Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple Page #5

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because of Fathers love.

We are trying to make,

and we are making

a place of refuge for all of you here.

There is no,

nothing at all that I would...

that I have any holdings here.

I do not want to go back in any way,

shape or form to the States.

I love it here and this is the place

where all of you are going to be.

Pretty soon we were

seeing film footage

of the first crew

that went down there.

We all wanted to go.

I wanted to go.

It looked like...

like freedom.

Now, will each of you

give a very fond embrace,

a salutary kiss of greeting

to your neighbor,

and lets fill this atmosphere

with warmth and love.

We thought of ourselves as one big

family that did handle our own discipline.

I was in a lot of the meetings where

people were spanked or beaten, and I...

I was slapped once,

also in a public meeting.

People were brought

up front and asked...

had to tell who

they had slept with

and who they had

sneaked off to a restaurant with.

There wasnt a week that went by

that I wasnt called up on the floor

because of my behavior,

because of my attitude.

Stanley Clayton, up, front, center.

He would ask people,

What do you think

we ought to do with them?

Do you think they ought to

get a good boxing?

And then hed get

a resounding roar, Yes!

You might fight

five people in one night.

Well, you know,

youre very tired!

Ive seen situations where

they actually knocked the person out

and actually took water

and threw water back on him,

woke him up,

and whooped him some more.

I had welts really bad,

and when I went to work the next day,

one of my employees

noticed the welts when I sat down.

And I just broke down

and told her.

She didnt even know

I was Peoples Temple.

And she called the manager

of the station up

and they talked to me

about leaving.

I couldnt say goodbye

to my son or my husband

because at that point,

it was like the Gestapo,

the families were

turning in each other.

If I had said goodbye,

one of them would have reported me.

Its kind of like when you

get married and you have this ideal.

And youre, you know,

youre in love and then,

you know, the honeymoon

wears off and reality sets in.

And most people,

once the going gets rough,

dont jump out immediately.

In one planning commission meeting,

Jim was getting notes, kind of love notes,

from one of the members

on the planning commission.

Jones is sitting there calmly

and so another lady said,

Well, I dont know

why you keep doing that.

What makes you think youve got

something that he wants anyway?

And so another woman says,

Well, you know what?

You ought to just take off your clothes

and show him what you got.

You aint got nothing.

And so, by this time,

they looked back to Jones

and so he looks over his glasses,

and he nods with approval.

Yeah, thats a good idea.

She was to be totally naked and

she was down to nothing but her skin,

not even any shoes on, you know,

no bra, no panties, no nothing.

Then they begin to say

what her breasts looked like,

her stomach, butt,

vagina, you name it.

Everything they could think of,

they were saying.

By this time, her face is red,

her bodys almost red from

embarrassment, and I noticed something.

Jones was sitting,

looking over his sunglasses,

but he had a smile on his face

like hes really enjoying

this woman being torn down.

I have a conscious memory of

sitting there, thinking to myself,

This is wrong.

And I didnt do a damned thing

to stand up and say, This is wrong.

Its like a child

in a dysfunctional family.

On a certain level,

its normal, you know?

I just kind of took

everything in stride.

But then we felt like we had gotten

involved and gotten in so deep that

it was actually no way out.

I had traveled on Bus Seven,

which was Jims bus.

And he sat down next to me.

And I was sitting there

and I thought,

Thats weird, it smells

like alcohol next to me.

And he leaned over and he said,

Do you know what you do to me?

He had informed me that

I was to come in... On Bus Seven,

there was a room

in the back for just him.

He had books.

He had a desk. He had a bed.

When everyone got off the bus

at the rest stop,

I went into his little room

and I sat there and waited for him.

And finally he opened the door,

and without any talk or anything,

he just pulled down his pants and...

and had sex with me.

And as I lay there frightened,

not sure what to do,

and as I shivered, hed say to me,

This is for you.

Im doing this for you, Debbie.

Well, in 1975 it was

a mayoral election in San Francisco.

A conservative candidate and

a liberal candidate, George Moscone.

Jones had several hundred people

who would go door-to-door Election Day.

Instead of a group that might give you

twenty or thirty of these people,

or a hundred, you had

three or four hundred.

The Moscone election was very close.

The margin of victory was

probably no more than 4,000.

So you had to credit a big chunk of

decisive votes to Peoples Temple.

The reward for the election

of George Moscone

was the appointment of Jim Jones

as Chairman of the City Housing Authority.

What was once a really

boring meeting, all of a sudden,

became like really interesting

when Jim Jones became the head of it

because we all

came down on the buses.

And we were instructed that

when Jim came in, we stood,

and when he left or spoke,

wed stand and clap.

The sheer staginess,

the controlled atmosphere

that sort of enclosed this guy,

made him so unusual,

so different than the norm,

that it made me very curious.

My biggest problem was

getting somebody

to sort of talk to me about the Church

in kind of conversational terms.

I had become friends with

some of the various defectors,

and one of the defectors told me that

she was going to speak

publicly about Jones.

And I said to her, Well,

if youre going to speak publicly,

Im going to speak with you.

Im not going to let you do this alone.

I finally heard from

some ex-members who heard

I was interested in writing a story

about the Temple forNew Westmagazine,

and they took a chance.

They called me and some of them said,

you know, You dont know

nothing about the Church.

Wait until I tell you

what I went through.

Before the article was going to break,

Jim convinced the publisher

that she needed to read it to him.

He was on one phone and

I was on taping the other end of it,

while somebody else

listened on another one.

Jim didnt understand that

there was no way he could talk her down

from whatever this article

was going to say.

And as she continues

to read this article,

hes looking around the room

at about five of us

and you could tell that hes becoming

more and more anxious and as...

and you know, his mouth

becomes dryer and dryer.

And he realizes that this article

is going to be hugely damning,

and it was midway through it

he mouths to all of us in the room,

Were leaving tonight.

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