Good Housekeeping/July 2001
By Kirsten Betsworth as told to Molly M. Ginty
"I hate black people," my eight-year-old son, Oskar, declared one day
last year. I had just picked him up from his father's house, and he
made the announcement as he got in the car. I asked him why, and he
said, "I just hate them." Then I asked which black person he hated, and
he couldn't give me an answer.

I wasn't the first - or the last - time I heard Oskar speak this way. I
knew he got those ideas from my ex-husband, Kevin, who's a prominent
figure in the National Alliance, a hate group that grew out of the
American Nazi Party. And I knew that al long as I shared custody of
Oskar and my other children - Edgar, six, and Klara Vita, four - with
my ex, they would be in danger of becoming like their father.

I married Kevin Alfred Strom in 1990 on a small island off the coast of
Virginia. The ceremony was performed by William Pierce, the leader of
the National Alliance and an author of the Turner Diaries, the book
that is said to have inspired Timothy McVeigh to bomb the federal
office building in Oklahoma City in 1995. After we took our vows,
Pierce told our friends and family members that the purpose of marriage
is to perpetuate the white race. A few of our guests gave us funny
looks, but the words just rolled off my back. I was in love and thought
I needed to show respect for my husband and his beliefs.

My parents taught me that - to them, being the perfect wife was more
important than anything else. My father, a former prison guard and
retired master sergeant, and my mother, a housewife, were very, very
conservative: They didn't let me go to college and didn't allow me to
leave home until I got married. My older brother, Arthur, and I were
conditioned never to speak out, never to ask for help, and never to let
anyone know there were problems in our family. I remember going to
other people's houses and wishing I lived there. It all made me
incredibly depressed, and at age 15, I turned to alcohol. I married my
first husband young - at 19. I would have done anything to get out of
that house.

But the marriage ended in divorce after six months, and I was forced to
move back home. Three years later, I met my second husband, Joseph, who
got me involved in the white pride movement. I found that the more I
agreed with Joseph about his beliefs, the less he would intimidate me.
Our marriage lasted only a year, and I didn't know where to turn when
it was ending. I couldn't go home again: My parents thought I was a
disgrace because my marriages hadn't worked out and because I had
turned to self-help groups to help me with my drinking problem. Kevin,
whom I'd met in 1987 through Joseph, seemed like my salvation.

In the beginning, Kevin came across as smart and soft-spoken -
especially in comparison to Joseph. When I met his friends in the
Alliance, they also seemed bright - people who wanted to talk about
current events and gun control, as opposed to everyone else in my life,
who seemed to care only about football and TV. Kevin and his friends
treated me like a queen at first. To them, I was a rarity - a girl who
was interested in politics but wasn't liberal. I felt like I belonged
somewhere for the first time in my life. One by one, I lost contact
with my own friends.

Our first year of marriage was great. Then Kevin and I moved to the
Cosmotheist Community, the National Alliance's 350-acre compound in
West Virginia that's an hour away from the nearest big town. We lived
in a beat-up trailer next to Pierce and his wife. The compound
stockpiled food and supplies, and the heating and cooling system ran on
its own power. But there never seemed to be more than ten people on
"the land" (as they called it) at any one time, even though the
Alliance claimed a membership of about 10,000 people.

I started feeling lonely very quickly: Kevin spent 12 hours a day
working on an Alliance radio show (for which he got a modest monthly
payment) and preparing for the race war, which he said would kill off
all the minorities and leave the Aryans in power. We were cut off from
the world, and my only companions were the other wives - mostly Eastern
European mail-order brides whom Pierce and the other members had
brought into the States. For Kevin's sake, I sometimes helped out by
photocopying pamphlets and stuffing envelopes with National Alliance
literature, or making plastic tubes that were designed to hold a few
rifles so you could bury them in your backyard. I even posed for a
white supremacist magazine while holding a swastika flag. When I look
at that photo now, I don't see Kirsten, but a person who was completely
brainwashed.

A year later, when we were about to have our first baby, we moved off
the land to nearby Hillsboro. I was happy to leave, but things didn't
get much better. I started shutting out the world and the terrible
things I was hearing about - like the raid at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in
which federal agents killed the wife of a white supremacist Randy
Weaver. I just couldn't handle all this. Right after Edgar was born in
1994, I began to feel really miserable and went to see a doctor. He
wanted me to go to counseling, but Kevin wouldn't allo9w it. He thought
it would expose him.

That's when we started fighting. Kevin would keep me up for days at a
time until I said what he wanted to hear. I remember one particularly
bad 48-hour stretch during which he wouldn't leave me alone until I
said that giving women the right to vote was what had caused everything
in American to go wrong. When we argued, Kevin would call my parents,
who'd yell at me to obey my husband. I felt there was nothing I could
do about my situation. After all, I had been taught all my life that I
was pretty much worthless. And I believed it.

In 1995 we moved to Rochester, Minnesota, a city that was 96 percent
white and rated one of the best places to live in the country. I was
very excited because I thought I'd be able to socialize more. But even
there, I was isolated. I wasn't allowed to make new friends - Kevin was
too afraid to let anyone into our house because if they noticed the
pamphlets or the books, they would know what we were. He didn't want me
to take the kids to the YMCA because he said it was dedicated to the
destruction of the white American family.

Kevin continued to do his radio shows for Pierce, and he let me take a
job as a real estate agent. But after he wrote a letter to the editor
that was published in the Rochester Post Bulletin advocating a racial
breeding program, my boss fired me, telling me that he couldn't afford
to have "something like this" going on in his office.

While we were in West Virginia, I was cut off from current events - no
television, no radio, no newspapers. Although we still didn't have a TV
in Minnesota, I was able to hear about what was going on in the world
without having it filtered through Kevin. About nine months after the
Oklahoma City bombing, I saw reports and pictures from the blast for
the first time. I was horrified - it was so much worse than Kevin had
made it out to be.

I finally began to step back and question his beliefs. Nothing he was
saying could justify what had happened to those children. And I no
longer accepted the idea that when the race wars came, I would have to
kill the people I loved - like my favorite junior high school teacher
who was Jewish; my best friend, a gay classmate who came out to me
after we graduated; and even my brother, because he worked for the
government.

All of it - the intimidation, my isolation, his anger and hatred - were
wearing on me. I didn't think I could take much more. The final turning
point came in November 1996. We were listening to the radio one evening
and heard that a young couple had killed their baby, stuffing its body
into a Dumpster shortly after it was born. I had just had my third
child, Klara Vita (who was named for Hitler's mother), and I couldn't
imagine anyone doing that to an infant.

Then Oskar tottered into the room and started asking questions about
the news. Kevin turned to him and said, "It doesn't matter what
happened to that baby because its parents were a gentile man and a
Jewish woman. That baby deserved to die." At that moment, I realized I
was married to a monster, and he was trying to make another monster out
of my son. I started crying, and for months, I couldn't stop. I broke
down completely and had to spend ten days in the hospital under
psychiatric evaluation.

Kevin left me while I was in the hospital. He got temporary custody of
the children due to my mental state. But by the time the hearing came
around, I had gotten a low-paying secretarial job, and a judge ruled
that I had to give Kevin $430 per month in child support. I ended up in
debt to him for thousands of dollars.

As exhausted, frustrated, and scared as I was, I knew I had to fight
back. In the hospital, I woke up to how restrictive my life had been
and just how horrible Kevin was. He tried to have me committed during
my breakdown and, after I got out, kept me from seeing my kids for nine
months. I knew the longer I was apart from them, the harder it would be
to save them. So two and a half years after the first decision, I went
back to court and won joint custody. The judge also determined that
Kevin had more money than he was claiming, so I got $61 each month in
child support. The legal bills put me $22,000 in debt, but it was worth
it.

Still, the custody battle continues. Kevin wants to move back to West
Virginia with the kids, and I won't let him have them. They're in bad
enough shape as it is. Oskar has been acting out in school. I'm sending
him and Klara to therapy to deal with the trauma of going back and
forth between their father's household and mine.

Kevin and I continue to battle about treatment for our younger son,
Edgar. He was diagnosed with autism at age two, but missed out on
crucial years of special education because Kevin wouldn't let him go to
the school his doctor recommended. Kevin claimed the school promoted
race mixing after seeing non-white kids in their posters and pamphlets.
Thankfully, Edgar is doing much better now that he's in a special
program for autistic kids.

I'm doing better myself. I've gone through psychotherapy, I'm in
college full-time and I'm writing a book. Last year I met a radio
producer named Brian Betsworth, and we got married on New Year's Day,
2001. His 11-year-old son, Tony, is with us every other weekend. I had
never taken Kevin's name when we were married, but I took Brian's
because I wanted to signal the start of my new life.

It's taken me a long time, but I now realize that hating people is just
a sign you hate yourself. I don't want my kids to feel that way ever. I
escaped from a world of anger and prejudice, and I need my children to
know that I figured out what was happening and did my best to speak
out. I want to protect Oskar, Edgar, and Klara from their father's
beliefs and break the cycle of hate.