The patriarch of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints leads 10,000 people, and is wanted for sexual assault and various types of criminal misconduct. He has numerous wives and dozens of children, and he keeps them under an iron fist.
Carolyn Jessop, who fled the community under cover of darkness with her eight children in a van and $20 in her pocket, said she still found it “hard to believe this stuff is going on in the United States.”
Jessop, now 38, was the fourth wife of a high-ranking church leader when she escaped that night three years ago. Fear drove her to desperation, she said.
Her oldest son had been yanked out of school at age 12 by his father to work construction jobs. And she feared that Jeffs, an accused pedophile, planned to take her 13-year-old daughter as his bride.
“I would have gone to the ends of the Earth to prevent that,” Jessop said.
This woman has guts.
It’s important to make a distinction here between the modern-day Mormon church and the FLDS. Mormons renounced polymany more than a century ago, largely so that they could incorporate the Utah territories into the rest of the nation. The FLDS isn’t a part of the Church of Latter Day Saints, but an extremist offshoot that the mainstream church doesn’t recognize.
“Man actually belongs to [the] prophet, willing to do what is directed,” Jeffs said in one sermon, according to a transcript. A woman, he said, should concentrate entirely on submitting to her husband, praying each morning, ” ‘I want to do your will, Father, through obeying my husband or my father or our prophet.’ “
The LA Times uses this quote to make it sound like the FLDS is extreme because they expect women to submit to their husbands — but basically every patriarchal religion demands that. It’s just a matter of which directions are emphasized. Just ask some high-ranking religious Republicans who have made similar statements.
“Now if any of you will deny the plurality of wives, and continue to do so, I promise that you will be damned,” Young declared in 1855.
Sect members are taught they cannot reach the highest levels of heaven without at least three wives. Women, or often girls, are “gifted” to men by the prophet, who is seen as revealing God’s plan. A former member said one of his “mothers” was 13 when he was 8. Wives are encouraged to give birth each year.
Some people — particularly some liberals — try and construct polygamy as an equal-opportunity set-up, where it could either be a woman with multiple husbands or a man with multiple wives. That just isn’t the case in practice. Women in polygamous situations like this one are there only for their husband’s service and pleasure.
And these aren’t random people out in the boonies. They’re respected and well-known community members:
Ruth Stubbs was 15 when she asked then-prophet Rulon Jeffs, Warren Jeffs’ father, if she could marry her sweetheart, Carl Cooke. The senior Jeffs said he’d “take it up with the heavenly father,” Stubbs recalled.
When she returned, accompanied by her sister’s husband, Rodney Holm, Rulon Jeffs told her: “It comes to me that you belong to Rod.”
Stubbs said she burst into tears.
“He asked if I was willing to do whatever the prophet asks and I said I was,” Stubbs recalled in a recent interview. “They didn’t even give me 24 hours.”
The two were married in 1998, and Stubbs became wife No. 3 for Rodney Holm, a then-32-year-old Colorado City police officer.
Still, as easily as marriages can be done, they can just as easily be undone.
Richard Holm, a Colorado City town councilman, had both of his wives and his children taken from him and given to his brother. Then he was kicked out of town.
City councilmen. Sherriffs.
Boys booted out of the community were exiled on the flimsiest of pretexts. The reason, say outside investigators, was to reduce competition for wives.
Sam Icke was one of more than 400 youths expelled. They are now known as the Lost Boys. His crime was having a girlfriend. He met with Jeffs before his exile.
“He asked me graphic sex details and took notes,” recalled Icke, who was 18 at the time. “I was told to repent, so I went on a repenting spree. I wanted to stay. I was afraid, like a bird being pushed out of its nest. My dad got a call a few days later from Warren and he said I should leave.”
Icke was helped by the Diversity Foundation near Salt Lake City, which shelters and educates the teens.
The boys said FLDS leaders often sent police to harass and ticket them. Some boys said they left because they couldn’t pay their fines.
“The cops would stalk me and try to give me curfew violation tickets,” said Carl Ream, 17, who was thrown out at age 14.
John Jessop, also exiled at 14, said police would wait for him to get home at night, then cite him for a curfew infraction.
“The cops care more about religion than the law,” he said.
And the police are part of it, too.
Women and girls, needed as wives, are rarely pushed out. Instead, those who disobey face being sent to mental hospitals.
Pam Black said her now deceased husband, a Colorado City police officer, would hold the phone and threaten to dial 911 whenever she refused his commands.
“He would say he was going to have me handcuffed and taken to an insane asylum,” said Black, a former FLDS member. “That’s all a man had to do, call 911.”
Sworn affidavits of FLDS women have accused law enforcement here of illegally transporting them to mental facilities without due process. The affidavits were submitted as part of an Arizona state inquiry into local police practices.
In one instance described under oath, a woman fleeing her abusive husband was picked up by the local sheriff’s deputy, an FLDS member, and taken to a hospital in Utah. According to the affidavit, the deputy called the prophet, not his law enforcement superiors, and was directed to a Provo, Utah, mental facility.
Other women said they were taken by police to the Guidance Center, a mental hospital in Flagstaff, Ariz.
Laurene Jessop ended up there after brawling with a “sister wife” who she said had tried to strangle her daughter. Their husband summoned the police. Two Colorado City officers arrived, handcuffed Laurene Jessop and took her in a police car to the Guidance Center, she said.
That’s right: Get a little uppity, and off to the mental hospital you go. And the police are entirely complicit in it.
“My best friend got married at 14. Her husband … started getting on me. I went to my parents; big mistake…. The prophet Leroy Johnson decided I should marry [the abuser],” Petersen recalled. “I’d be his fifth wife and he was 48.”
Petersen said if molesters were caught with a girl, the abusers were often told to marry the victims.
Unwilling to marry at 14, Petersen ran away to Las Vegas but never really escaped. She learned that her 12-year-old sister had married 39-year-old Colorado City polygamist William Orson Black Jr.
Ugh.
In 2001, Petersen found another of her sisters, Ruth Stubbs, on her doorstep fleeing what she said was an abusive polygamous marriage to Rodney Holm.
Petersen assembled details and persuaded Utah to prosecute Holm for having sex with a minor; Stubbs was 16 when she married him. He was sentenced to a year in jail, serving at night, and was released after six months.
Some criminal justice system we’ve got, eh?
It is rare for polygamists to be prosecuted in Utah. State authorities consider it impractical to prosecute its estimated 20,000 polygamists, though the practice is a felony in Utah.
Well under those standards it’s also “impractical” to prosecute the tens of thousands of non-polygamous child molestors out there, but I don’t hear all that many voices arguing that we should just let them be.
“They keep saying it’s a religious freedom issue,” Petersen complained. “I keep saying it is not a religious freedom issue, it’s about sleeping with children.”
Um, yeah. Religious freedom has its limits. And it stops when your “freedom” is injuring someone else.
Rodney Holm’s conviction provided an opening for other victims, the first crack in FLDS defenses against outsider intrusions. A group of Lost Boys followed up with a lawsuit against the church. Another man sued Warren Jeffs saying the prophet molested him as a child.
Internal frictions mounted as Jeffs imposed increasingly draconian punishments.
He called a rare town meeting in January 2004 and read the names of 21 men he called “master deceivers,” including Colorado City Mayor Dan Barlow. They were excommunicated, and Jeffs gave their wives and children to other men.
Gave their wives and children. You’re all just property. Or at best, rewards.
Most significantly, however, former insiders began telling their stories. Few were as explosive as the one told by Brent Jeffs. And he told his in a formal complaint filed in court.
In 2004, Brent Jeffs named his uncle Warren Jeffs in a civil suit seeking damages for alleged sexual abuse suffered as a boy. He charged that his uncle routinely sodomized him as a 5-year-old in the bathroom at an FLDS school where Warren Jeffs was a teacher and principal.
Brent Jeffs kept quiet for years, he said, until the nightmares became unbearable. He said he would wake screaming, “Don’t hurt me! Don’t hurt me!” When he finally told his family, two of his brothers said the same abuse happened to them.
Warren Jeffs did not respond to the suit. He has not been seen in public since the lawsuit was filed.
Brent Jeffs, now 23, is seeking a default judgment. His brother Clayne shot himself in the head shortly after sharing his long-held secret.
Even more points for these winning men.
Oh, and before you start thinking that these are just good old religious, conservative folks, check this out:
His office also is looking into allegations of welfare fraud. Shurtleff said 66% of Hildale residents and 78% in Colorado City received welfare, usually food stamps.
So much for black welfare queens and their cadillacs. This is the right-wing extremist base that’s sucking up welfare dollars so that they can obtain more child brides. Where’s the Republican outrage?
We’ll see if these people are ever brought to justice.
Oh, and does anyone else find it a little fucked up when you look at a family photo and you can’t tell who are the mothers and who are the daughters?
The LA Times is covering this one pretty deeply. In another article, they write:
Among sect members, girls as young as 13 are forced into marriage, sexual abuse is rampant, rape is covered up and child molesters are shielded by religious authorities and law enforcement.
Boys are thrown out of town, abandoned like unwanted pets by the side of the road and forcibly ostracized from their families to reduce competition among the men for multiple wives.
Children routinely leave school at age 11 or 12 to work at hazardous construction jobs. Boys can be seen piloting dump trucks, backhoes, forklifts and other heavy equipment.
Girls work at home, trying to keep order in enormous families with multiple mothers and dozens of children who often eat in shifts around picnic tables.
Wives are threatened with mental institutions if they fail to “keep sweet,” or obedient, for their husbands.
Warren Jeffs, a wiry third-generation church member, is the sect leader — a post that carries the title “prophet” and gives him virtually absolute control over the most intimate conduct.
Jeffs orders marriages, splits up families, evicts residents and exiles whomever he wants with no regard for legal processes. He even tells couples when they can and can’t have sex.
Sounds pleasant.
But then, it does seem to be a basic rule in all modern fundamentalist religions that sex must be controlled — and of course, women = sex.
Charged with protecting and serving their community, Colorado City police have long had a reputation for protecting and serving church interests instead.
The force, which covers Hildale as well, is reportedly handpicked by FLDS leaders. Call 911 here, say state investigators, and it is the same as calling the FLDS.
Former police employees and state investigators say officers either ignore molestation allegations or send them to the church rather than to outside prosecutors.
Paul Musser, a former dispatcher for the Colorado City police, was eyewitness to the daily activity of the station.
“Sex crimes were handled very delicately, very discreetly,” he said. “They were taken to the prophet.”
Sam Roundy, a polygamist and former Colorado City police chief, moonlighted as a church security officer. He told investigators from the police standards boards of Arizona and Utah who were evaluating his training that between 20 and 25 times he failed to report child sex abuse cases as required by law.
As a result, state child welfare agencies were often unaware of molestation allegations and unable to help or intervene on behalf of possible victims. Another result was the reluctance of victims to call police in the first place.
So even the authority figures, and the people who are supposed to help you, are part of this scheme where patriarchy has gone wild.
“I never once considered going to the police,” said Sara Hammon, 30, who told of enduring years of sexual abuse at the hands of her father and brothers.
“Going to the police would have been going against the whole town. Everyone was [molesting]. The church never said it was all right, but it was treated nonchalantly.”
Although many police officers on the local force have multiple wives, state authorities have rarely acted to remove practicing polygamists — a felony in Utah and a violation of the Arizona Constitution. State officials hired a polygamist as a lawman to patrol the area.
See, this isn’t just a regional problem. State officials are not only allowing it to happen, but encouraging it.
In 2001, Dan Barlow Jr., son of the Colorado City mayor, was charged with 14 counts of sexual abuse, accused of repeatedly molesting his five daughters, ages 12 to 19, over several years. According to the police report, Barlow confessed to the crimes.
Letters begging for mercy poured into Ekstrom’s office in Kingman, Ariz. The daughters expressed love for their father and asked that he not get any prison time. They also asked that they not be required to testify against him.
FLDS member LeRoy Fischer said Barlow shouldn’t be jailed because he was the only locksmith in town and “a prison sentence would only add an additional burden to society.”
Floyd Barlow, the defendant’s son, said his abused sisters “look happy” and could get emotional help from their mother if necessary.
Barlow was allowed to plead guilty to a single, lesser charge of sexual abuse, and was sentenced to 120 days in jail — most of which was suspended. He served 13 days.
Ah, justice.
Sometimes the leniency shocked even defense attorneys. Jim McGhee, attorney for Dan Barlow Jr., was stunned by his client’s 13-day sentence.
“I saw it as a victory, but the fact that he spent 13 days in jail for molesting five daughters is pretty amazing,” he said. “The fact that the judge went along with it is one of the most surprising things.”
Mohave County Superior Court Judge Richard Weiss, who presided over the case, said it was really just “a little bit of breast touching.”
Oh is that all.
And naturally, they’re racist and anti-intellectual, too:
Financial collapse came after FLDS leaders in 2001 ordered all of their children to abandon public education and attend private church schools. The curriculum teaches, among other things, that man never walked on the moon and that blacks are cursed by God.
But who needs facts when you have faith?
The head of Utah’s Division of Child and Family Services, Richard Anderson, said the best bet for an abused girl in the community was “to find someone she can trust.”
That’s tough in a tightly run theocracy where girls are taught to obey males and interaction with the outside world is largely forbidden.
Yes, thank you.
Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) once visited the FLDS church in Hildale and played the organ. He later defended the group when asked about its alleged abuses.
“All I can say is I know people in Hildale who are polygamists who are very fine people. You come and show me the evidence of children being abused there, and I’ll get involved,” he told local reporters. “Bring the evidence to me.”
Through a spokesman, Hatch declined to be interviewed for this story. Staff aide Peter Carr said allegations of FLDS abuse were “a matter for local and federal prosecutors.”
In his successful 1991 bid for Arizona governor, Fife Symington wrote an open letter to the residents of Colorado City concerning their “family-oriented lifestyles,” vowing never to do anything to “upset or question” their religion.
“Our policy was one of noninterference,” he said recently. “The advice I got when running was this was an issue I wanted to stay away from.”
That’s right: Those “family values” Republicans are standing up for these folks. Why do I feel like I’m going further and further down the rabbit hole?
And there’s even more.
One former FLDS member, a woman who asked not to be identified because she still lived nearby, said she knew of such child abuse but did nothing.
“One of my girls had an experience with my husband, and I got angry and was making a fuss, and one of the sister wives said he was confused and thought my daughter was his wife,” she said. “I told myself: As long as God upholds him, I will.”
Well, there ya go.
The Hammon house was chaotic. There were 75 children and 19 mothers, or “sister wives.” Whenever J.M. Hammon came home, the children lined up and he asked each one, “What is your name and who is your mother?”
Even as her father lay dying, Hammon said, he reached up her dress.
Everyone in Utah knows this is going on, and they aren’t doing much about it, elected officials — senators! — included.
When she was 7, Hammon said, a teenage brother tried to rape her in the family barn. Other brothers molested her as well, she said.
She tried organizing a family meeting to stop the abuse, but one of her mothers told her that “boys have a sex drive and can’t be blamed,” and the discussion ended there.
Well now that sounds familiar.
What’s striking about articles like this is how the same patriarchy-excusing lines are used to prop up polygamist cults, mainstream religious organizations, and the general conservative status quo. “Boys will be boys.” The concept of female sexuality as pathological. Telling women when they can and cannot have sex. And on and on.
Read the articles.
I did a fair amount of research on Mormonism and polygamy for a chapter on…I’ll stop there and leave it at “for a chapter.” Point being, the best book I found on textual Mormonism was An Insider’s View of Mormon Origins; the best on contemporary Mormon culture, Under the Banner of Heaven. Granted, mainstream Mormons aren’t happy with either book, but they’re amenable to the sectarianism of Under the Banner and can accept it as an explanation of particular, splinter organizations. (Plus, it’s a thumping good read, as my literary journalism students will attest.) As for An Insider’s View, well, I’ve yet to hear a Mormon speak a kind word about it, but it’s written by someone who still considers himself a part of the flock, and it’s textually solid, so there’s something to say for it.
If you haven’t already, read Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer. Colorado City is profiled at length.
Thirding Under the Banner of Heaven.
Also, here’s a story on the Canadian town associated with this sect: the fifth estate: Bustup in Bountiful. You can watch it online.
cults love welfare. when i was with the hare krishnas, i think almost everyone i knew was getting foodstamps. it was one of the justifications they gave for paying us no wages or illegally low wages for our work. there was always welfare.
You touch on it, but one thing that most people don’t notice about polygamy is, that the biggest victims are not necessarily the women, but often the men (specifically, the beta- and gamma-males). No, not the men with a dozen wives (the alpha males). The men who want to marry someone but can’t because the “big men” have married everyone already.
In a lot of cultures, this has resulted in opportunistic homosexuality (don’t think Castro Street, think prison) and in the inability of men to work together because each sees the other as a competitor for women and a threat.
Well, Glaivester, I wouldn’t necessarily say that the beta males are the “biggest” victims where 13-year-old girls are married off to old men and traded like property, but yes, they do get the shaft. At least in terms of not being able to lay claim to the women who are bought and sold as resources.
Well now, I’ve actually been to Hillsdale/Colorado City (aka Shortcreek). I can tell you that the feeling of suspicion and fear are almost palpable. It is profoundly weird. Imagine a nice little town in the desert only with dorms instead of houses.
However, if you want to see true evil, study up on the Kingston Clan.
Someday, we may figure out how you wound up in Utah, Magis.
And what the hell you were doing in Hillsdale.
Actually, many of the teenage boys are driven out of the communities, so they won’t be competition. Seriously. A lot of boys between 14 and 16 show up in Social Services offices in Utah and other places where they have these communities. They have no education, they’re just kids, and they’ve been dumped off by their families like an unwanted dog abandoned by the side of the road. they’re under orders never to speak to any member of their family ever again. A lot of them try to go home, and just get thrown outrepeatedly, sometimes with violence. We have one of these nutjob communities here in the BC Interior, and there’s been a lot of stuff in the newspapers about these boys. One ex-member of the church actually set up a group home solely for these boys, because when Social Services put them in regular foster homes or group homes, they were completely lost because they didn’t understand the outside world. The guy who runs the group home said a lot of these boys cry for their mothers, but the mothers are forbidden to agree to contact with htem. Letters and birthday cards get sent back, the whole works.
So, yeah, it’s horrible for the girls, but it’s not exaclty a bed of roses for the boys, either, unless they’re lucky enough to be part of the minority of teenage boys who aren’t driven off. I mean, there has to be a major imbalance between the numbers of adult men and adult women so the polygamous, patriarchal system can work. That means getting rid of boys. I suppose we should count our blessings and be glad they’re just driven off, as opposed to being murdered.
Oh, wait, that’s already in the article. I’m a dim-bulb. Just ignore me.
I understand that MOST christian-types aren’t this scary–even most Mormons. All the same, I can’t really say I’m surprised. By focusing on Christ’s death as a excising of sin–rather than on his life and teachings about humility and compassion–early Christian leaders effectively created the framework for a personality cult. Without Paul and Timothy, I suspect that Christianity might well have become a philosophy very similar to Buddhist/Hindu-Samanic mysticism. Instead, it chose to elevate Christ’s final act focusing on hero-worship rather than personal betterment. Any institution such as the FLDS should find it terribly simple to carry that paradigm to its most extreme logical conclusion.
This is what happens when we take religious edicts from a patriarchal, indigenous 2,000 year old desert culture, and try to make them work in a society that purports itself to be enlightened, democratic, and focused on principles such as reasoned public discourse and individual liberty. The Utilitarians are spinning in their graves.
zuzu:
I was a Jainist who swatted a fly in the last life.
I was in Hilldale campaigning for a Democratic state senator. His district was larger than Massachusetts and Connecticutt put together. If you find yourself on the wrong side of Lake Powell you can either travel three hundred miles to get on the other side of the district or travel the Arizona Strip for which you go through Hilldale/Colorado City. We also used to have the much more benign Alex Joseph bunch in Big Water.
Magis,
Ten points for the Jainism reference.
Several people mentioned “Under the Banner of Heaven,” but I’d also like to recommend the book Rulon Jeff’s daughter wrote. At the moment I can’t remember the name, which does rather blunt my recommendation, doesn’t it? She describes growing up in a polygamous family and talks about how she rejected it as an adult. It has an interesting connection to “Under the Banner,” in that the same group responsible for the murder described in that book also murdered her father. Sex and violence, as traditional as it gets.
I have a question: Did these people flee England or did they get the boot?
The LDS church was formed in New York state, if I’m not mistaken. Then they were driven out of various places until they wound up in Utah. The church had to renounce polygamy when they were admitted to the Union, and some of the fundamentalists didn’t like that, so they split.
Similar to the way they GOT Capone with Tax Evasion, why can’t/doesn’t the FEDERAL or STATE Government (Arizona, at least) go after the FLDS for Welfare fraud? In all this time SOMEONE must have noticed all the checks going to the same FUCKING ADDRESS(S) !!! Answer of course is they just aren’t TRYING, but this issue (Polygamy) has come WAY out from under the radar since I first read Under THe Banner Of Heaven.
Anyone want to take a guess as to the level of inbreeding going on in these places… I can’t help but think that they don’t get much *new blood*… they’ve all got to be like cousins of each other or something…
Rhiannon, I’ve heard that the inbreeding is very bad, and that the “imperfect” results are kept at home and not allowed out, adding to the burden of the women who do the work at home.
Rhiannon, all of the inbreeding is already making its presence felt.
Those who are aware of this problem – parents, family members and such – all look at it as a special challenge from God, meant to test their faith. It gives one the idea that they explain away every possible negative outcome as a ‘test of faith’, which leads me to believe that these folks will breed themselves into sterility and genetic deterioration before they will ever give up their lifestyles.
Sickening, really. Absolutely sickening.