Posts Tagged ‘FLDS’

Is Sister Wives Hiding The Disturbing Truth About Polygamy?

Is ‘Sister Wives’ Hiding The Disturbing Truth About Polygamy?
9/7/11 – Sam Brower

Despite the recent well-publicized and deeply disturbing child molestation trial of self-proclaimed polygamist prophet Warren Jeffs, TV reality show polygamist Kody Brown and his trendy wives and family seem to be everywhere these days. Their TV show, “Sister Wives,” is a big hit….

For more than seven years, as a private investigator I have been investigating and researching similar polygamous societies, but mainly the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS) and its outlaw prophet, Warren Jeffs, who is now serving a sentence of life plus twenty years in a Texas prison….

I can only hope and pray that the depravity of child abuse and the degradation of women and children to the status of chattel will never be thought of in such a callous manner as simply- unconventional yet relatable.

In my world, unconventional doesn’t mean four mommies showing up for back-to-school night; the FLDS do not send their kids to public schools. If they’re lucky, the children may receive the equivalent of an eighth grade education before being sent out to work on a construction job, or to become mothers themselves.

Admittance into the bride pool can begin within a few weeks after a child’s twelfth birthday. “Mother” is the person who raises and nurtures you as a “daughter in Zion” over the course of those short formative years. She then takes you by the hand and places it in the hand of a man decades older, in an arranged “spiritual sexual union,” alongside that man’s several or many other “sister wives.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-brower/sister-wives-_b_952693.html

Facing life for sex abuse, the monster church leader with 24 child ‘wives’

Facing life for sex abuse, the monster church leader with 24 child ‘wives’ who he told would find ‘favour with god’

Jury took only three hours to find polygamist leader guilty
Court had heard tape of him having sex with 12-year-old girl
Leader claimed he was victim of ‘religious persecution’

By Tom Leonard In New York
6th August 2011

The leader of a polygamist Mormon sect has been found guilty of sexually abusing girls aged 12 and 15 among his two dozen child ‘wives’.

Warren Jeffs, 55, faces a possible life sentence.

The self-proclaimed prophet and head of the shadowy Fundamentalist Church of Jesus of Latter Day Saints told females in his 10,000-strong flock they would find favour with God if they pleased him sexually.

He defended himself and spent much of his trial in west Texas angrily claiming he was being religiously persecuted.

Prosecutors said they will present evidence to his sentencing hearing that he had 78 so-called ‘spiritual wives’ – 24 of them under 17 – in addition to his legal one.

They said they would also show how Jeffs either witnessed or performed more than 500 unlawful polygamous marriages, as well as 67 others involving under-age girls.

Jurors were given DNA evidence showing that Jeffs had fathered a child by the 15-year-old.

And prosecutors reduced some jurors to tears when they played an audio tape of Jeffs, breathing heavily and panting as he had sex with the 12-year-old…..

The FLDS, which has at least 10,000 members, is a radical offshoot of mainstream Mormonism and believes polygamy brings exaltation in heaven. They see Jeffs as God’s spokesman on earth…..

Seven other leaders of the sect, which broke away from the official Mormon church over its insistence that polygamy brings exaltation in heaven, have already been convicted of similar offences.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2023066/Warren-Jeffs-trial-guilty-sexually-abusing-children-followers-spiritual-marriages.html

Warren Jeffs, Polygamist Leader, Convicted In Child Sexual Assault Case

Warren Jeffs, Polygamist Leader, Convicted In Child Sexual Assault Case
8/4/11

SAN ANGELO, Texas (AP) — A Texas jury convicted polygamist sect leader Warren Jeffs of child sexual assault Thursday in a case stemming from two young followers he took as brides in what his church calls “spiritual marriages.”

The 55-year-old head of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints stood stone-faced as the verdict was read.

Jeffs, who acted as his own attorney, faces up to life in prison. The jury went immediately into sentencing proceedings. They had deliberated on a verdict for more than three hours.

Prosecutors used DNA evidence to show Jeffs fathered a child with a 15-year-old girl and played an audio recording of what they said was him sexually assaulting a 12-year-old girl. They also played audio recordings in which Jeffs was heard instructing young women on how to please him sexually.

Jeffs has claimed he was the victim of religious persecution. The FLDS, which has at least 10,000 members nationwide, is a radical offshoot of mainstream Mormonism. The church believes polygamy brings exaltation in heaven and that Jeffs is God’s spokesman on earth.

Police had raided the group’s remote West Texas ranch in April 2008, finding women dressed in frontier-style dresses and hairdos from the 19th century as well as seeing underage girls who were clearly pregnant. The call to an abuse hotline that spurred the raid turned out to be a hoax, and more than 400 children who had been placed in protective custody were eventually returned to their families.

But authorities brought charges against several men from the group, with Jeffs by far the highest-profile defendant…..
Jeffs represented himself after firing seven attorneys in the six months leading to the trial. He broke his courtroom silence with an objection marked by a nearly hourlong speech defending polygamy, and twice threatened the judge and the court with warnings of punishment from God.

….Eleven other FLDS men were charged with crimes including sexual assault and bigamy. All seven of those who have been prosecuted were convicted, receiving prison sentences of between six and 75 years.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/04/warren-jeffs-polygamist-leader-convicted_n_918915.html

new FLDS Polgamy book, PTSD epigenetic immune system changes

also Catholics returned convicted priest to Sierra Leone where he had preyed on boys

Wikipedia – Bomis and online pornography
http://www.childlaw.us/2010/04/congress-reacts-to-wikipedia-f.html

Excerpt: ‘Triumph’ by Carolyn Jessop – Jessop Writes About Life After the Polygamist Sect
May 6, 2010 In “Triumph,” Carolyn Jessop writes about growing up in a polygamist sect and her April 2003 escape from the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

Carolyn Jessop reflects on her life in a polygamist sect and how it changed her. Jessop, 42, begins her story on April 3, 2008, when the church’s Texas ranch was raided by law enforcement officials and she watched hundreds of children, some her own stepchildren, involved in a case that would unfold in the spotlight of the national media….
Kathy Mankin and her husband, Randy, publish The Eldorado Success, the local newspaper in Eldorado, Texas, the town nearest to the Yearning for Zion Ranch, a $20 million compound spread across seventeen hundred acres in West Texas. The YFZ Ranch is owned and operated by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the polygamous Mormon cult in which I’d spent my entire life until fleeing in April 2003. My ex-husband, Merril Jessop, had been running the ranch since becoming one of the highest- ranking men in the FLDS in 2006.

Kathy and Randy had been covering the FLDS since 2003, when the ranch was bought under false pretenses as a corporate retreat and lodge. On March 24, 2004, with the headline “Corporate Retreat or Prophet’s Refuge?” the Mankins broke the news to the residents of Eldorado—a town of roughly two thousand residents, thirteen churches, three restaurants, and an aging motel—that their new neighbors were members of an extreme polygamous sect….

The Texas Supreme Court decision that was reached six weeks later described the reception CPS got at the ranch: “When the Department arrived at the YFZ Ranch, it was treated cordially and allowed access to children, but those children repeatedly ‘pled the Fifth’ in response to questions about their identity, would not identify their birth dates or parentage, refused to answer questions about who lived in their homes and lied about their names—sometimes several times. Answers from parents were similarly inconsistent: One mother first claimed that four children were hers, and then later avowed that they were not. Furthermore, the Department arrived to discover that a shredder had been used to destroy documents just before its arrival.”….Law enforcement officers who accompanied CPS onto the ranch noticed pregnant young girls being herded from one house to another on the compound. A lawyer involved with the case later told me that the state always suspected that it never got all the children from the ranch because some had been whisked away….

As for CPS, along with not being equipped to handle all the children who were removed from the ranch, it never found the Sarah Barlow who’d made the call. Suspicion was building that the call was a hoax. All the same, evidence suggested that the YFZ Ranch was a hotbed of child abuse. As this evidence was presented to Judge Walther, she ordered more and more children removed.

By Monday, April 7, Judge Walther had ordered 401 children into temporary protective custody based on a determination of significant risk of harm. In addition, 133 women had now left the compound. The men, meanwhile, were told to remain on the ranch while the investigation continued.

….One of the major reasons I fled the FLDS was because fourteen-year-old girls were routinely forced to marry and my daughter Betty was thirteen at the time….
With Warren Jeffs’s 2006 arrest and conviction (he’s now serving two five years-to-life sentences for being an accomplice to rape), his followers became more convinced than ever that he was being persecuted like Jesus Christ, just as he’d predicted. http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Books/triumph-life-cult-survivors-lessons-carolyn-jessop/story?id=10564744

Trauma-Induced Changes to Genes May Lead to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
ScienceDaily (May 5, 2010) — A study by researchers at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health suggests that traumatic experiences “biologically embed” themselves in select genes, altering their functions and leading to the development of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)….
Previous studies have found that lifetime experiences may alter the activity of specific genes by changing their methylation patterns. Methylated genes are generally inactive, while unmethylated genes are generally active….

The analysis found that participants with PTSD had six to seven times more unmethylated genes than unaffected participants, and most of the unmethylated genes were involved in the immune system.
The observed methylation changes in the immune system genes were reflected in the PTSD participants’ immune systems: levels of antibodies to a herpes virus were high in PTSD patients, indicative of a compromised immune system.

While people who experience severe trauma will exhibit a normal stress response, in PTSD, the stress response system becomes deregulated and chronically overactive causing compromised immune functioning. PTSD has long been linked to increased risk of numerous physical health problems — including diabetes and cardiovascular disease. This paper suggests why PTSD is so strongly associated with physical health problems — trauma exposure causes epigenetic changes in immune system genes and thus, compromised immune functioning putting individuals at risk for a host of disorders.

“Our findings show that PTSD may be associated with epigenetic changes in immune-system genes. If this is the case, these clusters could provide clues to our understanding of how a traumatic event changes gene expression, thus altering immune function and resulting in other possible physiologic alterations,” says Dr. Galea.
M. Uddin, A. E. Aiello, D. E. Wildman, K. C. Koenen, G. Pawelec, R. de los Santos, E. Goldmann, S. Galea. Epigenetic and immune function profiles associated with posttraumatic stress disorder. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2010; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0910794107 http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100504102124.htm

Catholics returned convicted priest to Sierra Leone where he had preyed on boys Carley Petesch and Michelle Faul, The Associated Press 6/05/2010 MAKANKA, Sierra Leone – A rutted red dirt track leads to the “bar,” a couple of homemade wood benches in the shade of an old tree dripping with wild mangoes. Within easy reach, there’s a yellow plastic jerry can of the fiery palm wine the American priest loved.

A 40-year-old schoolteacher now charges that Rev. James Tully gave the palm wine to teenage boys to make them more susceptible to his advances. This faraway corner of West Africa — with no electricity or piped water — is where the Roman Catholic Church sent Tully, twice. The teacher told The Associated Press that Tully abused him and other boys repeatedly during his first stint in Sierra Leone, from 1979 to 1985. After a conviction in the U.S. for giving minors alcohol and groping them, the church sent Tully back to Sierra Leone for a second stint from 1994 to 1998. Tully’s story is an example of how the church transferred abusive priests from country to country, in a scandal now emerging worldwide. But it also shows the deep reluctance to come out against a Catholic priest in many parts of Africa. http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/life/home_family/catholics-returned-convicted-priest-to-sierra-leone-where-he-had-preyed-on-boys-92999779.html

No sect members on polygamist sex case jury

No sect members on polygamist sex case jury By TERRI LANGFORD Houston Chronicle Oct. 28, 2009 ELDORADO – The issue of polygamy and how it pertains to a child sexual assault case is expected to be a contentious issue when opening statements in the first criminal trial involving a West Texas religious sect begin today….Raymond Merril Jessop, 38, is the first of 12 men from the FLDS to stand trial following a raid of the breakaway Mormon sect’s ranch in Eldorado in 2008, when Texas Rangers and other law enforcement officers descended upon the Yearning for Zion Ranch after child welfare workers found several underage girls there who were pregnant or already were mothers….Evidence seized from the ranch in 2008 includes a journal dictated to followers from now jailed prophet, Warren Jeffs. That dictation indicates the group kept one of Jessop’s eight spiritual wives, a 16-year-old girl, from going to the hospital after she appeared to be struggling through labor for three days. Jessop is also charged with bigamy. http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/6689679.html

Survivorship ritual abuse organization, fighting child abuse, FLDS

What is Survivorship? Survivorship is one of the oldest and most respected organizations supporting survivors of extreme child abuse, including sadistic sexual abuse, ritualistic abuse, mind control, and torture. Survivorship provides resources, healing, and community for survivors; training and education for professionals who may serve survivors; and support for survivors’ partners and other allies. The organization functions as a lifeline for survivors who may be isolated emotionally or geographically. Through community outreach and training,  Survivorship also raises awareness about these difficult issues.  website - http://www.survivorship.org/
wordpress bloghttp://survivorshipwp.wordpress.com/

Child sex: The cruel truth by Caroline Rwenji and Fred Mukinda 6/17/09 Sexual abuse against children has been on the increase over the years, but many of the cases are never reported, police have said. Information available at police headquarters shows that 1,626 cases of attacks against children were recorded in 2007. The number rose to 1,984 in 2008, representing an increase of over 300. The Cradle, a child rights organisation, on Wednesday said that an average of 10 cases involving child abuse have been reported at its Nairobi offices every week since January….According to the Cradle, 74 per cent of all cases of violence against children involved defilement. Girls between the ages of 12 and 14 were the most vulnerable. The minors are often abused by people they know and trust, particularly in whose care they are entrusted. Eighty six per cent were defiled by someone they knew, according to a 2007 report by Cradle, which adds, 43 per cent of the children were molested repeatedly by the same abuser. http://www.nation.co.ke/News/-/1056/612244/-/ukayts/-/

FLDS warped lives, “Lost Boy” recounts By Electa Draper The Denver Post 6/14/009  Brent wants people to know that forced underage marriages were not the only horrors under Warren Jeffs. Brent years ago filed a civil lawsuit against Warren Jeffs in which he alleged that his uncle had raped him several times when he was in kindergarten and first grade. Warren Jeffs used church tenets to satisfy his own perverse sexual appetites and to control every aspect of members’ lives, Brent claims. As prophet – the title the sect gave its leader – he banned almost all music and all literature except the Book of Mormon and the Bible. He even banned dogs and, most infamously, ejected many young boys from FLDS families. With Warren Jeffs now in the Utah State Prison after conviction on two counts of being an accomplice to rape, the sect’s towns, such as Colorado City, Ariz., and Hildale, Utah, are coming back to a semblance of normal life, Brent said.  http://www.denverpost.com/headlines/ci_12586013

Ritual abuse journal articles, Polygamy Survivor Carolyn Jessop

from http://ritualabuse.us

Journal of Child and Youth Care - ISSN 0840-982X – SPECIAL ISSUE 1990 – CONTENTS
A Case of Multiple Life-Threatening Illnesses Related to Early Ritual Abuse
Rennet Wong and Jock McKeen
Ritual Child Abuse: A Survey of Symptoms and Allegations
Pamela S. Hudson
Satanic Ritual Abuse: A Cause of Multiple Personality Disorder
George A. Fraser
Differentiating Between Ritual Assault and Sexual Abuse
Louise M. Edwards
The Choice – Gerry Fewster
http://www.cyc-net.org/Journals/jcycSpecial1990.html

Polygamy Survivor Carolyn Jessop By Andrea Sachs 10/24/07 Polygamy was the norm in Carolyn Jessop’s life. After all, her own father had three wives by the time she was in fourth grade. Her family was part of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), a radical offshoot of the Mormon Church. But Jessop’s own experience in the cult was so disturbing that she ran away with her eight children four years ago. Last month, the FLDS was in the news when its leader, Warren Jeffs, was found guilty of being an accessory to rape for forcing a 14-year-old girl in the group to marry her 19-year-old cousin. Jessop, 38, tells her extraordinary story in a riveting new book, Escape (Broadway). TIME’s Andrea Sachs spoke with Jessop from her home in a suburb of Salt Lake City.

TIME: You were 18 when you were told you were going to be the fourth wife of Merril Jessop, a 50-year-old leader of the FLDS. How did you feel?

Carolyn Jessop: I was shocked. I was devastated. I really wasn’t expecting that I’d be getting married. I didn’t want to get married. I really had my heart set on going to college. The biggest concern I had with it was that once you’re married, your husband really does own you….

You describe physical abuse and beatings. How widespread was that?

It was a big part of the culture. Dominance and control. It was all to maintain the work of God. If it was done in the name of God, then you didn’t question it. It was just a fundamental part of life. I think that in the community people did have their limits when it came to physical violence of what was okay and what was not okay. And so there were cases of extreme violence in families and people viewed that as not being okay. But a man was believed to have the spirit of God and he could get divine revelation from God that pertained to his family. If he had a revelation that in order to get a wife in line physical violence [was required], then he was within his right to use whatever means he needed to have control of his family. Mostly it pertained to children. It was frowned upon for a man to beat his wife, but they did it all the time. http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1675126,00.html

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 64 other followers