Stolen Innocence - Lisa Pulitzer [161]
Warren’s nephew Brent Jeffs had also accused him and others of repeated acts of sexual abuse when he was just a boy of about five or six attending Alta Academy. The Utah Attorney General’s Office declined to press criminal charges on Brent’s behalf, but that didn’t stop him from filing a civil suit. Brent Jeffs told the press that he’d decided to come forward after his brother Clayne committed suicide. Medical records revealed that Clayne had also been sexually abused.
A lawyer for Warren Jeffs denied the charges, calling the action “part of a continuing effort by enemies of the church to defame it and its institutions.”
Lamont and I were appalled by this information about Warren’s behavior. Warren had always held himself up to be the most righteous and had demanded perfection from us all. Even masturbation was considered a sin, and Warren punished and often exiled boys who admitted to such an “evil” activity. Lamont told me that Warren instructed boys to confess in painstaking detail, describing what they’d done and how it made them feel. Thinking back to how often Allen had done this in front of me, I found myself even more furious at what I’d been forced to endure.
With this gathering storm against Warren, Lamont and I began to understand Warren’s mysterious absences since at least the summer of 2004. That was when the first of these lawsuits was filed against him. Outside of Short Creek, there was a lot of public speculation that he was giving up on the southern Utah community to evade the lawsuits piling up against him and the church. The media began to explore a new FLDS settlement in Texas, one that Warren had been building for a couple of years. YFZ (Yearn for Zion) Ranch was the walled-in community being constructed in a remote location outside of El Dorado, Texas, on 1,697 acres for use as a “hunting retreat.”
By late January 2005, a massive footprint of a building began to take shape, and in late March a temple rose up from the landscape. The enormous structure soared ninety feet above the ground, and as April neared, news reports claimed that workmen were busy applying a coat of primer to its exterior. There were reports that Warren wanted the construction to be complete by April 6, the date of the annual priesthood conference. Not only would the FLDS temple be a place to get closer to heaven, but it could also be a place where rituals such as blood atonement could be performed. I’d always been taught that this ritual could only be performed in a temple. Members of law enforcement quietly prepared themselves in case Warren was planning something more ominous for the temple’s completion date.
As the April 23 deadline to file charges loomed, Kassandra and Craig increasingly encouraged me to come forward. While I fretted over the possibility that one day I might regret not speaking out, I was not prepared to make such a leap. All I wanted was to close the door on that chapter of my life, to put the past behind me and settle into my role as a new mother. It was fun to focus my attention on the little things like what outfit I would dress my baby in and how I would comb his thick shock of dark brown hair. It would be weeks before his fair blond locks would come in and months before he would utter his first sounds, but I was eager to soak in all that motherhood had to offer me. Lamont and I had started to make some friends in Hurricane. We’d moved to a nicer house that had a swimming pool in the backyard, and I was excited at the prospect of enjoying summer barbecues with friends like “normal” people do.
I finally told my siblings I just couldn’t do it. April 23, 2005, passed like any other day, and I breathed a sigh of relief, believing that I was ready to move