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Daily Mail
December 15, 2013
When she reflects on it now, the whole notion seems simply preposterous. Tracey Sharp was induced to live for more than a decade in a menage of seven ‘wives’ who shared a single ‘husband’.
Moreover, she was persuaded to believe the absurd fiction that Philip Sharp, once a Messianic Jewish rabbi, was a Biblical king who had been instructed by God to have multiple wives and a brood of children.
‘I do question how I got involved,’ says Tracey, 46, who has two daughters, Naomi, nine, and Mischa, three, by the self-styled king.
She left his Sussex harem in November after their relationship disintegrated into a succession of blazing rows.
She is the first of Philip Sharp’s devotees to break free and tell, in full, the truth about the bizarre household over which he presides. Her story is as compelling as it is extraordinary.
Now, two months after the split, she is pursuing him via the Child Support Agency for £6,500 in unpaid child maintenance; he is contesting the claim.
She says she finally grew sick of his tyrannical autocracy and the unquestioning obedience he demanded from his women. When she defied him, they had blistering arguments — she claims that on two occasions he slapped her.
‘I was vulnerable, insecure and lonely when I met him,’ she says. ‘Philip was my rabbi and a father figure. He made me feel safe and supported. He was also charming and charismatic.
‘He said he’d had a visitation from God and was about to be a king, and I think he genuinely felt God had decreed he should take many wives and that what he was doing was right. At the time I believed it, too, because I wanted it to be true.’
Tracey asked if she was to be one of the chosen ones. When Philip said she was, she felt privileged. ‘I wanted to be one of his “wives”. I wanted him to be a king. It gave my life meaning and me status. When you feel as insecure as I did, it is easy to succumb. I was going to become someone.
‘Now, looking back, I think it is hard to differentiate between what God was telling Philip and what his ego was telling him. He has a huge, huge ego. He is a very confident man, very sure of himself, and that is quite attractive. The fact that he was telling us God has sanctioned the whole set-up gave him enormous power.
‘He was quite manipulative and he expected all his “wives” to be compliant and submissive. He had the capacity to make or destroy our day with a compliment or a cutting remark.
‘But the whole scenario was toxic, because we were always fighting for our place in the hierarchy. There was constant jostling for position. All the “wives” wanted to be Philip’s favourite. We weren’t kind or loving to each other at all.’
Philip’s ‘wives’ are not, of course, legally his spouses. He merely claims to have ‘married’ them when he first had sex with each of them. They take turns to share his bed — a super-king size, as befits his assumed regal status — but there is no rota or allocation of time to each.
‘He would ask “Do you want to stay tonight?” and then you might sleep with him for a week, four nights, a single night. It all depended on his fancy at the time.
‘I don’t think he was particularly sexually voracious — despite being dubbed the Rampant Rabbi. But he was having a lot of sex. When he wanted you to go, his standard phrase was: “Can you change the sheets?” Then you knew it was someone else’s turn to share his bed.
‘If you were out of favour, you might not have sex with him for a year. Then there were times when he’d take two ‘wives’ to bed at once. I think the majority participated in that. He asked me, but I refused. It wasn’t my thing. He justified it. He said whatever goes on in a marriage is all right.’
Philip, 53, keeps racehorses at the converted oast house he shares with his remaining ‘wives’ Judith, Chava, Margo, Hannah, Karyn and Vreni. They range in age from 29 to 68, and have ten children between them, all of whom are home-schooled.
The £675,000 farm, in Whatlington, East Sussex, incorporates an array of stables and a ramshackle collection of caravans that house the overspill from Philip’s expansive family.
The property, which is for sale, is part-owned by Philip, two of his ‘wives’ and his ‘mother-in-law’ Maureen — Karyn’s mother — who is the family matriarch and does not share the matrimonial bed.
The route that took Tracey from a childhood in an ordinary family — her dad owned a plumbing business, her mother worked for BT and she has two brothers — to Philip’s eccentric commune is a circuitous one.
She was living in the New Forest when, in 1998, she first encountered Philip. He was then rabbi of the Messianic Jewish Synagogue — a movement that combines Christian theology with elements of the Jewish faith — in Hove, East Sussex.
Tracey met him when he was a guest preacher at the church she then attended in Bournemouth.
‘He is a good preacher, very charismatic, and what he said struck an immediate chord with me,’ she says. ‘He also came across as genuine and caring.’
Indeed, so impressed was Tracey with the rabbi that she travelled with friends from her church twice-weekly to Hove to worship at his synagogue.
Tracey, who says she did not have a good relationship with her father as a child, saw in Philip the father figure she craved. It is hard to over-state the allure he had.
‘I was insecure at the time and he gave me counselling,’ she says. ‘He made a greater impact on me than anyone had ever done before in my life. I had issues with trusting people; he made me feel supported and safe.’
Before long, Tracey cut ties with her friends in Hampshire, rented a flat in Hove and immersed herself in the life of the synagogue.
