This article originally appeared at Baptist News Global on April 24, 2026.
Surrounded by FBI agents attempting to coax them into their vehicles, five of Samuel Bateman’s underaged wives huddled tightly.
With trembling arms around one another, they sang, “And he will come again, and one by one we’ll rise, to praise his holy name.” Then as their friend reassured them they would be OK and said it was time to go, they kept singing, “Risen, to bring us home again.”
Trust Me: The False Prophet is the latest docuseries from Netflix exposing the dark underground of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It follows Christine Marie and her husband, Tolga Katas, who moved to Colorado City, Ariz., and befriended a group called the Samuelites, followers of the self-declared prophet Samuel Bateman.
Under the guise of creating a documentary to share the Samuelites’ vision for the world, Marie and Katas earned the trust of Bateman and his wives, filmed their lives and collected evidence that eventually led to prison sentences for Bateman and a multiple of his adult followers.
After Bateman’s wives, which included multiple 9- year-olds, were eventually separated and placed in foster homes, they began to realize what they had endured.
“They were no longer communicating with Sam or the other older wives,” the FBI agent working the case observed. “And that’s when things in this case started to open up.”
“We leave the church, begin to listen to the stories of our neighbors and start to recognize how we were harmed.”
One way they were liberated was by recognizing their own story in Marie’s story. That’s a common journey many survivors of religious abuse go through. We leave the church, begin to listen to the stories of our neighbors and start to recognize how we were harmed. And whether the stories come from Baptist, Presbyterian, Pentecostal, Catholic or Mormon environments, patterns immediately emerge.
The abusive men in virtually every liberation story — from Sarah Stankorb’s Disobedient Women to Christa Brown’s Baptistland to Tia Levings’ A Well Trained Wife to Megan Phelps Roper’s Unfollow to the girls of the FLDS — all have a very specific assumption in common: Each group thinks their ego-driven demand to submit to their male hierarchy under the threat of hell is totally different than everyone else’s.