Christine Marie Tells Why Sameul Bateman's FLDS Followers Won't Leave

The Samuel Bateman case ends with the question every cult researcher eventually has to answer. He's in federal prison for fifty years. Multiple of his adult followers are doing long sentences. His underage victims testified against him in open court. And a meaningful number of the women Christine Marie risked her life to save have walked right back to him by their own choice.

Why?

In this third and final part of our three-part interview, Christine — herself a survivor of coercive control under a different false prophet years earlier — takes us into the hardest part of the entire story. The arrest didn't break Bateman's hold. The sentence didn't either. He calls his followers from inside federal prison every day, and the certainty he's been feeding them flows right through the line, the way Christine has called an IV of indoctrination. Warren Jeffs' followers held tight after his life sentence twenty years ago. Now Bateman's are doing the same thing.

Christine walks us through what she actually knows about what's being said on those prison calls. The split between the women who got out for good and the ones who returned — and whether the ones who left are now seen by the faithful as the fallen. Why some women can leave a coercive group and rebuild, the way she did, and others physically cannot. The point at which she's had to ask herself, with grown adults who keep returning, whether some people only ever feel safe inside something broken. And the larger question her whole career keeps circling — what authorities should actually do about communities like this, or whether religious freedom in America is just going to keep producing the next false prophet, in the same town, every twenty years.

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DISCLAIMER

This publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.


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