Carolyn Jessop

Carolyn Jessop (born January 1, 1968) is an American author and former Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints member who wrote Escape, an autobiographical account of her upbringing in the polygamist sect and later flight from that community. She is the cousin, by marriage, of Flora Jessop, another former FLDS member and advocate for abused children. Carolyn Jessop now lives in the Salt Lake City area with her children.

Autobiography

Escape

On April 21, 2003, when Jessop was 35, she left her husband's family and the FLDS church, fleeing to a safehouse in Salt Lake City. Subsequently, she sued for custody of her children, and in 2003 became "the first woman ever granted full custody of her children in a contested suit involving the FLDS."

In 2007, she co-authored her book Escape with Laura Palmer, which chronicled her life in the FLDS organization, her adulthood and disillusionment, and her eventual flight. It was published by the Broadway division of Random House. She followed its publication with a book tour. In 2008, actress Katherine Heigl announced she had contracted to produce and star in a feature film based on the memoir.

Jessop was born Carolyn Blackmore and raised by her parents in Hildale, Utah, with her older sister and younger siblings. She is a sixth-generation descendant of a polygamous family, all of whom were faithful members of the FLDS church. Her father became a polygamist when he married his wife's niece when Carolyn was a child. Jessop describes her relationship to her parents as emotionally distant, with her father dominating her mother, and her mother taking out her anger on the children with such regularity that the children soon devised a strategy to get their beatings "out of the way" in the mornings. Merril Jessop was 32 years her senior and already had three wives and more than 30 children, several of them his new wife's age and older; some had been her classmates.

April 2008 YFZ Ranch raid Texas law enforcement officers began a raid of the YFZ Ranch on April 3, 2008, following a phone call with allegations of physical and sexual abuse of a 16-year-old girl. Children from the community had been placed in state custody because authorities believed they "had been abused or were at immediate risk of future abuse," a state spokesman said. As of April 8, as many as 533 women and children had been removed from the ranch by authorities. Officers later learned that the phone call was a hoax perpetrated by an adult woman outside the FLDS.

Jessop arrived on-site Sunday, April 6, in hopes of reuniting two of her daughters with their half-siblings. She stated her opinion that the action in Texas was unlike the 1953 Short Creek raid in Arizona. On April 8 she was interviewed by the NBC Today Show regarding the event, and described life at a FLDS community. Jessop had also been in Texas the prior month at a speaking engagement, where she said, "n Eldorado, the crimes went to a whole new level. They thought they could get away with more" but "Texas is not going to be a state that's as tolerant of these crimes as Arizona and Utah have been."

Legal proceedings

Carolyn Jessop has been involved in several legal proceedings arising from her departure from and knowledge of the FLDS community. With assistance from Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff, in 2003 Carolyn became the first woman who left an FLDS community to be awarded full custody of all of her children. As of February 2010, Merril Jessop had still not paid any of the child support he owed, and according to Carolyn Jessop's attorney, Natalie Malonis, Merril Jessop's failure to support his children could result in jail time. Raymond Jessop was ultimately convicted of sexual assault of a child and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Carolyn also testified for the State of Texas in criminal trials against Leroy Jessop and Allan Keate. Leroy Jessop, another of Carolyn's stepchildren, was convicted of sexual assault of a child and sentenced to 75 years in prison. Allan Keate was convicted of sexual assault of a child and sentenced to 33 years in prison. She describes her years outside the sect as traumatic, explaining that public school was a shock and that the task of caring for her siblings fell to her due to her mother's health problems: "With the responsibility landing on me so hard every morning, I was an emotional wreck, and after a while, I hardened into a frazzled bundle of nerves."