Netflix’s true-crime docuseries Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey, streaming June 8, 2022, provides chilling footage from self-professed prophet Warren Jeffs’s days of religious dictatorship. Jeffs led a secretive polygamous sect of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS). While at the helm of this radical arm of the Mormon Church of the Latter-Day Saints, Jeffs accumulated 78 wives, 24 of which were underage girls, and reportedly at least 60 children.

In 2008, federal law enforcement raided Jeffs’s Yearning for Zion Ranch in West Texas on the grounds of sexual, physical, and psychological abuse. The 66-year-old was convicted on two counts of sexual assault of a child and sentenced to life in prison. He will be eligible for parole in 2038.

The Docuseries Explores Jeffs’s Oppressive Criminal Rule and The Brave Women Who Broke Free

Warren Jeffs
Daily Beast

Keep Sweet interviewed survivors and former wives of Warren Jeffs, including one woman who married him at age 14. Peabody Award-winning filmmaker Rachel Dretzin (Who Killed Malcolm X?) said in a statement:

“The first time I traveled to Short Creek, Utah, I had the same first impression as most. With their pleated hair, prairie dresses, and diffident, skittish manner, it was easy to see the young girls and women of the FLDS as odd, even alien creatures. It was almost impossible to believe that a society so repressive, isolated, and extreme could exist in plain sight in 21st century America.

And then I began interviewing survivors. The stories they told — of the process of systematic coercion and mind control exercised by the man they thought of as a religious prophet, Warren Jeffs — were far from alienating. After many months spent reporting this story, it was clear to me that these women could have been my daughter, my mother, or me. And it was also abundantly clear that they showed incredible courage and strength in leaving this religion-turned- criminal cult. The women in our series managed to leave the FLDS with no real education or skills, no money, no support whatsoever. For their whole lives they had been valued solely as plural wives and as breeders of children. To leave meant saying goodbye to everything and everyone they loved to start over in a society they didn’t understand.”

See the chilling trailer for the Netflix docuseries below:

Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey will be released on Wednesday, June 8, 2022. All four episodes have a runtime of approximately 45 minutes.