lexis Broderick was flying.
The wind whipped her face and her little legs stretched higher and higher, pulling her into orbit. As she reached the skies, for one intoxicating moment, she could see everything: The cars. The trees. The people. The real world. It was right there; visible, in flashes, beyond the compound’s fence. She didn’t know this feeling, but she allowed herself to feel it anyway. Freedom.
But then the swings fell back to earth. The world was different down here: A cult leader was grooming Alexis to be his wife, she recalls. Her sister had been banished to the House of Scorn, and her brother was out on watch, tasked with keeping intruders at bay. Her friends were spying on her: one slip-up and she’d be beaten, exiled, or worse. Life was good, of course: The world was about to end, and the prophet of God had promised her passage into heaven. But sometimes, secretly, it didn’t feel right.
So 10-year-old Alexis pushed herself back into the skies, gripping the swing set tight as she went. Over the fence, she saw suburbia in all its boring and beautiful hues. And then, on one trip into the clouds, she saw something else: “Men,” she recalls. “With machine guns.”
“They were completely surrounding the property,” she says. Every exit was blocked in an instant. There was nowhere to run, but she ran anyway, the swings tangling behind her as she launched herself towards the house. She called for Tony’s wives, several of whom dashed into a safe room. He had warned them all this would happen. “This is it,” Alexis thought. “They’re coming to kill us.”
The chaos that ruptured that quiet fall morning would split the lives of Alexis, Shaina and Matthew Broderick into two.
The siblings had been brainwashed, abused and groomed while growing up in a cult led by Bernie Hoffman, an apocalyptic preacher and false prophet known to the world as Tony Alamo. Then they were thrown, kicking and screaming, into the real world: a place they had learned to fear and loathe.
In the ensuing years they would reckon with their past, suffer tragedy and live once-unthinkable lives. Their journeys intertwine, but their stories are unique. And after declining interview requests for almost two decades, they shared those stories in a series of conversations with CNN.
People leave cults, but the cults do not always leave them. For years, Alamo’s voice stalked the Brodericks like a shadow. “(We) saw a lot of crazy, horrific things,” Alexis says now – things that can’t be unseen.
Their childhood, for all its horrors, felt at times like the easy part. “It was all I knew,” Alexis says. What came next was far more complicated.
The two faces of Tony Alamo
Afew months earlier, Alexis’ brother, Matthew, arrived groggily to breakfast. He’d been on “night watch” for hours, trawling the grounds of their sprawling Arkansas compound. It was an unbearably boring task for a 14-year-old, but it was important: Tony said so. “The government controlled everything, (and) they were out to get him,” Matthew says, recalling the core belief that their leader instilled in his followers.
Like all the children on the compound, Matthew had been forced several times to go days without food. So when he was handed his breakfast, he immediately sat on the male side of the cafeteria – boys and girls were strictly segregated – and wolfed it down. But then he heard the rumble of a golf cart: Tony was coming.
The leader, who exists in the Brodericks’ memory as a rotund, graying man whose sinister aura was magnified by the sunglasses he wore due to glaucoma, surveyed the room. He walked over to Matthew, and took a seat across from the teenager.
“I was so happy,” Matthew recalls. “So fortunate to be sitting there, eating breakfast, and talking with him.” He could scarcely believe his luck: being in Alamo’s presence was the ultimate prize on the compound.
“But then he reached over, grabbed my shirt, yanked me, and punched me in the face,” Matthew says. A fury crossed Alamo’s face. “You were mocking me! You were scorning me!” he yelled. A stunned hush fell across the cafeteria.
And then, as if a switch had been flicked, Alamo’s tone changed again. “I really didn’t want to do that,” he said. “But the Lord told me to, so I had to do it. You understand, right?” Matthew managed to mumble back a “Yes, sir.”
Inside Matthew’s head, a common calculation started. “In my heart, I knew I hadn’t (scorned him),” he says. “But God told him, so obviously I did,” he says.
“I had to search myself and figure out what I was doing wrong.”
‘The world was always ending’
The Broderick siblings were born and raised into Alamo’s world.
Their father joined Alamo’s fringe, ultra-conservative Christian ministry shortly after it was founded in Hollywood in 1969 by Tony and his wife, Susan Alamo. “He was hitchhiking, and ran across one of Tony Alamo’s people,” Shaina says, gathering the scant details her parents had told her. “He was at a low point in his life,” she says. “That’s who he preyed off.”
Alamo bore all the gruesome hallmarks of a 20th-century American cult leader. He emerged from the same hazy, late-Sixties Hollywood era as Charles Manson, and developed a strange affinity with David Koresh, whose group perished during a fiery siege on their Waco compound. Like Peoples Temple leader Jim Jones, he used charisma, punishment and fear to manipulate his followers. And like Warren Jeffs, who led a polygamous group in Arizona, his perverted lust for child brides would contribute to his downfall.
For decades, the Alamos authored one of the wildest Hollywood stories of that feverish and freewheeling time. They preached on TV about eternal damnation, while Tony schmoozed some of Los Angeles’ biggest stars.
But to evade the scrutiny of California authorities, the cult moved in the 1970s to Arkansas, Susan’s birthplace. After her death, the cult’s survivors say Alamo forced his followers to pray over her body to bring about her resurrection, which the Brodericks’ mother gladly did. It was many months before he had her rotting corpse buried.
Eventually, the group settled in Fouke, a tiny town near the Arkansas-Texas border, setting up a church and buying up homes. The centerpiece was Alamo’s house: a fortified sprawl of rooms and buildings where he lived with his brides. “The town hated him,” Matthew recalls: locals would frequently hurl insults during his mandatory nighttime patrols of the grounds.
A number of side-hustles funded Alamo’s project, most notably a business creating bespoke, ostentatious jackets and clothing, worn by celebrities like Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley. The Brodericks’ mother modelled those jackets, and Alamo “loved to boast about celebrities wearing them,” Matthew says. A belt signed by Presley remained among Alamo’s possessions, according to the Internal Revenue Service. Its message read: “To Tony, your friend always. Elvis.”
But the garments were made, it was later found, by the children of the cult. “I worked in those warehouses a lot from a very young age,” Shaina says.
Alamo brainwashed his followers to believe he was the prophet of God, that the apocalypse was nigh, and that he was their ticket to the afterlife. The teaching was so ingrained that when the Mint started printing the fifty states on quarters in 1999, a young Matthew was glum: he enjoyed collecting the coins, but the series was set to run until 2008. “It’s never gonna happen,” he thought. “The world was going to end before then.”
Matthew, the pragmatic sibling, took the teaching in his stride: “As long as you were right with God, you’d be OK.” His sisters were less ambivalent. “It always felt like doomsday,” says Shaina, the middle of the three. “The world was always ending. It was terrifying.”
The Brodericks don’t remember their childhood as tragic, exactly. They spent much of it happy, even as their family shrunk. There are five Broderick siblings, but their eldest brother and sister ran away from the cult, and their mother was kicked out after medication was found among her belongings. “(Alamo) said God told him one day, ‘If you don’t have enough faith in me to heal a headache, then go work for the aspirin company,’” Matthew remembers.
The children missed their mother, but they couldn’t show it. Their banished relatives were now backsliders, and they believed that Alamo could read their thoughts. “I wish I would have been able to ask her more (about) what she went through because,” Shaina says of her mother. “She had such a rough life that I didn’t really ever think about.”
“Maybe in the back of my mind somewhere, I thought maybe something was wrong,” Alexis adds. “But I pushed it down. I was too scared to question anything.”
There’s an irony to Matthew’s name, which he shares with one of the era’s biggest movie stars, because the Brodericks were almost completely shielded from the outside world. “When I was about five, they took the computers away,” he says. Radios were allowed for certain Christian music stations, but the children had to glue the dials so they couldn’t be turned.
Occasionally, though, they’d get tantalizing glimpses. When Shaina accompanied an adult to a superstore for supplies, she was drawn to the TV aisle, where sets were playing the Disney Channel. She stared longingly at the adventures of Zack & Cody and thought: “Why can’t I watch this all the time?”
Eventually, though, a rare honor was bestowed among the Brodericks: each child was invited to live in Alamo’s house. “It felt like (we) were so privileged,” Shaina says. “(But) it ended up being really scary. Because (we) got to see the real Tony.”
‘Praying to die’
Inside his home, the Brodericks say, Alamo berated and demeaned his wives. He woke the children up in the middle of the night and forced them to watch for hours as he tape-recorded messages of doom and fury. An intricate reporting system was put in place: everyone in the cult was ordered to log bad behavior, and Alamo kept extensive notes in a filing cabinet. “You weren’t supposed to talk about anything you saw in the house,” Alexis says.
Alexis is the youngest sibling, but she had a sharp intuition. She saw girls “marry” Alamo and become one of his many wives once they began menstruating – the moment, he insisted, that they were mature enough to become his wives. “I knew that was what was gonna happen to me,” she says. When she was eight or nine, Alamo had an adult buy her bras.
“Consent is puberty,” he later told The Associated Press. “It’s not according to me. That’s according to the Bible,” he said in a 2008 interview with CNN. During that interview Alamo denied being a polygamist but added, “What would be wrong with that?,” citing Biblical figures who had multiple wives.
Violence was common. “I quickly learned to keep my head down and (not) look him in the eyes,” says Shaina. Eye contact often led to beatings. “I was terrified of him,” Shaina says. “You always lived in fear.”
And there was a sadistic streak to the attacks. One dark day, Shaina was summoned for punishment: her sister had reported her for discussing one of Alamo’s abusive tirades.
“He had all the wives come and watch, and then had four women hold me down,” Shaina says. Among them was Alexis. Shaina begged to be spared: “He kind of acted like he was going to forgive me – and then he just laughed.” A beating ensued, leaving Shaina black and blue. For two weeks, it was painful just to sit.
The memory is a difficult one for both sisters to revisit. “I just stood there and held her leg,” Alexis says. “I remember closing my eyes because I didn’t want to watch.”
“Now, thinking back on it, it’s like: How could you allow that to happen to your sister?” she says. “But that was just what we were taught to do … we were brainwashed.”
The Brodericks’ father later admitted to a court that he allowed his daughters to live at the group’s facility while he traveled out of town for months at a time to work, but he denied knowing and refused to believe that any children had been beaten or sexually abused by Alamo.
Soon after her beating, Shaina was exiled to the adjoining House of Scorn, where Alamo sent girls who displeased him. “I was isolated from all my family,” she says.
“I remember just crying and praying to die,” she says. She was 12 years old.
A few days later, another prayer was answered.
The raid
Matthew saw the cars first: a fleet of black SUVs, then SWAT vehicles, darting like an arrow towards Alamo’s compound.
He was monitoring the church in September 2008 with an elder, who rushed to phone Alamo’s office. They were ready for this: Alamo had become increasingly paranoid about the authorities. Armed guards were placed outside the compound, and children were instructed to remove water pistols and miniature guns from their Lego sets, in case the feds argued that weapons were encouraged on the compound.
“He was terrified they were going to try and do what happened in Waco to us,” Matthew says. He kept preaching that “God’s about to make a move.”
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
