Christine Marie had the tape. She had the man on camera describing what he was doing in his own words. She had a community of red flags, a documentary’s worth of footage, and a local sergeant who watched every minute she showed him and admitted — yeah, that looks real.
And nothing happened.
That’s the part of the Samuel Bateman story that’s hardest to swallow once you understand it. The local police on the Utah-Arizona border didn’t fail to know. They failed to act. They watched the tapes. They believed her. And they kept sending her home. The sergeant in the Netflix documentary all but says it out loud: Short Creek had spent decades learning to leave that community alone, to treat polygamy as just how things are out there, to call certain behaviors “their lifestyle” and turn the page. Christine and her husband Tolga were standing in front of a wall of accumulated permission. Years of nobody asking. Years of nobody pushing. Years of a town that had decided, quietly, that its own children were not its problem.
And every month that wall held, Bateman kept doing what he was doing. Christine sat at his table. She filmed his wives. She filmed his sermons. She filmed his daughters. She watched him operate, day after day, and went back to her own house knowing that the people sworn to protect those girls were instead protecting a comfortable status quo. She had to make a choice. Stay with the locals and keep building the case at their pace. Or skip them entirely and go to the federal government, knowing the moment she did, every relationship she’d built in Short Creek would be in jeopardy.
In this second part of our three-part conversation, Christine walks me through what that wait actually felt like. The moment she stopped trying to convince local police and reached for the FBI instead. The recording — the one she captured in late 2021, where Bateman described handing three of his wives, one of them a minor, to three of his male followers — that finally broke the case open. The mother she helped flip, Julia Johnson, four of whose daughters had been given to Bateman. The morning of the raid, and how she pulled the girls away from him before the agents moved in.
(Continued In Video 👆)
This publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.
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#SamuelBateman #FLDS #ChristineMarie #ShortCreek #TrustMeFalseProphet #PoliceFailure #FBIRaid #TrueCrime #Cults #Netflix
