‘prophet’s Prey’ Review: a Predator and His Flock

By Joe Morgenstern
Wall Street Journal
September 24, 2015

http://www.wsj.com/articles/prophets-prey-review-a-predator-and-his-flock-1443123197

As horror upon horror unfolds in “Prophet’s Prey,” Amy Berg’s shocking documentary about the mad polygamist Warren Jeffs and his followers, one may marvel, in horror, at the elaborate forms that deviancy can take. The half-educated son of a crackpot father who ran a splinter group calling itself the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), Mr. Jeffs took over the church on his father’s death, declared himself a prophet, promoted polygamy that frequently involved underage girls, set up isolated communities throughout the vastness of the Southwest and reigned supreme over thousands of believers as a veritable godhead, All the while, the film contends persuasively, Mr. Jeffs’s rogue church was, fundamentally, a crime syndicate built by and for sexual predators.

Was, and by all accounts in “Prophet’s Prey,” still is—that’s the most shocking part. Mr. Jeffs is in prison for the rest of his life, having been captured in 2006 during a traffic stop near Las Vegas, and convicted, in 2007, of two felony counts of child assault. And some of the child victims were freed by authorities from what amounted to imprisonment and enslavement in FLDS compounds, thanks in large measure to an activist attorney general in Utah. (The Church of Latter-Day Saints renounced the doctrine of polygamy in 1890.)

Yet many of those blighted children were returned to their families after an appeals court ruled that the authorities had overstepped their bounds, while Mr. Jeffs is said to be still running the FLDS from his jail cell; as many as 10,000 members continue to follow his teachings. For a while he occupied a place on the FBI’s most-wanted list between Osama bin Laden and James “Whitey” Bulger. But capturing the criminal hasn’t put an end to the crime.