Warren Jeffs, the leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, is prominently discussed in Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey, a new Netflix documentary about the sect.
The FLDS (as the group is known for short) is a sect that developed when mainstream Mormonism banned polygamy. Members of the FLDS still practice it, and a former member says in Netflix’s four-part documentary that within the group, “a man’s status depends on how many wives he has”.
Warren Jeffs became the group’s leader following the death of his father Rulon Jeffs in 2002. Rulon Jeffs had been the leader of the FLDS (known to members as “the prophet”) since the Eighties.
In 2011, Warren Jeffs was convicted in Texas of two counts of sexual assault of a child. He was sentenced to life in prison for sexually assaulting a a 12-year-old girl, and 20 years for sexually assaulting a 15-year-old girl. Warren Jeffs was previously convicted in Utah on two counts of being an accomplice to rape in 2007, but that conviction was overturned by the Utah Supreme Court in 2010.
According to a former US Attorney Special Prosecutor who participated in the Netflix documentary, evidence during the sentence phase of the trial reflected that Jeffs was “involved in conducting the marriages of 67 underage girls to FLDS men”, and that he “had himself 78 wives – 24 of those wives were underage.”
Warren Jeffs is now serving his life sentence at the Louis C Powledge Unit, a prison located near the city of Palestine, Texas.
It is believed that he still runs the FLDS and exercises influence on its members from prison.
