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Carolyn was miserable for years and wanted out, but she knew that if she tried to leave and got caught, her children would be taken away from her.

For in the FLDS, a wife’s compliance with her husband determined how much status both she and her children held in the family. He chose when they had sex Carolyn could only refuse—at her peril. He controlled the money she earned as a school teacher. He decided where she lived and how her children would be treated. Over the next fifteen years, Carolyn had eight children and withstood her husband’s psychological abuse and the watchful eyes of his other wives who were locked in a constant battle for supremacy.Ĭarolyn’s every move was dictated by her husband’s whims. But arranged plural marriages were an integral part of Carolyn’s heritage: She was born into and raised in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), the radical offshoot of the Mormon Church that had settled in small communities along the Arizona-Utah border. When she was eighteen years old, Carolyn Jessop was coerced into an arranged marriage with a total stranger: a man thirty-two years her senior.