Rachel Jeffs - Breaking Free: How I Escaped Polygamy, the FLDS Cult, and My Father, Warren Jeffs

I dedicate this book to my children, Ember, Majasa, Rulon, Lavinder, and Nathaniel, and to anyone and everyone who has had difficult experiences in their lives. You can be strong and fulfill your dreams.

I am not a victim, and I do not want anyones sympathy. I wrote this book to help others who have suffered from similar experiences, whether in the FLDS church, or in thrall to some other circumstance beyond their control. I want people to know that it is possible not only to overcome their trials but also to use those difficult experiences to help others. No matter where you came from or what youve been through, we are all in this together.

One week into my marriage, I was a wreck. I couldnt eat. My skin felt prickly, like I was being poked all over by a thousand invisible needles. This was a new experience for me, being a plural wife, but it was also new for my sister wives to have me there. They hadnt asked for another woman to join their ranks, and I was starting to get the message that they werent exactly pleased I had been added to the family, or that I was sharing our husbands bed. They didnt know that I was just sleeping in it, and not very well at that. On nights when one of the other ladies shared our husbands bed, I slept on the couch in the living room. I didnt have a room of my own.

Four weeks into my marriage, I was still getting acclimated. I didnt love my husband, Rich, yet, but I had started to like him. I enjoyed his company, anyway.

One afternoon, I was helping him with some yard work.

Rachel, would you please go get my pruning shears? Rich said. They should be in the closet in my room.

I put down my rake and went into the house. In his bedroom, there was a beautiful bouquet of roses on the desk, with a small balloon attached that read I love you. There was also a little note: Dear Rachel, happy 4 week anniversary, I love you, Rich.

Id cried a lot since the wedding, but the tears that fell now felt different. I was grateful that Rich wasnt there to see my reaction, because I cared what he thought about me. I couldnt have explained my feelings, because I didnt understand them myself. I found the shears and went back outside.

Thanks, I said, as I handed the shears to him.

Rich smiled at me. I wanted to do something for you.

I like it, I said, and meant it.

It was a full two months after our wedding before I finally summoned up the nerve to ask Rich for a baby. I had been way too frightened to be intimate with a man Id met only one day before he became my husband. I was still a little scared, but he had a big grin on his face when I said it.

Do you know how to make a baby, Rachel? Rich said, with genuine concern in his voice. The church separated boys and girls before puberty hit. At home and at school, we were kept apart. Crushes werent allowed. Dating wasnt even an idea. Marriage was our introduction to intimate relationships.

Nonetheless, I said, Yes.

Richs eyes opened wide, and he tilted his head to the side like a dog thats just heard an unfamiliar sound. Really? How do you know?

I just do, I said, turning my face away from him. I couldnt look him in the eyes.

That night I joined him in his room. Rich undressed himself, then undressed me as I lay on the bed. Do you want to see? he said, hovering over me.

No! I squeezed my eyes shut.

My other ladies wanted to see.

I dont. I really dont.

Over the next nights, I started to relax, and being with my new husband got easier. I soon learned that I was pregnant. When I was about four months along, Rich said, How did you know about sex before we were married?

Rich was my husband, and now the father of my unborn child. I had kept this secret for so many years, I hardly knew how to answer him. And then, just like that, I did.

Father taught me.

There is only one man on the earth at a time that can receive direct revelation from God, and it is Gods Prophet.

Warren S. Jeffs

Hildale, Utah, November 25, 1986

Rachel, Becky, come here.

Father was standing next to the Prophets casket at the front of the meeting house. The Prophet was Leroy Johnson, the leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) and the only man on earth worthy of receiving the word of God, but we knew him as Uncle Roy.

My sister Becky and I walked over to the casket. Our father was Warren Jeffs, and he was the principal of our church school. Father took one of our little hands in each of his, and we held on tight. I had just turned three years old, and Becky was two months younger than me. Our mothers, Fathers first two wives, were sisters, and had been pregnant with Becky and me at the same time.

Can we get these girls a stool so they can see? Father asked one of Uncle Roys wives standing in line, waiting to pay their respects to Uncle Roy. I could hear people crying.

A lady with gray hair brought over a small yellow stool and placed it in front of the casket. Father helped me up onto it first. I had never seen a dead person before. I looked inside the coffin, curious and frightened, at the withered, pale figure lying there. He didnt look at all like the bald man with the benevolent smile Id only seen in pictures. He was so very old, and his face looked white and fake. He had been sick for a long time.

I hadnt met Uncle Roy while he was alive, but I knew he had been the leader of the church since before my father was born.

Father leaned into me, put his mouth next to my ear, and quietly said, Uncle Roy was the greatest man on earth. Rachel, I want you to never forget what a privilege it is that you have seen the Prophet.

The most important rule in the FLDS religion is this: Never question the Prophet. Even after Uncle Roys death, Father continued to read his sermons to us every day at 6:00 a.m. before breakfastbefore we did anything else at all, in fact. These readings were considered vital to our spiritual growth.

Uncle Roys teachings were very specific. People in our church should conduct themselves with humility and obedienceto the church, to our parents, to our husbands. Women had to wear long dresses, with sleeves to their wrists and skirts to their ankles. Boys should not so much as touch a girls arm before marriage. The Prophet determined who and when a person should marry.

With Uncle Roys passing, my paternal grandfather, Rulon T. Jeffs, assumed the mantle of Prophet of the FLDS. While Grandfather Rulon was still alive, Father preached to us about the Prophet from the stand at the meeting house and from his living room chair almost every day. God and the Prophet do right, Father said.

Being the descendant of a Prophet made you something like royalty in the FLDS. I, and some of my siblings, had Prophet blood on both sides of the family.

Uncle Roy had been the Prophet since 1949, three years before declaring our church a completely separate entity from the Church of the Latter-Day Saints in Salt Lake City (commonly called the Mormon Church). Before that schism, our church had considered itself a subsidiary of the main church in Salt Lake, but in truth, Uncle Roys declaration was kind of a formality; our people had already been excommunicated from the traditional LDS Church back in 1935 for refusing to give up polygamy.

In those days, the Prophet had been John Y. Barlow, whose older brother, Ianthus Barlow, was my maternal great-grandfather. Ianthus left the church when his brother became the Prophet because he didnt want to follow his younger brother, but Ianthus continued to practice and teach his family to live polygamy.

More than four decades later, in 1978, Ianthuss son, Isaac Barlowmy mothers fatherrejoined the church with his family. By then, Uncle Roy was the Prophet. The Barlows stayed for only a few years, but it was long enough for Isaacs daughter Annette, and three years later his daughter Barbara, to marry a young schoolteacher named Warren Jeffs. Both girls were seventeen years old at the time of their weddings.