Escape to freedom

Ian Munro, Utah The Age - Melbourne, Australia

She gave evidence that sent the leader of a US polygamous sect to jail. Now, this brave young woman is helping others caught in the same trap. NO LONGER the star prosecution witness against cult leader Warren Jeffs, nor a fully disappeared participant in the FBI's witness protection program, Elissa Wall remains guarded about her whereabouts. Who knows what some particularly devout supporter of Jeffs might do? Say she lives "somewhere in Utah". That is near enough. We meet at a hospital where Wall's husband — her true husband, the man she loves and chose to marry — is being treated for a lymphatic disorder. She is blonde and bright and welcoming. But her eyes are prone to welling up when she reflects on life in the fundamentalist Mormon sect that made her an unwilling teen bride to her first cousin, Allen Steed. Jeffs, 52, was sentenced last November to at least 10 years in prison for facilitating Wall's rape when he ordered Steed to consummate their forced marriage. Jeffs, the sect's prophet, claimed he was acting on a revelation from God when he directed Wall to marry Steed. Wall thinks it was mere vindictiveness, a malicious assertion of his power over members of the enthusiastically polygamous Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints. She had, after all, defied this self-proclaimed messenger of God, telling him more than once that she was not ready to marry. "Especially after the way I stood up to him, he thought: 'How can I punish her forever?' I think he saw that I did not want to marry (Steed), so that's exactly what he wanted me to do," she says. "In the beginning," says Wall, who during the trial spent months moving to secret addresses as a secured witness, "(the marriage) was so traumatising I didn't know what to do. I was still a child mentally, physically and emotionally, and I was not prepared for the responsibility of being a wife, or being forced to be a wife. Part of me could not wait for the end of the world to come and end this pain I was in. I had no love for Allen and he hurt me so deeply and so much. "My marriage was a slap in the face and I should have been able to wake up sooner, but I had been so deeply conditioned to believe this was what I was supposed to do. I only had a sense of the reality that they gave me." And she was 14 years old. The episode reached its culmination last November when Wall's evidence of Steed's abuse fostered by Jeffs' instructions helped jail the "prophet". The cost, however, is not Jeffs' alone. Wall, now 22, lost as well: her friendships, and contact with much of her family, including her biological mother. "I have not been able to have any contact with my mother in … wow … a little over three years," she says, surprising herself at the realisation. "She tried to contact me during Warren's trial — I knew why she was trying to contact me and I knew from past experience what the FLDS do very well is use your family against you. They use your heart against you. I could not speak to her because I did not know if I would be strong enough. I didn't know if I could stand her pleas to not (testify)." Jeffs had escaped prosecution in a similar case in Arizona, she said, when the girls who were to testify against him succumbed to pressure not to expose him. "I kind of expected it," Wall says of her mother's "reaching out" to her. "I have to know that it's not her, that she's only doing it because there's somebody watching her, or because she feels like she has to. I have to hold on to the hope that she was not acting on her own. Otherwise it's too hard, it's too deep to think that after everything she watched me go through, she could not support me in that. "Then I understand what it's like from her point of view. To believe so deeply in Warren to such an extent where you can abandon your own family because they told you to." The mainstream Mormon church abandoned polygamy in 1890, but delving into the community from which Wall fled it seems appropriate that in Salt Lake City, across the road from the Mormon Tabernacle, is a genealogical museum that offers visitors help in tracing their family trees. The FLDS has remained committed to the so-called principle of plural marriage and comprises a tangled web of intra-family marriage and breeding among 13,000 followers in two adjoining towns on the Utah-Arizona border. There is also a further settlement in Texas at the El Dorado ranch Yearning for Zion that was raided two months ago by child protection authorities investigating claims of sex abuse. Again, the inhabitants are all followers of "prophet" Warren Jeffs. There is little about Jeffs' appearance — certainly not the scrawny physique or the rodent features — to suggest he might command widespread respect and loyalty. And there is not much about the man to do so, either. By Wall's account he is prurient, inclined to prying into the activities of pubescent boys and girls, as well as adults. He is domineering and manipulative, making and breaking families at will. Wall was born to her father's second wife, who was later separated from her husband at Jeffs' instruction and joined to another man. All told, Wall's father had 24 children by his three wives. Her father's third wife was also ordered to separate from him, and she turned up, along with two of Wall's half-brothers, in the raid on the Yearning for Zion ranch. Her father now lives with only his first wife. Jeffs, by contrast, has 143 wives, to Wall's knowledge, 34 of whom he inherited from his deceased father, Rulon, who preceded him as prophet but who confined himself to a comparatively modest 60-odd wives. Two of Wall's sisters, one aged 22 at the time, the other 19, were wedded to Rulon Jeffs when he was 83 years old and 86 respectively. Has Warren Jeffs consummated all those 143 unions? "I don't know," Wall says, "but I would not be surprised if he has." Wall witnessed the younger Jeffs growing into his role, initially forecasting that Rulon would be resurrected after his death at 92, and when that deliverance did not occur, taking up with, initially, eight of his father's widows. She also witnessed him banish 21 men from the community and reassign their wives. And she saw her own father banish her brothers at Jeff's instruction. Even though Jeffs' repeated predictions of the imminent destruction of the world failed to materialise, his status was undiminished, as were his volatile and capricious demands. "Fear was such a part of my life," recalls Wall. "I was afraid of not being obedient enough. I was afraid of not being prayerful enough. I was afraid of the end of the world and the day that destruction would come to the land and I was afraid that I would not be worthy enough to be lifted into heaven. "Fear reigns so much of their lives. It's not just fear of the outside, fear is a controlling factor in their lives, and I think the leaders know that." Jeffs was also the principal educator in the community, consigning girls' education to the realm of housekeeping and obedience. "I was terrified of the outside world," Wall says. "I was taught from a young age that I was one of God's chosen people, that I already was on this one and only path to heaven, so everybody on the outside was not as worthy as I was. And as Warren came into power he would tell us that the people on the outside were marked in heaven and they were evil and other races were the servants of the devil. "All races were marked by something their forefathers had done. Especially blacks, he had a thing for black people. He was very racist. I remember looking at the outside world and being afraid of it, but also almost pitying everyone out here." While she describes herself as religiously traumatised, Wall retains her belief in God and maintains friendships with mainstream Latter Day Saints believers. Wall regards the excesses she experienced as essentially the work of Jeffs. But others who grew up in the FLDS communities much earlier, in the 1950s for example, tell similar stories of widespread sexual, physical and emotional abuse as children. Wall acknowledges that sexual abuse in the cult-like community is "rampant". "People knew. I am sure that most of it was not talked about, but we knew of daughters who had been abused by their fathers, or brothers who had abused sisters and step-sisters and cousins. People knew that," she says. "I remember seeing a specific man or woman and asking why they were looked down upon, and I remember my mother saying because they had been hurt. It seems like someone who has been hurt like that was treated different." Abuse included infants — including, she has since learned, herself, — through "to marital abuse where husbands take advantage of their wives. I know that happens quite a bit, but the women are told just to pass it off because they are supposed to do their husband's will." Wall presents plural marriage as a pit of envy, jealousy and competition among her three mothers. Yet she has a tolerance of it that is probably unique to Utah, and says it can work for some, but not as it is portrayed on television's Big Love. "Anyone who has had an experience with plural marriage will tell you that it's nothing like it. They really sexed it up, Big Love. Sex and the money and the drama of it. I always laugh when I see Big Love because I always think if it was really like that there would be a lot more people that lived it." While not formally in witness protection, Wall and her husband, Lamont Barlow, 30, and their two children, aged three and one, live carefully. Warren Jeffs faces another trial, this time in Arizona, for which Wall will again be a witness. And she will also testify against Allen Steed when he faces charges of raping her. She has thought of abandoning Utah, and even fleeing the US, but so far she has chosen to stay. When Texas authorities raided the Yearning for Zion ranch, they sought her help in dealing with the 416 children removed from their families. And while the children have been returned by court order, Wall is confident abuse charges will be pursued. She has put aside thoughts of leaving the country, choosing instead to live in its shadows, and to help other refugees from the FLDS. "I feel like I have a responsibility to help these women who, if they want a way out, they can turn somewhere," she says. "Maybe I'll be doing that for the rest of my life, where I reach out to women and families and help them. I want to go to school. I want to be something. I want to change the world somehow. I want to make a life for my children I didn't have." Ian Munro is New York correspondent.

theage.com.au Originally published July 12, 2008

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