Ex-sect members escape polygamy but not pain
Thu April 17, 2008
By Eliott C. McLaughlin
(CNN) -- Long after she escaped a polygamist Colorado City, Arizona,
community in 1986, Flora Jessop found another way to escape: cocaine.
"It killed the pain. It killed the hurt," she said. "I didn't have to
hurt so bad because I missed everything I knew."
Once she fled the fundamentalist Mormon sect, she was an apostate. She
believed God hated her. Her parents and siblings thought she was
wicked. Worst of all, she knew she was damned to hell, Jessop said.
Jessop, then 17, began hitchhiking across the country, almost killed
herself with cocaine, worked as a topless dancer and eventually became
pregnant, she said.
Fearing that church members would hunt her down, she looked over her
shoulder for five years, she said. She occasionally drank alcohol --
she liked tequila best -- but preferred to use cocaine because it kept
her alert.
"When you're running for your life, you can't afford to get to the
point you cannot run," she said.
It was a need to protect her daughter that finally convinced her there
was more to life, she said.
Today, Jessop, 38, escapes by freeing others trapped unwillingly in
polygamist sects: 84 to date. She finds particular solace in rescuing
women and children, some of whom are child brides like she was. It was
a marriage to her first cousin Philip that prompted Jessop to run.
Her story strikes a common theme among those who have left the
Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a Mormon
offshoot that disavowed the mainstream church in 1890 when it
abandoned polygamy as a pathway to the highest level of heaven.
The FLDS has strict rules, especially for girls: no pants, haircuts,
drugs, booze or boys; just "keep sweet" and obey. So young women who
leave often delve into worldly pleasures once outside, indulgences as
innocent as blue jeans and as destructive as heroin and prostitution,
survivors and an expert say.
Jenny Larson experienced such urges in 1946, when her mother, Berna,
left a polygamist household in Glendale, Utah, with seven of her nine
children. In those days, however, rebellion bore a different hue.
Larson, 73, recalls how "you wouldn't have caught me wearing a long-
sleeve blouse" after leaving Glendale.
"I think I was one of the first girls in the seventh grade to wear
lipstick. I put henna in my hair to make it red. I wasn't going to
look like a little 'polyg' kid," she said, using the slang "polyg"
with all the contempt of a racial slur.
Larson -- who goes by Aunt Jenny to the dozens of girls she's helped
escape and who wrote the book "Brainwash to Hogwash: Escaping and
Exposing Polygamy" -- concedes it's rare that young women can shed the
sect's psychological shackles.
So how did she know polygamy wasn't for her? Larson recalls seeing her
father, Vergel, smack her mother for expressing jealousy over his
second wife, Mae.
"There was no way in hell I was going to live that way," Larson said.
And Larson quipped of the men hounding her for her hand in marriage
when she was 11: "Some of them were so ugly I wondered how they could
have *** without putting a sack over their head, but I'm being mean."
Larson's and Jessop's escapes are not typical. Many women don't want
to leave, ex-sect members and an expert said.
The pur****tedly rescued women often return to polygamy. An example is
the 1953 raid at Short Creek (now Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City),
where dozens of women and more than 260 children were placed in state
custody.
Three of the then-children taken in the raid recently said that they
eventually returned to polygamist lifestyles, including Fawneta
Caroll, who was 7 when she was taken from her family. She remembers
clearly what she felt 55 years ago, and it wasn't relief, she said.
"We knew that the object was to take us away, adopt us out and we
would never be back to our homes," she said.
Religion -- the reason these women say they stay -- is also used to
validate the brainwa****ng and, in some cases, physical abuse employed
to keep women and children submissive, said Marci Hamilton, author of
"Justice Denied: What America Must Do to Protect Its Children."
The women are wholly dependent on the patriarchal community, Hamilton
said. They often lack education and marketable skills, and they're
told of "terrible forces outside the compound," namely evil people who
wish them harm, she said.
And there's always the prospect of eternal damnation, said Hamilton, a
professor at Ye****va University's Cardozo School of Law who has
studied polygamist sects for 10 years.
"It's not only physically dangerous to leave, you're also risking your
soul," she said. "Staying in the compound, even though they're being
abused, may look like a smarter choice to a lot of these people."
Joni Holm has taken care of four children who escaped Colorado City,
and she concurs that youngsters who leave the community have trouble
shaking their indoctrination.
"You literally have to take them, deprogram them and reintroduce them
to society," she said.
Flora Jessop brought Fawn Holm, 16, and Fawn Broadbent, 17, to Joni
Holm's Sandy, Utah, home in 2004.
Fawn Holm, Joni's sister-in-law, feared that she was about to be
married to now-imprisoned FLDS "prophet" Warren Jeffs, who is serving
time in Utah for being an accomplice to rape. Broadbent's name had
just been placed in the church's "Joy Book," meaning she could be
married off any day, and probably without warning.
The "two Fawns" were smart, Joni Holm said, but had elementary school
education levels. They had bizarre mannerisms and wouldn't look people
in the eye. They would sometimes jump off elevators because "they were
taught they could never be alone with a man," she said.
Fawn Holm began using drugs and alcohol, and Broadbent dabbled in
drinking, Joni Holm said.
It's a common phenomenon, Larson said. "When you're held down and
can't have any freedoms, they go the opposite way when they get out:
drinking, drugs, ***. They're going to hell anyway; they just jump
headfirst in."
Joni and husband Carl's greatest challenge, however, was teaching the
teens to trust. So entrenched was their distrust of "outsiders" that
they needed even the simplest things proved to them, especially
examples of how the FLDS "twisted" the Book of Mormon, said Joni Holm,
a mainstream Mormon.
"You have to show them factual stuff, because this is what their dad
has taught them all their lives," she said.
When Texas authorities seized 416 children from the FLDS Yearning for
Zion compound in Eldorado this month, there were similar signs of
indoctrination, said Helen Pfluger, whose Baptist church in nearby San
Angelo volunteered to help feed and clothe the children and their
mothers.
"They were very quiet and didn't want to look us in the eye," she
said. "We never knew for sure which child belonged to which mother. It
was very communal."
They refused to play board games. Clothes had to be cotton and plain,
no patterns and no red, "the color of the devil," Pfluger said. The
children shunned processed food, white bread and sodas, and
essentially subsisted on yogurt, fruit and lots of almonds, she said.
"Another San Angelo church had brought some coloring pages and
crayons," she said. "They didn't know what to do with them, and their
mothers didn't either."
Learning to color will be one of many challenges the children will
face if they're permanently removed from YFZ ranch.
Joni Holm said it takes five to 10 years for a sect child to learn how
to live a life society would deem "normal." Larson said it could take
longer. Jessop said she might never be normal.
But Jessop said she would rather wage the battles she faces on "the
outside" than live a life of submission and abuse. She reckons many
FLDS children would feel the same way if given a choice, she said.
It was difficult to give up the life she was taught was her only path
to salvation. But she had to do it to get away from a culture that she
felt was backward and malevolent, she said.
"The pain got so bad in heaven that I was willing to damn myself to
hell to escape it," she said.
http://www.truthandgrace.com/polygamy.htm
http://www.truthandgrace.com/mormonhistory.htm
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