Without Christine Marie, Samuel Bateman might never have been jailed for his crimes among the Mormon community of Short Creek. What drives the heroine of Netflix’s hit documentary Trust Me: The False Prophet?
When Christine Marie and her husband, Tolga Katas, packed up their lives in Las Vegas in 2016 to start from scratch in Short Creek, a remote desert town in the Arizona Strip, the odds of fitting in and finding community were surely against them. This was the headquarters of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), the secretive polygamist sect, known for its patriarchal control, where women and girls wore prairie dresses and “married” wherever they were placed by their leader. Marie, with her blond ponytail, pink cowboy hat, pink boots and pink glasses, was a former beauty queen, ventriloquist and escape artist, now finishing her psychology doctorate. Tolga, once a rock singer, was a videographer, a city dweller who had never been on a hike.
This is the starting point of the Netflix documentary Trust Me: The False Prophet – and unsurprisingly, the couple’s arrival is met with deep suspicion. What follows, though, is gripping TV, recorded as it happened, but paced like a thriller. Having gained the community’s trust, the couple discover a polygamous, predatory paedophile among them, and a situation of horrifying sexual abuse. Working with the FBI as double agents, they infiltrate this tightly knit cult and ultimately gather enough evidence to secure arrests and convictions.
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Without Christine Marie, Samuel Bateman might never have been jailed for his crimes among the Mormon community of Short Creek. What drives the heroine of Netflix’s hit documentary Trust Me: The False Prophet?When Chri...
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