For more than 50 years, Shirlyn Watson had the privilege of being the wife of a future prophet, a man chosen by God to lead a flock of at least 10,000 followers.
Unfortunately for Shirlyn, founder of a chain of Utah health food shops, the flock in question is the Apostolic United Brethren (AUB), a breakaway Mormon fundamentalist sect that practices polygamy.
She had to share her husband, David, with four other ‘sister wives’. One of them she actually lived with for two years when they and their bed-hopping husband squeezed into a 2,400 sq ft house with 15 of the 34 children or more he has sired.
Watson, now 73, who has had eight wives in total and who also owns a car-body repair business (which gets terrible online reviews), has evidently been a busy man.
Far too busy for Shirlyn, his second wife, who is now suing him in a case that lays bare the bleak reality of life for women in the oppressively patriarchal world of strict Mormonism.
Glamorous young Mormon women such as Taylor Frankie Paul and Utah farmer’s wife Hannah Neeleman have become internet superstars and clogged programme schedules with reality TV series such as The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, Sister Wives and The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City. The first of these follows the lives of a group of Utah-based TikTok influencers known as ‘MomTok’ who ratcheted up excitement in a religion traditionally dismissed as staid, boring and bizarre when they revealed they practised so-called ‘soft swinging’ with other Mormon couples.
Mormons now account for a huge proportion of the most successful ‘monfluencers’ on social media. They have spawned the ‘Tradwife’ movement epitomised by 35-year-old Neeleman, an implausibly willowy mother of eight whose carefully curated daily existence – under the handle ‘Ballerina Farm’ named after her 328-acre holding – boasts 10 million social media followers.
The picture of her elegantly simple life, complete with a handsome, Stetson-wearing husband and cherubic children who bake bread in their weatherboarded farmhouse at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, wouldn’t look out of place in a Boden catalogue.
For more than 50 years, Shirlyn Watson (pictured) had the privilege of being the wife of a future prophet, a man chosen by God to lead a flock of at least 10,000 followers
Pictured: Shirlyn Watson and her husband David. She had to share her husband, David, with four other ‘sister wives’
Pictured: David Watson with five of his wives. The Apostolic United Brethren (AUB), is a breakaway Mormon fundamentalist sect that practices polygamy
Suffice to say, however, the truth for many Mormon wives is rather different, for there has been nothing glamorous about the life of Shirlyn Watson, as laid out in court papers seen by the Daily Mail.
Now 71, she is demanding a 25 per cent stake in the $1million property in central Utah she says was promised her and three other ‘plural wives’ when he moved them in there with him in 2016.
After spending her working life sharing everything she earned with a man who in Utah doesn’t constitute her lawful husband as the state doesn’t recognise traditional common law marriage, she says that a share in the property is her only means of avoiding homelessness.
When Shirlyn resolved to leave David Watson – technically impossible inside the Brethren without the prophet’s permission – he allegedly punished her by changing the locks on her home while she was away commemorating the life of one of their own children, who had died.
Shirlyn has also complained that he neglected her and their 11 children during their 51-year marriage.
She has made it clear that she was particularly upset that Watson shamelessly preferred his other wives, spending more time with them and their children even though he was meant, under the sect’s traditions, to rotate his time ‘fairly’ between them.
She says that, in line with the usual behaviour of polygamist Mormon men, Watson would have a ‘favourite wife’ – in this case a demanding younger spouse who was endlessly phoning Watson and ensuring she got most of his attention.
Shirlyn, who has been suffering for 25 years from the after-effects of carbon monoxide poisoning caused by leaks from a broken water heater, was this week in hospital and too unwell to discuss the case.
Shirlyn and her ex-husband David ended their relationship of 47 years in 2019 after having 11 children together
According to Shirlyn’s lawsuit, she invested some $37,000 in her portion of the compound in Manti, Utah,(pictured)
However, she has previously told local TV news: ‘Polygamy really worked for me. I know that that’s hard for people to accept. It was presented to me, and it felt right.’
But she went on: ‘[My husband] started to lose me years ago. If something came up with “the favourite wife” he would go take care of her first.’
She said Watson had refused to put her name on the title of the property because she had dared to end the marriage without his say-so. ‘He doesn’t think I have rights to anything,’ she said.
Although Shirlyn insisted they had ‘a lot of good times together’, her daughter Emily Lee described Watson to the Daily Mail as ‘the biggest worthless piece of s**t… who’s now leading these 10,000 people, which is unbelievable’. Emily confirmed everything her mother had alleged about her father, and gave a disturbing insight into life inside the secretive sect.
She said that most women who leave their husbands ‘are lucky to leave with their children and the clothes on their backs’, adding: ‘This is such an abusive patriarchal society and most women are just so brainwashed, manipulated, beaten down and abused that by the time they get out, they’re just happy to be out.’
Emily, a 43-year-old mother of two, left the AUB when, aged 17, she married a non-member. She believes only four of her 34 siblings remain in the sect.
She was raised to accept polygamy as perfectly natural ‘until I was old enough to realise how miserable everyone was’.
‘He kept a schedule and would rotate between the wives each night,’ she said. But he would sometimes stay for two or three nights at one home if it was a wife’s anniversary or if a kid had been born.
To Emily’s mother’s annoyance, Watson always made sure he spent weekends with his ‘favourite wife’ at the time. The identity of this individual occasionally changed but was never Shirlyn. He blamed her – entirely unfairly, says Emily – for his first wife, whom he’d adored, leaving him.
Emily also claimed her father treated Shirlyn’s children more harshly than the others, beating them when he came home from work before calmly settling down to watch the TV news. ‘We were the whipping-post family,’ she said.
Asked to respond to Shirlyn’s lawsuit and his daughter’s claims that he beat his children, Watson told the Daily Mail: ‘No comment. All lies!’
Mormons regard procreation as a divine responsibility – observing God’s injunction, in Genesis, to Adam and Eve to ‘be fruitful and multiply’. Shirlyn had at least six miscarriages before having her last child when she was 46, said Emily.
‘We grew up super-poor,’ she said. ‘We regularly had hardly enough food to eat.’ A very air-brushed version of their unconventional lives may have become a staple of US reality TV, but polygamous Mormon sects spent decades attempting to fly under the radar. And with good reason.
Rulon Allred, the AUB’s founder reportedly had two 14-year-old wives – one the daughter of another Brethren senior who gave her to Allred as a present.
‘When you grow up in polygamy, your women and children are a form of currency for these men,’ said Emily. ‘If they have desirable daughters, they can tell other men, you know, that “You can have first pick of my daughter when she’s ready to get married”.’
Polygamy was a means of control and manipulation, she said, as was making wives jealous of each other. ‘It would be his night to come to [Shirlyn’s] house and he would go to another wife,’ she recalled of her own father’s behavour. ‘So the favorite wife, she would call him obsessively – 10 times in an evening – and he’d go over to her.’
On other occasions, he’d simply lie about his whereabouts or turn up for his scheduled evening with Shirlyn with the favourite wife in tow.
Emily admits that the wives ‘pretended to get along for the sake of us kids… but I don’t think they did.’
Shirlyn Watson (nee Tuttle) was already a Mormon when she joined the Brethren shortly before marrying Watson in 1973 when she was 19. The wedding ceremony was conducted by the sect’s then Prophet in his living room.
They wed – she says in her court claim – ‘with the understanding that they would jointly provide for themselves and their children’.
The court papers state that the AUB ‘teaches that a plural wife is bound on earth and heaven to her husband and can be “released” from such a marriage to her husband only with the consent of the AUB leader’. Shirlyn, it adds, has never been ‘released’.
She says she raised their children ‘largely by herself’ as well as starting her own business, Shirlyn’s Natural Foods, in 1989 and later working as the secretary for Watson’s collision-repair company. She no longer has any connection with either business.
All of her ‘earnings and efforts’, she says, went either to Watson or providing for their huge family in rural Utah.
Shirlyn claims she ‘cared for and raised their children, cared for and cleaned their homes, cared for the yards, cooked meals and purchased food for David Watson and their children’.
In 2016, she and Watson moved to a large property in Manti, Utah, along with his three other remaining wives, with each woman assigned a separate house on the property.
Shirlyn says Watson also promised them an equal financial interest in it – a pledge that Shirlyn’s lawyers admit was never formalised in a trust – and she later spent more than $36,000 (£28,000) on the property.
Then, in early 2020, it’s alleged that Watson ‘stopped spending nights with Shirlyn Watson in Unit 4’ of the property but continued to live there primarily with two of his other wives, Carolyn and Pamela.
The following year, Watson started demanding that all of the wives living there start paying him $260 month in rent. He later took out a large loan secured against the home – valued at $1million – but he, Carolyn and Pamela pocketed all the money without telling Shirlyn, it’s claimed.
Then in 2023, by which time Shirlyn had decided to leave him without his permission, she says Watson had the locks changed while she was away for a family gathering in California to celebrate the life of their recently deceased 10th child, Robert, who had Down’s Syndrome.
He ‘reluctantly’ relented after their children demanded he didn’t leave her homeless, says her claim.
Shirlyn, who is suing Watson for ‘unjust enrichment’, is claiming a 25 per cent interest in the property, including the value of the loan the others took out on it.
Watson’s lawyers have denied some of Shirlyn’s allegations, insisting he has ‘100 per cent ownership’. They also deny that there was ever any ‘solemnised marriage’ between him and Shirlyn.
Officially, polygamy was outlawed by the Mormon church more than a century ago in a bid to clean up its tarnished image, while the practice of marrying more than one person is illegal in all 50 US states.
However, Utah, the home of Mormonism (practised by some 17.5 million people), controversially decriminalised polygamy in 2020, reclassifying the offence from a felony to the far less serous category of an ‘infraction’, similar in gravity to a traffic violation.
Tonia Tewell, the executive director of Holding Out Help, an organisation that helps people, mainly women and children, escaping polygamy, said the number of Mormons fleeing the religion has ‘skyrocketed’ by 273 per cent since Utah loosened the law on having multiple wives. Her group has dealt with 591 people this year alone, she told the Daily Mail.
She said fundamentalist Mormons cherish polygamy – which they are raised to believe is God-ordained – as a way of ensuring that their bloodline (which they hold to be the blood of Jesus Christ) remains ‘pure’. But instead of supporting the vast number of children they produce, they leave it to the state, she said.
‘The system is set up in a way where the husbands are usually doing pretty dang good, but the wives and the children are living in poverty and having to take care of themselves the best that they can while raising a lot of children with little education, with no assets, with often abuse and neglect,’ she added.
The women who dare to leave find it challenging to cope in the outside world as, previously, they’ve had every decision made for them, said Tewell.
Legally, David Watson has been married only to his first wife. His subsequent weddings – such as the one to Shirlyn in 1973 – were unofficial ceremonies conducted by Apostolic United Brethren elders in their living rooms.
The sect clings to various beliefs no longer espoused by mainstream Mormons, including the idea that ‘plural’ marriage is an essential step to earning a place in Heaven.
Its adherents also believe that a husband decides his wife’s eternal fate, either ‘calling’ her from the grave on Resurrection Day or consigning her soul to servitude. All of which leaves unhappy spouses in an unenviable position.
More practically, the AUB also differs from other Mormon sects in believing that sexual intercourse can be a source of pleasure, not an act solely designed for purpose of procreation.
The world’s biggest polygamous sect, it now has communities as far south as Mexico up as far north as Montana on the Canadian border.
It is led by its Prophet, or President, chosen from a 12-strong council representing the 12 apostles of the New Testament. Watson became its supreme leader in 2021 after fulfilling one of the chief criteria, which is to have at least seven wives.
The sect has long been mired in controversy. Its founder, Rulon Allred, was murdered in 1977 by members of a rival polygamous group. In 2014, David Watson’s immediate predecessor as leader, Lynn Thompson, was accused of fondling his 12-year-old daughter and sexually abusing two of his underage nieces, as well as embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars in church funds.
Concerned sect members were reassured by elders that God had told Thompson, who died in 2021, not to respond to the disturbing allegations.
Silence, it seems, has long been the sect’s most valuable currency, something that Shirlyn and her daughter Emily are determined to change.
