Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #312996 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 432 pages

Daily Mail
So compelling. An incredible memoir

Elle
Riveting, compulsive reading

Excerpted from Escape by Carolyn Jessop. Copyright © 2008. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Escape. The moment had come. I had been watching and waiting for months. The time was right. I had to act fast and without fear. I could not afford to fail. Nine lives were at stake; those of my eight children and my own.

Monday, April 21, 2003. At 10:00 that night, I found out that my husband had left earlier in the evening on a business trip. All eight of my children were home-including Arthur, 15, my oldest who often traveled on construction jobs. There were two things that had to happen before I could escape and they just had; my husband was gone and my children were all home. I had to act within hours.

The choice was freedom or fear. I was 35 and desperate to flee from polygamy, the only world I had ever known. I came from six generations of polygamists and was part of a sect known as the Fundamentalist Church of the Latter Day Saints (FLDS) 10,000 of us lived in a small community along the Utah-Arizona border.

At 18, I was coerced into an arranged marriage with Merril Jessop, a 50 year-old man I barely knew. I became his fourth wife and had eight children in 15 years. They ranged from Arthur, my oldest to Bryson, the youngest who was eighteen months old and still nursing. The six children in-between included my son, Harrison, who was almost four and severely disabled with nerve damage from a highly aggressive cancer known as spinal neural blastoma.

The first thing I did when I realized I might be able to escape was go to my sister, Linda's, house to use the telephone. I couldn't call from my home because the phones were monitored. My husband's six other wives were suspicious. I had a reputation for being somewhat independent and thinking for myself so the other wives kept tabs on me with each other. If anyone suspected something, one of the wives would immediately call Merril.

My sister was part of the FLDS community but she and her husband were not in a plural marriage. She knew from our previous conversations how desperate I was to escape. We both felt the sect was becoming too extreme and frightening under the leadership of its prophet, Warren Jeffs. The running joke between us on the phone was, "Don't drink the punch."

Ever since Jeffs had taken over the sect after his father, Rulon Jeff's death, he began preaching that he was Jesus Christ incarnate and that his late father was God. He also started talking in apocalyptic terms about moving his followers to what he called "The Center Place." We feared that meant a walled compound from which there would be no escape. Jeffs did not believe people had the right to make their own choices. My husband was a powerful member of the FLDS community and very close to Jeffs. With his seven wives and 54 children, the odds were my husband would be one of the first to be taken to "The Center Place." It would be tantamount to a prison camp for me and my children-one where we'd be required to report on others who strayed from or disobeyed the word of God.

When I was growing up in the FLDS our lives were not as extreme as they were becoming under Warren Jeffs. The children in the community attended public schools. But that ended when Jeffs took over. He felt that teachers in the public schools had been educated by gentiles and were "contaminated." Jeffs ordered all FLDS children into church-run schools called "private priesthood" schools.

When I was growing up in the F.L.D.S., our lives were not as extreme as they had become under Warren Jeffs. The children in the community attended public schools. But that ended when Jeffs took over. He felt that teachers in the public schools had been educated by gentiles and were "contaminated." Jeffs ordered all F.L.D.S. children into church-run schools called "private priesthood" schools.

Jeffs preached that our children were the "chosen seed of God" and that it was our duty, as God's people, to protect them from all unclean things. In the F.L.D.S.-run schools, children were brainwashed, not educated. My kids were taught that dinosaurs never existed and that men never set foot on the moon. I could see how fast they were falling behind and feared that soon they'd be functionally illiterate.

I had been a public school teacher and cherished literature. I had collected over 300 children's books. Shortly after Jeffs took over, he decreed that all worldly material-- including books-- be banned from the community. My husband ordered us to comply. Our home was scoured and all literature confiscated and destroyed, including my books.

It was common knowledge among us that Jeffs was marrying off younger and younger girls and taking more wives for himself. (At last count, he had 70.) I came home once after one of Harrison's hospitalizations and could not find my 12-year-old daughter, Betty. My questions were ignored when I tried to find out where she was. I was upset. Someone eventually told me that she was "in compliance with her father's wishes." I finally learned that she and several other young girls had been invited to a sleepover at the prophet's house.

When I arrived at my sister's house, the first call I made was to the police. The Arizona police were gone; I got their voice mail. But the Utah police answered. I asked if anyone would be willing to help a woman and her children leave the F.L.D.S. community. The police said they had no jurisdiction because even though we were just a mile or so across the border, we were legally in Arizona.

It was getting close to eleven p.m. I tried calling a group that assists women fleeing polygamy. No one there could act immediately.

I felt the trap closing as midnight approached.

Customer Reviews

Thought provoking.
I actually found this book at work and when I read the cover it intrigued me. I'm not a great fan of the 'woe is me....life has been so bad but look how I've turned it round' kind of books that seem to fill the shelves at the moment, but this story made me curious. What a rollercoaster of a read....I seriously could not wait to have an early night to read a few more chapters! Carlolyn Jessop was born into the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints. When she was 18 she had an arranged marriage to a man old enough to be her father...and by the time she was in her early 30's she had 8 children! Because I'm not in the slightest bit religious, I could not grasp how anyone would not see through the abuse and brainwashing that was part of Carolyns daily life....but as she explains, this is just how it was and she had been brought up not to question but to accept! Carolyns saving grace was that she managed to get an education before the groups 'Prophet of God' forced her into a marriage with Merril Jessop...a well known member of the FLDS. Carolyn became one of his 6 wives (he went on to marry more after her escape!)The wives were seen as the husbands 'property' and the belief was that if you served your husband well, he would take you into the next life with him into his celestial Kingdom. Barking!!!!!Carolyn and her children suffered mental and physical abuse throughout her marriage....and as time went on Warren Jeffs became the leader. The rules began to spiral into madness....mothers were not even allowed to cuddle their own children, pet dogs were all rounded up and killed, if a child became ill it was seen as punishment to the mother for being a bad wife....it goes on and on.When Carolyns 7th child develops cancer and has to be regularly hospitalized, she begins to see what life outside the community is really like and that non-believers are not all bad people. She gets her first taste of freedom. Warren Jeffs then begins to marry girls off younger and younger and Carolyn discovers that her 12 year old daughter has been to stay at his house. She realises that her husband would have no qualms in marrying his daughter off to Warren Jeffs to gain a higher status in the community, and this finally sets her mind onto escaping. But the battle doesn't end there....she has to fight for custody of the children. She suffers from PTSD and has to start from scratch with no money, no job and on the run from her husband who is outraged at her disobedience. Her children have been brainwashed and believe life outside the community will mean punishment in the afterlife and she has to deal with all this. Eventually Carolyn wins custody and Warren Jeffs is jailed for sodomizing young boys and raping underage girls as young as 5 or 6.
This book is a truly amazing story and my review will never do it justice. Get it and give it a go....you won't be disappointed.

Moving
I purchased this book on a total whim. I have never been more moved by the written word than I was by this book. Carolyn Jessop is without a doubt one of the rare modern day heroes of this world, and what really shone throughout this book was that despite her endless personal struggles and abuses she was continuously concerned about the welfare of others, even those people who had mistreated her. She fought battle after battle to stand up for what is right in the face of such horrific mental, emotional and physical traumas, and despite having to continuously struggle she was still able to get her message out there and see that justice prevailed.

Carolyn Jessops writing is exceptional. Her words flow in a way that truly engages her readers into the world that she lived in for 17 years; we feel a fraction of what she must have felt, we are able to clearly picture the chaos and feel the fear that must have been a daily part of her life for so long.

On the surface whenever the outside world was ever invited to view the behaviours of the polygamous sects I was always led to believe that everyone was happy with their way of life, that all of their children, despite there being so many, were happy and thriving. It was not until I read this book that you truly realise that perhaps a lot of what we are occasionally privy to is a cleverly constructed facade to keep away a world that they are taught to believe is full of evil influences and evil people.

What I found to be most moving about this work is that despite the abuse that Carolyn Jessop experienced and witnessed, and despite the constant barrage of brainwashing propaganda about the outside world, she was always willing to open her heart to others, to trust and to care about their wellbeing as well as her own.

Carolyn Jessops sole drive throughout this work is the protection of her children, and despite suffering at the hands of her "family", despite numerous complications from her pregnancies, and despite facing times of near starvation and the detrimental effects of little to no health care, she was able to use her wits,instincts and her faith that good would prevail, to not only escape the only world she had ever know, but also to learn how to survive in the real world, and to ultimately help in putting a chink in the armour of the crumbling world in which she had been raised.

This book is not for the faint-hearted, it is a real story of courage and living moment to moment, a story of bravery and the extents a mother will go to to protect her children. This stirring work will truly make you stop, smell the roses of your life and be thankful for everything you have around you.

Stranger (and more disturbing) than fiction
My wife bought this book. Just the sort of thing she would read, I thought. Then I picked it up myself, and was unable to put it down. The events and the personalities it describes are all true, yet barely credible. One wonders how such things can go on in a 'civilized' western country. Carolyn Jessop's upbringing in the FLDS faith, her forced polygamous marriage, the harrowing accounts of her treatment by her husband and his favourite wife, and her eventual escape are calculated to make your blood boil. At every page I was asking myself: How could this happen? How could anyone allow themselves to be treated in this way? How could anyone be duped into believing such utter garbage? Why did no-one do anything about it? Strange but true. You can read newspaper accounts about the FLDS and its prophet Warren Jeffs that will bear it out. This may be a book of the 'hasn't my life been awful' genre, but it is one of the better ones. Not a literary masterpiece; it just tells the story as it happened. The book and the events it describes are very recent. I would imagine that its author is still in the process of recovering from her old life and discovering her new one. If she were to write an update from a longer perspective in a few years from now, I would certainly wish to read it.