The Girlfriends: Spotlight, E2: Lu Ann Escapes the Order

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Hey, listener, in this episode, we have got a long list of traumatic subjects coming up.

There's child abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, spiritual abuse, emotional abuse, domestic abuse, and suicide.

In many ways, obviously, it's a really heavy listen.

But there's also the story of how one woman broke away from all of that and helped other women do the same.

And dare I say it, at points it's even funny.

But if it's too much for you, skip on, sister.

We were taught that we were the elite, that our group was the only ones going to heaven.

Before I went to kindergarten at five years old, I was taught how to answer questions like who is your dad and told what lies to tell to protect our religion and our family.

We didn't want anybody to go to jail because of anything that we had said.

I just thought, if I'm going to heaven, why is everybody else so much happier than I am?

Why couldn't I be born in a family that was happy?

Luanne Cooper, like all of us, didn't get to choose what life she was born into.

It's a lottery, a roll of the dice.

And for a while at least, there's not much you can do but live through it.

But eventually, as you grow older, if you're lucky enough, you get to make one of two choices.

Either to conform, to fill exactly the amount of space that you're designated,

or to opt out, to just say, I can't do this.

This isn't me, and it never will be.

I had to make that kind of decision decision when I was in my teens.

I was struggling with my sexuality and how people treated me because of it.

Eventually, I felt all I could do was move out of my small village and give up the Christianity that I once held dear.

And I moved to Brighton, which is the UK's gayest city.

That transition was affirming, but it was also one of the hardest things I've ever done in my life.

Walking away from everything you know, especially religion, which is meant to be the underpinning of, well, just about everything,

is really disorientating.

Now, Luann Cooper's story is an extreme version of that.

She grew up in one of the strangest religious environments that I have ever heard of.

For her, life was already planned out when she was just a young girl.

When I was 15, I was told to drop out of school and then I was approached to be married to my cousin slash nephew as his fourth wife.

I knew that it was going to happen with or without my consent.

All this because Luan grew up inside the infamous so-called Kingston clan, where Luan claims every man is expected to have many wives and every woman is expected to have many children.

All with the aim of building up the kingdom of God.

That's where spiritual abuse happens.

You need to do this thing that the world sees as bad, but God will see it as good because you're protecting the kingdom of God.

And so when somebody tells me to do something, I think, well, I have to to survive.

During her life inside the group, Luanne felt manipulated into some absurd emotional and religious contortions of the mind.

Until one day, she just couldn't take it anymore and decided to do something about it for herself and others like her.

I'm Anna Sinfield, and from the teams at Novel and iHeart Podcasts, this is the Girlfriend's Spotlight, where we tell stories of women winning.

Today, Luann escapes the order.

Before we dive into Luann's story, I want to set the scene and give you a little bit of a primer on the Kingston Group, which is also known as the Order.

It was founded by a man called Eldon Kingston back in 1935, which was during the Great Depression.

Many of its original members had been part of the mainstream Mormon church.

By that point, polygamy, the practice of men marrying multiple wives, had already been banned by the Mormons.

But Eldon Kingston believed in polygamy.

He believed it was the only way to build the kingdom of God, basically the only way to get to heaven.

So on the outskirts of Salt Lake City, he started his own group, the Order, along with another man, Luann's grandfather.

Luann and other former members also say that the Order's idea of creating the kingdom of God includes marrying only within the family to keep the bloodline pure.

Now, the Order refutes this and says it doesn't have any preference for any particular family or bloodline.

But because a lot of the practices performed inside the group are frowned upon in the outside world, the community is very secretive.

According to Luann, over time, it's developed a set of, let's just say, unique teachings.

To me, it sounds sort of like you're mixing religion and capitalism.

We were taught that if we found a penny on the sidewalk, we turn that into the order.

All of our incomings and our outgoings are in the name of God, meaning we turn it into the order.

As a kid, it was in the name of God that we would go to work at his businesses and that the kingdom of God was measured off of how much money I was making the business that I worked at.

I feel like it's speculation on how much I feel feel like they make,

but they do have a few businesses that profit a million a month.

To be clear, this is Luann's assumption.

We haven't been able to check it against any financial records.

But from what Luann says and other former members, it sounds like the order are very powerful in Utah.

I feel like they are.

The Kingstons have, I would be willing to guess, about 200 businesses.

They have standard restaurant supply company.

They have a department store, a property management company, pawn shops, they have a grocery store.

I mean they're just spread throughout the Salt Lake Valley.

They have an empire here in Utah.

Wow.

And so 200 businesses and how many people?

They have possibly 4,000 members that is at their disposal to build up the kingdom of God.

At church as a kid, I remember attending meetings where the speaker would suggest that eventually the order will grow to be big enough to take over Utah and then eventually take over the world.

And that's why women need to have children every year.

That's why we need to make sure our kids don't leave the order.

I'm interested to go back to this idea of you being at school and having to lead this sort of double life.

What were the things that you were saying to the other kids when you were having to sort of talk about who your dad was and you were making up things and trying to cover it all up?

Well, honestly, we were told what lies to say.

So this is who you're supposed to say your dad is and this is what you're supposed to say about this or that.

Eventually, you know, second and third grade, I didn't have very many friends at school because I wasn't allowed to play with them outside of school.

Yeah, you must have felt like a real outsider.

I definitely did.

Yeah.

I guess that's the goal, right?

To keep you guys in your own bubble and make sure you don't get any ideas of what other life could be.

Yeah, that was the goal.

You said you were told as a child that you can't tell anyone who your dad was.

I mean, what was your actual relationship with him and who was he?

So I didn't know that I was supposed to have a dad.

until I was six years old.

Like, you didn't know one existed?

Growing up, most of the kids I played with, which was my cousins, didn't have a dad.

It wasn't until I was six years old, after I had been to school for a couple years, that I realized, oh, I'm supposed to have a dad.

And so I would look around at church to see who my dad was.

And after a couple of weeks of going to church, I could not figure out who my dad was.

And so I asked my mom, and she just started crying.

And she said,

you can't tell anybody who your dad is.

I could feel the fear in her voice.

I just said, okay.

And she said, your dad is Brother Ortell.

And I was immediately disappointed because Brother Ortell was the leader.

And he was busy.

I've already been taught to fear him.

And I knew I was never, ever going to have a relationship with him.

Could you tell me a bit more about your family generally that you did have access to?

Like, what was the setup?

Obviously you had your mom, you said siblings.

How many of you were there?

Yeah so I have

I had my mom and my mom has eight kids.

I was the youngest of the eight.

We lived with my grandpa and my aunt.

My mom and my aunt were married to the same guy.

And I remember my dad visiting my house two times in the seven years of my life that he was alive.

Once he visited my mom, once he visited my aunt.

And so I guess that leads me on to wondering what your role was within the family, what it was like to be a young girl growing up in that environment.

Because I was the youngest and I was a girl, there was a lot of abuse.

I remember being sexually abused by a close family member in my home for as long as I could remember until I was about 12 years old when somebody finally put a stop to it.

My dad taught our family, his family, that our kids should obey the second you ask them to do something.

His strategy was

you hold the child by their hair at the top of their head and you slap them in the face until they stop crying.

And so you learn, you learn to stop crying so that they will stop hitting you.

And looking back, it just taught me fear.

And so when somebody tells me to do something, I think,

well, I have to to survive.

And then it evolves into what they teach in church is the law of one above another.

That is their main gospel principle, which is not supported by any scripture, by the way.

But their law of one above another teaches that you do what the person over you tells you to do, whether it's your boss at work or your your husband or one of the leaders.

And if it's wrong, the person that told you will be eternally held accountable.

The way this works within the group, according to accounts of various former members, is that the closer a man is related to the leader, the more powerful they are.

Each one of them are strangely numbered, and so the leader is number one, the second in command is number two, and so on and on.

The order deny this.

They say that being a quote-unquote numbered man does not give the individual additional authority or preference over the affairs of any other person.

And where do women fit in this hierarchy?

There's no room in the hierarchy for women.

So it really, I mean, it's really religion as an act of control.

It is.

And if you don't do what you're told, you're eternally held accountable.

But if you do,

the person that told you is held eternally accountable.

So it doesn't matter what the law is here on earth.

It matters what is going to happen to you in heaven.

But where did God come in that?

Because presumably you shouldn't be forced to do bad things just because somebody above you has said it.

Well, yes.

And so that's where spiritual abuse happens is we need to protect the kingdom of God.

And in order to do that, you need to do this thing that the world sees as bad, but God will see it as good because

in the end, you're protecting the kingdom of God.

And that's the manipulation tactic that they use.

I mean, I feel like I get a sense now of just how difficult it is to even exist within the order.

Would you be able to take me back to the time when you first heard that you were going to be married?

What was that like?

Well, everybody around me was getting married, and that was scary because I knew eventually it was going to come around to me.

So I tried to lay low.

I stayed in school.

Luanne was still just 15 at this point.

I was one of the few cousins that I had or half sisters that I had that actually went to ninth grade.

I knew it was coming my way.

And so when my mom finally said, so-and-so is asking to meet with you,

I just thought, thought, ah, here it is.

Here we go.

The so-and-so in question was Luann's first cousin, Jeremy.

She was to become his fourth wife.

Luanne knew that the life she'd been primed for all her childhood had just become inevitable.

After the break, Luanne gets married.

But soon, she starts to doubt everything she had been raised to believe.

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At 15, Luanne was told to drop out of high school and dedicate herself to what her family saw as her duty, marriage.

The person she was supposed to marry was Jeremy, her first cousin.

who already had three wives.

Her mum arranged a meeting for her, Luanne, and Jeremy to discuss the marriage.

I met with them

and

I met with the leader of the order and I didn't really respond.

I just let them do all the talking, which I'm assuming led them to believe that they needed to keep talking until I said something because I had meeting after meeting after meeting with the leader.

and my future husband.

But presumably they weren't seeking your consent in this.

No, they definitely weren't.

I should mention here that statements from the order say that they believe marriage is a personal choice that should not be coerced.

What Luanne describes here is her own recollection of her experience.

What were they talking about?

Following the Lord's plan for me

and building up the kingdom of God and fitting in and being a part of my divine birthright.

And building up the kingdom of God, that means having babies.

Yes.

Having babies that can eventually start working in the order businesses.

Yeah.

But you were a baby yourself.

You're only 15.

Yeah.

How did you feel about the prospect of all of what they were talking about?

I felt like I was still a kid.

Yeah.

You were?

Yeah.

I felt like I was still a kid.

I was too young.

At one point I said, maybe he is the person I'm supposed to marry, but I don't feel like I'm ready yet.

And so that just led to more meetings, which I realized this is a constant thing that I'm only going to get out of if I get married.

And so it was the lesser of the two evils.

I said, okay, I'm ready.

And I was married three days later.

Meanwhile, while I'm in these meetings, My mom is at home sewing a dress.

My sister takes me to the store to pick out flowers.

And I'm just on autopilot.

I knew I did not have to say anything.

I knew that it was going to happen with or without my consent.

And what about your, at this point, would-be husband?

Did he seem remotely interested in you?

You know, could this have been a love story?

You know, who was he?

He kept saying, I never thought that I would be to the point where I would get four wives, which made me feel like a number to him.

And that was probably the most endearing thing he ever said to me or about me.

Endearing.

So it wasn't a good start.

And how much older was he than you?

He was 23 and I was 15.

So then I thought, well, it could be worse.

My cousins are marrying men who are 40.

He's only 23.

My sister is married our half-brothers.

He's a cousin.

And so it felt like maybe this was the best shot I had.

Oh, Luanne, I'm sorry.

There is like nothing good you can say about that.

So now, you know, I can see how you were reaching for,

you know, oh, maybe this is better, the lesser of evils.

But, you know, that would have been illegal.

Yeah, and it was illegal.

And so it was a spiritual marriage.

I was told who I could invite and who I couldn't invite.

I wasn't allowed to talk about it on the phone because they were afraid the government taps our phones.

And I didn't even have to plan the wedding because it was being planned for me all around me.

Was 15 the youngest that they'd marry girls?

No, I had been to a wedding where a 12-year-old had married a 30-year-old man.

Jesus.

And why would people do that to their daughters that young?

Well, they're building up the kingdom of God.

Right.

But it was normal to have a 12-year-old get married.

It was normal at the age of 12 to 15

that you would get married as a girl.

It was normal to marry somebody who was 10 or 20 or more years older than you.

And it felt creepy to me, but I would watch everybody around me and think they're okay with this.

Like, this is normal.

So I felt like I was the odd one out because

I

really wasn't okay with it, but It was the law of one above another.

I had to go with it.

The order disputes this.

They say on their website that, quote, marriages should be conducted within the legal age of consent.

In Utah, that legal age of marriage is currently 16, raised from 15 in 2019.

Since 2019, the law also says that 16 and 17-year-olds cannot marry anyone more than seven years older than them.

And why do you think that you had become more aware in that sense to see it from almost an outsider's eyes and go, this doesn't feel right.

Because I was alone a lot, I watched a lot of TV, I went to school, I did have friends, I did hang out with them eventually after school.

I just made sure nobody was home to catch me.

I gave myself as many outside influences as I could as a kid because I honestly felt like they're happier than I am because they're not in the order.

So, I don't know, maybe in the back of my head, I just wanted to leave.

I wanted to be a member of a different family growing up.

Yeah, it sounds like those kernels of thought had been bubbling for a while.

Could you tell me what early married life was like?

It was awkward and weird, and we went on our honeymoon the day of our wedding.

It was awkward to be alone with him.

There wasn't a lot of conversation.

On our wedding night, he had gotten a very nice hotel.

I didn't tell him no on our wedding night because I knew it was my duty.

This is why I'm marrying him.

And so I just went into autopilot.

Yeah.

What matters is that you're obeying the one above you.

You're doing what you're told, and you're building up the kingdom of God.

But it doesn't sound like he was particularly into this marriage either.

Yeah, he wasn't.

So I stayed living at home with my mom and he would visit me every four days.

And on the nights that I couldn't get away from work, he would come over and my mom or my aunt would make him dinner.

That made him uncomfortable.

So then he stopped coming over on the nights that I worked and eventually only started coming over once a week.

So that worked out, but he told me I wasn't a very good wife, that I didn't have dinner prepared for him because I was at work.

I feel like his end goal was to just break me and make me feel less than.

Those were the only conversations he would have with me.

And I was taught that if I wasn't happy, then it was my own fault.

And so I had to figure out how to be happy in spite of what kind of person I was to my husband.

And it just put me into a spiral of depression.

Luanne was 15 years old.

and expected to begin married life with this 23-year-old man who didn't seem to care about her at all, other than to make sure he could take advantage of his conjugal rights.

And she was just one of four wives.

They were a big, but by the sounds of it, not very happy family.

We had family dinners on Sundays.

And when I was first married, it was so awkward to go.

So sometimes I didn't go and I would get in trouble for that.

When I say I got in trouble, he just yelled at me.

He never physically harmed me, but he yelled at me really well.

But yeah, we would have family dinners, family outings,

and if there was church, then he wanted us all to sit together.

If there was a church dance, then he wanted us all to sit together.

Sometimes I did and sometimes I didn't.

I was definitely the black sheep in the family.

But I did figure out that if I was friends with the other wives, with my sister wives, then these get-togethers were tolerable.

And did you get along along kind of genuinely or was that you were kind of playing happy families?

At first it was just playing happy family and just being kind just to survive, but I eventually did develop relationships with my sister wives and I started to enjoy being around them.

They started to open up to me more and sharing stories that you do not share with your sister wife.

That must have been important to have that support network.

I eventually realized realized how unhappy all of his wives are.

Of course, we haven't spoken to Jeremy's other wives who are still within the order, so we can't say for sure how they felt about their marriages.

But during the early years of Luanne's marriage, everyone around her seemed focused on making sure she became pregnant.

When I was 16, I was moved into my own apartment.

and living by myself and

getting more pressure to get pregnant.

and I eventually did get pregnant and when I told him I just took a pregnancy test and it said I'm pregnant he said well we'll see and that was his response and then he leaves and a month later I reminded him I'm still pregnant because I was trying so hard to be a good wife and you'd done the thing the thing that you were meant to do Yeah, and I just wanted him to like me.

I just wanted to feel like he liked me.

I really, really wanted to be loved.

So I would remind him, I'm still pregnant.

And he was like, well, is it even mine?

And he would say stuff like that to me.

And I said, why would you ask me that?

And he's like, well, I don't know where you've been.

I didn't see a doctor during my first pregnancy at all.

There was no doctor's appointments, no checking to see if I was healthy or if the baby was healthy.

And then.

When I was in labor, my mom came to stay with me for the day.

They called one of the leaders of the order to come help deliver my baby because they had more experience.

And the whole time that they were there, they kept saying, can you make this happen faster?

Or how can we speed this along?

Luanne was freshly 18 and terrified while this impatient man essentially mansplained her labor to her.

Luanne says that there were no medical professionals there and that it was her husband who did her stitches afterwards.

Fortunately both Luanne and her daughter were okay.

Luanne's second pregnancy, which was around a year later, was even tougher.

She says that for most of her second labor, she was left alone, panicked, in and out of consciousness.

But luckily, Luann's second daughter was born healthily as well.

These two girls became something for Luanne to hold on to.

When I held my first baby for the first time, I realized what it was to love another human being more than myself.

I loved my girls.

I still love my girls.

Even after Luanne had the kids Jeremy wanted so badly, she says she was left to fend for herself and their two daughters, basically all on her own.

He didn't support me at all.

He kept a room in the apartment that I was in and kept the door locked and had his storage in there.

But I paid for the rent and the utilities.

I paid for my own groceries.

When I had kids, I paid for everything, all of their needs.

And then one time he came home and he said, do you have food storage?

And I said, not really.

And he said, well, I have a bucket of beans in my closet here in my apartment.

Just to be absolutely clear, what Luanne is suggesting here is that Jeremy kept a locked room that only he had access to in Luanne's apartment, which Luanne was paying for.

And the room was full of, from what I can gather, beans.

He said, I'll sell it to you for $5.

And I said, okay.

I didn't feel like I had an option to tell him no, because you don't tell the one above you no.

And so I just let him pull the bucket of beans out and stick it in my pantry and then charge me $5.

What's the point of the husbands then?

What are they bringing?

Well, the wives are supposed to have a baby every year.

So the husband brings home his sperm every week.

Oh, thank you so much.

Gratefully received, I'm sure.

Well, it's better when they leave.

Yeah.

I can't get over how utterly bizarre and also how cruel that beans incident sounds, as Luanne tells it.

It's like Jeremy was hopped up on the power that the order's hierarchy provided him with.

Shortly after I got married, I realized I am going to be miserable for the rest of my life.

And it kind of just hit me like a brick, like, oh, this is my life.

I'm going to be expected to have babies and support myself and support my family and try to please my husband, try to please my boss.

And that was the beginning of my depression.

So at what point did you start thinking about actually leaving the order?

Well, my cousin, who had left a year previously, sent LDS missionaries to my house to try to talk to me.

LDS stands for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

It's the mainstream Mormon church.

They proceeded to tell me, well, we know about your group.

We know about the polygamous relationship you're in.

And then my mind went to, oh, somebody is sharing our secrets.

I need to figure out who and how they're finding out so that I can report back to the leader.

Wow.

So you're still, even though you're, well, you definitely didn't like this life, you're still wanting to report that back.

Well, you want to be accepted.

You want to be loved.

You know, anytime you can get a second of belonging, you desire that so much.

Yeah.

I ended up having a long conversation with this missionary.

I agreed to meet with them at a nearby church where nobody would see me.

And they taught me about the atonement of Christ.

For those of you who aren't across the vocabulary, the atonement of Christ refers to the sacrifice that Jesus Christ made to atone for the sins of humanity.

In Mormon faith, it means all people, regardless of religious or moral standing, are saved.

When they taught me

about the atonement, it was the first time I ever felt his love.

And it was the first time I ever felt love for myself.

And I wanted to keep feeling that.

And I thought, how do I keep feeling this in the situation that I'm in?

And then

my cousin appeared.

And

she said, you know, you can leave, right?

And I thought, I can.

The thought of leaving the order never occurred to me.

It occurred to me that I could get out of the order by ending my life, but it never occurred to me that I could get out of the order by leaving the order.

The wheels started turning for me.

And she said, well, if you did leave, when would you do it?

This was a Wednesday afternoon when we had this conversation.

and I said, Friday.

After the break, Luanne hatches a secret plan to get herself and her kids away from the order.

Once Luann spoke the idea of leaving the order into existence, there in that church, she knew she couldn't delay.

She wanted to be gone in less than three days.

It has to be Friday.

My cousin would come to my house at night.

She'd park a few blocks away and walk to my house after dark and help me pack.

We packed all night long.

I was just being very secretive those two days, packing as much as I could.

And then Friday, I decided that I couldn't take my kids to the babysitter and I couldn't go to work because it wasn't safe to be separated from my girls.

I didn't want to risk being caught leaving because I didn't know what would happen to me if I was.

I had heard stories of girls being kept in a closet for a week until they agreed not to try to leave again.

I had seen girls that supposedly tried to leave and then they disappear for a month and they come back more loyal and more obedient than they were before.

So I didn't show up to work on Friday.

My girls didn't show up to the babysitter on Friday.

I went to another cousin's house that had left 15 years prior to hang out at her house.

And me and my cousin went to my apartment at noon with my girls in the car to see if anybody had tried to check up on me.

And my sister came running out and she tried to open the back seat where my girls were, but it was locked.

And my cousin jumped in the car and she started driving.

And my sister grabbed the door of the driver's side and started running with the car.

And my cousin said, what do I do?

And I said, drive faster.

And my sister let go of the door and started chasing us down the road saying, you give me those girls.

You do not deserve to have those girls luanne's escape was so abrupt that she hadn't even been able to grab all the boxes she'd packed so the next day she returned to her old house this time volunteers from the lds church came with her 30 of them but luanne's family were there too she says they tried to stop her from leaving

Luanne stood strong.

She had her entourage of church volunteers, and one of them called the police.

When the police officer came and said, we have to go, my family all wanted to hug me goodbye.

I felt like this is the last time I'm going to see them.

And so I hugged everybody bye and I walked away and I was walking away from my family towards that group of strangers and I knew that I was going to be okay.

But

I had to figure out what I was going to do next.

Luanne needed to build a whole new life for herself.

Early on, she managed to find an apartment of her own.

She also got her first job on the outside where she was selling family portraits to passers-by in a parking lot of a grocery store.

Now that's a nightmare job for most people.

I definitely can't imagine anything worse, but especially for someone who's been taught to fear and mistrust the outside world for the last 20 years.

Luanne even ended up putting herself through school, finishing her last three years of high school in just one year.

Obviously, it sounds like you were kind of really making a life for yourself out there, but how did it feel to be away from the family and the order?

It was really hard to leave my family.

My mom and my sister were my best friends.

And I knew that by choosing to leave the order, I was choosing to lose that relationship.

I would call my mom.

She would say things to me like, we can't talk to you anymore.

One of my close family members members said, you're not my sister anymore.

You left the order.

You chose to leave the order, so you're not a part of this family anymore.

It was hard.

Are you still not in touch with any of them?

No.

I will call my mom every

four-ish

years.

And when I get off the phone, I remember why I don't call her.

And why is that?

She is not proud of me or the things that I have done to hurt the order.

It's funny because obviously, from an outside perspective, you've done so many heroic things and put yourself out on a limb, and everyone should be proud of you for what you've done.

Yeah.

So, after I left, I did not want to hurt anybody.

I wanted to make a life for myself.

I wanted to focus on surviving, but I kept hearing stories of the abuse

that was still going on in the group.

And I realized I can do something.

So I went to the Attorney General's office and told them, I am a witness to an underage marriage.

I was married to my first cousin.

I have two little girls with this individual.

I am a witness of this.

This is still happening in there today.

And it took a couple tries before they took my case.

It felt like they were afraid of the Kingstons, but I don't know why they would be, but nobody wanted to touch my case until they finally did.

And they did DNA samples and they did pick him up, and he did go to jail for incest.

The sentence was that he would go to jail for up to a year, and I think he got out after nine months.

Wow.

And that was for incest.

Was he never charged with having sex with a minor?

So they were able to go after him for one count of incest,

but statutory rape, all of the other stuff, the statute limitations had run out on that.

And how did you feel putting him away?

I was scared, you know, repercussions from my family.

I didn't receive any repercussions, so that was good.

But it felt rewarding in a sense that Somebody was caught for doing something and maybe it was scared of them enough to stop doing what they were doing.

Luanne has gone beyond just holding Jeremy accountable for their marriage.

Sort of inadvertently, she found herself as the go-to person for other girls trying to get away from the order.

It sounds like she's become almost a kind of folk hero for those who question their life in the group.

I have had girls dropped off at my house at night.

We stay up all night talking and then they decide to go back.

I have had girls call me and say, how do you raise your kids outside of the order and have them be good?

I have had girls dropped off of my house and I've helped them call a police report in so they don't have to go back.

Throughout the years, anybody who's ever reached out for help getting out, I have been able to help them.

And how many people do you think that is?

I left in 2000.

Maybe between 10 and 20, maybe.

You know, I don't advertise, but I'm helping people leave, but if anybody reaches out, then.

We're advertising now.

I guess so.

Roll up, roll up, get into the house.

Yeah.

Luanne realized that she couldn't keep sheltering runaway girls who shot to her house without notice forever.

It just wasn't sustainable.

So she came up with a new idea.

I have started a non-profit with four other women who also left polygamy, And we created an organization that offers educational scholarships to people that have left polygamy because the average person that leaves polygamy has an eighth grade education.

So we felt like the biggest help we could give

was to help them and encourage them to go to school and get an education and learn for themselves.

what they wanted in life.

That's amazing.

And how is that going?

Well, we opened our doors in 2018.

We are established to the point where we have been able to give out over 60 scholarships.

We just want to be a light of hope to those that have left polygamy and show them that, look, you can leave a bad situation and make a better life for yourself.

Absolutely.

So I think we can move on to what I'm hoping is a happier story, which is your love story.

You met your husband.

Tell me about meeting him and what that was like.

So I was convinced to meet a friend at a dance club.

And so when I showed up, she had sent my husband out to the parking lot to pay for my parking and for my entrance fee.

And he followed me around the dance club all night long.

And I just thought, oh boy, you are annoying.

Over time, Luanne warmed to this very persistent guy.

His name is Dustin, though she's always just called him Cooper by his surname.

He seemed like a good person, like he genuinely cared for her.

And Luanne fell in love with him.

When we were talking about getting married, I've realized that I could not handle the anticipation of being married again.

And I told him, I said, I don't think I'm going to marry you if we don't do it today.

He went to go get a ring and I went to go get a dress for me and my girls.

And we met back up that evening and we got married that night.

It was exactly the way I wanted it to go because I could not handle the anticipation of being married again.

Well, I can imagine that would have been a very hard thing to kind of do again.

I can see why you were anxious about it, the thought of having to wear a dress again.

And the last time you wore one was then, and all of these things would be kind of triggering memories.

Well, it was the fact that I was in control at home and that I was worried that he would be in control afterward, you know, that there would be another male figure in my life that I would have to

obey or include.

I just really loved my freedom.

It sounds like, you know, thank God you found yourself a really nice guy.

Yeah, I definitely did.

It makes me think about the women who are still living within the Kingston clan.

What do you think about them now that you're on the outside?

I hope that some of them have found some happiness.

I know that a big survival trait is going numb

so that things can happen around you that you have no control over.

But I don't know how possible it is, but I do hope that there's some happiness in there.

Finally, I'm just thinking for the listener and for myself, your story...

It's so unusual and it's so unique.

What do you think is a sort of universal thing about the experience?

What is something we can all learn from?

I would say listen to your heart.

Don't let yourself stop dreaming.

The decision we had to make leaving the order was do I want my freedom or do I want my family?

And some people choose their family over their freedom.

That's more important to them.

Listen to your heart.

If there is something inside of you telling you that there's something better, then there is something better.

Thank you so much, Luanne.

Well, thank you.

While many people have alleged abuse at the hands of the Order, and some Order members have been convicted of abuse in the past, the Order states on its website that it, and I quote, has been speaking out publicly against fraud and abuse for decades.

We reaffirm to our members that this type of behaviour goes completely against our beliefs and principles, and we cannot support anyone found to be engaged in this type of behaviour.

If you want to keep up with Luann's amazing amazing work, the organization that she runs, which provides women who left polygamy with scholarships, is called Hope After Polygamy.

We've put a link in the show notes if you want to learn more about them or support their work.

Next time, on the girlfriend's spotlight, Nellie goes undercover.

In the first paragraph, she writes, Could I pass a week in the insane ward at Blackwells Island?

I said said I could, and I would, and I did.

Hey, you've reached the girlfriend's hotline.

You can leave your mini story after the tone.

Right, catch you later.

Bye.

A classic moment with some of my closest friends is that when we're visiting each other or traveling together or when we live together at university, we would pick one of our beds as the morning coffee slash morning tea drinking area and just talk shit about anything or watch sleigh videos and just spend time with each other before getting our day started.

And it's moments like that where having girlfriends is just the best.

If you have your own story like the one you just heard and you'd like the whole girlfriends gang to hear it, then please send it to us.

You can record it as a voice memo under 90 seconds, please, and email it straight to thegirlfriends at novel.audio.

Please don't include your name, we're keeping things a little anon.

We want stories like say that one time you faked an emergency on an awful date and your bestie bailed you out with a phone call, we love her, or that time when all of your girls showed up on your doorstep with five pizzas, two tubs of ice cream and three bottles of Savignon Blanc because the man of your dreams just dumped you.

I want stories that are meaningful or silly.

I want big, I want small.

I'm desperate to hear them.

So send them over.

This season we're supporting the charity Womankind Worldwide.

They do amazing work to help women's rights organizations and movements to strengthen and grow.

If you'd like to find out more or donate to help them secure equal rights for women and girls across the globe, you can go to womankind.org.uk.

The Girlfriend Spotlight is produced by Novel for iHeart podcasts.

For more from Novel, visit novel.audio.

The show is hosted by me, Anna Sinfield.

This episode was written and produced by Jake Otayevich.

Our researcher is Zayana Yousaf.

The editor is Hannah Marshall.

Max O'Brien and Craig Strachan are our executive producers.

Production management from Joe Savage, Cherie Houston and Charlotte Wolfe.

Sound design, mixing and scoring by Nicholas Alexander and Daniel Kempson.

Music supervision by Jacob Tayvich, Nicholas Alexander and Danna Sinfield.

Original music composed by Louisa Gerstein and Gemma Freeman.

The series artwork was designed by Christina Limpool.

Willard Foxton is creative director of development.

And special thanks to Katrina Norville, Carrie Lieberman, and Will Pearson at iHeart Podcasts, as well as Carly Frankel and the whole team at WME.

This is an iHeart podcast.