Jesus Christ (of Latter-Day Saints), there are some terrible things (still) going on within the FLDS community.
Netflix‘s Trust Me: The False Prophet (2026) is a four-part documentary series that captured the rise of Samuel Bateman, the self-proclaimed heir to convicted child abuser Warren Jeffs’ Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS). If you thought Jeffs was a bad guy, well, you’re right, but cult expert and sexual abuse survivor Dr. Christine Marie tells The Hollywood Reporter her friends inside the community say Bateman was even worse.
A decade before Rachel Dretzin‘s 2022 Netflix docuseries Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey, which chronicled Jeffs’ crimes against children, arrest and life-plus-20-years sentencing, Marie, who has a PhD in psychology and a specialty in media psychology, and her videographer husband Tolga Katas moved to the tiny community of Short Creek, Utah, to help. They ended up helping more than they ever could have imagined.
Over several years there, the couple went undercover, kind of, to infiltrate Bateman’s cult and expose his despicable behavior. After gaining Bateman’s trust under the guise of filming footage for a straightforward documentary on his teachings, Katas’ camera captured evidence of continued awful abuses, including more sex crimes against minors. Footage was provided to the local police and the FBI, and then to Dretzin. The result was a number of arrests leading to lengthy prison sentences — Bateman is doing 50 years — as well as Trust Me: The False Prophet.
Read THR‘s interview with Marie, the docuseries’ undisputed breakout hero, below.
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Trust Me has a lot of producers (Jeff Skoll, Courtney Sexton, Miura Kite, Dretzin, Dorin Razam, Zachary Herrmann, Jamila Ephron, Katas). Your husband is one. Why aren’t you?
I didn’t want to be. [Katas] was an executive producer probably because he shot so much of the footage. He had no creative control and neither did I. We were just too in the middle of it and we wanted to trust experts. We were not experts, by any means, on documentaries. We had never done one before — I wanted to my hands clean of it and let them do whatever.
Since I knew I was a character, I didn’t want my own ideas to infuse it, so it wouldn’t seem like some sort of motive on my part.
What has been the response to the documentary — and to the popularity of the documentary — from the FLDS community?
Well, that’s an amazing question because — understand that the FLDS are still an isolated, sort of reclusive community that doesn’t go on the internet as a general rule. I don’t want to get any FLDS people in trouble, but they have been watching this and word has been spreading. Some FLDS, they have family members that have watched it or that send them screenshots of some of the comments, and it’s been surprisingly positive because it’s like the first real documentary that shows the FLDS for who they really are. It’s not all about their own crimes, or it’s not all about Warren Jeffs, and a lot of the comments have been that it has helped people break their stereotypes and realize that these FLDS people are different than they thought based on all the media coverage from the past. I’m very happy about that.
What has the response been from the non-fundamentalist Mormon population — the regular LDS community?
The mainstream LDS church is very sensitive about being portrayed as polygamists. They stopped that more than 100 years ago. Throughout history, since they’ve banned polygamy, they have had animosity towards this group down in Short Creek, Utah — and all polygamist groups. But in more recent years, like maybe the past five years, I have seen the LDS church pitching in humanitarian support down here. So that’s been incredible.
I’m so excited about the worldwide reception to this film because I’m getting positive feedback and stories from around the world. Someone said, “This series changed me, and it gave me strength, and I already made arrangements — tomorrow, I’m going in and filing a police report against my abuser.” Somebody else said, “I see myself in this. I know I need to fight and walk out of it now.” The series is having a real impact on individuals, so I screenshot things that people send me, and I send them to those people who are in the film, or that worried about it, or whatever, because I want them to see this is making a difference in a real way.
You still live in Short Creek — are you going to stay there after this?
Yeah.
Why?
I love it. I love my friends. I have friends FLDS and not-FLDS. It’s a beautiful, small town where everybody knows each other. And I have work to do. I have built this unique relationship with these stigmatized people, and they I feel like they still need me somewhat. I intervene on evictions, and I help — when they don’t go on the internet and they need somebody to look something up for them, they call me. When somebody who’s ex-FLDS has a present or something for their FLDS grandmother, I can figure out how to get things back and forth. Our house, we call it Switzerland, because people who are FLDS and ex-FLDS come and have secret unification meetings. I just don’t know who could replace me right now.
Samuel Bateman in Trust Me: The False Prophet season one.
Courtesy of Netflix
Do you plan on sort of exposing other cult groups through the medium of unscripted programming a la, for lack of a better example, To Catch a Predator?
Well, I don’t plan to catch another predator. I actually have been involved in other ones before this, which no one knows about, but what I do love to do is help people accomplish their dreams. So if they’ve been through something like this, I just want to empower people — and Tolga loves that too. We have a lot of connections, if we can find somebody that can help them with their dream of becoming a musician or their dream of becoming an actor or getting a new house. Can we find somebody some way to help get a down payment? I really like that a lot.
So no more documentaries or undercover work?
I don’t know about documentaries, but no, no more undercover work, if I can help it. I hope to do speaking teach law enforcement and Child Protective Services. I just hope to take what I know and share it with people who don’t understand why people get in these situations. If you don’t understand that, you’re going to charge somebody with a crime when they’re a victim, and there’s a probably a better path. I’ll give you an example: Nomz (Naomi Bistline), you know, from the documentary, she has a felony. She takes accountability for what she did, but when you think about it, she was obedient at the risk of her life. She was a passenger in a car that where she received instructions from Sam on what to do, and now she has a felony, but everybody knows what a victim she is. I hope to figure out how to get her and Moretta (Johnson) pardoned, because they were both so young and so coerced, and so it’s something that’s just on my heart right now.
At the end of the series, we get a bit of an update on what Nomz, now 27, is doing after prison. How is she today?
She is quite moved on. She has a great job that she can do remotely, and she has integrated into the world. She’s still extremely innocent, because that takes time, to learn how the world works. Like, you know, she didn’t know who Elvis Presley was. I mean, my FLDS friends had never heard of Kim Kardashian. You don’t know how many people from the FLDS community that I helped get their very first email, and they didn’t know even how it worked and what the app button was. So little by little, we keep hearing something that Nomz didn’t quite get educated on in [the cult]. I mean, she’s a great writer, and she and great at math, but there are other cultural things.
Do Bateman’s followers hate you?
The people who still believe in Sam hate me, but to be clear, his group is not FLDS. They’re a very small cult subset of the FLDS. So that’s completely different.
Do you see any of them out in public still?
Yeah. In fact, just the other day, I saw somebody coming out of the store — two of people who believe in Sam — and I smiled and waved at them and I just got a dirty look. But you know what? I would probably feel the same if I were them. And I’m still here for them, and even if these people hate me, I’m not gonna hate them back. I know that they have things going on in their brains.
This is probably too dumbed-down a way to ask a question about two very bad men, but since we’ve had Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey that chronicled the downfall of Warren Jeffs and now your work that turned into Trust Me: The False Prophet that directly took down his self-appointed successor, Sam Bateman… who was worse?
OK, so funny that you should ask this because just this weekend, someone came over, somebody ex-FLDS, and they just watched the whole series with an entire group of ex-FLDS people. And what they said was, Sam was worse. Sam was worse. So Warren Jeffs impacted a lot more people, but on an interpersonal level, as to what he put upon those who followed him, their consensus was, yeah, Sam Bateman was worse.
Is there a new Samuel Bateman yet, or is he still running his cult from prison?
They’re following him while he’s in jail. It’s very frustrating that he even gets to talk to them from there.
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