NEW YORK (NY)
Daily Beast
June 3, 2019
By Kelly Weill
Grand Marais is a quiet Minnesota town on the Lake Superior coast. Seth Jeffs is the brother of notorious cult leader Warren Jeffs, and the leader of his own secretive sect. The only thing separating them is a dispute over local wetlands.
Seth Jeffs was a prominent figure in the Fundamentalist Church of the Latter Day Saints, a polygamist sex cult that married off underage girls to adult men. After leader Warren Jeffs was sentenced to life in prison for crimes including raping his 12-year-old “wife,” Seth Jeffs and other FLDS members flitted from state to state establishing new religious compounds and dodging legal action. Now Seth Jeffs is build a new compound in Grand Marais, all while facing a lawsuit from a woman who says he and the FLDS subjected her to ritual sex abuse at 8 years old.
Right now, Grand Marais’ best hope to stop Jeffs is a regulation about construction in the area’s wetlands.
On May 18, approximately 100 Grand Marais residents, nearly a tenth of the town, gathered for a community meeting about their new neighbors. In December, Jeffs secured a permit to build a 5,760-square-foot structure on 40 acres of local land. (Jeffs was unreachable for comment.)
“We wouldn’t be able to tell if anything is going on there,” one local worried during the meeting, according to KARE 11.
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