POLYGAMIST PROPHET’S DAUGHTER EMERGES FROM DARK ABYSS
When Rachel Jeffs was eight, her father initiated her into sex. It started with sexual touching that eventually escalated and it went on for eight years.
Rachel’s father is Warren Jeffs, the prophet of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He’s in a Texas prison serving a life sentence plus 20 years for sexually abusing two of his underage wives — a 12-year-old and a 15-year-old.
Rachel Jeffs was born into the church’s royal family in 1983 in Salt Lake City. At the time, her grandfather, Rulon Jeffs, was the prophet — a position that her maternal great-uncle had filled four decades earlier.
Devout FLDS members believe that their prophets receive direct messages from God about everything from what they should or shouldn’t do to who they should marry, where they should live and whether they are worthy of salvation.
They believe their prophets are infallible.
When Warren Jeffs stopped molesting his daughter, she was 16 and he had wives who were younger than her.
But her father’s threats and retaliation against Rachel for telling the secret only ended in 2014. That’s when she left the FLDS.
“The first time I said out loud that I was going to leave was when I found out that my sister was abused (from the time she was six),” Rachel said in a telephone interview from her home in Idaho.
“For so long, (Warren Jeffs) tried to make me feel it was my fault. I thought I was an exceptionally bad person. It made a whole world of understanding that he was a really bad person.”
She took her five children. But she left behind her husband — a man that she met the night before she became his third wife when she was 18, a man that she’d grown to love. To him and to the others in the church, Rachel is now deemed to be dead. Having apostatized, they can have nothing to do with her.
Her stunning revelations of abuse by her father — God’s selfproclaimed mouthpiece on Earth — is the most talked about part of her book Breaking Free: How I Escaped Polygamy, the FLDS Cult, and My Father, Warren Jeffs.
But there are also chilling descriptions of emotional and psychological abuse that Warren Jeffs unleashed on her as well as thousands of others within this severely dysfunctional group spread across the west from the Canadian outpost of Bountiful, B.C., to Texas, Utah, Arizona, Colorado and South Dakota.
At her father’s command, Rachel was abandoned alone at a safe house for several months. Her children were taken from her several times even when the baby wasn’t weaned. For months at a time and eventually for more than a year, she wasn’t allowed to see her husband.
It wasn’t unique. Similar things happened to her husband’s other wives, to her sisters, cousins, friends.
Family and friends went missing. Some reappeared. Some didn’t. In the past decade, her father literally outlawed fun along with toys, sugar, money, sex between husbands and wives.
Marriage has been banned until he’s released from prison. And, as Rachel told me, he’s convinced his followers that he’s in jail because of religious persecution.
“They think he’s innocent of the things he does. He has brainwashed people to believe that the leader can do no wrong,” she said.
He’s convinced them that it’s their fault that he languishes in prison, urging them weekly to repent, to become purer, because then God will free him from his jail cell.
“I had an advantage,” Rachel said. “I personally knew that father had done wrong. We were taught against child abuse and sexual abuse.
“We were taught really high moral standards, but I knew he was doing things against the teachings. But he lies to them. He talks the opposite of what he does.”
But Rachel had another advantage. Her mother’s side of the family — the Barlows — left the FLDS after then-prophet Rulon Jeffs coerced her mother’s marriage to Warren Jeffs.
They set up their own community called Centennial Park right across the highway from the FLDS community known as Short Creek, which straddles the Utah-Arizona border.
The night before Rachel left, she sent her children across the highway to visit their grandparents. The next night, she joined them.
“I actually had an opportunity. My sisters don’t even have a way to leave,” said Rachel, who has 52 siblings.
Only six have escaped from the so-called houses of hiding scattered across the western states. Her allegations of sexual abuse have not been tested in court, nor does she plan to go to court against her father. It’s not necessary, she said. Since his sentence is life plus 20 years, he’ll never get out of prison.
But people still in the FLDS need to know what kind of person Warren Jeffs really is.
It’s why she wrote the book. “It’s unlikely that they will read it,” she admitted. “But it’s in stores like Costco and Walmart, where my family goes a lot. Maybe they’ll have a chance to flip through it.”
As for her father, does she have any hope for him? Maybe a belated flash of remorse?
“Nothing. I don’t even think about him very much. But I am angry at how he hurt his family and the dark abyss he created.” Tomorrow: Rachel Jeffs talks about her unwritten chapters on life after the FLDS, her recent marriage to a former FLDS member from Bountiful and why she testified at the Canadian trial of Brandon and Gail Blackmore.