The three adult children of Oath Keepers boss Stewart Rhodes have detailed what it was like growing up with the libertarian-turned-violent militiaman, from being home-schooled on nothing but the American Revolution to having no food on the table while he was jet-setting around the country.
Rhodes, a Yale-educated lawyer and former paratrooper, has been charged with seditious conspiracy after the feds said he “spearheaded” the most coordinated and serious effort to overthrow the U.S. government on Jan. 6. He and 10 other members of the far-right militia group worked together to recruit, train, and prepare for an attack, and Rhodes continued to call for the overthrow of the government even after the failed insurrection, prosecutors allege.
Rhodes didn’t storm the Capitol himself and instead remained in a D.C. hotel room communicating with other members and even getting on the phone to a Trump intermediary in an effort to speak to the president, one member said.
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The day after his arrest this year, Rhodes’ ex-wife Tasha Adams called him a “complete sociopath” who terrorized and physically abused her and their six children for years until she finally got a divorce.
Speaking for the first time to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch, his three adult children (the other three kids are still minors) said that, on the day Adams filed for divorce in 2018, they packed their bags and tried to sneak out of the house at 4 a.m. by telling their dad, who was already up and “in a mania,” that they were going to buy food.
“We thought that if he is here and we are here when [the divorce papers] are delivered, he would kill all of us. We felt that we were running for our lives,” Sequoia Adams, 19, said.
The couple’s children grew up being home-schooled but the only history Rhodes taught them was the American Revolution, they said. He “brainwashed” them into thinking the world was ending, and constantly moved the family around the country as he “burned everyone around him,” Sequoia said.
“You could tell that he wanted to be George Washington,” said daughter Sedona Adams, 23.
All the kids were born at home and Sequoia said she never got a birth certificate so therefore couldn’t get a passport or social security number later in life. Rhodes used the possibility of getting her birth certificate to psychologically abuse her and force her to maintain contact with him, she said.
Rhodes was initially involved with Texas Rep. Ron Paul, who ran three failed presidential campaigns as both a libertarian and Republican candidate. Rhodes threatened to leave the country if Paul lost in 2004, Sequoia said, and then said he’d do the same if Obama won in 2008.
But when Obama did win, Rhodes instead realized he could bring together other terrified, angry libertarians into some sort of movement, they said. At first it was a supposedly bipartisan group to educate people about their constitutional rights. But when people started donating, the Oath Keepers quickly turned into something darker—and shoddier.
“What he wanted was collapse, so he could be the king of the collapse, with his own little army, so it was always going to go the way it did,” Sequoia said.
As money flooded in, he started jet-setting around the country to give talks, eating at fancy restaurants, and buying top-of-the-line survivalist gear. Meanwhile, his wife and kids had no food on the table and resorted to selling silver to pay the bills, they said.
Rhodes realized “disaster relief” or emergency appeals were the most lucrative, so he’d always be on the phone saying, “We need to create an emergency,” Sedona recalled.
“Anything that they could put up a GoFundMe for—anything that gets a GoFundMe link in front of the mailing list,” his 24-year-old son Dakota Adams said.
The children didn’t mention specific fundraisers Rhodes ran; one of the group’s earlier efforts involved recruiting members and resources to guard rooftops in Ferguson, Missouri, during the 2014 riots sparked by Michael Brown’s death.
When Trump was elected, Rhodes was initially critical and wanted to release an open letter to “school Trump” on the Constitution, the kids said. But he grew paranoid that a Democratic president would give the FBI the green light to charge him over his participation in anti-government militant Ammon Bundy’s infamous standoff with federal authorities on a Nevada ranch in 2014.
By the time Trump lost in 2020, Rhodes was all in on the deluded belief that the election had been stolen and people like him needed to take part in a bloody fight to save the republic.
He is still behind bars awaiting trial after a federal judge shot down claims by his lawyers in February that he should be bailed as he’s “no longer a danger” with Trump out of office.
