SEDUCED BY CHARLES MANSON... AT 14!
In a new memoir, the youngest member of the Manson Family reveals why she joined the depraved cult
Dianne Lake was a lost, vulnerable teenager when she first met “Charlie” at a party. The 14-year-old had been living in a commune with her hippie parents, who had given her a note, essentially emancipating her.
“Charlie held me at arm’s length, looked at me and said, ‘Oh you’re beautiful. I want to talk to you. I’ve been looking for you,’” she says.
Dianne found Manson, 32, charming, witty and intriguing. The girls he lived with made her feel welcome and special, a feeling she had been craving her whole life.
Hours later, Manson led Dianne out of the party and into his “magic bus” where he seduced her.
“He took his time to explore my body,” Dianne, 64, recalls of the encounter. “After a few minutes, he put himself inside me while staring in my eyes. When he finished, he sighed: I exhaled and realised I was hooked.”
From that moment on, Dianne was part of what came to be known as the Manson Family. They lived a transient life, moving between houses in California on the bus, taking part in acid trips, orgies, sermons and dumpster diving.
Manson told his growing group of followers what to do. He delivered sermons and saw himself as the second coming of Jesus Christ.
“We are all together for a reason,” Manson would tell them. “Think about my name and you will understand your purpose. I am Man-son, man son, man’s son.”
While Dianne and the handful of girls in the Family were being brainwashed, they found their life quite exciting. Bands came through frequently and some of them even moved in with the Beach Boys’ drummer Dennis Wilson in 1968.
But their quality of life was always dependent on one thing – Manson’s mood.
Dianne learned to read his erratic behaviour, particularly after the day he beat her with an extension cord for taking too long to put the dishes away.
“I never saw it coming,” she says. “There was no way I was going to cry. The more he beat
me, the more I held in my tears and stared him down.”
But the abuse didn’t stop her from loving Mason. He managed to convince Dianne and his girls it was all part of a woman submitting to her man.
“This is how all you women need to be,” Manson told them. “You need a father to tell you what to do and you damn well better listen.”
Over time, Manson taught the cult members how to stab someone with a knife, claiming it was for self-defence. He also instilled fear in them of an impending race war.
When Dianne was 16, fellow cult member Leslie Van Houten come home and frantically threw items in the fireplace.
Soon afterwards, she realised Van Houten and other Family members had slaughtered seven people over two nights, including pregnant actress Sharon Tate. They admitted it, and were seemingly proud of what they had done after their leader Manson had ordered the murders to take place.
Horrified, she knew it was the end of the Family as she knew it.
“All I could do was nod silently, my emotions moving quickly from terror to disgust to fear and back again,” she says. “I had been with the Family from the start. I’d been there by everyone’s side during the births, the garbage runs, the lovemaking and the sermonising. I’d been abused, I’d been raped and I’d been forced to perform sexual acts at Charlie’s command.
“But after everything I’d seen, everything I’d lived through, I understood – brainwashed as I was – that this was the end of the Family as I knew it.”
After a few weeks on the run, Dianne, Manson and the rest of the followers were arrested. However, because she was underage, Dianne was taken to a mental institution.
A year later, she faced Manson again in a Los Angeles court, where she testified against him and finally saw him as the monster he had always been.
“He was a fake, a fraud, a pimp and a con artist,” Dianne says of her former leader. “And now I was truly free of him.”
Once Manson was convicted of multiple counts of first-degree murder and jailed for life, Dianne was finally able to move forward. She married, raised three children and completed a master’s degree in education.
There’s little doubt she felt sweet relief when the man who was once her master manipulator died of natural causes at the age of 83 last November. Read more in Dianne Lake’s memoir Member Of The Family (William Morrow, $24.99).
‘I’d been abused, I’d been raped’