Lost Boy »

BRENT W. JEFFS spent his entire childhood in the Jeffs compound as nephew of Warren Jeffs and grandson of Rulon Jeffs, the Mormon fundamentalist group’s former prophet, who had dozens of wives and more than sixty children. He currently lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, with a beautiful wife and daughter.

MAIA SZALAVITZ is the author and coauthor of several books, including Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids. She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Elle, and is a Senior Fellow at stats.org, a media watchdog group. She lives in New York City.

In the polygamous Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS), girls can become valuable property as plural wives, but boys are expendable, even a liability. In this powerful and heartbreaking account, former FLDS member Brent Jeffs reveals both the terror and the love he experienced growing up on his prophet’s compound—and the harsh exile existence that so many boys face once they have been expelled by the sect.

Brent Jeffs is the nephew of Warren Jeffs, the imprisoned leader of the FLDS. The son of a prominent family in the church, Brent could have grown up to have multiple wives of his own and significant power in the 10,000-strong community. But he knew that behind the group’s pious public image—women in chaste dresses carrying babies on their hips—lay a much darker reality. So he walked away, and was the first to file a sexual-abuse lawsuit against his uncle. Now Brent shares his courageous story and that of many other young men who have become “lost boys” when they leave the FLDS, either by choice or by expulsion.

Brent experienced firsthand the absolute power that church leaders wield—the kind of power that corrupts and perverts those who will do anything to maintain it. Once young men no longer belong to the church, they are cast out into a world for which they are utterly unprepared. More often than not, they succumb to the temptations of alcohol and other drugs.

Tragically, Brent lost two of his brothers in this struggle, one to suicide, the other to overdose. In this book he shows that lost boys can triumph and that abuse and trauma can be overcome, and he hopes that readers will be inspired to help former FLDS members find their way in the world.

The Barnes & Noble Review

That polygamous Mormon sects can be, in reality, a lot more sinister and disturbing than, say, HBO's soapy Big Love may not surprise you. But you may be alarmed to learn, from a young man who experienced it firsthand, just how horrifying life within the cloistered compounds of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints was under leader Warren Jeffs. Those of us who remember the FLDS "president, prophet, seer, and revelator" from the TV coverage of his 2006 arrest can summon images of a gawky, bland-looking fellow being led around in handcuffs. Lost Boy, an unflinchingly honest, brave and riveting memoir by the FLDS leader's nephew Brent W. Jeffs, will replace those relatively benign images with far more graphic ones. In it, Brent describes being brutally and repeatedly raped, beginning when he was only five, by his uncle Warren. (Two of Brent's brothers have also alleged that Warren raped them when they were five or six; one of those brothers, tormented by his memories, later committed suicide.) He evokes the complications and cruelties of life in a "plural" family, where one man, multiple wives, and countless offspring share a home. He depicts the increasingly harsh treatment of sect members under Warren's leadership and the way young men were heartlessly driven out of the fold by the power-mad "prophet," as well as these "lost boys" subsequent struggles to build new lives. "I don't know if polygamy always produces abuse of women and children," writes Jeffs, "but from my experience, it frequently does. When women are seen as second-class citizens, I don't think polygamy can be anything but abusive." Lost Boy depicts one young man's struggle to right big wrongs -- and to find his way safely home. --Amy Reiter