3 Who Beat Children Get 5 Years’ Probation : Crime: The women used the whippings allegedly as a form of religious ritual. The sentence was unusually long for someone with no criminal record.

Three women who allegedly whipped their children as a form of religious discipline each pleaded no contest Monday to one count of felony child abuse and were sentenced to five years’ probation.

The supervised probation, unusually long for women with no criminal records, is intended in part to protect the children, some of whom will be 18 by the time their mothers’ probation ends, said the prosecutor, Deputy Dist. Atty. Fred Klink.

The women, Valerie Okongwu, Yulonda Wade and Nita Sims, also were ordered to attend parenting classes. Okongwu said they have already attended such classes. The probation will be reviewed in 1994, when it may be ended or changed to unsupervised probation, said Superior Court Judge Richard Neidorf.

They were arrested after relatives took some of their children to police on Christmas Day. The children bore welts and bloody wounds from what the relatives said were ritualistic “deliverance whippings” by all three women. During the beatings, one child later testified, they were forced to cry out, “Go, devil, leave this body.”

Most of the same children were in court Monday with their mothers; some had spent as long as five months in foster care. Okongwu said she had wanted a trial to clear her name, but did not want to put the children through any more turmoil, so she reluctantly entered her plea.

“My daughter said, ‘Mommy, as long as you know the truth, that’s all that matters. If you fight it, there’s going to be more ugly stories about it. At least now we get to be together,’ ” said Okongwu, 31.

The sentencing resolves the child abuse charges filed last year, but it does not answer questions about the church which, by some accounts, came to concern itself with expelling demons, sometimes physically.

The three accused women said the case stemmed not from ritual child abuse, but rather from arguments within their families over churchgoing and child-rearing.

Many of the family members once attended Jesus Cathedral, a church in South-Central Los Angeles that began with a good-sized congregation on 41st Street, then moved to a converted movie-house on Jefferson Boulevard. By Christmas of 1990, some relatives had split from the church, its pastor, Chester Nubine, and his preaching. By the time church services had moved to a rented room in an airport-area hotel, a score or so of the faithful still attended regularly, including the three women and their children.

Nubine, who was questioned by police, faces no charges.

Yes, they whipped their children, the women said, but it was for discipline, not religion: “I admit I went overboard,” said Sims, 25, in punishing her daughter for skipping school, petty thievery and keeping company with boys.

Several children have recanted what they first told authorities. One of them retreated from her testimony on the witness stand, and said her mother did not whip other children, only her, and only because she had misbehaved. Four children told The Times they were whipped but, like their mothers, they said it was because they had acted up, not in any religious ritual.

And they said a relative who took them to police because of their marked and bloody buttocks had promised them money if they talked about the devil and demons.

One 11-year-old girl said the relative was “trying to make a book of our family and call our pastor some Jim Jones person.” The relative had promised that “we’re going to be rich . . . white people will eat this up. They love to hear this about black people.”

Relatives said that is absurd. They saw the welts and marks and were frightened for their nieces and nephews. They said the youngsters told the truth about the whippings at the beginning, and only came up with the Jim Jones story at their mothers’ behest, to confuse the issues. Authorities agree.

“I think the truth (was) probably more clear at the beginning of the case than as time (went) by,” said Klink. “The girls keep wanting to protect their mothers and possibly the preacher too.”

The children’s cousins attended Nubine’s services in December, after their adult relatives had stopped going. They saw no beatings during services, they said, but one cousin recalled that the daughter of one of the accused women confided that she would soon be getting a “deliverance” whipping, and then “(I) don’t have to be bad any more.”

The cousins and their mother, who asked that their names not be used, said Nubine’s preaching changed dramatically last fall, emphasizing demons and discipline. Nubine told one parishioner that she had “sex demons,” they said. He chastised a fat woman because “he saw a pig in her stomach,” they added.

The three women are angry at being painted “as a bunch of freaked-out blacks with this New Age religion,” said Wade. There was nothing peculiar about their church or its pastor, they say.