Cultish: Interview w/ Warren Jeffs' 65th Wife

Are you Warren Jeffs?

Yes.

All right. Mr. Jeffs, you're being held as a fugitive, and there are two fugitive holds for you, one from Utah, one from Arizona. I'm going to explain to you very quickly what your rights are in regards to being a fugitive from justice.

Yes.

Okay. What would you like to do? I've had the extradition. You want to waive your rights in regards to extradition and go back as quickly as they can come pick you up?

Yes.

All right.

All right. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to Cultish, Entering the Kingdom of the Cults. My name is Jeremiah Roberts. I am one of the co-hosts here. I am here with Andrew, super sleuth. Andrew, the super sleuth of the show.

How are you, man?

I'm doing well, man. Thank you. I hope you're doing well as well.

As always, I say I'm super psyched, super excited for this episode, particularly because I am of the opinion that there are four horsemen of the last 100 years as far as notorious cult leaders go. Jim Jones, Charles Manson, David Koresh, and Warren Jeffs.

Those are the people when you think of cult, that's what comes to mind. Every probably twice a year, Time Life magazine or one of those magazines you'll see on the grocery shelf, they'll have some magazine about cults.

Usually, it's those four that you see. It's actually one of our logos on Cultish. I think on the banner cover for our Facebook page, we have those four cult leaders. We are here with Brielle Decker. How are you?

I'm doing good.

We are here today really to be flies in the wall. You grew up in the FLDS. We talked a little bit on the phone. You were married to Warren Jeffs at the age of 18. You were wife number 65.

Yes.

Okay. I'm going to be a fly in the wall. Go ahead. The floor is yours.

Appointed Marriage and the FLDS Priesthood Order

Okay. My parents, when they were 18, they went through the line. In our churches then, they believe that God, the leader, there's one man that holds the keys of the priesthood that is the leader of the church.

After church, everybody in the whole congregation would walk through and shake his hand. When my father went through, this is a story they told me. When he went through, they pulled him aside. Then my mother, they pulled her aside.

Then they told them they were going to get married. They had only heard of each other. They had never met.

Oh, wow.

My point is that appointed marriage is a big deal in the FLDS, which is the group that I was raised in and that Warren Jeffs now leads from prison. I was a product of appointed marriage. I remember going to school in Alta Academy where Warren Jeffs was the principal.

He was 17 when they asked him to be the principal of that school. He was the only principal ever of Alta Academy. When I started in first grade, his first wife was my teacher. Later, she, yeah. Anyway, I don't want to give away everything.

Indoctrination, Choice, and the Meaning of Grace

I remember going to class every morning. We had to be there by 8 o 'clock in the morning. We listened to church doctrine, Warren Jeffs interpretations because he was the principal. One of the things that he taught us very in detail was that we had a choice.

We all have a choice. At the wedding, we can say yes or no. I remember really young questioning, but I didn't dare tell anybody that I questioned. Just silently in my mind, I just remember thinking, if they've never heard of each other, how do they know if they should say yes or no?

Then I had, when I was six years old, so it was shortly before I, I think it was during this first year, when I was in first grade. It was around six and seven. My oldest brother and my oldest sister got married in an arranged marriage.

My oldest brother had a wife that was severely diagnosed with a mental illness that she wouldn't take care of. It had really bad consequences for the children later and so many things. As I grew up from seven to eight years old, I remember questioning even more.

If it's not choice because you've never heard of each other, then it must be trust. I don't really trust these guys because I don't see any reason why my brother should have gone through that. I remember thinking that in my mind.

I'm like, I don't really trust them because they say that there's always an excuse of not being good enough. We need to atone for our sins somehow. I didn't think that applied to my brother. He didn't deserve that.

It was his first wife. He always didn't really feel like he had hope of qualifying for more because he couldn't even perfect what he had. You have to have at least three in the FLDS to be able to make it into the highest degree of glory in the celestial kingdom.

You have to qualify. It was almost impossible, especially for the boys, because they were competition, I believe. They never say that, but they usually said they were priesthood bearers, so they had every right to have a harder.

They were the ones that made the rules in the house. The ladies were just supposed to keep sweet. Everybody's supposed to keep sweet, but the ladies for sure had to keep sweet because they didn't get to make any decisions.

Who appointed these marriages?

The leader. The leader had full say, but when I was really young, I don't really know what age then. I think I was a year old when Rulon Jeffs, Warren Jeffs' father, became the leader. I don't remember when that happened, but then he had a stroke when I was really young.

All I remember of Rulon Jeffs was that he was handicapped and Warren Jeffs was the spokesman and the one that made things happen through him. We used his name and stuff.

He was speaking on his behalf?

Yeah, he spoke a lot on his behalf and took care of him. He actually taught us in our school, because he had in-depth training on history, which was church history. We never had world history in our schools.

In this church history lesson, he went over how the regular LDS church split, how the split happened. He described it as how there were three leaders. Joseph Smith was the first one, Brigham Young was the next, and then John Taylor.

Those are still leaders of the LDS mainstream church. Then he claimed that there was a secret meeting that John Taylor had called the Eight Hour Meeting, that he set apart eight people to carry on polygamy no matter what.

Then he passed away without telling everybody about the meeting. Before him, the next leader, Brigham Young, was after Joseph Smith. He was in the highest appointed position in the church at the time, so he kind of got the authority.

This is how Warren Jeffs described it. He said Wilford Woodruff was in that position. Everybody voted him in. The church members decided to vote him in. He said that that was all done wrong because God chooses who the leader really is, whose heart is right.

That's kind of how he also usurped authority to become the leader. It's because he said God chose, you don't get any say in it. God just decides and you either follow or you don't.

That kind of reminds me of the arranged marriages you're talking about. He says you have a choice, but really you don't because if you don't choose what the prophet says, now you're disobeying God in a sense.

The whole time it was like what we were allowed to hear was only what the church allowed us to hear. They taught us that if we heard news or media or anything from a different source, it was tainted with lies and the devil will tell a hundred truths to slip in one lie.

We couldn't have television after I was nine years old and that got outlawed. We couldn't have any movies of any kind.

Wouldn't they call it Gentile? He would always call this is like the Gentile media or Gentile this, Gentile that.

Or apostates even like on the news and stuff. He didn't want people hearing outside sources at all. He had already told us that music wasn't okay before I was, I don't even remember when that happened.

I think it was before I was born. Because I don't ever remember listening to outside music unless somebody was just breaking the rules. I knew they were breaking the rules when I heard the beat and different things.

Then television was outlawed when I was about nine and then internet was outlawed when I, we called it outlawed, when I was in Warren Jeff's family and there was something else. I can't remember the other thing.

It will come to me. But yeah, all of those things. So books, books too. He got to where they all had to be handmade. They couldn't have pictures that weren't taken by you and stuff like that. And the music was all made by the church too.

We had music, it was just piano. They couldn't have a drum or anything in it.

I've actually listened to some of Warren Jeff's, him singing with the piano. So I kind of know just a little bit.

Yeah.

I wish I heard that. I never heard that.

Yeah, I think it was one of the videos you sent me. But yeah, it's definitely, there's definitely, I can only imagine what it must be like. And again, I'm a movie connoisseur, but there's an M. Night Shyamalan movie that came out.

It was back in 2004, The Village. And the whole aspect is there's this, and you haven't seen it by now. I'm sorry, spoiler, you should have seen it.

I think I might have saw The Village.

I think so. You see these people in the whole movie, you think you're living in the 1800s. And what you find out, it was actually this isolated community. And even above where they were, there was a no-fly zone.

So there were no planes flying over. So people literally thought they lived in the 1800s. And it wasn't until you find out at the end of the movie, no, it's not the case. They're living in the modern day.

There's this whole, whatever the agenda was. But yeah, I just, real quickly, I just remember, as much as I can remember seeing the news when this happened, you can go back in the story, but just seeing people that looked at it, who were dressed, and they looked like something, like a set piece out of Little House on the Prairie.

Like a pioneer.

Yeah. And even you using the language outlaw. And I love it too. I grew up loving Westerns too. That's definitely like, you know, 1800s Western language, but I love it. But anyways, go ahead.

Yeah.

Language, Doctrine, and the FLDS View of Baptism

Our language is a lot different. Like even the interpretations that the Bible has, and like grace in the Mormon church means mercy. And grace in the Bible is not mercy at all. So I've learned some of the different interpretations of the same word.

Yeah.

That's just, it intensified to a major extreme in war and just group.

Yeah.

That not everybody is like aware of, but yeah, they are so extreme in every way. So like, anyway, I'll keep going with the story. No, go for it. So anyway, I went to school. I learned about like constant indoctrination, like every day, every day.

And one of the things he taught us was about when our turn came for our arranged marriage, we could never date. We could never even, they would separate the girls and boys in like fourth grade. If we even thought a bad thought, then we had to confess it.

We were taught to confess or tattle on people if they told you instead of the leader. And it was like a punishable sin that you could actually be sent away, lose your family and everything forever.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

It was like a really one of the, it was like almost like there's a verse in the doctrine of covenants, I think that talks about, I don't know if it's in the Bible, but it talks about if you even think of thought about somebody else that isn't good, you know?

Right.

Then it's somehow a punishment. Anyway, so they applied everything to the extreme. And even children like, because at eight years old in the, even in the Mormon church, they believe that you get baptized at eight years old.

And in their interpretation of baptism, it's not the same as Christianity. Their interpretation of baptism is that once they are baptized, then Jesus stops atoning for them and they have to earn it after that.

And I didn't know that until after I was baptized, of course, like my parents sit me down and tell me, okay, now you get to earn it, you know, and I would have never done it. You know, I really understood, but I was young too.

So that was a big deal at eight years old. So once you turned eight and you were baptized and Jesus stops atoning for you, if you do something that isn't right or in any way, then there's consequences.

And they say you should start teaching your children really young so that by the time they're eight, they have some idea what the consequences are.

And what are they?

So like, if it's a simple thing, like, I mean, if it's just like they stole something or something, then it would be like, maybe sit on the chair, you know, for 15 minutes or, you know, they always have consequences.

If it's something like, like I've even heard of eight year olds being dropped off on the side of the road.

Wow. So do these consequences, is it supposed to put them in favor with God? Like it's a form of atonement for doing something wrong in a sense?

It's to teach them that it's better to be good than it is to be bad.

Okay.

So they say that if you don't understand, there's a Doctrine and Covenants quote that says if you don't understand the scriptures by the time you're eight years old, which is really young, then the sin goes on the head of the parent.

So that's why the parents are so determined to baptize their kids and stuff, because they don't want to carry that weight.

Wow. That's heavy.

That's too heavy.

An eight year old. Yeah, that's too heavy. It's impossible. So I want to hear something like, take me back to your childhood. Like, was there ever a time where the modern world like just got thrown into your world?

Like, say like there's a car driving through your town with the windows rolled down and there's like music blasting that you've never heard before. Like, is there anything like that that happened? Like, where did you grow up?

I grew up in Salt Lake.

Oh, okay.

So I was in the FLDS.

Gotcha.

But I was born around, the world was all around me.

Okay, okay.

We just had pine trees. We had almost an acre lot. And we had pine trees all around the border. And there was, we always saw people and stuff in my world. But I did notice like later when Warren Jeffs got really strict, the children didn't have that luxury.

And when the raid happened in Texas, there was seven year olds that had never seen somebody with a different color skin. Like, they didn't even know they existed and they were really traumatized.

Yeah.

Because they're taught that they're bad, essentially. People with different color skin.

He would hide things from them. You know, like they had never been outside of the walls of the city. So, of his little compound thing. So, they actually thought they were gorillas.

Wow.

Yeah, it was pretty sad.

Isolation, Education, and the Use of Fear

When it came to your education, especially with your upbringing, a lot of times cult members will, especially growing up, you're isolated from the outside world. But then, as far as like your education goes, and learning skill sets, whatever they are for how to actually like deal with the world.

A lot of times that's not as well because typically you might be doing some sort of like labor or work or things like that. There's a lot of times where that's affected people, for example, who grew up in Scientology.

Where they're going through the Scientology learning courses and they're part of, maybe a lot of times their parents are part of the Sea Org. And so, they're in some sub school. And when something happens, a lot of them have left.

They end up just being sort of thrown into this world that they're just not prepared for. It's all they've ever known is this. As far as education goes, maybe you could talk about that generally and then like talk about yourself as a girl growing up in the FLDS.

What was that like?

Yeah.

So, they tried to scare us away from the truth. Now I know that. I didn't know that when I was being raised in there and all I could hear was what they had to say. But now that I know the difference, and I've experienced the difference, I know that they had a lot of tools and tactics to blindside us to do what they wanted us to do instead of what was logical or what might actually be better.

So, an example of that is like one of my sister-wives had a really sad story one day. She was talking about how she grew up in a ranch with just her brother and sisters. Her family was the only people there.

She knew the church. She was in the church her whole life. She knew people. She knew people, but she didn't daily interact with people other than her family. So, it's like a really prairie. And then she marries Warren Jess later.

And she had a hard time because he corrected her father. And she gets up one day and he told her to tell us this story about how he called. She was having a hard time with it for like a month. She wouldn't talk to him when he called her.

And so he punished her. And what he did is he called the caretaker, the person who was watching the household, buying the groceries and everything. She was struggling. He had a house in hiding that she was living in.

He had the caretaker go and buy some clothes that were like Gentile clothes and told her to like put them on, wear them. And he drove her all the way to Vegas. And it was the middle of the night, like 10 o 'clock at night, she said.

They gave her one little phone and told her to walk down the street in the middle of the dark in Vegas and watch. And Warren Jess told her, because he talked to her on the phone, he's like, I want you to stare at all of the graffiti and all of the stuff and just see what you will be like if you don't stay faithful to the church.

Oh my goodness, he's terrifying her.

And she's telling us the story, so it's putting all of us into like this contrast shock.

He's vicariously speaking to you through her. This is a traumatic experience that he put her through.

Yeah.

Wow.

And she walked, you know, that was life-threatening. In Vegas, like in the middle of the dark, you know, all alone. And so she walked down the street and she kept crying. She said she was crying and crying.

And then he would call every once in a while and she would say, is it over? Is it over? And he's like, no. And he would just hang up and, you know, it was really cruel. And in the end, he didn't let it be over for like a whole nother day.

You know, like he sent her to a hotel and told her to watch TV. You know, it was just so, it's not how the world is at all. And so the way that they portray it is not accurate. There's a lot of good people in this world.

There's, you know, I know that now. But they do tell you it's a scary, dangerous, bad place. And another thing about the Bible, they don't explain so much detail about how love versus works is. And that's a really big deal because if you really knew the Bible, there's so many solutions.

Right.

But they don't, they hide it all from you. And they know that they're hiding it from you. So, and they get to study, like they have leaders who are appointed to study what's really going on out in the world and stuff like that, just so they can protect themselves and, you know, keep themselves in check.

But not everybody is allowed to do that. So, yeah, they know.

Yeah, of course. There's like three different options. If you're someone claiming to be a prophet, it's either that you're mentally disturbed, thinking that you're talking to God or that you're talking to maybe a spirit that's an evil spirit, could be deceiving you.

Or the third option is that you know that you're not a prophet, you know, and you're doing these things to control and manipulate people when you get pleasure from it. Like that's kind of terrifying.

Yeah, he was, he did like to, it seemed like he liked taking hope away from people really slowly and painfully. And there's so many people that suffer from that, you know.

Yeah.

Just it's devastating, the trauma that, you know, like he would find out what you liked and then just like use it against you. Mm-hmm.

Wow.

And another thing too, because you talked about being put on the outside of the road, and we talked on the phone and maybe you just know, this is more a different vantage point, but this is something that was a prominent story that came up with Warren Jeffs is that there were boys who continually, from my understanding, would continue to show up in Salt Lake or other places in Utah because they had been kicked out.

Yeah.

Because from my understanding, Jeff saw them as they get older as competition and he didn't like that. And so a lot of them would get just kicked out because they violated some rule for a particular reason.

Yeah.

That was always vague and arbitrary. It was just, this is how it is. You've done the profit. You've sinned. You're now a Gentile.

You're out.

And these people were illiterate and like with barely any education at all.

Yeah.

So like I was telling you how the boys had the rules that were stricter, it was really easy to make them so strict that they couldn't do it.

Mm-hmm.

I mean, that happened so much. People don't even realize as often it happened. And it started to get to be parents, especially later when Warren Jeffs became the leader. And he didn't like teaching parents because they have the option to leave.

Mm-hmm. He wanted to, and he's a pedophile too, so he likes children and also he traps them in until they're 18. Like he had the parents sign away their rights to the church for the children saying everything belongs to God, sign this paper, it's legal.

And it's not legal. But the parents don't always know that. Mm-hmm. And so they sign their children over to the church. And then he calls them up and tells them, you aren't worthy of your kids, you need to go and repent, go to a house far away and send me money.

And they do it because they just want to someday see their kids again.

Yeah.

Polygamy, Apostasy, and the LDS Split

As far as the theology, I want to just get your thoughts on something because this is going to go in a couple different avenues, at least what I'm going to try and do, is that polygamy. Initially, that was something that was started by Joseph.

And then Brigham really kind of brought that to the forefront. And then it wasn't until where the Mormon church was threatened to be exiled into Utah when they then had a revelation to get rid of polygamy.

But Section 132 of the Doctrine and Covenants has never been removed from the LDS Scripture. It's still part of the canon. So I've always seen there's this conflict between what's being said and even the argument that subsects of the current Mormon church could make the argument against them, that they're the ones who have apostatized and that we're the ones who need to restore it.

Would people in the FLDS, they believe in polygamy, that was a central aspect of their doctrine, or of the gospel of Jesus Christ. But would they also talk about the current Mormon church, that they were an apostate, or what's your perspective on that from their vantage point?

So actually Warren Jeffs, I only know Warren Jeffs' interpretations really, because like I said, he ruled his father and then he was the one that became the leader next. And he actually compiled all the books of all the leaders in the FLDS.

So even if somebody else said it, he chose if it got to be put in the book.

Wow.

So yeah. So what I would say about Warren Jeffs' interpretation of the LDS church is his father actually was a convert from the Mormon church. But he said when, because they're really racist, when the Mormon church updated their doctrine and got away with racism, then that was when they apostatized.

So it was Spencer W. Kimball who got the revelation. Yeah. And that's when Rulon Jeffs left? That was Warren Jeffs' father, right?

No, Rulon had already been a convert for years.

Okay.

I don't know when he became a convert, but I think it was before that.

Okay.

And so yeah, he was very, like I don't know any of the group's branches off of the LDS church that aren't racist. Like all of them pretty much have their twist on racism.

On the fence sitters?

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's crazy, but I don't really, like I have some ideas because of what I went through, but it's kind of far-fetched. And I'm going to put it in my book because I need the sequencing to be able to explain some of the concepts and stuff.

Like there's certain things that if you saw how the indoctrination got so intense, it's easier to understand.

For sure.

So in my story, when I went to school and I was just constantly being indoctrinated with what they wanted me to hear, and then I remember being told about when our turn came to be married, there would be like three different routes the leader would go to be able to decide who your partner was.

And one of them was he would just tell you, your partner so-and-so, like what happened to my parents. Or, you know, he told us this in his, like if you listen, he had a whole book on polygamy called The Enlightened Truth that he wrote.

Jeff's dead.

Warren Jeff's, yeah. And there was another route that if you, he would like ask you if you had an impression from God yourself of who you were supposed to marry. And then if you lie, then there's a consequence.

So, and then the other route was that, the last route was if he says you need to go away and pray and figure out and come back to me and ask me who, if you think so-and-so is supposed to be your partner, and then I'll tell you yes or no.

And all of them, he has the ultimate say.

Right.

So, as a child, I remember I would like get premonitions. I don't know if you guys know, you know, I don't know who believes in premonitions, but I know that's what it's called when I would dream. I would dream that the room was lit, darkly lit, and that Warren Jeff's would turn to me and he'd say, do you have an impression of who you're supposed to marry?

And I remember waking up every time at that point. I would just wake up out of a dead sleep, even as a little girl. And I got teased my entire life. Because in a situation where you're not, you don't have any choice, like you're not dating, it's a different kind of tease.

It's like everybody's looking at the leader to decide what he might, you know, who he's, you know, what he's acting like. And so, my whole life, I was teased about marrying Warren Jeff's, and I was terrified of that.

I didn't want to marry Warren Jeff's because I didn't have the status, I didn't have the life experiences that would help me advance in his family higher.

Would there be different, as many wives as he had, there would be certain wives that would obviously have favor or the other?

Yes.

I mean, I think Rachel Jeff's talked about this in her book.

Yeah.

That within that whole community, there is very difficult, even if you were sort of the favorite, because all the other wives, there'd be jealousy, and there'd be a lot of competition. That would be the case?

Yes.

But with me, I wasn't the favorite. And I knew I never would be. I would be more of a servant.

Wow.

And that didn't sound very exciting to me. So I was more terrified. I remember as a teenager, I had a best friend who was the favorite family, and she was talking one day about Warren Jeff's, and I said, I get teased all the time about marrying Warren Jeff's.

And she says, if I did, I would love that. And I remember looking at her like, you would? I wouldn't love that. And then I realized the difference. She was in the favorite family. She probably would be advanced.

Wow.

In my situation, I knew I would be more of a servant.

It's like a caste society in a sense.

Yeah.

People have their roles.

We all had roles.

Yeah.

It was even harder in his family. Now that I look back, and I know emotion and stuff now, I had to keep sweet no matter what in there, and I could never express anything. I could never do anything like this.

But now that I recognize, I remember feeling. I just didn't identify at the time. And I didn't struggle as hard as most of them because I didn't love Warren Jeff's at all. I was kind of like, you guys can have him.

And I went overboard with that. And that's what made him ultimately really mad is that I would just give him away. He's like, you can't do that every single time. I'm like, I live in the doctrine to the T.

Love one another. You guys can have him. He thought I was playing hard to get. And the reality is I didn't really ever bond. I never wanted to.

Yeah.

So his family, with polygamy, he had a favorite wife for sure. And she was all the time with him. She was his secretary, and she did most of all of his work. So he's basically a monogamist, even though he had...

I've heard the number from somebody who has the Texas records is like 79, ultimately, when he got caught. I don't know if he's had some spiritually sealed sense. You know, that happens sometimes. But so he basically was monogamist.

And he did have like his power trip stuff and his things that he would decide he wanted to do. But most of us didn't have any say. I remember after I went to Texas and I got introduced to some of the stuff that he was doing.

Well, actually, I got introduced. The very first training I got after I married him was a really shocking training. And it was the whole time. So when I went into the ceremony to get married, it happened exactly like my premonitions, except for I didn't wake up.

You know, I was already there. I actually went into shock. But it felt like a trap because he's the one that groomed me, basically. He was my principal. He was my, you know...

Grooming, Shock, and the Night of the Wedding

Just a question real quick. Just totally adding on to what you're saying. With the FLDS believing in polygamy, and that being one of their primary examples, it wasn't until Warren Jeffs took over that he introduced underage marriage, correct?

Well, he took it to an extreme.

Right.

He took it to a really strong extreme. The highest extreme that you could possibly take. And that's what he did with everything.

But I guess my question would be, with him when he was the principal, he really worked his way to be empowered. He had planned this for a long time. So in the same way that he was playing his cards to get to the top and to take a rule on Jeff's place, going back to the beginning of the podcast when you talked about being in class and you talked about you can either say yes or no, those sort of conversations, that would be grooming.