Chosen at 13 to be the pastor’s ‘maiden’: Sex-cult survivor shares her horrifying story

When Lindsay Tornambe was just 11 years old, her parents and four siblings moved out to remote Minnesota to join a religious compound called River Road Fellowship. The group was led by a man named Victor Barnard, who claimed that God had ordained him to gather and shepherd the fragmented people of the Way International — a deeply heretical “Christian” sect — after its founder Victor Paul Wierwille died in 1985.

At first, things were almost idyllic. Lindsay spent her days playing with the other kids, tending to animals, and skating on the frozen lake. But it wasn’t long before Barnard’s sinister intentions shattered the pastoral facade he had created, condemning Lindsay and other victims to years-long servitude in a sex cult.

On this episode of “Relatable,” Allie Beth Stuckey interviews Lindsay about her decade as a “maiden” in a cult whose leader is currently serving a 30-year prison sentence.

After secretly grooming Lindsay, Victor, who had taken off his wedding ring, claiming he was “married to the church” like Christ, reportedly preached a sermon from the passage in Exodus where God commands the Israelites to “give” Him their firstborns, meaning redemption through small payments or temple service.

As many cult leaders do, however, Victor reportedly twisted the passage to mean that parents must literally give their firstborn daughters over to him.

“He read off a list of names. Mine was on there,” says Lindsay.

This all happened during the early 2000s, amid lingering influences from the 1999 “Summer of Love” — a notorious period in the Way International when leadership allegedly encouraged widespread sexual promiscuity among members, including married people, as a supposed expression of “God's love.”

Victor, however, didn’t frame the girls’ role as sexual. They were merely being asked to serve Christ and the church. Lindsay, after seeing her friends eagerly volunteer, consented to being a “maiden,” having no idea what awaited her.

She, along with nine other young girls, was then removed from her family home and taken to live in Victor’s private living compound. The maidens were assigned different duties, like gardening, cooking, cleaning, and assisting Victor with various tasks, many of which were intimate.

“Things in the beginning were kind of okay,” says Lindsay, noting that she initially believed her time as a maiden was temporary.

“I was under the impression that I would serve there and live at the camp ... and then I would go home and be homeschooled,” she says.

But a shepherdess who helped oversee the young girls told 13-year-old Lindsay, who had expressed excitement about returning home to her family, that her role as a maiden was a lifetime commitment. “You're not going home. This is your home now," she said.

“It was shortly after that that I was raped by Victor for the first time,” says Lindsay, adding that he justified his actions by claiming that “Jesus Christ had Mary Magdalene and the apostle Paul had Phoebe” as sexual partners.

He also claimed that “even though he would be having sex with me, I could remain a virgin spiritually,” she adds.

This abuse, which was often accompanied by physical and emotional abuse, lasted for years, she says.

Eventually, fear and manipulation brainwashed Lindsay into believing she genuinely loved her captor. “One thing that Victor would tell us is that the more we dedicated ourselves to him in this life and to God, the better place in heaven we would have, and so I think the thought of not being in heaven with the maidens and with Victor really scared me,” she says.

But Lindsay’s sympathetic view of Victor was a ticking time bomb.

In 2008, after most of the girls had been moved to another remote location in Washington state, one of the maidens was deported to Brazil after her student visa expired. Victor sent other maidens to live for temporary periods in Brazil alongside her.

When it was Lindsay’s turn to go, she was exposed to the outside world for the first time since her family had joined the commune. The taste of freedom was intoxicating.

When she returned to Washington, the maidens had started their own cleaning business. As a housemaid, Lindsay got another taste of life outside the cult, as she studied family pictures on walls and heard secular music drifting from radios.

This view of the outside world had already begun to sour Lindsay’s feelings for Victor, but then news came that he, still legally married to his wife, who lived next door to him, had been sleeping with married women in the community.

In Minnesota, it is against the law for pastors to have sexual relations with their congregants, so one of the women in the commune reported Victor to the police and even shared some information about his “maidens,” forcing him to flee. The infidelity broke up the original commune in Minnesota, sending Lindsay’s family back to their home state.

Lindsay, deeply disturbed by Victor’s philandering but still unaware of her own abuse, decided she was done being a maiden. Even though fellow maidens and Victor pleaded with her to stay — calling her Judas and accusing her of not loving God — Lindsay’s mind was made up.

She called her parents, who were still committed to the Way International and Victor, and they agreed to allow her to come home.

“They gave me $500 and bought me a train ticket, and I took Amtrak all the way from Washington state to 30th Street Station in Philadelphia,” says Lindsay.

Re-entering secular society at 23 proved difficult and confusing for Lindsay. “At that point, I thought the only way to make a man happy was to sleep with him, and so I slept around a lot. I lived in a lot of sin,” she says.

“I just was really interested in exploring and living life and making friends and getting away from my parents, because they were still supporting Victor.”

While her outside life looked fun and exciting, Lindsay’s internal world grew darker over the years, as she reckoned with her past life in the cult.

“I just kept thinking over and over again: If God is a God of love that I read and believed for so long, why would he let this happen to me? If heaven is so great, why don't I kill myself now and not live in this internal pain that I feel?” she admits.

To quell the pain, Lindsay experimented with a gamut of “remedies” — self-love programs, crystals, witchcraft, even self-harm.

“I always came up feeling so empty, so unsatisfied,” she says.

But despite Lindsay’s doubt and sin, God was working in ways she couldn’t see. Single motherhood, unexpected friendships, and perfect timing wove together and allowed Lindsay to distinguish the real God from the phony one who had been used to warp and manipulate her as a child.

To hear the beautiful story of Lindsay’s redemption, including where her family is today and the trial that landed Victor behind bars, watch the full interview above.

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