FLDS

FLDS — Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints — is an American religious organization that regards itself as a fundamentalist branch of Mormonism, and which in US criminal, civil and family law proceedings is primarily known for its association with polygamy, forced marriage and sexual abuse of minors. The organization is not part of the official Mormon church, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which renounced polygamy in 1890. FLDS instead maintained practices that the American state considers unlawful, including plural marriage and marriages to underage girls arranged by the sect's leader.

In US court proceedings, FLDS is not a legal party in an institutional sense, but appears as the organizational and religious framework for a series of serious criminal cases. The most central is the case against Warren Jeffs, the sect's self-appointed prophet and leader, who in 2011 was sentenced in Texas to life plus twenty years for sexual assault of minors, including a twelve-year-old girl he had designated as one of his wives.

FLDS is also connected to cases concerning internal abuse of power, enforced submission and psychological control over members of the sect. Jeffs governed the organization with an authoritarian hand and decided who was permitted to marry whom — including arranging marriages between adult men and underage girls. These acts form the basis of the criminal cases that have made FLDS a central concept in American true crime accounts.

After Jeffs' imprisonment, internal power structures within FLDS continued to give rise to new criminal cases, including the case against Samuel Rappylee Bateman, a former FLDS follower who declared himself a prophet and was likewise charged with abuse of minors. In this context, FLDS is used as a designation for the religious and organizational environment in which these crimes took place.