262 other children (in addition to the 12 girls) were subjected to neglect under Texas law. In these instances, the parents failed to remove their child from a situation in which the child would be exposed to sexual abuse committed against another child within their families or households.
124 designated perpetrators: Designated perpetrators included men who engaged in underage marriages; parents who failed to take reasonable steps to prevent an underage daughter from marrying an older adult male; and parents who placed their child in, or refused to remove their child from, a situation in which the child would be exposed to sexual abuse committed against another child.
Of the 146 families investigated, 62 percent had a confirmed finding of abuse or neglect, including one or more children in the family. The final disposition of the 146 CPS cases involving families at the YFZ Ranch is listed below:
91 families: Reason to believe CPS determined that is was reasonable to believe that one or both parents in the family sexually abused or neglected a child in the family by entering into an illegal underage marriage with a child; failing to take reasonable steps to prevent the illegal underage marriage of a child; or failing to remove one or more children in the family from a situation in which they would be exposed to an ongoing underage marriage in their family or household.
12 families: Ruled out CPS determined that it was reasonable to conclude that no child in the family was abused or neglected.
39 families: Unable to determine There is not a preponderance of the available evidence to find that abuse or neglect did occur, or to rule it out.
1 family: Unable to complete CPS was unable to complete the investigation due to an inability to locate the subjects of the allegations.
3 families: Administratively closed After reviewing the information received, CPS determined that an investigation was not received.
How can anyone look at those numbers and not be outraged? The state of Texas removed 439 children from the YFZ Ranch and found that in only twelve families could those children be considered completely safe from abuse or neglect. Of the 145 families investigated, 62 percent had a confirmed finding of abuse. Yet parenting classes were somehow supposed to straighten all of that out and establish an environment where children are safe and protected? The raid and investigation cost $12,436,310.
It’s fair to ask where the triumph is in all those numbers.
I could have been one of those mothers because for seventeen years I was. My own life bears witness to the possibility of change and transformation. The lives of my children show the power of human resilience. My life feels like a triumph because with love, support, and persistent determination I was able to forge a life of joy from one of desperation.
Whenever I feel depressed about the outcome of the raid in Texas, I remind myself that losing the battle is not the end of the war until we give up hope. That is as true in epic struggles as it is in each of our lives. The raid on the YFZ Ranch did yield mountains of evidence that are the basis for state trials against eleven FLDS men. If those trials continue to result in convictions, as did the first against Raymond Jessop, it could end up loosening the grip of abuse, degradation, and exploitation that FLDS women and children have endured for years. That is a dream I will never abandon.
On September 15, 1963, a bomb placed by a white man went off in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four African American girls who were in their Sunday school class. The week before, George Wallace, the governor of Alabama, had told the New York Times that his state needed a “few first-class funerals” to stop integration.
On November 4, 2008, forty-five years later, hundreds of thousands of people filled Chicago’s Grant Park to celebrate Barack Obama’s election as president of the United States. I voted for the first time in my life on that day when I cast my ballot for Obama. I, who had been taught in an American public school that Abraham Lincoln was evil for freeing the slaves, helped elect the first African American president.
It was a moment of transformation that would have been unimaginable just a few years earlier. When I think of the FLDS in Texas, I force myself to remember that the horizon is never the end, but only as far as the eye can see. I remind myself that my life today affirms the astonishing, mysterious, and often miraculous power in the human potential for change.
PART TWO
The Tools of My Transformation
My Personal Power Source
Whenever I contemplate how I summoned up the power to leave the FLDS, my thoughts inevitably drift to my maternal grandmother, Jenny Bistlane. Although she lived in a culture dominated by men and worshiped a faith controlled by men, Grandma Jenny never sacrificed herself to any man. She never needed a man’s validation to feel valued or accepted, and she enjoyed being feminine and powerful. “Women are the footstools men use to get into the kingdom of heaven,” she once said.
Grandma Jenny was a paradox in the FLDS. She made her own decisions and was always guided by what was best for herself and her family. When I was growing up, she was the only woman I saw who had genuine respect for herself. I didn’t realize at the time what an impact she would have on me. She adored me, and I loved her spunk and her blunt sense of humor.
I don’t think I ever heard Grandma Jenny talk about marriage as good for women. One day she was complaining about her husband to my mother who, still a child, asked, “If marriage is so bad, why don’t the married women warn the unmarried ones not to do it?” Grandma looked right at her and said, “Misery loves company!”
Yet Grandma had married a man she loved, and they had ten children together. Both were Mormons who believed in plural marriage, but they didn’t join the FLDS until much later. When my grandfather died, Grandma began receiving a small Social Security pension. She ended up marrying Merril’s father and, for a time, turned over her pension and everything she had to him.
Grandma learned that she could survive on her own after the raid on Short Creek in 1953. The raid was a pivotal moment in FLDS history and is routinely cited as an example of the religious persecution of the cult. On July 26, 1953, Arizona police invaded the FLDS community in Short Creek (now Colorado City) and began arresting men and women for practicing polygamy. In all, 122 men and women were arrested and 263 children seized from their families. Public opinion quickly turned against the state when newspapers published photographs showing law enforcement officers taking children from their mothers’ arms.
Grandma’s brother pressured authorities to release her children to live with her at his house in Phoenix until the issue was resolved. The new independence she had in this life changed her. When she eventually came back to the FLDS, she continued in her marriage to Merril’s father. But when he wanted to marry one of her teenage daughters (a girl he helped raise), she went ballistic and blocked it. Grandma stood up for herself and was an example of a woman who would not be subjugated to her man.
She died several years before I was assigned to marry Merril Jessop, but I know she would have been appalled. At the time I still believed that God had told the prophet whom I should marry. I also still believed that I needed to pray harder to accept God’s will for my life. My future depended, at eighteen, on finding a way to be accepted by Merril and his other wives. I wasn’t thinking about what my grandmother’s life could teach me.
Like most FLDS girls, I would do anything to fit in and feel valued by my husband. I was resigned to being the youngest wife of a complete stranger. If I had balked at my marriage, I would have brought enormous disgrace to my family, and I did not want to let them down. I had to find a way to succeed as wife number four.
I wholeheartedly embraced the work of acceptance. I had always turned to God when I didn’t understand aspects of my life. I prayed and prayed for understanding when it came to my marriage. I had tried to avoid Merril’s daughters in high school because they were shallow and petty. I was the same age as two of them, and younger than several others. Now I was one of their mothers. How could I wi
n their acceptance? We were competing for the same man, except that I was sleeping with him.
On my first morning in Merril’s gargantuan house, I went to take a shower in one of the four bathrooms shared by thirty children. (There were three additional bathrooms that were private.) I managed to slip in before anyone else. When I finished, I ran into two children who were scampering down the stairs. I felt like an intruder. They had no idea why a strange woman in a bathrobe was coming out of their bathroom.
Bewildered by my sudden new reality, I went into the kitchen and made myself a cup of coffee. Two of Merril’s daughters whispered to each other. I took my coffee back to my room. After two sips there was a knock on the door. It was one of the daughters from the kitchen.
“Father wants you to bring him a cup of coffee,” she said. “He’s waiting for you in his office.”
“There’s coffee in the kitchen,” I said, genuinely perplexed. “Why don’t you take him a cup?”
She looked at me with disbelief. How dare I reject an order from her father!
“He wants to talk to you,” she said, turning away in disgust.
I took the coffee to Merril. He said nothing. He took one sip, then another. The silence felt deliberately calculated to make me feel uncomfortable. Finally he spoke. “I appreciate my ladies asking me before they make themselves coffee.” (Men in polygamous groups commonly refer to their wives as “my ladies.”) Was this for real? I had to ask him if I could make myself coffee in the morning?
“I also am very disappointed in you for wearing a sweater top,” he added. “I don’t allow that kind of clothing in my family.” Two of his wives, Barbara and Ruth, were in his office as he humiliated me. Barbara seemed to be enjoying it. He cited her clothing—she was wearing a dress with puffy sleeves that were gathered in at the elbow, a fitted bodice, and a skirt with ruffles—as an example of how I should dress. It was the last thing on the planet I wanted to wear. But Merril didn’t stop there. He went on to complain about the inappropriate clothes he’d seen my mother wear.
Little goes unnoticed in a community as closed as the FLDS. The intense level of competition among women means that they keep each other under a close watch. Even the “sins” of a woman’s mother can be held against her. Over and over I’d hear people say, “After all, you know who her mother is. She’s going to be just like her.” Moreover, FLDS families intermarried for generations, so most of us were related in one way or the other. My grandmother Jenny had married Merril’s father when my mother was two years old, so she was Merril’s stepmother. She used to say that Merril was “the worst little shit that ever lived in the community.”
That morning in his office I saw exactly what Grandma meant. When I finally left, it was abundantly clear that his other wives, like Barbara and Ruth, would never accept me. I was their competition, and neither had any interest in friendship. They were also old enough to be my mother. Figuring out a way to be accepted in this bizarre family was a huge challenge. Even so, I continued to pursue acceptance as my salvation. Acceptance would guarantee my survival, if not my success, in this weird world that was now my home.
No one in Merril’s family was loved for who they were. Love and worth had to be earned, and Merril enjoyed pitting us against each other. This was obvious from the first week. Barbara completely dominated Merril and his entire family. I knew the only way to avoid being controlled by Barbara was to win acceptance from Merril and so be able to influence him.
Audrey, one of Merril’s daughters, told me she had once asked her father why he spent all of his time with Barbara. She was nineteen and knew she could be assigned to a husband at any time, so she was trying to understand the dynamics of a plural marriage. She knew she didn’t want to end up like her mother, Foneta, Merril’s first wife, whom Merril had shut out in the cold. Ruth was another poor advertisement for polygamy because she did most of the work in the family and got none of the credit. Audrey knew Barbara was controlling and narcissistic. She wanted Merril to explain why it was all right for one wife to bully everyone else and keep them in subservient positions.
If Merril had been remotely capable of being truthful, his answer might have gone something like this: When I was young, I was passionately in love with a non-FLDS woman. I was not allowed to marry her. When Barbara came along and took control of me, I didn’t protest. Over the years we’ve both enjoyed hurting those we control.
That sort of honesty, of course, was way beyond him. Merril denied that he had a favorite wife and told Audrey that because he was a man who was inspired and instructed by God, there was a divine hand in everything he did.
Poor Audrey paid dearly for her blunt questioning. Everyone knew the family was unfair, but talking about it was taboo. Barbara became very abusive toward Audrey. Audrey’s other sisters ridiculed her and felt she got what she deserved. Audrey became an example of what can happen to anyone who dares offend Merril or Barbara. So I worked from the beginning to stay out of Barbara’s line of fire.
It was obvious that I did not have a friend in the family, but I kept studying its social structure to see if there was a place to fit in. I persisted in my efforts to find acceptance, but I felt as though I had been sentenced to a life of isolation. During the first seven months of my marriage, I felt stranded in an unbelievable world that was becoming ever more disturbing and bizarre. My well-being was totally in the hands of others. My self had been outsourced.
While he was on a business trip around this same time, Merril married two more wives, Tammy and Cathleen. They were the youngest wives of Leroy Johnson, the FLDS prophet who had died three weeks earlier. Tammy was ten years older than I, and Cathleen, two. I was still the youngest of Merril’s six wives, but it was a relief that neither of them was old enough to be my mother. I naïvely hoped we could be friends.
Tammy was not only confident of Merril’s love but bragged about her ability to win his acceptance. She had been married to the prophet when he was in his late eighties and she was eighteen. She had a decade’s worth of practice in catering to wives who were old enough to be her grandmothers.
Cathleen was upset by Tammy’s cavalier attitude because she believed Tammy’s prior marriage to the prophet was sacred. Cathleen scrubbed floors endlessly, without complaint. She received no recognition for the work she did. She often reminisced about how perfect her past life in the prophet’s family had been. She would correct Merril’s daughters and explain how a job or chore had been carried out in the prophet’s family. They looked at her with disdain and began avoiding her.
Cathleen had been married to Leroy Johnson, the so-called prophet of God, when he was ninety-six and she was seventeen. The seventy-nine years between them mocked the very idea of a genuine marriage. But Cathleen still reveled in having been the prophet’s wife. She cried constantly about being married to Merril. But because she had once been married to the prophet of God, she felt superior to me.
When Cathleen and I did the joint interview with Anderson Cooper on CNN during the Texas raid, I felt heartbroken when I saw the wreckage of what she’d become. Cathleen was not evil; she was a true believer. Now she exemplified what the FLDS lifestyle can do to a woman. She had worked herself into the ground, desperate for the approval of Merril’s family. But it never came. Merril didn’t really care about her, and over the years that pushed her to try even harder. When I saw Cathleen on CNN, I felt a rush of sadness.
I too slammed into so many dead ends trying to find acceptance that for a time I started to believe there was something wrong with me. I kept seeking acceptance because a lifetime with no connection to the people I lived with seemed unbearable. But Tammy’s and Cathleen’s difficulties made me realize that we were three women in a bad environment, not three bad women. I concluded that I had to disengage my self-esteem and value as a person from Merril and his family. It was futile to wait and hope for something they could not give.
Years later, when I moved through that sea of pastel dresses, I knew that every woman t
here was trapped by her need for approval from her husband, her sister wives, her children, and most of all the FLDS leadership. I doubt many of them even knew what the court case was about. They were just doing what they’d been told to do, because they craved acceptance, as I once had.
This craving is like an addiction; you always want and need more. But it is insatiable. As long as my sense of self was defined externally, not internally, my needs were never going to be met, because in Merril’s family power depended on the exploitation of others. Valuing anyone else threatened the power structure.
When I thought about my grandmother Jenny, I realized she had never made a decision based on how it would appear to others. Merril remembered that his father liked to spar with my grandmother. I think that was because she knew what she thought about things and would always hold her ground. She would not have walked across the street to get approval from a man or anyone else. She wanted to feel good about her life and the choices she made. Grandma Jenny accepted herself, and her own sense of self was nonnegotiable. The more I understood how much personal power this gave her, the more I wondered if I could ever find any of my own.
This knowledge kept me going, both consciously and unconsciously. Even when I wasn’t thinking about my grandma Jenny, her spirit was strong inside me. I’d always been more self-reliant than most. But now my survival depended on my self-reliance because in Merril’s family I could depend on no one else. In a sense, that made me very free. Painfully free.
I was nineteen years old and pregnant with my first child. Like my grandmother, I had concluded that the only real acceptance I would ever have was my acceptance of myself.