How Pamela Jones Went from Being a Cult Survivor to a Self-Made Millionaire
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Today, Pamela Jones is a self-made millionaire and CEO of a successful Minnesota-based cleaning company. But back in 2000, she was a member of a fundamentalist Mormon cult living on a rural compound in Mexico, called Zion’s Camp. Born into polygamy, she was one of 61 siblings, and had five sister wives, and nine children.
Jones was married at 15 to a husband who forbade her to have contact with outsiders, including her own family. She was told her throat would be slit if she tried to escape, but she did it anyway, bravely fleeing with her children. In The Dirt Beneath Our Door: My Journey to Freedom After Escaping a Polygamous Mormon Cult, out now, Jones tells the story of her liberation and how she ultimately built a new life for her family in the US. Here, in an exclusive excerpt, she tells the story of how her remarkable journey began.
Istrapped Bethany, my youngest, at 20 months old, into the car seat, then slid behind the wheel, buckled up, and reversed. The sky was deep ebony and pockmarked with stars as the headlights rose up and over the dull adobe walls, then cleared the flat roof of the home I hoped I’d never see again.
My sons, Hyrum, 16, and Mosiah, nearly 13, in a white Toyota, dropped into line behind me as we drove one block, turned left, then two more blocks out of the compound and onto Federal Highway 10, the main road leading out of town and north toward the US border.
It was eerily quiet, with no traffic and the kids drowsing behind me, their little sandy and reddish-blond heads tipped toward their shoulders. I floored the gas as hard as I dared on this sun-bleached, potholed highway. I felt numb, my knuckles blanched white on the steering wheel. I didn’t know where or when we’d be stopped, or by whom—my husband, David, the Mexican authorities, or God—but I expected it. It was official: I was leaving Mexico with eight children, two vehicles, two tanks of gas, a five-dollar bill I’d found in my husband’s dirty laundry, and two credit cards I had no idea how to use.
By 10 am we reached Ciudad Juárez and the busy border crossing over the Rio Grande into El Paso, Texas. We drove a few blocks to the American consulate, a gray, fenced brick building along the dusty highway. I left my daughter Lucy, 14, in charge as I went inside, took a number, and waited for what seemed like forever to be called. All my children except one had been born in Mexico, like me, but we had legal status as “American citizens born abroad.” I had been naturalized as an American citizen at the age of 7, when we lived in El Paso, but because my husband and I lived so far off the grid, my children’s births hadn’t been properly recorded with the authorities, which meant they also needed to be naturalized before we could settle in America.
I’d contacted the consulate and collected this paperwork for months without David’s knowledge, helped by my father and Velma, the first of Daddy’s 11 plural wives.
Content retrieved from: https://www.elle.com/culture/books/a66028184/pamela-jones-the-dirt-beneath-our-door-memoir-excerpt-2025/.
