When I arrived in Salt Lake City from Austin, I immediately turned on my cell. Ben was to bring Natalia down for her next scheduled surgery, and we’d planned to meet at the airport. I was excited to see my sweet toddler, and nervous for what lay ahead for her. The next moment my phone signaled a text from Ben.
“I can’t bring Natalia down. Find your own ride home.”
Two years of applications, appointments, tests, and travel to Salt Lake—all to lead to this appointment to measure balloon expanders for the implant surgery in just three weeks’ time, including surgical volunteers at Shriners Hospitals that could complete the operation. How could he?
Without Natalia there, we were disqualified from the special programs at the hospital. I didn’t know any other place where she could have the procedures done without $25,000 down and a 60 percent copay, which I did not have. Inconsolable, I sat with my face to the window as all the other people left the plane before me. I felt like I had nowhere to go.
The next few months I was virtually homeless, sometimes sleeping in my car, but mostly relying on the support of a few friends and family. The kids were often with me, sometimes having to spend nights in the car, too. I wasn’t proud of it, but I was determined to create a better life for them. My good friend Kara took us in for several weeks while I searched for viable income. Still, I had to be honest: who would hire me? A woman with a crazy schedule of trials and surgeries, who desperately needed health insurance? I was going to have to do something flexible and yet profitable, but I didn’t know how.
Patrice introduced me to a multilevel-marketing skin care company. Initially wary, I tried the products and realized that perhaps this was a way to care for my stressed body while providing income simultaneously. A powerful benefit was that the company initiated motivational training calls each Saturday from some of the best in the industry that we as distributors could access. One such call was from a guest named Kevin Hall who introduced an ancient, powerful concept from India called Genshai. It touched me deeply, and I wrote the word and its meaning in my cell phone, then went on with my busy life.
I attended a conference for the company with Patrice. Her boyfriend, Jamison, was the son of Michael George Emack, an FLDS leader charged with bigamy and sexually assaulting a child. Whenever she brought up the trials, I had always changed the subject.
That weekend, Patrice got right in my face.
“You get him off!” she shouted. “Whatever it takes!”
Patrice didn’t understand that I did not have the power to get anyone out of his sentence. Second, she did not know that it broke my heart to have to sit on the stand as a witness for the prosecution of these men, particularly Mike Emack. Of all the men on the docket, he was one I truly respected. Only one thing kept me moving forward, and that was the photos of the young girls in evidence, and their rights and freedoms.
The first Texas trial scheduled was that of my cousin Raymond Merrill Jessop in Eldorado. I had not been close to Ray, but I had fond memories of cliff jumping with him and other cousins into the water of Lake Powell, all long sleeves and big smiles. However, Raymond was being charged with sexual assault of a child, a first-degree felony in the state of Texas. At age thirty-two, Ray had married Janet Jeffs, one day after she turned fifteen. Her mother was the same Sally Jeffs, who had denied the existence of underage unions on Larry King. Janet gave birth to Ray’s child when she was sixteen. Through his lawyers, he denied paternity, even though DNA evidence marked him with a 99.9 percent likelihood of being the father.
I had been most disturbed with the evidence regarding Janet’s labor. She had been prohibited from going to the hospital on orders from Warren to protect him, her husband, and the ranch from questions. Sally, the midwife, watched her daughter suffer immeasurably for three days. And now Raymond was not only denying her as his bride; he would not claim the child for whom Janet had nearly given her life.
Raymond’s was the first paper case without a victim in the witness stand, and they had to fight for it with a solid foundation of evidence. It was taking a long time. By law, I could not be in the courtroom except when I was testifying (except for closing statements and jury sentencing), but I had loads of team members who kept me informed legally of almost every nuance of the trial. I was rarely in the dark, but it didn’t assuage my loneliness while I waited on an isolated ranch where my security was strictly monitored. I was allowed off the ranch only for my time in court. To make matters worse, it was Eric’s strategy to have me testify twice in each trial: first in the guilt-innocence phase, and again at the sentencing phase.
Each day I had to face the inner turmoil of testifying against my own cousin. Each day I had to be emotionally prepared—dressed, ready at a moment’s notice with “LOVE” written on my hand. Each day I just sat there.
On Friday, October 30, I missed Kyle’s Halloween party. The next day I missed both kids dressing up in the costumes I had helped Ben to put together before I left. Kyle was a fierce pirate and Natalia a darling dinosaur. I missed taking them trick-or-treating. In a vulnerable state of longing to connect with them, I asked Ben to send me pictures.
“Why?” he texted back. “So you can show all your cowboy friends what a great mother you are? Tell them the truth. You’ve abandoned your kids.”
Nearly everyone from the attorney general’s office had driven back to Austin for the weekend. Except for my guards and a few investigators, I was very alone—with only Ben’s ugly texts, and calls from Patrice that I couldn’t bring myself to answer. I played the violin for hours in an attempt to calm myself down, but my anxiety continued to build. I couldn’t eat or sleep without nightmares. By the wee hours of Sunday morning, I was a wreck. I lay in that bed, thousands of miles from my kids, feeling totally useless.
Suddenly I was filled with anger. Hadn’t I done enough? Hadn’t I suffered plenty? Couldn’t someone else do this? I threw the covers back and shoved on a pair of jeans, a hoodie, and sneakers. In the predawn darkness, I slipped away from my security detail, leaving the flat lawn and following the twisting path down the slope, far from my cabin. I finally came to a place where not a soul could see or hear me, and I fell onto a cold, flat rock, curling into a fetal position. In anguish I cried out to God, “Why me?”
I had already testified in Utah. I had already told the truth. There’d been hundreds of people on that ranch, hundreds of people who had left the FLDS… wasn’t there at least one other person able to validate the records? My whole body shook with sobs as I cried like a child.
I continued crying until I was empty. I lay with my face pressed against the cold rock in total surrender.
In the burgeoning colors of dawn, the simmering Texas sun suddenly burst out of the thinning clouds. The rays seemed to caress my skin little by little with prickles of warmth and light, filling me like I had never been filled before. Then I was touched by a beautiful voice.
“Don’t ask ‘Why me?’ ” the familiar voice said. “Instead, ask ‘Show me.’ ”
At first it didn’t make sense to me, but I was too tired to fight. Long moments of silence later, I realized that asking Why me? kept me in victim mode: wallowing in self-pity, closed off to solutions. Show me, on the other hand, had totally different energy. Not only did someone believe that I had the strength to make it through; I would not be alone on this journey. I let the meaning sink deep within my bones as I lay there. Okay. Show me, then.
Suddenly the wake-up alarm on my phone sounded, and as I went to turn it off, I saw the definition I had written weeks before of the word Genshai:
Never treat another in a manner which would make them feel small; not anyone, not even yourself.
Recognition dawned inside me as strongly as the Texan sunrise. Since that day in the attorney general’s office in Austin, I had been absolutely vicious to myself. It was a repeated pattern in my work, with my family, with Ben. In the trials I had allowed the brutal barbs of family, friends, and media to make me feel small, and guilt to make me feel worthless. But I didn’t have to make that choice any longer.
It was okay for me to treat myself with respect. It was not wrong, egotistical, or selfish as I’d been taught. Just as it was the right of every one of those girls I testified for to live a life of dignity, it was my right, too. The ugly texts and calls would not stop, but I learned to take a deep breath, to treat myself with respect, and to say, “Show me.” I did not have to wait long to be shown.
Other witnesses came to the ranch to await their time to testify as well. The next day I met Dr. Lawrence Beall, a psychologist from Utah. Dr. Beall’s life work dealt with helping others to overcome trauma, abuse, and severe, unhealthy conditioning. He had worked with more than twenty former FLDS members, many of them women. He brought a powerful perspective to the courtroom, explaining to the jury what sexual assault does to the psyche of a young woman. Equally important, he established the difference between coercion and personal consent, and what conditions must be in place for one to really give consent—conditions rarely present in the FLDS culture.
In what started as a casual conversation, Dr. Beall and I talked about the struggles I’d faced in my relationships. Finally, I shared with him the intense shame I carried about the sexual, spiritual, and emotional abuse happening to my “children” and “grandchildren” in the FLDS community.
“You got out of the FLDS,” Dr. Beall explained wisely, “now you’ve got to get the FLDS out of you.” We discussed the belief paradigms among FLDS women, particularly the shattering of boundaries. I had one of the biggest breakthroughs of my entire life when Dr. Beall introduced me to a list of personal human rights written by Dr. Charles L. Whitfield in Healing the Child Within. To see my fundamental rights listed in black and white created a mammoth shift in the reasoning part of my brain, which had been forcibly blocked since my days as an Alta Academy student. I read out loud: “I have the right to say ‘no’ to anything when I feel I am not ready, it is unsafe, or violates my values.” Just for breathing, I deserved the same fundamental human rights as everybody else—even men! For a woman from the FLDS, this was a huge awakening. This was Genshai.
Over the next several days, it felt like I was rebuilding the foundation of my life, stone by stone. Only this time, it was not built on the sand of unhealthy beliefs and nonexistent boundaries. I was able to walk into the courtroom on Wednesday, November 4, 2009, to testify with grace and strength. Now I wrote the words “LOVE” and “GENSHAI” on my hand. The repeated challenges of Mark Stevens, Raymond’s defense attorney, could not move me. I was like that rock on the ranch.
The Schleicher County jury found Raymond Merrill Jessop guilty of sexual assault of a child. On November 10, 2009, the jury sentenced Raymond to ten years in state prison and an $8,000 fine. I sat in the courtroom as the sentence was read. Yet there was no triumph inside of me. The clinking sound of the handcuffs on my cousin’s wrists startled me. I felt a visceral clinking in my soul. As they led Ray away, I felt a very real part of me went to prison with him.