Bartholomew's Notes

Here’s one I missed from October: a Mail Online article by Tom Leonard with “astonishing new allegations” from Bette Davis’s daughter Barbara Hyman, better known as “B.D. Hyman”:

…She says her mother was so possessive that she couldn’t tolerate her marriage — aged just 16 — in 1963 to British film executive, Jeremy Hyman, 13 years her senior.

Unable to persuade her daughter to leave Hyman, the actress apparently placed a ‘demonic’ curse on their family that led to their older son developing bipolar disorder and Bede being diagnosed with ‘terminal’ cancer, which she miraculously survived.

…Even more dramatically, she also relates how one night, at Davis’s Beverly Hills mansion in 1984, she watched her mother go through occult rituals in a ‘last-ditch attempt’ to make Bede ‘run back to her’.

Lying in bed, she says she suddenly felt tremendously scared. As she locked the French doors to the terrace, Davis appeared on the balcony and rattled the doors.

‘She began demonic cackling and I watched her transform into a Satanic figure — a Satanic face, long claws on the ends of her hands as she scraped at the glass,’ Bede said.

This was in fact the second article from Mail Online on the subject – the same ground was covered in March, although in that version Davis’s “long claws” manifested in 1982. The earlier piece was based on videos uploaded by Hyman to YouTube in 2015, and Hyman in fact claimed that “Bette Davis engaged in a Satanic assault against her family” in a 2003 magazine interview. The news hook for the March article was the TV series Feud (currently available in the UK on the BBC iPlayer), in which “B.D.” is depicted as a teenager, while Leonard’s October piece was a response to a new sympathetic memoir of Davis by her former personal assistant Kathryn Sermak.

Hyman notoriously attacked her mother’s reputation in her 1985 memoir My Mother’s Keeper, which was published at a time when Davis was seriously ill. However, as Leonard notes, “there is nothing about witchcraft” in this earlier account. She followed up with Narrow is the Way, which she co-wrote with her husband; this sequel includes an account of her religious conversion that was soon afterwards summarised in The Forerunner, and now available online. Hyman said that she became interested in Christianity through an encounter with a travelling salesman named Serafino Fazio, and that she was subsequently healed of an illness after she saw Pat Robertson miraculously describe her “age, location, and back problem” during an episode of the 700 Club. According to a 1985 report in the Washington Post, much of the the advance for My Mother’s Keeper was donated to Robertson and to her local Assemblies of God church.

Hyman’s ministry is based in Charlottesville, VA, and her 2003 reference to Davis as committing a “Satanic assault” was made in a local magazine called The Hook. The profile has further details:

 When asked how her family came to Charlottesville after a five-year stint in the Bahamas, she says, “Virginia was the last bastion of real fox hunting left in America, and that was what God used to get us here.”

She’s tracking bigger prey now. Rooting out satanic infiltration of contemporary culture, B.D. Hyman warns in her 2002 book, The Rapture, The Tribulation And Beyond, that babies are sacrificed on Halloween; Harry Potter indoctrinates children into the occult; and the Antichrist is promoting his agenda of homosexuality. Aggressively.

As for the coming time of tribulation, B.D. Hyman writes: “People will pray for death but not die. There is no repentance for those who receive the mark of the beast… [just] eternal condemnation and torment in the lake of fire.”

Hyman also told The Hook that she has “hundreds” of ministry partners; one supporter provided a testimony of healing for the article, and Hyman further claimed that some partners have been cured of Aids.

Hyman’s father was Bette Davis’s third husband, William Grant Sherry, who married her nanny Marion Richards two days after being divorced by Davis. Hyman told the Washington Post that Davis had told her that her father had run off with Richards, when in fact Davis had thrown him over for her next husband, Gary Merrill. Time magazine quoted Sherry as describing his new – rather younger – wife as a “very spiritually impressive girl”. Details about Sherry’s later life are scarce, although according to Hyman’s website he became an “elder” in a “cult”, which he in due course left following “intercessory prayer”. He died in 1995.

One interesting connection here is that Marion Sherry, who died in 2014, had a niece named Pamela Leigh Richards, who maintains a webpage with details about her “Uncle Grant and Aunt Marion”. Pamela Richards is probably best known as David Icke’s second wife; it’s curious that while the fundamentalist Hyman claims that her mother physically transformed into “a Satanic figure”, her New Age step-cousin was for a time married to a man who claims that various public figures are shape-shifting reptiles (a belief that Richards says contributed to the end of their marriage, as Icke feared that she might be one).

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