UTAH
Journal Review
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — As a young teen, Roy Jeffs would spend long days typing up his father’s sermons while stuck inside a house in an Albuquerque subdivision where he and his mother were sent to live in hiding. In the middle of the night, the phone would ring. It was his father, polygamous leader Warren Jeffs.
“There would be like this piercing of despair in your heart,” Roy Jeffs said. “What’s he going to say now? Is he going tell me I’ve lost my place? Is he going to kick me out?”
Roy Jeffs, now 23, says he was controlled, manipulated and shuffled around the country and assigned to work crews to atone for his perceived transgressions before leaving the sect last year.
His stories provide a window into the secretive sect based on the Utah-Arizona border in which cellphones, toys, movies, the Internet, bicycles and even swimming were strictly forbidden. He said Jeffs imposed his control over followers by reassigning children and wives to different men, sending people to “houses of hiding” and wielding the constant threat of exile.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.