Teen and Husband Escaped Cult After Their Compelled Marriage — and Later, They Fell in Love

Angela and Cade Johnson have been married at a laundromat in 2003 when she was 16 and he was 19.

They exchanged vows not by selection, however as a result of the infamous polygamist cult they grew up in — the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints — compelled them to take action.

The cult Angela and Cade have been born into made headlines when its notorious “prophet” and chief Warren Jeffs was accused by quite a few younger victims — together with his personal youngsters — of molesting them.

Named one of many FBI’s Ten Most Wished after fleeing the cult to keep away from arrest, Jeffs, now 69, was lastly taken into custody in Las Vegas in 2006. He was convicted 5 years later of two counts of kid intercourse abuse and sentenced to life in jail.

Due to the tumult within the church on the time, “We didn’t have an excessive amount of to do with him,” Angela says. “However in the event you’ve ever met him, he is only a creep. Stuffed with vanity.”

She did not like how women and youths within the cult have been compelled to wed males they didn’t know. One man she knew had 24 wives.

“Getting married younger was every little thing you have been raised to do your entire life,” Angela, now 38, who grew up in British Columbia, Canada, the place one department of the sect is positioned, tells PEOPLE. “They did not even let women go to high school additional than tenth grade as a result of they noticed no purpose for them to get an training.”

Angela and later Cade, who grew up in Hildale, Utah, within the twin cities of Hildale and Colorado Metropolis, Ariz., the place one other a part of the cult was positioned, left the church — and one another — dwelling separate lives till they reconnected a number of years later. Right this moment, they’re fortunately married with three youngsters, ages 18, 15 and three. Each have careers. Angela is a labor and supply nurse and Cade is a helicopter pilot.

Wanting again, Angela says, “It’s been a journey.”

Teenage Bride and Groom

Angela and Cade nonetheless cannot imagine they received married in a laundromat. They did so as a result of the justice of the peace who carried out the mandatory authorized ceremony was not allowed on church property as a result of she was an “outsider,” Angela explains.

That evening, the couple wed once more in a spiritual ceremony. After that, the brand new teenage bride went house together with her new husband, feeling out of types. “We each laid in mattress awake all evening lengthy within the very awkward silence of simply, what the heck are we doing?” she says.

As days and weeks went on, Angela realized that she didn’t need to be married. She simply wished to be a standard teenager.

“I used to be solely 16 so I used to be nonetheless desirous to do issues that weren’t allowed within the faith,” like listening to pop music from artists like Shania Twain and Britney Spears, she says.

Cade admits that he, too, had been breaking the cult’s strict guidelines. “I had been listening to music. I’d sneak and drink alcohol from time to time.” However after his marriage, as head of his new family, “I spotted that we’d higher straighten up.”

That meant making an attempt to maintain his new bride consistent with the cult’s instructing — one thing he did not actually need to do.

“She had simply been by all this in her father’s family and now right here she was again being managed once more together with her new husband who was making an attempt to determine it out too,” he says.

The stakes, in accordance with the cult, have been larger than ever. “This was all about our ‘everlasting salvation,’” he says.

Angela didn’t care. “I used to be like, ‘This isn’t for me,’” she says, deciding that she was leaving Cade.

Upset at Angela’s “rebelliousness,” her dad and mom, with the cult’s backing, finally despatched her to reside with an aunt she had by no means met. However the expertise was a constructive one for Angela.

“She was superb and helped me type of get on my ft and see issues from a special perspective,” she says.

Marriage 2.0

Angela stayed together with her aunt till June 2004, across the time she and Cade began speaking once more when her greatest pal began relationship Cade’s greatest pal.

Angela initially wished to start out divorce proceedings, however after spending time with Cade, who says he had “run away” from the cult, she realized how a lot that they had in frequent.

“We began type of seeing one another and speaking, and finally, we have been each like, ‘Properly, you are type of cool,’” she says. “I joke about this, however he took his shirt off [when they were swimming, and] I used to be like, ‘Oh, okay. You are all proper,’” she says, laughing.

A month or so later, they determined to offer it one other strive “since we’re already married,” she says. “The worst that may occur is we will get divorced.”

The remaining is historical past. These days, they proceed to share a journey of “therapeutic” from the traumas they endured by mountain biking, snowboarding, engaged on Angela’s youngsters’s clothes line, Glimmers, and spending time with their youngsters. “We permit them to be themselves and take a look at to not form or type them into one thing that perhaps I’d need,” says Cade.

Provides Angela: “I take a lot pleasure in seeing how comfortable my children are.”