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One woman?s courageous flight to freedom with her eight children.
Broadway
October 2007
On Sale: October 16, 2007
432 pages
ISBN: 0767927567
EAN: 9780767927567
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
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.
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. Merril Jessop
already had three wives. 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. 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.
Carolyn’s
every move was dictated by her husband’s whims. He decided
where she lived and how her children would be treated. He
controlled the money she earned as a school teacher. He
chose when they had sex; Carolyn could only refuse—at her
peril. For in the FLDS, a wife’s compliance with her husband
determined how much status both she and her children held in
the family. 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. No woman in the
country had ever escaped from the FLDS and managed to get
her children out, too. But in 2003, Carolyn chose freedom
over fear and fled her home with her eight children. She had
$20 to her name.
Escape exposes a world
tantamount to a prison camp, created by religious fanatics
who, in the name of God, deprive their followers the right
to make choices, force women to be totally subservient to
men, and brainwash children in church-run schools. Against
this background, Carolyn Jessop’s flight takes on an
extraordinary, inspiring power. Not only did she manage a
daring escape from a brutal environment, 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 their
notorious leader, Warren Jeffs. Written with Laura
Palmer
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