Annie Dawid
speaker
147 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Annie Dawid’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
that term, you know, only I can fix it. And that's, you know, all the cult leaders say that. So in San Francisco, they're kind of thriving. And by this time, this is important not to leave out, he starts taking speed because he wants to do more things, you know, and sleeping gets in the way of doing more things. So you could say his drug addiction starts kind of, again, in the service of
an altruistic edge.
I mean, they certainly see his behavior, and he starts wearing the glasses, right, to cover his red eyes.
But he says, the light in my eyes is so intense, I have to protect you from it, and that's why I wear these glasses.
So in Ukiah, he starts sleeping around, and... The story is that Marceline has a bad back and she can't engage in the wifely duties of sex. And he says all this to his congregation. So he's not hiding his infidelity. So there he gets together with one of his married disciples and they end up having a child, but they disguise the child's paternity
She goes away for her pregnancy and divorces her husband, is married, you know, in quotes, to another husband in the church, and then comes back with this child, this boy. Depending on where you are in the church hierarchy, you know that, and you know that this is Jim's child's
Or you just believe the story and one of his inner circle white women has a child with her husband and he has the husband's name, the boy does.
Okay, so there are early defectors. So in 73, the group of eight, which is how they come to be called, There's a group of four men and four women, four white and four black, who have gone to college sent by the people's temple. I mean, finance. Their education is being financed. And so guess what? College education starts affording them some critical thinking.
And these eight people decide they don't like where this is going. They don't like the hero worship. of Jones to the exclusion of everything else. And they write this long letter and they leave. Now, there were a lot of family networks in the church. And so some of them leave family in the church. So they're family defectors. And Jones is like all cult leaders.
He's very, very hurt when people turn on him. He does not like to be rejected. I also want to add that they have All this time, they have lots of good works. Besides soup kitchens, they have a drug rehabilitation program. And that has also drawn in a bunch of people off the streets. And ironically, they're very effective with their drug rehabilitation program.
But there are things I would call greatly abusive practices that have started developing by this time. So And again, this is not uncommon in cults where you have kind of forced confessions in public of things you did wrong. You know, I shouldn't have taken that expensive food out of the refrigerator. I was lusting after so-and-so. And so they start having these collective public punishments.
It's called being called on the floor. And So Jim Jones is sitting up on the stage with some other people and you get called up and then you have to confess to whatever you did. And this is also growing a big community of informers, which is another classic kind of cult behavior. And they start doing physical punishment in that way.
So some of it's like you get a whack, you know, sort of like corporal punishment in school in the old days, you get a whack on your butt, but it escalates. And they have this piece of wood that's called the Board of Education. And you start getting whacked as much as 20, 30, 50, 70 times if you're really bad.
And so some of those people at that time, people who had been really high up in the administration, like this one couple, Their daughter gets really beaten in one of those episodes and they decide, can't do this anymore. And they are really some high level people. So they leave as well.
At this time, there's been some newspaper coverage, you know, by newspaper reporters who are skeptical of all this, the great works of the great Jim Jones and the mayor praising him and his presence on the housing board. Like he'd bring crowds of people, his worshipers to the housing board meetings. And that's kind of unusual for a housing board. So that attracts attention.
I should also add this interesting thing
aside which is that for a certain time they are supportive of reporters and first amendment issues and so they kind of go picket in various for you know they're also supportive of the black panthers and angela davis is a supporter of the people's temple and they'll go and demonstrate for progressive causes which at one time included reporters but that love of reporters
ends up dying pretty quickly. So what happens in 77, after this one reporter, or it's a team of reporters, they've been trying to get people to go on the record criticizing Jones. And up until then, people won't go on the record because they're afraid that Jones and his henchmen will come after them because he's threatened that.
You can't speak against the temple or something bad will happen to you. And so... In 77, so now that's four years after the Gang of Eight, the first big defectors. And so some of those people, and then some of these new people, like this couple whose child was badly beaten, they say, all right, we're going to go on the record now.
Jim Jones is, you know, he has his hands in everything, politically and otherwise, and he knows about this article. And so we're talking now, we're getting into the summer of 1977. And so... If you just look back in time a little bit, summer 77, the end of the People's Temple is November 78. Jones is very paranoid.
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