Samuel Bateman Took Children as Wives — Their Parents Stood By Him

The most haunting moment in the Netflix documentary Trust Me: The False Prophet isn't the arrest. It isn't the sealed trailer. It isn't even the fifty-year sentence. It's the parents. The ones who gave their daughters — some as young as nine, according to federal prosecutors — to Samuel Bateman and called it God's will. The ones who, at his sentencing, showed up to court to support him. Not their children. Him. Their kids stood up there alone.

Bateman built his following out of nothing — broke, homeless, claiming to speak for imprisoned FLDS leader Warren Jeffs. Within a few years he had more than twenty wives, at least ten of them children, and a community so locked in that when grandparents called the FBI, their own adult children called them traitors. After his arrest, he directed the kidnapping of girls from foster care from inside a jail cell. His followers drove those children across state lines. The girls went willingly.

Robin Dreeke — retired chief of the FBI's Counterintelligence Behavioral Analysis Program — examines the question at the center of this case: what does a man have to do to your mind before you'll sacrifice your own child and believe you're saving her? How does a person like Donnae Barlow — reportedly forced to marry her own uncle as a teenager in the original FLDS, mother to a child with a terminal genetic condition because of it — still end up helping Bateman take girls she believed she was rescuing? And how is anyone supposed to feel like this is over when Short Creek still stands and the theology that produced Bateman hasn't changed?

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