Revealing the twisted truth about my childhood would have sent my father to prison… but a sickening realization forced me to flee

When Janet Zitting was ten years old, she drew a picture of herself and her future husband watching the sunset.

The picture showed the two of them with their arms around each other, a child’s heartfelt vision of how her future would be.

But then her mother came along and told her there was a problem – the picture was ‘too monogamous.’

Zitting’s mother told her to draw another wife because the image did not line up with their family’s religious beliefs: that polygamy was God’s work and she needed multiple ‘sister wives’ to live a full life.

Today in an exclusive interview with the Daily Mail, Zitting, 32, said that the episode marked one of the first instances where she started to really question her Mormon faith.

‘I remember as a kid being like, what? And I was so sad,’ she said.

‘I’m like, “But they’re in love. Now I have to draw another woman? That’s dumb.”‘ Still, she obediently erased the image she had drawn and sketched out another as instructed. The new image showed the two women, either side of the man, their arms around him.

This, then, was the norm for Zitting, who didn’t just grow up Mormon, she grew up in an offshoot of the Church called The Work where having multiple wives wasn’t just encouraged – it was mandatory.

Zitting’s father had four wives, and she grew up with 44 siblings: she was the twenty-fifth of 45.

Living in the family’s 13-bedroom, 15-bathroom home just outside of Salt Lake City in Utah, she ‘thought that having one mom was not normal,’ she told the Daily Mail.

It wasn’t until the age of 17 that she began to really question her faith and at 20 she became one of the first of her family to leave both the home without being married and the religion.

Zitting has recently begun sharing her story on TikTok on her account @manifestmoremagic and other social media platforms where she has gone viral, with some of her clips being viewed more than 32 million times.

Commenters bombard her with questions like whether she remembers all the names of her siblings, who are aged between 15 and 48, or their birthdays – she does.

They also want to know who sibling number one is, but Zitting is keeping the names of the others private for now because they don’t want to go public.

Zitting’s family followed the teachings of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints – led by the now notorious self-proclaimed ‘prophet’ Warren Jeffs who, at 70, is serving a life sentence plus 20 years for child sexual assault.

Polygamy is illegal in the US and was only decriminalized in Utah in 2020, long after Zitting had moved out of her home.

‘I definitely knew we were different growing up,’ Zitting said on a Zoom call from her home in Southern Utah.

‘When we would go to the grocery store, we had to keep things very secretive because my family was at risk, my parents were at risk for going to prison for living polygamously.

‘My parents had family members who had gone to prison for it, so it was a very valid fear.’

That’s why the children, all 45 of them, spent most of their time at the family’s one acre plot of land and their massive home, which was expanded by their father, who ran a construction company, to accommodate them all.

As Zitting describes it, life was like a commune and each day three meals were cooked from scratch with everyone mucking in.

In the beginning, all the children were home schooled on a religious-led curriculum that would last from 7.30am to around 3pm, followed by chores.

Non-religious books were frowned upon, and one time Zitting’s father was appalled to see one of her sisters reading a Harry Potter book.

There were three kitchens, two laundry rooms and they had animals like chickens, pigs and cows.

‘We had a lot of gardens and every fall, we would butcher the animals and do a lot of canning,’ Zitting said.

‘We had a big cellar of tons of canned food like applesauce, jams, dried food, and then we would have a freezer full of meat from butchering the animals.’

Neighbors were referred to as ‘gentiles,’ a term more commonly used by Jews to refer to a person not of the Jewish faith, and the family was told to never reveal the truth of their living arrangements to them.

‘It was very focused on that because that is not good,’ Zitting said. ‘Don’t ever tell them that, that would be dangerous.’

As Zitting recounts her childhood, details which are normally mundane become extraordinary.

Each of the four wives had their own room and Zitting shared a room with seven of her sisters: all were on bunk beds.

The family got around with a 15-person passenger van and multiple other cars.

When they did get to Costco for groceries, the bill could be as much as $1,500 – today of course that figure would be even higher.

But this was no country idyll and the fact there were four women competing for the attention of one man – who was the one who decided where he slept each night – created a difficult atmosphere.

‘There was always tension,’ Zitting said. ‘There’s always jealousy. Some of it became so normal.

‘I don’t even think they realized how much tension there was.

‘Things flared up sometimes. They tried to not really do that in front of the kids. But they could have done better with their communication with each other.’

There were other drawbacks to having a big family: they never celebrated birthdays.

‘They said it was because it was worldly, and they didn’t want to celebrate it, but I really think it’s because they couldn’t afford it,’ Zitting said.

‘We couldn’t go on vacation. We didn’t ever go camping. We’d go out to the mountains sometimes. But that’s not something we could do, because it would be way too much.

‘Looking back there were definitely a lot of good times. I love how my siblings were my best friends.

‘We were all very creative. We were very crazy with our games; we would climb trees and climb on top of the roofs and be crazy. We were very daring with a lot of things.

‘But it was also challenging for me how controlled the environment was. I wasn’t allowed to hang out with kids outside of the religion. My parents were worried that they were going to take us out of the religion.

‘I remember thinking as a kid: “I just want to hang out with them. Why would I speak about religion with them?” I was pretty little, and I remember saying to my mom: “How do I talk about religion? Like, we just want to play. I’m so confused right now.”‘

From the age of eight, Zitting had been asking questions about her faith but once she got to 17, she began to wonder if it really was the life for her.

Zitting did not want an arranged marriage, which would have been approved by the church. She began to date – a fact she kept secret from her mother and father.

‘My boyfriend would feel guilty, thinking that he’s stealing me from my true husband,’ Zitting said.

‘So that was one of our biggest arguments, where it was, like, I’m not some man’s property that they can just give me to another person.

‘My path in life (from my religion) was to grow up and marry a good man as one of his wives and have children and have sister wives, and that it’s an honor to have sister wives.’

Hearing stories from friends who had entered into polygamous marriages further convinced Zitting that the life her parents lived was not for her.

A line that, she said, has always stuck with her was a sentiment shared by a good friend where she told her: ‘I feel like my husband is cheating on me in front of my face and I have to be okay with it.’

‘Life is already hard in general,’ Zitting said. ‘I do not want this type of hard.

‘I do not think it’s worth it, sacrificing myself and my soul to live this lifestyle.’

One month before she left, Zitting told her birth mother that she was going to leave. She only told her father and siblings nearer the time.

She borrowed one of her brothers’ bicycles, as she couldn’t afford a car, and found a place of her own.

The reaction among her family was mixed: her mother was quietly supportive and even secretly loaned her $200 to get her own place.

Some of her siblings thought she was ‘going to hell’ and that she wouldn’t live in eternity with them.

They have become more accepting over time, and today her relationships with all her siblings is strong. One of Zitting’s sisters regularly appears in her social media posts.

Zitting has also become a mother herself, to a one-and-a-half-year-old son. Her husband, whom she met 11 years ago, was raised in the same faith as her but they didn’t meet until they had both left.

From an outside perspective, much of her upbringing sounds like a cult, and even Zitting admits that is what it was.

‘Oh yeah, it definitely is,’ she said.

‘But I say high demand religion, because it’s a nice way of saying cult and because I have so many family members that are still in it and I still want to be in their life.

‘The word cult stings very hard for them.’

In recent years there have been a string of stories linking some polygamist sects with allegations of child abuse. Did Zitting experience any treatment she would consider abusive during her childhood? ‘Definitely,’ she replied, declining to elaborate.

‘I’m not really sharing a ton on that yet just because I’m learning how to communicate that,’ she said.

‘There was so much love, and I love having this family, but there was abuse too.’

Zitting’s father died two years ago after a battle with cancer which, she said, changed him as a man.

He became ‘more open-minded’ and less controlling in his final years, even complimenting her on her butterfly tattoo on which he would previously have frowned.

‘When he saw it, he was like, “Oh, wow, that’s so beautiful,”‘ she said.

‘To me, that’s just showing how much he’s grown.’

After her father’s death, Zitting’s mother began to speak out about her faith, ultimately deciding to walk away, too.

Zitting lost her second mother three years ago, a death which hit her like the loss of any other parents.

‘It’s definitely deeper for my other siblings where they lost their biological mom,’ she said.

‘Yes, I did still lose a mom. Definitely. But it’s even deeper for my other siblings who lost their mom because now they’re orphans.’

Zitting is currently a full-time mother and content creator who hopes others will take inspiration from her story.

She is also looking to work with other women to deprogram them from the same religion that she was born into: ‘A lot of people who are in it, truly are happy and they truly do feel it’s their life path.

‘But I want other women to know that they do not have to live it if they don’t want to, if it’s not for them. I just want people to be happy. Live it if you want to – but if you don’t, you don’t have to.’