Source: Radio New Zealand (world)
Secretly helping to convict a false Mormon prophet, cult psychology expert Christine Marie felt so conflicted she could barely handle it.
Befriending the abused wives of Sam Bateman, then becoming “the one who took away their prophet and the father of their babies,” was not easy for Christine Marie, star of Trust Me: The False Prophet.
After her own controlling relationship with a Mormon man she’s described as another “false prophet” in the late ’90s and years of psychology study, Marie knew how well Bateman’s victims had been manipulated to believe they were not being abused.
“I knew they wouldn’t understand it, maybe even for years, and that I would be losing my relationship with all these women and children that I adored. But it wasn’t about me,” she tells RNZ’s Saturday Morning.
Taking down a cult leader: Dr Christine Marie
To “give purpose to her past pain,” Marie and her videographer husband Tolga Katas, moved to the tiny town of Short Creek, Utah in 2016 to study the culture of a remote polygamous splinter sect of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS).
In 2019, the imprisonment of former prophet Warren Jeffs (subject of the 2022 Netflix documentary Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey), left a vacuum in the FLDS leadership, Marie says.
After pleading guilty to criminal sexual activity in 2024, Sam Bateman is serving 50 years in federal prison.
Seeing an opportunity, the “not charismatic or particularly smart” Bateman proclaimed that Jeffs had died and he was the successor.
“Because Warren Jeffs hadn’t been communicating in ages, he said that Warren Jeffs was no longer mortal. Now, Sam was being communicated with by Warren Jeffs in his immortal form.”
Befriending Bateman and his wives, she and Tolga first presented their filmmaking project as a historical, neutral look at the FLDS church, she says.
“[Bateman’s victims] believed they were part of some elite group that was simply following the requirements to make it to the highest degree of heaven” – Christine Marie.
When the couple started to discover the extent of Bateman’s abuse, Marie says their next thought was “Maybe we should film him and they’ll get used to the cameras and maybe we’ll find some evidence”.
Bateman seemed to assume that he could be “the star” of whatever they were making, she says.
“We were filming, thinking, ‘We’re going to turn this into law enforcement’. And we did.”
“They were in a group, which was like an echo chamber, where everyone was confirming whatever Sam said” – Christine Marie.
Between 2019 and his arrest in 2022, Bateman recruited 23 “spiritual wives”, which included 10 young women under 18, and one girl as young as nine.
He controlled their behaviours, thoughts, emotions, and restricted the information they received, Marie says, yet the girls and women did not believe they were being abused by him.
“They believed they were part of some elite group that was simply following the requirements to make it to the highest degree of heaven. That was an honour. They were in a group, which was like an echo chamber, where everyone was confirming whatever Sam said.”
Christine Marie still feels that she has a “special purpose” in Short Creek.
For Marie, the lack of victim-shaming in response to Trust Me: The False Prophet has been surreal after she was depicted as “weak-minded” after going public with her own story of an abusive nine-month relationship with a Mormon leader.
“There was no explanation of the cultural background of [me] having been Mormon for decades, there was no psychology. It created a very victim-shaming narrative for me. It was so devastating that I thought I would never recover. I thought, who would ever hire me after watching this docudrama that paints me as somebody wanting to be harmed? It just made no sense.”
Christine Marie still lives in Short Creek.
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Once a strident anti-polygamy activist, Marie says “stop judging, start helping” is her motto now.
As an intermediary between people in the FLDS sect, those who’ve left and government agencies, the 66-year-old still feels that she has a “special purpose” in Short Creek.
Do whatever you can to keep up the relationship is her advice to people with a loved one involved with a cult.
“You could attack family members for what they believe, but then you can’t speak to them anymore. It’s more important that your love and kindness continue than that they change their beliefs.”
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