Karen Zerby

Karen Elva Zerby (born July 31, 1946) is the current leader of the new religious movement, The Family International (TFI), originally known as the Children of God. She is also called, Maria, Mama Maria, Maria David, and Queen Maria.

Zerby was raised in evangelical Pentecostalism. Her father was a Nazarene minister, and she is credited with bringing the "fundamental Pentecostal principle of being 'Spirit-led'" into the movement she eventually came to lead. She joined the group, then called Teens for Christ, in 1969. Trained as a stenographer, she became the personal secretary to David Berg, the group's founder, and instrumental in transcribing his classes. He later separated from his first wife, Jane, and Zerby became his wife. Berg openly explained this to his followers via a missive called "The Old Church and the New Church".

In 1975, while living in Tenerife, Spain, Zerby had a son, Ricky Rodriguez. Rodriguez's childhood (Berg was his stepfather) was recorded in a book called The Story of Davidito, which was meant to be an example to other members on how to raise their children, and featured photos of Ricky Rodriguez being sexually molested. The book is controversial for its encouragement of child sexual abuse. The church leadership in this period was highly secretive, living in remote locations and being barely seen by anyone; Zerby was known to the church's followers mostly from cartoons in the Berg-penned MO Letters, as well as the various nude photos of Zerby which Berg included in his publications. In January 2005, Rodriguez killed his childhood nanny Angela Smith (a former member of the cult who sexually molested Rodriguez); hours later Rodriguez committed suicide. In a video recorded the night before, "he said he saw himself as a vigilante avenging children like him and his sisters who had been subject to rapes and beatings". Apparently, he had been looking for his mother and for his stepsister: "He wanted to see his mother prosecuted for child abuse, and to free Techi from the group".

By the mid-1980s, Zerby began to issue missives. Throughout the 1980s, she emphasized elements of balanced discipline, i.e., ending a training program for children she and others deemed too harsh. With David Berg's health declining in the late 1980s, Zerby, having been trained for the position, essentially took over the leadership position in 1988, and in 1994, after Berg's death, she married Steve Kelley, their long-time helper, and assumed the spiritual leadership of the Family.