Ex-FLDS Women Describe Horrific Loss Of Freedom, Eventual Escape In ‘Keep Sweet’

Rulon and Warren Jeffs. Photo courtesy of Netflix

The story of Warren Jeffs, president and prophet of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, has been told countless times and ways — it’s usually just a way that emphasizes his heinous sex crimes and the cross-country chase that brought him to justice. 

After months on the Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list and evading police while living large at Disney World and in Vegas, Jeffs was caught and put on trial in 2006 for various sex crimes. In the process, investigators found recordings and evidence that Jeffs had married and had sex with girls as young as 12. 

It’s horrifying, and unfortunately an aspect of FLDS history that’s been sensationalized in other news and documentaries. 

In “Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey,” a new four-part documentary series on Netflix, director Rachel Dretzin says she consciously wanted to avoid that kind of storytelling. 

“I wanted the focus to be on the methodical way in which people were deprived of their autonomy and their freedom of thought,” Dretzin told ReligionUnplugged.com. She said she did not want to concentrate on the sex itself but to contextualize it in the bigger picture.

Photo courtesy of Netflix

The documentary chronicles the rise of Warren Jeffs primarily through the stories of women who have since left the FLDS. These perspectives make the documentary ever more real, both in its horrifying truth and its message.

“This series focuses very consciously on the stories of women who managed not only to escape the FLDS but to stand up against Warren and his despotic rule,” Dretzin said. “That took an immense amount of strength and courage.”

“Keep Sweet” comes at an opportune time, as “Under the Banner of Heaven” addresses similar concerns with fundamentalism in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Both focus on poor treatment of women, particularly in belief systems that involve polygamy. 

“But polygamy is really not the problem anyway,” Utah attorney Roger Hoole says in the documentary. “It’s the secondary crimes that occur in a closed religious society controlled by men.”

One of the girls, Rebecca, was married to Rulon Jeffs, Warren’s father, when she was 19 and he was 85. She recalls lulling him to sleep on nights she had to spend with him so she didn’t have to have sex with him. Another, Alicia, married Rulon when he was 86 and had over 20 wives. Elissa was forced to marry her cousin at 14. 

This was even before Warren became the church’s prophet. Under his rule, restrictions got tighter, keeping FLDS members from the outside world and increasingly treating women as property — offering them as “rewards” to men in the community and expecting them to behave as servants to their husbands and the prophet.

“During that period, what he managed to do in such a methodical way is pretty stunning. I call it the tightening of the noose,” Dretzin said. “It's quite ingenious, and it was unbelievably effective at robbing people of the little bit of free will that they had left. And it allowed these terrible things to happen.”

Shows like “Keep Sweet” can’t help but ask, Is any religion as bad as its worst member? 

“Under the Banner of Heaven” ends as its main character loses his faith over the evil he’s seen done in the name of religion; he decides that he’ll keep up with tradition for the sake of it, for his family and his community. It’s sweet but not particularly hopeful. 

“Keep Sweet” ends on an even worse note. It remarks how Jeffs continues to dictate much of what happens in the FLDS from prison and how many still believe his teachings. It makes no condemnation of religion or the Latter-day Saints church, but it’s difficult to see what Jeffs has done and not feel as though more has been tainted than just the people in his community. 

(The same could be said about the SBC, particularly after the recent release of the report detailing sex abuse in churches that was covered up and brushed aside for years.)

Photo courtesy of Netflix

“I hope that religious viewers will be drawn to it for several reasons, since it does engage very directly in religious questions,” Dretzin said. “I think for mainstream Mormons, this is a kind of a third rail, but it is there. It is fundamental to the tenants of Mormonism, and therefore, it's hard for Mormons to completely turn their backs on it. I hope this series gives the mainstream Mormon church something to think about and talk about as well.”

Fundamentalism is only one of the issues addressed in “Keep Sweet” that’s worthy of discussion. 

“There’s the issue of groupthink and the way in which a closed way of thinking can cause you to make decisions that are profoundly uninformed, which I think has political repercussions,” Dretzin said. “There’s also the control of women's bodies. I mean, these women were property. And when you look at what’s happening with abortion in this country, there are definitely connections.”

Don’t be surprised if “Keep Sweet” leaves a bad taste in your mouth — or makes you furious, or makes you cry. It’s likely to do any or all of those things because it’s a new and terrible horror to experience what terrible men have done to women under the guise of religion.

But that isn’t the complete end of the story.

“It is astonishing and miraculous and inspiring that these women managed to get out and to build lives for themselves,” Dretzin said. “So I hope this series leaves people with hope — hope not only for people who grew up in polygamy but hope for anyone who grows up with that kind of a trauma in their past. You can make a new life for yourself.”

Jillian Cheney is a contributing culture writer for Religion Unplugged. She also writes on American Protestantism and evangelical Christianity and was Religion Unplugged’s 2020-21 Poynter-Koch fellow. You can find her on Twitter @_jilliancheney.