Escape Audiobook By Carolyn Jessop, Laura Palmer cover art

Escape

 Preview

Audible Standard 30-day free trial

Try Standard free
Select 1 audiobook a month from our entire collection of titles.
Yours as long as you’re a member.
Get unlimited access to bingeable podcasts.
Standard auto renews for $8.99 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Escape

By: Carolyn Jessop, Laura Palmer
Narrated by: Alison Fraser
Try Standard free

$8.99 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $12.58

Buy for $12.58

The dramatic first-person account of life inside an ultra-fundamentalist American religious sect, and one woman’s courageous flight to freedom with her eight children.

When she was eighteen years old, Carolyn Jessop was coerced into an arranged marriage with a total stranger: a man thirty-two years her senior. Merril Jessop already had three wives. But arranged plural marriages were an integral part of Carolyn’s heritage: She was born into and raised in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), the radical offshoot of the Mormon Church that had settled in small communities along the Arizona-Utah border. Over the next fifteen years, Carolyn had eight children and withstood her husband’s psychological abuse and the watchful eyes of his other wives who were locked in a constant battle for supremacy.

Carolyn’s every move was dictated by her husband’s whims. He decided where she lived and how her children would be treated. He controlled the money she earned as a school teacher. He chose when they had sex; Carolyn could only refuse—at her peril. For in the FLDS, a wife’s compliance with her husband determined how much status both she and her children held in the family. Carolyn was miserable for years and wanted out, but she knew that if she tried to leave and got caught, her children would be taken away from her. No woman in the country had ever escaped from the FLDS and managed to get her children out, too. But in 2003, Carolyn chose freedom over fear and fled her home with her eight children. She had $20 to her name.

Escape exposes a world tantamount to a prison camp, created by religious fanatics who, in the name of God, deprive their followers the right to make choices, force women to be totally subservient to men, and brainwash children in church-run schools. Against this background, Carolyn Jessop’s flight takes on an extraordinary, inspiring power. Not only did she manage a daring escape from a brutal environment, she became the first woman ever granted full custody of her children in a contested suit involving the FLDS. And in 2006, her reports to the Utah attorney general on church abuses formed a crucial part of the case that led to the arrest of their notorious leader, Warren Jeffs.©2007 Visionary Classics, LLC; (P)2007 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc. Biographies & Memoirs Christianity Religious Marriage Mormon

Critic reviews

"Escape provides an astonishing look behind the tightly drawn curtains of the FLDS Church, one of the most secretive religious groups in the United States. The story Carolyn Jessop tells is so weird and shocking that one hesitates to believe a sect like this, with 10,000 polygamous followers, could really exist in 21st-century America. But Jessop’s courageous, heart-wrenching account is absolutely factual. This riveting book reminds us that truth can indeed be much, much stranger than fiction."
—Jon Krakauer, Author of Under the Banner of Heaven, Into Thin Air, and Into the Wild
All stars
Most relevant
This captivating book drew me in and I was able to start and finish it within a day, you feel so close to her as she explains her life, i am so thankful she wrote her story and that she got out. Not many can, and not many do especially with their children. I personally know a few Barlow’s, Jeff’s, Wall’s, and some Rockwell’s I went to school with all of them. I had no idea what their parents had to do to get out of this bondage so their children could have the freedoms they deserved. It came no surprise to me that the Rockwell’s were cousins but I never knew it because that family wasn’t allowed to talk with us, or meet us before they got out. So crazy.

Interesting

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.