I listened to a little bit of it. I'll have to listen again when I can listen to it in its entirety. It sounds like quite a bit of the core concepts are very similar to TWI. More extreme but similar.
Of course TWI is nothing like Jonestown or the Branch Davidians, but the way her mom spoke to me and the way Stephanie tends to speak about her beliefs is very telling.
I beg to differ. I saw a new documentary on Jonestown about a year ago. They interviewed folks who were "leadership" in the church, and the things that came out of their mouths could have come out of my own mouth about twi at one point. And what do you call the farm in New Knoxville, OH if not an isolationist compound where the leadership rule with an iron fist? Just because they don't have death drills don't think they aren't EXACTLY the same at heart.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again... a cult, is a cult, is a cult.
The exterior may look different. The actions taken may be different. But the issues, methods, and mindsets of both the leaders and the followers of all these groups is, in my humble opinion, IDENTICAL.
"As a member of an isolated polygamous sect in Arizona, Laurene Jessop says she was sexually abused by her father, who had four wives and 56 children, and mistreated by her husband, who was already married to Laurene's sister.
After enduring a lifetime of desperation, she fled her home in Colorado City, Ariz., a town dominated by the group, called the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints."
"From a very young age, everyone in Colorado City is taught that outsiders are evil. They wear old-fashioned clothes, and they fervently submit to the rules of Warren Jeffs, a man they call "The Prophet."
Young girls are destined to be married off in their teen years to older men, who keep several wives. The girls are expected to bear many children and obey the sect's strict patriarchal rules. The FLDS split from the mainstream Mormon church in 1890 when it disavowed polygamy.
Laurene returned to Colorado City to reconcile with not only the damage caused to her life by polygamy -- but her lost childhood."
"As a teen, Laurene was married to an older man chosen by the sect named Val Jessop. He had already married Laurene's sister, so Laurene says she knew him "a bit." But she adds, "I always felt like I was an intruder."
""I was trapped. I felt like I had done my very best in trying to live my religion," she said. "I was taught that, the only rights a woman has is to be obedient to her husband.""
"Val told Quiñones he wants the kids back -- and denied he is a polygamist. Even though he has two wives, he says it's "plural marriage.""
"However, Laurene says her wounds from Colorado City run much deeper than her marriage to Val Jessop.
She says her father sexually abused her. It started when she was in puberty, she said.
"There would be several of us girls in the room. And he would come into the house and go around and kiss each one of the girls -- put his hand down your blouse -- say, 'Oh, looks like you're getting bigger, you know -- you're developing, you're coming along very well here,' " she said.
"Then he would go to the next girl and give her a kiss, do the same thing, the next and on around the room."
Laurene and 12 of her sisters reported they'd been molested, she says -- though the abuse stopped short of actual intercourse. In 1983, her father, Jack Cooke, pleaded guilty to sexual assault and went to prison for five years."
"He said at the time he didn't view his fondling of his daughters as abuse. It wasn't sexual, he said, claiming it was "on the same premise as our religion."
"I had the idea that I was the big boss," he said. "I believed those children were mine."
He compared his position to a farmer with his animals. But he also said "every intimacy which I had with them, they understood perfectly that if I did anything they didn't like, to tell me and I would not do it."
Laurene denies this. She says he told his daughters they "weren't normal if we didn't like it. And, that all men do that to their daughters."
Cooke continued: "I'd say it was consensual, whatever we were doing. I was not imposing on them."
When Laurene finally confronted Cooke, he greeted her by saying, "Hello. I want to feast my eyes on you, beautiful lady."
She ignored his remark, and instead, asked him several questions she had carefully prepared for the moment. "Can you tell me in your own words what you did to me sexually?" she asked.
He replied, "You know that you're one of those few, that I don't remember hardly touching at all."
When she told him the explicit details, he responded, "I did?" But he didn't challenge her. "I won't call you a liar," he said.
She continued: "I was a very tender age. I remember every smell. I remember every detail of it." The memories of her fear came back to her. "We weren't safe at home. We weren't safe at school. We weren't safe anywhere," she said."
==========
"Meanwhile, the sect's iron grip on Colorado City may be beginning to loosen. A year ago, the county attorney sent special investigator Gary Engels there in search of criminal activity.
He recently got eight men to surrender to face allegations they married underage girls. (All have pleaded not guilty.) He now has a warrant for the arrest of the sect leader, Warren Jeffs, on charges of forcing underage girls to marry.
But he says he doesn't know where Jeffs is right now. "He travels with bodyguards and I'm sure they're probably armed. And, what their directive is -- and how they'll protect him, we don't know," Engels said."
After years of neglect, the law takes a hard look at Colorado City, Ariz., a sect-run town where old men marry teenage girls, TV is banned, and polygamy runs rampant
By: Thomas Fields-Meyer, Oliver Jones in Colorado City
People Magazine
Pennie Peterson was 14 when she learned she was about to become the fifth wife of a 48-year-old man. Frightened, she ran away from her family--which included her father, his three wives and Peterson's 38 brothers and sisters--and met friends by a roadside in Colorado City, Ariz. "They took me to their house in Las Vegas," recalls Peterson, 34, nearly 20 years later. "And I never went back."
Colorado City, a desert town some 50 miles north of the Grand Canyon, is a world of its own. Just below the border of Utah, the community teems with children, yet there are no competitive sports leagues, no dances, not even a backyard pool. Most kids are homeschooled. Even quilting bees have been forbidden by town leaders for fear they might promote gossip. Men and boys dress in a uniform of dark pants, striped shirts and suspenders; women and girls wear long-sleeved, ankle-length dresses, even in summer. But what truly sets this place apart is the group that controls it, a radical Mormon offshoot called the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) that has more than 8,000 members and espouses polygamy--which is illegal in all 50 states. One local historian estimates that plural marriages account for about half the city's unions. Mayor Dan Barlow, 70, a polygamist, sees nothing too unusual about his town. "We are just families," he says, "with a little bit of a different take on things."
Now, after decades of being ignored, that little difference could land town leaders in big trouble. Last year Barlow's son Dan Jr. pleaded guilty to sexually abusing one of his daughters. Then, in May, a couple who had been threatened with eviction from church-owned land after they refused to allow their 16-year-old daughter to become the second wife of a 37-year-old won a court ruling allowing them to stay. Three months later a jury convicted a local police officer of bigamy and unlawful sex with a minor. And state officials in Arizona and Utah are investigating charges of welfare fraud in Colorado City and the adjacent town of Hildale, Utah, which also has many FLDS followers. Although many Colorado City families live in sprawling homes, 78 percent of them are on food stamps. "The history of this sect is all about money and power and sex," says Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff, who is leading the charge against FLDS in concert with Arizona officials. A Mormon himself, Shurtleff calls the polygamists "an embarrassment" to the mainstream Church, which proscribes polygamy. "We're adamant about rooting these people out."
The investigation predates the Elizabeth Smart case, in which Utah police allege Brian David Mitchell, 49, kidnapped the then 14-year-old to make her the first of seven virgin brides. But both cases shine a light on the practice of polygamy, which still flourishes in this part of the country.
"There may be 40,000 polygamists in Utah alone," says Shurtleff. "We do not have near the resources to go after [all of them]. But we do have the resources to go after other crimes in polygamist communities like Colorado City and Hildale, particularly crimes against children."
The crackdown could bring drastic change to Colorado City, where church policy forbids newspapers and television and, according to one high school teacher, no one has gone to college since 1992. Sect doctrine says that in order to enter the celestial kingdom's highest level, a woman must obey her husband and a man must take more than one wife. After the mainstream Mormon church banned plural marriage in 1890, the forbears of the FLDS moved from the Salt Lake region to this largely uninhabited area, where they could practice polygamy with little interference. In July 1953, Arizona Gov. Howard Pyle sent a force of more than 100 to arrest the men of what was then known as Short Creek, arresting 122. But the raid generated such ill will--news photos from the period show tearful children being ripped from their parents' arms--that Pyle was voted out of office the next year, and the issue became a political hot potato. "That raid was badly managed," says Ron Barton, who has spent three years investigating the sect for the Utah attorney general. "It set back efforts to control what was going on in those communities 50 years."
It also enabled the church's top official, or prophet, to wield unparalleled influence in Colorado City. These days that position is held by Warren Jeffs, 46, who has not made any public appearances since a jury convicted policeman Rodney Holm of sex abuse in mid-August. Under church doctrine, only the prophet can grant permission to marry, and he regularly made matches. DeLoy Bateman, 52, a high school science teacher who left the sect five years ago, says that when Jeffs's father and predecessor, Rulon--who died last year at age 92--began assembling an "army" of wives to prepare for a miraculous ascent to heaven he expected in the year 2000, he married some 56 teenage girls. "Because they are married in secret, we have no idea precisely how many there are," says Barton.Lawyer
Rod Parker, who represents the group, says after a man first weds, subsequent marriages are performed only within the church and don't involve underage girls, therefore breaking no laws. For the FLDS, he says, "the issue is, who controls marriage--the state or God and God's representative, their prophet?"
The church has further clouded the lines between church and state with an arrangement called the United Effort Plan, a 1942 common-law trust designed to protect church members' property from the state. Today the UEP owns much of the land in Colorado City and in neighboring Hildale. Although residents don't pay rent, they are expected to give at least 10 percent of their earnings to the church. Shurtleff says that includes substantial amounts of welfare money collected by the sect's women--who, because they are single mothers in the eyes of the state, qualify for government aid. "Women and children live in poverty," he says, "while rich old prophets get richer and have more and more young brides."
The sect's tight control over the territory can make life difficult for the few who split from the church. Teacher Bateman, for instance, had two wives and 15 children when the town's sheriff threatened to take four of his kids away over a marital dispute. He left the church but is now fighting its efforts to evict him from his huge 18-bathroom home.
But the power is beginning to shift. In December 2001, Pennie Peterson was at home in Phoenix when her sister Ruth Stubbs showed up with two of her children. "She was underweight, stressed out, dark circles under her eyes," says Peterson. At age 16, Stubbs had been coerced to marry Rodney Holm, the police officer, who was twice her age and already had two wives, including one of Ruth's sisters. It was the testimony of Stubbs, now 21, that convicted Holm of illegal sex with a minor and bigamy on Aug. 14.
Church leaders are nervously anticipating Holm's sentencing on Oct. 10: Two days after Holm was found guilty, the prophet Jeffs canceled the regular Sunday services and has not been seen publicly since. Law enforcement officials are also watching with interest. In the only other case against a Colorado City polygamist, the mayor's son got a suspended sentence, serving just 13 days for molesting one of his daughters after his other children appealed to the judge for leniency. Says Shurtleff: "There hasn't been justice made available to these women and children."
That leaves some of them stranded in marriages with plenty of company but little hope of escape. "We're chattel to them," says Pam Black, 51, a former FLDS member who was 16 when she was coerced to marry. Black left the cult three years ago to live with her mother in Hildale when her husband (who has since died) became increasingly tyrannical and wanted to take on other wives. "My rage was driving me insane," says Black.
For the women Black left behind, the nearest hope are organizations like Help the Child Brides, which offers aid and advocacy for women harmed by polygamy, and an underground network of activists like Black and Peterson, who have successfully escaped plural marriages. The women have helped persuade local officials to establish a justice center in Colorado City to offer shelter for others like them and to prosecute abusive spouses. But that's unlikely to open until mid-2005.
In the meantime Black speaks out whenever she gets a chance and, with Peterson, tries to keep state officials focused on what was for so long a secret in Colorado City. "Word is getting out," Peterson says, "and that's definitely troubling the leaders up there."
...I've been following this story...the men who are in charge of this cult are nothing more than animals......and I include Wierwille in the same category. The damage done to these young girls is horrible...I hope they give them all a jar of vasoline and send them to federal prison.
I also saw the Dr. Phil episodes about this cult and many things were familiar, not so much the details of what happened in the group as how the people felt after they left. A major theme of this group is that when people leave they are going to be destroyed, go to hell, or whatever that group calls it that is very similar to "God's hedge of protection is off of you." I still remember the exact details of what I was told.
When you leave it won't be obvious that you are being destroyed, the adversary is sneaky, it may even look like things are going well, but the reality is that you are going to be destroyed by the adversary for leaving the ministry as the adversary wants people to leave so he doesn't want the consequences to be well known, but we are letting you know for you own good about this...........sound familiar??????
Then they started throwing people out!!! (how evil is that......)
Anyway....inspires me to keep working towards my license and get out there to help people (not limited to ex-ways) :)
A major theme of this group is that when people leave they are going to be destroyed, go to hell, or whatever that group calls it that is very similar to "God's hedge of protection is off of you."
In other words, if you leave, you're "screwed".. if you stay, you're "screwed"..
...I've been following this story...the men who are in charge of this cult are nothing more than animals......and I include Wierwille in the same category. The damage done to these young girls is horrible...I hope they give them all a jar of vasoline and send them to federal prison.
What we have heard so far is the tip of the ice burg.
It all started when one poor child dialed 911.
I can see something like this happening with twi someday.
I know many here who were either molested or beaten in the name of the ministry. It's probably still happening.
Vasaline-they should be hung.
There is nothing I am disagreeing with you about except that the phone call apparently was NOT from a girl in the compound, but from a mentally ill, grown woman in Colorado Springs, CO with a history of prank phone calls, and NO involvement with the organization or "church".
This does not change the facts of what goes on with the group, but it does raise some questions about what precipitated the current investigation and whether it has proceeded legally and properly.
I don't know much about legal and proper investigation, but I would certainly hope that any adult that impregnated a child would be held accountable for breaking the law. I believe it was mentioned earlier in one of these discussions that a lot of these women receive government assistance to support their families - that sounds like they should be following the laws of that same government, one that frowns on pedophilia.
Yeah...sigh...but I have to wonder if what is happening to them now isn`t way worse.
They have been ripped from the only family that they have known. Ripped from the arms of their loving mothers. For what to them seems very normal.
It has to be terribly traumatic.
It puts me in mind of the stories I have heard about the australian aboriginies and even the american indians...years ago...the kids were taken by force and put into schools to be remolded into what modern civilization thought that they ought to be.
The kids returned as adults angry and disolusioned ...no longer a part of their people....yet not a part of society. The authorities tried to eradicate their culture, their beliefs, their history.
I know that intervention was needed, I just think that it is pretty scary when the government can move in and seize your children on a fake phone call and then build a case against you.
There has to be a better way to serve these children.
I guess being a mother, and having been in a mind controlling cult, it hits home.
I remember the repulsive things that we did...disgusted, saddened, but fierce in our determination to serve God, no matter what the personal cost.
Do you remember the teachings about saving yourself? About abandoning your kids if you had to, because the word needed to live on in us...we could always have more children later??
I know that no matter how bad obedience was...the fear of life without God`s blessing was a whole lot scarier??
These guys think that they are doing God`s will, and will no doubt suffer stoically everything that happens to them believing that it is satans persecution :(
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waysider
I listened to a little bit of it. I'll have to listen again when I can listen to it in its entirety. It sounds like quite a bit of the core concepts are very similar to TWI. More extreme but similar.
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TheHighWay
Quoted from another current thread ----
I've said it before, and I'll say it again... a cult, is a cult, is a cult.
The exterior may look different. The actions taken may be different. But the issues, methods, and mindsets of both the leaders and the followers of all these groups is, in my humble opinion, IDENTICAL.
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HAPe4me
point of clarification- Colorado City (where this polygamist group is) is NOT in Colorado. It is in Arizona.
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WordWolf
Seems that being a female member of the cult may be a matter of being "carefully taught."
Here's one woman's story.
A few women here may be reminded that vpw selected women who were already sexually-abused
before deciding who to rape or molest because they're easier to victimize if they survived the earlier
sexual abuse, because their sense of self is ALREADY broken.
(For those who forgot, those "From Birth to the Corps" papers were used for that- one of vpw's attempts
began, according to one poster, with him summoning her to him privately
WHILE HE HAD HER PAPER IN HIS HAND.)
http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/Health/sto...7099&page=1
"As a member of an isolated polygamous sect in Arizona, Laurene Jessop says she was sexually abused by her father, who had four wives and 56 children, and mistreated by her husband, who was already married to Laurene's sister.
After enduring a lifetime of desperation, she fled her home in Colorado City, Ariz., a town dominated by the group, called the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints."
"From a very young age, everyone in Colorado City is taught that outsiders are evil. They wear old-fashioned clothes, and they fervently submit to the rules of Warren Jeffs, a man they call "The Prophet."
Young girls are destined to be married off in their teen years to older men, who keep several wives. The girls are expected to bear many children and obey the sect's strict patriarchal rules. The FLDS split from the mainstream Mormon church in 1890 when it disavowed polygamy.
Laurene returned to Colorado City to reconcile with not only the damage caused to her life by polygamy -- but her lost childhood."
"As a teen, Laurene was married to an older man chosen by the sect named Val Jessop. He had already married Laurene's sister, so Laurene says she knew him "a bit." But she adds, "I always felt like I was an intruder."
""I was trapped. I felt like I had done my very best in trying to live my religion," she said. "I was taught that, the only rights a woman has is to be obedient to her husband.""
"Val told Quiñones he wants the kids back -- and denied he is a polygamist. Even though he has two wives, he says it's "plural marriage.""
"However, Laurene says her wounds from Colorado City run much deeper than her marriage to Val Jessop.
She says her father sexually abused her. It started when she was in puberty, she said.
"There would be several of us girls in the room. And he would come into the house and go around and kiss each one of the girls -- put his hand down your blouse -- say, 'Oh, looks like you're getting bigger, you know -- you're developing, you're coming along very well here,' " she said.
"Then he would go to the next girl and give her a kiss, do the same thing, the next and on around the room."
Laurene and 12 of her sisters reported they'd been molested, she says -- though the abuse stopped short of actual intercourse. In 1983, her father, Jack Cooke, pleaded guilty to sexual assault and went to prison for five years."
"He said at the time he didn't view his fondling of his daughters as abuse. It wasn't sexual, he said, claiming it was "on the same premise as our religion."
"I had the idea that I was the big boss," he said. "I believed those children were mine."
He compared his position to a farmer with his animals. But he also said "every intimacy which I had with them, they understood perfectly that if I did anything they didn't like, to tell me and I would not do it."
Laurene denies this. She says he told his daughters they "weren't normal if we didn't like it. And, that all men do that to their daughters."
Cooke continued: "I'd say it was consensual, whatever we were doing. I was not imposing on them."
When Laurene finally confronted Cooke, he greeted her by saying, "Hello. I want to feast my eyes on you, beautiful lady."
She ignored his remark, and instead, asked him several questions she had carefully prepared for the moment. "Can you tell me in your own words what you did to me sexually?" she asked.
He replied, "You know that you're one of those few, that I don't remember hardly touching at all."
When she told him the explicit details, he responded, "I did?" But he didn't challenge her. "I won't call you a liar," he said.
She continued: "I was a very tender age. I remember every smell. I remember every detail of it." The memories of her fear came back to her. "We weren't safe at home. We weren't safe at school. We weren't safe anywhere," she said."
==========
"Meanwhile, the sect's iron grip on Colorado City may be beginning to loosen. A year ago, the county attorney sent special investigator Gary Engels there in search of criminal activity.
He recently got eight men to surrender to face allegations they married underage girls. (All have pleaded not guilty.) He now has a warrant for the arrest of the sect leader, Warren Jeffs, on charges of forcing underage girls to marry.
But he says he doesn't know where Jeffs is right now. "He travels with bodyguards and I'm sure they're probably armed. And, what their directive is -- and how they'll protect him, we don't know," Engels said."
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WordWolf
http://www.childbrides.org/abuses_people_magazine.html
In God's Name
After years of neglect, the law takes a hard look at Colorado City, Ariz., a sect-run town where old men marry teenage girls, TV is banned, and polygamy runs rampant
By: Thomas Fields-Meyer, Oliver Jones in Colorado City
People Magazine
Pennie Peterson was 14 when she learned she was about to become the fifth wife of a 48-year-old man. Frightened, she ran away from her family--which included her father, his three wives and Peterson's 38 brothers and sisters--and met friends by a roadside in Colorado City, Ariz. "They took me to their house in Las Vegas," recalls Peterson, 34, nearly 20 years later. "And I never went back."
Colorado City, a desert town some 50 miles north of the Grand Canyon, is a world of its own. Just below the border of Utah, the community teems with children, yet there are no competitive sports leagues, no dances, not even a backyard pool. Most kids are homeschooled. Even quilting bees have been forbidden by town leaders for fear they might promote gossip. Men and boys dress in a uniform of dark pants, striped shirts and suspenders; women and girls wear long-sleeved, ankle-length dresses, even in summer. But what truly sets this place apart is the group that controls it, a radical Mormon offshoot called the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) that has more than 8,000 members and espouses polygamy--which is illegal in all 50 states. One local historian estimates that plural marriages account for about half the city's unions. Mayor Dan Barlow, 70, a polygamist, sees nothing too unusual about his town. "We are just families," he says, "with a little bit of a different take on things."
Now, after decades of being ignored, that little difference could land town leaders in big trouble. Last year Barlow's son Dan Jr. pleaded guilty to sexually abusing one of his daughters. Then, in May, a couple who had been threatened with eviction from church-owned land after they refused to allow their 16-year-old daughter to become the second wife of a 37-year-old won a court ruling allowing them to stay. Three months later a jury convicted a local police officer of bigamy and unlawful sex with a minor. And state officials in Arizona and Utah are investigating charges of welfare fraud in Colorado City and the adjacent town of Hildale, Utah, which also has many FLDS followers. Although many Colorado City families live in sprawling homes, 78 percent of them are on food stamps. "The history of this sect is all about money and power and sex," says Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff, who is leading the charge against FLDS in concert with Arizona officials. A Mormon himself, Shurtleff calls the polygamists "an embarrassment" to the mainstream Church, which proscribes polygamy. "We're adamant about rooting these people out."
The investigation predates the Elizabeth Smart case, in which Utah police allege Brian David Mitchell, 49, kidnapped the then 14-year-old to make her the first of seven virgin brides. But both cases shine a light on the practice of polygamy, which still flourishes in this part of the country.
"There may be 40,000 polygamists in Utah alone," says Shurtleff. "We do not have near the resources to go after [all of them]. But we do have the resources to go after other crimes in polygamist communities like Colorado City and Hildale, particularly crimes against children."
The crackdown could bring drastic change to Colorado City, where church policy forbids newspapers and television and, according to one high school teacher, no one has gone to college since 1992. Sect doctrine says that in order to enter the celestial kingdom's highest level, a woman must obey her husband and a man must take more than one wife. After the mainstream Mormon church banned plural marriage in 1890, the forbears of the FLDS moved from the Salt Lake region to this largely uninhabited area, where they could practice polygamy with little interference. In July 1953, Arizona Gov. Howard Pyle sent a force of more than 100 to arrest the men of what was then known as Short Creek, arresting 122. But the raid generated such ill will--news photos from the period show tearful children being ripped from their parents' arms--that Pyle was voted out of office the next year, and the issue became a political hot potato. "That raid was badly managed," says Ron Barton, who has spent three years investigating the sect for the Utah attorney general. "It set back efforts to control what was going on in those communities 50 years."
It also enabled the church's top official, or prophet, to wield unparalleled influence in Colorado City. These days that position is held by Warren Jeffs, 46, who has not made any public appearances since a jury convicted policeman Rodney Holm of sex abuse in mid-August. Under church doctrine, only the prophet can grant permission to marry, and he regularly made matches. DeLoy Bateman, 52, a high school science teacher who left the sect five years ago, says that when Jeffs's father and predecessor, Rulon--who died last year at age 92--began assembling an "army" of wives to prepare for a miraculous ascent to heaven he expected in the year 2000, he married some 56 teenage girls. "Because they are married in secret, we have no idea precisely how many there are," says Barton.Lawyer
Rod Parker, who represents the group, says after a man first weds, subsequent marriages are performed only within the church and don't involve underage girls, therefore breaking no laws. For the FLDS, he says, "the issue is, who controls marriage--the state or God and God's representative, their prophet?"
The church has further clouded the lines between church and state with an arrangement called the United Effort Plan, a 1942 common-law trust designed to protect church members' property from the state. Today the UEP owns much of the land in Colorado City and in neighboring Hildale. Although residents don't pay rent, they are expected to give at least 10 percent of their earnings to the church. Shurtleff says that includes substantial amounts of welfare money collected by the sect's women--who, because they are single mothers in the eyes of the state, qualify for government aid. "Women and children live in poverty," he says, "while rich old prophets get richer and have more and more young brides."
The sect's tight control over the territory can make life difficult for the few who split from the church. Teacher Bateman, for instance, had two wives and 15 children when the town's sheriff threatened to take four of his kids away over a marital dispute. He left the church but is now fighting its efforts to evict him from his huge 18-bathroom home.
But the power is beginning to shift. In December 2001, Pennie Peterson was at home in Phoenix when her sister Ruth Stubbs showed up with two of her children. "She was underweight, stressed out, dark circles under her eyes," says Peterson. At age 16, Stubbs had been coerced to marry Rodney Holm, the police officer, who was twice her age and already had two wives, including one of Ruth's sisters. It was the testimony of Stubbs, now 21, that convicted Holm of illegal sex with a minor and bigamy on Aug. 14.
Church leaders are nervously anticipating Holm's sentencing on Oct. 10: Two days after Holm was found guilty, the prophet Jeffs canceled the regular Sunday services and has not been seen publicly since. Law enforcement officials are also watching with interest. In the only other case against a Colorado City polygamist, the mayor's son got a suspended sentence, serving just 13 days for molesting one of his daughters after his other children appealed to the judge for leniency. Says Shurtleff: "There hasn't been justice made available to these women and children."
That leaves some of them stranded in marriages with plenty of company but little hope of escape. "We're chattel to them," says Pam Black, 51, a former FLDS member who was 16 when she was coerced to marry. Black left the cult three years ago to live with her mother in Hildale when her husband (who has since died) became increasingly tyrannical and wanted to take on other wives. "My rage was driving me insane," says Black.
For the women Black left behind, the nearest hope are organizations like Help the Child Brides, which offers aid and advocacy for women harmed by polygamy, and an underground network of activists like Black and Peterson, who have successfully escaped plural marriages. The women have helped persuade local officials to establish a justice center in Colorado City to offer shelter for others like them and to prosecute abusive spouses. But that's unlikely to open until mid-2005.
In the meantime Black speaks out whenever she gets a chance and, with Peterson, tries to keep state officials focused on what was for so long a secret in Colorado City. "Word is getting out," Peterson says, "and that's definitely troubling the leaders up there."
People Magazine
Originally published October 6, 2003
For more information email: theHOPEorg
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GrouchoMarxJr
...I've been following this story...the men who are in charge of this cult are nothing more than animals......and I include Wierwille in the same category. The damage done to these young girls is horrible...I hope they give them all a jar of vasoline and send them to federal prison.
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freeone
I also saw the Dr. Phil episodes about this cult and many things were familiar, not so much the details of what happened in the group as how the people felt after they left. A major theme of this group is that when people leave they are going to be destroyed, go to hell, or whatever that group calls it that is very similar to "God's hedge of protection is off of you." I still remember the exact details of what I was told.
When you leave it won't be obvious that you are being destroyed, the adversary is sneaky, it may even look like things are going well, but the reality is that you are going to be destroyed by the adversary for leaving the ministry as the adversary wants people to leave so he doesn't want the consequences to be well known, but we are letting you know for you own good about this...........sound familiar??????
Then they started throwing people out!!! (how evil is that......)
Anyway....inspires me to keep working towards my license and get out there to help people (not limited to ex-ways) :)
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Ham
Groucho.. you're being too kind.
forget the vaseline..
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frank123lol
They(twi) told me:You will be isolated..Living in the wilderness..
Phfffftttt on that.They are the ones isolated,living in the wilderness,
See they(twi) do not like the outside world,Too many checks and balances to
keep it open,which it cannot be cause it(twi) always has somthing to hide.
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frank123lol
They(twi) told me:You will be isolated..Living in the wilderness..
Phfffftttt on that.They are the ones isolated,living in the wilderness,
See they(twi) do not like the outside world,Too many checks and balances to
keep it open,which it cannot be cause it(twi) always has somthing to hide.
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frank123lol
They(twi) told me:You will be isolated..Living in the wilderness..
Phfffftttt on that.They are the ones isolated,living in the wilderness,
See they(twi) do not like the outside world,Too many checks and balances to
keep it open,which it cannot be cause it(twi) always has somthing to hide.
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frank123lol
It does emphasizes twi.
GET OUT,GET OUT,GET OUT!!
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polar bear
Sorry guys, I meant to say Colorado "City".
More stuff coming out all the time.
These guys are real creeps.
What we have heard so far is the tip of the ice burg.
It all started when one poor child dialed 911.
I can see something like this happening with twi someday.
I know many here who were either molested or beaten in the name of the ministry. It's probably still happening.
Vasaline-they should be hung.
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HAPe4me
There is nothing I am disagreeing with you about except that the phone call apparently was NOT from a girl in the compound, but from a mentally ill, grown woman in Colorado Springs, CO with a history of prank phone calls, and NO involvement with the organization or "church".
This does not change the facts of what goes on with the group, but it does raise some questions about what precipitated the current investigation and whether it has proceeded legally and properly.
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bowtwi
I don't know much about legal and proper investigation, but I would certainly hope that any adult that impregnated a child would be held accountable for breaking the law. I believe it was mentioned earlier in one of these discussions that a lot of these women receive government assistance to support their families - that sounds like they should be following the laws of that same government, one that frowns on pedophilia.
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polar bear
Did anyone see the interview on Oprah with the girl who got out of the Colorado city cult.
She says--
----- you are not allowed to leave the cult through fear and intimidation.
----- decisions are made for you by the leader and you follow what he says because his will is God's will
----- you are told (encouraged) to not have any outside relationships with the world.
----- if you do not listen to what they have decided you are banned and cast out.
scary, very scary doesn't it remind you of something, uh......oh.......twi....oh my God
they should all be hung.
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rascal
Yeah...sigh...but I have to wonder if what is happening to them now isn`t way worse.
They have been ripped from the only family that they have known. Ripped from the arms of their loving mothers. For what to them seems very normal.
It has to be terribly traumatic.
It puts me in mind of the stories I have heard about the australian aboriginies and even the american indians...years ago...the kids were taken by force and put into schools to be remolded into what modern civilization thought that they ought to be.
The kids returned as adults angry and disolusioned ...no longer a part of their people....yet not a part of society. The authorities tried to eradicate their culture, their beliefs, their history.
I know that intervention was needed, I just think that it is pretty scary when the government can move in and seize your children on a fake phone call and then build a case against you.
There has to be a better way to serve these children.
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rascal
I guess being a mother, and having been in a mind controlling cult, it hits home.
I remember the repulsive things that we did...disgusted, saddened, but fierce in our determination to serve God, no matter what the personal cost.
Do you remember the teachings about saving yourself? About abandoning your kids if you had to, because the word needed to live on in us...we could always have more children later??
I know that no matter how bad obedience was...the fear of life without God`s blessing was a whole lot scarier??
These guys think that they are doing God`s will, and will no doubt suffer stoically everything that happens to them believing that it is satans persecution :(
Again, I wish there was a better way to help.
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