New Nonprofit Offers Support To Former Community Of Jesus Members

ORLEANS – When Shawn DeLude left the Community of Jesus at the age of 15, he turned away from almost everything and everyone he knew. Out on his own, he found the freedom that he never had as a Community member, but acclimating to life outside of the Rock Harbor compound was difficult. 

DeLude went through bouts of homelessness. At times, he was forced to find his meals on the streets. He tried therapy but said he couldn’t find the professional help he needed. 

“It wasn’t always easy,” he said. “There were people that came in and out of my life as my life evolved and theirs changed. But I found enough help and resources from people willing to reach out and befriend me when I needed it.” 

But for all the challenges he faced trying to forge a path forward outside of the tight control of the Community, DeLude said he had it easier than others who made the decision to leave. Some people left the Community with nothing and nowhere to go.

Bonnie Zampino, another former Community member, also was homeless after she left the Community at the age of 18. 

“Living in a homeless shelter wasn’t any weirder than living in a cult,” said Zampino, who now lives in West Virginia. “They were two extremes, but I never had anything in the middle. I never knew that there were people that lived the way I live now, belonging to a neighborhood and going to work, raising my kids. I didn’t know that that existed.”

Now DeLude and Zampino are working to help provide a network of resources for other Community “survivors” to help them assimilate to life away from the religious organization. The two are in the process of establishing Rock Harbor Truth as a nonprofit through which funds and resources can be gathered to provide assistance to former members in a host of areas, from housing to legal and mental health resources. Through a website, they’re also working to make information about the Community and its operations available to the broader public.

“Rock Harbor Truth is the work of all the survivors,” DeLude said, noting that the organization is currently run by one staffer and a number of volunteers. “It’s all of us coming together, and we’re working on that as well. We’re providing an opportunity to unify, and in doing so we can identify all the survivors that are out there.”

Founded in 1970 by Cay Andersen and Judy Sorensen, the Community of Jesus today is composed of approximately 200 members, many of whom live in the Community’s Rock Harbor compound. Stories and allegations of physical and mental abuse allegedly inflicted on members by Community leaders have surrounded the organization for decades. Most recently, in July, a former member, Oliver Ortolani, filed a civil suit in U.S. District Court in Boston alleging that the Community’s performing arts center in Brewster was built using unpaid child labor and that the Community trafficked children through the project in violation of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. 

Through their attorney, Jeffrey Robbins, the Community and two other nonprofit defendants, Arts Empowering Life, Inc. and Performing Arts Building Foundation, Inc., have repeatedly denied the allegations outlined in the suit. 

DeLude called Rock Harbor Truth the first “officially unified front of survivors” of the Community of Jesus. Both he and Zampino said that, had an organization like that existed when they decided to leave the Community, it would have made all the difference.

“To have a place to go, to see the history of what has been said about [the Community] over the years, I think would have been life changing,” Zampino said. “Because you’re very isolated when you’re there, and you’re really isolated when you leave. To see that other people experienced similar things, I just think would have been amazing.” 

Planning around Rock Harbor Truth started following the death of Aaron Bushnell, a former Community member and serviceman in the U.S. Air Force who died by self-immolation outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. in February 2024. In a video that the 25-year-old Bushnell recorded of the incident, he said he committed the act as “an extreme act of protest” against the treatment of the people of Palestine, adding that he would “no longer be complicit in genocide.”

According to a published report in New York Magazine following his death, Bushnell described himself as being part of a “toxic and abusive family system” and requested that no members of the Community of Jesus be in attendance at his funeral.

“Psychologically, I just think that’s not something that any normal person would choose to do,” DeLude, who said he knew members of the Bushnell family, said of Aaron Bushnell’s death. “Having known what he was subject to, we believe that’s why he did what he did.”

There has historically been reluctance by the broader community to address allegations of abuse at the Community head on. DeLude said local businesses, for instance, have been afraid to wade too far into the Community’s operations out of fear of losing business from its members.

But that’s begun to change, according to Zampino, who said Bushnell’s death has caught the attention of the larger public in a different way.

“He talked so much about how he wanted to end a war overseas,” she said. “And I think what he’ll do instead is help end something that’s really bad right here. His death wasn’t in vain, but I think that brought focus.”

One of DeLude and Zampino’s early efforts through Rock Harbor Truth was the establishment of a “safe house” where survivors could settle upon leaving the Community. But DeLude said that insurance and other issues made operating the house more difficult than organizers anticipated. 

“We also had to figure out how we were going to pay for this, how we were going to fund it,” he said. “These were the conversations that really kind of forced us toward forming a nonprofit, particularly when we wanted to raise funds for something like this.”

Zampino said that the focus then became to take a “several-pronged approach” to helping Community survivors. That included creating what she and DeLude call an informational “clearinghouse” where people can learn more about the Community and how it operates. The Rock Harbor Truth website includes a history of the Community and Grenville Christian College, a now-defunct school in Canada that had ties to the Community, as well as records and documents relative to the Community’s finances and land transfers within the Community.

A Rock Harbor Truth podcast, “The Cult on the Cape,” was launched last month. Hosted by Zampino, the podcast has so far featured interviews with former Community members as well as with local authors that have written about their experiences in the Community and Grenville Christian College.

There’s growing interest in town about the Community, DeLude said, adding that the information shared through the website and the Rock Harbor Truth Facebook page has been very well received by people thus far.

“We are emphatically about educating the public as to what’s going on, because we’re dealing with a particular entity here in town that is very good at masking what entity is tied to the next and where the money goes,” he said.

And while their experiences in the Community have informed their work with Rock Harbor Truth, DeLude and Zampino said that the organization is not geared toward expressly supporting former Community members. Those in need of help moving on from other organizations or institutions can also seek their assistance, they said. Rock Harbor Truth has the ability to connect former members with a number of local organizations and nonprofits, among them Housing Assistance Corporation and the Community Development Partnership, which are more readily equipped to help provide them with the resources that they need.

“We met with all the heads of these organizations, and what we realized is we were trying to reinvent the wheel,” DeLude said. “They have these resources. They have professional help.”

And as the organization works toward achieving nonprofit status, there’s also a need for fundraising to provide former members with the help they need. That can take many forms, DeLude said. Some people leave their spouses behind in exiting the Community, which can entangle them in legal issues involving finances and housing. Others might need counseling or more basic support such as food assistance.

DeLude said Rock Harbor Truth has so far been funded through funds gathered through a GoFundMe campaign, as well as some other private donations. But he said the goal is to undertake “an aggressive fundraising campaign” to help secure “a round of investors” to support the project. So far, the organization has received four or five financial “pledges” of $10,000 or more, a number DeLude said he expects will “soar.” But the organization needs to secure its nonprofit status in order for those pledges to become monetary donations, he said.

In an email, Robbins discredited Rock Harbor Truth as “a reliable source of misinformation and disinformation, spread by someone who has had not even minimal firsthand knowledge of the good people who are part of the Community of Jesus for somewhere between 35 and 40 years.

“That the hateful, truly bigoted orchestrator of this website uses the word ‘truth’ in its name would be hilarious were it actually funny,” he said. “But it is not amusing at all. The site is a geyser of poison aimed at a religious minority that has the nerve to practice the teachings of Christ, a website intended to play on some peoples’ hatred of ‘the other.’”

The “vast majority” of Cape Codders, Robbins continued, recognize the Community’s members as “the good, decent and genuine neighbors that they are.”

“That is why literally thousands of people visit the Community’s grounds, or attend Community programs, each year,” he said.

But DeLude and Zampino said if more people knew where their money in support of the Community’s various programs and performances went, they might not be as inclined to support it. 

The defendants in the Ortolani suit have each filed motions to dismiss the charges brought against them, citing a lack of evidence provided in support of the suit’s allegations. But DeLude said the allegations in the suit brought by Oliver Ortolani mirror the stories of many former Community members going back decades. The Chronicle has talked to multiple former Community members in recent months who have alleged that they were verbally abused, forced to work in the Community and separated from their immediate families. 

“It’s too late for me,” DeLude said. “It’s too late for many people I know due to the statute of limitations. But everything he’s alleged are things that I experienced myself. This is not one case, this is all of the cases. Every survivor will tell the same story.”