Reese Oliver
speaker
1,229 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 15 Sep
Reese Oliver’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.
Appearances
And critics and former members of polygamous communities have pointed out that what we see on TV is...
pretty much just a curated version of a much more complicated and often troubling reality.
The most extreme examples come from groups like FLDS, which you can learn more about in documentaries like Keeps We Pray and Obey or Alyssa Wall, her book Stolen Innocence, really good, where under Warren Jeffs, girls like Alyssa were married off at really young ages and dissent was punished severely.
Jeffs was convicted in 2011 on charges related to the sexual abuse of minors, which brought national attention to the darker side of these communities.
I'm pretty sure he was arrested in the back of a car that was either on the way to or leaving from Disneyland.
He was breaking all of his own rules, baby.
Beyond that, there are broader patterns that former members have spoken about, such as young women being pressured into marriages, limited access to education or financial independence, men being expelled from communities to reduce competition for wives, and families being separated when somebody leaves.
And even outside the most extreme groups, people who leave often discard losing absolutely everything, their family, their support system, their identity.
Like I said earlier, these FLDS communities are extremely insular for that purpose, to intimidate you into staying because being excommunicated from them is purposefully life-ruining.
But that is because not everybody in a plural marriage or in this lifestyle would describe themselves as oppressed.
There are a lot of people who choose this life that find meaning in it.
They say that it works for them.
And the TLC show definitely helped to push that narrative to the masses.
What's scariest to me about it is it's like a double-walled, insulative layer of cultishness, because not only are you within the cultishness of a fundamentalist Mormon community, but then within your own household, you don't even have agency or you're not able to share that headship position.
The only slight silver lining I see in it is I think as opposed to like a lot of different Christian fundamentalist couples that are monogamous, at least in this you have commiserators.
There are other women with whom you can bond, but I do think that that gets scary because I think when all of those people are victims of this system that are warping their perspective, it can become just kind of like an echo chamber of some really harmful things that are not good for your self-esteem.
So I worry for the women in these homes.
That's how I feel.
Something else that I'm also curious about is what life is like for the children on the inside of this.
Like, I guess this is kind of just a general polygamy question, but I wonder if as a kid of a secondary or a third wife, there's tension there as opposed to the children of maybe the primary wife.
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