Patrick J. Kiger
Inside NGC on
April 10, 2012
Survivors of a polygamist breakaway Mormon sect and a fundamentalist Christian community discuss their experiences under the control of cult leaders.
Brent has an elite bloodline by FLDS standards. His grandfather Rulon and his uncle Warren both rose to leadership in the sect, and were regarded as prophets whose word was not to be disobeyed.
But as Brent describes in his 2009 memoir, Lost Boy: The True Story of One Man’s Exile from a Polygamist Cult and his Brave Journey to Reclaim his Life, his lineage didn’t protect him from becoming a victim of what he and others describe as the cult’s cruel sexual exploitation of children. Starting at age 5, he says that he was sexually abused by his uncle Warren. Memories of his ordeal continued to torment him into adulthood. In the book, he describes awakening, screaming, from nightmares in which Warren plucked him from a kindergarten classroom and led him down the hallway to a bathroom where the rapes took place. “All I remember feeling was overwhelming panic, pain, and helplessness,” he writes. “Something terrible was going to happen to me, something horrendous and unstoppable.”
But Brent, sadly, wasn’t the only young victim of a twisted subculture in which a few leaders had supreme power to take whatever they wanted. Adolescent girls were compelled to become the brides of older men and begin breeding as soon as they were able to produce more members of the flock. But because the most powerful men had multiple wives, that led to shortage of females. To reduce the competition, adolescent boys continually were excommunicated and cast out of the community to fend for themselves.
Inside NGC on
April 10, 2012
Survivors of a polygamist breakaway Mormon sect and a fundamentalist Christian community discuss their experiences under the control of cult leaders.
Brent Jeffs, one of the subjects of I Escaped a Cult, was born in 1983 behind the walls of a concrete compound in Salt Lake Valley that was an outpost of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The group, also known as FLDS, is a breakaway Mormon sect which still clings to the practice of polygamy, a practice that the mainstream Mormon church abandoned back in 1890.
Brent has an elite bloodline by FLDS standards. His grandfather Rulon and his uncle Warren both rose to leadership in the sect, and were regarded as prophets whose word was not to be disobeyed.
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But Brent, sadly, wasn’t the only young victim of a twisted subculture in which a few leaders had supreme power to take whatever they wanted. Adolescent girls were compelled to become the brides of older men and begin breeding as soon as they were able to produce more members of the flock. But because the most powerful men had multiple wives, that led to shortage of females. To reduce the competition, adolescent boys continually were excommunicated and cast out of the community to fend for themselves.
