Man raised in extremist cult reveals harrowing experience after being forced to marry and have seven kids
A man who was raised in an extremist cult that split off from the Mormon church has spoken out about the experiences that he went through.
Their official name is the Latter Day Church of Christ, sometimes referred to as The Order - not to be confused with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which is the mainstream Mormon Church.
The Order started in 1935 after the Mormon Church moved away from polygamy, with a man called Elden Kingston splitting off and forming his own fundamentalist group which retained the ability to marry multiple people.
Nephi Robinson, from Utah, recently appeared on the YouTube channel Cults to Consciousness to speak about what his life inside The Order had been like, explaining that he had been a gay man in a cult that expected him to marry multiple women.
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The Order's current leader is a man called Paul Elden Kingston, and Nephi is the son of his older brother John Daniel Kingston.
More specifically, Nephi is the son of John Daniel Kingston and his third of 14 wives and the second of her 13 children.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a member of The Order and an uncle to Nephi, David Ortell Kingston, was convicted of taking his 16-year-old niece as wife number 15 in 1999 - with jurors finding him guilty of incest and unlawful sexual conduct, LA Times reported.
Since polygamy is illegal and his mother was the third wife to his father, on Nephi's birth certificate, it said his dad was a fictious man called Phil Robinson.
Nephi told Cults to Consciousness that even as a child, he was having to parent his younger siblings since his dad only visited their home around once a month, and as a boy, he soon realised that his father was timing his visits to when his mother was most likely to conceive a child.
He explained that he realised that he was attracted to men at a young age but kept it a secret, saying he 'felt a lot of shame for it'.
"I tried so hard to not be. I fasted and prayed many times," he said, explaining to the YouTube channel that he threw himself into being an older brother to his siblings to find his reason for living.
"The way I understood it, I was instilled with something that is anti-marriage, and anti-life and anti-procreation, and terrible." he said.
"Being gay was such a terrible thing that I just did what I could to deserve to be alive, I guess."
Nephi was also forced to get married, and had seven children with his then-wife as he said that 'creating kids is definitely one of my least favourite parts of my life' but having children had been 'the most fulfilling thing' in it.
Even with seven children, he faced pressure to get married again, both from his father and his wife.
In 201,1 he came out as gay to his father, who said it was because he'd eaten 'too much chicken' and there were hormones in the meat.
In the end he left, divorcing his wife, who he said had since remarried while two of her older sisters had married Nephi's own father.
When his mother got cancer in 2013, he witnessed how The Order ignored treatment advice from her doctors and put her to fasting, even designing a strict diet for her to follow.
Nephi estimated that his mother was eating under 500 calories a day, and at one point where he was tasked with watching over her, he woke up to find her eating grapes in the kitchen before she begged him not to say anything.
He said: "We just watched her pretty much die a slow, long and painful death."
When he left The Order, he started out by living in his car before his grandmother offered him a place to stay.
Nephi also fought for visitation rights to his children, and said that he was aware that his eldest daughter was only a few years away from being expected to marry.
Joe Harker