Stolen Innocence: Elissa Wall on Growing up FLDS (Part 2)

A Little Bit Culty

Sarah Edmondson & Anthony “Nippy” Ames

Education, Society & Culture

4.6 • 3K Ratings

🗓️ 1 December 2022

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. We’re getting into a whole lot of mess with this one, so if you haven’t listened to Part 1 of this story from earlier this week, you’ll be mighty confused. Make sure to give it a listen before diving in here.

Many people became aware of the horrors taking place within the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (if you were really in touch with God s/he’d have given you a better name) after watching Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey on Netflix. Our guest on today’s show, Elissa Wall, had to live through them.

Born into a polygamous family within Salt Lake City, Utah’s FLDS—which is how we’ll be referring to it from here on out— Wall was only 14 when church leaders orchestrated a marriage between the child and her 19-year-old cousin, Allen Steed. Unfortunately, such marriages were insanely frequent within the church, with girls as young as 12-years-old being groomed and forced to marry older men. Much of this is thanks to human trash can Warren Jeffs, president and prophet of the FLDS, who can also add convicted child rapist to his list of titles. At one point, Jeffs had 78 “wives,” 24 of whom were children. Now, he’s serving life in prison, with no small help from Elissa Wall.

Wall’s autobiography is titled, Stolen Innocence: My Story of Growing Up in a Polygamous Sect, Becoming a Teenage Bride, and Breaking Free of Warren Jeffs. The book became a New York Times bestseller and is a fascinating but heart wrenching look into the truly fucked up world of Warren Jeffs.

Also…

Hear Ye, Hear Ye:

The views and opinions expressed on A Little Bit Culty do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the podcast. Any content provided by our guests, bloggers, sponsors or authors are of their opinion and are not intended to malign any religion, group, club, organization, business individual, anyone or anything. Nobody’s mad at you, just don’t be a culty fuckwad.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The views and opinions expressed by a little bit cultier, those are the hosts,
0:03.6	and don't reflect the official policy or position of the podcast, right, sir?
0:07.6	Correct.
0:08.3	Any of the, quote, fire content, I prefer lava content provided by our guests, blog
0:13.3	responses, or authors of the opinion, and are not intended to malign a religion,
0:18.4	a group, a club, an organization, business individual, anyone or anything, unless, sir?
0:23.9	Your douchebag.
0:24.6	Yeah, I mean, pretty much.
0:26.8	Also, we're not doctors, psychologists or wizards.
0:29.5	We're just two non-experts trying to make you a friendly and formative podcast
0:33.5	based on our experience that we've turned into wisdom.
0:35.7	Okay.
0:36.3	Good talk.
0:36.9	Okay.
0:47.2	Hey everybody, Sarah Edmonds in here.
0:49.6	And I'm Anthony Ames, aka Nippy, Sarah's husband, and you're listening to a little bit cultier, aka
0:56.7	LBC.
0:57.6	A podcast about what happens when devotion goes to the dark side.
1:00.9	We've been there, and back again, a little about us.
1:03.6	True Story, we met and fell in love in a cult, and then we woke up and got the hell out of
1:09.0	dodge.
1:09.5	And the whole thing was captured in the HBO documentary series The Vow, now in its second season.
	...

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