The story of Warren Jeffs, a prophet tyrant, rapist and Mormon leader

Elissa Wall was 14 years old when she was forced to marry her 19-year-old cousin in 2001. On their wedding night, her husband raped her for the first time. Then came years of abuse and psychological mistreatment. At 17, she Elissa had suffered two miscarriages that she attributed to divine punishment for not being a good wife. The man who forced her to marry was Warren Jeffs, the leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Ifsud), an offshoot of Mormonism—the largest of them—that maintains polygamy as the vault key of a social organization based on the fear of the afterlife and the absolute submission of women, just a slave destined to procreate and be used as currency. Elissa’s is one of the testimonies she collects Be docile: pray and obey (Rachel Dretzin and Grace McNally), the bloody docuseries, released on Netflix on the 8th, detailing the excesses of Jeffs, today sentenced to life in prison for the rape of a 12-year-old girl and a 15-year-old girl, and the operation of a community isolated from the outside world, anchored in superstition and whose codes seem to be taken from The Handmaid’s Tale.

Although Mormons originally embraced what they called plural marriage (its founder, Joseph Smith, had dozens of wives), they ended up renouncing polygamy at the beginning of the 20th century, which caused a schism and the splitting of numerous factions, the More importantly, the Ifsud, led by a president, also called a prophet, whose word is considered the word of God and whose power is absolute: he is the one who decides who marries whom, and when, which is substantial because for fundamentalism A Mormon to reach the highest degree in the kingdom of heaven, the one that allows one to be a god and create planets and constellations—something exclusively reserved for men, of course—requires getting at least three wives. The prophet, furthermore, just as he gives them, he can take them away and assign them to another man, together with the children conceived in common. And, in addition to forming or breaking families at will, he can keep the money, properties and even businesses of any member of the sect; force anyone to work the hours he agrees, and expel whom he considers. It is convenient to be on good terms with him: to reply to him is to question the will of God and the shortest path to death and eternal perdition.

The documentary goes back to the times when the prophet was Rulon Jeffs, Uncle Rulon, who took office in 1986 and whose motto, which he repeated like a litany to his wives – it is estimated that he was over 80 – was “keep sweet” (stay sweet, or tame). His favorite son of the 62 credited to him, Warren, took control of the Church when the patriarch suffered a stroke in 1998, adopting the name of “pray and obey” (pray and obey). If Rulon had his motto printed on the soles of his shoes, Warren embedded his in the outside wall of his house, in plain view. When his father died, in 2002, the son set himself up as the new prophet and took the iron fist out of the silk glove in which his father camouflaged him. He forced all women to dress alike and wear the same hairstyle, and forced most of his father’s wives to marry him. And, under the pretext that the Winter Olympics that were going to be held in Salt Lake City (Utah) would bring all kinds of misfortunes, he ordered all the members of the sect who lived there to move to Short Creek, a small community of Mormon fundamentalists on the border of Utah and Arizona. The town, in the middle of nowhere and difficult to access, which facilitated isolation, multiplied its population by 10.

Elissa Wall fled the Ifsud and denounced Jeffs for having forced her wedding at the age of 14, which made him an accomplice to rape. The prophet went into hiding and dedicated himself to living the high life while traveling incognito through the country, contravening the precepts that he imposed on his subjects. He was caught in the summer of 2006, and in 2007 he was sentenced to 10 years in prison. That trial would later be declared null, but in 2011 he received two sentences totaling 120 years for the rape of two minors, aged 15 and 12. One of the pieces of evidence was an audio recording of the second of the rapes, committed before several of his wives. He had 78, 28 of them minors.

Jeffs’ story has already been told by filmmaker Amy Berg in Prophet’s Prey (2015). Seven years have passed between the two documentaries and Me Too, and it shows. If Berg’s feature film traces a chilling profile of the prophet that takes as its common thread the investigation of private detective Sam Brower and journalist Jon Krakauer to hunt down the leader of the sect, the series also turns to Brower, and to another scourge of the Church, reporter Mike Watkiss, but the leading voice is for several victims, the vast majority of them women. After all, “the currency of the kingdom is a young bride. That is her monetary system, the basis that supports everything, ”Watkiss synthesizes on screen. “They can clothe it with all kinds of theologies, they’ll say it’s the word of God, but it’s just about men controlling women and their sexuality.”

Elissa’s sister, Rebecca, 10 years older and married to Uncle Rulon at the age of 19, who was 85 at the time, sums up the message of empowerment that the series tries to convey: “The irony and beauty of all this is that women , in the Ifsud society, we are second-class citizens, and even so, we women were the ones who confronted that man”. But it is a partial victory, and a bitter one. The prophet is behind bars, but the Church still has thousands of members and is still under the control of Jeffs, who with the aura of a martyr has reinforced his influence over followers who are blindly obedient to him. Including most of the loved ones of those who, after a lifetime of indoctrination, have managed to leave behind a nightmare that is much worse, because it is real, than The maid’s tale.

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