Melanie Williams hadn’t even turned 10 when her father arrived home to his three wives and communal brood of children with a fourth bride in tow.
Bride No. 4, she remembers, was just 14 years old – the same age as Melanie’s big sister.
It was the 1980s in Utah, and this was the way things were done in the fundamentalist Mormon polygamist cult Melanie, like both of her parents, was born into.
Her father’s new teenage wife had been deemed ‘wild’ by the men running the cult, Melanie tells the Daily Mail, meaning they ‘look at it like she’s wicked and she needs to be married off right away and locked down with a baby and impregnated… she can’t go out and sow her wild oats,’ she says.
It wasn’t long before the young bride ran away from her new home, where jealousy between wives was rife, Melanie says.
Melanie broke free from the cult when she reached young adulthood, escaping to California in 2001 to pursue a career in Hollywood.
In 2008, while making ends meet as an actress in LA, Melanie tried out for a game show hoping to win some prize money.
She was almost instantly chosen as a contestant on Fox’s short-lived Moment of Truth, which was known for hooking participants up to lie detectors and asking deeply personal, potentially damaging questions.
Melanie Williams, an actress who’d fled a fundamentalist Mormon polygamist cult, appeared on Fox’s 2008 game show Moment of Truth where she said she believed her father had sexual relations with a minor
Melanie, in red, is pictured with her father and two sisters during her time as a member of the Second Ward, an offshoot of FLDS, which had already split from the mainstream LDS church after it outlawed polygamy
Melanie’s appearance on Moment of Truth’s second season made history, even though it never aired in the US. She was the only contestant to ever answer all questions truthfully for the $500,000 prize money.
Living on through clips of the taped show, which eventually aired over seas, she remains a viral sensation to this day.
‘For $500,000, Melanie Williams… do you believe your father, as an adult, has ever had sexual relations with a minor?’ the host can be seen asking in the viral clip.
Melanie tearfully answers the host: ‘Yes.’
Her father, John, who flew to California for the taping and was in the audience, is seen shaking his head on camera in surprise and dismay.
The clip alone is shocking, but Melanie’s life before that was equally dramatic.
The Daily Mail attempted to reach John Williams several times for comment – each attempt was unsuccessful and family members declined to put us in direct contact.
Growing up in a cult
Melanie’s childhood in Hildale, Utah, had been cloistered and stifling. She was born in 1979, delivered by a famed midwife who’d brought thousands of babies into the fold of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) – which had established a thriving, hierarchical and complex society in the southern Utah area.
The cult, promoting polygamy and rules set down by a living ‘prophet,’ had split in the early 20th Century from the mainstream church of Latter-Day Saints, which outlawed plural marriage.
FLDS was undergoing another schism in the years surrounding Melanie’s birth: A new offshoot calling itself the Second Ward, or the Work, cropped up in the same area, governed by a priesthood of several male elders, rather than the FLDS prophet.
Melanie said she was raised Second Ward, though her maternal grandfather remained FLDS and constantly hounded her mother to ‘come back to the true church.’
Polygamy, obedience and women’s subservience were central tenets of both, Melanie told the Daily Mail.
Melanie’s mother was her father’s third spouse. She recalls each wife having her own room in the home, where her father ‘would circulate from Wife One, Wife Two and Wife Three.’
Melanie is the seventh of her father’s 40-or-so children, of which her mother birthed 14, she said.
‘They teach us we’re full-blood sisters, full-blood brothers – that we’re all equal growing up,’ Melanie told the Mail.
But from a young age, she could tell otherwise.
Her father’s second wife was a daughter of The Prophet, and Melanie noticed her children always seemed better taken care of.
The group undeniably favored what Melanie calls ‘religious royalty’ – just one of many problems she had with the lifestyle.
She knew her community was different
Growing up, Melanie’s mother would take her to Walmart in nearby St. George. There, she found herself ‘mesmerized’ by magazine covers featuring beautifully done-up women, while her own prairie dresses attracted stares.
‘I could feel the glares,’ she told the Mail. ‘I could feel the stares. I could feel that people were whispering.’
Melanie, right, poses with her sister, left. She says all women she was raised alongside were taught ‘If you live polygamy, you go to heaven… that’s what God wants you to do. That is the highest law’
Melanie, left, knew that she and her community were different from an early age, and felt women were the second-class citizens of the cult
None of the girls were allowed to wear pants, she remembered, and their legs had to be covered at all times.
Her mother would say, ‘You are chosen to walk this path. You are an elitist. You’re better than them. God loves you, and it’s not going to be easy.’
And it was hard.
Melanie recalls waking up at 5 a.m. to plant corn daily, describing how ‘we had to work two hours in the yard… to get cheese on our omelet’. She’d stay up all night making mandalas for wife No. 1 to sell in the desert.
She also recalls knowing her gender was a barrier from a young age. The men, she said, were the ’ones that had all the clout and power.
‘We were nothing. We were treated like dirt and traded like pawns.’
She told the Daily Mail that, among fundamentalist Mormon polygamists, ‘the men are told to get as many women as they can.
‘They can stay in the fast lane and take as many women as they want, but the women have to just choose one man and build his empire.’
Coming of age in the Second Ward
From birth, Melanie said she was taught: ‘If you live polygamy, you go to heaven… that’s what God wants you to do. That is the highest law. You sacrifice your jealousy. You go through all these tests and trials where you learn love for the other women and you don’t have jealousy.’
She said that at 15, her father tried to marry her off to a rich, 71-year-old cult member – she still chokes up thinking about it. Melanie said her father convinced her to go on a date with this man, saying, ‘What’s the worst that can happen?’
What happened, she told the Mail, was the man drove her out of the state, took her to a casino and said ‘God told him [she] belonged to him.’ He said he’d arrange their marriage the following week and tried to pressure her into spending the night.
Melanie said her father encouraged the marriage – though she successfully resisted.
John took a fifth wife after his teen bride fled, but Melanie notes he was wrestling with abiding by cult teachings – and that had an influence on her, too. She remembered him getting in trouble for transgressions including watching broadcasted Dodgers games.
‘He started going his own way, which they call “the way of the world”… which is watching television, reading books that are forbidden, taking on more freedoms that they don’t want you to have for control reasons,’ Melanie said.
Melanie’s mother, right, was her father’s third wife. Melanie said left him and remarried in the FLDS community after he began disregarding strict rules
She said her mother left John because of it, heeding her own father’s advice and getting remarried through FLDS. By then, the cult was being run by Warren Jeffs, who’s now serving life in prison for child sexual assault.
But Melanie was also going ‘the way of the world,’ saving up money to leave. At 22, she packed up her car and drove to Los Angeles, enjoying the freedom but shocked by the newness.
Breaking free
Tasks such as paying rent, putting money in parking meters and even driving in a city were all foreign to her.
‘I had to deprogram my brain of the things they put in – the fear that they planted deep into my psychology,’ she said. ‘I was slowly saying, “This is okay to try… God’s not going to strike me down dead if I try this.”’
Meanwhile, she said her mother sent her hate mail, though she eventually stopped. Siblings back home told her she was being preached about at services as a cautionary tale, Melanie told the Daily Mail.
Melanie left Utah and the fundamentalist community in her 20s. She is pictured here during her time auditioning as an actress in California
After a period of partying and self-destruction, Melanie said she began auditioning, doing stand-in and acting work and waitressing to pay the bills. She told no one of her upbringing, afraid of what they’d say or think.
Until she turned up for Moment of Truth.
The since-cancelled show primed contestants by asking 50 deeply personal questions – pre episode taping – while hooked up to a lie detector. They then selected 21 to re-ask in front of an audience during the episode’s taping. Correct answers – many of which could be hurtful or damaging to contestants or their loved ones – won money ranging from $25,000 to $500,000.
‘The first time I talked about it was in this audition,’ she said. ‘I go in there and I’m like, “I’m not comfortable talking about these things, but… I left this cult.”
‘And they were like, “What?!”’
A Texas FLDS ranch had recently been raided by state police and child protection authorities, and the polygamist group was atop the 2008 media agenda, often in the headlines.
Producer Howard Schultz – best known for Extreme Makeover – ‘looked at me, and he looked at the other [producers], and he’s smiling really big,’ she said.
When producers began calling Melanie’s family to enlist their participation, many refused – but her father agreed. They had a good relationship at the time, and Melanie told him she’d share some of the prize money if she won.
He was in the studio as Melanie answered question after question correctly, cheering his daughter on.
After Melanie gave her 20th correct answer, producers shut down the set.
No contestant had ever gotten so far.
She was whisked up to a suite with executives, she says, and asked three new questions that were ‘extremely disturbing,’ she told the Daily Mail. She was told that final question of the show would be picked from those three in an unprecedented move.
‘They changed the whole show rules right there on the spot,’ she says.
One question was about her dad’s sexual history with minors. She answered, then begged them not to include it as Question 21.
She argued that they’d flown her father out to California for the taping just to ‘betray me and him on national television,’ also begging them to consider the backlash she was sure to suffer from her family and members of the cult she’d successfully fled.
‘They promised multiple times they wouldn’t go there – they’re like, “Your dad’s safe,”’ she said.
‘So they blindsided me… at the end of the day, they just wanted ratings.’
Schultz died in 2014, and the current president of Lighthearted Entertainment, Jeff Spangler, told Daily Mail that ‘the baseline conversation and polygraph was with the initial 50 questions.
‘Per the rules, they could be asked additional polygraph questions, and those could be used,’ he said, insisting that ‘she wasn’t cornered in any way.’
After Melanie answered the dreaded last question, she tried to explain to the host: ‘It was men telling him what to do. They gave him a wife, he took it. You step up and take wives in this society, and he did, and… he feels very guilt-ridden and very guilty about it. It’s killing him, I know it is.’
Her father chimes in on camera, saying, ‘Gosh, I’m not sure when I did this I knew what a minor was. That was a long time ago.’
While the crime was a felony, the statute of limitations in Utah would have expired. And producers had further couched the allegation by phrasing the question to ask whether Melanie ‘believed’ it happened, which did not establish truth.
In the immediate aftermath, Melanie recalls to the Daily Mail, ‘family war’ broke out. She claims her father ‘emotionally’ called one of her brothers and said, ‘She betrayed me on TV, my own daughter.’
The family ‘told me that I owed them,’ Melanie said, and she claims that she wrote checks that sent her into debt – waiting for payment from a show that never aired. Moment of Truth was cancelled after one season, and Melanie was left in limbo about the $500,000 from her Season 2 victory.
Then, she got a call from a stranger in Sweden claiming to have just seen her show – she realized it sold internationally. It wasn’t long afterward that Fox invited her to pick up the check.
She did, though she was ‘still very mad’ – and reaped the benefits despite her episode never materializing on American screens.
In the years since, she married and divorced a grandson of Jeffs, who’d also left the cult, and became estranged from her father.
Melanie, 46, treasures the freedoms she now enjoys after breaking free from the cult’s practices and teachings – including her recent solo trip to Italy, pictured
She wrote a book called Time to Woman Up, chronicling her upbringing in the ‘patriarchy’ and encouraging women to find their voice and power.
She’s posted about pedophilia, polygamy and other problems on social media, but every time was ‘attacked’ by both cult and family members.
‘We can’t keep brushing it under the rug, or it goes into the next generation,’ she said of the lifestyle. ‘We have to have these difficult conversations.’
Now, Melanie is living in Missouri near her brother and his family, who are active in a local polygamous religious group. She wants to show by example how independence can be achieved, without shoving her escape in anyone’s face.
‘The women find this very fascinating,’ she said, noting that local mothers ‘have many kids.
‘They don’t have their own land… They don’t even have a decent car that works. They can’t even go to town.’
She teaches those who approach her that ‘it takes a lot to fight and make your own money – you’ve got to have that grit.
‘Some of them are open to me, and some of them are threatened.’
Despite the threats and vitriol, Melanie is committed to continuing her mission.
‘My purpose is to find women and empower them – give them the tools to be confident, believe in themselves and succeed,’ she said.
‘[They] deserve to have a better life… they can have it if they just lean into that belief system.’
