Featured Image Credit: YouTube/@UnfilteredStoriesYT/Netflix
Topics: Netflix, Real Life, True Crime
Ali Condon
Topics: Netflix, Real Life, True Crime
The daughter of controversial religious group leader and convicted child rapist Warren Jeffs has spoken out about how her dad married girls as young as 12 years old.
Jeffs was the president of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) - a polygamist group that is widely considered a cult, and was documented in Netflix's Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey.
Before he was sentenced to life in prison, Warren had more than 80 wives - many under the age of 18 - and at least 60 children.
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Now one of Jeff's many daughters, Sarah Thompson, who also appeared in the Netflix docu-series about him, is sharing more details about what life was like inside the FLDS.
Up until she was 15 years old, Sarah, like many others, was convinced that her father Warren was a 'prophet'.
"Growing up as a daughter of Warren Jeff's was king of like royalty, in a way," she told Unfiltered Stories.
"But also you had a lot more pressure to be perfect."
A typical day for Sarah would involve waking up at 5:00am to feed farm animals before attending a cermon and going to school.
After school, her evening pretty much consisted of doing dishes because 'doing dishes for 132 people lasts hours', as Sarah says.
Sarah's mother, who was Jeff's eighth wife, was married to him just after her 19th birthday
When Sarah was 12, other wives in the family started warning her to prepare for marriage.
"It wasn't until after I left that I found out who my father was planning for me to get married to. And it was my sister Rachel's husband," she revealed.
"The reason it probably didn't ever happen is because we left, like right after they found that out," said Sarah, though she does admit if she had to be married to a man from the FLDS, he 'wouldn't be a bad choice,' because he 'wasn't one of the abusive ones.'
Recalling the moment she found out everything she thought she had known about her dad was a lie, Sarah shared: "We just cried together for a couple of hours.
"It was really emotional and it took probably a couple of years to get it all through my head."
Even after Warren Jeffs was arrested in 2006 and sentenced to life in prison in 2011, he still kept the cult running.
"The messages he would send from prison would get a lot more strict over time. Honestly it was just fun for him," she shared.
When Sarah finally got out into the real world, she admitted the experience was really 'strange' and seeing boys stand so close to girls in her first public school was 'terrifying'.
Though she did eventually get the hang of things.
"I feel like now I have adapted a lot better to life. Going through four years of high school definitely helped me a lot.
"That is one thing that pushed me a lot faster to be normal. I had to learn to talk fast, I had to learn who Taylor Swift was."
And if that isn't the cornerstone to normality, what is?