I'm not really sure how entertaining this will be, but it didn't seem to fit anywhere else.
Film-making effects change. Director Rachel Dretzin, a former investigative journalist for Frontline, will testify to that.
“These films that I’m making,” says Dretzin, “that other documentarians are making, are often more effective than the legal system at effecting change; psychological change and also sometimes systemic and criminal change.”
But the impact film-making has in Trust Me: The False Prophet feels more immediate. The riveting four-part series follows a pair of documentary film-makers, turned FBI informants, who helped take down Samuel Bateman, a polygamous Mormon cult leader currently serving a 50-year sentence for luring minors into criminal sex acts.
Cult expert Christine Marie and her husband, Tolga Katas, embedded themselves among Utah’s Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS) community. They earned the trust of typically guarded followers, and were eventually invited into Bateman’s home, where he presided over 20 “wives”, many of them underage.
Bateman’s so-called wives were (and some still are) so heavily indoctrinated that they believed their spiritual husband was a prophet, a gateway to heaven and the heir apparent to Warren Jeffs. The latter is the notorious FLDS leader whose 2007 imprisonment for similarly abhorrent sex crimes left a vacuum Bateman was eager to fill.