- A new documentary series on
Netflix exposes the horrors of a church in Utah. - One woman said she was forced to marry an 85-year-old leader of the
cult when she was 19.
Content warning: This article mentions
When Rebecca Wall Musser was 19 years old, her father married her off to Rulon Jeffs, the 85-year-old head of the polygamous cult, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
She said that after the wedding, Jeffs rolled on top of her and said, "Spread your legs."
"I felt like, 'This is everything that we were told was bad,'" Musser recalled in the new Netflix documentary series "Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey."
It details the horrifying experiences of the teenage girls and young women who were abused by the leaders of the FLDS, who called themselves prophets.
The rebels formed the cult after the mainstream Mormon church outlawed polygamy in 1904.
Musser tells her story in the first episode of the documentary. She appears with her other so-called "sister wives," including Alicia Rohbock, who was forced to marry Jeffs a year after Musser. At the time, he was 86 and Rohbock was 20.
One of Rulon Jeffs' wives said she was made to clean up after him because he was incontinent
Rohbock described how her former husband, who was too frail to walk on his own, would demand that she took him to the bathroom following sex.
She said that he wouldn't always make it to the toilet before wetting himself, leaving her to clean up. "That was my introduction to the blow dryer," Rohbock told the series' director, Rachel Dretzin, about the first time she dealt with his incontinence and used the device on the carpet.
Appearing in home videos in "Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey," Jeffs has plastic breathing tubes inserted in his nostrils. Rohbock recalled stepping on the cord attached to the oxygen tank once — and the octogenarian getting "pretty angry" because she'd "yanked his face."
Rohbock and Musser managed to escape the confines of the FLDS, which was located within a mountain range near the Utah-Arizona border. The remote community made headlines across the world when Rulon's successor, his son, Warren Jeffs, was arrested in 2006 by the FBI.
Women and girls in the FLDS said they were kept in line by the men and had to pretend they were happy
Five years later, in 2011, Warren Jeffs was found guilty of sexual assault of a child and aggravated sexual assault of a child. He'd married two girls, then aged 15 and 12, and added them to his collection of wives, believed to have numbered almost 90.
In "Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey," a woman going by the name Charlene said the prophets adopted the mantra to keep the women and girls in line.
Charlene said that the phrase "keep sweet, pray, and obey," which was often sung aloud, meant "to be in control of your emotions and you didn't display things like anger or resentment or frustration."
Musser also remembered how the girls, who wore prairie dresses, had no rights. "They didn't let us work, they didn't let us go to school," she said. "Our sole purpose was to be in religious prayer and to be obedient, adoring."
Wallace Jeffs, one of Warren Jeffs' younger brothers, told Dretzin that he thought most of the men in the FDLS regarded women as "chattel" and "property."
He said they had been indoctrinated to think they would be accepted into the "highest degree of the celestial kingdom" if they took at least three brides and had as many children as they could.
The former disciple explained how he decided to leave the FLDS after seeing a photograph of his then middle-aged brother kissing a teenager. "That's when I said, 'I'm done,'" he said.
Rohbock talked about her cloistered upbringing, saying the wedding kiss she received from the elder Jeffs was her first. "He gave me one heck of a smacker and I felt like I was being sucked in," Rohbock said. According to the Netflix series, the leader of the sect married more than 30 women before dying, at age 92, in 2002.
"A young girl dreams of fairy tales and all that kind of stuff and your brain runs away with you. and you think it's going to be magical," Rohbock said. "Yeah, it wasn't magical."