God, Guns, Prairie Dresses and Very Bad Men: The FLDS Universe Explained

Warren Jeffs ran a polygamist cult from prison on a life sentence. His replacement was a man so unremarkable his own community barely noticed him — until he decided God had appointed him to collect wives, including children. Trust Me: The False Prophet is the new Netflix documentary on the FLDS cult — and it’s the latest chapter in the most bizarre, infuriating, and surprisingly camp corner of true crime.

I found Short Creek through a podcast. If you haven’t listened to it, stop reading this and go do that first — it’s one of the best pieces of audio journalism I’ve encountered, and it set me down a rabbit hole I have never fully climbed out of.

Short Creek is a community straddling the Utah-Arizona border, home to thousands of members of the FLDS — the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints — a breakaway Mormon sect that practices polygamy, enforces extreme isolation, and operates on the belief that a man called the Prophet speaks directly to God and his word is absolute.

I’ve now spent considerable time in this universe. Short Creek the podcast. Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey on Netflix — the definitive Warren Jeffs documentary. And now Trust Me: The False Prophet, the new FLDS cult Netflix documentary that dropped earlier this month and is already one of the most compulsively watchable true crime releases of the year.

This is my attempt to make sense of all of it. Or rather, to make sense of why none of it makes sense.

What Is FLDS and Why Does It Look Like That

First: the aesthetics. Because we have to talk about the aesthetics.

FLDS women dress in long-sleeved prairie dresses that reach the floor, in pastel colours that manage to be both modest and deeply unsettling. The hair is swept up in elaborate braided arrangements. No make-up. No jewellery. Necklines so high they’re basically turtlenecks. The look is approximately 1890, which is not an accident — FLDS doctrine froze in that era and has been refusing to move ever since.

Here is the thing they don’t want you to realise: this is not modesty. This is control. Beauty is power — the power to attract attention, to be chosen, to have options. Take beauty away and you take options away with it. FLDS women are dressed this way from birth specifically so they have no idea what they’re missing. No mirror ever shows them what they could be. No outside reference point exists. The prairie dress is not a religious choice. It’s a cage that looks like a frock.

I’ll come back to this. It’s important.

The theology, briefly: FLDS broke from mainstream Mormonism in the 1930s over polygamy, which the LDS Church officially abandoned in 1890. FLDS rejected that decision and kept practising. The doctrine holds that men must marry multiple wives to achieve the highest level of heaven, that women are saved through their husbands, and that the Prophet’s word on earth is God’s word. Children are raised from birth in total isolation from the outside world — no internet, no television, no news, no outside relationships.

The result is a community in which the concept of leaving is nearly incomprehensible. Where would you go? You have no education beyond what the community provides. You have no money. You have no skills the outside world recognises. You don’t even know what the outside world looks like. And you’ve been told, your entire life, that leaving means eternal damnation — not just for you but for your children, your parents, everyone you love.

That’s the architecture. Now for the men who built it.

Warren Jeffs: The Original Prophet

Warren Jeffs became FLDS Prophet in 2002 following his father’s death. He was immediately, obviously, catastrophically wrong for the job by any normal human standard — quiet, strange, reportedly humourless, with a specific kind of entitled coldness that you recognise instantly in retrospect and should have been a screaming red flag in real time.

He controlled who married whom. He expelled hundreds of men he considered threats or competitors — leaving them wifeless, shamed, and with nowhere to go. He accumulated wives himself, including girls as young as twelve. He was eventually convicted of child sexual assault in 2011 and sentenced to life in prison plus twenty years.

He continues to lead the FLDS from his cell.

That sentence deserves its own line, so here it is again: Warren Jeffs continues to lead the FLDS from prison on a life sentence. He issues proclamations. His followers obey. He arranges marriages. Hundreds of people genuinely believe that God speaks through a convicted child rapist currently serving life in a Texas penitentiary, and that this is normal and fine.

Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey — the 2022 Netflix documentary, directed by the same filmmaker behind Trust Me — is the essential companion piece to this FLDS true crime story. It’s where you learn the full architecture of what Jeffs built, how he controlled an entire community through fear, shame, and the promise of eternal damnation. Watch it if you haven’t.

The Wardrobe Problem

There’s a reason I keep coming back to the clothes. It’s not shallow — it’s the whole point.

Think about what it means to reach adulthood having never worn colour. Never chosen your own haircut. Never seen your own reflection in anything other than the FLDS-approved version of yourself. These women weren’t just isolated from the world — they were isolated from any sense of themselves as people with preferences, tastes, desires, attractiveness. All of that was stripped out in the name of doctrine.

The men, meanwhile, wear normal clothes. Jeans. Shirts. Nothing that marks them as different from any other man in America.

The asymmetry is not incidental. It is the entire point.

Enter Sam Bateman: The Universe’s Most Unimpressive Prophet

When Jeffs went to prison, the FLDS fractured. No unified leadership. No one to arrange the marriages. The community sat in theological limbo — no weddings, no structure, no clear path forward.

Into this vacuum walked Samuel Bateman. A former rank-and-file FLDS member. By all accounts, completely unremarkable. Nobody had particularly noticed him before. He had no status, no particular gifts, no obvious reason to be listened to.

He decided he was a prophet.

Specifically, he decided that Warren Jeffs — still alive, still in prison — was now communicating divine will through him. That Jeffs’ spirit was channelling itself via Samuel Bateman of Short Creek, Utah, and that this meant Bateman got to collect wives.

Here is my honest, not-entirely-charitable assessment of Samuel Bateman: this is a man who, in any normal social context, would have struggled enormously to find a single willing partner. He was not charismatic. He was not particularly attractive. He had no money, no status, no interesting qualities that I can identify in any documentary footage. What he had was a community of women raised from birth to believe that questioning a prophet means eternal damnation — and the audacity to declare himself one.

He accumulated over twenty wives. Nearly half were minors. The youngest was nine years old.

There’s something almost cosmically unfair about the fact that the most mediocre man imaginable can access this kind of power just by saying the right words to the right isolated community. Warren Jeffs, at least, was terrifying. Bateman looks like he’d struggle to get a table at a mid-range restaurant.

He is now serving fifty years in prison. He continues to make daily calls to his remaining followers from his cell, and most of them still believe he is their prophet. They consider his imprisonment a martyrdom. His hold hasn’t loosened — imprisonment just changed its shape.

The Mothers

This is the part nobody wants to talk about, so let’s talk about it.

Some of the women in Bateman’s community gave their daughters to him. Not because they didn’t love their children — almost certainly they did, desperately — but because the doctrine was so total, so unquestioned, so deeply embedded in every moment of their lives, that handing your nine-year-old daughter to the prophet was understood as the most loving, righteous thing a mother could do. The alternative — refusal, questioning, leaving — meant eternal damnation for the whole family.

This is what a genuinely total control system looks like. It doesn’t just control behaviour. It rewires what love means.

Christine Marie: The Real Hero of This FLDS Cult True Crime Story

Christine Marie has a PhD in psychology specialising in cult behaviour. She moved to Short Creek in 2016 with her videographer husband Tolga Katas, ostensibly to document the community recovering from Jeffs’ imprisonment. What she found instead was Bateman, and evidence she couldn’t ignore.

She went undercover. She gained Bateman’s trust — enough trust to get inside his inner circle — while simultaneously feeding footage to federal investigators and begging local police to act. She had been, years earlier, a victim of a fundamentalist man who convinced her he was a prophet. She knew exactly what she was looking at.

“I had never been FLDS, so I wasn’t considered an apostate. I was an outsider that could do something they would’ve done if they could, but they couldn’t — there was this big invisible wall between them. I just had this little opportunity.”

She is extraordinary. Watch Trust Me specifically for Christine. And if you want more context on the true crime podcasts that cover this world, the ATD essential list is a good place to start.

Nomz

And then there’s Nomz.

Naomi Bistline — known as Nomz — was one of Bateman’s wives. She eventually became a key witness against him. She is now out, living in the community, and navigating the outside world for the first time.

In prison she heard Olivia Rodrigo’s “Vampire” for the first time. A song about a manipulative man who drains you. She said it was the first song that really struck her. She is now writing her own music.

A woman raised in FLDS with no internet, no television, no outside culture whatsoever — and the first song that cracked her open was Olivia Rodrigo’s Vampire. About a manipulative man who drains you.

The Nomz glow-up is the closing image of this piece because it should be. She found eyeliner. She found colour. She found music. She found herself in a song about exactly the kind of man she’d been handed to.

You cannot make this up. And you don’t need to.

“The prairie dress is not a religious choice. It’s a cage that looks like a frock.”