Rose McGowan Talks Growing Up in a Cult

Actress escaped Children of God sect with her siblings and father

Talk about a crazy childhood!

Rose McGowan might have raised some eyebrows when she dated rocker Marilyn Manson back in the day, but nothing compares to the story of being brought up in a cult while living in Italy.

Seriously.

They were called the Children of God and believed in the virtues of free love and preparing for the second coming of Jesus, which doesn't sound too crazy, until they started to advocate something else...

Child-adult sexual relations (cringe).

McGowan explains to People that she does believe in God, but not so much the hippie lifestyle that the cult represented, especially when it came to their attitude toward women and sex.

"I did not want to be like those women. There were basically there to serve the men sexually," she says.

Fearing that his young daughter would be molested, the actress's father decided to leave. "My dad was strong enough to realize that this hippie love had gone south," she says.

The Conan the Barbarian 3-D star admits that "it was not an easy assimilation" when she, along with her siblings and father, moved to the U.S., saying, "My brothers and sisters, we thought everyone was boring."

Well, it's definitely no cult, that's for sure. But despite the horrors that might have come with her childhood, McGowan credits it to her upbringing.

"There are people who will read this story and think I had a strange existence," she says. "I think they've had a strange existence!"