It’s been 20 years since Warren Jeffs, the “prophet” who ran the cult-like polygamist Mormon offshoot the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Short Creek, Utah, was arrested for sexual assault and abuse of minors.
In director Rachel Dretzin’s 2022 docuseries Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey, the documentary filmmaker explores how the religious leader used his power and influence to build an insular community in Utah and facilitate the abuse of young girls, both by himself and other church members. In 2011, Jeffs was convicted of aggravated sexual assault and sexual assault of a child, which came with life in prison plus an additional 20 years. The women and children previously under his power were supposed to be safe. But in a new Netflix docuseries, Trust Me: The False Prophet, two filmmakers who moved to Utah in 2016 stumble upon a new religious leader aiming to take over where Jeffs left off — and go undercover to try to save a new generation of girls being targeted.
“This community is highly isolated. They’re in a remote part of Utah on the Arizona border. There’s very little interaction with the rest of the world. And I think that the premium from birth in that community is obedience and particularly, obedience to men,” Dretzin recently told Vanity Fair. “So, for women that can get very complicated when the man above you, whether it’s your husband or the prophet, is telling you to do things in the name of God that are wrong, but your entire worldview [is] that you must obey. That’s part of the problem.”
COURTESY OF NETFLIX
Filmed by husband and wife duo Tolga Katas and Christine Marie, Trust Me gives audiences an unprecedented, behind the scenes look at the insular FLDS community that spanned Utah, Arizona, Colorado, and Nebraska, and its attempted new leader, Sam Bateman. Bateman built a small but incredibly tight-knit community around claims that he was Jeffs’ religious heir, destined to lead the FLDS. In addition to spreading religious teachings, Bateman claimed that God spoke to him and pointed out wives that were meant to belong to him. He “married” 23 women, nine of whom were minors.
When Katas and Marie discovered his abuse, the couple used a growing relationship with Bateman to try and get evidence of his crimes on camera so the police would act. Trust Me compiles hours of the couple’s personal footage with first-hand interviews from FLDS community members, including two of Bateman’s victims, to detail how Bateman’s arrogance led to his eventual downfall. In 2024, when he was 48, he was convicted of sexually abusing girls as young as nine and sentenced to 50 years in prison.
Here are four things we learned from the docuseries Trust Me: The False Prophet.
After Warren Jeff’s arrest, his followers couldn’t have sex, marry, or have children. The community was desperate — and Bateman used this to his advantage.
As an offshoot of the mainstream Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, one of the FLDS strongest mandates is the strict separation of roles of men and women in the home. Men are the spiritual leaders, while women’s main job is to give birth to as many children as possible and always obey their husbands, fathers, and church leaders. It’s this cultural understanding that both Jeffs and Bateman exploited to their advantage.
While Jeffs was a predator in the eyes of the law, even after his conviction, many of the people in the FLDS still believed that he was a prophet with a divine mandate from God. So when he told his followers that, people in the community were not allowed to get married or have children while he was in prison — if he couldn’t procreate, neither could they — the community obeyed. Bateman was able to convince people he was Jeffs’ replacement by telling everyone that Jeffs was actually dead — and Bateman had been given express permission that people could marry and have children again. In several cases, men in the community were so grateful that Bateman told them he was supposed to marry their daughters and they agreed.
During their time in Utah, Katas and Marie told Bateman they were filming their interactions because they wanted to make a documentary about his journey and teachings. Bateman believed this, often inviting them over to his home, setting up hours of filming time, and eventually letting his wives be alone with Marie.
The filmmakers used this trust to get close to the women in Bateman’s home, hoping to build enough of a personal rapport in order to get them to disclose they needed help and were being sexually abused by Bateman.
Christine Marie told Samuel Bateman that she was making a documentary, but slipped footage to the authorities.COURTESY OF NETFLIX“While we were filming I was trying to get to know the girls more and try to understand the women in Sam’s group,” Marie says in the docuseries. “I knew they were putting on a show but I didn’t know exactly what was going on behind the scenes.”
Police believed Bateman was committing crimes, but required more proof than Christine’s secret recordings for an arrest warrant
According to Katas and Marie, the filmmakers went to Utah police multiple times over their concerns with Bateman and his underaged wives. David Wilkinson, a sergeant with the Colorado City-Hildale Police Department, says in the docuseries that police officers believed the footage was genuine, but they required more evidence before they could build an arrest warrant.
Child Protective Services was called several times. But Bateman circumvented authorities by often marrying the mothers of his young wives. So when authorities arrived, he would use the mothers’ presence as evidence nothing untoward was happening. The case would also require testimony, which meant that at least one of Bateman’s wives needed to realize she was being manipulated and abused.
“What we know and what we can prove beyond a reasonable doubt are two very different things,” Wilkinson says.
Katas and Marie continued to give their raw footage to the police and sent even more when the FBI got involved. But the police were clear that they needed incontrovertible proof in order to give prosecutors the best chance at a straightforward arrest and conviction.
“We were hoping we would have something to indict Sam on so that we could arrest him when we conducted the search warrants, but without a disclosure from an underage victim, the United States Attorney for the District of Arizona would not approve child sexual abuse charges,” FBI Special Agent Dawn Martin says in the docuseries. “We still needed more evidence against Sam. So we needed Christine to keep playing her part and stay close to Sam. You know, give him a rope and let him hang himself.”
When the FBI were ready to raid Bateman’s home, they got Katas and Marie to set up a morning interview with him. The couple purposely separated the girls from Bateman so the FBI could conduct the raid.
Even after his arrest, Bateman held unwavering control over his followers. His victims are still recovering.
Bateman was arrested in September 2022 on suspicion of child sexual abuse. The Department of Child Services showed up after the raid and took all nine of the minor “wives” into custody. They were placed in an Arizona group home, while the adult wives were questioned by police. But even after Bateman’s arrest, the false prophet still held extreme power over his followers. Almost all of the wives lied to police and refused to disclose that the minors were forced to engage in sexual acts. And less than two months later, Bateman convinced his followers to kidnap the girls. Police found them five days later in Washington.
In 2024, Bateman pleaded guilty for transporting a minor for sexual activity and conspiracy to commit kidnapping. He was sentenced to 50 years. Some of Bateman’s wives, like Naomi, a sister wife who spent two years in prison for her part in the girls’ kidnapping, were able to begin a process of recovery. In an interview in Trust Me, Naomi says that her time in prison exposed Bateman’s lies and allowed her to realize she was being lied to. But for many of the women who were under Bateman’s pull, the prophet’s arrest did not end their relationship.
“There were nine minors. They are all free of this. They’ve all testified against him. But their mothers, their sisters, the adults that were part of this group, the majority of them still do follow Sam. They live together. And I think they reinforce each other,” Dretzin told Vanity Fair . “They speak to him from prison, if not on a daily basis, on a near daily basis. So the mind control is still going on. Breaks my heart, actually. Although I’m really hoping that the documentary, because I suspect that at least some of them will watch it, helps unstick some of the hold that he has.”
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Fans cheer in the streets of Port-au-Prince on Nov. 18, 2025 as Haiti celebrates qualifying for the World Cup.
We’ve Been Thinking About Animal Sexuality All Wrong
I want to take you back to the year 2008, when New York City’s Museum of Sex launched an exhibit on the sex lives of animals. The exhibit ran for a full decade, and I had the chance to check it out about a year or so before it closed in 2018. The Sex Lives of Animals exhibit is, in fact, where I learned that ducks possess massive, corkscrew-like penises. But duck genitalia aside, the Museum of Sex’s intention, nearly 20 years ago, was to reveal the “astonishing array” of sexual behaviors animals routinely engage in, from kissing to hugging to, well, everything else. And definitely not always male-on-female.
As many props as I give the Museum of Sex for teaching me so much about what goes in broad daylight among the literal birds and bees, I also have to acknowledge what a bummer it is that such an exhibit would probably not be permitted in a place where they don’t sell vibrators and lube in the gift shop. And how disappointing it is that the truth about cats and dogs, if you will, has not become more widely accepted.
When it comes to the gender and sexuality of animals, the truth is not only out there — it’s actually been staring us in the face for years. The problem is, mainstream science and society have been slow to move away from the narrative that all animals copulate only for reproduction, any same-sex activity is purely anomalous (and unnatural), and every species is male-dominated. Now, a new documentary called Second Nature: Gender & Sexuality in the Animal World is working to dispel those myths — and, ideally, popularize them to a greater extent.
Narrated by Elliot Page, Second Nature more than does its homework by interviewing a handful of in-the-know scientists who have built lengthy careers studying the diversity of sex and gender behaviors of a range of species, from primates and birds to fish and reptiles. And there certainly is a lot to unpack. In addition to the facts themselves, Second Nature asks a few important questions: Why isn’t this information taught in basic biology classes or included in zoo books? Why do humans insist on projecting their own binary narrative of gender and sexuality — that males are aggressors, females are coy, and sex is only for procreation — onto our animals neighbors?
The answer is pretty simple: in order to understand the world around us, the easiest and simplest thing to do is to apply our societal framework. Historically speaking, those who research and study animals are prone to projecting their ciscentric, patriarchal ideas into animals, despite lots of evidence to the contrary.
Anyway, now that I’ve watched Second Nature, I can rattle off some very cool facts: Dolphins have homosexual sex — a lot — as do penguins and black swans. Also regarding penguins, those seabirds frequently form pair bonds of the same sex to parent little penguin chicks. Bonobo females frequently use sex to resolve conflicts via “genital rubbing,” and males can have sex with each other via “penis fencing.” Bonobos also operate in a matriarchal society. About half of the sex capuchin monkeys have is homosexual.
Speaking of those crazy-dicked ducks, get this: Female ducks possess vaginas with two to three pouches that may lead nowhere; beyond the pouches lies a labyrinthian spiral. When ducks mate, it’s the female who decides which male she’ll allow to deposit sperm in the spiral, but that’s only if she decides to relax her muscles enough. If and when a male duck tries to force himself on a female — and that definitely happens — her vaginal pouches actually prevent the sperm from getting anywhere.
What else? Well, female golden lion tamarins have harems of unrelated males, all of whom she mates with. And I think we all are pretty familiar with the tale of the seahorse, where males become pregnant and give birth.
A lot of this information initially found an audience in Dr. Joan Roughgarden’s 2004 book Evolution’s Rainbow, which looked at evidence from birds, fish, and mammals to push back against the Darwinian sexual selection theory, which proposed that male-male competition, or intrasexual selection, was a method for successful mating. (Basically, the strongest and most aggressive male gets to mate and pass on their genes.) Charles Darwin also proposed that intersexual selection involved females evaluating and choosing males with whom to mate based on specific traits, such as a colorful peacock plumage.
When Roughgarden, a Stanford evolutionary biologist who is prominently featured in Second Nature, argued against these long-accepted Darwinian theories, she was met with some horrific pushback. The reviews were “nasty,” she recalls in the documentary. Other reviews said that there was a “gay agenda” at work. (Dr. Roughgarden is a trans woman.)
We tend to forget that in Victorian England, when Darwin first proposed the theory of evolution, religious leaders weren’t having it. Generally speaking, religious leaders in the 1800s resisted Darwinism because they felt it contradicted the Genesis creation story (though some were comfortable with the idea of Christian Darwinism, which proposes that God utilized biological evolution to create all life). Catholic leadership felt Darwinism could explain physical biology but threatened the existence of unique human souls. Ultimately, leaders in Christianity felt Darwinism reduced human life to something purely mechanical and soulless, and therefore Godless.
It wouldn’t be until the 1870s — nearly two decades after Darwin published On The Origin of Species — that the scientific community and other educated groups widely accepted evolution as fact.
In Second Nature, scientists theorize that Darwin couldn’t help but impose his own heterosexual ideations on animal reproduction, mainly that animals only copulate for the purposes of reproduction, with males being the aggressors and females fluttering their eyelids behind lace fans, or something.
In more recent years, as the scientific community became more diverse, there came a fresh wave of observations about animal behavior and the evolutionary reasons behind them. For instance, social animals like bonobos and chimpanzees use sex as a means of reconciliation, which allows for a peaceful, cooperative existence. (If sex were primarily achieved through aggression, that would probably result in more volatility, injuries, and death, which doesn’t sound ideal for any community’s survival — animal, human, or otherwise.)
“Humans project ourselves onto nature all the time, and have been doing it forever — just look at any myth,” Second Nature director Drew Denny tells Rolling Stone. “We love creating colorful explanations for natural phenomena, but often do so at the peril of totally innocent people. Remember when all left-handed people were controlled by Satan? I bet you know several lefties who are not, in fact, Satanists.”
Denny thinks it would benefit all of us to take a bird’s eye view (pun intended) of history and remember the myriad stories we’ve told each other over the years in an attempt to explain the unexplainable. If humans and our inventions are inherently fallible, then it’s reasonable to figure that our stories are too. “Our little projections — even our longest standing myths — are nothing compared to the billions of years of evolution that have led us to this moment,” Denny says.
Of course, animals don’t really need us to understand the full spectrum of their gender and sexual experiences — they’re all doing just fine living their lives, fencing penises, same-sex pair bonding, and changing sexes in order to preserve their existence. Really, by peddling outdated narratives about the way animals relate to each other will only hurt one species: our own.