Wait, Christine, wait. I'm gonna get you from the front too.
-Okay. -I got it from the back.
All right, this looks good.
In 2016,
my husband and I moved to Short Creek on the Utah-Arizona border.
It's the fundamentalist Mormon version of Mecca.
-You have a call from… -Warren Jeffs.
You may start the conversation now.
At the time, their prophet, Warren Jeffs, was in prison.
Guilty of two counts of felony sexual assault against two girls.
We heard how dangerous this town was.
We heard it was the most reclusive, isolated town in America.
Warren Jeffs may be in prison,
but he's apparently still very much in charge.
Jeffs led the polygamous sect,
the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-day Saints.
But I felt drawn to come here to help these people.
And they said, "We don't need outsider help."
You're trespassing.
Well, guess what? Yes, they did.
Yes, they fucking did.
People who think this story came to an end with Warren going to prison are wrong.
They've left a very vulnerable population wide open to predators.
We didn't know who we could trust.
Sam Bateman saw himself being an heir apparent to Warren Jeffs.
That tells you all you need to know.
Predators don't come in dressed with their horns and their cape.
They come in dressed in their suit and tie.
The only reason I'm rich
is Heavenly Father blessed me with these girls.
Everybody wants to jump in, huh?
He said,
"Are you having temptations to report Samuel to the law?"
What?
Tolga, we have to… I have to turn this tape in.
We're the only ones in, so we gotta get in more.
Yeah, face the curtain. Nice. Stay that way a little bit.
I wasn't there to betray them.
I don't know if it's traitors or what.
I was there to save them.
This is the police! I want your hands above your head!
Are you a prophet?
I would be a liar if I said I wasn't.
Go ahead.
Here we go.
There she goes.
There we go.
We're basically moving to the Crick.
I mean, it is absolutely crazy out here.
Especially for me. I'm a record producer. What the hell am I doing out here?
There we are. We're moving in.
Colorado City.
Gloves off.
Okay, it's makeshift, okay?
We gave up the life of comfort.
For the life among the polygamists.
Go this way.
I'm gonna walk this way.
-Tolga, you go this way. -I'm gonna do ten different shots.
Stop.
When we got here,
we felt like we were in the Wild, Wild West.
There were no outsiders here. I mean, there was maybe one other outside family.
That I knew of.
Hey, buddy. Hey, buddy.
My husband Tolga is a music video producer and a photographer.
And so of course, when we moved to this town, he wanted to document it.
Hold on.
So…
This is where the FLDS community gets their food supplies.
It's not just FLDS. A lot of people come here.
Well, that's true. Right. A lot of people come here. Including… myself.
When Christine came along,
everybody was leery of her
because nobody knew what she was about.
We always had people looking at us like we were a freak show.
So there was a lot of speculation among our people
that they were just here to do something for TV or write a book or something.
We're documenting it all.
They were a very eccentric couple, and it was very odd.
He was from Turkey,
and he had long hair with a little ponytail,
and she was like a little blonde…
…like, Hollywood girl.
She wore a lot of vintage clothing,
which I thought was darling.
But I didn't know for sure why she was here.
Nobody has to buy water here.
It's so beautiful to come up here.
-It's not work. It's like… inspiration. -Yeah, I know. It's true.
I felt a sense of calling
that I wanted to move here.
Long ago, I used to be Mormon.
I was mainstream Mormon,
but I was absolutely zealous and devoted.
Mormons believe in prophets.
And I met a man who persuaded me that he was a modern-day prophet.
And I decided, if this man was a prophet,
I was going to be completely obedient.
I had to do what he said or risk my soul.
Little by little, I got more confused,
and I lost my critical thinking.
Before I knew it,
I was so broken.
I didn't even know who I was anymore.
So I then spent the next decade
reading everything I could about cults.
I became an expert in cult psychology.
I believed that every single person who was FLDS needed to be rescued
from irrational cultic beliefs and brainwashing.
But I felt connected to these people.
So all of this made me believe
that I could be helpful here.
And when I got here,
I learned that the FLDS were floundering.
In the aftermath of Warren Jeffs's incarceration,
the community has really been fraying and fragmenting.
Warren Jeffs wound up in a prison down in Texas.
He's been there a long time.
But I've been around the story long enough to know incarcerating Warren
would do nothing to diminish his power.
Having him in prison doesn't change what he is.
You know, Heavenly Father hasn't appointed another to be the prophet.
So as far as we're concerned, he's still the prophet.
-Do you know what happened in that trial? -I don't want to know anything about it.
You don't want to know anything about it? How come?
Just don't want to.
I shut myself off to that negative about him, I--
-You don't believe it's true? -I know it's not true.
Warren Jeffs became more powerful because he's now a martyr.
And from his prison in Texas, he would put out edicts.
Behold that which you hear, the revelations of God.
He told his congregation, "No more marriages."
He told them to stop having sex.
Because he's not having any sort of intimate contact,
apparently nobody else could.
We weren't supposed to be getting married.
We couldn't have marital relations.
Even with your husband, then we didn't hug anymore.
We've been taught our whole lives that not one year should go by
without a child being born.
And now there were no more children.
Nobody was having babies.
Oh my gosh.
Look at these cribs.
Holy mackerel. This is where they took all the cribs and bassinets
after you couldn't have children anymore.
There are just hundreds and hundreds of FLDS cribs in here.
Wow.
You have a group of people who are paralyzed,
waiting for their leader to be released from prison,
not knowing what the right steps are to do.
And around 2015,
Warren seemed to be getting more mentally unstable,
and he stopped communicating with almost everyone outside of prison.
And then in 2016,
the outside government came in
and took control of the town away from the FLDS and Warren Jeffs.
The court sort of took control of the entire community.
The prophet was gone.
We weren't getting directive.
We were a very, very vulnerable
and hungry… people.
When we got to Short Creek,
we began to see what the FLDS were going through.
We started seeing endless moving trailers
packing up and leaving town.
We learned that, when the town had been taken over by the state of Utah,
the FLDS started being evicted from their homes.
I need you off the property.
I'm not gonna be off the property.
-Okay, then I'll call the police. -I want you to kick me out of my home.
Because in order for them to stay in their homes,
they had to sign a document
that they believed was a violation of their religion.
Take a picture of this.
This is an eviction
of somebody who was just evicted last week,
moved over temporarily into this house.
So, Tolga and I just started documenting these things.
Do you need help? Can we help him? Do you need help?
I don't know what's going on, but this looks really wrong.
I feel bad for these people.
This was my great-grandfather Elmer's homestead.
It's just totally heartless.
We just saw what I felt was injustice,
and no one cared because they were FLDS
and had been painted with the crimes of Warren Jeffs.
So, we thought,
well, maybe we could do a documentary and tell the other side of the story
of these FLDS people because they're so stigmatized.
Okay, that's rolling.
And this is rolling. Oh, I'm not rolling yet.
I have to do this, so…
it syncs to audio on both cameras.
We wanted to help people understand the positive side of the community.
You look like you're going on a safari.
-What's with the hat? -I wanted to look like a producer.
Okay, Tolga, I'm gonna do it.
Let's do a little orientation, um, real quick.
Okay, do it.
Okay. So, if he's filming, if you see Tolga with a camera,
then don't call his name and don't call my name.
We wanna show the regular life. We wanna show the truth.
It took us a while to totally trust,
but she really knew how to get into people's hearts
and put 'em at ease.
So, the FLDS people consider themselves to be like the real Mormons, right?
Yeah, we just feel like that we wanna live it fundamentally, in its purity.
-Yeah, okay. -And…
I didn't know about her backstory.
I didn't know anything about her ventriloquism.
Happy birthday to you.
I happen to be a ventriloquist.
By the way, this is Zucchini. She's my scarecrow.
I'm not just a scarecrow.
I'm half scarecrow, half cookie.
Oh yeah…
Before I moved here, I lived a very colorful life.
I had all kinds of adventures.
Miss Michigan, Christine Marie.
I am a former Miss Michigan,
an escape artist,
a certified life coach.
We're gonna make vowel babies.
I love these.
So, what you do is cut out two pieces of fabric.
When I met Christine, she had a TV show called Gingerbread House,
and she was teaching kindergarten.
I've never met anybody like her in my life.
I would catch her doing crazy stuff, helping out people.
Dean is here.
He collected up a bunch of donations for our community.
Yeah, we got…
As we were making the documentary,
I also launched a nonprofit called Voices for Dignity.
We would bring comfort bags and resource lists.
And these are all new backpacks and duffel bags.
You're kidding. Woo!
We needed a way for the women to have an income,
so Christine created Short Creek Cottage,
where we'd sell homemade items.
Oh, that's adorable.
I don't know how I would have survived without this cottage.
Yeah, let's do… let's do it with energy.
I had gained their trust.
I thought, what an honor and unique position it was for me.
-How'd you get down? Tell Tolga. -I landed.
-I had to. -How did you get down?
I decided whether people leave the church or don't, I want them to be okay.
And that I would never say anything negative about their prophet,
because I have the unique opportunity to help people.
Why would they come to somebody fighting against their way of life?
Wait one second, Christine, wait.
You can turn that one on. Hold on. Wait, guys.
We were very excited about this documentary project we were making.
I'm getting video.
By this point,
it was just known that Tolga's around with a camera.
Tolga! He's got a big lookin' camera!
He's video-ing everyone Around the world too!
And that's how we met Sam Bateman.
Hey, Christine.
-Come right through here. -Okay.
-I'll push all this out of the way. -Okay, thanks.
All right. Got it.
In the community,
Sam was not generally a man with status.
I don't mind doing things that
could break my leg or something if I wasn't careful.
When I first met Sam Bateman, I didn't think much about him.
He had got an eviction notice.
And he asked me to help,
which I did.
At that time, he said, "I'm not doing very well."
"I am in financially dire straits."
He and his wife were getting a divorce,
and he was a broken man.
People thought of Sam Bateman as kind of a shlub.
He could never seem to make money at his jobs.
He was looking for, you know, a lifeline.
I didn't see him for some time.
And then Sam reappears with a new wife.
Okay. All better. There you are.
Over 18, but young and beautiful.
Where should I look?
You can just look at him or Christine.
Look at me.
Keep in mind, people are not getting married
because the prophet stopped marrying people.
-I have… -Is it an iPhone?
I remember thinking, "That's interesting."
How did Sam get a new wife, you know?
You know, somebody's… been doing something that
wasn't put together by the prophet.
-What background do you want? That? -This one.
-Yeah. -Okay.
The next time I saw Sam, he had another wife.
Again, over 18.
And the younger sister of the first wife.
I was running the Short Creek Cottage.
And Sam showed up outside in the back.
He was in a vehicle with a trailer. Like a flatbed trailer.
There's a gift we all can give To help along the way…
And I went out, and it was, like, just… dripping with women.
There are so many things to do
He'd showed up with all of these wives singing.
I was like, "Really?"
How did that happen?
There were babies too.
It was like they clear forgot some of our core beliefs.
It was really strange to me.
All these women and girls.
I had no desire to be… close to that situation.
I just started avoiding all of 'em.
Everybody that I heard was involved with him, I just…
Okay, I don't wanna go there.
Sam was always kind of a joke in our whole friend group.
So at first, I didn't believe it.
I thought it was funny.
But when Warren goes to a whole group of people and says,
"Thou shalt not have sex,"
I'll bet you that lasts about two and a half mi-- milliseconds.
Why? Because you can't proselyte human nature out of humans.
They're gonna do it.
And guess what? They did.
Sam is apparently doing his own version of being FLDS.
Getting married, having babies,
and who knows what else.
The FLDS community shunned Sam.
They knew something was wrong. Red flag, Sam is shunned.
I don't shun.
If you shun, you can't help.
If you attack, they're not gonna come to you when they're in need.
You wanna go flyin'?
Oh, it's working. Okay, so what happened?
Just seeing Sam with all these females
is concerning in and of itself.
So I wanted to figure out what was going on.
Sam invited Tolga and I to come to dinner
at a house where Sam and a lot of his wives lived.
-Hi. -Hey.
There were a lot of people there, but mostly young women.
And then some very small children.
They gave us their Sunday best.
And then after dinner,
they started singing to us like a talent show.
I think these little girls want to sing you a song too.
-Okay. -Some might.
-All right. -Oh, that'd be wonderful.
I wanna go here so I get everybody.
If you guys don't all fit in the camera,
I have to, like, keep turning, I guess, like this.
All right, we're ready for the song.
An inheritance
With our Savior
In Zion…
I had alarm bells ringing everywhere.
Is everlasting
I knew that Sam was married to some of these women,
you know, even these young women.
But there were rumors that he was married to the children.
And this group is called?
Us.
Okay.
-How old are you guys? -Didn't you make the words and the…?
-What? -We're both 10.
Really?
After the dinner and talent show,
I talked to a police officer.
The Colorado City/Hildale City Police Department
is a department that's contracted
to manage policing services on both sides of the border
in Utah and in Arizona.
We here in Colorado City/Hildale
have… a nice little community.
The nickname's "the Crick."
It's been kind of a sanctuary place
for people who practice plural marriage.
Prior to Christine Marie speaking to us,
members of the community had reached out to the police department
on a number of occasions about Sam Bateman.
We had heard that he was trying to gather members of the FLDS community
to his new offshoot,
that he was gathering multiple wives,
and that some of those wives may be underage.
It was obviously cause for concern.
But I told Christine Marie at the time
that unless we could establish that some criminal act occurred,
we did not have a crime to investigate.
Okay.
Sergeant Wilkinson told me,
"It's not a crime to call someone your wife, even if it's a child."
"What's a crime is to do something with that child,
something like to molest that child."
And I didn't have that information.
So I'm paying attention to any clue I can get.
And Sam started inviting us to things and wanting us to film.
Wow, how many people are coming out of there? Wow.
What in the world?
It was uncanny.
We would go on a hike up in the mountains.
Sam would be there.
How's it going?
That was amazing. I'm gonna shake your hand.
That was like, how do you get up those rocks like that?
And then we got an idea.
Hello, Tolga.
Hey, brother.
Sorry, my voice is so bad, but I just got back into town, so…
…I'm gonna bring you a little surprise. Is that okay?
It's your birthday, so I wanted to kind of film it and give this to you.
The idea was,
if they let us film…
-Happy birthday! -Where's the birthday boy?
…maybe if we spent more time with them
and developed a relationship with them,
maybe we would see what was really going on.
Was he sexually abusing any of these girls?
-How old are we now? -Thank you, 46.
Forty-six? Okay, good.
Did you have a good birthday?
What did you do for his birthday?
-We're doing it tomorrow. -Tomorrow? Okay.
I'm so glad we came tonight, then.
This is for the king.
Yes.
We were gonna literally bring you a crown.
We wanted to get a crown, but we couldn't find any, so…
Well, thank you.
What I told them is,
"I'll go in my room and shut the door,
and you sing 'Happy Birthday' while I'm there."
Oh.
Sam, I learned,
was the actual leader of this new group.
The Samuelite Group.
They all lived in the same house.
A big blue house.
The group was very small,
less than 50 people, and that includes babies.
Besides Sam, there were three main families involved.
He recruited Torrance Bistline.
Torrance was a very motivated businessman.
Sam also recruited Ladell Bistline Jr.
and Moroni Johnson.
I was so lacking in that gift of revelation.
I could not do it without Samuel's help.
I love him more than I love anyone, and I will do what he asks me to do.
And he has proven it and proven it, and God is my witness.
All the men in Sam's group had status in the community,
and they all were successful.
And I thought,
why are they going for Sam, of all people?
For the FLDS,
everyone was expected to be obedient to the prophet.
That's the way to heaven.
So they're dying to hear from Warren,
dying to know what their next step was.
It's been five, six, seven years
since some of these people have heard from Warren.
Now suddenly,
Sam came up with
that Warren Jeffs has actually died,
and the media is lying to you, as they always do,
and it's just a mannequin that's in his room.
And Sam said, "I am now Warren Jeffs's messenger."
"He's giving me this direction from the other side of death."
This, in fact, was what Warren had said
when his father died.
His father had been the prophet,
and Warren said that his father was now speaking through him.
And so what Sam told his followers
was that Warren had left his body
and that he was now speaking through Samuel.
The other night we were talking, and he said,
"This is the spirit of Uncle Warren."
And I thought, that's pretty bold.
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
But if he didn't say it, he'd have never woke me up
and never started down the path of waking me up.
He is now the mouthpiece for Warren Jeffs.
I can feel… people's spirits.
I can feel it. The spirit. It's a gift.
Sam decided that the mantle of Warren Jeffs had fallen upon him.
I mean, shit, you take people's faith away,
they'll do anything to feel it.
Moroni was the first person to believe in Sam.
And because Sam was now the prophet,
he agreed to turn over his daughters,
even his very young daughters, to marry Sam.
By the time we met Moroni,
he had given all of his daughters to Sam.
I surrender
the ladies under my care.
They belong to Father Samuel.
What he chooses to do with them is his business.
Moroni had many wives,
and most of those wives married Sam.
And then Sam starts taking
Ladell's daughters
and his wife
and other women in his care.
And I says, "Samuel, she's yours."
And he said, "God bless you."
So your whole family is now going to be sealed to Samuel?
Mm-hmm.
However it might look to an earthly mind,
you don't have any clue.
Those girls love him.
I'll testify that to the whole world.
I've seen it.
Everybody in a fundamental Mormon group
want to be associated with the prophet.
They want to be the right-hand man of the prophet.
They want to be the wife of the prophet.
It's like being the wife of God.
And if you're a believer, who wouldn't want that?
Several of my nieces ended up
marrying him.
It gave them the opportunity to have children.
And… I could…
I just felt like, but by the grace of God, that could be me.
It was really hard for me to see
these people that I really loved and respected
go that way.
You know, Lud and Torrance are my nephews.
So I did know
a lot of 'em very well.
Now that he's a prophet,
Sam would use his power to make his desires known.
Torrance had a very successful green energy company
that was making a lot of money.
Moroni and Ladell worked for this company.
And I learned that Sam's followers were subsidizing his lifestyle.
We found out where he lived,
and so we'd drive by it every couple of days
and see how many cars he had there.
And then all of a sudden, holy crap.
That's basically the Bateman crew
and their fleet of vehicles driving by my house.
They'd have a whole motorcade with a Range Rover and two Bentleys
and then another Range Rover.
And they'd drive around town and show off.
It was really sort of a…
a fuck you to all the men
who had dissed on Sam and thought he wasn't important in his life.
He wanted to show those men that he was the king.
Did you ever hear the story
of our Jan's Canyon experience?
It was a training… It was a training I was giving the girls.
It was so dang deep.
It looks… It looks small on the surface, but it was… it was eternal.
I… I could feel it from the start.
Is it something we should film them talking about?
Oh, I… I think so, yeah.
At some point,
Sam started believing that he should be the star of our documentary.
What could be better than blessing the world with his… his presence,
his face, his teachings?
Hi, Samuel.
Okay, we're coming with cameras.
Okay.
Sam's calling us saying, "Can you come film this?"
We play along.
The rule of thumb was, if Sam wanted us to spend time,
we were gonna go. This is our new job.
-We brought Christine! -Hi!
Hi, Christine.
We are going on an adventure.
Tolga was making money doing music videos,
but now his career was on hold.
His life is on hold.
He wanted us to film all the time.
I'd like some videos of me just walking real fast.
My day would start out, eight o'clock in the morning,
"Tolga, Sam wants you to go film him on the motorcycle."
Tolga, he's there. You see him?
He was the worst. He couldn't jump the motorcycle.
He couldn't do anything. I had to sit there and watch him
like a fool.
Amazing.
He would say, "I want you to watch me hike."
Wow, you're really talented. I didn't know that.
-Where did you learn to do that? -What, to hike? Just hiking, huh?
We're here with Sam and the girls,
and he's, um, facilitating a reenactment of an experience.
There's a message in it. It's like a life lesson,
and he wanted that captured, so we're doing it.
So this is kind of how it was.
Did you say, "Pray for me," right?
Oh yeah, I didn't say that, did I?
-Should we do that one again? -Yeah.
Pray for me.
-That works. -Perfect.
I can't guarantee this is…
this is the right path.
Watch the cactus.
Girls, I've been wondering when you'd come down.
I'm not displeased with you, but this is a lesson that people have to learn,
is that you can communicate through the spirit of God.
Okay. What? Should we do it again, or what?
Then one day,
Sam called in the morning,
and he said he had an impression.
Now, an "impression" is like God's telling you something.
"I had an impression from the Lord
that you and Tolga
need to come over to my house this morning
and we need to tell you some things."
Oh my goodness, thank you.
It might be a bit slushy because it was in the freezer.
He had all these women and children there.
Because it's like they're here to protect us…
And then Sam said he had an impression that he should leave the room
while the girls talk to us.
Okay.
Finally, the chance to talk to the girls by themselves.
I was trying to figure out, what can I ask without giving a red flag?
So do you feel like… do you feel like your life…
Like, how has your life changed since all this?
Since you got your testimony of Samuel?
All for the better.
-Fifty times happier. -Yeah.
-Fifty times more at peace. -Something to live for.
There's always something to live for and always an increase.
And you always know that somebody loves you,
somebody's praying for you.
What more could a girl ask for but just to belong somewhere.
Yeah.
The girls were enamored with Sam.
They told us that they had received
confirmation from God that they were meant to be with Sam.
Should we hop in the Bentley and get Toro and talk to him?
-Sure. -Okay.
And then Sam said, "Let's go for a drive."
And he puts us in the car,
and he picks three girls. "I want you and you and you to come along."
We start driving around.
There's four of us in the back seat,
and then Tolga in the front with Sam, but he wasn't filming.
Sam starts talking about how much he suffered.
And it seems as if he's trying to build up to something.
I thought, where is this gonna go?
I put in a lot of hours to wait for this moment
to see what is really happening.
So I reached my hand down into my purse,
grabbed my phone,
and I sneak it up my leg.
And I very secretly hit record.
And Sam
just spilled the beans.
Okay.
Mmm.
Sam explained
that he had to atone for the sins of wicked men
by having these three wives
have sex with them.
The three girls he had chosen to come in the car
were the three he was telling you?
Yes.
This girl was 13 years old.
It was clear, for the first time,
that… there was sexual abuse of children.
Yeah.
Mmm.
Yeah.
While he's telling this story,
he's trying to describe
all the pain and suffering that he had to go through.
In the meantime,
these pure FLDS women,
young women and child,
are incredibly humiliated.
They were like,
you know, not good.
Yeah, it hurts.
She said, "I was so dang scared."
And then Sam starts telling them what to say.
-Not one speck of anything. -Trauma?
Has it…?
Wow.
All of the panic circuitry in my body was exploding.
I mean, my mouth was turning into cotton,
and I couldn't handle any more.
Well, I am gonna go start getting ready and feed the animals,
but Tolga can stay and talk more if… if you want.
So, um…
-We actually gotta be home too. -Well, thank you.
-Love you, guys. -All good.
-Thank you. -Thank you. I love you.
-God bless you. -Love you too.
-Love you, Sam. Love you all. -Thank you guys so much.
Bye.
The date is November 10th, 2021.
The location is
Colorado City, Arizona.
Driving around in a car.
Yeah. Tolga, we have to… we have to…
I have to turn this tape in.
Yes, but you got… you got now full trust.
You gotta wait a couple more days.
-I know, I can't… I have to explain. -They can't know.
These girls need my… They need to trust me,
or they won't ever trust anybody.
So I don't know what to do.
-You know. They'll know-- -Just lay low for a second.
-Just let the police know, and… lay low. -Yeah.
Yeah, I'm gonna call. now, and… lay low. -Yeah.