Trust Me: The False Prophet has been all over our social feeds since it landed on Netflix earlier this month, and for good reason. The four-part docuseries about Samuel Bateman — the self-proclaimed heir to convicted FLDS leader Warren Jeffs — has the pacing of a thriller and the kind of shaky-cam footage that makes your stomach drop. It follows cult psychology expert Christine Marie and her filmmaker husband as they go undercover inside an FLDS splinter group to expose how Bateman preyed upon young girls in Jeffs’ absence, chronicling the years the duo spent begging authorities to intervene before the women themselves decided to take a stand. If you’ve already burned through it, the next thing you should queue up is on Netflix, too, and it’s been there for a while.

We’re talking about Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey, the 2022 docuseries that hails from the same director as the streamer’s latest true crime hit. Filmmaker Rachel Dretzin spent years inside this story before Bateman even surfaced. If Trust Me is the urgent, real-time account of two people trying to stop something before it gets worse, Keep Sweet is the autopsy of how it got this bad to begin with. It examines the rise of Warren Jeffs inside the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the polygamist Mormon offshoot that Bateman would later try to inherit.

Where *Trust Me *moves quickly, Keep Sweet takes its time recounting the twisted origins of one religion’s corrupted idol. It has the benefit of distance — Jeffs was already convicted and sentenced to life, with the community dismantled, all by the time Dretzin captured it on film — and she uses that distance to do something Trust Me doesn’t have the room for. She shows you the machine: how it was built, how it ran, and why it kept producing men like Jeffs in the first place.

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‘Keep Sweet’ part two.

The title alone does a lot of that work. “Keep Sweet, Pray, and Obey” was the motto coined by Rulon Jeffs, Warren’s father and predecessor, as a directive for how women in the community should conduct themselves relative to their husbands.** **Those three words functioned as a complete governing philosophy. Women who kept sweet got to stay. Women who pushed back were a problem to be managed. By the time Warren inherited the church and started turning every dial toward something much darker, the women had already been conditioned not to fight it.

But the docuseries starts at the beginning, tracing the roots of the FLDS community in Short Creek, Utah, under Rulon, where polygamy wasn’t just tolerated but treated as a divine obligation. The more wives a man accumulated, the higher his standing in the eyes of God. When Rulon died, Warren inherited the church and immediately made it his own, tightening control over every aspect of his followers’ lives. Over time, he expelled men he deemed threats, relocated entire families, and eventually ordered the construction of a sprawling compound in Eldorado, Texas, where he could operate even further from outside scrutiny. His arrest in 2006, after years as a fugitive, and the subsequent raid on that Texas ranch — during which hundreds of children were removed by Child Protective Services — became one of the more surreal media circuses of that decade. The series ends with Jeffs convicted and sentenced to life, though it’s careful not to let that feel like a resolution. What makes Keep Sweet worth the watch isn’t the legal procedural of it all. It’s the women who agreed to speak on camera, many for the first time, describing what ordinary life inside the FLDS actually felt like.

*Trust Me *is largely structured around Marie and Tolga Katas’ undercover operation, with the women Bateman victimized arriving toward the end as the human stakes of the investigation. Dretzin’s goal with Keep Sweet, though, was to give survivors the chance to tell their stories for the first time, and you can feel that difference. None of this is a knock on Trust Me. It’s gripping television, and Marie is a genuinely remarkable subject. But a docuseries that ends with its monster behind bars can create a false sense of closure that a story like this has never really earned. Bateman is serving 50 years, but still makes daily calls to followers who consider him a prophet. The arrest didn’t dismantle anything; *Keep Sweet *is the series that explains why it couldn’t.

Keep Sweet: Pray And Obey

2022 - 2022-00-00