Inside Utah's Sad, Abusive Polygamy

(from the Salt Lake Weekly, December 1998)

Sexuality Lesson.....

Perhaps no one else has lived through more daily lives and inner workings of as many different Mormon-fundamentalist polygamist groups as Laura Chapman.

Because of her first-hand experiences, there is one message above all she would like state officials, and the public in general, to know: Incest, statutory rape, physical, sexual and emotional abuse, and forced marriages are endemic to all of the polygamist communities. They do not, as some have proclaimed, occur only as often as they do in the general monogamous population, and are not isolated to a few groups like the recently exposed Kingston clan.

Chapman is a bright and articulate woman in her mid-30s. As is common for girls in polygamous families, she was pulled out of public school at age 11. However, after escaping polygamy, she managed to earn a GED and then a Bachelor's degree in sociology and human development as a single parent while working part time and raising four daughters and a son with special needs.

Her specific educational knowledge combined with her life experiences make Chapman's perspective unique. "I did my field work for more than 30 years before I got my formal education," she says. She employs that combination in her drive to help victims of polygamy, and in educating a state so ambivalent about the practice of plural marriage that it appears schizophrenic.

Born, raised and once married in polygamy, Chapman is now a board member of Tapestry of Polygamy (TOP). TOP is a group of former polygamous wives, and women who grew up in polygamous families, helping those who wish to escape polygamy, exacting change and pushing local leaders to act on behalf of polygamy's victims.

While living in hiding from polygamists who have threatened her, Chapman doesn't shy away from her highly visible work with TOP, or from telling her story. "I have no shame attached to things I had no control of as a child. Maybe through my experience, I can help others who've gone through this," she says.

Chapman admits it hasn't been easy. "But that's me, always trying to do the impossible," she laughs. "Right down to my unruly hair that I could never make stay in those tight braids and waves the Johnson/Jeffs girls had to wear."

In those days of tight braids, Chapman began to question her family's lifestyle. One day in kindergarten, she committed what she calls "the unthinkable" by bringing a friend home with her from school a black friend. "I was told afterward never to bring friends home because my father might go to prison," she recalls. "And then I was told not to be friends with Negroes because they are the seed of Cain, and if I married one it would be 'death on the spot.'"

This doctrine of hate is taught by all Mormon-fundamentalist polygamists who refer to statements made by early leaders of the Mormon church. One leader, Brigham Young, said, "... any man having one drop of the seed of (Cain) ... in him cannot hold the priesthood, and if no other prophet ever spake it before, I will say it now in the name of Jesus Christ. I know it is true and others know it ..." The same position was held by the LDS church until 1978.

Chapman no longer uses her married name, but instead goes by the name on her birth certificate. "It was the name my father gave me to hide his paternity, so it's not his name either," she says. "Kind of like how the Kingstons just choose names out of the phone book."

Because of the often arbitrary names given to offspring, genealogies can be difficult to trace. However, individuals are clearly aware of family ties due to a belief in royal lineage. "I'm related to just about everyone in Utah who has anything to do with polygamy," Chapman laughs. "And if they keep reproducing like they do, I'll eventually be related to about half the state of Utah."

Indeed, Chapman's pedigree goes back four generations in Mormon-fundamentalist polygamy, reading like a who's who of Utah's own home-grown cults. Her father was arrested in the 1953 raid on the Johnson/Jeffs clan in Short Creek, now known as the twin cities of Colorado City and Hilldale (where Chapman was born). Rulon Allred, murdered by members of the Labaron group leader of the Allred group, was her great uncle on her mother's side. Her grandfather was Morris Kuntz who, before his death, was held in high regard among independent polygamists. Chapman married into the Barlow group, and her aunt married into the Labaron group.

There are an estimated 10,000 members of the Johnson/Jeffs clan in Colorado City and Hilldale, with followers also living along the Wasatch Front. Although this group doesn't marry as closely as the Kingston clan does, they do intermarry. According to Chapman, one of the leaders tells members that it's all right to marry relatives as close as cousins, and uncles to nieces. Like the Kingstons, they are also producing children with genetic disorders, such as Tourette's syndrome, as well as dealing with some communicable diseases because polygamists don't inoculate their children. Ross Martin, public information officer for the Utah Department of Health, says whooping cough is currently spreading through the community.

Chapman describes a world for girls in which there is no semblance of childhood or innocence. The prevalence of pedophilic behavior dominates the culture. The victims are forced to revere their abusers. "It would be difficult to pull a girl out of Colorado City who hasn't been sexually assaulted," she claims. "I know girls as young as 9 years old who have been forced to marry."

Besides sexual abuse endured by girls, they're also condemned to a life of child slavery. "Like other girls my age, I was cooking meals for our entire family (of 36 people) and sewing clothes by age 13," Chapman recounts. "At age 10, I was baking a dozen loaves of bread at a time."

Beatings by her father and one of his four wives were common occurrences; Laura and her siblings bore welts over minor infractions. "No mother can protect her own child from the other mothers," Chapman explains.

Born the 25th of her father's 31 children, Chapman's earliest memories are of molestation by her father. "I can remember my father molesting me as early as 2 years old, waking up terrified with him in my room. That lasted until I was 13," she says. Between the ages of 13 and 15 she was routinely molested by some of her brothers. "When I confided to my mom what my brothers were doing we had to go to my father about it," she remembers. "He told my mom he wanted to talk to her alone and when she came out she said, 'Your father says we have to let [brothers] be who they're going to be.'"

When she was 4 years old, one of Chapman's step-brothers tied her to a bedpost and attempted to rape her. "Afterward I was crying and so my father told me he would slap me until I stopped crying, which he proceeded to do," she remembers. "My mother made herself busy in the kitchen so she wouldn't have to watch."

Using the word "father" for the man who is responsible for Chapman's paternity, is done only in that context. According to Chapman, these men are not fathers in any other sense of the word. Neither are they husbands, spiritual advisors or community leaders as they pretend to be. Instead, TOP's members maintain that these men are pedophiles the worst kind of predator.

Ironically, according to Chapman, people in the group are fond of saying that her father is, "One of the most Christ-like men they've ever met."

For Chapman or anyone living in a community that demands unquestioning allegiance and obedience to all men left no options. She had no options living in a community that preaches, "You can all but kill a child for deliberately disobeying." There are no options when you know no way to deal with problems other than prayer when you don't know you can call 911. You have no options when your mother is powerless to protect you from beatings inflicted by the other mothers or from sexual assault from your father and brothers.

"I can remember being suicidal as far back as 6, but not knowing how to do it," Chapman remembers. "So I'd lay on my bed andwill my heart to stop beating or to stop my breath."

At age 15, she tried to run away after a beating by her mom's sister, who was also a sister-wife. On her 16th birthday, her father took her for a ride in his Cadillac because it was time for her "Sexuality Lesson." It was a tradition for all her father's daughters. Driving down the highway at 60 mph, he told her not to speak to her mother about the lesson, because sister-wives don't tell each other about intimacies. "My father basically married me while I had my hand on the door handle debating whether or not to pull it and jump to my death," she remembers.

Her sister, married at 17 to a 70-year-old leader of the group, tried to press Chapman into an arranged marriage to a man she didn't know. But Chapman knew a boy from the Barlow group who was 20. The boy was a friend of her brother's, so she requested to marry him instead. "I wasn't in love and he wasn't either, but at least we knew each other some," she says, adding with pride, "I became the first girl in the group not to marry a man I was told to marry."

Although she was her husband's first wife, they were married without benefit of a legal marriage, and Chapman moved in with his family among the Barlow group. The Barlows, she remembers, also had their platitudes to live by: "Women are vessels to be worn out in childbirth," and "One child is worth 10 of the mother." She would soon experience these sentiments firsthand.

Among the Barlows, Chapman saw the same abuses that she experienced in the Johnson/Jeffs group and the Allred group, where her mother's relatives were. They were the same abuses she saw her cousins endure in the Labaron group, and with the independents she knew through her grandfather. In the house where she was now living with her in-laws, Chapman was silently watching. "I could hear my father-in-law's second wife beating the children," she remembers. "The same wife told me how her husband threw her down the stairs while she was pregnant."

Her father's-in-law second wife so became plagued with genital herpes on her rectum, while the grandchildren became infected with herpes in and on their mouths. "They actually went to a doctor that all the Barlows go to even though they don't believe in doctors," Chapman relates. "He told the mother to talk to the children about sexual abuse, and wanted her and my father-in-law to come in for marriage counseling. That was all that happened."

Chapman's husband worked on and off for his father, but they could never make ends meet due to his chronic unemployment. The couple were continually moving in and out of his parent's home while Chapman gave birth to five children. "All I had to eat during most pregnancies was toasted bread and canned fruit," she says. "As long as I could be frightened, confused and in poverty, I'd have no way out." Although the Barlows believe taking birth control is killing your children, Chapman told her husband she just wanted to do right by the children she had and didn't want any more. He told her if she used birth control, he wouldn't have anything more to do with her.

Later, Chapman confided to her husband about the sexual abuse she had suffered from her father and brothers. Instead of outrage, he told her how he, at the age of 19, had molested his 11-year-old sister. "From then on, I knew I couldn't trust him with our daughters," she says. "And I began planning my escape and accessing the local library to find out how to talk to my children about sexual abuse."

Their 10th anniversary was another clincher for Chapman's resolve to leave. He presented her with a ring, and then told her he had to take another wife in order to go to the Celestial Kingdom. She talked him into making their marriage legal, planning for the time that she could demand child support. He agreed, and they had a legal ceremony performed. Less than two months later, she and her children moved out.

Chapman says her ex-husband didn't try to contact their children until he was remarried. "He married a 16-year-old before our divorce was final," she says. Chapman has been unable to find an attorney who would take her case to fight her husband's right for visitation with the children. "I've all but sweat blood to give them a different life," she says. "How many parents would want their daughters to go to Colorado City? Don't I have the right to protect my children from that? Their father married an underaged girl and lives in a community of organized crime. I should have state and legal assistance behind me."

She compares leaving polygamy to taking someone from a third-world country and setting them down in New York City with terrorists after them. "It's harrowing, and there is no one there for you like there is when gang members leave," she says. "Polygamy is about gangs of criminals, too. It would have been nice to have had TOP to turn to."

In the process of building a life for herself and her children, Chapman began getting word from her sisters about other girls who were being molested and raped. She called the Division of Child and Family Services (DCFS) about one particular case. Chapman approached the girl by telling her about her own abuse, and explained to the girl that she had already reported the girl's father. "She freaked and told her husband, who is my 56-year-old former father-in-law," says Chapman. He told Chapman that she had her way of dealing with things and they had theirs; then he told his wife to pack her things. "He said, 'You don't know what we've gone through to keep her from state authorities,'" she recalls. "Then they drove down to Colorado City and across state lines, which is a federal offense. And DCFS dropped the case."

It is a misdemeanor in Utah when a person knows about child abuse but does not report the crime. In polygamy, if a person reports the crime, her or his life is threatened. Because of just such threats, Chapman and her children went to the YWCA for safety. "They almost didn't let me in because my husband wasn't beating me," she says. "I really didn't feel safe in Utah because I figured no one wil take this seriously."

Chapman asks rhetorically, "How many years will the state look the other way while laws are broken by these people? Twelve years ago my sister was abducted on her paper route, which is a federal offense," she says. "My sister was then held in her room and threatened to be killed by blood atonement [the spilling of one's blood to atone for sin]. The police said 'You can't be abducted in your own home.'"

It was natural for Chapman to align herself with TOP, after hearing about the group that had independently organized several months before accusations against the Kingston clan surfaced. Those accusations came to light after a bruised and bloodied 15-year-old girl called police from a gas station in Cache County. The girl claimed she was beaten by her father, John Daniel Kingston, for running away from a marriage to her 32-year-old uncle, David Kingston. Both men deny the charges.

While making strides, the work Chapman and the other women of TOP have tried to accomplish has been marked by frustration. When TOP found out about the Kingston girl, they called DCFS to ask what was being done about the statutory rape and incest accusations against the uncle. "The social worker said they were waiting for charges to be pressed," recalls Chapman. "So we said, 'Look, she's a minor in your custody and you have to be the ones to press charges.' We actually had to tell DCFS how to do their job."

Chapman is encouraged by recent overtures between the attorney general's office and the Allred group concerning domestic violence and child abuse. "I never thought I'd see this in my lifetime," says Chapman. "It's a big step, but so much more is needed."

At any rate, she is going to give the state and her work with TOP a couple of years, she says. As for those who abused her, she doesn't hesitate: "My best revenge is to live a healthy life."