John Victor Stoen was born on January 25, 1972. His birth certificate lists Grace Grech Stoen as the mother and Peoples Temple attorney Timothy O. Stoen as the father. Less than two weeks later, Tim Stoen signed an affidavit stating that the Temple\u2019s leader Rev. Jim Jones had sired the child. In the years to follow \u2013 and especially after Tim and Grace both left the Temple, both without the child\u00a0 \u2013 Jones would cite the affidavit countless times to demonstrate his paternity of the child, to denigrate Grace\u2019s worthiness to be a mother, and to dismiss Tim\u2019s claims of custody rights.<\/p>\n
Eventually, John Victor Stoen came to the most visible symbol in the battle between Jim Jones and the Concerned Relatives organization, with which both Tim and Grace were both allied by then. Everyone \u2013 Jim Jones, the Temple leaders and members, and the entire Jonestown community on one side; and the Stoens, the oppositional group they belonged to, and the growing number of the Temple\u2019s critics on the other \u2013 knew that if Jones were forced to surrender John Victor, the precedent would have been set, and every relative seeking child custody or adult conservatorship of their family members in Jonestown would be emboldened. Jones would have lost more than just the boy he claimed as his own. He would have lost his claims of absolute power of protection for his followers. After all, if he couldn\u2019t hold on to his own flesh and blood, how could he defend anyone in the community against the other dangerous forces \u2013\u00a0real, imagined and exaggerated \u2013 which were aligned against them?<\/p>\n
For more information and documents, see the page<\/a> on the John Victor Stoen child custody under Primary Sources<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" John Victor Stoen was born on January 25, 1972. His birth certificate lists Grace Grech Stoen as the mother and Peoples Temple attorney Timothy O. Stoen as the father. Less than two weeks later, Tim Stoen signed an affidavit stating that the Temple\u2019s leader Rev. Jim Jones had sired the child. In the years to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"parent":35361,"menu_order":45,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-35338","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/35338","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35338"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/35338\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":125139,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/35338\/revisions\/125139"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/35361"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}