Nico
Muhly,

Has everybody been following all the new and exciting developments in Texas, Utah, and Arizona with the polygamist sects? Warren Jeffs, the prophet, keeps on going on hunger & masturbation strikes, getting sick, and moving around. Meanwhile, the fascinating and endless appeals process is continuing, sometimes handwritten! A 25-year old fled the twin towns of Colorado City and Hilldale! Here’s a picture of a very large house in Colorado City I took last year:

We’re going back into rehearsals for Dark Sisters, which deals, in a way, with a very similar situation to the one this woman found herself in. However, now, thanks to a long but patchy history of women escaping successfully, it’s easier to ring up the police and a network of informal shelters. If you want to read a strangely wonderful account, check out Carolyn Jessop’s book Escape. It’s strange inasmuch as it’s ghostwritten but not, it seems, ghost-edited, so it follows a very casual narrative structure and occasionally dwells on enormously small details (another sisterwife stole my shampoo!) while eliding over large ones (over the next three years, I had four more children!)

One more interesting thing about that woman escaping: it seems like she got help from Willie Jessop, who used to be a sort of spokesman/enforcer for the FLDS, until one of the various internecine fights inside the FLDS shuffled him around. In a lot of the memoirs written by escapees, he is a sort of villain, and here he re-materializes as a helping hand….