Picking up where I left off yesterday, the headline at the Sun reads:
Yet despite the sensational claim in the headline, the quotes in the article don’t back up the assertion. From the quotes provided, the lawyer (Rodriguez) didn’t claim that the father was the leader of a cult. What he said was that in some cases this is what has happened:
It’s not clear what motivated the Turpins to live a secluded life with their large brood or what went on in the house.
But parents convicted in similar cases exerted control over their children though intimidation, psychological and physical coercion, and frequently possessed their own belief system, claims Attorney Ambrosio Rodriguez.
He said: “They develop a kind of cultish doomsday type of religion where the father becomes this mythical leader and the mother and children’s duty is to serve the father.”
Like I did in my post yesterday, Rodriguez is speculating. While I pointed out the evidence so far that strongly suggests the wife was in charge*, Rodriguez is basing his speculation on past experience:
“I’ve seen this movie before,” Rodriguez said.
“It’s going to get more creepy and make our skin crawl. And at the end of it, we’re all going to be asking the same question: ‘How did this happen in front of us and no one noticed?’”
The article references a case Rodriguez worked in the past, where a Christian pastor abused five children. However, the case they offer to bolster the claim that it must have been the father abusing the wife and children doesn’t fit the pattern. In the movie Rodriguez saw before, the perpetrator was a woman, and there was evidently not a man around to blame her actions on:
Rodriguez was a longtime Riverside County prosecutor who sent Jessica Banks, a pastor and mother, to prison for life for beating, starving and drugging her five adopted daughters, who were kept locked in her garage.
H/T HoseB
*Which would not lessen the father’s guilt.
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