Escape

Reading this book felt very much like staring at a car wreck. With every page, every disclosure of another horrible indignity or example of abuse, I felt a little sick, and yet I kept reading. Escape is the story of Carolyn Jessop, from the time she was awakened in the middle of the night to be informed she would be married off to a much older man named Merrill Jessop, through the birth of her eight children, through their abuse and suffering, through the increasingly bizarre behavior that took over the community after Warren Jeffs came to power.

And when I say the children are abused, they are. They are starved, severely beaten . . . even during prayers, denied hugs from their mothers. It's horrifying. Ambulances won't come to take a child to the hospital in Colorado City unless the father approves. In fact, when a wife or child is sick, the sickness is blamed on the wife not being "in harmony" with her husband.

There were so many things I was shocked by. There's a scene with Merrill Jessop when he takes three of his wives to Hawaii on a vacation, and the one wife starts an argument in public about who he's going to "be with" that night. The extent that they use sex in that culture for power and intimidation is shocking. And yet you see the arrogance too. These people are taught to believe, not only that the outside world and everyone in it is evil, but that they are superior to everyone else. This, as they take food stamps and welfare by the thousands of dollars.

I don't know how to recommend this book, other than to say that if you have a curiosity (as I did) about what the FLDS community is really like, this is one insider's very revealing telling of it.