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The Choice

Discussion & Talk

Factual: Life Stories

Series featuring people who have made life-altering decisions

Series featuring people who have made life-altering decisions and exploring the whole process, from the original dilemma to living with the consequences

The Choice: 26/08/2010

26/08/2010

BBC Radio 4 - The Choice, 26/08/2010

Michael Buerk talks to Elissa Wall about her decision to break away from a polygamous sect

Michael Buerk talks to Elissa Wall about her decision to break away from a polygamous sect.

On The Choice this week Michael Buerk talk to Elissa Wall who was born into the strange, narrow world of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints - an American  sect that had broken away from the Mormon church. 

It was a group that believed in religious devotion, hard work, female subservience, the virtues and the clothes of the prairie puritans - and polygamy. Elissa was married off at 14 to a 19-year-old cousin - a relationship she hated. After several miscarriages, and a stillbirth, she faced the toughest choice of her young life - to stay with the community and the church, which was all she knew, or to leave. That would mean, not only separation from her mother and sisters, maybe for ever, but taking on the man who had ruled her life, the cult leader Warren Jeffs.

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26/08/2010

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