Brandon James and Gail Blackmore were charged with the unlawful removal of their 13-year-old girl for an illegal purpose.Īfter the girl’s marriage to Jeffs, Rachel had seen her “almost every day” when his wives and daughters were sent to a “place of refuge” near Pringle, South Dakota. In November 2016, both Brandon Seth Blackmore and Rachel Jeffs testified against his parents in the B.C. Ever since, Brandon has been locked in a battle to gain sole custody of their children, so that they won’t be denied an education as he was. He found out when he arrived home from work and the door was locked. An hour before their wedding, the 48-year-old prophet married Brandon’s 13-year-old sister.īrandon’s father - Brandon James Blackmore - and Gail Blackmore (the third of his father’s three wives) had driven their daughter to Arizona, met the prophet for a counselling session before the wedding, witnessed the religious ceremony and left almost immediately to return home.īy 2012, the younger Brandon had four children with his wife, before Jeffs deemed him unworthy. Within hours, the bride and groom were back on the road for Bountiful just as the prophet ordered. A few days later, Brandon was married to a young women that he’d never met. Two years later, Jeffs ordered 21-year-old Brandon Jr. The rest - including Brandon’s father, Winston’s younger brother - stuck with Jeffs. Half the community went with Winston’s breakaway group. But the community split in 2002 after Warren Jeffs excommunicated the FLDS bishop, Winston Blackmore. He’d grown up in the FLDS community of Bountiful, B.C., which is about four hours’s drive north of where Rachel was living in Montana.īlackmores founded Bountiful. A few months later, she met Brandon Seth Blackmore. In Montana, Rachel focused on her own education, getting her high-school equivalency and then starting college. The hardship of money (is) much less pain than church.” “Still with all that pain and hardship, it was not near to the pain experienced there (within the FLDS) and I never, ever dreamed of going back. I cried a lot,” she said in an interview from her home in Idaho. They bounced around from Salt Lake City to Texas to Montana. “It seemed so unfair to the wives they already had.” “I loved my relatives there and was grateful for their help, but I didn’t like the way so many men there were on the lookout for more wives,” she writes in her book. Initially, they stayed with relatives in another polygamous community known as Centennial Park, which split from the FLDS more than 30 years ago. Her first decision was enrolling her children in public school where they began the tough task of catching up on all they’d missed. But it was nowhere near enough to get a well-paid job that would support five children, the oldest of whom was 12. Her Grade 8 education was enough for her to teach Grade 3 at the church-run school. The hardest thing was figuring out how to support them,” she said in an interview. “It was really hard for me to realize the amount of responsibility, it was taking care of kids by myself. Outside, there was nothing but decisions to be made. Until she decided to leave, every decision had been made for her, including whom to marry. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Yes, it’s been tough to leave behind 47 of her siblings, the man she loved and three sister wives with whom she had shared a home and husband. Now 34, she’s convinced that the next chapters of her life will be happier ones. In her book - Breaking Free: How I Escaped Polygamy, the FLDS Cult and My Father, Warren Jeffs - Rachel Jeffs describes the abuse and the absolute control her father still wields from a Texas prison cell, where he is serving a sentence of life plus 20 years for sexually abusing a 12-year-old girl and a 15-year-old girl. First it was sexual abuse, from the time she was eight until she was 16, then years of threats if she ever divulged the secret, and cruel retribution for the few times that she did. She had had enough years of abuse at her father’s hands. Their phone calls go unanswered and messages are never returned.īut Rachel Jeffs didn’t care. Under orders from Warren Jeffs - her father and the FLDS prophet - church members can’t speak to apostates.
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