Sexual Crimes Are “Next To” Murder. More On Jodi Hildebrandt.

This is a follow-up interview with Jessi Hildebrandt, niece of convicted child abuser and Mormon therapist Jodi Hildebrandt. I’ve been about 50% keeping up with this story and have written about it several times. Currently, I am struck by what appears to be a tenet of Mormonism, which is that so-called sexual crimes are “next to murder” in the hierarchy of crime and are therefore punished severely by the Mormon church, nearly as severely as the crime of murder. Although I have no idea what extralegal role the church takes in punishing murderers, (!) the church apparently refers adherents to church-approved therapists when they are considered within the community to have committed a sexual crime.

What counts as “sexual crime” seems to be a point of contention within Mormonism, or at least, males who consume porn, cheat on their wives and commit other sexual offenses that are barely on the radar in secular America, are boo-hooing that Mormonism considers those things to be sexual offenses at all. There does not seem to be a hierarchy within the various sexual offenses, and masturbation and premarital sex (for example) seem to be treated as severely as any other sexual deviance. Initially, Jessi was sent to live with Jodi as a teenager after questioning her parents’ Mormon faith. After being accused by Jodi of various sexual offenses herself, including masturbation and being a lesbian, accusations Jessi denies, and after enduring months if not years of abusive “therapy” in Jodi’s care, Jessi finally successfully escaped by running away.

At the time of the abuse and her escape, and in the aftermath including Jessi’s resulting homelessness and being raped in a homeless shelter, no one cared about Jessi’s accounts of abuse, even though her experience was strikingly similar to the experiences of Jodi’s latest victims, for which “therapy” Jodi has now been convicted of aggravated child abuse and sentenced to prison. Understandably, Jessi is currently on a crusade, as it were, to expose Jodi’s long history of abuse and the role of the Mormon church in enabling Jodi and generally creating and perpetuating a culture of abusive “therapies” for so-called sexual crimes.

In this interview and elsewhere, Jessi describes the Mormon belief that sexual crimes are “next to” murder and proceeds to tear the belief apart. While advocating for herself, she also advocates for other Mormons who have been accused of sexual crimes, mostly if not exclusively Mormon males who were referred to Jodi for treatment for “pornography addiction” and other diagnoses, which males have claimed that Jodi summarily wrecked their marriages and ruined their lives. The men have reported that, due to the men’s proclivities including porn consumption and sexual infidelity/promiscuity (and likely more serious offenses like rape, incest and trafficking but no one wants to talk about that) Jodi told them they were dangerous to their wives and children and often separated the men from their families, where the men left the household as a precondition to saving their marriages and their own eternal souls.

Jessi is mad about this and thinks all Jodi’s victims were treated unfairly and that all Mormon doctrine “is bullshit” including the seriousness with which the Mormon church seems to treat sexual crime. As a spectator to these most recent events, including Jodi’s criminal prosecution and conviction and Jessi’s and others’ testimonies of Jodi’s abuse, I can report that secular America is appalled at these stories and at the Mormon tenet that sexual crime is next to murder, and that things like porn consumption and infidelity are considered sexual crimes at all.

Of course, secular America has pretty serious (and pretty unaddressed) problems of its own with sexual entitlement, predation, violence and abuse, making this alliance between pornified Mormons and pornified normies a bit more problematic and a bit less savory than anyone will probably admit. Radical feminists have analyzed and written about sexualized violence and abusive sexual practices for decades and from what I can tell, sexual crimes like rape, incest and trafficking really are “next to” murder in their brutality and destructive intent and effects on victims.

To wit, I’ve heard (or read) victims say that they wish their abuser had killed them, because living as a “survivor” is a kind of permanent living-death from which there is no respite and no relief. Prostituted and trafficked women and exited porn performers report the same things. The entitlement and complete lack of empathy on the part of males who constantly think with or about their dicks, including males who consume porn and prostituted and trafficked women does make these offenders dangerous to women and children, not to mention dangerous to animals and to all life. Secular America is unwilling to categorize most of these things as sexually deviant, let alone criminal and Mormons want to have their cake and eat it too: they want to be Mormons and benefit from whatever goodies that entails, including access to absolutely massive church resources and generational wealth, but when it comes to sex and sexual offense, they prefer the secular approach. Of course they do.

This needn’t be a long post, and I am kind of bored with it already, but what I would like to address is this. Sexual crime probably really is “next to” murder in its severity, including the depravity of almost exclusively male offenders and the effects on primarily female victims’ bodies, minds and lives and I have never seen any religion (or any institution or anyone except radical feminists) take it as seriously as it deserves. I’m unwilling to say that Mormons or any religion, high-demand religion or cult gets it right with its treatment of sexual offense or of anything, but I can’t say they get it wrong about the import of sexual offense, can I.

Their reasoning is certainly patriarchal and male supremacist, and Mormons are likely unconcerned with the effects on victims though. Husbands and fathers who are removed from their homes are probably sequestered so that their unmanly jerking-off and other habits do not rub off on their sons and decidedly not because the pornography industry and porn consumption in the home is per se damaging to women, including these men’s wives and daughters. Mormons are not radical feminists afterall. The problem really, as I see it, is that Mormons are attempting to mediate if not remove male proclivities and male nature/biology as sexual predators and they will not be successful at that.

As we have seen throughout the Hildebrandt/Franke case, attempting to mediate/remove male sexual predation is impossible — a fools’ errand really — and opens the door to very serious abuse up to and including protracted torture practices visited on children, which is exactly what Jodi did and what she was ultimately prosecuted and convicted for: attempting to correct a boy child who Jodi and the child’s mother, Ruby Franke, accused of porn addiction and acts of sexual abuse against other children. Obviously I am choosing to believe or at least tentatively or even hypothetically believe Jodi’s and Ruby’s characterization of the child and his behavior and proclivities which if true, would hardly be a surprise, would it. Radical feminists and girls and women who themselves have been sexually abused by boy children (as I myself was abused as a child) know this is a common occurrence, more common than normies like to think and just will not believe, despite all evidence.

So I ask again, as I have asked throughout my reporting on this saga, what is a Mormon mommy to do, and what is a Mormon therapist to do for that matter, when tasked with correcting underage (and adult) males of their natural proclivities as sexual deviants and predators? This is a serious question. Just what the fuck are they supposed to do, when their religion more or less requires that all Mormon females become mothers to boy children, and the Mormon religion dictates that all children’s very souls depend on receiving and assimilating correction, but where successfully correcting males (or anyone) of a more or less natural state is impossible? And being that that is the case, the reality appears to be that there must be massive, widespread torture practices being performed on children throughout the Mormon community — basically the entire state of Utah and beyond — and these torture practices must be normalized and invisiblized (and unprosecuted) much more than anyone would probably imagine.

The scale of this exact type and degree of abuse and worse happening at any moment within the Mormon community probably beggars belief, but it has to be happening, doesn’t it. If Mormons really believe that sexual crime is next to murder, and that men’s eternal souls are at stake, then constant, unrelenting and ultimately unsuccessful abuse practices must be a feature and not a bug of Mormon culture, mustn’t it. At least the secularists have figured out how to create and maintain a culture mostly free of torturing males: they reserve punishment for deviance in the form of suspicion, prosecution and incarceration for token males or the worst of the worst and let every other boy and man completely off the hook, preferring to normalize just about every possible abusive practice instead. Feminists and progressive women have only helped with that agenda, agreeing to “enthusiastically” participate in every sick male whim and not cry about it, so long as we are allowed pocket money and access to contraception and abortion. The joke’s on them with the abortion access obviously. And with all of it, really. Innit.

To me, the unsolvable problem of male sexual predation, and the Mormons’ apparent attempts to solve this unsolvable problem using “therapy” including protracted physical and mental torture is the most compelling part of the Hildebrandt/Franke story and it is the one thing that no one, and I mean no one seems willing to address. Instead, the True Crime and “survivor” communities have absolutely rallied in this case, doubling and tripling down on their knee jerk assertion that the accusations against Ruby’s son cannot possibly be true, that the accusations are yet another abuse tactic/unacceptable victim-blaming, and that boy children cannot be perpetrators of sexual abuse themselves. But that’s just not true, is it. Of course they can be and of course they often are.

And escalating, unending torture — or conversely, ignoring boys’ and men’s sexualized abuse against vulnerable women, children and animals — seem to be the only ways anyone has of dealing with the obvious, timeless, cross-cultural issue of sexually predatory males destroying the lives of women, children and animals and in a religious context, damning their own eternal souls to Hell. Of course, a third solution — separatism — is unrealistic because getting and staying away from males in a more or less global patriarchy is almost, or almost always, impossible. It is unrealistic, even “radical” and horribly dangerous, you see, to neither torture people nor ignore it when anyone perpetrates abuse. And within a global patriarchy, those seem to be the 2 things we and anyone just cannot be allowed to do.

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