Book Review: Breaking Free: How I Escaped My Father – Warren Jeffs, Polygamy, and the FLDS Cult by Rachel Jeffs

Breaking Free: How I Escaped My Father-Warren Jeffs-Polygamy, and the FLDS Cult by Rachel Jeffs
Publisher: Harper
Release Date: November 14, 2017
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Publisher’s Description:

In this searing memoir of survival in the spirit of Stolen Innocence, the daughter of Warren Jeffs, the self-proclaimed Prophet of the FLDS Church, takes you deep inside the secretive polygamist Mormon fundamentalist cult run by her family and how she escaped it.

Born into the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Rachel Jeffs was raised in a strict patriarchal culture defined by subordinate sister wives and men they must obey. No one in this radical splinter sect of the Mormon Church was more powerful or terrifying than its leader Warren Jeffs—Rachel’s father.

Living outside mainstream Mormonism and federal law, Jeffs arranged marriages between under-age girls and middle-aged and elderly members of his congregation. In 2006, he gained international notoriety when the FBI placed him on its Ten Most Wanted List. Though he is serving a life sentence for child sexual assault, Jeffs’ iron grip on the church remains firm, and his edicts to his followers increasingly restrictive and bizarre.

In Breaking Free, Rachel blows the lid off this taciturn community made famous by Jon Krakauer’s bestselling Under the Banner of Heaven to offer a harrowing look at her life with Warren Jeffs, and the years of physical and emotional abuse she suffered. Sexually assaulted, compelled into an arranged polygamous marriage, locked away in “houses of hiding” as punishment for perceived transgressions, and physically separated from her children, Rachel, Jeffs’ first plural daughter by his second of more than fifty wives, eventually found the courage to leave the church in 2015. But Breaking Free is not only her story—Rachel’s experiences illuminate those of her family and the countless others who remain trapped in the strange world she left behind.

A shocking and mesmerizing memoir of faith, abuse, courage, and freedom, Breaking Free is an expose of religious extremism and a beacon of hope for anyone trying to overcome personal obstacles.

A new polygamy book – yay! Breaking Free is a memoir by Rachel Jeffs, the daughter of Warren Jeffs, leader of the FLDS church. The Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints, or FLDS, is a polygamous sect that is basically a cult. Jeffs himself has more than 70 wives. He dictates who women marry and got in trouble with the law for marrying off girls as young as twelve years-old. You may remember when the FLDS’s compound in Texas was raided by law enforcement in April 2008.

Since Jeffs was God’s chosen profit and God spoke through him to tell people how to live their lives, he was followed without question by FLDS members. When Rachel was only eight years-old, her father began sexually abusing her, telling her that he was preparing her for her husband. Even at a young age, she knew it wasn’t right and doubt that her father was the true prophet started to form in her mind.

Luckily, Rachel actually liked the husband Jeffs chose for her. He seemed like a nice guy but frustratingly, he bought into every revelation from God Jeffs espoused hook, line and sinker. Jeffs was eventually arrested and convicted of sexual assault of a child. He continued to release ridiculous edicts from jail, like that husbands and wives couldn’t touch each other, which his followers continued to blindly obey. He also continued to arrange marriages and rearrange families – taking children from one mother and giving them to another. As always, it’s fascinating to me how much people will go along with in the name of religion. For Rachel, the threat of losing her children was the last straw.

I’ve read a few other books about the FLDS and some of the same people come up time and time again in the various books. It’s interesting to see the church and its people through various perspectives. For instance, Rebecca Musser, whose memoir of her time in the FLDS church is called The Witness Wore Red, is mentioned in this book. She was married to Warren’s father, Rulon Jeffs and therefor was one of his mothers even though she was only a few years older than him. That also makes her one of Rachel’s grandmas. I liked hearing Rachel’s view on the testimony that Rebecca gave at Jeffs trial.

Rachel’s story is both fascinating and horrifying at the same time. Breaking Free is a solid addition to the polygamy section of my home library.

Other books about polygamy I’ve read:

Fiction:
The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff
Circle of Wives by Alice LaPlante

Non-Fiction:
Becoming Sister Wives by Kody, Meri, Janelle, Christine, and Robyn Brown
Escape by Carolyn Jessop
Love Times Three by Joe Darger
Triumph by Carolyn Jessop
Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer