Random Horrifying True Facts About Warren Jeffs (11 items)

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  (#1) He Married His Youngest Wife When She Was Only 12

  In 2006, Jeffs married his youngest wife, Merrianne Jessop, when she was 12 years old, and Jessop’s father performed the ceremony. Jeffs consummated the marriage on a temple bed. Jessop told caseworkers when she was 15 the then-50-year-old “Prophet” couldn’t possibly be guilty of a crime because “Heavenly Father is the one that tells Warren when a girl is ready to get married.” 
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  (#2) He Made Audio Recordings of Consummations and Sexual 'Training'

  Jeffs made at least some of his other reported 70-plus wives watch as he consummated his marriage to Jessop. Reportedly, he made an audio recording of the event. In 2001, prosecutors asked the jurors to listen to the recording when Jeffs was on trial for sexual assault.

  The tape, which investigators seized following his arrest in 2006, also included recordings of Jeffs instructing other “child brides” to “assist” and “comfort” him physically. It also documented him directing the girls to shave their pubic hair. Jeffs referred to the sexual misconduct as “heavenly sessions.”
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  (#3) He 'Reassigned' Wives and Children to Other Men

  According to Jeffs’s doctrine, wives may belong to their husband for all eternity. As the FLDS Prophet, Jeffs had the authority to “reassign” wives and children to other men as punishment for misdeeds. The wives rarely resist because, in accordance with their beliefs, obedience to the Prophet was paramount.

  The FLDS dictated each man take a minimum of three wives, and ultimately, the husbands decided whether or not to “invite” their wives into heaven.
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  (#4) He Admits to 'Immoral Actions' With His Sister and Daughter

  In 2007, Jeffs had telephone conversations with various family members while temporarily in Utah jail for an accessory to rape conviction. There, Jeffs “renounced” his prophet title because, when he was 20, he engaged in “immoral actions with a sister and a daughter.”  

  In 2011, court documents revealed Jeffs allegedly kept a journal chronicling his history of sexual assault: "If the world knew what I was doing, they would hang me from the highest tree."
   
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  (#5) The Prophet Preached Homophobia

  The Southern Poverty Law Center compiled an intelligence report on Jeffs in 2005, including audio recordings of him expounding on various topics. Jeff maintained a homosexual partnership “is the worst evil act you can do, next to murder.” He continues, further explaining these relationships as “like murder. Whenever people commit that sin, then the Lord destroys them."

  Jeffs’s sermons contained homophobic themes, and the Prophet instructed women on how to combat same-sex tendencies: “[B]uild up young men by being submissive.”
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  (#6) He Allegedly Sexually Assaulted His Young Nephew and Niece

  During his trial in 2011, Jeffs’s 28-year-old nephew, Brent Jeffs, told jurors his uncle sexually assaulted him in a restroom following a “family meeting” when he was 5 years old. Jeffs allegedly asked Brent to kneel “like he was praying” before warning Brent “this is between me and you and God.” 

  Jeffs’s adult niece also told jurors he made her sit on his lap when she was 7 and did "inappropriate things” to her. She recounted the event:

  He said, 'You're a special girl' and that he would help me to go heaven. And he had a certain way of making me feel like I was special and he told me I'll go to heaven if I, for sure, just don't tell anybody.

  She was reportedly sobbing so hard in the courtroom the prosecutor stopped questioning her.
   
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  (#7) The Prophet Endorsed Racism

  Another Southern Poverty Law Center recording revealed the Prophet’s tendency to preach racism: "The Black race is the people through which the devil has always been able to bring evil unto the earth." Jeffs, as a proponent of racial separation, also disapproved of interracial marriage: "If you marry a person who has connections with a Negro, you would become cursed."

  The YFZ ranch in Eldorado, Texas, was comprised of all white members.
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  (#8) He Is Allegedly Creating A Miniature 'Master Race'

  In 2016, former FLDS members told Rolling Stone magazine how Jeffs decreed only men of a so-called “royal bloodline” could reproduce in the community. These chosen men were limited to intercourse with women selected to be a part of the “United Order,” an elite group within the faith - many of which were already married. The 15 alleged “seed bearers” hid their identities using a hood and a sheet during the act. 

  The Prophet instructed the husbands to watch the “breeding session.” If the impregnated United Order woman followed the required “special detox diet” and successfully gave birth, members whisked the baby away. Reportedly, Jeffs intention was to create a “master race” loyal only to him.

  Former FLDS members also alleged Jeffs rewarded the United Order members - the elites - while those who weren’t suffered from lack of food and psychological punishments. 
   
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  (#9) He Prayed So Much In Prison Wounds Festered On His Knees

  Jeffs has been serving a life sentence in a Texas prison since 2011. He reportedly prayed so much at one point “open wounds began to fester on his knees.” Rolling Stone magazine reports Jeffs never interacts with other inmates, choosing instead to sit alone and read letters from his followers. To keep him from doing too much harm to himself during his intense prayer sessions, officials have at least once had to chain him to a wall.

  Jeffs has allegedly been trying to continue FLDS church affairs, including adjustments to doctrine, while in prison.
   
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  (#10) He Banned All Books from His Community

  Former FLDS member Carolyn Jessop says before Jeffs took over, there were plenty of books available in the community, including her personal collection of more than 300. As Prophet, Jeffs reportedly decreed “all worldly material” be banned. He ordered all literature burned, including magazines and children’s books. 

  Jeffs maintained the church was not a democracy and how “the work of God is a benevolent dictatorship.”
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  (#11) He Forced A 14-Year-Old Girl To Marry Her Abusive Older Cousin

  Jeffs forced Elissa Wall to marry her first cousin, 19-year-old Allen Steed, when she was just 14 years old. At 31, Wall spoke openly about the abuse she suffered during her time in FLDS. Wall protested the union, but Jeffs compelled her to go through with it. She was resistant to playing the role of Steed's wife, and he reportedly began sexually and physically abusing her. She suffered several miscarriages as a result. She told Jeffs about the abuse, but he chastised her for being a bad wife: 

  He reprimanded me over and over for not being submissive. Reminding me of my teachings. Reminding me that I was the property of this man and he could do whatever he wanted to me.

  She ran away when she was 18 and eventually told police what happened. In 2005, she won a $16 million lawsuit against FLDS. She later authored the autobiography Stolen Innocence: My Story of Growing Up in a Polygamous Sect, Becoming a Teenage Bride, and Breaking Free of Warren Jeffs.
   
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  (#12) He Preaches That He Is 'Christ Incarnate'

  When Jeffs’s father, Rulon, died, Warren took over the sect and began preaching he was “Jesus Christ incarnate,” according to a former FLDS member. He married several of Rulon’s wives, but not out of disrespect: he also preached that his father was God.

  Specifically, he explained Rulon Jeffs wasn’t dead but had been "renewed" or “reincarnated” into the form of Warren-Jesus. This, he claimed, made it okay for him to marry his father’s wives.
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  (#13) He Allegedly Forced His Wives to Engage in Group Phone Sex

  Jeffs former family caretaker, Roy Allred, told the FBI Jeffs’s 70 wives, for a time, engaged in “nightly group sex rituals” with an incarcerated Jeffs listening in - and participating - over the phone. These so-called “heavenly comfort sessions” allegedly began when Jeffs was on the lam and would call in from the road. Allred, listening in on secure phone lines he set up for Jeffs, says at least one wife was “underage and inexperienced in the ways of sex.” 
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  (#14) He Made a Custom Temple Bed for Consummating Marriages

  Court documents from his 2011 trial revealed Jeffs demanded a special temple bed be constructed at his Yearning for Zion ranch temple in Eldorado, TX, strictly for consummating marriages. Jeffs reportedly wanted the bed to be sturdy “so it wouldn't rattle,” and to have padded sides that could hold him in place as “the Lord does His work with [him].” Jeffs also wanted “a plastic cover to protect the mattress from what will happen on it.” 

  The world got to see the bed when the temple was seized in 2014. 
   
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  (#15) He Banned The Internet So Members Couldn't Learn About The Outside World

  According to Roy Jeffs - Jeffs’s estranged son - Jeffs banned Internet access as well as the use of TV to keep his members as isolated as possible from the world outside of FLDS. Reportedly, few members had phones that would allow them to access the web. Roy maintains gaining Internet access was instrumental in allowing the members to realize they needed to break away from FLDS, which Roy himself did:

  [The Internet] definitely opened our eyes to what the world was really like and that peace and happiness exist out here. Without it, I don’t think this many people would’ve left.
   

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