Book excerpt: Rachel Jeffs, daughter of a polygamist and prophet, gets news that scatters her family

[TexasTowelie]

Book excerpt: Rachel Jeffs, daughter of a polygamist and prophet, gets news that scatters her family from Utah to Texas

Editor’s note • On Tuesday, HarperCollins Publishers will release a memoir from Rachel Jeffs titled “Breaking Free: How I Escaped Polygamy, the FLDS Cult and My Father, Warren Jeffs.”

In the book, Rachel Jeffs alleges her father, Warren Jeffs — who today is the president of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and is serving a sentence of life plus 20 years in Texas for crimes related to sexually assaulting two girls he married as spiritual wives — molested her as a child.

At the time of the following excerpt, Rachel Jeffs is the 19-year-old third wife of the man to whom her father assigned her, Richard Allred. Rachel Jeffs has just given birth to her first child and the plural family is living in the FLDS community on the Utah-Arizona line, called Short Creek. Rachel Jeffs changed her sister wives’ names to protect their privacy.

In April 2003, I went up to Father’s house to find Rich. All the family members I encountered looked at me with sad expressions. What’s the big deal? I wondered.

“Rachel, you need to go talk to Father,” one of his wives said.

I walked down to Father’s room and knocked on the door. “Come in,” he said....

Father sat there for a moment before he said, “It looks like your mother has breast cancer. A doctor has confirmed it.”

I bolted from Father’s room and ran up to Mother’s room, where I found her lying in bed. Barbie was only 2 months old, and I had spent most of my time recently with her, so I hadn’t seen how ill my mother had become. I was only 19, and my mother 38. (She had a 2-year-old baby herself.)

Read more: http://www.sltrib.com/news/polygamy/2017/11/12/book-excerpt-rachel-jeffs-daughter-of-a-polygamist-and-prophet-gets-news-that-scatters-her-family-from-utah-to-texas/