ANDERSON COOPER 360 DEGREES
 
RANDI KAYE, CNN ANCHOR
CNN
 
Webmaster's note: the first part of this show has been omitted because it discussed Osama bin Laden.

Just ahead tonight, another gripping family story. One woman's struggle to leave a life of polygamy.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

KAYE (voice-over): She was born into a life of inferiority and abuse.

SARA HAMMON, THE HOPE ORGANIZATION: It was like marching to the guillotine.

KAYE: Inferiority, abuse and the polygamist prophet, Warren Jeffs.

WARREN JEFFS, SELF-PROCLAIMED PROPHET: Dear wives, realizing happiness is only in being a part and a strength to your husband.

KAYE: See how she escaped, but also how it haunts her to this day.

Plus, see what Rudy's saying about the latest bin Laden tape. Hear that Cold Cash Congressman's latest answer to his money found in the freezer problem.

And is another Republican getting ready to run for president? That and more tonight in "Raw Politics." 360 next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

Up next, life in a secretive polygamist community through the eyes of one woman who escaped.

Plus, polygamist members of the FLDS church call him their prophet, but what will the future hold for church leader Warren Jeffs when he faces a jury? That's ahead for him and for us on 360.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KAYE: Tonight we're going to take you inside the secret world of polygamy. Jury selection is about to begin in the trial of polygamist leader Warren Jeffs. He's charged with arranging marriages of child brides, and prosecutors say that makes him an accomplice to rape.

Their key witness was just 14 when she was forced to marry her older cousin. Eventually, she broke free from the sect, and so did the young woman you're about to meet.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

KAYE (voice-over): As a young girl in a polygamist home, Sara Hammon knew her future. She'd be forced to marry, likely a man twice her age. She'd been taught he would be her ticket to heaven, but she didn't feel that way.

HAMMON: It was like marching to the guillotine.

KAYE: Sara grew up in Colorado City, Arizona, a polygamist community. Her father had 19 wives. She had 74 siblings.

(on camera) What was the general attitude toward women in your home?

HAMMON: They were second-class citizens to my -- to my father. These women have no voice.

KAYE (voice-over): Sara calls it mind control. She says her mother had more than two dozen nervous breakdowns.

HAMMON: I don't know how a woman can allow another woman to come into her home and cook some supper up with the family for her and go to bed with her husband that night and respect herself.

KAYE: When Warren Jeffs became prophet, he closed the schools. Children were no longer educated. Instead, girls were taught to cook and keep house.

Listen to this rare recording of one of Jeffs' sermons.

JEFFS: Dear wives, realizing happiness is only in being a part and a strength to your husband.

KAYE: Sara learned her place at a painfully young age. Before she'd even turned 5, she says her father and other members of her family had begun sexually abusing her.

That sense of power and entitlement followed Sara's father to his death bed. Before his last breath, she says, he tried to put his hand up her skirt.

HAMMON: He knew he was dying. Instead of at that moment being connecting and, you know, a child and her father, it was -- it was abuse.

KAYE: Investigator Gary Engels knows about the abuse in the community and illegal marriages involving underage girls. The challenge is getting women to talk about it. They're so afraid, he says, it can take years for them to open up.

(on camera) Why did the women stay?

GARY ENGELS, MOHAVE COUNTY INVESTIGATOR: If they get them young enough and get a couple of children, then it makes it very difficult for them to leave. And the fact that the women are not educated or taught how to deal or take care of themselves in the outside world is another issue.

KAYE: Many women don't even know they have options, that another life exists. Those trying to help them are in the process of putting up billboards like this one which, when complete, will let women know that they have a right to education. And if they need help, it's out there.

(voice-over) At age 14, Sara found that help. A couple she'd been baby-sitting for outside the community agreed to take her in.

HAMMON: I was the first 14-year-old girl to successfully leave the community. KAYE: Nearly 20 years have passed. Yet Sara still struggles with her place in society.

(on camera) Have you been able to date? Is that too personal?

HAMMON: I don't date much. I watched my mom just die emotionally, and I relate that to marriage. I still have never been able to undo what I absorbed as a child, that once a man and a woman become a unit, the man's up here, and the woman's down here.

KAYE (voice-over): Sara will forever wonder who she might have been, she says, had she been born into a normal family.

(END VIDEOTAPE)
 
CNN.com
Originally broadcast September 7, 2007
 
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