On 31 December 1999, Pamela Jones watched TV while she waited to see if the world would end. She had been born into a cult based in Mexico, and ever since she was a child, Jones had been taught that the millennium would lead to an apocalypse.
As far back as the 1980s, leaders of her breakaway Mormon sect – the Church of the Firstborn of the Fulness of Time – had been preparing for this night. “They were dehydrating eggs and storing them,” she recalls. “Up in caves in the mountains, they had barrels of corn and wheat, because their grandpa had a revelation that the United States was going to be destroyed.”
California would sink under the ocean and surviving Americans would travel south, where they would be fed and become members of the cult.
Jones was 34. She didn’t see her husband so often, as he had five other wives, and normally he railed against television, but that night he came to watch too.
Midnight came and went. The US wasn’t flooded. Nobody was coming. Her husband was angry. “He took the satellite dish down and tried to break it. He said: ‘This is vanity and it’s evil’.”
Looking back, Jones isn’t sure if she really believed the apocalypse was going to happen. “I was so brainwashed,” she says, but after decades of misogynist abuse by the cult – which included sometimes being beaten or kept hungry, as well as being almost permanently pregnant – she had begun to question the church and its teachings.
Despite fears of being killed if she rebelled, the false doomsday premonition made her more certain. Months later, she escaped with her nine children.
It’s now 25 years on and Jones is opening up about her experiences, speaking to The i Paper from her home in Minnesota. She has learnt to enjoy liberty and is the owner of a cleaning business. But she says: “I couldn’t go into the next stage of my life without sharing my story… to break free from the secrecy of the cult and the denial of things that I had hidden for so long.”
She has written a compelling memoir, The Dirt Beneath Our Door, and has been recording the podcast Wicked Confessions Uncensored with her sister Vera. She explains: “When I was raising the children, I didn’t want them to know a lot of this, because it would just inflict fear. But all my children are grown now and married, and I felt like it was time for them to hear.”
After all, if she hadn’t run away, they would all still be there. Her 31st grandchild will arrive soon, and Jones wrote her grimly fascinating book because she “wanted them to know the price that was paid for them to experience freedom”.
Others have not been so fortunate. The cult still exists and polygamy is still practiced, with teenage girls being married off and cousins sometimes entering relationships, she claims. “There’s lots of fighting for land, lots of dishonesty,” she says. “By exposing this these things collectively, more of us will help to hopefully give encouragement that you can get out of these situations.”
It goes beyond this small, “bizarre” cult. The core issue of her story is relevant around the world: the suffering inflicted upon women by extreme misogyny.
What life was like in the cult
Polygamy was rejected by most Mormons more than a century ago. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints banned plural marriage in 1890 and excommunicates anyone caught living this lifestyle. But in the mid-20th century, five brothers from the LeBarón family, fundamentalist Mormons who still believed in the practice, founded their own church and set up a commune in the Mexican state of Chihuahua.
Among those who joined the Church of the Firstborn of the Fulness of Time was Jones’s father. She was the 11th child of Thomas Ossmen Jones, born to his third wife. In all, he had 57 biological children, besides others he adopted. Her book reveals in detail what life was like.
“My father was alcoholic and physically abusive to an extreme,” she says. “There were times when I totally did believe that I would be killed.” She recalls one occasion when he lined up his children to find out who had stolen a can of drink – and proceeded to waterboard them. Jones was six at the time.
“I was always trying to be good enough for Daddy so he wouldn’t hurt me.” Sometimes he would whip her. “He said: ‘Spare the rod, spoil the child’.”
And beyond her father, there was an almighty being to fear. “I was brainwashed that God was going to beat me with this whip that had glass, because I was so rotten and terrible, and I was going to burn in hell… I just believed there was no other life. I wanted to go to heaven.”
When girls in the church reached 13, they could be sold or traded. “My father had a lot of daughters, so we were on the market to see the highest bidder who would be able to bless my father economically the most,” says Jones. “Once I turned 13, men were coming around. It scared me. In my heart, I wanted to be a first wife – I didn’t want to be marrying an old man… There was a lot of manipulation, a lot of coercing, a lot of brainwashing, they would make you think it was your own free will.”
She married at 15 to get away from her father. Her 21-year-old husband never beat her, but life in the cult was about to get even harder for her.
The church had begun to splinter in the 1970s, after founder Joel LeBarón expelled his brother Ervil, who set up a rival sect: the Church of the Lamb of God. Joel was murdered by one of Ervil’s followers in 1972, and Jones remembers being held up as a small girl to see his body in its casket with a bullet wound between his eyes.
In 1974, Ervil launched a raid on a beachside compound run by the original church, which still refused to accept him. Jones was living there at the time. Her family survived but her father was placed on Ervil’s “blood atonement” kill list, under the belief that sinners could be cleansed if they were killed.
Ervil LeBarón, who became known as “the Mormon Charles Manson”, was eventually arrested and extradited to the US, where he was jailed for ordering a murder. He was found dead in his cell in 1981 after an apparent suicide. But rivalries continued, leading to the coordinated “Four O’Clock Murders” of four people in 1988, for which five cult members were later jailed.
Jones’s husband belonged to one of the harsher wings of the cult and she moved to another location, Zion’s Camp. She was banned from entering the main colony or seeing her parents.
The core belief of the cult at this time was “to keep a woman wanting for everything: water, clothing, shelter, love, food, connection, companionship”, she says. It was all about control. “I was told that I existed for one purpose and one purpose only, and I existed to procreate.” As well as nine children, Jones had eight miscarriages.
In the cult, many women and children lived in poverty. For Jones, rations consisted of 10 potatoes per fortnight. She grew turnips and carrots in her garden, and was able to make homemade bread, tortillas and cheese, but was so hungry that she ate wild pigweed and dandelions.
The cult had controlled her so tightly that it wasn’t until her late 20s that she began to question why the men and women were treated so differently.
Eventually, by 34, “it dawned on me that if I stayed in the cult… my daughters would turn out like me. That scared me so bad that I started planning my escape”.
She began secretly sorting paperwork to cross into the US with her children. Early one morning in March 2000, they drove to the border and somehow made it through.
“I can’t even believe I had the guts to do it… I had no idea where I was going, no idea what I was going to do. My only focus was to save my children.”
Misogyny beyond the cult
Escaping her cult was the defining moment of Jones’s life, but starting afresh was an equally huge challenge. “I was just so naive to the way the world worked, and there was a lot of trial and error.”
She is proud that she gradually was “able to unprogramme myself” from all the beliefs she had absorbed from birth, eventually setting up a cleaning business that has been highly successful.
A handful of other women have also dared to speak out. Anna LeBarón has published her account, The Polygamist’s Daughter, about being the child of Ervil LeBarón. She appeared with her sister in the documentary series Daughters of the Cult. Another survivor, Ruth Wariner, told her story in The Sound of Gravel.
Having lived through some of the worst experiences that misogyny can inflict on women, however, Jones feels “heartbroken” to see a resurgence in sexism and the rise of influential men preaching male supremacy.
It’s not lost on her that she sought refuge in the US, where the current President was elected despite being caught on tape boasting in 2005: “When you’re a star they let you do it… Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”
Such language shocks her. “It’s disheartening because it’s everywhere… If it wasn’t acceptable, we wouldn’t have the president we have,” she says. “He doesn’t stand alone. He’s in a group of men like this.
“As a mother of four sons, with 15 grandsons, I see the need and value of masculine power, energy, intelligence and guidance. I love men… But a real powerful, strong man treats a woman good because he’s not threatened by her.”
Jones is sad that girls can admire Andrew Tate, with her own daughters divided over him. The self-proclaimed “misogynist” influencer has been accused in Romania of rape and human trafficking, which he strongly denies. When that case concludes and he returns to the UK, he will also face 10 charges including rape, which he denies.
“One of my daughters will say: ‘Andrew Tate calls for men to provide and protect and take care of your family.’ Another daughter says: ‘He exploits women, he uses women, he’s disgraceful’.”
Mainstream Mormons living in the US remain horrified by stories of how fundamentalists have used their religion to abuse women. But having been treated so badly by her so-called church, unsurprisingly Jones is not the member of any organised faith.
“I have nothing to do with Mormons or the cult and any of their beliefs,” she says. “I was let down so many times through all these different forms of religion.” She remains “spiritual”, however.
She feels her biggest accomplishment is not simply that she left the cult, but that she rescued her children by doing so, daring to take them beyond an invisible fence that had been constructed in their heads by decades of indoctrination.
“We walked away from a whole world,” she says, “but I had the guts to heal and raise my kids.”
The Dirt Beneath Our Door: My Journey to Freedom After Escaping a Polygamous Mormon Cult by Pamela Jones with Elizabeth Ridley is out now (£26.99, Matt Holt Books)
