Inside the Mind of a Polygamy Whistle-Blower

April 10, 2008 — -- The 16-year-old girl whose whispered plea for help on a borrowed cell phone exposed the sexual and physical abuse of young girls by an austere polygamist cult showed extraordinary courage and resilience, cult experts said.

"There is a part of her that is extremely strong," said Paul Martin, a psychologist and the director of Wellspring Retreat and Resource Center, a facility that treats cult victims. "She has some amazing courage [to speak out against the group]."

The girl, who authorities have not been able to locate and do not know whether she is one of the 416 children taken from Yearning for Zion Ranch earlier this week, placed several calls to a local family violence clinic explaining her "spiritual marriage" to a 50-year-old man and how he forced her to have sex with him.

Already the mother of one child, the teen told the investigator that she feared she was pregnant again and detailed how the man "would beat and hurt her whenever he got angry."

One beating was so severe, according to the court documents, that the girl suffered broken ribs and was taken to the hospital.

But despite her alleged brutal treatment, at the end of the phone conversation the girl begins to cry and pleads with the investigator to "forget" her story.

"She began crying and then stated that she is happy and fine and does not want to get into trouble and that everything she had previously said should be forgotten," court documents stated.

The teen's sudden change of heart is common among cult members, particularly those debating whether to escape a world that has held them so close for so long.

"For one moment, that internal sense of self was saying something isn't right, and by the end of the conversation she was going back into the cult identity," said Martin. "You see this back and forth all the time between what might be called the true self and the pseudo-self that is formed by being in these cult compounds."