Oprah - Carolyn Jessop who "escaped" polygamy suggests decriminalizing it

From Brooks Blog - The Plural Life - Long but interesting reading

Oprah!
Thi Friday, the Oprah show will focus on polygamy. There is a segment on a family from Centennial Park, a bit on Valerie, the plural wife from the Salt Lake Valley I wrote about earlier this year, and Carolyn Jessop.

Oprah apparently really liked Carolyn. And Carolyn's book got a big boost: Oprah gave audience members a copy.

Carolyn was featured in a two-page spread in this week's People magazine, too.

Carolyn told me she had to cut a lot out of her book to get it down to its published size of 400-plus pages. What got left out?

All the positive stuff, she said. She had to keep focused on her marriage, her efforts to leave the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and the ''injuries and the harms.''

So what did she like about the communal lifestyle?

''We had to dump so much information about the things that attracted me to the life there, that made the life feel wholesome. What got left was the conflicts between the wives,'' she said.

''There were strengths in the society where the whole society pulled together,'' Carolyn said. ''We had the farms that would grow big crops of potatoes and grow big crops of corn. We'd have potatoes they would bring into the community and process them and take care of them so we could just get potatoes for practically free. We could go get corn for practically free and freeze everything we needed for a year.''

And peaches, too. ''You could get all the peaches you wnated for practically nothing. Those types of things made it where you could live better on less,'' she said. ''And then we had the programs where when somebody really didn't have the means to build a home and they were helping Uncle Fred, we had a house in a day project, where the community built a house in one day. Those kinds of things made us feel self sufficient and like we had a strength.''

Carolyn said the philosophy pushed by former FLDS prophet Leroy Johnson was that if you had a big family, you had more responsibility and you had to work harder. ''It wasn't that you have to go rely on someone else to take care of you.''

Carolyn said she considers what has happened to the community ''tragic.''

''That community was progessing to a point we were starting to really take off, from an economic point of view. We had more people getting educated than ever before in history. We had all these educated people beginning to come back to the community and the community was starting to, you felt it, you felt like we were just in a place where we were going to become a powerhouse,'' Carolyn said.

''If we would have continued down that path, it's hard to know where that community would be right now. If we had stayed with a little more moderate approach to things. But when Rulon came in we went to such an extremist place,'' she said.

''It didn't happen right off the bat. He started allowing people [who had started school] to finish the degrees but nobody else could start. And it became more and more oppressive, and then he had his stroke and that's when it started going just like crazy. That's when Warren got in power and all of a sudden everything was taboo.''

''It's like you would get out of bed in the morning, and you were just like, 'Oh Heaven help us, what freedom is going to be taken today?''

''I look at 'Big Love' and I'm like wondering if our society could have been a little more along that line, if we would have been able to succeed economically. But with no education and driving everybody back into dirt floor living conditions, there's no way.''

Labels: Carolyn Jessop, Oprah Winfrey
10:51 AM | 0 comments
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Carolyn's children
I appreciate all the people who have read my story about Carolyn Jessop's book ''Escape'' online today.

One reader posted this comment: ''I am interested in reading this book. I'm also interested in knowing how her other children are coping and learning to live in the new environment. It would be hard to watch your daughter go back to the life you worked hard to escape.''

I plan to write a second story about Carolyn and her daughter, Betty. I have no idea if I will be able to reach Betty to get her perspective, but I am going to try. I hope to get it in the paper soon. But yes, it was hard for Carolyn to watch her daughter, who graduated from public school here in the Salt Lake Valley, go back to the sect. Betty is living with one of her other mothers -- not in Texas, by the way -- and is in touch periodically with Carolyn.

As for Carolyn's other children, they have all been in therapy since leaving the FLDS sect but the children are succeeding in school and other activities: football, karate, and Girl Scouts. Carolyn's son Harrison has disabilities caused by his bout with spinal cancer as a toddler and requires much of her attention.

Her oldest son is attending Salt Lake Community College and is a brown belt in karate. By the time he graduated from high school, he had a pilot's license.

Merril Jessop, their father, has not seen the children in about three years, according to Carolyn. Their custody agreement requires his visits to take place in Salt Lake City. He has been in Texas for about that long, which apparently makes visiting his children complicated.

I asked Sheriff David Doran of Schleicher County, Texas, to send word to Merril Jessop that I was writing about his ex-wife's book and welcomed any comment he might care to make. I did not expect a response; the FLDS typically choose to ignore what they see as media hysteria about their faith. And I did not get one.

Labels: Carolyn Jessop
4:59 PM | 1 comments
Monday, October 15, 2007
Carolyn Jessop's Escape
Carolyn Jessop, who was once married to the man running the FLDS' YFZ Ranch in Eldorado, Texas, has written a book titled Escape about her life in the sect.

The book, which appears in bookstores tomorrow, is sure to be a big hit given its portrayal of feuding sister wives, fanatical prophets and a faith that makes fantastical demands on followers.

I have a story about it in tomorrow's paper. The book includes a few surprises, but also covers ground that will be familiar to those who've followed the FLDS saga.

First a capsule review: Carolyn spends much of her childhood in monogamous family that belongs to the FLDS faith. Her mom is depressed and beats her often. Her dad takes a second wife when she is 10. Things improve. Carolyn is married at age 18 to Merril Jessop, then 50, and life becomes a nightmare. Still, she completes a college degree and works as a teacher, Web designer and even in direct sales. More on that later. She has eight children in 15 years and finally bails out, assisted by family and friends.

The book bogs down in minutia at times and Carolyn gives only superficial accounts of some events. She leaves out any positive take on the community -- which she told me in an interview she regrets. More on that later, too. Her sister wives sound horrible, forming ever shifting alliances. But Carolyn doesn't seem like much of a peach in the plural family, either. She figures out pretty quickly sex is power and uses it to her advantage. Survival of the fittest, you know.

The book is a total character assassination of her ex-husband, who is a topdog in the FLDS hierarchy. You don't put just any one in charge of your temple grounds, after all.

Merril comes off as a complete cad who doesn't give a damn about his wives -- well, six of them any way. Carolyn estimates her former husband now has 13 wives and more than 100 children.

Carolyn levels all kinds of accusations against Merril. He is emotionally abusive and eats steak while the rest of the family is getting along on tomato sandwiches. He leaves her to fend for herself against a freaky drifter. He allows her to go on state assistance just before the birth of their seventh child. The boy develops cancer and Merril blames Carolyn's ''rebelliousness'' for it. The state picks up the tab.

''I had to go in and claim I was a single mom with no income and in a lot of ways I felt like I was telling the truth,'' Carolyn told me.

Merril disappears as she nearly dies after giving birth to their eighth child. I'm really glossing over the details here, but you get the idea.

So much for ''Big Love.'' More on that later, too. But Carolyn is definitely a determined, smart woman and many will find her courage inspiring.

Here are some of the surprises. As Carolyn struggles to provide for her children, she begins selling NuSkin products -- skin care as well as cosmetics -- to elite women in the community.

Her success -- some months she netted $1,000 or more -- was due to family connections. Seven of Merril's daughters were married to former prophet Rulon T. Jeffs, an octogenarian who had a total of about 60 wives.

"He's got all these young wives who wanted to look pretty and they're not having babies," Carolyn said in an interview. "Their lives [were] just about them mostly and their little teaching job or whatever they're assigned to do. And so they spent a lot of money on skin care."

And makeup, too. ''And because Uncle Rulon's family was using it and Merril's family was using it, wow, then it makes it OK for everybody else to use it. That's why I got away with that. It is because of who I was married to and who I was selling to.''

Status, after all, has its pluses.

Another surprise: After Carolyn moved to Salt Lake City, she hooked up with the creators of HBO's hit ''Big Love.'' She told them their first script was "a bunch of nonsense.''

She said the first scenario for the show pitted a group modeled after the FLDS against a more progressive group modeled after Centennial Park, a nearby polygamous community.

''I said, 'If you portray that this is about freedom you are going to injure some people badly because that is not what is going on.' And I really told them a bunch of stuff. I don't know that they listened to me, but they didn't come out with it the way they planned,'' Carolyn said.

The show aired two years later with a vastly different theme, she said.

By the way, she made a little money courtesy of ''Big Love.'' The show paid Carolyn $20 an hour to sew ankle-to-wrist undergarments modeled on those worn by the FLDS.

''It saved my life,'' she laughs. ''At that point, it was a really great thing. I was like, 'I'm glad these skills are going to come into use somewhere now. They sure are not going to come in use in [her new] life.''