Like
Cohen, DeeDee Agee, daughter of writer James Agee, was young when she joined. In
1971, she was 24 years old, married, and with a 2-year-old son, living an
isolated and unhappy life in upstate New York. Her husband was an alcoholic who
was frequently away for work. Thanks to therapy, she left her husband and moved
into a group apartment, breaking with a family pattern that had repeated over
three generations—early death, alcoholism, and a female existence built around
the fate of a man. After three years of therapy, her therapist encouraged her
to send her son, then 5, away to boarding school. She was told, as were many
others, that she was so dangerous to her son that she shouldn’t visit him or
spend vacations with him.
Eventually, she lost her son in a custody battle with her husband (the judge: “plaintiff …
spends more time with her therapist than she does with her son”). In 1982,
DeeDee Agee had another child via what the group called a “sperm pool,”
whereby a woman would sleep with multiple people during her ovulation period,
and the leadership refused her access to the infant, insisting that her
breast-feeding was creating dependence in the child, which was ultimately bad
for both mother and baby (it should be noted that members
of the group’s leadership were always allowed to hang on to their children and
used much of the money they pilfered from their patients to send them to fancy
Manhattan private schools).
Over
the decades, the group became more and more insular, more and more
leader-driven, more and more abusive and cult-like (although to this day some
former members bristle at the classification). On a few occasions the group
used violence to defend its turf: In 1985, when the recent college graduates
who lived next door to one of the group buildings refused to remove some paint
they had spilled on the building, the group broke in and attacked their place,
smashing dishes, furniture, sinks, and toilets, and “when one of the young men came
over to protest what had happened, one of the men from the group pulled him
into the lobby and hit the boy so hard he broke his own wrist.”