Source: This shook me to my core… Channel: Alyssa Grenfell Published: April 17, 2026 | Archived: April 23, 2026

Video: This shook me to my core…
Channel: Alyssa Grenfell
Published: April 17, 2026
Duration: 1:31:40
Views: 484,844
Category: People & Blogs
Video ID: _rYeupy1clw

Description

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~~~~~~~~ Trust Me: The False Prophet follows the disturbing yet predictable rise of Sam Bateman, a leader from a breakoff fundamentalist Mormon group. He took extreme advantage of a community already shaped by prophetic control, polygamy, and total obedience. As an ExMormon myself (with family roots in polygamy) this didn’t feel like some far-off story to me. It felt like an extreme version of beliefs and power structures I already recognize. What makes the documentary especially chilling is that people were documenting what was happening in real time as they tried to protect young girls. The police were shockingly slow to act.

~~~~~~~~ A few resources I mention in the video: *Watch my reaction to Love on the Spectrum on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/155857934?utm_campaign=postshare_creator *Watch Trust Me: False Prophet on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/81758532 *Donate to Christine’s Dream Fund: https://www.paypal.com/donate?campaign_id=4F2UR7DSLH23C *My video visiting Short Creek and learning about the FLDS video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6v_ZW89itGk&t=805s *My Joseph Smith polygamy video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BJqFHEyW4s&t=268s *My video breaking down my own polygamist family history: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbQ119adjZE&t=3274s *Rulon Jeffs to Warren Jeffs transition period: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/after-years-of-transformation-twin-towns-once-run-by-flds-sect-enjoy-new-freedoms *The Nauvoo Expositor “wolf in sheep’s clothing” quote: https://ia802907.us.archive.org/18/items/NauvooExpositor1844Replica/Nauvoo_Expositor_1844_replica.pdf *Issues with local police in Colorado City: https://www.cnn.com/2017/04/19/us/flds-police-colorado-city-hildale-warren-jeffs *Cristine’s instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dr.christinemarie/?hl=en *Naomi’s (Nomz) Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nomzia_b/ *An interview I did with one of the former wives of Warren Jeffs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WP4x64XSqc&t=2450s *Watch Keep Sweet, Pray, and Obey on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/81292539

~~~~~~~~~~ Where to find me: *Patreon (ad free & bonus content): https://patreon.com/alyssadgrenfell?utm_medium=unknown&utm_source=join_link&utm_campaign=creatorshare_creator&utm_content=copyLink *Read my book, How to Leave the Mormon Church: https://amzn.to/4na4rpo *TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@alyssadgrenfell?lang=en *Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alyssadgrenfell/?hl=en *Email me: alyssadgrenfell@gmail.com

~~~~~~~~~~ Support my channel: *Patreon (ad free & bonus content): https://patreon.com/alyssadgrenfell?utm_medium=unknown&utm_source=join_link&utm_campaign=creatorshare_creator&utm_content=copyLink

Transcript — YouTube panel (human-authored)

0:00 Are you a prophet? I would be a liar if I said I wasn’t. And that is a scene from the new Netflix documentary called Trust Me, False Prophet. The man in this scene, his name is Sam Bateman. He’s the one that claimed to be a true prophet, and he had over 20 wives, though we put very strong quotation marks around the word wives. We’re going to get more into his story, but he did most of this while wearing the most ridiculous white leather jacket I’ve ever seen. He’s involved with a religion called the FLDS, the fundamentalist Latter-day Saints. As I film this, this is currently the number one show on Netflix, which seems to be the case anytime anyone makes a show about anything involving Mormons. I, for example, was raised in the mainstream Mormon church, the LDS, Latter-day Saints. And this covers the fundamentalist sect of the religion I was raised in. The mainstream Mormon church did give up polygamy in about 1890 to 1920. It was a bit of a process,

1:00 but the FLDS sect of the church never gave up polygamy. When the mainstream Mormon church decided to stop practicing polygamy, there were a lot of different breakoff groups that came as a result of that. It’s not just the FLDS. Other examples are the AUB and the order. Most of these groups are based in Utah. And as someone who once lived in Utah, I can easily say that if you live in Utah, you will eventually see polygamist people, whether they’re FLDS or another sect.

1:29 There’s a pretty large population of polygamous people in Utah. And so when you live there, you know, it’s just kind of part of the culture that whether you’re at the gas station or the grocery store, especially in southern Utah, you may run across them at some point. Here is a chart that represents some of the most major breakoff groups that came as a result of Joseph Smith dying. Because Joseph Smith died pretty young. He was killed. And so whether it was the succession after Joseph Smith died or the chaos that ensued after they gave up polygamy, there are a lot of moments within the mainstream church that ended up in a lot of breakoff groups. Most of these breakoff groups do claim the same thing though, which is that they are the true church that Joseph Smith originally founded. So growing up, I actually thought that the FLDS had literally nothing to do with mainstream Mormons. I was quite surprised to find out that they also read the Book of Mormon. They study the teachings of Joseph Smith.

2:26 They have the Doctrine and Covenants. They use a lot of the same language and wording. Even watching the show, one of the girls talks about being spoken to by a still small voice, which is something I talked about myself when I was growing up in the mainstream Mormon church. And if you do go study the history of the Mormon church and the life of Joseph Smith, the polygamists do have a point.

2:47 They are living what Joseph Smith originally taught. Joseph Smith had over 30 wives, the youngest of which was 14. He also preached that polygamy was required to get into heaven. This is also something Brigham Young preached and other Mormon prophets have preached in the early days. And so if we’re talking about who gets to claim Joseph Smith’s true church, I do think the polygamists have a point when they say that they are living what Joseph Smith originally taught. I talk more about Joseph Smith and the women and girls that he manipulated into marrying him in this video, but throughout this video I will be comparing Joseph Smith’s polygamy to Warren Jeff’s polygamy and then also to Sam Baitman’s polygamy because there are a lot of through lines. I personally have been to Short Creek uh several times. That’s where this entire story takes place is in Short Creek in the Creek in Utah. And I think similar to Christine who we learn about in the documentary, uh Christine

3:48 decides to go live there and she feels a pull towards this community. And I really identify with that. Uh the first time I went to Short Creek was about 2017. As I was leaving the Mormon church and we were traveling through Utah, one of the places I wanted to see was where the FLDS lived. I am a sixthg generation Mormon. Obviously now ex- Mormon, but as far as like my family history in the church, it goes back six generations and two of those generations were living in polygamy. So I do have literal polygamy and sister wives and first cousin marriages in my actual DNA and in my family history. So what this means is for me, I am distantly related to people in the FLDS community. We at one point were all in the same core religion that was out in Utah. So watching shows like this, uh, Keep Sweet, Pray, and Obey is another famous Netflix show about the FLDS. But when I watch these shows, I really think like this could have been me. I could have been a sister wife in

4:54 modern day America. It was almost like a genetic roll of the dice. If my family line was going to go through the mainstream Mormon church or if they were going to hold on to polygamy and they were going to stay in one of these polygamist sects. I think the FLDS and the LDS, this is like a distant cousin, maybe even not a distant cousin. This is these are like sister religions in a sense. And with the LDS, obviously the volume is turned up to a thousand. I’m not trying to say I went through anything close to what these women have experienced, but considering that the root religion with Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon, the same founding story, that is the same. And so there there are a lot of similarities. Here’s a clip from the show that really reminded me of this reality. Uh I’ll say that this reaction to the show will include spoilers, so just know that it’s coming.

5:51 for the little girl who winers at the gate on this path every all the women’s women and children um singing in that lineup are his wives essentially. Some of them are very small as you’ll note. And honestly, when they first started singing that song, when I was watching it, it truly did make me tear up because I grew up singing that song. That song is called What Heaven Sees in You. It was originally published by the mainstream Mormon church. It’s a song about how a girl has three dresses, three white dresses in her life. She has her baby blessing dress, her baptism dress, and then her wedding dress. And it very clearly sets out like what heaven sees in you as a girl is like a future bride. That that’s your purpose.

6:49 It’s one thing to have that applied to me and feel like I was kind of uh it was I was very much indoctrinated into seeing being a bride as like my primary purpose in this life. But then also then to see it being used in an LLDS context as like not only what am I learning these lessons, but these girls are also being taught to sing this song about how what heaven sees in you is you as a bride. But not just for these girls, not just that you’re going to be a bride, but there are some very little girls. I think that that in this group, the youngest was 10. And so I think whether it’s music or the Book of Mormon or the same language, the systems of control are very recognizable to me, especially having spent time in Short Creek learning about Warren Jeff’s talking to um Sam. His name is Sam. He has a YouTube channel called Growing Up in Polygamy. He was He’s XFLDS. And so all of these things I feel like come together to just make it so that I do kind of see these patterns, these

7:54 patterns that are used by the leaders or predators to control and manipulate the flock, the the lambs, um these like naive little sheep who are looking at them for direction and as profits and they are using it to commit these heinous crimes. I do think though of all of these polygamous sects that have broken off of the Mormon church, the FLDS is clearly the most infamous because of Warren Jeffs, he was on the FBI’s most wanted list. His story and his crimes had national attention on them for a long time. And so I do think the FLDS is the group that most people know about and most the most coverage has come from. And obviously this new Netflix documentary mostly revolves around Sam Baitman, but he was able to do what he did, what they cover in that documentary because of what happened in the FLDS community long before he was ever on the scene, so to speak. Sam Baitman really stepped into a power vacuum created by Warren

9:03 Jeffs after he was arrested. And I think to understand why Sam Baitman was able to do what he did, you do have to understand Warren Jeffs first and just the history of the FLDS in general. Warren Jeffs became the FLDS prophet in 2002. He was the successor of his father, Ruland Jeffs. and Rule and Jeff’s Foley was also a polygamist, but from news articles and from stories and books I’ve read, it sounds like Ru and Jeff’s was just a kinder leader or dictator or prophet. Uh, he was just kinder. I think from what I can gather, as soon as Warren Jeffs stepped in, he really ruled with an iron grip and he implemented all of these new rules that were much harsher, much stricter, way more heartless uh than his father had. To quote from this article, it says, “But they say things got worse after Jeff took charge following his father’s death in 2002. Families were broken apart by church leaders who cast out men

10:03 deemed unworthy and reassigned their wives and children to others. On Jeff’s orders, children were pulled from public school, basketball hoops were taken down, and followers were told how to spend their time and what to eat. And while I wouldn’t ever say that Ru and Jeffs was a good man, it does seem like Warren Jeffs took a bad situation and took even greater advantage of it. At one point before Warren Jeffs was arrested, he did try to set up a kind of satellite religious community in Texas.

10:32 It was called the Yearning for Zion Ranch. It had its own temple, which if you go look at the pictures of is eerily similar to the Mormon temple. There are so many harrowing stories that have come out of the war in Jeff’s years. He did things like separate families constantly. It’d be like you have an hour of notice and they would basically send the child one place, send the mother to a new husband and it was like it’s like constant chaos and heartbreak.

11:00 Obviously, the crimes that he was arrested for, marrying underage children and really just overall horrible abuse. Uh he was placed on the FBI’s most wanted list in May of 2006 and then they were able to find him and arrest him by August of 2006. As of recording this video, Warren Jeffs is still alive which has continued to cause so much heartache for the LDS community and so much dysfunction because he’s still calling.

11:30 He’s still able to use the phone. So he still is having like edicts from prison. He’s still leading from prison. And so even though the war in Jeff’s years were horrible, it has still created in the time after him, it’s just still continued. And part of what has made that aftermath so ugly is that even after Warren Jeffs was uh convicted of all of these crimes, the FLDS still believe that he is God’s true prophet on the earth. Essentially, they just believed that this was a test from God.

12:04 And persecution is proof that they’re being tested. Persecution is proof that Warren Jeffs is a true prophet. And so, even though he was arrested in 2006, he hasn’t been in that community since 2006, there are still many, many FLDS people who are living their life every day now, 20 years later, fully believing he’s still their prophet. They interview some FLDS people in the Trust Me documentary who clarify and say that they do believe Warren Jeffs is still their prophet. So here’s that scene.

12:40 But I’ve been around the story long enough to know incarcerating Warren would do nothing to diminish his power. Having him in prison doesn’t change what he is. You know, Heavenly Father hasn’t appointed another to be the prophet. So, as far as we’re concerned, he’s still the prophet. I feel like imprisoning Warren Jeffs turned him into this like martyr figure. It really galvanized the followers to double down, which is something we’re going to talk about in the video today.

13:10 It’s like why it’s so hard to uproot a group like this because any attempt to kind of disrupt or negate what’s happening is often met with even more ferocity from the believers.

14:33 To me, one of the craziest parts of watching this documentary is that this woman that was just in the clip, she is an active FLDS member. She still believes and they’re able to recognize that Sam Bateman is a snake. He’s a predator. They’re quick to just say he’s a false prophet. But they are, so many of them are deeply unable to turn that same critical thinking onto their own prophet, onto Warren Jeffs. This is a very human thing where we can pull apart and criticize other belief systems. We can say, “Oh, that’s strange,” or that that’s a backwards way of thinking about things. It’s very difficult for us to turn that same mentality on our own deeply held beliefs. And I’ll say like I I do that too. It’s just part of human psychology. I’m not saying I’m exempt from that way of thinking. I do think I I did it when I left the church. Uh,

15:40 that’s not to say there aren’t still parts of my life that are unexamined. It’s just part of being a human. We are we are our own blind spots. All of that to say, I do think seeing it in this FLDS context, it is still shocking to see that they can understand and comprehend that Sam Baitman is using religion to manipulate women and children, but they can’t see how Warren Jeffs within the same religious to us the same religious context. They can’t see how Warren Jeffs and Sam Baitman are the same. To me, this is like the same.

16:16 These are the same types of people. Uh, but to them, this is like God himself and the devil himself. I do also think the FLDS voice is so interesting to me. The way that the FLDS speak, they’re obviously still speaking English, but I I swear if a 100 people lined up, I could pick out the FLDS person just by hearing their voice. Uh it’s very similar to me to how Mormons have their own kind of affect or way of speaking.

16:43 When I was Mormon, we’d called it the Relief Society voice, Mormon voice, uh testimony voice. There’s lots of things you could call it, but it’s like this for women especially, this like very soft, high-pitched almost like childlike way of bearing your testimony uh and speaking and and affirming truth of speaking to each other. And what’s crazy too is that it also just shows how insular the FLDS is because most people in Utah don’t talk like that unless they’re maybe in a testimony meeting context or a preaching context. I mean, I grew up Mormon and I think I have a relatively average sounding voice. Like I I wouldn’t think most people would say I have an accent at this point, but I do think the FLDS voice shows how closed off this community is because their way of speaking is so different from the rest of the United States or even the rest of Utah. And here at the beginning of the show, they cover that Warren Jeff had a lot of rules that he instituted once he was in prison. He said, “No more marriages, no more and no more babies.

17:52 And they have this scene in the documentary where there’s this room where there’s all these bassinets just like piled up on top of each other. If you’re true to Warren Jeffs, if you’re following Warren Jeffs, another thing you’ll see in the show is a lot of doorways have the word Zion over them. And that’s proof in the FLDS community that you are loyal to Warren Jeffs. At least that’s historically what it’s meant. And so not only I think did war and just getting incarcerated, I think that created a huge leadership power vacuum because now all of these people uh at least I there are different estimates of how many FLDS people there are. I’ve seen 10,000. I’ve seen 20,000.

18:32 It’s not like these people are answering the door for the census. Nobody really knows how many people there are in the FLDS community. Often they don’t even give birth in a hospital. So these people do not have birth certificates or social security cards. But it just meant that all of these people who were used to having really strict rules were now just having some their profit like dictate to them from a prison cell and saying like we’re cutting everything off. All of this focus around having huge polygamous families. We’re not going to do from now on no more marriages. And so I think the power vacuum that was created was not just that Warren Jeffs was no longer there.

19:11 It’s also that he said you now you must now like press pause on your lives. We’re not moving forward in the world. You need to essentially freeze in time for as long as I’m in prison. With a life sentence though, he has a life sentence. That becomes pretty difficult for all of these people. And so this is essentially where the show picks up is in this power vacuum left by Warren Jeffs which allows Sam Baitman to walk through the door. And I think watching the documentary it really shows how someone like Sam it was almost like the writing on the wall uh that something like this was going to happen. This is not some random aberration that walked through the door. This was a path that had already been laid for him by all these teachings about obedience, prophetic authority, polygamy, personal revelation. It was bound to happen when Warren Jeffs went to prison that someone else would come in and pick up these pieces. Before we jump into the rest of the reaction about the show, don’t

20:20 forget to like this video, subscribe to my channel, drop a comment if you watch the show and some of your takeaways. I do have a separate Patreon reaction. On a lighter note, there was a Mormon storyline in the show Love on the Spectrum. So, for this Patreon video, I basically watched that the most recent season of Love on the Spectrum and then reacted to it and kind of broke apart like here are the the Mormon elements that are really jumping through the screen at me. So, if you want to watch that after this video, it’s already posted on Patreon. So, we pick up where the FLDS are obviously living in this total state of being in a stalemate. And that’s where Sam Baitman walks in. And I’ll say to at the top here, similar to the Mormon church always having all these breakoff groups, people proclaiming that they are prophets is a very common story within the Mormon community. It’s definitely not just Sam

21:17 Baitman. And it’s not even just because of polygamy either because as I said like polygamy was a huge reason all of these groups broke off. But to me the core reason of why this is such an issue is that the entire religion is built on the idea of prophets and revelation. Because if you teach that prophets are super super important and then you also teach that obedience is the highest law of heaven. It means that anyone who walks through the door with charisma or cunning, who just says, “I’m a prophet.”

21:51 If they’re charismatic, if they’re convincing, if whatever, like if they’re able to get people on their side, that that is an immediate recipe for tons of different breakoff groups. Utah generally, not just the FLDS community, but Utah, Utah has this nickname of being the scam capital of the world, uh, which is why MLMs uh, do so well in Utah. And this community that has been bred since birth to believe that obedience is very important. It’s just ripe for people to take advantage of them, especially when someone starts claiming, I had a revelation from God, and God told me to God told me you’re supposed to be my wife. God told me I’m the new leader. If you are already inclined to be a believer and to assume that people who speak for God are actually speaking for God, you’re going to have a lot of issues with people getting misled by new religious leaders.

22:51 It’s like a recipe for disaster. And I think to get back to the documentary, part of what makes it so incredibly mind-blowing, I showed that scene earlier where the girls are all singing. You might find yourself wondering like how how do we even have this footage? And it’s because of this woman named Christine Marie. She is herself an ex-member uh of the mainstream Mormon church. So they show her, she has the black name tag. She was once a member of the mainstream Mormon church. And similar to as I’ve been saying, uh she had a man approach her and essentially say that he was a prophet and that she was meant to be one of his wives. and she got she believed him because like I said, you’re very inclined to believe.

23:34 And I’ll say this is not the first time I’ve heard this story of a man approaching a woman and saying, “I’m a prophet. You need to follow me.” And the woman often believes because like I said, we are taught to be submissive and obedient. Even the story of Elizabeth Smart, he believed he was a prophet. I swear these this is like a dime a dozen type of situation, which is what makes it so insidious is that it’s clear that this is pretty easy for these monsters to do. Here’s a clip where Christine shares a little bit about her story.

24:06 I met a man who persuaded me that he was a modern-day prophet. And I decided if this man was a prophet, I was going to be completely obedient. I had to do what he said or risk my soul. Before I knew it, I was so broken. I didn’t even know who I was anymore. And I think watching that clip, even when I watched it the first time, I I just I am not joking when I say it gives me chills almost when I hear these stories over and over again because it’s almost like I could finish if you give me the first half of the sentence, I could finish the second half of the sentence because now having made these YouTube videos for this long and heard so many stories, it’s just like I feel like the number of times I have heard the same story, but with different people. It makes me feel sick to my stomach because it’s just so clear that this is no longer a one-off problem. It is a systemic problem that has plagued this community probably since its inception with Joseph Smith. I mean,

25:16 she’s worried that if she doesn’t listen to this prophet that her soul is in danger. And Joseph Smith literally said that these young girls and women who had to marry him, he said that their families would be in danger if they didn’t marry him. Joseph Smith said that an angel with a flaming sword would visit them or had visited him. That their entire salvation was dependent on this. And so it’s just like, man, this line has been used for over a hundred years at this point. And so because Christine, which I think is what is so amazing about her, she literally goes and embeds herself into the FLDS community with her husband Tolga. She does end up uh after this prophet experience. She escapes from that and then basically meets her husband who is supporting her in the docu series whose name is Tolga. But because she had this experience, she feels called to go help the FLDS. And so they moved to Short Creek. I mean, it used to be that it was just FLDS people. Now, I don’t know.

26:20 Like I said, it’s not like we have a sense, we have census data on this, but it’s now not so singularly just FLDS. There’s a little bit more of a balance. Like, for example, when I was last in Short Creek, I went to Short Creek’s first brewery. It was just very recently opened. And so obviously it’s pretty new that outsiders are coming into this community and living there and interacting with the FLDS community. I think when I visited for the first time in 2017, as soon as we pulled off the interstate, a car started following us.

26:55 That car literally followed us the entire time we were all in Short Creek, which was probably only 15 minutes cuz I got kind of freaked out. And this was back before a lot more of the outsiders started moving in. And as we were driving back in 2017, all of these kids were coming and lining the road or sticking out of like fences or the bushes like putting their heads over the over the fences and just doing this to us and sticking their tongues out at us.

27:24 It was very much like, “Okay, let’s leave.” That memory is about 10 years old at this point. So things have there are more outsiders there than ever before, but there is a still a very strong FLDS presence there. If you go and drive around, you’d still see the FLDS like walking around and having their dresses on and things like that. And so to me, even though more outsiders are are moving to Short Creek, it is still pretty brave to go live there and try to kind of embed yourself in that community and help them out when historically they have been so suspicious of outsiders. In the docu series, we learn that after Christine moves in, she sets up this almost like a a center where people can go get like food and blankets and that kind of a thing. and she starts meeting people from the FLDS community and this is how she meets Sam Baitman for the first time. I’m gonna show you the clip where we are introduced to Sam Baitman for the first time. I didn’t see him for some

28:24 time and then Sam reappears with a new wife over 18 but young and beautiful. Keep in mind people are not getting married because the prophet stopped marrying people. I remember thinking that’s interesting. How did Sam get a new wife? You know, and so in the story, we learn that he was divorced and then now he has this new wife, but nobody’s supposed to be getting married. And one minute later in the docu series, suddenly he has a trailer full of women.

28:57 And so here’s where we discover this new information. The next time I saw Sam, he had another wife. again over 18 and the younger sister of the first wife. He was in a vehicle with a trailer, like a flatbed trailer. More singing. And as you can see, they have the faces blurred. Later in the show, they have a note that anyone that was a minor, they blur and then they make like a recreation of a face over top of that just to obscure their identities. As you watch the show, they give the actual number because at this point they’re just in the trailer. It’s like there’s babies, there’s children, there’s young women, there’s old women.

29:43 What’s going on here? And so later in the show, they give the actual number, which is that he had 23 wives. And of those, nine of them were minor children. And I know I’ve been putting wives in quotation marks. That’s because obviously they are not. This is like not legal. That is just what they’re called within the polygamist community. It’s like that’s the name they’re given. But you can call just because you call it something does not mean that they are wives. Uh it’s that is a crime actually.

30:16 And lo and behold, suddenly we have this man who has stepped into this community and used the doctrines and the power vacuum to acrue all of these wives very very quickly. And even the others people seem very shocked by how he was able to do this. Here’s an example of one of the FLDS believers. So this is someone who believes in Warren Jeffs but is able to point out that Sam Baitman is a fraud.

30:45 So, here’s a clip of one of them talking about what’s going on with Sam and the women and children. He is a predator and everything that they’ve been taught unturning. Yep. You know, when he goes and digs into the scriptures and he tries to manipulate things and twist them to capture their purity and they don’t realize and that’s just one example. There are so many points in this docu series where other FLDS members are saying like he’s manipulating them. He’s using the scriptures against them. He’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing. And that phrase, especially, the wolf in sheep’s clothing, uh, always stands out to me because it’s used pretty commonly in these types of stories. But it was also used against Joseph Smith. This document is called the Nauvoo Expositor. This was a one edition. This newspaper only had one edition because Joseph Smith literally burned this printing press to the ground which then resulted in his

31:46 eventual arrest and death which I talked about in this video. But in this here I’m going to read a quote from the Nauvoo Expositor and this quote is about Joseph Smith and it’s the people who wrote this were the ex-members of the church. So, similar to me, ex Mormons coming out and saying, “We are telling the truth about what’s happening in this group of people. What’s the truth of Joseph Smith?” And like I said, he burned it to the ground. So, they said of Joseph Smith, “Lo, the wolf is in the fold, a raid in sheep’s clothing, and is spreading death and devastation among the saints. And we say to the watchmen standing on the walls, cry aloud and spare not, for the day of the Lord is at hand.” And they go on to say in the documents so that they’re they’re speaking about polygamy specifically.

32:36 Joseph Smith is a wolf in sheep’s clothing because he is manipulating women and girls into marrying him in secret. They say and with a penalty of death attached that God Almighty has revealed it to him that she would be his Joseph’s spiritual wife. And so in this newspaper back in the 1800s, they were outing Joseph Smith as trying to manipulate women and children into marrying him. And like I said, he got so angry at this newspaper, he burned it to the ground. People, ex-members of this church, have been trying to sound the alarm on what’s been going on since day one. Unfortunately, because Mormonism has become so widespread and this theology and doctrine has become so adapted in this area of the world in Utah, in Arizona, in Idaho, it just has meant that many people have adapted the sheep’s clothing. Whether it’s the man who kidnapped Elizabeth Smart, whether it’s uh Jodi Hildebrandt, whether it’s even Mark Hoffman who manipulated Mormon prophets and tricked them. It’s like

33:50 it’s pretty clear to me that when you breed such a high level of obedience and such a high deference and reverence to authority, it’s going to create massive implications for the people who just choose to follow the wrong the most evil person. and someone like a Jodie Hilda brand, she’s just staying in like the the normal part of Utah, the normal part of Utah, the the mainstream Mormon part of Utah where at least people are allowed to go to college. Like the mainstream Mormon church allow there’s no like rule against going to college.

34:28 But consider how much more this would terrorize the community. This like desire to obey. How much more it’s going to impact a community like Short Creek where people are so much more cut off. People aren’t really allowed to have internet access. People don’t have an education. This problem that takes place over and over again within any community touched by Mormonism is going to be even more extreme in a place like Short Creek. There’s a part where Christine is remark she remarks this is such a fictional world and it really can feel like that. I mean even just the fact that it takes place in this this world that looks like Mars you know where Short Creek is in Utah the whole landscape looks alien. It looks like it’s happening on another planet. Uh to me it looks like Mars. And so even just how otherworldly it is to step into this community as someone who who’s been there. I remember the last time I went,

35:28 multiple people were like, “Oh, you’re traveling. I was alone.” They’re like, “You’re traveling alone? Do you maybe you should stay out of town?” Basically, and I was like, “I already booked my hotel. I think it’ll be fine.” And I I only stayed there one night, but I woke up the next morning and my tire was flat. There was a nail in my tire. So, I had I like woke up and realized like, “Oh, I this I can’t even really get around.” and kind of freaked out initially like, oh my god, you know, and I it’s not like I know if somebody did that or if I just drove over a nail, it could be as benign as that, but I went and got it patched and then did what I needed to do for the rest of the day and then left. So, I feel like even having been there and feeling like there have been so many crimes committed here. I don’t believe in curses, but if I did, I would say that land is cursed. And I feel so horrible for all these people

36:24 who are still trapped there, whether they just don’t have the resources to leave or they’re mentally trapped there because they still believe. I’m going to talk about in a bit how the government plays a role in this because we do see how the police are responding to this situation, which I’m going to get to. I think that’s the first question most people have is like how is the government allowing this to happen? And there’s a pretty long explanation there.

36:49 And so in the docu series around the time where he acrews all of these wives, he also proclaims he’s a prophet. Uh which is the clip I showed at the beginning. He’s like, “I’d be ly I’d be lying if I say I can’t even really do the accent. It just sounds like a country accent when I try to do it, but it’s like a FLDS country accent.” And as part of proclaiming he’s the prophet, he asks Christine and Tolga to start filming him, which is another just obvious point that he has clear like delusions of grandeur. He is actively committing crimes and he’s like, “Can you get the can you get a closeup of me doing a crime?” Obviously doesn’t make a lot of sense. And Christine and Tolga because they’re embedded in this community because Christine knows from all of these other FLDS people like he’s doing illegal things. He’s not just I mean obviously polygamy having multiple wives is already illegal, but involving underage girls moves it to another level. And so Christine feels like, hey,

37:49 I if I film him, I may be able to get him fully confessing to something. I can take that to police and then the police will break this up uh so I can help them and save them. I feel like this creates such a difficult dynamic for her, which she she speaks to in the docu series because she basically has to get these people’s trust in order to betray them. So she’s a mole. She’s also going to be their savior essentially. She’s going to hopefully save them from this situation, but she has to betray them first. And you can tell in the show like she’s very loving. She’s cares for them so deeply and they feel it too. Like I think that that is really genuine. Obviously, she does really care for them. She’s trying to save them. And I do think this is an element of the show that feels very poignant because she has to figure out how to betray these people because to betray their prophet who is committing crimes obviously similar to Warren Jeffs. It’s the same thing. They believe they they

38:53 do believe he’s a prophet. It’s this absolutely crazy situation where you have a victim and you have the victimizer, the predator, but if you try to get the victim out of there, they will scream. And I mean, they so show some scenes where the girls are just swearing and like, “You can’t take him. We have to protect him.” It’s like a very religious version of Stockholm syndrome. I don’t know if there’s a proper like medicalized term for this, but it is why these situations are so difficult because if you’re even if you’re trying to save them from their situation, the moment they sense you’re trying to remove them from their situation, the teeth are going to come out and they are going to cut you off. I think too that this request he makes for them to film him, aside from this like egotistical side of the story or like him having these delusions of grandeur, I do think it shows how much he believes that he is a prophet. I think that he is fully believing his own lies here

39:58 because I think that he thinks God is going to protect him. God protects his prophets, right? And so you see in him this, it’s so strange to watch him on camera because he is also Sam Baitman is also naive. He’s naive enough to let Christine come in and film him while committing and admitting to crimes, but he also believes he’s like the smartest person on earth because he’s a the prophet of God. And I’ll say despite him seemingly having zero charisma, he is able to get three men to join him in his own little sect. It’s like inception because it’s like Mormonism LDS, Sam Baitman FLDS. So he’s able to get three people to come join his like mini cult.

40:43 Here’s a clip where they explain how this all plays out. And also I’ll say it’s not just that he Sam Baitman declares he’s the prophet. He says that Warren Jeff’s prophetic mantle, mantle is very Mormon word, that that mantle has now fallen on him. So he’s kind of doing the same thing Brigham Y. Young did the same thing War and Jeff’s did to to rule and Jeff’s similar like the same pattern. They’re all doing the same thing, which is like I received a vision from Uncle Warren that now I’m supposed to be the prophet. And because Sam was now the prophet, he agreed to turn over his daughters, even his very young daughters to marry Sam.

41:25 I surrender the ladies under my care, you belong to Father Samuel. What he chooses to do then is his business. And then they go on to say that not only did this man Moroni, which is a character in the Book of Mormon, Moroni is very Mormon name, he turns over his daughters and then he also turns over most of his wives. And then the same thing happens for the two other men. So that’s how Sam Baitman is able to acrue all of these women so quickly is that because he can capture the minds of these three men, they then relinquish their ownership, their care of these women and girls all almost exclusively all over to Sam. Another commonality between this story and Joseph Smith is that Joseph Smith also was secretly sealed or married to motheraughter pairs. So that was another thing he did was he would marry the mother and marry the daughter. They actually say at another part that this helps them when the CPS comes and investigates them

42:28 because it’s like these people are together because the mothers are caring for the daughters, not because the mother and the daughter are both married to that the man. We also learn along with these three men turning over the the women to Samuel Baitman, they also give him a ton of money. So there’s a scene where they have like a motorcade which War and Jeffs also did. Uh Sam Baitman comes through with a Bentley and uh they have this motorcade of cars for the profit that is now like basically all of these three men have turned over most if not all of their money to Sam Baitman too. This is called the law of consecration. Um it’s also something I promised in a Mormon temple uh the mainstream church. You promise to give all you have, your time, your talents, and everything with which the Lord has blessed you to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Joseph Smith taught the law of consecration.

43:24 So, this a very core part of Mormon doctrine is that you don’t own anything per se. Whe within the Mormon church, it’s not like they literally have their their name on your possessions. It’s just that theoretically, if the church asks you to give something to the church, you’ve promised that you would give it. In the FLDS community though, it does mean that these people own nothing. All of it is entrusted to the profit. All of it, whether it’s their houses, their children’s legal status, as in like who has custody over the child, that’s relinquished in many cases to these men. And so, you don’t own anything. Um, you don’t have legal custody of your children. You don’t have your name on your own home. Your name is not on your car. It is all, at least for the FLDS, it’s all in a trust that’s operated by the church, not private property that you actually own. And obviously too, I it just raises so many

44:20 crazy ethical questions about this like victim and victimization conversation I already touched on, which is that the wives, the adult wives are now participatory in these crimes. They are relinquishing their responsibility to protect their children and giving it to Sam Baitman. Why? Because they do actually believe he’s a prophet of God and that this is how they’re going to be saved. That’s why it’s so hard to talk about like who holds the blame. Uh obviously Sam Baitman owns the blame, but then we have these three men who are brainwashed under Sam Baitman, but then we have all of their daughters and wives who are also brainwashed. And it’s like the further you get from Sam Baitman, the more it starts to feel like they are all simultaneously being victimized and they’re victimizing. Other than the children, all of these people are participating in this system in which they are the persecuted and they are doing the persecution. It actually

45:23 reminds me of this book which uh I’ve been reading recently. The review on the back says, “Parks delves into Mormon history and lore to produce a picture of the institution as one that is both marginalized and marginalizing.” And I do think the history of the Mormon people being cast out of everywhere they went. I think that sums it up very well because I think in its history, Mormons and the FLDS have moments in which they they do have persecution, but then they are simultaneously persecuting or marginalizing oring their own people.

46:02 It’s almost like for me, I feel like with so much of Mormonism, it’s like the roots are just poison. The heart of this religion is poison as instituted by Joseph Smith. Like we cannot escape the poison that Joseph Smith started with polygamy and with a lot of the other things he did. Like the the inception of it is bad. And so trying to add layers of goodness on top of something that is at its heart was born out of a predator.

46:33 It’s like we can’t escape the the beginnings of what this is. So, as Christine is filming, as they are getting more and more acquainted with Sam Baitman and all of these women and girls who are always with him, Christine on her phone captures an audio of saying that three of the girls should be with uh in Sam Baitman’s words, he’s like they should be with the three men who have committed themselves to Sam as a prophet. And I’ll say even with Joseph Smith’s polygamy, this is also very common where the women and girls, the women and children are basically trading cards where as the men curry more favor with the head honcho, the head honcho then dole out uh the women back to the men. So, it’s basically like whichever of the male followers is like bringing in the most money or currying the most favor in whatever way, they then are rewarded by getting more wives. As she’s recording this audio on her phone, the three girls who are going to be

47:40 distributed, as he says, to be with uh the three men, uh the youngest of which uh is 13 years old. And on the recording, he’s like asking these girls that are in the car with him, “Did you did you feel guilty? Were you scared?” And he’s like, “I’m not going to tell you what to say.” And there’s obviously this insane undertone of like, “I’m not going to tell you what to say, but you better say the thing I want you to say.”

48:07 And the girls are just like, “No, I you know, no, no.” Like, they’re clearly just placating him. It’s just like so just such a manipulative conversation between him and the girls and she’s Christine is like recording all of this on audio where he is actively admitting to committing crimes. So, because Christine finally has this audio recording, she feels she can now go to the police to say, “Okay, we obviously thought this was happening um when he’s carrying these women around in a trailer to sing us songs. There was like this assumption that that’s what was happening. But now they have audio an audio recording where he is actively admitting to committing a crime. So, she’s like, I’m going to take this, take it to the police, and that’s the end of it, right? the police will take care of it because we have evidence of a crime being committed. Unfortunately though, we quickly discover that this is not going to be a open and shut case where the police act quickly and with

49:09 competence because even after that initial recording, nothing happens on the case for months. This is one of the huge problems. Um I hinted at it earlier with like why isn’t the government doing anything in this case? whether it’s like the local police or state police or federal there. There’s all of these levels of law enforcement. You’re like, how how is it that this is just happening? And it takes some renegade woman who’s like, I’m going to make a difference. Like, why is it that Christine has to be the one embedding herself in like as a like a private detective um when she’s just a citizen?

49:46 It’s like it does make you feel like why is there not more help at a governmental level to keep these things from happening? As a side note about Christine, I was very inspired by her. Uh she has a website where she’s raising, it’s called a dream fund for the girls who escaped Sam Baitman, uh which I donated to. If you are moved by the story and you’re able to, I suggest doing the same. I’m watching this and I’m just like she’s not even going to get a like it’s not like she’s going to get a reward. Um sometimes when you are able to like break a case you might get a reward in the United States like reward money for information on blah blah blah but like she’s truly just doing this because she feels compelled to help these people which is what makes her the angel of the story. Um she’s an amazing person for doing all of this.

50:35 So, if you if you want to donate, she does have a a place on her page where you can, and I’m going to link that below. But with that being said, to get back to the history of Colorado City or Short Creek, they’re the same thing. Sorry if I’m being confusing. This area of the world, since the FLDS settled there, it’s it has always been the FLDS community. I say that because in any other place, usually when a city was started, it had like founding documents and it had the sheriff and the mayor and there there’s a way these things usually play out as uh the United States was being colonized. However, since the FLDS settled in Colorado City in the 1930s, they have held this territory from the get-go. It was never like they were working with the government. They were always operating outside of the law since the FLDS settled there. I already kind of hinted at this by talking about how no one owns anything. Usually in a city there might be like the police station, the city hall, the post office.

51:41 This is the grocery store. This is such and such’s house. I know this is probably pretty apparent if you’ve ever lived in the United States or really anywhere in the world, but in Colorado City, everything was always just held by a trust essentially. No private ownership. Nobody has bank accounts even from what I can tell. Everything is just directly deposited back into the trust and then people get like an allowance.

52:09 But part of Warren and Jeff’s getting imprisoned is that for the first time, some of the ex-members came back and started to try to stake a claim on their old houses and basically said like, “This is my residence. I deserve to have my name on the title. I won’t go fully into it, but it’s just been incredibly complicated because it’s almost like because they all just sat down in this land, they’ve almost had to reverse engineer the town after this fundamentalist group took hold. One of the clearest ways that this impacted the town is through the police force.

52:49 Because for a very long time, really most of the history of Colorado City, the police force was 100% staffed by members of the FLDS church. I’ve heard stories of girls trying to escape polygamy, like running bare feet in the middle of the night and the police picks them up and drives them back to their situation, back to their dad or back to their husband. And basically the police is aiding and emedding the FLDS community in committing these crimes.

53:22 It’s easy to find articles like this one. This one’s called FLDS community is order to reform police department. I forgot to even mention that another problem is that Colorado City is on the border of Arizona and Utah. So even that has made it much more difficult to prosecute these cases. Another thing that Warren Jeffs would do is that when he knew there was some like CPS situation or they were trying to solve this problem with a certain family, he would just shift that family to be on the other state line. So then it was in a new jurisdiction. And so it meant that because they could swap jurisdictions even if the state police was trying to look for someone, they it was just one step harder for them to try to find whoever they were looking for because they could cross state lines so easily.

54:10 But in this article, it says that they were ordered to retrain officers and hire an independent mentor after discriminating against non-members of the sect and turning a blind eye to church misconduct, which a federal judge ruled. And that was just in 2016. So that was around the time that I, like I said, that I went there the first time when it was even more deeply entrenched as like FLDS only. And so I do think because more outsiders have moved in over time and I also think more XFLDs have come to kind of reclaim their rightful homes. It does mean that even still the police force in Colorado City has like no teeth. At one point, Tolga, they’re trying to have all these police cruisers try to find someone and he’s like, “They need our help.” Because there are literally only eight people on the entire police force of Colorado City. So, it’s this city with like an intense and insane level of crime

55:11 against some of the most vulnerable populations. And there are like eight eight police officers who are there to help. Now, they do have a local Colorado city police officer on the show. I’m I’m going to show a clip from him in a second because that’s another moment where you’re like, are you kidding me? And I think obviously there are issues with local police, FLDS local police, but even Utah in general, I think because it is such a religious state has its own issues with prosecuting these kinds of cases because even if it’s not FLDS, it is still Mormon. I’ll say too, I’m going to read a portion of Under the Banner of Heaven, another interesting book, another book about men who decided to proclaim they were prophets. Like I said, a dime a dozen. But in this, it it covers another time at which the Mormon church did try to break up the FLDS and in Colorado City and what the outcome of that was.

56:10 So, I’ll say like the Mormon church and the government of Utah has tried to break break up the FLDS before, but it did not go well. This attempt to break up the FLDS community happened in the 1950s. So, uh it says the raid made national headlines. It was even reported on the first page of the New York Times. But to the dismay of LDS leadership, most of the press presented the polygamists in a favorable light.

56:38 Photographs of crying children being torn from their mother’s arms generated sympathy throughout the nation for the fundamentalists who protested that they were upstanding law-abiding Mormons simply trying to exercise their constitutionally protected freedoms. It says that just a few years later by 1956 all the polygamists who had been arrested were out of jail and reunited with their families in Short Creek. It also says uh paradoxically the Short Creek raid proved to be a huge boon to the FLDS church. Thanks to the backlash that followed the raid for most of the next half of a century fundamentalists were able to practice polygamy throughout the inner mountain west with little state interference. And so based on that, I mean, it seems like the Mormon church did actually try to do something about it in the 50s. But because it didn’t go very well, to me, this is very similar to the story of Waco, if you are familiar with that,

57:32 where the government tried to break up this group and ended up killing a lot of children in a fire, like an accidental fire that killed a lot of children. And it is I mean, the same thing happened with Warren Jeffs. There’s all of these pictures of women crying with children. It’s just like how are you not going to feel a tremendous amount of of sympathy to see a woman being separated from her child? And so because it is so difficult to break these people apart because they are so entrenched in their religious thinking and I think at least for the state of Utah to some extent they’ve kind of like washed their hands of it because it’s like well people don’t like it when we do something about this so we’re just going to rather than trying to muscle their way through and figure out like okay we are going to fix this even if it’s hard even if it creates backlash even And if it makes us look bad in the press, like we’re going to keep this from happening, the child

58:33 brides, rather than wrestling with the difficulty of it. I think that more often than not, they are just turning a blind eye. It’s even very similar to Christine, who her approach is to wrestle with the difficulty of helping people in these situations. And she has to betray them. She has to gain their trust and betray them. And she says that they literally named a baby after her.

58:56 She was so loved by these the the people of the Sam Baitman group that they named a child after her and she still has to betray them in order to save them. Now, I’m going to show you the clip of where the police officer is explaining what he did. So, this is a Colorado city police officer, local police, and they bring him this recording that has Sam Baitman on audio confessing to a crime. This is a portion of the clip where he talks about what that was like. I haven’t listened to it since I listened to it the first time. It’s not something I like to to burden myself with. There is a lot of information that comes that that hurts a gentle heart.

59:37 That part did uh make my jaw fall to the floor. It was like I don’t think police officers should probably have gentle hearts uh if you are trying to protect children from these sorts of situations. And I’ll say like I know in past videos I’ve said like, “Oh, I hate exposing myself to this kind of stuff because it is so gut-wrenchingly horrible.” But I’m not a police officer. And even if I was, I do like if I was in his shoes, I feel like sometimes you have to stare into the void. If you’re in a position to help people and you’re like, well, you know, I have a gentle heart, so I try not to think about that too much.

1:00:17 Meanwhile, there are girl like 10year-old girls at this house and you’re just like falling asleep at night knowing like, well, I didn’t do anything, but I’m just protecting my gentle heart. I just feel like that was mindblowing. And it almost makes me wonder if they chose him to fill that role because he is like doesn’t seem like he’s equipped to handle this job and there have been so many historically so many issues with Hilldale, Colorado City, FLDS, Short Creek, so many names for it. I think that this is probably just a continuation of the issue of not having competent police that has plagued this community since the get-go. After they bring them the recording, it is not an open and shut case. Months pass before anything even happens at all. Uh, finally, because Christine has tried to go to local police so many times, she finally takes it to the FBI. And I’ll say even though the FBI does seem way more competent, it does still take a

1:01:19 shocking amount of time past even when they go to the FBI. So at least the FBI starts working on it, but it’s not like they arrest him the next day. Uh she’s basically like, “Well, Christine, we need you to go back and get more information.” And the fact that they’re just working with Christine as an informant for all these months, it makes you feel like, man, she like I said, Christine is an angel.

1:01:44 But it also makes you feel like it shouldn’t be this way. Why does like a random local citizen have to become the savior of all of these women and children. Meanwhile, the FBI is just like, “Oh, well, let me make a little list for you of of other clips and evidence we’d like you to gather.” From my math, based on the documentary, the initial recording is made November of 2021 and he is finally arrested on September 13th of 2022. So that is about 10 months, 10 and a half months where they know things are going on. This these like horrible heinous crimes are going on. They’re just like still gathering evidence. And I know like I feel like I’ve listened to enough true crime podcasts to know that if they screw up something about a case then it may mean that the perpetrator goes free.

1:02:37 Sometimes if someone is under arrest and they have a good lawyer, they can get away on a technicality like because evidence wasn’t stored correctly or the Miranda rights weren’t read correctly or some you know there’s there’s these cases where people who have committed major crimes are able to get get off from the the the jail time because the police work wasn’t done correctly. And so I know that they they want to make sure that they have a perfect case against him, but there’s so many moments in the show where you’re like, how could this not be enough evidence? Like, how why are we still twiddling our thumbs?

1:03:16 Like it it just feels like the justice system is broken if we have to allow the crimes to keep happening for this long in order to make sure he does go to prison for the rest of his life. though shockingly he still after all of all of everything they went through he still didn’t even get a life sentence. He uh was sentenced to the maximum amount of time for his particular crimes which was 50 years which at the time of sentencing he was 48 years old. So, I mean, he’ll probably die in prison, but the fact that he like on paper, it’s still not a life sentence is another obvious failure of the justice system. And I feel like whether it’s the FBI or Colorado City or Utah in general, it just feels like top to bottom, there are so many times in this that you’re like, no one is stepping up to be the adult. Like, who’s coming to bat for these girls? The only one that’s coming to bat for them really feels like Christine and she doesn’t have any true power. She doesn’t have the power of the government. She just

1:04:22 has like she has her iPhone and she obviously saved them in so many different ways. But to me, it shouldn’t take a private citizen doing months and months of groundwork in order for children to be saved. Why do we pay taxes? I don’t know. I just felt myself feeling so frustrated watching this and knowing how little was being done and how much they were asking of Christine. And so because Christine hasn’t gathered enough evidence yet, they also said that they need a personal witness, which is also crazy. They’re saying like, well, we need someone to testify against him, which means they want one of these like 14-year-olds to take the stand. And the fact that they have to get a victim to testify against him to me is shocking as well. Like another crazy issue I have with the way the justice system works is like so it’s not enough that he they have audio of him like talking about committing the crime. You have to have a victim to come forward. And knowing this

1:05:17 situation, knowing that he has brainwashed these children to view him as the prophet and as their husband, it’s just like why why do we have to revictimize the child? Uh, why does the child have to have enough strength to come forth against this man? Why can’t we just say like, I think you’ve been through enough? And I feel like because Christine is gathering and Tolga, they’re gathering so much of this footage. I mean, the Netflix do docue series is crazy because there’s so much footage of the of the women and girls just like draped over him, doting on him, like swirling around him, praising him. And they say later in the show that they were being coached on what to do and how to show like they were his followers. But so much of the footage is just like sickening to watch. It’s during this time that they get that scene that I showed at the beginning where the women are all singing women and children that they’re doing that music video. So Sam Baitman throughout

1:06:15 the show, you also learn that he’s like obsessed with the Queen of England of all things. And so he has this idea that they’re going to make this music video because somehow that will entice the Queen of England to come and travel across the pond to visit Short Creek. As part of this music video, uh, which is supposed to be like him with all of his brides, Christine has this idea to try to get Sam Baitman to take photos with the girls and women to try to create some incriminating evidence. And so here’s that scene. We offered to take photos of each woman with Sam. Our goal was to get Sam with each of his underage wives. Sam said, “We better not do that because that’s how they took Jess down.” Because they had that photo evidence.

1:07:11 He may seem like he’s kind of dumb to let this documentary crew into his life, but he at least knows some things. And there’s that girl. Uh I’ll put it here. You can see she’s in a white dress because she’s like I said, the song is about like um the baby being blessed. So the a a girl a Mormon girl’s three dresses. The blessing dress, the baptism dress, and the wedding dress. And because one of the girls is so young, they have her in her baptismal dress because she’s supposed to represent an eight-year-old because eight-year-olds get baptized. And once again, you find yourself asking, how is all of this is still not enough evidence, which to me doesn’t it truly does not make sense. So Christine and Tolga, they’re just still just kind of following them around.

1:07:56 They’re doing the music video. They’re still trying to just like see if they catch anything that the FBI will finally be like, “Okay, that’s enough.” He actually does finally get arrested, but not for the crimes we know on screen he’s committing. He is arrested for like a traffic stop situation because they have this trailer and some of the wives are in the truck but then some of the wives are also in the trailer that the truck is carrying. They show which I’ll put here that uh the girls basically the trailer doors were coming open on the highway. So the girls in the the trailer were trying to keep the the trailer closed.

1:08:36 So crazy. Um so dangerous. And they also say that this traffic stop happened in Arizona in August. What temperature is it in Arizona in August? It’s like I’m shocked they didn’t just die of heat exposure. And so because people behind them in cars were like, is that are those fingers? Is there people in that trailer? They call the police and the trailer gets stopped. I’m seeing now I just had to look at my notes again from as I’m taking it. These are three notes, three bulleted notes that I took. Why is it taking so long? Oh my god. Still need more evidence.

1:09:14 As my very authentic, emotional reaction as I’m watching the show. When they get to the traffic stop, they arrest Sam Baitman. And then here’s a clip of when they’re getting some of the girls out of the trailer. Keep your hands up for me. Is there anybody else inside the trailer? No. Perfect. Thank you guys. Just head back there with your siblings, okay? Head back there with them, okay? Thank you so much.

1:09:40 And here they they say in the body cam footage that some of the girls have wedding rings on. There’s like children with wedding rings on and that the girls like take them off and like hide them. I mean, some of them just look so tiny. So such tiny tiny children. Then Christine calls the FBI and they’re like, “This was not really part of the plan for how he was going to get arrested.” He does end up getting bailed out. They bring a check for $150,000.

1:10:05 One of the men, the minions, the because keep in mind, there’s still three men who are helping him commit all these crimes. So, one of the me men drives all the way from Utah to drop off this check so that he can post his bail. We also see um one of the women who’s featured more prominently in the show. her name is Gnomes or Naomi. Her nickname is Gnomes and she’s seems to be like the prophets Sam Baitman’s chosen favorite. Uh kind of the head honcho of the women.

1:10:36 She’s also one of the ones who is kind of on the phone talking to him while he’s in the prison while he’s waiting to get bailed out. And I thought that this scene was really interesting. They’re talking about uh pretending to be Gentiles. They’re trying to keep a low profile while they’re trying to get him out of prison. Um so here’s that. How do you like being a gentile for 15 minutes?

1:10:56 So, I’m actually extremely comfortable living like I am. I don’t care what they think. Yeah. Like because like in our minds, we’re celebrities, right? We’re different. We’re right. The delusions of grandeur are disseminating through the rest of the group. I mean, here they just look so young. But like what do you what do you say to someone who looks at you in the eyes and is like I am extremely comfortable with the life I’m living and if you try to dissuade me from this life path I will cut you out. I’ll call you the devil. I’ll say I never knew you.

1:11:34 These women are his victims. These women are also simultaneously victimizing other people. And I mean, they go on to say too that the two women in the this car end up serving jail time for some of the things that they do in the show in the docky series. But I do feel like this is the same dynamic where it can feel very it’s such a gray, horrible situation where you want to be able to say, “Here’s the the good guy. Here’s the bad guy.” And they are victims who are victimizing. Here’s a scene where he gets back to the the hotel. They pick him up from the jail. He’s back to the hotel and the women are just like crying, welcoming him back, giving him hugs. He’s now kind of like a martyr.

1:12:20 This is proof of the persecution. Same thing that happened to Warren Jeff’s. And even Gnome’s mentioning she’s a celebrity. It just shows like these people are working logically in an illogical world with an illogical compass. It’s like in her mind, she is the prophet’s favorite wife. She is the most important person on earth. Sam Baitman thinks he’s gonna get the queen of England in on the game. It’s really interesting if you go look at some of the pictures from Warren Jeffs. He also had like his favorite wife, little wife that he would bring around with him. They like went to Disneyland together.

1:13:00 Some of the pictures of them like he she’s like on the back of the motorcycle. I think of it kind of like the Elizabeth Smart story where he had his first wife and the first wife was helping him kidnap Elizabeth Smart. It’s like these women who get convinced to be on the side of these predators and then they turn around and do his bidding. I do feel like looking at Naomi Gnomes, she seems very intelligent. Like she has like a strong intellect. Like I’m sure he chose her to be his favorite because she could figure out systems. She could figure out how to get him the bail money, how to call him in the prison.

1:13:37 And at the end of the show, to jump ahead a bit, they do show that she did eventually get out. She goes to prison, like I said, for some of the crimes she ends up committing as part of being in this story. She serves 21 months of time, so less than Sam Baitman, obviously, but she does end up getting convicted of crimes. And I feel like watching her and I’m gonna show another quote from her in a bit. I do feel like I see that’s like the type of Mormon I was. Not that I was ever FLDS, but just like the rule following Mormon, the believer, like the I will do whatever it takes type of believer, which is chilling to see. I have shown this in the past. These are like clips of me talking about being Mormon and going on a Mormon mission. But I feel like as she talks about how much she was willing to submit and give everything to him because she believed so thoroughly, it’s just I do I mean there’s also this interview where she’s like this could

1:14:34 happen to anyone. I think maybe some people don’t believe that, but I I do feel like if you’ve ever been in a high control religion and you’ve relinquished so much of your identity to it, it’s very easy to watch someone like Gnomes and feel like I feel like I I could see this happening to me, especially when I was in my early 20s or teens or as a child. I don’t think it could happen to me now. But when you are so raised with obedience and so raised to view yourself as needing a voice to lead you through life, I could I feel like I could see it happening to me. I was so happy because they do end up having a like a testimonial from her at the end of episode 3, which when you’re watching it, you’re like, you don’t even know who’s still going to be a believer by the end of this, who’s going to get out, who’s going to escape, who’s going to still be buying into the lies. And so, when she gives a testimonial, it feels like a like a mini celebration because you know that it is a sign that she’s on the outside world now. And as I was watching her and feeling kind of like,

1:15:40 man, I I just feel so much similar to Christine, like I I have so much empathy and I can almost see myself in the story. Uh I went over to her Instagram, Naomi’s Instagram, and she had this picture. So this is a picture of her. She’s celebrating her one year being free of prison, being totally out of this entire story. And in this picture, you can see she’s standing in front of the Brooklyn Bridge and the the caption is basically celebrating being free. It was a very special moment for me because this is a second picture which is me that is me a year after I left the Mormon church standing in the same place. And it’s really silly. I mean, sometimes I’m like I I don’t want to try to be melodramatic in connecting myself to these stories because I’ve not experienced anything as horrific, but like it does feel very beautiful to see people just like get free and I’m so proud of her and also proud of myself.

1:16:42 Different scenarios, but still finding finding freedom and still finding yourself after growing up in this type of environment. I hope I didn’t get too far away from the story by sharing that. But I just I think that when I saw that I was like just like it’s so crazy that so many of us who leave are like let me just go out into the world and see like when I was Mormon I would have thought I thought New York was like Sodom and Gomorrah the great and spacious building from the Book of Mormon. and going out and seeing and going from believing like the boogeyman that these places are like the most evil places on earth to just feeling like, oh, I like I can drink coffee. I can go in a bar in New York City and like I can still be a good person. Like I said, I’ll I’ll have one final quote from her at the end of this video. But to get back to our story, Sam Baitman, after this whole experience of being arrested, they end up confiscating his phone for evidence. And so he is in

1:17:47 the car talking like, I need to figure out how to wipe my phone so that they don’t see anything on it. And Christine is able to audio or she video records him uh saying that he wants to to wipe his phone. and destroying evidence is a felony and it’s enough for the FBI to finally get a search warrant to conduct an arrest and to raid his multiple homes. Because Christine and Tolga are so close to him, they’re able to basically get him separated from most of the wives and set up in this like interview setting. That’s the first clip I showed where he’s like, “I’m a prophet. I’d be lying if I say I said I wasn’t.” when they are conducting this interview for the documentary, that is when the FBI is finally able to swoop in and they arrest him. However, at this point, one of the wives texts the girls who are in the other women and girls who are in a different house and like tips them off. So, they’re like, “The FBI is here. You know, just know they’re they’re probably coming for you, too.”

1:18:50 And so all the other women and girls in this separate house who are there with Christine, they start to panic. Unsurprisingly, uh they do have guns, the girls and women. And so this is a clip from a scene that Christine is like she’s still actively filming u before the the FBI come. And so here’s the clip where they figure out that the FBI is on their way. If they try, they die and we die and they’ll be accused of murder.

1:19:18 Where’s my pepper spray? I need an AR-15. And so in watching this, obviously it does feel like the girls have been trained or are ready to potentially use some firepower against the FBI. And this is I meant I referenced Waco because there was like a standoff with the government and the polygamous group in the Waco story. Those that’s not a Mormon story. It’s just another fundamentalist group who also practiced polygamy. Ruby Ridge is another example of this uh where there was like a standoff that they just engaged fire and it ended up killing a child. And so these situations are incredibly dangerous because if someone starts shooting, it could result in the deaths of a lot of people. And so this is another moment where Christine is just like an impossibly important figure because she is able to step in and rather than having the girls if they do have any firepower like resorting to that she can step in and facilitate this handoff. So here’s that scene.

1:20:25 And I told them I will come out with them one at a time. I’ll never forget how I felt as I was walking the younger girls out, but I’m walking them to their freedom and they’re also about to really, really hate me. I mean, thank goodness that they were able to get everyone out of there without any firepower, like any shots being fired. I think there are so many levels at which she saved these people’s lives, whether it was because she saved them from their captor or because she just saved them from like a shootout with the government. Like I said, I feel like because she was so amazing, I was wanting to support her. So, I linked her website and the dream fund below if you want to check that out. Another crazy frustration I had at this moment is that uh DCS, which is like Utah’s version of CPS, came and picked up the girls from the FBI. So, we have another, this is another like justice system is failing moment where it’s almost like waring

1:21:22 departments where we have the FBI trying to do this over here and then DCS DCS yes um comes and like intervenes and takes the girls and puts them into their own custody. Later, we find out that the girls who were taken into Utah state custody, they have a phone and they’re able to communicate with one of the other wives who was not kidnapped. So, we have the underage girls in state custody and then the adult wives are not taken into custody. One of those wives drives and goes and picks up, well, not picks up, she kidnaps them. It’s like legally considered kidnapping and picks them up in the middle of the night and drives off with them. And the idea that like the Utah State Child Protective Services is intervening and then taking these girls and then where they’re staying is not truly private. It’s not protected. It makes it so that they’re getting back into the hands of the people who are in this religious group.

1:22:22 The FBI is eventually able to track down these girls, the minors, but seems like that shouldn’t have happened from the beginning. We also find out that DCS is involved in leaking that uh Christine was the FBI informant. So, here’s that scene. The lady at the group home that was taking care of the girls had a paper from the DCS. She took a picture of that and sent it to me and it said the girls trust the FBI informant Christine Marie. So because DCS had this letter with like privileged information, they out the FBI informant, she’s been able to conceal her true intentions for months. And it just makes me like honestly that’s my tinfoil hat moment is I just feel like Utah, the governmental system, I feel like something’s going on there. Somewhat unrelated but still related to Utah. If you recall, I had a video about Swig and one of the founders had a child abuse conviction which made him be on the sex offender registry. I talked about that in my Swig video. That

1:23:34 is a whole story, but basically I do have the original screenshots I took and I saw that the Wall Street Journal had covered Swig and I thought to myself like, “Oh, I wonder if they talked about the fact that one of the founders had a conviction.” And I go and I search controlf husband Todd Tanner nothing. And so then I go and basically went back to the database in Utah and see that he has been removed from the database. He is no longer on the sex offender registry, which I’m guessing is because they used my video as proof that he was being unfairly targeted or something. I don’t know. This is speculation. But he’s not on the registry anymore. And I do still have the screenshot of him being on the registry before I talked about it in the video. And I’ll say too that after I had made that video, this is not related to Utah, but I’ll just throw it in there cuz here we are.

1:24:30 Someone had put on the Wikipedia page that he had that he had that conviction. And you can go search through the Wikipedia search history, edit history, and you can see where someone put that in there. And then you can go see where there was like a back and forth of a battle of someone taking it out and then someone putting it back in and taking it out. And now if you go on the Wikipedia page, it’s not there anymore. And honestly, all of this just feels like the Epstein files to me, which shows like it’s not just a Mormon thing. This is just like systems of power, system, how systems of power protect those who are doing wrong things in the world. But I think even the fact that we have this situation where by court mandate, this man was supposed to be on the registry and someone greased the wheels after my video. I do think it was my video, tinfoil hat moment, and was able to get him formally removed from it. That is crazy to me. I do think that the the way

1:25:30 the church operates in Utah, the way that that impacts the legal system, the way that that impacts uh the justice system. I would never live in Utah. I’ll say that. But I do feel like whether it’s the Swig example I just used or the example of how DCS is like basically throwing a wrench in the gears of trying to help these children and then like not protecting even where they were staying to the point that one of the polygamous wives is able to go kidnap them from state custody or outing Christine as an FBI informant by not keeping privilege information private. I feel like I so many issues with you the way Utah operates in cases like this. Even Sherry Frankie said that she called CPS multiple times and they chose not to investigate. And so now in the story we have Sam Baitman is arrested. He’s committed to prison basically for life, 50-year sentence. They also note that eight of the adult wives also received prison sentences. the three men who were

1:26:36 the minions um who gave up their daughters and wives. Those three men also received uh prison sentences. One of the men, Moroni, he ends up complying and testifying against Sam Baitman and giving personal testimony. Moroni’s wife is also one of the ones who was willing to work with the FBI and work with Christine. And so, obviously, it wasn’t just Sam Baitman that ended up getting a prison sentence. A lot of the people who participated in this were eventually convicted. What I think is interesting is that at the end they cover some of the stories of the wives, one of which, like I said, is gnomes. And here’s what she says at the end of the the episode that uh she’s sharing about what it was like for her to be in prison.

1:27:21 And that was the first time I actually recognized he’s lying to me. Once I question one little thing, then a whole flood, like a tsunami of questions came in. What am I doing with my life? Why do I believe the way I believe? Is there even a god? And I realized I had been lied to my entire life. I was born in lies. And I couldn’t even blame my parents for it. They were born in lies. I mean, like I said, I just feel like so much I empathize with her so much because same for me. I mean, like I said, I was my family has been Mormon for six generations and I can’t I can’t be mad at my parents because it’s like the same just exactly like what she’s saying. Like I was born into this. Well, my dad was a convert, but my mom was born into it. And I think that her having these like mind-melding questions of like, is there even a god?

1:28:22 Why do I believe what I believe? I’ve never even questioned. I mean, she thought she was a celebrity at one point. I think that her having these earthquake moments of thought of questioning things is why that picture of her in Brooklyn, New York is so beautiful and empowering. And I feel like people escaping these types of situations is so empowering because it gives you hope that there is a way. I mean, I’ve talked about in this video like what do you do with this problem where even if you’re trying to rescue the person who’s being victimized, they viciously fight against you. For me, same thing. Like I was so devout and I think most people would look at me and just be like, “She’s she’s never leaving this church.” Um, I’ve thought that about myself and it does give me hope that even though humans are highly susceptible to manipulation, to fundamental religious beliefs, to high control religions or groups or cults, we can get free sometimes. There is a way

1:29:26 to think outside of yourself. It was interesting cuz she talks about how being in prison set her free and during the pandemic actually so many people questioned the Mormon church. I I had a lot of friends who left the church during the pandemic because it was like for once the momentum of their lives no longer is like pushing them forward into this like, you know, this is what I’ve done my whole life. I have to wake up in the morning. I have to take care of the kids. I have to go to work. Like I have to go to church. It’s like they almost need some massive gut punch and for like life to stop. Like the pandemic stopped so many people’s lives. They had time like they were at home. They were questioning. They were like wondering about the state of the world and what’s going to happen. And for her that moment was literally going to prison made her actually have a space to breathe and to think about her life and what was

1:30:19 happening in it. Thank you all so much for uh joining me today for my reaction to this show. I highly suggest watching it if you haven’t already. And there’s honestly too like so much of the story that I couldn’t even fit into this video. And even I think I can’t even truly capture all of the firsthand footage that Christine has. Like so many hours I’m sure like thousands of hours of footage. Not that all of that is in the docue series, but just that it provides such an interesting firstp person experience and view into what this religion and what Sam Baitman’s group specifically uh what it was like.

1:30:56 If you enjoy this video, please consider liking this video and subscribing to my channel. Uh, like I said, I did react to the Mormon storyline on Love on the Spectrum. So, if you want to check that out, it’s already posted. It was very interesting to see, especially because dating is such a huge part of Mormon culture. It was really interesting to see how dating takes place on the show.

1:31:19 And I’ll say too, I often have a lot of people ask questions about how disabilities are treated within the Mormon church. And so I talked about love on the spectrum, but also talked about disability in general and how that is more commonly viewed in the church. And so, like I said, it’s already posted. Thank you all so much for watching and as always, I will see you all next week.