Opinions: State and federal officials must keep pressure on the FLDS cult.
$16M judgment is a blow to FLDS, but not a defeat
A$16 million judgment can’t buy back a child’s lost innocence. It does not make up for years of abuse sanctioned by the cult that controlled her community and her family. But the cash judgment against a polygamous group that infests northern Arizona and southern Utah is part of a long, painstaking effort to bring justice to the cult’s victims.
That effort needs to continue until this cult has been eradicated, and this judgment will help in meaningful ways.
Lawyers for a woman who became a child bride against her will say the decision will allow them access to bank accounts and other financial records for a secretive cult with a trust estimated in excess of $100 million.
In addition, the young woman who won the judgment says she will use the money to help others leave the cult.
Make no mistake: This group is not a religion by any reasonable definition.
Its leaders mandate conduct that violates human rights and is, as the judge who awarded the judgment said, an “outrageous and intolerable” offense to “generally accepted standards of decency and morality.”
This cult calls itself the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, or FLDS. Don’t confuse it with the mainstream Mormon church — the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which bans polygamy and condemns the FLDS.
The FLDS makes victims of those who grow up in its clutches.
Those victims include young girls forced into plural marriages with adult men.
They include young boys driven away from their homes to reduce the competition for wives.
They include the families of men who fell out of favor with the cult hierarchy and had their wives and children “reassigned” to other men.
They include women treated as chattel and denied their basic rights as human beings.
They include people whose labor and assets were used to enrich an empire as wicked as any horror-fiction writer could imagine. But this place is real.
It has been a running sore for decades in northern Arizona and southern Utah. Efforts to curb the illegal activities date to an Arizona law-enforcement raid in 1953.
The cult persisted. It has spread to other states and exists in Canada and Mexico.
Under former Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard in the mid-2000s, there was a coordinated effort with Utah to move against the cult on multiple fronts, including prosecutions.
Federal prosecution won child-labor and food-stamp-fraud cases. Last year, an Arizona case resulted in finding the community denied police protection, building permits and water hookups to non-believers.
The cult’s self-proclaimed “prophet,” Warren Jeffs, is serving a life sentence in Texas for sexually assaulting young girls he considered his “spiritual wives.” He was previously convicted in Utah of being an accomplice to rape, but that verdict was thrown out on a technicality.
Elissa Wall, who provided key testimony in that case, escaped the cult and was awarded $4 million in damages and $12 million in punitive damages Tuesday in the lawsuit she filed against the cult and Jeffs, who forced her to become a child bride.
We generally do not identify victims of sexual assault. But Wall has been widely identified in news coverage and wrote about her life in the cult in a 2008 book, “Stolen Innocence.”
In awarding her the $16 million judgment, Judge Keith Kelly wrote that Jeffs exercised “absolute control, power and authority” over her life. He controlled her parents, too. Jeffs used his power to “require her, as a young girl, to enter into an unlawful spiritual marriage.” Wall says she was subject to continual abuse in that sham marriage until she escaped.
She was one of many, many young girls treated that way by the FLDS cult, which is a closed and secretive society that uses mind-control techniques to cruelly exploit its members, while teaching them to fear the outside world as evil, corrupt and dangerous.
The judgment she won is a victory against cruel tyranny masquerading as religion. The judgment is not the end. It needs to become part of a continued effort to triumph over a cult that is an affront to human decency.