HWA's Grandson, Larry Gott, Speaks of HWA's Incest

Recently Troy Fitzgerald, founder of Secular Safe House, conducted an interview with HWA's own grandson, Larry Gott, the son of HWA's first daughter, Beverly Gott.

In the interview Larry Gott confirms that HWA did commit incest with his daughter as has been publically known since 1980.

You can listen to the interview here.

For those who have not listened to the interview here is an enlightening comment regarding this interview by Head Usher.

Interviews don't always produce nice summary soundbites, but in this case, it did. As a public service, I post the following transcription which I made of Larry's answer to Troy's question about Herbert's character:

"He was a person who craved and used authority over other people. That was sort of the essence of him. No one was close to him ever, not even his wife. He was an authoritarian. And I would tell people that he was not completely honest with everybody about himself because he expected people to hew to a line that he couldn't follow himself, including the divorce thing, and of course the incest. That did happen ... And then he didn't even bother to deny it. He said, 'Well, my people won't believe it anyway.' He was so smug about it. One time I was going to, there was an open house, over at Jet Propulsion Lab and I was being taken over there by David Antion who was Shirley Armstrong's sister's husband, and there was a couple who were not in the church, from back east, and they knew that I was Herbert Armstrong's grandson. And they just asked me, 'Well, is Herbert Armstrong the wonderful, caring, loving, kind, gentle, Christian kind of man that he seems to be?' And my answer was a single word, 'No' ... It was embarrassing, but I just had to tell her the truth. No, he wasn't as he appeared at all. And so if people are basing their beliefs and their desire to be in that church upon the character of its founder, they're making a mistake."

Herbert claimed to be the one and only representative of a heavenly Jesus Christ on earth. He claimed that he was an end-time "Elijah." A long-missing link between heaven and earth. He claimed that his church was the one troo church. He claimed that his (heretical) ministry was the one troo "work" of the christian god. And he said all these things upon his own authority. He asked people to place their trust in him first, and having committed to that, then, secondly, in his interpretation of the christian bible and his interpretation of its god. And by preaching over radio and television, exhorting people to believe his message, he also promoted the impression that he was a paragon of virtue, not a compulsive liar, a pedophile, and in churchy lingo, a totally "unconverted" person.

The bible doesn't mention Herbert Armstrong. It nowhere prophesies Herbert Armstrong's (insignificant) arrival upon the world scene. No supernatural beings came down from heaven above and vouched for Herbert Armstrong. If we made the mistake of being members of his church, it's because we first made the mistake of accepting that anyone who so boldly and unwaveringly claimed to be all that he claimed he was could not display so much confidence unless it were true, and decided to misplace our trust in him on that basis. It's good to remember that the "con" in "con artist" is short for "confidence." Many thanks to Larry Gott for making it undeniably clear, in a way only someone in his position can, that it is impossible for any of Herbert's grandiose claims about himself to have been anything but the calculated deceptions of a man with an amazing talent for confidence.

There is also this comment.

An exact quote from the interview, at 1:02:55:

"We all knew it happened. Nobody spoke about it because of Dottie, we didn’t want to disturb or upset her. None of it was her fault. She was 14 or 15 when it began, so she was not capable of consent in the first place, so what it was, was basically rape. It went on for quite a while. Yes, he did commit incest with his younger daughter."

Direct from HWA's grandson. Let the deniers refute that.

Indeed. This commenter is most correct. How can persons like Bob Thiel continue to deny that the incest happened? HWA most certainly committed incest with his own daughter for ten years.