telling her that she was a terrible mother and was selfish and had the “beast nature” in her. Marilyn would leave the room crying and heartbroken. For a period of time, the Hinsons moved her out of the house that she and her son shared and moved her into the girls’ dorm where I stayed. She told me that they had talked to her son and convinced him that she was a bad mom and that he would no longer cooperate with anything she asked him to do and was treating her badly. She said that she had called the police because he had gotten violent with her, and that John Hinson knew the police chief and pulled strings to not have her son arrested. Instead, they moved her into the girls’ dorm in their home and told her that it was to keep her away from her son because she was a bad mother. Marilyn stayed in our dorm for a few weeks, but she was verbally and emotionally abused so badly by the Hinsons and the other leaders of CHOIR, that she moved back to the northeastern United States.
There were many strange stories told to me while at CHOIR. Two in particular stand out in my memory:
There was a woman named Petra who was married to a man named Victor, and they had 3 small children. Petra told me that because she had come to CHOIR from the Move group in Switzerland, she was only legally able to stay in the US for a limited amount of time. During her time at CHOIR, she met Victor, and they started “walking out their year” (the Move’s 12 month chaperoned courtship process). Her time in the US was up before they were done with their year of courtship, and the Hinsons’ solution was to allow them to get married at the courthouse in secret. They then were required to return to CHOIR where they continued to live separately and finish their year. They then had a typical Move wedding, and only then were they allowed to divulge to the other cult members that they had actually been legally married for several months.
The other story was told by a man named Kyle, who had enlisted in the military prior to coming to CHOIR. Once at CHOIR, he decided he did not want to/the Lord did not want him to honor his commitment to the military. He told John Hinson this, and John pulled some strings with someone in the military to get Kyle out of joining the military.
John Hinson would often brag about knowing many high-ranking city and government officials in the Immokalee, Florida area. He consistently attended the Full Gospel Businessmen’s breakfasts at IHOP in Naples, where many wealthy men also attended. Several of these businessmen were recruited to the Move by John Hinson, and they attended church services at CHOIR regularly. These men and their families were treated like royalty by the Hinsons, as were the other financially successful families at CHOIR. They could tithe large amounts of money, and it was clear to me that people with money and power were treated much better than the rest of us.
One clear example of this was my roommate who was the daughter of the cult elder who led the Atlanta, GA Move group. Their family was well known to be financially successful as well as influential leaders in the cult. My roommate was given many privileges and opportunities that I was not afforded. For example, she was doted on by Bambi Hinson and put forward constantly as a proper young lady who the rest of us should emulate. She was allowed to have her own car and have a job at a hotel in Naples. They took half of her money for room and board, and she was allowed to keep the rest. She did not have to do any of the grunge work jobs on the cult property like I did. In fact, she barely was asked to do anything at all. She was quite prideful and treated me like I was a second-rate citizen. Every time I called anyone and was talking to them in our room, she would blast Sam Fife music so that I could not hear what was being said on the other end of the phone. She told Bambi that I was keeping in touch with non-cult affiliated friends from Alaska, and Bambi then told me that I was not allowed to use the phone or my calling card to call anyone except my immediate family who were cult members. After a friend sent me a birthday card with $100 in it, she also told the elders that I stole the $100. The elders grilled me about where I got the money and believed her over me in the end.
CHOIR, like many other Move of God cult locations, harbored sexual predators. One such man, Phil, had been accused by several women and children in Alaskan Move cult groups to have sexually groomed and raped them. He was at CHOIR because after his wife in Alaska caught him cheating, she gave him an ultimatum that he either had to go to CHOIR to get help or she would divorce him. Being from Alaska, I had heard the rumors and accusations against Phill, even from members of his own biological family. He made me feel very uneasy and on edge any time I was around him. When he had been there a week, Bambi Hinson informed me that I was being assigned the task of doing Phil’s laundry every week. I told her that talking to him or being around him made me feel very uncomfortable, and she told me that this was a command and that I was not being given a choice. Feeling the I had no other choice, I complied. I asked Phil to bring his laundry basket and detergent to me at the main trailer where we all ate meals and attended classes. Instead, he insisted on bringing them to me in the laundry room trailer, which was quite a distance from any other trailers or cult members. He knew that I was assigned that same afternoon to wash my laundry and would be there. Over and over, I told him to stop bringing me his laundry to the laundry room and just to leave it in the entryway of the main trailer. Over and over, he ignored my request. One afternoon, Phil brought me his laundry to the laundry room trailer, but instead of setting it down and leaving, he closed the trailer door behind him. He set the basket down and stalked towards me, staying between me and the only exit the whole time. I involuntarily started walking backwards until my back was eventually pressed up against the washing machine. I kept asking him, “What are you doing?” He did not answer the first few times, but then the third time I asked he answered with a lewd comment about my breasts. In that moment, I knew beyond a shadow of the doubt that he intended to sexually assault me. He then put his hand on one of my breasts. Feeling internally panicked, I put on the bravest face I could muster and said, “If you touch me, I will scream it from the roof tops and make sure that your wife, Theresa, knows about it.” He froze and then removed his hand and left the trailer. I was left shaking both from fear, relief and then rage at the nerve of this man. I told the Hinsons what happened, and Bambi Hinson looked at me scornfully and asked, “What did you do to lure him into temptation?” I felt such anger that I could do is turn and leave the room, slamming the door behind me.
A few weeks longer, when I had been there almost 8 months, I got my tax return and secretly called a friend in Alaska to help me book my one-way ticket back to Alaska. I did not tell anyone that I had my ticket or was planning to leave until 2 days before my flight was due to leave. Bambi told me that I was on a path to go straight to hell. I told her, “No, that place is reserved for you.” I left that day and never returned to that hell on earth known as CHOIR.
Truth's Song 