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Here’s one from “this cult”:

John Nicholson worked for church-run companies. Sundays were spent at the temple, where Uncle Roy told followers he would live forever. Kathy Jo believed him. He died when she was 15. She began to see her faith as “a big lie.”

She grew rebellious at the church-run Alta Academy, where Warren Jeffs was headmaster. He forbade students from watching TV. “Hard metallic music,” he’d preach, “is the devil.”

Jeffs made girls wear “prairie dresses” of the same fabric — “we looked like we were on a wagon train.” If students disobeyed, they were beaten, physically or emotionally.

“We had to pray Warren’s way,” Nicholson said. “We got to sing songs that Warren approved. He just systematically ripped us of every individual thought, or action or unique trait you could possibly have.”

Caught passing a note to a boy, Kathy Jo was expelled and sent to work at a church-run factory. There, she fell in love with a man named Matt. He was seven years her senior, worldly, but also questioning the faith.

They eloped, married by a justice of the peace. The church refused to sanction the union. Their families shunned them.

(snip)
http://www.rickross.com/reference/polygamy/polygamy872.html

and another:

Polygamist sect leader Warren Steed Jeffs was found guilty Tuesday of being an accomplice to rape for using his religious authority to push a 14-year-old girl into a marriage she did not want.

Jeffs stood with his hands folded and didn’t appear to react as the verdict was read.

A few feet away, his accuser had tears in her eyes.

“When I was young my mother taught me that evil flourishes when good men do nothing,” said Elissa Wall, the prosecution’s star witness, who was “placed” by Jeffs in an arranged marriage at 14.

She told reporters that the trial “was not about religion or a vendetta, it was simply about child abuse and preventing further abuse.”

“The easy thing would have been to do nothing, but I followed my heart,” she said, urging other girls and young women who feel trapped by polygamy to come forward.

(snip)
http://www.rickross.com/reference/polygamy/polygamy724.html

And from just one article:

Lenore Holm discovered the penalty for dissent in this theocratic community. She objected six years ago when the prophet came for her then-15-year-old daughter, Nicole. Jeffs told the mother that he had selected her teenager to marry a 39-year-old man. “I told Warren I would never give my consent to have my daughter marry that man,” she said. “He didn’t say much because he was so angry. He told us to get out.” The entire family was ordered out of their home.

Ruth Stubbs was 15 when she asked then-prophet Rulon Jeffs, Warren Jeffs’ father, if she could marry her sweetheart, Carl Cooke. The senior Jeffs said he’d “take it up with the heavenly father,” Stubbs recalled. When she returned, accompanied by her sister’s husband, Rodney Holm, Rulon Jeffs told her: “It comes to me that you belong to Rod.” Stubbs said she burst into tears. “He asked if I was willing to do whatever the prophet asks and I said I was,” Stubbs recalled in a recent interview. “They didn’t even give me 24 hours.”

Richard Holm, a Colorado City town councilman, had both of his wives and his children taken from him and given to his brother. Then he was kicked out of town. “Warren told me that the Lord had told him to get rid of me,” Richard Holm recalled. “I thought there was some kind of misunderstanding.” Church rules provided no avenue for appeal.

Sam Icke was one of more than 400 youths expelled. They are now known as the Lost Boys. His crime was having a girlfriend. He met with Jeffs before his exile. “He asked me graphic sex details and took notes,” recalled Icke, who was 18 at the time. “I was told to repent, so I went on a repenting spree. I wanted to stay. I was afraid, like a bird being pushed out of its nest. My dad got a call a few days later from Warren and he said I should leave.”

The boys said FLDS leaders often sent police to harass and ticket them. Some boys said they left because they couldn’t pay their fines. “The cops would stalk me and try to give me curfew violation tickets,” said Carl Ream,, 17, who was thrown out at age 14. John Jessop, also exiled at 14, said police would wait for him to get home at night, then cite him for a curfew infraction. “The cops care more about religion than the law,” he said.

“If there was a young kid in town they didn’t like, they would get rid of him,” said Paul Musser, the former (police) dispatcher. “I was in the station. I heard all the calls. The police were watching for people they thought were not good influences. They would wait for probable cause or maybe they wouldn’t.”

Pennie Petersen was born and raised in Colorado City. Independent-minded even as a child, she read voraciously, even books banned by the FLDS like the works of Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour. Yet all the time, she said, she was fending off sexual abuse from every direction. “My best friend got married at 14. Her husband … started getting on me. I went to my parents; big mistake…. The prophet Leroy Johnson decided I should marry [the abuser],” Petersen recalled. “I’d be his fifth wife and he was 48.”

Internal frictions mounted as Jeffs imposed increasingly draconian punishments. He called a rare town meeting in January 2004 and read the names of 21 men he called “master deceivers,” including Colorado City Mayor Dan Barlow. They were excommunicated, and Jeffs gave their wives and children to other men. “Warren looked at us and said, ‘You know what you have done,’ “ recalled Isaac Wyler, who was on the list and didn’t know why. The 21 were instantly divorced by Jeffs’ decree, and their families were ordered to stop talking to them. “He told us to keep working, keep sending him money, and to repent from afar,” Wyler said. “I sent him a 25-page letter of repentance listing anything I might have done. He never answered my letter.”

In 2004, Brent Jeffs named his uncle Warren Jeffs in a civil suit seeking damages for alleged sexual abuse suffered as a boy. He charged that his uncle routinely sodomized him as a 5-year-old in the bathroom at an FLDS school where Warren Jeffs was a teacher and principal. Brent Jeffs kept quiet for years, he said, until the nightmares became unbearable. He said he would wake screaming, “Don’t hurt me! Don’t hurt me!” When he finally told his family, two of his brothers said the same abuse happened to them. Warren Jeffs did not respond to the suit. He has not been seen in public since the lawsuit was filed. Brent Jeffs, now 23, is seeking a default judgment. His brother Clayne shot himself in the head shortly after sharing his long-held secret. “I have no doubt our son’s death was due to Warren,” said Ward Jeffs, Brent and Clayne’s father. “He would put the fear of God into people, telling them that perfect obedience assures heaven. Now he’s running like a scared rabbit. Eventually the man will have to pay for doing such bad things to people.”

Colorado City Police Officer Sam Roundy and another officer were decertified last year and lost their badges. The church hierarchy has relocated to a sprawling compound in Eldorado, Texas, where a new temple recently was completed. Enclaves have emerged in South Dakota and Colorado. FLDS groups also operate in Nevada, Idaho, British Columbia and Mexico.

http://www.rickross.com/reference/polygamy/polygamy453.html

There’s lots of information available . . . if you look. Here’s a good starting place: http://www.rickross.com/groups/polygamy.html

Here’s a short video: http://bankingonheaven.com/flash/BankingTrailer092006.html

And some books:

Escape by Carolyn Jessop and Laura Palmer

Daughter of the Saints: Growing Up In Polygamy by Dorothy Allred Solomon

Banking on Heaven by Jon Krakauer, Ruth Cooke, Elaine Jeffs, and Carolyn Jessop

Colorado City Polygamists: An Inside Look for the Outsider by Benjamin G. Bistline

His Favorite Wife: Trapped in Polygamy by Susan Ray Schmidt

Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer

God’s Brothel: The Extortion of Sex for Salvation in Contemporary Mormon and Christian Fundamentalist Polygamy and the Stories of 18 by Andrea Moore-Emmett

Shattered Dreams: My Life as a Polygamist’s Wife by Irene Spencer

Stolen Innocence: My Story of Growing Up in a Polygamous Sect, Becoming a Teenage Bride, and Breaking Free of Warren Jeffs by Elissa Wall and Lisa Pulitzer

Inside the World of Warren Jeffs by Dr. Carole Western

The Polygamists: A History of Colorado City, Arizona by Benjamin G. Bistline

Inside the World of Warren Jeffs: The Power of Polygamy by Carole A. Western

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A seven-member Priesthood Council once governed the FLDS church but the council lost in a power struggle that resulted in “one-man rule”. People were like a big family. In recent years, however, the increasingly secretive FLDS church has tightened its grip on its members. They changed from a religion to a cult, an organized crime cult. It’s all about money, sex, and power.

One of the most recent contracts awarded to JNJ was for restoring habitat at Clark County’s Wetlands Park area. JNJ was to remove invasive tamarisk trees and replace them with native trees and shrubs in what is an ecologically fragile park on the east side of the valley. However, instead of improving habitat, the county says JNJ killed hundreds of expensive trees that were raised just for this project. One estimate of the damage is more than $500,000.

Paragon Contractors Corporation, another FLDS construction company, was fined more than $10,000 by the U.S. Department of Labor for employing minors aged 12, 13 and 15, and failing to pay them for their work.

In 1985 Arizona allowed Colorado City to incorporate, which made the town eligible to receive state and federal grants. Since then it has received over $1.8 million from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to pave streets, upgrade fire equipment and build a water-storage tank. Hildale got $94,000 for its fire station. And the government-financed airport on the edge of Colorado City cost $2.8 million.

The Defense Department awarded $1.2 million in contracts to an aircraft parts supplier linked to the FLDS.

New Era Manufacturing also received a $900,000 federal small-business loan in 2005. John Nielsen, a former employee who worked for the company when it was known as Utah-based Western Precision in 2005, said in an affidavit as part of a civil lawsuit that church members were made to work for little or no wages. He and other sect members thought their work would bring them redemption, while $50,000 to $100,000 in company profits were given each month to the church “and/or” Jeffs.

Dan Barlow, who moved into a St. George home after being expelled by Jeffs, is the father of 71 children, who at the time of his exile ranged in age from 1 1/2 to 53. Jeffs reassigned Dan Barlow’s wives and children, including Gideon’s mother and his six full siblings, to other men. Last July, Jeffs ordered his brother to kick him out. The Glausers agreed to take him in. Stacha Glauser recalled her astonishment when Barlow’s parents willingly relinquished their son. “It was just not that big a deal,” she said. Barlow puts it less subtly: “Once you leave or you’re kicked out, no one gives a damn about you.” But the elder Barlow continued to use his son to claim government benefits, drawing Social Security funds in his name. In addition to Barlow, Dan Barlow has at least eight minor children living with their mothers in Colorado City.

With God ordering fraud, there is plenty of it.

Many plural wives claim they don’t know the whereabouts of their children’s father. As many as 50% of Hildale residents were on public assistance in 2001; 33% were on food stamps in 1998 compared to Utah’s statewide average of 4.7%. In 1997 every school-age child in Colorado City was living below the poverty level.

The twin towns have received millions of dollars from the federal government for housing and street improvements.

Colorado City got $2.8 million for an airport, which prophet Jeffs has used for his chartered Lear jet.

In 2005, Colorado City’s tiny fire department received $350,000 in Homeland Security funds—the state’s third largest Homeland Security grant.

Arizona has taken over the Colorado City school system because of gross mismanagement of public funds. (*that’s a story in itself for another post)

The FLDS owns property in Texas, in the twin towns of Colorado City and Hildale on the Utah-Arizona border, in Benjamin Hills, Mexico (south of Nogales in the state of Sonora) and another near Encinada, Baja, in Canada, in Custer County, South Dakota, and in Mancos, Colorado.

Local historian and former member of the sect, Benjamin Bistline said 90 percent of people in the area are blood relatives of two men — John Y. Barlow and Joseph Smith Jessop. They claim to be the chosen people, the chosen few, and their claim is they marry closely to preserve the royal bloodline.