There is another life, if you can kind of get that out early enough.” “In my experience, in doing films that have had victims of sexual abuse in the story, the people that are the most recovered are those who speak out about it at a young age and either find justice by reporting their perpetrator or going to get counseling very close to when the incident happened. The best way to break the cycle, Berg believes, is to bring the abuse to light. “They are just like brothers,” Berg says. members, archival materials including photographs and audio recordings, and the cooperation of two men who have been chasing Jeffs for a decade-the author Jon Krakauer, whose book about the Mormon church, Under the Banner of Heaven, is being adapted into a feature film, and an intrepid private investigator named Sam Brower. “They think everyone else is an enemy and they will never make it to the next life unless they follow the law of whoever their leader is.”ĭespite repeated entreaties, Berg wasn’t able to get Jeffs to cooperate, but she ended up with plenty to work with anyway: interviews with victims and other former F.L.D.S. “These people know nothing else,” Berg says. The film presents a devastating indictment of Jeffs, but it also raises disturbing questions about his congregation, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which continues to allow polygamy more than a century after the larger Mormon church abandoned the practice. “I’m getting such a bad reputation,” Berg says with a rueful laugh, before pointing out that she also has a big Janis Joplin documentary in the pipeline.īut, first: Prophet’s Prey, which premieres on Showtime tomorrow. Her films have probed priestly pedophilia, child murder, casting-couch molestation in Hollywood, and, now, the monumentally icky case of Warren Jeffs, the Utah religious-sect leader convicted in 2011 of sexually abusing under-age female members of his flock. Oscar-nominated documentarian Amy Berg is not the type to shy away from dark subject matter.
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