Toddled Dredge

Escape is Carolyn Jessop’s account of her life within the FLDS, the fundamentalist mormon sect, and her gradual change from a believer in its religion to a woman who feared its abuses and needed to get out.

Jessop lived in the Short Creek area of Utah-Arizona, where the FLDS dominates a few small towns and their services. When she was eighteen, her parents arranged a marriage for her with a fifty-year-old man, Merril Jessop, who already had three wives. Over the next fifteen years, she had eight children with Merril until an emergency hysterectomy following the birth of her last son.

Carolyn Jessop describes her life in Merril’s household as an endless wrangling for position, each wife (he had seven when she left him) struggling for a place in Merril’s affections. The home was often abusive, and there was not enough money for everyone. Currying favor with Merril was the only way a wife could be certain she could buy her children the basic necessities, or protect them from the abuse of other wives.

As Warren Jeffs (the “prophet” of the FLDS currently serving a prison sentence as an accomplice to rape) gained more power in the sect, rules became more strict. Children were withdrawn from school. Dress codes became more extreme. Less dissent was tolerated. Carolyn became more and more concerned with the direction the religion was taking.

Carolyn and her father sought help from Warren Jeffs to end the abuse Carolyn was suffering at the hands of her husband. Jeffs proved worse than useless, placing the responsibility for the abuse solely on Carolyn. Carolyn decided she needed to leave the sect, but only if she could take all her children with her. Over the course of months, she planned her escape and grabbed the moment when it came, leaving with all eight children, aided by family members who had already left.

Jessop’s book opens a window on a secretive sect, allowing the reader glimpses of its beliefs and practices. Her portrayal of polygamists and their conflicts may also serve as a corrective on the very simplistic view of highly authoritarian, partriarchal religious groups that sees all the men as bad and the women as innocent victims. Carolyn and her children suffer as much at the hands of the favorite wife as they do from Merril himself.

But it is a badly written book. The time frames of the book are not always clear. It is poorly organized. Carolyn’s anger is palpable throughout, not only at the larger corruptions of the cult, but at the snubs and pains of everyday life with the other women. Sometimes she rises above it and expresses sympathy for the difficulties the other women faced, but sometimes I was left with the feeling that she wrote particular paragraphs to anger particular women in retaliation for particular slights.

Perhaps inevitably when writing about a secretive cult, there is a lot of unconfirmed gossip in the book. She writes of things she heard without explaining where she heard them, and she attributes motives to people that she could not possibly verify. I am not saying that I did not believe her, but when dealing with a cult that lies so freely, it is worthwhile to take extra pains to be exact and careful about what the author knows and what the author merely suspects.

Escape still shows the effects of Jessop’s life in the cult in many ways. She exhibits a lingering reluctance to attribute the same corruptions to the men who were prophets during her childhood, portraying most of its flaws instead as the result of Warren Jeffs’ leadership.

Most strikingly, after so many years in a religion that uses people’s sins as blackmail against them, she does not expose many of her own flaws to the reader. Although she describes the fierce manipulation and power-grasping that were a part of life with “sister-wives,” the stories of particular instances are, with only one small exception, always about the pettiness and resentment of other wives, never about her own. She does mention the ways that the structure of FLDS society prevented her from mothering her children as she wanted to.

All in all, Jessop struck me as a capable and courageous woman, but one whose literary efforts are still hampered by the scars of her life. Her book is worth reading if only as a rare opportunity to see the FLDS through the eyes of a former insider, but, like Jessop’s own life, it is a raw and unfinished product.