‘False prophet’ wife on leaving FLDS cult, healing through music
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When Naomi “Nomz” Bistline initially auditioned to be in her prison’s band, she tried out to be the guitarist. “Then I started singing a little and they said, ‘Put the guitar down. Let’s just hear you sing,'” she says. “I sang Miley Cyrus’s song, ‘Flowers,’ a cappella. And they said ‘We got our lead vocalist.'”
Though excited, Bistline, now 27, was apprehensive about performing in front of the other incarcerated women. “I remember that night going back to my cell and thinking, ‘This is so scary – I’ve never done this,’ and then coming to the conclusion that I’m the lowest that I’ve ever been,” she says. “I’m the lowest that anyone will be. Nobody has phones to video me and mock me or anything. Like, why not?”
At that point, Bistline was in a Texas prison serving a 21-month sentence for unlawfully removing minors from state custody – a crime she committed under the direction of Sam Bateman. Bateman is the leader of a small offshoot sect of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) who claims to be a prophet and the heir apparent to Warren Jeffs, the FLDS president who is currently serving life in prison for child sexual assault.
Bistline was the 13th of Bateman’s 23 “spiritual wives” – nine of which were girls as young as nine, and all of whom he sexually abused. After living a sheltered life in a secluded town, followed by a stint in prison, Bistline now finds herself in the public eye, thanks to Netflix’s new docuseries Trust Me: The False Prophet. It tells the story of Christine Marie, PhD – an expert in cult psychology who infiltrated Bateman’s group posing as a documentary filmmaker, ultimately taking him down using footage as evidence against him – and the women like Bistline whom she helped to set free.
In September 2022, Bateman was arrested following an FBI raid of his Colorado City, Arizona compound, and the minors in his group were placed in state custody. That November, he instructed Bistline and two of his other followers to kidnap the girls and take them out of state. The women were caught in Washington State, arrested, and returned to Arizona.
It took a few months of being in prison – and away from Bateman – for Bistline to realize that he wasn’t a prophet, and that he had actually been abusing her and the other women and girls. “I started talking to the other inmates, and they’d tell me about their lives,” she says. “When I hinted about things that happened in my life, they’d be like, ‘Your life was not normal.'”
From there, she started challenging her beliefs. “I was also really scared,” she explains. “I literally thought that if I questioned Sam or Warren Jeffs, then lightning would come in and strike me and kill me. That was how brainwashed I was.”
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Content retrieved from: https://www.msn.com/en-us/entertainment/entertainment-celebrity/false-prophet-wife-on-leaving-flds-cult-healing-through-music/ar-AA22ikR7.
