One of the calls I received during this time still haunts me. When I said “Hello,” I heard a young girl on the other end. Her voice seemed to tremble as she stumbled over her words. “I didn’t think you would answer the phone. I thought I would only get an answering machine.”
I laughed. “You’re in luck that you didn’t get my voicemail,” I said. “My phone has been ringing off the hook, and I have to call most people back.” She didn’t respond to my lightheartedness.
“I heard you’ve been in Texas working with the authorities.” She paused for a long time. Then she asked, “Have you seen my mother?” The question was phrased one word at a time between sobs. “She got me to my uncle’s before she disappeared.” The girl’s sobbing was becoming uncontrollable. “Oh, I didn’t realize this was going to be so hard,” she said. Words could not make it past her tears.
I tried to make her feel safe. “It’s all right, honey,” I reassured her. “Crying is just fine. I can listen as long as you need. But I need to know who your mother is.”
She regained enough composure to say, “I will call you back later. I can’t talk right now. It’s too hard.”
I knew it was important to keep her on the phone. In my experience, these callers rarely called back. I didn’t know who this girl was. All I knew was how terribly upset she was and that I’d be powerless to help her if she hung up.
“Being upset is all right, and time is not an issue for me,” I said. “I want to help you find your mother.”
Her voice was carried by waves of sobs. “I have to go. I can’t talk about this.”
The line went dead. I threw my cell phone across the bed. This was the most distressing call yet. If she had only told me her mother’s name, I might have had a chance of finding her. I might have been able to refer her to someone in CPS who could have helped locate her siblings. Her number did not show up on my cell phone, so I could not track her.
Losing that call reinforced how powerless I felt. Hearing about the abuse of my stepchildren and the trauma that this young girl was facing because her mother had been stolen from her was almost too much. How could such things happen?
She never called back. It would be an entire year before I got an e-mail from a source. The girl did find her mother, who was finally reunited with most of her children and is now out of the FLDS. All the public saw and heard were the faces and the emotional appeals from crying FLDS mothers who were given due process as granted by the Constitution. The invisible mothers, the ones who disappeared and had their rights to their own children savaged by Warren Jeffs, are not only still invisible but also still silent. The law failed to protect these women, who had no ability to protect themselves. Had the media been able to tell this story, I wonder if it might have kept public opinion from swinging wildly to the side of the FLDS.
As it turned out, some of the children in state custody were found to have none of their actual biological parents living at the ranch. CASA told me that a surprising number of mothers showed up after the children were in custody admitting they had not been on the ranch at the time of the raid. They all had different explanations. The lifestyle on the ranch was so restrictive—women were not free to come and go—that it’s plausible that once women were separated from their children, they had a hard time getting them back.
While CPS and CASA workers were dealing with the disturbing realities of what had been discovered on the YFZ Ranch, the media reports were becoming increasingly sympathetic toward the FLDS mothers. The weeping and distraught women in their quaint clothes invited the public to imagine their own worst fears of being separated from their children. Religious freedom—fundamental to American identity—is a powerful argument. But few viewers could appreciate that the media were showing just the tip of an iceberg. Beneath the slick FLDS spokesman and the zombie women in their Little House on the Prairie dresses was a sadistic and cruel world that perpetuated abuse against women and children.
Public opinion was turning not only against the state but against the state workers as well. CPS staffers who’d worked extremely long shifts, slept on cots, and endured abuse from the most aggressive children in the FLDS were now being called “Nazis” by some. The photos of a twelve-year-old girl passionately kissing Warren Jeffs, a man of fifty who was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list when the photograph was taken, seemed to have minimal impact on the wave of pro-FLDS feeling that was building in the public.
The state was starting to think about what the next level of care for the children would require. Until it could determine if parental reunification was possible, the children needed to be moved from temporary foster care to longer-term facilities.
I was feeling cautiously optimistic when, on May 22, 2008, a bombshell blew everything apart. The Third Court of Appeals in Austin ruled that Texas had acted improperly in seizing the children because the raid was too broad. The lower court ruling was overturned. This meant the children were going back.
It was unbelievable to me that the children would be returned to their abusers. Was it about money? I knew the raid and its aftermath were costing the state millions of dollars. Now that public opinion was swinging in favor of the FLDS, was Texas looking for a way out of the mess?
The news made me weak. The hope that had been quietly building in me was shattered. I expressed my dismay in every media interview I did after the ruling came down. But I was in an awkward position; so few women ever escape, and almost none with all their children, that I sounded like a lone voice in the wilderness. “If it’s really as bad as Carolyn Jessop keeps saying, why don’t more flee?” went the sentiment. Negative stories about me were circulating on the Internet. Some of the statements were so outrageous and made such little sense that I stopped reading them. Did anyone really believe that Texas would take more than four hundred children into custody so I could make money on a book?
The state fought back by challenging the appellate court decision and blocking the orders, issued only hours before, to give the children back to their parents. All state workers were told that if any FLDS parents came to the shelters and wanted to pick up their children, they were not to release any of them until the Texas Supreme Court made its ruling.
My spirits were buoyed, at least for the time being. State workers kept seeking my advice. One who approached me had been working with my stepdaughter Millie and her children. Millie had been married to Warren Jeffs at seventeen. This worker kept shaking her head and saying over and over to me, “They can’t let these children go back to that abuse. This can’t be happening. We have to do something to stop this. These children have to be protected.” She did not go into detail, but it was clear from her distress that she had seen and heard terrible things.
An enormous outpouring of emotion came from those who had witnessed the mind control to which the children were subjected and had heard the children’s abuse stories. Those who talked about it with me had horror written on every inch of their face.
What upset me most was that the children who’d told their caretakers the truth about their lives might now be handed back to their abusers. They had opened up because they thought they were going to be protected. Now they ran the risk of terrible reprisals if what they’d said got reported back to the FLDS elders. Never again would they trust anyone non-FLDS who offered them protection. They would forever view those people as evil, interested only in tricking and betraying them. And that concept would be reinforced by the punishment they’d likely receive for speaking out.
I was often asked by the media what I feared most. I always said my worst fear was that the children might not be given the complete protection they deserved and would be sent back to their perpetrators. Now that fear seemed to be coming true. The only hope was that the Supreme Court would overrule the appellate court and that the state would continue protecting the hundreds of children in its care. I could neither believe—nor accept—that the state of Texas would shove these children into the same dark corner where it found them. Didn??
?t these young citizens deserve the same protections guaranteed to every other child in America? Could their parents’ bizarre cult beliefs, hidden behind the magic word religion, supersede the rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution? I was thirty-five years old before I ever breathed as a free citizen. How could the abuse of yet another generation be perpetuated when Texas had the power to stop a lot of it right now?
Once you’ve taken on a highly controlled group, backing down only makes the group stronger. If the FLDS won this war, it would feel empowered to take its crimes to another level. Not only that, but other closed polygamous groups closely monitored what was happening in the FLDS, because it was the largest such group. If this ruling held, they too might up the ante in their behaviors and practices.
If, on the other hand, Texas protected the children in its custody, it would send a message to FLDS members everywhere, as well as members of similar groups, that they could lose their children if they abused them. People would think twice before allowing the leadership of their organizations to injure their children. Texas, I felt, now had a moral obligation to follow through on its actions and protect the more than four hundred children in its care.
A lot of memories came rushing back to me. Until I won full custody of my own children, I had felt like the legal system was set up to protect the perpetrators. As I wrote in Escape, my children went on weekend visitations with their father in which he would force them to fast and pray for my death. I felt crushed and unsure if there was any way the system could protect women who were fleeing from abuse. Over the years, however, I had seen such positive change and progress in my own life that I was optimistic about the potential in our legal system.
How could a state that likes to brag “Don’t Mess with Texas” back down from this confrontation? I was holding my breath for the ruling from the Texas Supreme Court.
A Spinmaster in the Spotlight
In the immediate aftermath of the raid, Willie Jessop stepped into the spotlight and stayed there. (His father was Merril’s cousin.) As the unofficial public spokesman of the FLDS, Willie reveled in the limelight and came across as a strong but friendly kind of guy. There was nothing strange or creepy about him, which was good image building for the FLDS.
Willie and I grew up together. He was a classmate of mine throughout school and always more of a follower than a leader. He strayed from the community in his late teens, and we never knew if he was still in the FLDS or not. Some said he had gone to California, lived on the beach, and worked as a limo driver for a wealthy clientele. For whatever reason—maybe because he made such good money in California—the FLDS wanted Willie back. The word around the community was that Rulon Jeffs went out to California and personally encouraged Willie to come home.
Willie did return, and with the money he made he bought a backhoe and went into business with one of his uncles. Willie continued to display his knack for making money and dutifully turned over a percentage of it to the prophet as required. But Willie was not given a wife for a long time. When he was finally assigned in marriage, it was to a woman who wasn’t part of the community’s inner circle. I think this was difficult for him. The Willie I knew had expensive tastes and built a showcase home for himself that was the talk of the FLDS. My sense is that if he could have chosen for himself, he would have picked a flashier wife.
Many of us in the community thought Willie was something of a joke. He had worked as Warren Jeffs’s bodyguard and was known as “Willie the Enforcer.” I was surprised when he became the FLDS spokesman because I knew he could be a loose cannon. He might have been a quiet kid, but as an adult he had a notorious temper.
Sam Brower is a licensed private investigator in Utah who’d been hired by attorneys and others in law enforcement to probe the FLDS for the past five years. Brower shared his take on Willie in an interview with a local ABC news station in Arizona on June 6, 2008. “Willie was always the strong arm,” Brower said. “He was the guy who showed up just to intimidate people.” Brower added, “He’s the hatchet man. His role now is to put somebody out there, [and] keep talking to the media and the public while the church leaders vanish.”
Willie’s job was spin, and he was as smooth as he was masterful. His logic frequently had holes, but the media rarely forced him to deal with his inconsistencies. Initially his line was that no underage marriages occurred within the FLDS, that all marriages in the FLDS were consensual. Then Willie changed his tune. He admitted that a few girls on the ranch were involved in underage marriages and that they’d given birth to babies. But he wondered why there was such an uproar since teen pregnancy was prevalent throughout the United States.
He also claimed that if any girls in the FLDS were married before they were eighteen, it was because they insisted. The FLDS, according to Willie, was being persecuted because of its religious beliefs. He kept reiterating that if the girls had been pregnant and attending a public high school, no one would have thought twice about it.
This was a gross misrepresentation of the truth. If a high school girl were sexually assaulted against her will by a man more than twice her age, her parents would press charges. Even if she claimed to consent, the man could still be charged with statutory rape in most states. Willie certainly knew that no FLDS girl could insist on being married to a man of her choosing. In the FLDS, as he knew as well as I, a girl’s only “right” is to be perfectly obedient to the prophet of God.
My daughter LuAnne and I watched several of Willie’s interviews. As he talked, she shook her head and told me some of the things Warren Jeffs had taught them in their morning session at the start of school every day. Jeffs emphasized that it was up to the prophet to decide whom a girl should be placed with in marriage. Girls had absolutely no right to set their hearts on a certain man. God, according to Jeffs, required all of his young ladies to get rid of their worldly traditions.
Those of us who had been in the FLDS knew Willie was deliberately misleading the public. Most of the girls seized in the raid who’d been forced to have sex had done so not with someone their own age but with men who were at least twenty years older. This was what Texas was determined to prosecute. The issue that the FLDS tried to shield from public view was that within its closed society was a highly organized conspiracy involving the sexual assault of children through underage marriages with the complete knowledge, tacit or otherwise, of their parents.
It’s been alleged that Merril Jessop himself performed the marriage of his twelve-year-old daughter to the fifty-year-old prophet, Warren Jeffs. Even if Barbara, the girl’s mother, hadn’t taken the infamous photograph of Jeffs kissing her daughter, she most likely was present when it happened. It’s a tremendous honor when your daughter marries the prophet, even if she is only twelve. Based on evidence seized in the raid, Merril would eventually be indicted on charges of performing an unlawful marriage ceremony involving a minor. He would turn himself in to authorities on November 25, 2008.
Willie Jessop claimed that it wasn’t standard FLDS practice for a girl under eighteen to marry. But on June 2, 2008, he said that if the public had a problem with it, the FLDS was willing to put a stop to all underage marriages. He said the church was “clarifying its policy on marriage” and would advise families to “neither request nor consent” to the marriage of underage girls. “In the FLDS church, all marriages are consensual,” he said. “The church insists on appropriate consent.”
However indirectly, Willie Jessop seemed to be finally acknowledging the truth.
I was asked in several interviews for my reaction to Willie’s announcement. I said I didn’t believe the FLDS ever intended to stop underage marriages. I pointed out that Willie was only the spokesman, not the prophet. He had claim to no real power (even though he sought it). What he was saying was spin and propaganda. I also told the interviewers that Willie, like all the rest of us, had heard the recordings of Warren Jeffs instructing the faithful to lie whenever necessary and promising that God would protect them if they did.
As long as Jeffs was considered the FLDS prophet, no one would change his edict on underage marriage. Yes, he was in prison, but most in the FLDS still considered him their leader. He lowered the marriage age, he said, because of the increasing evil in the world, which made underage marriage necessary to preserve the FLDS.
On that point I have to agree with Jeffs, because polygamy will come to a halt only when women stop being willing to participate. If a girl is allowed to mature and make her own decisions, odds are she will choose to marry someone closer to her own age—ideally someone she has dated beforehand—and that never happens in the FLDS. To let young women control their dreams, hopes, and desires held serious risk for the FLDS. The older girls became, the more confident and independent they were about their lives. When I married Merril, most of his daughters would not marry until they were in their twenties. By the time I fled, they were being married at fourteen. A fourteen-year-old who gets pregnant right away is trapped in the FLDS because by the time she is eighteen, the odds are she will have a few kids. Her chances of getting a college education—or even finishing high school—are slim. These women become so isolated from the outside world that they really have no understanding of alternatives.
Warren Jeffs’s reign was so much more oppressive than his father’s that women and girls started looking for other options. The younger girls knew how much they could lose once they began sinking into the quicksand of polygamy. Jeffs understood that underage marriages were essential in maintaining his power. He needed young girls to marry and have babies to perpetuate the FLDS. Jeffs had, at one point, eighty wives, many of whom were very young. He did not want to be the only one in the FLDS committing these crimes, so he normalized the behavior.