Christine Marie Confesses What Taking Down Samuel Bateman Cost

About this episode

Christine Marie discusses her experiences infiltrating Samuel Bateman's FLDS community and the consequences of her investigation.

The complete three-part conversation, all in one extended sit-down. Christine Marie — the cult psychologist who walked into Samuel Bateman's FLDS world with a camera and a hidden agenda — sits down with me to tell the whole story from start to finish. Christine and her husband Tolga moved to Short Creek in 2016 with a completely different project in mind. Then Samuel Bateman rose out of the post-Warren Jeffs FLDS community, declared himself the new prophet, took "spiritual wives" — some of them girls as young as nine — and made the decision that would cost him fifty years in federal prison: he let two outsiders with cameras into his house. He thought they were going to make him famous. He didn't know Christine had been under a false prophet's spell herself, years before, and could read every move he was making the second he made it. In this extended interview, she walks me through the entire arc. The cover story. The mole identity. The years of going to local police who believed her tapes and refused to move. The Atonement recording she captured in late 2021 that finally turned the case federal. Julia Johnson, the mother she flipped, whose four daughters had been given to…

People in this episode

Host: Hidden Killers Podcast

Guest: Christine Marie

Topics covered

• cult psychology
• FLDS community
• true crime
• interview
• Samuel Bateman
• child welfare
• investigative journalism

Keywords

• cult
• psychologist
• Samuel Bateman
• FLDS
• investigation
• true crime
• child brides
• federal prison
• interview

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: FLDS, Warren Jeffs

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