South Dakota pondering what to do about polygamous sect

Nate Carlisle
Salt Lake Tribune
February 3, 2016

Seth Jeffs

It's a bad sign when a meeting is being held for people "interested in doing something about" you. It's a worse sign when the meeting is organized by the local newspaper.

That is the scenario facing the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints compound outside of Pringle, S.D. The local weekly newspaper, the "Custer County Chronicle," is apparently organizing the described meeting for 7 p.m. local time Thursday at the courthouse annex in the town of Custer.

The newspaper in September published an editorial in opposition to the FLDS' application for more water at the Pringle compound. But the newspaper wasn't the only one.

A state board heard opposition from neighbors and average citizens who don't like the FLDS for all the obvious reasons — underage marriages, child labor, a church president in prison, etcetera. The state board was reluctant, too, but said the FLDS met the legal requirements for the permit and granted it.

The Pringle compound appears to be the largest FLDS enclave outside of its traditional home on the Utah-Arizona line, and increasing the amount of water it can pump would seem to indicate the compound is preparing for more residents. But other than Seth Jeffs, a brother of the imprisoned FLDS president, it's not even clear who is at the compound, much less that anything illegal is happening there.

But locals are thinking of ways to examine both those things.

ncarlisle@sltrib.com

http://www.sltrib.com/home/3481252-155/south-dakota-pondering-what-to-do

Ex-sect member testifies about leaving polygamous church

New York Post
Associated Press
January 21, 2016

PHOENIX — A former member of a polygamous religious sect that is the focus of a discrimination trial in Arizona described on Thursday how he suddenly became the victim of vandalism and intimidation after he left the church.

Isaac Wyler said he complained to local authorities hundreds of times after his horse property was vandalized, including water lines and fences being cut, but the police did nothing because he was no longer a member of the church. He also described finding a dozen dead cats on his property after leaving the church.

“There are two sets of rules depending upon who you are,” Wyler told the jury in US District Court.

Wyler is the second former member of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints to testify at the trial on behalf of the U.S. Justice Department. The sect broke away from mainstream Mormonism when the latter disavowed polygamy more than 100 years ago.

The Justice Department accuses Colorado City, Arizona, and Hildale, Utah, of functioning as an arm of the church and discriminating against nonbelievers by systematically denying them housing, water services and police protection.

Police officers are accused of failing to investigate crimes against nonbelievers and assisting leader Warren Jeffs while he was a fugitive on charges of arranging marriages between girls and older men.

The communities deny the allegations and say religion isn’t a motivating factor in their decisions. They believe the government is discriminating against them based on their religion.

The case marks one of the boldest efforts by the government to confront what critics have said was a corrupt regime in both towns.

Wyler on Thursday provided a look into life in the towns. He says his hometown of Colorado City had parades, fairs and other happy social gatherings when he was growing up, but those activities ended after Jeffs took over as the church’s top leader.

“Everything changed,” Wyler said.

Wyler said although he was forced out of the church in 2004, he actually started to turn against it after he heard Jeffs call for the executions of the attorneys general of Arizona and Utah.

“That shook me up real bad,” Wyler said. “I don’t feel like I signed up for any religion like this.”

After leaving the church, Wyler went on to work part-time as a consultant for a communal land trust that was once run by Jeffs but was seized by the state of Utah in 2005 amid allegations of mismanagement by church leaders. The fund is now controlled by the state and controls the housing within the community.

Wyler cited his work for the trust as evidence of how town leaders treat non-believers differently. He was once charged and convicted of trespassing for carrying out an eviction in his work for the trust, but noted that none of his complaints about vandalism at his property ever led to arrests.

“I feel like my complaints go into a bin that says ‘garbage’ on it,” he said.

http://nypost.com/2016/01/21/ex-sect-member-testifies-about-leaving-polygamous-church/

Ex-Wife of a Leader of Polygamous Church Testifies in Trial

TERRY TANG

ASSOCIATED PRESS

ABC News
January 27, 2016

The ex-wife of a leader in a polygamous church teared up in court Wednesday when recalling how she was isolated from her children and feared even authorities would help hide them from her.

Charlene Jeffs, who was married to ex-Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints leader Lyle Jeffs, testified at a trial in Phoenix in which the federal government alleges that two towns in Arizona and Utah served as an enforcement arm of the sect.

Jeffs said she was kicked out of a sacred group within the church called the United Order in 2012.

"I was exiled into a trailer," Jeffs said. "I was not allowed to see my children, talk to them or associate with them in any way."

She left the community altogether in October 2014 and pursued custody of three children.

Jeffs says Curtis Cook, a member of the Colorado City Marshals Office, approached her at an April 2015 custody hearing and told her "the way I was going about getting my children was illegal." According to her, Cook said she should have notified marshals that she wanted custody.

"I said: 'We both know what would've happened.' They would've disappeared, and I never would have seen them again," said Jeffs, who says Cook nodded in agreement.

Colorado City attorney Jeff Matura disputed Jeffs' testimony, getting her to confirm two instances where Cook and another deputy helped her.

They included a welfare check and the day Jeffs was to receive her children after a judge ruled she was entitled to custody. Cook even escorted Jeffs and her children to the county line to make sure they left without interference, Matura said.

"He acted as you hoped he would act as a police officer," Matura said.

Lyle Jeffs is a brother of church leader Warren Jeffs, who was on the run from charges of arranging marriages between girls and older men before being captured during a 2006 traffic stop outside Las Vegas in an SUV with $50,000, cellphones, a police scanner and wigs. He is serving a life sentence in a Texas prison for sexually assaulting one of the 24 underage brides.

The towns are accused of discriminating against nonbelievers by denying them housing, water services and police protection. The communities deny the allegations and say religion isn't a motivating factor in their decisions.

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/cloak-dagger-steps-protect-fugitive-sect-leader-36541020

Cloak-and-dagger steps used to protect fugitive sect leader

JACQUES BILLEAUD
Arizona Daily Star
January 27, 2016

PHOENIX (AP) — The former head of security for a polygamous church rattled off a list of elaborate steps used to assist the sect's leader while he was a fugitive a decade ago and explained how towns in Arizona and Utah took orders from the church.

Willie Jessop, who left the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in 2011, said those who assisted church leader Warren Jeffs used disposable cellphones and encrypted radios to communicate. They drove 40 miles to make calls out of fear that authorities were monitoring their phones.

Jessop is a key witness at a trial in Phoenix in which the federal government alleges that Colorado City, Arizona, and Hildale, Utah, served as an enforcement arm of the sect.

The former security chief said he would fly to places around the country to serve as a decoy and throw law enforcement off the trail while Jeffs was being moved to a new hiding place.

Jeffs, who was on the run from charges of arranging marriages between girls and older men, was captured during a 2006 traffic stop outside Las Vegas in an SUV with $50,000, cellphones, a police scanner and wigs. He is serving a life sentence in a Texas prison for sexually assaulting one of the 24 underage brides.

The towns are accused of discriminating against nonbelievers by denying them housing, water services and police protection. The communities deny the allegations and say religion isn't a motivating factor in their decisions.

Jessop told jurors that residents must have church approval to serve in government in the towns.

He said a turning point occurred in 2004 when 20 men were booted from the church. "It changed from a church to a cartel," he said.

Lawyers for the towns pressed Jessop on why he remained in the church for seven more years.

Jessop said he turned against church leaders after Texas authorities played him an audio tape in which Jeffs raped a 12-year-old girl. Jessop said he later reviewed another recording in which Jeffs confessed to a rape.

Hildale attorney Blake Hamilton objected to Jessop's testimony about the allegations against Jeffs.

"This is not the criminal trial of Warren Jeffs," Hamilton said.

Outside court, Colorado City attorney Jeff Matura said: "The testimony about Warren Jeffs and his criminal conduct is heartbreaking, especially with respect to this treatment of children, but it's not part of the allegations of this case."

Federal investigators say Colorado City officers claimed to have no information on Jeffs' whereabouts while he was a fugitive, even though it was later discovered that some of them had written letters to the church leader during that time.

http://tucson.com/news/state-and-regional/cloak-and-dagger-steps-used-to-protect-fugitive-sect-leader/article_584658f6-69d7-56a8-b06c-01e3f17cc975.html

Police vow loyalty to polygamous leader in letters, feds say

Jacques Billeaud, The Associated PressSt George News
January 26, 2016

 

Vehicles drive past the Sandra Day O'Connor United States District Court where a federal civil rights trial against two polygamous towns on the Arizona-Utah line is set to begin. The jury selection is set to begin Tuesday at the trial that will examine allegations that the towns discriminated against people who aren't part of the communities' dominant religious sect, Tuesday, Jan. 19, 2016, Phoenix, Arizona | AP Photo by Ralph Freso, St. George News

PHOENIX (AP) — Jurors at a federal trial against two polygamous towns in Utah and Arizona heard testimony Monday about the influence that sect leader Warren Jeffs still wields over the communities from his Texas prison cell.

An FBI agent testified about letters in which local police officers pledged loyalty to Jeffs while he was on the run from charges of arranging marriages between girls and older men. A prison mailroom administrator described how Jeffs tried to send coded messages to his followers from prison.

The federal government offered the letters as proof of its allegations that Colorado City, Arizona, and Hildale, Utah, are serving as an enforcement arm of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The sect broke away from mainstream Mormonism when the latter disavowed polygamy more than 100 years ago.

“I view Colorado City, Hildale and FLDS as one in the same,” testified FBI agent Robert Foster, who helped search for Jeffs when he was a fugitive during the mid-2000s.

The U.S. Justice Department alleges in a lawsuit that the towns discriminate against nonbelievers by denying them housing, water services and police protection. The communities deny the allegations and say religion isn’t a motivating factor in their decisions.

On the stand, Foster said Colorado City officers claimed to have no information on Jeffs’ whereabouts while he was a fugitive. A handful of the officers later were decertified, including one who refused to answer a grand jury’s questions about Jeffs’ whereabouts.

Attorneys for the towns have acknowledged past problems with the police department but pointed out that the officers who didn’t cooperate in the search for Jeffs are no longer working in law enforcement. They say no officers have been decertified since then.

Some of the letters written to Jeffs were found during a 2005 traffic stop in Colorado of a vehicle carrying his younger brother, Seth Jeffs. Inside the vehicle, officers discovered $200,000 in cash, prepaid credit cards and a donation jar with Warren Jeffs’ photo and a label saying, “Pennies for the Prophet.” Authorities say the items were intended for Jeffs.

Some letters professing allegiance to Jeffs were written by then-Colorado City Mayor Richard Allred, other town officials and two police officers, including Fred J. Barlow, who was leader of the towns’ police department.

“I want my work in the town government, as town clerk, to be an extension of priesthood,” then-Colorado City town clerk Joseph Allred said to Jeffs in an October 2005 letter.

Colorado City attorney Jeff Matura repeatedly pointed out that Jeffs didn’t respond to the letters in question.

Jeffs was captured during an August 2006 traffic stop outside Las Vegas. Investigators found more than $50,000 in cash, cellphones, laptop computers, a police scanner and wigs inside the SUV in which he was traveling.

He is now serving a life sentence in a Texas prison for sexually assaulting one of his 24 underage brides, prosecutors said.

In other testimony, Jennifer Smith, an administrator for the mail system at Texas’ prisons, described the huge volume of letters that Jeffs still receives. Jeffs would get 1,000 to 2,000 letters per day when he was first locked up, though that number now tops out around 500 per day, she said.

Some letters written by Jeffs in prison weren’t actually mailed because they were written in code, Smith said.

The trial ended for the day after a juror experienced a health problem. Testimony is expected to resume Tuesday.

It comes as a federal judge began hearing evidence Monday in a separate child labor case involving the sect. Federal investigators say a company tied to the faith used 1,400 unpaid laborers, including 175 children, from the sect during a 2012 pecan harvest in Utah.

Paragon Contractors says women and children were volunteering to collect fallen nuts, not working as employees.

https://www.stgeorgeutah.com/news/archive/2016/01/26/apc-police-vow-loyalty-to-polygamous-leader-in-letters-feds-say/#.VqjUoZorLGg

Arizona Trial to Scrutinize Polygamous Community

SARA RANDAZZO

Wall Street Journal
January18, 2016

A trial starting this week in Phoenix will pit a polygamous religious community against the U.S. government, which claims the community’s public officers discriminate against people who don’t share the sect’s beliefs.

The Justice Department in 2012 sued Colorado City, Ariz., and Hildale, Utah, adjacent border towns populated by members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or FLDS, which broke away from the mainstream Mormon Church after it rejected polygamy in 1890.

The government alleges that city leaders and law enforcement in the towns serve at the bidding of church leaders and routinely fail to protect the constitutional rights of all residents. Opening statements are slated to begin Wednesday in what is expected to be a five-week trial.

Testimony from current and former residents, police department members, public officials and outside experts is likely to offer a rare view into the inner workings of the roughly 10,000-person community, located about an hour’s drive from mountainous Zion National Park.

The alleged discrimination, according to the Justice Department, includes refusing to arrest church members who committed crimes against nonmembers, destroying crops on nonmembers’ farms and failing to fairly provide housing and utility services like water to nonmembers, in violation of federal laws.

The fundamentalist sect follows the teachings of Warren Jeffs, who is serving a life sentence in Texas for sexually assaulting underage girls. He was convicted in 2011 after years of scrutiny. At one point he appeared on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.

Jeffrey Matura, an attorney for Colorado City, said religion played no role in the actions cited in the complaint and that “this case is an effort of the government to try and eradicate a religion that it finds distasteful.”

Blake Hamilton, an attorney for Hildale, said the town plans to show there was no pattern or practice of discrimination. There have been a few isolated incidents in the past, he said, that led to some officers being removed from duty. “This is an overreach by the federal government,” he said.

A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, more commonly known as the Mormon Church, said through a spokesman that it has no connection to various fundamentalist groups in the Southwest and would excommunicate any member who practiced polygamy.

A judge denied a request from government lawyers to force Lyle Jeffs, an FLDS bishop and brother to Warren Jeffs, to testify in court. Testimony from a video deposition could still be played for a jury.

Amos Guiora, a law professor at the University of Utah who has studied the fundamentalist sect for several years, said that if the government is able to prove the community’s law enforcement isn’t independent but instead an arm of the church, “it raises incredibly powerful questions on the separation of church and state.”

Separately, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is scheduled to hear arguments this month over the legality of polygamy in Utah. A lower-court ruling in 2013 struck down a criminal ban on polygamous cohabitation, saying the state failed to demonstrate the harms associated with it. Issuing multiple marriage licenses to a single person is still prohibited.

Write to Sara Randazzo at sara.randazzo@wsj.com


http://www.wsj.com/articles/arizona-trial-to-scrutinize-polygamous-community-1453147932

A century in the making, the federal government goes to trial against two polygamous towns

NATE CARLISLE

The Salt Lake Tribune
January 17, 2016

The U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit against Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz., goes to trial Tuesday in Phoenix, and there are some specific things that Colorado City resident Margaret Cooke wants out of it.

For one thing, she wants a judge to order Colorado City to allow parcels to subdivide the way other towns do.

The other thing Cooke wants goes to the heart of the lawsuit: She wants Hildale and Colorado City, collectively known as Short Creek, to hire municipal employees and police officers who are not members of the polygamous Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

"We then get our freedom from the bondage of the FLDS religion," Cooke said. "Basically, the whole government is FLDS and they want to keep us from living here peacefully."

No one denies that the Short Creek municipal governments are filled with FLDS followers. The issue at the trial is what people have complained and argued about for a century: whether those municipal governments discriminate against people who do not follow the church and its imprisoned leader, FLDS President Warren Jeffs.

Neither Jeffs nor the church is a party in the case. Yet the trial will put the towns up against the one group that consistently defeats anything FLDS — juries.

While the FLDS and its members have had some successes in front of judges and appeals courts during the past decade and a half, jurors in criminal and civil trials have consistently delivered guilty or adverse rulings, whether it be the Texas trials that convicted Jeffs and 10 of his followers on sex abuse and bigamy charges, or the civil jury in Phoenix in 2014 that ordered Hildale and Colorado City to pay $5.2 million to a couple denied utility services for five years. All sides later settled the lawsuit for $3 million.

Blake Hamilton, an attorney representing Hildale, acknowledged the problem during a recent interview. In those previous trials, the prosecutors or plaintiffs piled on as many unsavory topics as they could — from polygamy to underage marriages to the eviction of boys and men to questionable use of public money — to try to make the FLDS look bad.

Those topics are fair game at this latest trial — so long as they relate to the discrimination allegations — and Hamilton worries they will prejudice the jury.

"The biggest concern I have is that this case is going to be decided by people's bias against the FLDS," Hamilton said, "and not because of supposed acts of discrimination."

Hamilton and Colorado City's attorney, Jeff Matura, will argue that while Utah and Arizona removed the police powers of some Short Creek marshals almost a decade ago, there has been no pattern of discrimination. If there have been isolated cases, the defense will argue, they did no harm.

The Justice Department will point to multiple examples of the Short Creek marshals protecting church interests, refusing to investigate reported crimes, and ignoring things such as marriages to underage girls even when another marshal was the groom. Federal attorneys will call former FLDS members, including a former marshal and the former Hildale town manager, to testify about how the towns operated and what was said and decided out of earshot of the public.

That former marshal and town manager, half-brothers Helaman and Vincen Barlow, respectively, testified on the towns' behalf in that 2014 trial. They then left their municipal jobs and confessed to prosecutors they had lied under oath. They have been granted immunity from prosecution in connection with their testimony in this latest trial.

The Justice Department also will tell the jury the history of the towns and the FLDS.

The Short Creek community was established in 1913. Residents continued practicing polygamy even after the mainstream church to which many of them previously belonged, the Salt Lake City-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, banned it. The FLDS have other tenets, too.

The FLDS adopted belief in a "One Man Rule," in which a prophet has supreme authority over the faithful and can determine whether they reach heaven. Since 2002, that "One Man" has been Jeffs, and much of the Justice Department case is built around conversations and correspondence between him and Short Creek's municipal officials.

The Justice Department plans to show that those elected and appointed officials sought Jeffs' guidance on the towns' business and would do anything to please the FLDS leader and keep intact their own salvations.

If the jury finds a pattern of discrimination, it can award monetary damages. Then Judge H. Russel Holland can order changes in the towns, including a dissolution of the police force and amendments to specific ordinances found to be discriminatory.

Matura said the Justice Department filed its lawsuit in 2012 to "exterminate a religion" it doesn't like.

"We find that very, very dangerous," Matura said, "because it might be the FLDS religion today, and tomorrow it might be my religion or your religion."

Cooke grew up in the FLDS. She left in 1994 at age 35 after an Easter sermon in which one leader asserted men on the priesthood council were guaranteed a higher place in heaven than other followers, even if they didn't live as righteous a life.

Cooke said her husband threw her out of their Colorado City home after she left the faith. Cooke was later able to reclaim that home, but still doesn't have the deed because Colorado City's municipal government won't allow her to subdivide her house from other homes on the parcel.

She said she hopes the trial results in fair laws and treatment in Short Creek.

"I'm talking about making it a community where the government doesn't rule everybody based on religion," Cooke said.

ncarlisle@sltrib.com
Twitter: @natecarlisle

http://www.sltrib.com/home/3420575-155/a-century-in-the-making-the

Polygamist leader's nieces say they prayed, cooked, cleaned at his compound

NATE CARLISLE

The Salt Lake Tribune
January 4, 2016

Polygamy » Residents of “The Jeffs Block” were instructed to follow strict rules or face eviction.

Hildale • At Lyle Jeffs' home, the day began at 5:30 a.m.

That's when he would lead a scripture lesson for the 60 or so people living in his compound here. There would be another scripture lesson at 7 p.m., though Lyle typically didn't attend that.

In between, say sisters Kate Musser and May Jeffs, there was work. Kate taught school subjects to little boys even though her education stopped in the seventh grade. Both sisters sewed. They cooked. They cleaned.

That last task they were supposed to do only with their right hand.

"You couldn't do anything without talking to [Lyle] first," May said.

In separate interviews with The Salt Lake Tribune, Kate, now 20, and May, 18, described what life was like living with Lyle. He is the bishop of Short Creek — the collective name for Hildale and Colorado City, Ariz. — and the full brother of imprisoned Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints President Warren Jeffs.

Lyle Jeffs did not respond to multiple interview requests. He values his privacy.

He lives in what the FLDS call "The Jeffs Block," or just "The Block." It's an entire block of Hildale surrounded by 10-foot walls. Everyone there was instructed to call him "Father."

Lyle's house, referred to as "The Big House," sits in the northeast corner. The house is in the shape of an asymmetrical heptagon with a courtyard in the center. It's two stories and, according to measurements from the county assessor's office, it is nine or 10 times the size of the average American home. Anyone in Lyle's family who is in the United Order, the elite subset of the FLDS, can live there.

Normal-size houses also sit on the block. Some houses, the sisters and other Jeffs family say, were for some of Lyle's then-nine wives — the ones who have not qualified for the United Order. Another house was for some women and children who are not related to Lyle but for whom he assumed the responsibility as caretaker — because their husbands and fathers were serving missions for the church, had been evicted from the faith, or were in prison.

Kate and May are Lyle's nieces. They, their mother and three other sisters went to live on The Jeffs Block in 2012 after Lyle evicted their father from the FLDS. Lyle claimed their father committed a sin before he was married, May said, though Lyle never described the transgression.

—

Big House, small meals • When they arrived, Lyle told them the bishop's family had to be an example. Lyle observed dietary restrictions and, apparently, the ban Warren placed on sex between spouses in 2011. Kate says Lyle slept alone in a large bedroom; none of his wives had any newborns.

Block residents ate meals at The Big House, with women and young children in an upstairs dining room and older boys and men eating in a downstairs kitchen. Kate, who was a cook in the house, said the meals were modest. Tacos or tilapia with rice were common for lunch or supper.

Lyle never ate with the family, Kate said. Instead, she was instructed to cook him special meals, which she delivered to him at his offices in Short Creek.

The meals were nicer than those served on The Jeffs Block — steak, shrimp, salmon. FLDS rarely eat dessert, but Kate said she baked Lyle lemon chiffon cakes, caramel apple cakes and cakes with Pero substituted for cocoa. Chocolate was banned.

"There wasn't a day when I wasn't in the kitchen," Kate said.

Followers outside the block, meanwhile, were waiting in lines at the bishop's storehouse for groceries, Kate and May said. Charity workers in Short Creek often describe the towns as being in crisis, with FLDS going hungry and living in deteriorating homes without utilities.

http://www.sltrib.com/home/3282059-155/polygamist-leaders-nieces-say-they-prayed

The Journey Out: Women Who Escaped a Polygamist Mormon Cult Share Their Story

Molly Oswaks
Vice
January 7, 2016

Although its leader Warren Jeffs is spending life in jail for raping his child brides, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) remains under his increasingly harsh control. Those who escape are ostracized by their family and friends—but this year, former members of the Church held the community's first Christmas celebration.

The twin towns of Colorado City, Arizona, and Hildale, Utah—a border community formerly known as Short Creek, which is home to the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS)—are a place of immense beauty and unspeakable pain.

Founded in 1913 by Mormon Fundamentalists who broke away from the traditional Latter-Day Saints church in order to practice the principal of plural marriage, this community, geographically isolated by the Vermillion Cliffs of the Colorado Plateau, is a step back in time for anyone who drives through it. Here, women dress modestly in ankle-length, arm-covering prairie dresses and wear no makeup. Because it is believed that in heaven they will wash their husbands' feet with their hair, they keep it long and braided in elaborate ropes down their backs. Men increase their chances of becoming gods themselves in heaven, if they take a plurality of wives; the more, the better. In this community, present-day polygamy is alive, but not so well.

Though the Mormon Church has officially disowned the fundamentalists, the FLDS trace their lineage all the way back to founding Prophet Joseph Smith. John Y. Barlow (whose last name is claimed still today by many of his descendants) was the first leader of the FLDS, until his death in 1949. He was succeeded by a series of men; more recent was "Uncle Rulon" Jeffs, who died in 2002 and was famously succeeded as Prophet by his son Warren.

After crisscrossing the country to evade police, and ultimately landing himself on the FBS's 10 Most Wanted list, Warren Jeffs was captured in Las Vegas in 2006. He had 78 wives at the time of his arrest—a third of them under the age of 17. In 2011, Jeffs was successfully convicted on two counts of felony child sexual assault for the rapes of just two of his child brides, ages 12 and 15. Yet, despite that fact that he is currently serving a sentence of life plus 20 years from state prison in Palestine, Texas, Jeffs continues to control the cult from behind bars, using his loyal brother Lyle Jeffs as a proxy and mouthpiece.

In the years since his arrest, "Uncle Warren" has issued new rules from jail. Easily the most disturbing is that physical contact between a man and his wives is utterly prohibited, and physical intimacy––meaning sex––is expressly prohibited. In current-day FLDS, a woman can only become pregnant by one of the 15 "seed bearers" appointed by Warren to carry out their worthy bloodlines. According to court documents filed by Lyle Jeffs' former wife as part of a divorce case, "It is the husband's responsibility to hold the hands of their wives while the seed bearer 'spreads his seed. In layman terms, the husband is required to sit in the room while the chosen seed bearer, or a couple of them, rape his wife or wives."

This is a community where most children have never even heard of Christmas or Santa Claus, let alone celebrated the holiday (these Fundamentalists don't celebrate any "worldly" holidays). In addition, Jeffs enforced a full ban on toys in 2011 for those in the sect. "I had a neighbor that lived right across the garden from me. I watched that man stand at the side of his garbage can, as he had his small children bring out their toys and he would then, one-by-one, break them and violently throw them into the can," wrote former FLDS member Brenda Nicholson at Voices for Dignity, an organization founded by human trafficking survivor Christine Marie Katas to speak out against the abuse, exploitation, oppression, and humiliation of human beings in patriarchal polygamous cults and other related instances of ecclesiastical abuse. This ban, in part, is what inspired Christine Marie to plan a Christmas celebration, dubbed the First Christmas, in Short Creek. "People say there is a cloud over the town," she told me. "I planned the First Christmas to bring happiness and help that gray cloud get dispersed by love."

Voices for Dignity, Christine Marie's organization, was joined by the Sound Choices Coalition, Church for the Nations in Phoenix, Movies Making Difference, Safety Net, and Shield and Refuge. on December 16 for a blowout Christmas celebration unlike anything the people of Short Creek had ever before seen. The event was open to all ex-FLDS (as well as any current FLDS members curious about life on the outside), and it also welcomed women who'd recently fled the Kingston clan, a polygamous sect in Salt Lake City.

People say there is a cloud over the town. I planned the First Christmas to bring happiness and help that gray cloud get dispersed by love.
Inside the Holm Sunday School Building in Hildale, Utah, rows of folding tables were laden with iced sugar cookies in every color and shape. Other tables offered an array of crafting supplies: paper and paste, glitter, pipe cleaners, and all manner of kid-friendly art supplies for DIY ornament making. There was also a booth set up and staffed by volunteers from Premier Pediatrics, a southern Utah-based healthcare provider for mothers and children. Though not as exciting as a dense puff of cinnamon divinity, their presence was a blessing for these young families, whose healthcare and medical needs are flagrantly ignored inside the FLDS, as Carolyn Jessop details in her memoir Escape.

Onstage, dressed as Santa, ex-FLDS volunteer Clinton Holm (whose family owns the building) posed for pictures and handed out stockings filled with handmade toys and small candies to the hundreds of children who had been brought by their mothers for their first-ever Christmas celebration. For the kids, the lavishing of such kindness was literally unbelievable. "This is my very first doll!" said one little girl, shocked by the free toy. All of these women and children had left the FLDS within the past four or five years, some as recently as just a few months ago. For many, it was the first large, purely social gathering they had ever attended.

Leaving the FLDS is not a simple process. Most women flee without much more than the clothes on their backs and whatever belongings they are able to throw quickly into a plastic garbage bag. Once you're out, you are considered an apostate. The same goes for any children you bring with you. Those who leave the cult are shunned by all family and friends who remain in the FLDS.

After the daytime Christmas party, close to fifty ex-FLDS women were invited to enjoy a holiday meal at 240 East Utah Avenue. Originally commissioned by Warren Jeffs from behind bars, this modern mansion was intended to serve as a home for him and his many wives. (Though he's not getting out any time soon, Jeffs tells his followers that the bars of his cell will melt and that he will be delivered back to them, and all who remain loyal believe this to be true.) The walls of the many-roomed building are upholstered in the same ugly but expensive baby blue carpeting that covers the floors, and the door jams are a good 12 inches thick; these rooms are designed with acoustics in mind.

Now known as the America's Most Wanted Bed & Breakfast, the building is owned by Jeffs' former bodyguard Willie Jessop, who purchased the whole compound at an auction. He has expressed hope that, in his hands, the property will help reunite families who fled under Jeffs's control. Willie was nowhere to be found, however, and for many of the women I spoke with here, his absence was a relief. Willie is "a really bad dude pretending to be a good one," I'd been told by a Los Angeles-based film producer who has worked in the community.

Here, the women shared a meal of turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, corn, and red wine for those who drink it. After dinner they were invited upstairs to a string of rooms, which had been packed wall-to-wall with gifts for young children and teens. There were stuffed animals, bicycles, toy trucks, boxed sets of Play-Doh, board games, books, dolls, clothes, makeup sets, and more clothing than there was square footage to display. Each woman was allowed to pick one gift for each of her children, and some collected as many as fifteen.

Adjacent to the gift rooms was a room filled with wrapping paper, gift bags, tape, scissors, and bows. Here, in the "Thank You" room, as Christine Marie dubbed it, women sat and chatted with each other, as they wrapped up presents for their children's first Christmas. "This is my first-ever wrapped Christmas present, and I'm 37!" shouted one woman to the crowd.

It had been a day of overwhelming emotion for everyone. Pretty quickly, a lively conversation developed between several ladies in attendance about the circumstances under which they made the choice to leave the church. For many, the Judgment was the last straw: In an effort to tighten his reins on the faithful and weed out anyone who might pose a threat to his absolute power, Lyle Jeffs, acting as leader in Warren's stead, devised a community-wide inquisition in 2011, referred to by all who lived through it as "the Judgment." This required every single member of the FLDS to answer a series of invasive questions.

This is my first-ever wrapped Christmas present, and I'm 37!
Depending on their answers, individuals would either be ushered into the United Order (UO), the group of elite FLDS, or deemed a non-member and put on probation. Many families were split up after the Judgment, with children separated from their parents in just about every home. For some, though, it offered women and children the perfect exit from a bad living situation. One woman recalled being asked whether she'd ever touched herself sexually. Others were asked whether they had been intimate with their husband. Many recalled being asked whether they had any anger; as one woman explained: "It eventually got down to 'Have you ever even had a bad thought enter into your mind."

Going into it, "my heart wasn't pounding. I was peaceful, as far as I knew peace at the time." said 40-year-old Misty Taylor*, who has warm brown eyes, a quick smile, and an unusually bubbly personality given the recent events of her life. Misty finally left the FLDS in May 2015. She equated her choice to jumping off a cliff: "You get to a certain point in life where you're ready to either jump off a cliff or keep going, and you just keep going until you're ready to jump." But, she stressed, you have to be ready—even though rock bottom can be difficult to identify when one's life has always been miserable. "That's why a lot of my sisters are still there. They feel like they're almost there––because that's what they've been told. And that the lifting up is almost here; the prophet is almost out of jail." Crazy, they all now agree. Of course Jeffs is never getting out. But, said one woman, "my mom has been out of the religion since February and she still believes he is going to get out; she won't listen."

You get to a certain point in life where you're ready to either jump off a cliff or keep going.
"When you're told your whole life that it's Him, he –– the Prophet –– is the One," explained Misty, "and you've been told he is pure and clean... That's exactly what we're being told: He's pure and clean, and He talks to God, and He visits with God. So here we are, striving so very hard, because there is a remnant this is going to be lifted up to heaven at the very end of the world, whoever is left standing. You can understand the fervency, even when your father is gone and your mother is gone."

Over the course of a year and a half, Misty, her sister wife and all of their children had their memberships revoked. Being deemed a non-member doesn't equate to being kicked out of the FLDS, it simply means you are not "good" enough to be part of the United Order of supreme FLDS members; non-members still live in the community and must follow all the rules, but in lesser homes consisting of children and parents from many different families. When the family patriarch is absent—as was the case for Misty and her sister wife, since their husband had been kicked out of the church completely and sent away on a "repentance mission"—the family is assigned a male caretaker. "Because there is not a father there," Misty explained, "you need a man that is over the family," meaning, essentially, that women without husbands need authoritarian male babysitters.

She wasn't supposed to, but on January 1, 2015, Misty sent a text to her estranged husband. "I just was chatting, just memories and feelings and la-di-da." She missed him and wanted to hear how he was doing. "I was starting to get to the done point," she explains. By then, her husband was aware of the crimes Warren Jeffs had been convicted of. "He started sending some information" about what Jeffs had done, Misty said, "and I just wasn't ready for it."

Everyone else I spoke to who has either contemplated leaving or successfully escaped the cult described feeling a similar sense of cognitive dissonance. In May 2015, she and her eight children left the FLDS for good. Misty and her husband now live with their kids in Short Creek, a seemingly happy family –– minus her sister wife and her kids, who remain in the FLDS.

The following morning, I invited Misty to join me at the Merry Wives Cafe, where I had made arrangements the previous night to eat breakfast with 30-year-old Lynette Warner, who had been married to Warren Jeffs at the age of 18 and escaped the FLDS at 26.

While Warren Jeffs was on the lam, Lynette says, his henchmen secreted her away into several so-called "houses of hiding" across the country: in Las Vegas, South Dakota, Wyoming, Texas, Colorado, Utah, and Arizona. Ultimately, after Jeffs was arrested and put in jail, Lynette was placed in solitary confinement, in a trailer in Colorado City, Arizona, where her older brother acted as jailer, nailing shut her windows and inverting the doorknob. Lynette crawled barefoot out of the trailer window, which she had unscrewed and pried off its tracks, in a desperate escape that was documented by news outlets that referred to her simply as Jeffs's barefoot wife. Lynette told Broadly that she ran in broad daylight across Uzona Avenue to the Hildale, Utah, home of a trustworthy man who had recently left the church. There, they discussed what to do, ultimately deciding to call a woman named Kristyn Decker, who left the FLDS at 50 and now assists other young women fleeing polygamy through the Sound Choices Coalition.

"The day after I escaped, police went door-to-door through the town with flyers," that featured a picture of Lynette's face, she told Broadly. But by then, Lynette was fifty miles away in New Harmony, Utah, at Kristyn's home. Within months, Kristyn adopted Lynette, who now goes by the name Brielle Decker and calls Kristyn "mom".

We sat and talked for hours at the cafe, which has become something of a tourist attraction for road trippers traveling through or to the infamous border towns. Lynette and Misty had never met before, but for Misty, Lynette was something of a celebrity: Everyone in the FLDS knows her story.

One consequence of the strict hair and dress uniform prescribed to all FLDS women is that they lose their individuality, resembling thousands of versions of the same ideal. It could be easy for an outsider to imagine these women as mindless drones, dutifully fulfilling their wifely roles. But sitting in the cafe, listening to these two strangers share their stories of escape, it became clear that no matter how much dogma and brainwashing one endures, our true personality remains in our core. As with all the women I met this weekend, these two ladies are true individuals, with different attitudes and laughs and outlooks.

Though both women are in therapy to deal with their pasts, Lynette is quick to refer to the FLDS as a cult, while Misty—who still wears her brown hair long down her back and high at her forehead and dresses modestly in long skirts and long-sleeved blouses—struggles to see it that way. Lynette has started to find her voice as an advocate for women escaping polygamy, and she's studying psychology with the hope that she will one day be able to work in a professional capacity with survivors like herself. Misty, whose departure from the church is more recent, is still reluctant to come out as an escapee, preferring to go by a pseudonym to protect her image in the minds of family who remain in the FLDS.

After breakfast, Misty left to pick her children up from school; it was the last day before winter break, and the kids got out even earlier than their scheduled half-day dismissal. But Lynette had a free day, so she drove me around Hildale and Colorado City, which were still covered in a light snow from the previous days' falling. The striking south-western landscape felt like North Korea on Mars: dusty red dirt roads and glowing red sandstone cliffs; vast homes in various stages of near-completion (not finishing construction, homeowners are able to avoid paying property tax); a zoo in the middle of town, vacant but for a few glum buffalo. At the old-looking playground there was not a child in sight. Rather, kids who looked as young as twelve barreled down the streets in big rigs trucks and SUVs, and little ones keeping close to the tall fences outside their homes flipped us off for no reason at all. They are taught to hate outsiders and apostates alike, believing us to be Satan's people.

Two week after I'd returned home from Short Creek, I received an update from one of the Christmas volunteers: Two more women had left the cult and are now working with lawyers to get their kids out, too. And at a Christmas Eve party held in Short Creek on the 24th, four young FLDS women had shown up unannounced, similarly emboldened by grapevine stories they had heard of the December 16 festivities. That, in itself, is progress. And it was also the point: by hosting the First Christmas party in the very town were thousands are still under the prophet's thumb, Christine Marie and her co-organizers were showing the town that they can experience joy and receive kindness from the outside world. They were demonstrating that when you jump off the cliff, you're actually taking a step higher.

As one of the FLDS escapees I spoke to at the event sees it: The brainwashing within the community is too strong for many people to overcome; instead, we must continue to offer glimpses of how good life on the outside can be, because they are paying attention. 

* Name has been changed

https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/flds-celebrating-christmas-after-escaping-a-polygamist-mormon-cult

Justice Department: Lyle Jeffs needs to testify at polygamous towns’ trial

NATE CARLISLE
The Salt Lake Tribune
January 12 2016

Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints Bishop Lyle Jeffs is a "key co-conspirator" in discriminating against people who do not follow his church and should be forced to testify in a trial scheduled to begin next week, the U.S. Department of Justice says.

The Justice Department made its allegation against Jeffs in a motion filed Tuesday. The Justice Department is suing Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz., collectively known as Short Creek and home to the polygamous FLDS.

Jeffs has been issued a subpoena to testify at the trial, though his attorney filed a motion last weekasking that subpoena be quashed.

In its motion Tuesday, the Justice Department rejects arguments from Jeffs that traveling the 371 miles from Hildale to Phoenix would be a burden, saying he has made such trips before and Jeffs frequently does business in Arizona. That means a court rule which says witnesses do not have to travel more than 100 miles does not apply, the Justice Department motion says.

Jeffs' attorney argued last week that the Justice Department can play a recording of Jeffs' pre-trial deposition. The Justice Department on Tuesday said live testimony, particularly if Jeffs' invokes his Fifth Amendment rights and declines to answer some questions, will better allow the jury to assess Jeffs' credibility.

"Bishop Lyle Jeffs is a key co-conspirator with Defendants in this case, and the United States will suffer prejudice in several ways if this Court grants the Motion" to quash the subpoena, the Justice Department wrote Tuesday.

"Lyle Jeffs represents a central figure in this case," Justice Department lawyers later added, "the biggest co-conspirator with Defendants beyond Warren Jeffs, and the jury thus should have the benefit and opportunity to observe him testify live."

Lyle Jeffs is the full brother of imprisoned FLDS President Warren Jeffs. Much of the Justice Department's case is built around communications officials in the two towns had with the brothers as they allegedly denied services to residents.

In a motion on behalf of Colorado City, attorney Jeff Matura on Tuesday also asked that the subpoena for Lyle Jeffs be quashed. Matura argued that since Lyle Jeffs is likely to take the Fifth, having him testify live will lead to a "scripted presentation between the United States and Lyle Jeffs" that could mislead the jury. Matura favored playing the deposition for the jury.

Lawyers for all sides have already argued over whether to permit discussion of polygamy and Warren Jeffs, who is serving a sentence of up to life in prison plus 20 years in Texas for crimes related to marrying and sexually abusing underage girls.

Holland has ruled that those topics may be discussed at trial so long as they relate to allegations of discrimination.

http://www.sltrib.com/home/3410948-155/justice-department-lyle-jeffs-needs-to

Trial is expected to reveal polygamous towns' inner workings, corruption

St George News
Associated Press
January 7, 2016

PHOENIX (AP) — A trial that begins this month in Phoenix is expected to reveal the inner workings of two secluded towns on the Arizona-Utah line that authorities say were acting as agents of a corrupt polygamist regime.

The federal government brought a civil rights lawsuit against Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona, that contends local leaders engaged in a pattern of discrimination against residents who are not members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which broke away from mainstream Mormonism when it disavowed polygamy more than 100 years ago.

The town of Hildale, Utah, date unknown. The U.S. Justice Department is suing Hildale and its twin town Colorado City, Ariz. for discrimation. | Photo courtesy of the Utah Attorney General’s Office

The government alleges officials in the towns seized property from nonmembers, denied them water services and prevented them from building homes.

Police officers are accused of assisting sect leader Warren Jeffs while he was a fugitive on charges of arranging marriages between girls and older men.

The government also says police failed to investigate crimes against nonbelievers. For example, officers refused to act on nonbelievers’ trespassing complaints against sect members, the lawsuit says.

The communities deny the allegations and say religion isn’t a motivating factor in their decisions. They tried unsuccessfully to get a judge to bar evidence of polygamy, underage marriage and church teachings.

Experts believe the trial will provide a rare glimpse into towns that for decades have been shrouded in secrecy and possess a deep-seated loathing of government and outsiders. One expert compared the trial to past proceedings that gave the country a window into the Mafia’s shadowy criminal underworld.

Sam Brower, a private investigator who has researched the church for years, said:

There’s going to be a lot of really interesting insights into what life is like there. What corruption is like there. What the civil rights violations are there. This should be a really revealing trial.

Jeff Matura, an attorney representing Colorado City, said the lawsuit is less about the towns and more about the religion. He also warned that the case could leave other religions open to similar attacks in court.

“Today, it’s FLDS,” Matura said. “Tomorrow, it may be my church or your church.”

Justice Department lawyers are bracing for the possibility of defiant witnesses from the towns. The agency says in court papers that some sect leaders invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination during depositions, and they are expected to do the same at trial.

A jury will hear the case and decide whether the towns carried out a pattern of religious-based discrimination. The Justice Department is seeking a ruling that the towns violated a fair-housing law. It’s seeking unspecified changes to prevent future discrimination.

The agency has declined to comment on the trial, which begins Jan. 19.

Amos Guiora, a University of Utah law professor who has studied the church, said witnesses should reveal valuable information about how Jeffs sends orders from his prison cell.

Sect members believe polygamy brings exaltation in heaven and that Jeffs is a prophet who speaks for God. Jeffs, who is serving a life sentence in Texas, is still believed to rule the sect through letters and phone calls from prison, with enforcement help from one of his brothers.

A judge has said the Justice Department has evidence suggesting officers dropped off packages, letters and other items for Jeffs while he was a fugitive.

But Guiora doesn’t expect the trial to influence Jeffs’ followers.

“You could bring 5,000 witnesses, but that would never convince the true believer,” Guiora said.

Willie Jessop, a former church spokesman and Jeffs bodyguard who left the sect in 2011, predicts Justice Department attorneys will have no trouble proving city government and police leaders take their orders from Jeffs.

Jeffs and other sect leaders control how much money they make, where they eat and sleep, and how they run the city, Jessop said.

“I think it will be quite a graphic case of city government corruption at almost the fullest degree — almost to the level of a complete cartel running our city government,” Jessop said. “It’s going to be a rodeo.”

https://www.stgeorgeutah.com/news/archive/2016/01/07/apc-trial-is-expected-to-reveal-polygamous-towns-inner-workings/#.Vo-1lLYrLGg

Polygamist leader Warren Jeffs, in a cage and under oath

BEN WINSLOW
FOX13NOW.COM
NOVEMBER 12, 2015

In a cell inside the Texas prison where he'll spend the rest of his life, polygamist leader Warren Jeffs raised his hand and took an oath.

"Do you affirm that the testimony you will give today will be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?" Jeffs was asked.

"I do," he replied.

"Will you please state your entire name?"

"Warren Steed Jeffs."

The leader of the Fundamentalist LDS Church was being forced to sit for a deposition last year in a St. George child custody case involving an ex-follower and his two wives. The videotaped testimony, which lasted hours, was recently obtained by FOX 13. It is the first glimpse of the polygamist leader since he was sent to prison for child sex assault related to underage "marriages."

Jeffs appeared pale and gaunt. His speech was slow, and those who were present for the deposition said he appeared "out of it."

"It reminded me of, like, Hannibal Lecter. Somebody that's in a cage and completely insane," said Sam Brower, a private investigator who works for attorneys suing the FLDS Church.

At first, lawyers tried to ask Jeffs about the case at hand. Lorin Holm, who was suing for custody of his children, had been branded an "apostate" by FLDS leadership and kicked out of the church.

"Their children have been told their father is a wicked man, that he's an apostate and he's lost the priesthood?" Nadine Hansen, the guardian ad litem for Holm's children, asked Jeffs.

He wouldn't answer.

"I refuse to answer based on the Fifth Amendment right under the United States Constitution," he said.

Jeffs stuck by that answer throughout most of the deposition, despite lawyers' attempts to rattle him. They strayed from the subject of the custody case, asking about the inner-workings of the FLDS Church.

"Is it correct that in 2012, you ordered all males among the 'priesthood people' to be circumcised?" Hansen asked.

"I'm going to instruct my client not to answer," Jeffs' attorney, Travis Walsh, interjected.

Jeffs was asked about an edict that "select men" were told to "father all the children in the community." Again, Jeffs was instructed by his lawyer not to answer the question.

When Jeffs would answer, he would cite his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

"I will not be answering your question, thank you," he said. "Fifth Amendment."

Roger Hoole, Holm's attorney, told FOX 13 he expected Jeffs to refuse to answer. In the three depositions he's conducted of Jeffs, the polygamist leader asserts both his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and his First Amendment religious freedom rights.

But in civil court case -- such as child custody matters -- sometimes the questions are more important than the answers.

"We want the judge to be able to see the questions, and understand he's taking the Fifth Amendment because whatever answer he has for that would not help him and reveal, probably, crimes," Hoole said. "The judge can draw inference from that in a civil case."

In the deposition, Hoole grilled Jeffs on polygamy and underage marriages. He played back tape-recorded sexual encounters made by Jeffs involving teenage girls. Those recordings were used as evidence in Jeffs' Texas trial, that led to his conviction on child sex assault for the underage "marriages."

"You described them, did you not, as 'heavenly comfort wives?' And you described these sexual activities as 'heavenly sessions?'" Hoole asked Jeffs on the tape.

To each question, Jeffs retorted "same answer," citing his Fifth Amendment right to not answer.

"There are many examples of these young girls you married, is that correct?" Hoole asked.

"Same answer," Jeffs replied.

As the deposition went on, Hoole became more direct in his questioning.

"Mr. Jeffs, isn't it true that this has nothing to do with religious persecution?"

"Fifth Amendment."

"Doesn't all of this boil down to raping little girls?"

Jeffs' attorney chimed in.

"Objection. Harassing," he said.

Brower, who wrote the book "Prophet's Prey" and has been promoting a documentary film based on his book, said in an interview with FOX 13 that Jeffs remains in charge of the FLDS Church.

"He's still in there causing so much human suffering," he said.

Hoole said he wished people inside the FLDS Church would see the deposition--but they will not.

"It's important for people to see what is happening in our own backyard, in terms of the abuses that are taking place in the name of religion," he said. "It's important for there to be opportunities for people inside the religion to learn about this. They are commanded not to look at this information."

Hoole told FOX 13 he would like to continue to depose Jeffs as part of other ongoing lawsuits he has pending against the FLDS Church. In other civil lawsuits, lawyers have sought permission from judges to make Jeffs sit down to answer their questions.

http://fox13now.com/2015/11/12/polygamist-leader-warren-jeffs-in-a-cage-and-under-oath/

Judge: Polygamy can be raised in lawsuit against 2 towns

Arizona Daily Sun
October 30, 2015

PHOENIX (AP) — A judge presiding over a civil rights lawsuit against polygamous towns on the Arizona-Utah line has ruled federal authorities can offer evidence at trial about polygamy, underage marriage and the teachings of the dominant religious sect in both communities.

U.S. District Judge Russel Holland ruled polygamy and underage marriage can be raised as long as they have a connection to the U.S. Justice Department's allegation that Colorado City, Arizona, and Hildale, Utah, served as an arm of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

Holland also ruled the teachings of the church, which broke away from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints when it disavowed polygamy more than 100 years ago, can be brought up if they have a connection to city business.

The rulings issued earlier this week marked a setback for both communities, which argued it would be irrelevant or prejudicial to let the Justice Department bring up those subjects.

The trial is set to begin in Phoenix on Jan. 19 and will be decided by jurors from northern Arizona.

The towns are accused of systematically denying housing, water services and police protection to people who weren't part of the church.

The lawsuit says the communities' police officers have confronted people about their disobedience of church rules, failed to investigate crimes against them and returned an underage bride home after she had fled.

The towns also are accused of refusing to provide water services to non-members and preventing them from building homes.

The communities deny the allegations.

Holland is mulling a request from the towns to bar the Justice Department from mentioning the sermons of sect leader Warren Jeffs, who is serving a life sentence in Texas for sexually assaulting underage girls he considered brides.

The Justice Department is seeking a judge's declaration that the towns have violated a fair housing law and court orders requiring steps to prevent future discrimination.

http://azdailysun.com/news/state-and-regional/judge-polygamy-can-be-raised-in-lawsuit-against-towns/article_5c2ee166-6f68-59d6-b158-a8574747d86a.html

Here’s the ‘application’ an FLDS school told girls to fill out

Nate Carlisle
Salt Lake Tribune
October 26 2015

 

Are you a girl in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints applying for the job of mother?

Have you learned to put the priesthood first?

Have you acquired heavenly smiles? How about unshakable sweetness?

Those are all questions on a class exercise given to seventh grade girls in the FLDS, according to Jessica Rohbock.

Rohbock posted the pseudo job application this month on her blog. She said a friend sent it to her. Rohbock says the application was part of a business class.

The assignment wasn't given to boys. The application articulates what's expected of girls and women.

The application is filled with FLDS parlance, including a heading telling the girls, "YOU MUST BE TRAINED IN THE CELESTIAL WAYS."

The FLDS removed their children from public schools years ago in favor of a sort of centralized homeschooling. On Rohbock's blog, in which she publishes her journals from growing up as a teenage girl in the FLDS and adds a present-day perspective, she describes the curriculum as "censored and developed by FLDS leaders."

Schooling for Rohbock stopped at the ninth grade.

ncarlisle@sltrib.com

Twitter: @natecarlisle

http://www.sltrib.com/blogs/polygamy/3098244-155/heres-the-application-an-flds-school

Colorado City rally to bring attention to alleged corruption in local governmen

DJ BOLERJACK
KUTV
October 23, 2015

Video

(KUTV) The polygamist cities of Hildale and Colorado City are not strangers to controversy within the walls of their local government. To end that, activists and former FLDS church members are organizing a rally.

The hope is that this rally brings more attention to what some former church members call "corruption" within the local government and law enforcement.

John Nielsen, a former member of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, says it's about time something is being done.

"Twenty years ago it was a fun town," said Nielsen. But now to him the towns he once knew are unrecognizable.

"With growth, change of leadership, things changed."

Nielsen said when Warren Jeff's, former President of the FLDS church, took over, he established a tight grip on local law enforcement.

"If you have the law book and the bible, they're definitely reading far too much out of the bible," said Nielsen.

To put a stop to this control, a rally has been organized.

"This is an historic rally, nothing like this has happened before," said rally organizer, Lindsey Hansen Park, who is not from the twin cities. She's an outsider that's been looking in for a long time.

"The main focus of the rally is for people, local citizens to feel courage to raise their voices," said Park. "I've been down there, I've been harassed by members of the community. I know I don't have protection from law enforcement."

In response to the local police department and rumors that surround its ethics, Nielsen said in order to feel safe in a community, you need a group of people you can rely on.

"That should be the police."

Even though Park comes from a different background, she feels something has to be done because for decades, this community has been silenced by its leadership.

"They're afraid to speak out. They're afraid to act out," said Park. "There needs to be a separation of church and state."

Park believes the Twin Cities rally on Saturday will gather at least 200 people and the purpose is to call on state and local leaders to re-examine the current laws and procedures in order to help residents take their cities back.

"These people need us, need Utahans to stand with them."

Park and other rally organizers, Terrill Musser and Whitney Moulton, said if people are interested in joining this rally, they ask you to meet at 6:30 p.m. near 75 Central Street, Colorado City, AZ in the parking lot of the strip mall, north of the hardware store in town.

Posters and signs are welcome at the rally and click here to see the Facebook page for this rally.

http://kutv.com/news/local/colorado-city-rally-to-bring-attention-to-alleged-corruption-in-local-government

Pecan harvest with polygamous sect kids subject of court hearing

NATE CARLISLE
The Salt Lake Tribune
October 19, 2015

A judge this morning will consider how to proceed in a case where a company and a polygamous church are accused of using unpaid children as laborers.

Paragon Contractors and the U.S. Department of Labor will go back to federal court in Salt Lake City. A docket describes Monday's hearing as a status conference, typically where attorneys and the judge set dates for future proceedings.

Paragon is accused of using up to 1,400 children and women from the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints as unpaid labor during a December 2012 nut harvest at the Southern Utah Pecan Ranch near Hurricane. Children who have since left the sect have submitted affidavits describing working at the ranch for years, sometimes in the cold for 13 hours a day without ever being paid on orders from FLDS leaders.

Paragon had the contract to provide labor for the harvest. The company was already under a federal judge's order from 2007 not to use underage labor.

The Department of Labor contends Paragon violated that order and is asking Judge Tena Campbell to impose sanctions, such as fines or more restrictions on how Paragon conducts business. The Labor Department has already fined the company, its executives, the FLDS Church and the man running its day-to-day operations, Lyle Jeffs, almost $2 million.

Paragon and two of its executives are contesting the fines in an administrative court, and the Labor Department cannot collect money from any of the parties until those appeals are adjudicated.

http://www.sltrib.com/home/3073651-155/pecan-harvest-with-polygamous-sect-kids

Utah Cites Warren Jeff as Reason Polygamy Should Be Illegal

ABC News
BRADY MCCOMBS, ASSOCIATED PRESS
SALT LAKE CITY

October 6, 2015

The state argues in a filing Tuesday to a federal appeals court in Denver that Jeffs' actions show what can happen when polygamy is allowed. Jeffs is serving a life sentence in a Texas prison for sexually assaulting underage girls he considered wives.

The state is challenging a 2013 ruling that struck down a key part of Utah's law banning polygamy, bringing the state's law in lines with other states.

About Jeffs, state attorneys wrote: "That is what the boots on the ground fact of bigamy and polygamy can look like."

They added that the sect he still leads from prison on the Utah-Arizona border is "a community ravaged by untold fraud and other crimes associated with larger polygamous groups. The harms are real," wrote Parker Douglas, the federal solicitor for the Utah Attorney General's Office.

Kody Brown and his four wives, who brought the case, argue in court documents that their reality TV show "Sister Wives" shows polygamous marriages can be as healthy as monogamous ones.

The Browns have never been followers of Jeffs, who leads the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, of FLDS. The Browns belong to a different polygamous group, Apostolic United Brethren, or AUB, that has a better reputation.

The state's filing comes after Jonathan Turley, an attorney for the Browns, argued in a filing that the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage shows that laws restricting consensual adult relationships are outdated, even if certain unions are unpopular.

It's unclear when the appeals court will rule. No hearing has been set for the case.

Turley has said the family is prepared to take the legal fight to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary.

Unlike same-sex marriage advocates, the Browns are not seeking full legal recognition of polygamous marriages.

The December 2013 ruling decriminalized polygamy, but bigamy — holding marriage licenses with multiple partners — remains illegal. In his decision, U.S. District Judge Clark Waddoups ruled that a portion of Utah's bigamy law forbidding cohabitation with another person violated the First Amendment, which guarantees the freedom of religion.

If the ruling stands, Utah's law would be identical to most other states that prohibit people from having multiple marriage licenses. In most polygamous families in Utah, the man is legally married to one woman but only "spiritually married" to the others.

Advocacy groups for polygamy and individual liberties called the ruling a significant decision that removed the threat of arrest for the state's plural families.

Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes appealed, saying courts have long upheld laws banning polygamy because they prevent abuse of women and children.

The teaching that polygamy brings exaltation in heaven is a legacy of the early Mormon church, but the mainstream Salt Lake City-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints abandoned the practice in 1890 and strictly prohibits it today.

The state points to Utah's prohibition on polygamy in the late 1800s, which allowed it to finally earn statehood, as another reason why the ruling should be overturned. Laws passed that prohibited plural marriages should make the court's decision an easy one, the state contended.

"Utah has ever since lived with that condition and found that it curtails public harms that flow from polygamist and plural marriages," the state filing says.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/utah-cites-warren-jeff-reason-polygamy-illegal-34289951

FLDS: The Story of a Mob Posing as a Church

September 18, 2015

The Takeaways

It's been nearly a decade since Warren Jeffs was arrested for the transgressions he committed as head of the Mormon Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints, known as FLDS.

But the details of those transgressions have, up until now, not been widely disseminated. Yes, many of us know about the plural marriages, and the sex abuse—these details are abhorrent enough.

But there's much, much more to the story, including money laundering, violent physical punishments, and operations that bore a greater resemblance to a mob than to a church.

Sam Brower is the private investigator who spent nearly a decade investigating FLDS leader Warren Jeffs. He wrote about the investigation in the New York Times best-seller "Prophet's Prey."

Amy Berg is the Academy Award-nominated director of "Prophet's Prey," the new documentary based on Sam Brower's book.

Brower and Berg join The Takeaway to discuss their harrowing investigation into the FLDS. "Prophet's Prey" is in theaters today. Check out a trailer for the film below.

http://www.thetakeaway.org/story/flds-story-mob-posing-church/

America’s little-known ISIS: The fundamentalist Mormon sect that blends polygamy, child rape and organized crime

Salon

Andrew O'Hehir

September 19, 201

Over the past century or more, there have been quite a few breakaway Mormon sects scattered across rural North America, small groups led by self-appointed prophets who rejected the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ decision to disavow Brigham Young’s famous doctrine of “plural marriage” in the 1890s. For the most part these splinter sects have been left alone, even (or especially) in a place like Utah, where the mainstream Mormon Church still dominates the political and cultural landscape. In the larger picture of American society and religion, such fundamentalist Mormon groups have been nothing more than tiny, stagnant backwaters of belief. All of them, that is, except one.

That group is the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (usually called the FLDS Church), a multi-million-dollar business enterprise that owns large chunks of remote real estate in Utah, Arizona, Colorado, South Dakota, Texas, Oklahoma and northern Mexico. FLDS-owned companies made the O-rings that failed in the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986 (although the failure was likely a result of flawed NASA specifications), have managed and run major construction projects all over the Western states and have installed the lighting in numerous Las Vegas casinos. For many years the FLDS Church has been dominated and operated by a man named Warren Steed Jeffs, who “married” more than 60 women and girls, some as young as 12 years old, and has repeatedly been accused of molesting children of both sexes, including his sisters, his daughters and his nieces and nephews.

Jeffs made the FBI’s Most Wanted list in the mid-2000s, spent several years as a fugitive, and was ultimately convicted on two counts of sexual assault against children by a Texas jury in 2011. During Jeffs’ two trials (an earlier conviction in Utah was thrown out), Mormon fundamentalism became an object of cultural fascination, inspiring the HBO series “Big Love.” That has faded, and Jeffs is almost certain to spend the rest of his life in prison. But as filmmaker Amy Berg’s new Showtime documentary “Prophet’s Prey” makes clear, the FLDS empire of rape and misogyny and child labor and relentless ideological and psychological domination appears to go on much as before. Despite his isolation and his precarious mental condition, Jeffs continues to command the devotion and obedience of his 10,000 or so followers from behind bars, like an old-time Mob boss with a direct line to God.

There was nothing especially strange or nefarious about the way mainstream Mormons and local law enforcement chose to ignore fundamentalist groups like the FLDS, although we can say in retrospect that it led to dire consequences. From the point of view of the LDS Church leadership in Salt Lake City, engaging with the disgruntled offshoots in any way was a no-win situation. For the last 60 or 70 years, Mormons have struggled to reposition their faith as a modern religious institution rather than a kooky artifact of pioneer America and the Second Great Awakening. Renegade groups who still practiced polygamy and dressed their flocks of sister-wives in hand-sewn “Little House on the Prairie” dresses and World War I hairdos weren’t helping. If the public largely viewed Mormons as freakazoids in clip-on ties with kinky underwear, who might well be practicing plural marriage in secret, then any attention paid to the throwbacks would only heighten the confusion.

This subject makes private investigator Sam Brower a little uneasy when I bring it up. Brower, who is himself a Mormon, is a sunburned, silver-haired, middle-aged man with the distinctive air of a Westerner who has spent his life outside. At breakfast in a trendy coffee shop in lower Manhattan (where I met him and Amy Berg, the filmmaker), he orders a Diet Coke amid a veritable forest of lattes and cappuccinos and chai. (I did not ask whether he observes the Mormon prohibition on caffeine.) When he moved to Utah from California some years ago, Brower agrees, he noticed “a sense of apathy” around Mormon fundamentalism in the Beehive State. “It was like they were just part of the landscape: You leave us alone, we’ll leave you alone.” But why, he continues, was this issue seen as the sole responsibility of the LDS Church, which had renounced polygamy and excommunicated every fundamentalist resister it could identify? Why hadn’t Catholic bishops and Jewish rabbis spoken out? Why had county sheriffs and attorneys general and federal prosecutors almost unanimously looked in the other direction?

Some of those questions answer themselves: Jews and Catholics felt no historical or theological responsibility for bands of weirdos in the wilderness who pronounced themselves the true heirs to Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. But if Brower feels defensive about outsiders’ attempts to connect mainstream Mormons to the wide-ranging criminal activities of the FLDS Church, by far the largest and most powerful of all Mormon breakaway groups, he has unmistakably earned that right.

Along with author and journalist Jon Krakauer (and arguably now Berg, whose documentary features both of them and is based on Brower’s book of the same title), Brower has done more to expose the enormous but almost invisible criminal empire built by Warren Jeffs than anyone in the world. Furthermore, in the larger context of social and religious history, Brower is clearly correct that the disturbing story of the Jeffs family and the FLDS Church reflects issues that go far beyond the contradictions of Mormon theology and the weirdness of the American West.

We can easily find a troubling parallel in today’s front pages, and as Brower will tell you, it’s not nearly as far-fetched as it sounds. You don’t have to approve of religion in general or the LDS Church to see that blaming the faith of Mitt Romney and science-fiction author Orson Scott Card and New York Yankees outfielder Jacoby Ellsbury for the apocalyptic extremism and mind-control techniques and vicious sexual predation of Jeffs’ isolated cult group is a lot like blaming Muslims in general for the 9/11 attacks or the gruesome crimes of ISIS. There’s an obvious historical connection that no one denies, but the two things are not the same.

After Brower tells me twice that he fears that the FLDS saga might end in catastrophic violence, and that he feels certain that Jeffs’ followers would kill or die for him, I ask how he sees the differences between the FLDS and ISIS. Both groups have sought to pursue prophetic religious teachings to their ultimate extreme, and both have constructed a throwback social order based on male domination, female subjugation, forced marriage and the rape and sexual enslavement of children. If Warren Jeffs had the guns, the territory and the freedom that ISIS possesses, how far would he go?

Brower chuckles in a way that suggests he has asked himself the same question. “I would say the difference between them is an AK-47,” he says. “Warren doesn’t have those, and instead of using AK-47s, he uses people’s fear for their salvation. Where my fear comes from is that we know that there’s armed security there [on the various FLDS compounds]. They’ve got weapons, and they’ve had tactical military-type training. So we know that they’re capable of that. And I am 100 percent certain that if and when the time comes, if Warren told them to die at their posts, and the FBI were starting to come in or something, they would die for him. No doubt about it.”

I have to issue a warning to anyone who might see “Prophet’s Prey,” which begins its theatrical release this week in New York and will premiere on Showtime next month. It’s a fascinating work of investigative journalism and cultural spelunking – and it features perhaps the most disturbing minute of audio recording you will ever hear. Berg and Brower decided to include the opening segment of a tape Jeffs had made documenting the consummation of his “marriage” to the youngest of his “spiritual brides,” who was then 12 years old. In other words, it’s a recording of a middle-aged man raping a little girl, while an uncertain number of Jeffs’ other wives stand by, ready to assist. Once heard, it cannot be unheard, but Berg insists it was important.

“Sam told me early on that even after Warren had been arrested and went on trial, people in the FLDS community didn’t believe any of it,” Berg says. “We talked about it many times: How much of the tape to use and where to put it and all of that. But I felt that the jury heard it, and it was on the record. If there was any chance that people that hadn’t heard it before could hear this, it would shed some light. And I think it was a good decision, because since we played the film at Sundance in January, close to 100 women have escaped [from the main FLDS settlement in southern Utah]. Sam is getting those calls all the time, helping those women find food and shelter.”

“Amy was very careful with that tape,” Brower says. “There’s much more of it. It’s much more graphic. That’s only one rape. The evidence produced in Texas was about an hour and a half, different recordings. And the jury – literally after 10 minutes, just about every member of the jury had their headphones off, and their face in their hands, just sobbing. You know, when Jon Krakauer talked about the case on CNN, not only did the people out in Short Creek [Utah] not believe it, the rest of the world didn’t believe it either. People said Jon was lying or exaggerating. ‘No, that could never happen! They’d go and arrest him!’ I think it was necessary to put that little taste of it in there so people could know, yeah, it really is true.”

While Warren Jeffs’ long career as a serial abuser and rapist created lurid headlines, and ultimately landed him in prison, the real story of the FLDS Church is at least as much about money and power as about sex crimes. Brower and Berg only scrape the surface of those issues in a 90-minute documentary, but it’s not fanciful at all to compare the interlocking tangle of FLDS-owned shell corporations, “shelf corporations” and quasi-legitimate businesses – carefully established in different jurisdictions, and all designed to funnel cash upward to Jeffs and his closest associates – to the operations of old-school organized crime. FLDS leaders (the functional head is presumably Lyle Jeffs, Warren’s brother, himself now a fugitive from justice) shuffle hundreds of millions through dozens of bank accounts in several states, pay fictional salaries to employees who actually work 20-hour days for almost nothing, and compel the children of church members to work as virtual slaves.

In fact, if there’s one thing that might lead bring down this vast but little-known evil empire, which has combined two American traditions – the end-times religious cult and the organized crime family – in unique and sinister fashion, it is more likely to be the repeated violations of child labor laws then the cascade of rape and abuse charges. “That’s how the majority of the FLDS Church’s money is made, through the slave labor of children,” Brower says. As we see in the film, when the FLDS-owned pecan groves in Utah are ready for harvest, the church doesn’t hire migrant laborers. It has a more cost-effective solution: Close school for a week and send the kids out to pick nuts for no pay. (Boys and girls are kept apart, to be sure.)

Largely as a result of Brower’s willingness to wade through tedious financial documents and court records, the federal Department of Labor has spent three years investigating and fining various FLDS-owned businesses and following the money trail back to the church itself. Lyle Jeffs and another brother, Nephi Jeffs, face contempt charges, and the church itself faces a potentially crippling federal suit. Among the numerous women who have recently left the church is Charlene Jeffs, Lyle’s only legal wife, an extremely high-level defector. She has apparently been talking to the Justice Department.

Brower worries about the fact that Warren Jeffs is “in really bad shape” in his Texas prison cell, both mentally and physically. If Jeffs believes that his brothers and followers have failed him, Brower says, he could decide, “OK, this is it: I’m going to push the envelope as far as it will go.” But through many years of work the Mormon private eye has compelled the media, the public, the government and, yes, his own faith to confront one of the most insidious and destructive religious sects in American history, which was hiding in plain sight and tolerated for far too long. He admits to some satisfaction, with a curt nod and a swig of Diet Coke: “There’s some good things happening.”

“Prophet’s Prey” is now playing at the IFC Center in New York, and opens Sept. 25 at the ArcLight Hollywood in Los Angeles, with a national rollout to follow. It will premiere in October on Showtime.

http://www.salon.com/2015/09/19/americas_little_known_isis_the_fundamentalist_mormon_sect_that_blends_polygamy_child_rape_and_organized_crime/