But in 2003, Carolyn chose freedom over fear and fled her home with her eight children. No woman in the country had ever escaped from the FLDS and managed to get her children out, too. Carolyn was miserable for years and wanted out, but she knew that if she tried to leave and got caught, her children would be taken away from her. For in the FLDS, a wife’s compliance with her husband determined how much status both she and her children held in the family.
He chose when they had sex Carolyn could only refuse-at her peril. He controlled the money she earned as a school teacher. He decided where she lived and how her children would be treated. Over the next fifteen years, Carolyn had eight children and withstood her husband’s psychological abuse and the watchful eyes of his other wives who were locked in a constant battle for supremacy.Ĭarolyn’s every move was dictated by her husband’s whims. But arranged plural marriages were an integral part of Carolyn’s heritage: She was born into and raised in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), the radical offshoot of the Mormon Church that had settled in small communities along the Arizona-Utah border. When she was eighteen years old, Carolyn Jessop was coerced into an arranged marriage with a total stranger: a man thirty-two years her senior. She became the first woman ever granted full custody of her children in a contested suit involving the FLDS, and in 2006, her reports to the Utah attorney general on church abuses formed a crucial part of the case that led to the arrest of its notorious leader, Warren Jeffs.The dramatic first-person account of life inside an ultra-fundamentalist American religious sect, and one woman’s courageous flight to freedom with her eight children.
Against this background, Carolyn Jessop’s flight takes on an extraordinary, inspiring power. Escape exposes a world tantamount to a prison camp, created by religious fanatics. Over the next fifteen years, Carolyn had eight children and withstood her husband’s psychological abuse and the watchful eyes of his other wives, who were locked in a constant battle for supremacy.Ĭarolyn was miserable for years and wanted out, but she knew that if she tried to leave and got caught, her children would be taken away from her. But arranged plural marriages were an integral part of Carolyn’s heritage: She was born into and raised in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), the radical offshoot of the Mormon Church.
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