Mugshots: Tom Green - Polygamist Family Photo | Forensic Files

with his Five Wives he lived the outlawed lifestyle of a polygamist Tom goes and marries 13 and 14-year-old
stepdaughters deprives them of Education gets them pregnant and lives off the welfare system a lot of people see him
as arrogant I see Tom as very self-confident Tom is a great guy to talk to I think he's a funny guy but he
is a pedophile our children see their father as a religious prisoner the underground world of polygamist Tom
Green next on mug shots we're just a family why should that be prosecuted [Music]
[Music] Tom Green is serving a 5-year sentence in a Utah State Prison I can't understand why it should
be a crime in somebody's eyes that I gave my children too many mothers green is a polygamist a practice that is
outlawed in every state in the country before he was imprisoned green lived here with his Five
Wives this is our picture wall it's not completed right now but that's all of the children this is the
picture of the adults in the family this is Tom and Linda she's the first wife and Shirley she was wife number two and
this is me I'm wife number three and Carrie wife number four and Hannah wife number
five in all 29 of Tom Green's children live at Green Haven okay Mel Chris John Bill Harum
Mindy um Sierra Kelly Joseph Lauren me Bonnie Sam Phillip Lonnie Emerald Wesley Becky and Sharon
Elizabeth Melanie Brigham Hunter Benjamin Rosie Richard Teddy Thomas and Mary Jane I
think it's over 30 or 30 I don't know all I know is that it's a lot of children part of the problem in people
judging us is because we pretty much look like Americans if our skin color was different and we came from the
opposite side of the world America would be far more tolerant of us everybody hold still let's start by
singing I am a child of God it's a practice that psychologically damages men and women it's a practice that prays
upon young girls it's a practice that really unless you are a very wealthy individual necessarily depends upon
public support to support the vast numbers of children that it produces it's not just to make babies but it's to
raise them it's to teach them self-esteem self-confidence and to teach them the gospel and to uh Revere God and his
teachings today there are an estimated 30,000 people living an illegal polygamous lifestyle in
Utah after the Mormon Church ban polygamy over a hundred years ago those claiming a religious right to practice
it went underground because it is a colorful part of Utah's history and it is still a
tenant of the Mormon religion in that polygamy will be practiced in the afterlife a lot of people don't have a
problem with it if it's kept quiet and it was kept quiet and underground for a long time until green took his
polygamous lifestyle out into the open in hopes of giving people a better understanding of it welcome Tom you guys
the ladies decide among themselves um when to spend nights with me this quote runaway liido is what people have said
but if they really knew Tom and they knew what his libido was like they would feel sorry for his
wives his wives would love it if he had a runaway liido what made the story so Sensational
was not just the number of wives he had but their relationship to each other as I understand it you two are
sisters green isn't married to just one set of sisters he is married to two sets
of sisters three of them are cousins he was also married to their mothers their mothers are also sisters they have both
left the marriage you know it would be nice if a if an anthropologist could take an objective look at p
culture and since it's underground that makes it hard to do but it is part of the early Mormon culture for a man to
marry a woman and then marry her mother and another one of her daughters this is
a little known aspect of Mormon fundamentalist culture but it it goes back all the way to Joseph Smith and
Brigham Young eventually green celebrity would catch the attention of prosecutor
David levit and ultimately land him in prison today he faces an additional charge he's accused of conceiving a son
Melvin with his wife Linda when she was only 13 years old I looked at Melvin's birth certificate which had the birth
date of his mother on it and I was never that good in math but a light just came
on that Melvin could not have been a 4 and a half month pregnancy and if it was not a 4 and a
half month pregnancy then what I had was not a case of bigamy but a case of rape
child rape the charge of rape of a child is extremely serious the way it's being used is not
how the the law was meant it was meant for somebody that goes and takes advantage of a child it's not meant for
somebody who builds a marriage but while green claims that no harm was done in his case the prosecution is clearly
interested in the bigger picture every state but this state in particular needs to send a message
that the young girls of the polygamist subculture deserve the same protection under the law that the girls of the
non-polygamist subculture get I will remember always the day that Tom came to me and said I want to marry
this girl and I thought get real Tom she just a kid although Linda was and is very mature
for her age I think that the laws that we have in society to protect young girls
are good laws and that they should be there I think that there are cases that those
laws don't really fit the situation and don't apply to in my case is one of them to us it's something that was very
beautiful and very special and we were building a family and getting married and living our life
together understanding things from a more contemporary societal perspective I would have waited till for sure Linda
was older is Tom Green embracing religion or hiding behind it is he being punished
for speaking out or paying the price for breaking the law you know after 50 years
of not Prosecuting polygamy in this state and and and where people shack up regularly without being
married my feeling was who cares I mean we're just a family why should that be prosecuted but obviously I was
naive two very big misconceptions existed prior to Tom Green number one it was a crime for which no investigation
could occur and it was a crime for which Utah's statutes were ineffective at gaining a
conviction next on Mugshots the local prosecutor who went after Tom Green the name of this book is Father court
and I written and illustrated by me once a long time ago in the year 1999 my father Thomas Arthur green was in the
fight for his religion he basically lets out the dirty little Utah secret he did
more to get polygamy out of the closet than probably anybody for 15 years Tom Green exposed
his life lifestyle to the media he had succeeded in introducing people to polygamy but he was about to pay a price
I've never fought for polygamy I've simply tried to help people understand it my only interest is in promoting my
right to live this lifestyle for me but in the process Tell Mother shle green alienated his fellow polygamists
most fundamentalists like their lifestyle quiet they like to hide because they're afraid that the
government will come in and take the husband out of the home they'll take children away because they've done that
in the [Music] past 50 years ago State Police raided the polygamous town of short Creek on
the Arizona Utah border the city goes right down the state line so that the polygamists when they were being pursued
by Arizona could step into Utah and be pursued by Utah could step into Arizona and basically a mass arrest of
all the men resulted in men and women being separated and children being taken screaming from the arms of their mothers
and it was a horrible scene really my mother went through the 1953 raid in short Creek and she remembers
her mother crawling on her belly through the Sage Brush to get back to her children who were hiding in the basement
from the sheriff's that were going to take them away from their family so it's one of it's something that's been
drilled into most polygamist from very young age you don't tell people that we live this way or we could be prosecuted
by the government and when I was a little girl I remember thinking that when I grow up I'm not going to be
ashamed of who my husband is I'm going to tell everybody and I guess I did the greens continued to publicize
their lifestyle until one interview changed the course of their lives when some reporters from dline came to us and
said we want know what you do and why you do it we did what we' done for 15 years we explained about our family and
I told dayline what I have told everyone else since then that polygamy is against
the law in the state of Utah that there is no religious right to practice polygamy that it ought to be against the
law and that if I have approvable case I'll prosecute it but up until that point in time I had never seen
approvable case brought to me the DAT line story aired in April 1999 I watched the Dateline piece on
television and saw Tom Green for the first time in my life confessing to a felony to in my jurisdiction I.E the
crime of bigamy there were some very pointed questions in that interview with the County prosecutor as to why he
wasn't Prosecuting these people who are living outside the laws of the state of Utah after the story was broadcast on
National Television prosecutor David levit and Tom Green met by accident at a town meeting and he came to me and and I
I said I think you're Tom Green he said yes I am I said yeah I saw you on Dat line a couple of weeks ago and he said
uh I think you're David Lev I said yes I am and I said yes I saw you on the same
program and he looked at me and he said you know Mr L we just want to be left alone and I said well Tom for a man that
wanted to be left alone you picked an awfully strange way of going about it and he came over to our house with his
wife that evening and we sat around our dinner table and he said the problem is is that I was on the same program with
you and I sat there and told everyone that I would prosecute every case I could prove and then you spend the next
21 minutes proving my case well he said I'd like you to be a test would no he said how would you feel if I prosecuted
you I said uh he said would you want to be a test case and you know see if this could go and be get the laws against
polygamy overturned I looked at him and I said really I don't think it sounds very
good at all I think I told him I says okay so you want us to be a test case for you and his first intention was to
overturn the laws against us so that we could live our lifestyle I say okay what if it
backfires on us and what if it doesn't work then what I said David I'm we're trying to recover from a
fire we're trying to get our business back on its feet uh we're trying to continue to set up our housing I don't
have time for a prosecution I just point blank told them I said uh you've put me
in a difficult situation I didn't know that you existed I can't tell really that you're hurting anybody but I have a
duty to investigate this crime and if I can prove a crime if I can see a need to
prosecute you then I'm going to prosecute you and I'll take you down after years of skirting the law Tom
Green and his polygamous lifestyle appeared headed for a showdown [Music] next on Mugshots life with 29 children
and Five Wives as we go inside the greens Homestead the reporters are here Sierra
I want the reporters are here please excuse me I must go do my [Music] hair Tom Green's Renegade polygamous
lifestyle first gained him celebrity and then landed him in prison he faced es new charges that could keep him in
prison for life meanwhile his family of five wives and 29 children continue to live together in a remote Desert
Valley you travel 60 Mi West on a paved Road you turn off that paved Road and then you travel another 2 hours on a
dirt road to a small settlement of people and in that 2 MX 30 m Corridor there may be 150 people the live there
it's called Utah West Desert Tom moved his family to this 15 acre compound in 1997 and called it
Green Haven these right here are all of our storage houses this next one right here
that's our family room and then this is the main kitchen house put those two close together
because that's our main living area his wives are independent his wives are industrious they're funny
I think you'd have to have a sense of humor to live out at Green Haven and have all those
[Music] kids like pick up all the dishes in the trash that are in here Hannah hey got to
hug you wash your um my father had four wives and 15 children I come from 100 Years of
unbroken lines of fam's living living plural marriage we call her the head wife okay great great great then some
monogamous families that's a bad word cuz the head wife means they rule the roost but with Linda that's not the way
it is what ever put such an idea into your head she's very selfless she thinks about everybody we have to you know tell
her you know think about yourself too no I'm here to save the pantry from the children when I first met Tom we were at
a picnic in the park and he had on this little Captain sailor hat and I was listening to him and and watching him
and the more times that I was around him I just started to develop an inection for him and I told him I said I want to
marry you and be your wife and it's always been his practice to let the woman propose to him because he believes
that if a man has a right to have more than one woman or wife that it should be the the woman's
Choice who she marries Tom and Linda were married in 1986 today they have seven children
together I buddied up with Linda and became her best friend before I ever got interested in
Tom I grew up in a place called Shark Creek it was a very popular town of polygamous nothing but polygamous
families you can't do polygamy light no that's just not cool that not cool Shirley is very sassy she just she says
what she thinks Shirley's just mouthy these guys are all really dud hard I can't believe you said Hard to k
around with them because they just don't get it she jokes around a lot and people
see her jok around and they think that's Shirley but it's not Shirley is really a
very caring person and very dedicated mother very dedicated to her family and to her little handicapped child yes you
do the town where grew up had a lot of things I wasn't sure about the women and the girls wear dresses and then the men
don't don't grow beards and so Tom really put off a lot of people in town just to come around
because his beard that was part of my attraction to him is that nobody liked him and maybe I'm just sort of
rebish Tom and Shirley were never legally married their spiritual ceremony took place shortly after Tom's marriage
to Linda today Shirley has six children with Tom when Tom first married surely after me I it was hard for me I was
jealous and I was afraid mostly that he would forget me that's the hardest time for the first wife and it gets easier
when the third and the fourth wife come along because you've been through that and you realize he still cares about me
and still loves me and you become more secure and confident in yourself surely is
asleep growing up in a plma situation helps a person to to prepare to live the lifestyle herself but I think that for
every person it's just hands on I had a struggle when wean married Tom I grew up in a very small polygamous
Community my father had about 60 children I am not sure um I don't know all my brothers and
sisters you copy copy I think cenne kind of shows people what she's really like with Leanne you can tell what kind of
mood she is just by looking at her face it's okay she's a leader she's the kind of person that makes things get
done my main focus in life was taking care of the family and learning how to be a
mother but Tom was legally married to Linda so they signed divorce papers Tom and Leanne then officially married in
early 1990 today they have five children together one of the neat things about Tom is his deeply held religious
commitment that's one of the things that I was looking for in a husband is somebody who could teach my children the
way that I believe uhoh carry their awake my parents were monogamous actually I knew Tom growing up because
he was a friend of my dad's but I look to him as a friend of my dad's if it wasn't for Carrie my children would have
a boring life because I am not a creative mom and I don't do very fun things and she does I love her because
she cooks I don't care to cook that much he took us to New York to babysit for him I thought man this guy's old he's
got a family but he let me know that he was interested and and I let him know that I
was well actually I kissed him and he said is that a proposal and I said yes I told him I
wanted to be married to him and marry him and be part of his family Tom and Carrie were married a month later in a
spiritual ceremony they were never legally married they have four children as I got to know their family I
just I fell in love with this family people asked me you know what about you and I thought no way he's too old
that was my first you know relax no no way but then when I got to know him and I fell in love with him and age just
disappeared Hannah because she has the body everybody's kind of been jealous of Hannah a little bit they feel like you
know he wants her more than me maybe and I've kind of been a sounding board because I know that that's not the only
thing Hannah wants in life Sharon you are being very reverent she really tries hard to be the best mother mother she
can be for her children and when I say her children I mean all the children I actually propose to him it
was actually on the reception of my sister car's reception we were going home and we were sitting together on the
way back and I told him that I wanted my children to have eyes like his and he said I don't know how we can make that
possible Tom divorced Leanne so that he was legally free to marry Hannah they have three children
[Music] Tom Green had built the polygamous lifestyle he wanted apparently within
the boundaries of the law coming up green makes the decision that would cost him his
freedom later we moved over on our land we had chickens dogs cats kittens and of
course brother sister in school since August 2001 Tom Green has been incarcerated in Salt Lake a city
founded by followers of the Mormon religion today the Church of Jesus Christ of latterday saints is the
dominant social political and economic force in a city where close to 50% of the population are practicing Mormons I
grew up here in Salt Lake City I was raised in an average size typic iCal Mormon family and uh was very actively
involved in the Church of Jesus Christ of latterday saints I spent a lot of time in the
church archives I found out that there's a difference between the popular history
and the Real History the Mormons came here 1847 seeking religious freedom basically
wanted to uh live life on their terms uh without persecution which they'd experienced throughout
their travels and and stays in the eastern part of the United States plural marriage was a principle revealed to the
Prophet Joseph Smith the founder of the LDS church it wasn't until Brigham Young
brought the Saints to the Great American desert a place away from decent Society
so to speak he then felt comfortable enough to publicly announce their belief in plural
marriage when they arrived it was practiced openly and so Congress pressed upon the Utah legislature that if it
wanted to enjoy statehood it had to ban polygamy in compliance with the Utah legislature the Mormon Church abolished
the practice of polygamy in 1890 6 years later Utah became the 45th state Congress passed a law against it and so
the Lord had to withdraw it and from then on I could never understand why we worshiped a God who was subject to the
US Congress it just never made sense to me the more I researched the more I found out that plural marriage had not
been done away with though it had been withdrawn from the church but it was still something that was available and
had been put put underground with instructions for it to continue when he was 22 Green was
married in a traditional ceremony at the Morman temple in Salt Lake City he and his wife had three children and for 10
years Tom lived a conventional Mormon lifestyle meanwhile he continued to investigate the fundamentalist belief of
plural marriage once I resolved in my own mind that I believed in original Mormonism it took a while before I had
the courage to come out of the closet as it were it was tremendously stressful on
me to be living one lifestyle when when I really believed another one I did try to talk Tom out of it I said this is
going change CH your life it's going to change your family it's going to change who you are and and by the way this
against a laot of people don't do this anymore you know but Tom was committed to the fundamentalist belief in polygamy
and when the church learned of it they took action I was immediately excommunicated uh tremendous pressures
came on my family to leave me which they which they did he shared with me uh through tears that uh that he felt like
he had been cut off from everybody in the world from there it was uh making a transition from open Society into a
closed underground world and meeting people who lived in that Society in time through my friends and acquaintances and
contacts in that Society I ran across the women who became my wives Tom's divorce was finalized in the
winter of 1984 shortly after he married his first polygamous wife Beth over the next 3
years Tom married Beth's daughter Linda Linda's cousin Shirley and Shirley's mother June when June entered the
marriage some of her children came with her Leanne was one of them Leanne is a complicated story she had actually fled
into State custody alleging sexual abuse when she was 14 years old Leanne told social workers that Tom Green her
stepfather at the time was sexually molesting her I guess what I would say about the
charges of Tom molesting me is that they're totally false when I was young I wanted to go and see my father and he
lived down in Colorado City where I grew up and he was dying so I went down there
to see him and in the process of that um I was coerced and talked into telling a story which is
exactly what it was and when I realized ized what was going on and what was really happening with the things that I
was talked into doing I put a stop to it as quick as I could Leanne recanted her
story dropped the charges and married Tom less than a year later people ought to look at Lanna in her life and see
what the fruit of it is she certainly wasn't coed to marry me in fact she had to fight for the chance to come back to
marry me the Green family grew over the next8 years moving to a trailer park just
outside Salt Lake City in 1991 Carrie and Hannah joined the family yes I am the boss right Tom and his wives ran a
magazine subscription business to support their 25 children they were making ends meat but were always
struggling to us the wealth of a family is not in how nice of a home you have and how nice of a car you drive our
wealth is the relationships and the success we have have in our children in 1997 they were evicted from the trailer
park Tom found a piece of land in the West Desert that would later become Green Haven as they were transporting
their four mobile homes a drunk driver demolished the largest one soon after settling into Green Haven a strong wind
damaged another of the homes Beyond repair you keep getting mors put on your shoulders and you think okay okay we can
finally handle this and then you get more 2 years later a fire broke out on the property and Shirly and Tom's
three-year-old son Jerry died of smoke inhalation Tom told me he said he's not there in his grave he's not he's gone
his Spirit has gone to heaven and he's not there anymore don't focus on the body that was kind of comforting to know
I felt like it was his time to go he needed to go he was needed somewhere with the magazine business income and
the help of welfare and Medicaid the greens were able to get back on their feet and Tom was soon back on TV
explaining his lifestyle in Utah there's still a lot of prejudice against plural marriage
there's a lot of people who feel threatened by it that's why we began talking to the
media coming up the state's investigation reveals disturbing details about Green marriages and the prosecutor
launches a crusade to discredit him my brothers were supposed to testify against my father but thanks Heavens
they didn't the days went by like a Bluster of wind in 1999 Tom Green appeared on Dat line with
the local County prosecutor that appearance touched off the inves instigation that would eventually land
Green in prison I began a methodical investigation saw what the elements were determined what I had to prove and the
most difficult thing I had to prove was is this man married is this man engaged in a marriage that the state of Utah
will recognize it is a difficult case to make because it's hard to get Witnesses wives
don't see themselves as victims there they go wives don't testify against their husbands levit set out on the
daunting task of untangling the complex relationships in the Green family they wanted to know i' been Party tour
witness at any of his weddings if legal marriages were performed or if they were
simply religious ceremonies it was just chaos from there he got an investigator to start digging into anything he could
possibly find about our family and the pattern became clear he would marry a girl when she
became 14 years old he'd live with her until she had passed the age where it would be a felony sex abuse for having
sexual relations with her then he would go to Nevada get a divorce then he'd come back to Utah and very shortly
afterwards in some instances the next day Mary in a different County another 14-year-old
girl the three women that Tom Green legally married Linda Leanne and Hannah were 14 years old at the
time Tom could legally have sex with these girls if he was married to to them that's the only way that he could he we
would be charged with child rape if he wasn't married to them when this lifestyle went
underground all of the cultural attributes of that lifestyle went underground with it including Preparing
People for building families as opposed to what Society has done and preparing people to build careers stand stand
stand up and take Tom Green has stated on National Television that this is God's practice and God designed women so
when they became physically mature enough to have a baby that they were ready and God expected them to marry
don't forget scand she's a teenager that conjures up horrible images in my mind and in most Americans
mind but in reality that's what's occurring inside the practice of polygamy while Green's wives were young
at the time of their marriages they were of legal age in Utah the investigation also revealed that at this point he
wasn't technically married to anyone so Tom Green appeared to be within the boundaries of the law so that at first
blast you would say this man's not married he's just living with all these women all these
girls it just didn't seem right to me that a man who would hold himself out in his estimation to 500 million people as
having Five Wives that that he couldn't be prosecuted for having wives that he could call them
wives but that the state couldn't call them wives although it appeared that green
was not technically married in April 2000 he was charged with bigamy oddly enough what they did is charge him first
and then bring a motion in the criminal charge to declare him to be married I was aware of Utah's what's what what
traditionally has been known as Utah's common law marriage statute which simply says if you are old enough
to be married and you hold yourself out as husband and wife and you cohabit then
a as of the date that you started doing those things you are married and it is a
state sanctioned marriage applying the common law marriage statute a judge recognized Linda and Tom as legally
married once that was done then all Mr levit had to do was go to a jury and by A Reasonable Doubt convinced the jury
that he cohabitated with the other four women and that was the basis of the four
bigamy charges these other four women people think of bigamy as marrying a woman and then marrying another woman
but you can also be charged with cohabitation you cohabit with a woman and you are uh like you're married and
and uh if you still have a wife you can be charged with bigamy and it was so bizarre it was so strange it was like
the Twilight Zone because why would someone charge you of a crime and then force you to be guilty of the crime it
seems odd to me that if somebody in Utah goes out and has sex for fun with someone he's not married to the state
looks the other way and it's a misdemeanor at that but if somebody has sex with someone they're not married to
because of their religious beliefs and to build a family the state feels like that person should be
prosecuted Tom Green went on trial in May 200 one the real issues in the case were not heard of the trial the freedom
of religion issue was taken out the freedom of speech issue and the selective prosecution why Tom Green is
being prosecuted rather than um uh other polygamist uh all those were missing green was also charged with owing the
state money that his family collected in welfare benefits all of these women went
to the state of Utah and applied for welfare benefits hey children time to come in as a condition of the welfare
benefits they had to assign to the state the right to go after the father of the
child for child support and so they signed away those rights he never made a dime of a payment towards that in nine
years I signed a stipulation judgment and then they said now they'll determine your payments I was waiting for them to
send me the papers to fill out to determine what kind of payment I could make and I was ready and willing and
able to make that payment he wasn't given that opportunity so when Tom says he he made efforts
those are the efforts he made and when lit says he hasn't paid back a scent that's also correct so those both
statements are correct accuse me of being a polygamist you know accuse me of of marrying my wives too
young and I don't have a problem with that but accuse me of robbing from my fellow citizens to support my of of just
having lots of babies and sitting on my lazy ass letting my neighbors support that's a that's as false as anything
I've ever heard that's a a lie from hell and I pity the man who perpetrates such
a thing when he stands before the Judgment bar of God after a week-long trial Tom Green
was found guilty on four counts of bigamy and one count of criminal nonsupport he was sentenced to 5 years
in prison you could hear the crying that's what that's the thing that I remember the most is the crying from the
children and then from the wife subsequently he's guilty of spending his entire life living it for his family and
everything he can do hi hi John wow nice [Music] dress it was devastating it was
U was traumatic it was a blow the judge could easily have given me probation especially pending an
appeal of my conviction but the prosecutor persuaded him that I'm a threat to society what I'm going to be
out bizinger again I haven't been married for 15 years I I I'm too busy with my family how how is jeab County and the
state of Utah any safer now that Tom Green is locked up instead of preparing for parole
hearings Tom Green faces the charge of child rape and a possible life sentence when we come back accusations that the
Morman Church used its political influence to silence Tom [Music] Green it's something that we all have to
do together and if we do it together then it'll be easy and if we just keep throughing it it'll be
easier think of you all the and please bless father so I won't get hurt in prison today as Tom Green prepares to
take on charges of child rape his wives continue to raise their 29 children without him we're really bitter it's
hard to not be I think the hardest thing is trying to keep your composure for your children knowing that Mother's not
going to lose it because Dad's not here anymore maybe that we able to visit our father our children know that our lives
our religion and our beliefs are against the law and they know that it's not popular with
Society so our children understand that their father was obeying God and doing what his religion told him
to do this made Herod so angry that he had John arrested that's how they see their father as someone who was very
courageous and stood up to the government so that he could live his religion in Utah the case of Tom Green
continues to Fascinate people some question the motives behind the prosecution and point to the fact that
the governor of the state is David lit's older brother there's been a lot of those conspiracy theories that the
governor said basically we need this guy shut up and it and it's more than just a
possible conspiracy between the governor and his younger brother you know it's a
it's also a possible conspiracy between the church and the governor and his brother people lump polygamous and
Mormons together it's it's a great embarrassment for the church they make such a huge deal of the fact that I did
it for this reason or I did it for that reason and I'm the puppet of this person
or that person or that entity the reality is that I alone am responsible for the success or failure
the avowed purpose of this prosecution is to send a message out to the polygamous Community concerning these
underage marriages but that's like using an M60 against a uh a fly you you don't
need to destroy the man he's not in there because he's a danger to society I think he's in prison because he had the
audacity to to talk about his lifestyle Tom goes and marri's 13 and 14-year-old stepdaughters gets them pregnant and
lives off the welfare system if I have evidence of other pgus violating the law and I think that I have approvable case
buckle up round two of course people will say you brought it on yourself there have been many times
since I've been in prison when I've rethought my decision to uh to speak about my lifestyle publicly especially
late at night uh when I'm laying there alone in my bunk uh nothing to occupy my mind except
thoughts of my family that's when it's the toughest and I think did I do the right
thing have I done the right thing am I doing the right thing and when I weigh it all
out on the moral continum I think I've done the only thing I could do morally and still hold
my head up to my posterity this is a story I wrote in school I wrote it after the trial I
wrote it because I felt that people out in the world should know what it's like for me
sh [Music] I [Music]

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Brief Summary

Tom Green's polygamous lifestyle leads to legal battles and prison time for marrying underage girls.

Key points

Tom Green's Controversial Lifestyle. Tom Green's polygamous lifestyle leads to legal troubles and societal scrutiny.
The Complexity of Relationships. Tom Green's marriages involve intricate family dynamics and relationships among wives.
A Call for Understanding. The need for a deeper understanding of polygamous culture is emphasized.
Legal Battles Ahead. Tom Green faces serious charges that could change his family's future.
The Price of Exposure. Tom's decision to publicize his polygamous lifestyle ultimately lands him in prison.
The Mormon Journey. The Mormons sought religious freedom and faced persecution in their quest for plural marriage.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

I see Tom as very self-confident.

A perspective on Tom's personality.

0:19WatchJul 28, 2014

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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