TikTok star Nicole Mafi opens up about escaping polygamous cult

A popular TikTok star has racked up thousands of views online talking about her experiences escaping a polygamist cult as a child.

Nicole Mafi is the daughter of Paul Kingston, head of the infamous polygamous cult known as The Order, or the Kingston Group, an offshoot of the mainstream Mormon church based in Salt Lake City, Utah.

“I grew up in a polygamous cult in Utah,” she says in one TikTok video.

“My dad had 27 wives, don’t know how many kids. My mum was wife number five and she had 11 of her own kids, and I’m the oldest.”

In another video, Mafi estimates that her father has “between 200 and 300 kids”.

“I don’t know exactly the number,” she says.

“When I counted when I left 10 years ago it was about 200, and he’s had quite a few more in the last 10 years. Like I said, I left about 10 years ago, I got married, I started a family. I lived in Utah for most of my adulthood and recently moved out to Missouri to start my own life and do my own thing.”

She also reveals that she doesn’t have a relationship with her father and “I never really did when I was in the cult”.

“And I probably did more than a lot of his kids just because I am one of the older ones and I was around when the family was a lot smaller,” she said. “I left about 11, 12 years ago and I’ve probably seen him twice.”

Mafi, who has more than 76,000 followers on TikTok, has been speaking out about her experiences in the group for the past four years.

She self-published a book in 2018, The Leader’s Daughter, revealing her “first-hand account of being born in this famous cult, and the traumas that plagued her childhood”.

Mafi escaped at the age of 17 to avoid an arranged marriage to her first cousin.

Writing in a popular Ask Me Anything thread on Reddit in 2018, she said she first began to question her family environment after sneaking out to take martial arts classes.

“My sensei would listen to my crazy ideas and then debate with me about them,” she wrote.

“He would research my questions and help me see things from an outside perspective. The more I questioned my belief system, the more I realized the religion was abusive and wrong.”

She revealed that she had suffered sexual abuse as a child in the cult, starting at the age of six. The last straw came when she was 16.

“My dad sat me down on my 16th birthday and told me I had to get married,” she said. “I knew I was leaving about that point even if I couldn’t admit it to anyone yet.”

Describing her eventual escape, she wrote, “One night, when I was 17, I packed my photo album, journals, and some clothes in the back of my car and I disappeared. I was homeless for a month, before I found a friend who allowed me to stay with him.”

But after contacting her family, “they brainwashed me into coming back”.

“When I was 18, I left again,” she said. “I stayed with a boyfriend’s parents while I waited tables and struggled through college.”

The Kingston Group, formally known as the Latter Day Church of Christ or the Davis County Cooperative Society, was founded by Elden Kingston in the 1930s.

The powerful cult has thousands of members and controls a fortune worth an estimated $US300 million, according to a Rolling Stone report in 2011, with a sprawling empire of businesses and landholdings.

Estimates of the group’s size vary but author Andrea Moore-Emmett put the number at 3500 in her 2004 book God’s Brothel about Mormon fundamentalism.

People who have left The Order claim the cult “exploits its members as virtual slave labor and hides profits from tax collectors,” Rolling Stone’s report said.

“Children born into the clan make up much of the labor force,” the outlet wrote.

“Girls, many of them teen brides, answer phones at The Order’s law office, bag groceries at its supermarket or tend to the clan’s many children. Boys work its coal mine and stack boxes at Standard Restaurant Supply, a massive discount store. They are paid not in cash but in scrip, an arcane form of credit used by the Mormon pioneers that can only be redeemed at company stores.”

Several members of the group have faced charges for incest in the past, but officially The Order says it does not condone underage marriage.

“The DCCS has been speaking out publicly against fraud and abuse for decades,” it says on its website.

“We re-affirm to our members that this type of behavior goes completely against our beliefs and principles and we cannot support anyone found to be engaged in this type of behavior. Any individual who is engaged in or becomes aware of any unlawful activity are encouraged to promptly correct any impropriety.”

According to the Associated Press there are an estimated 30,000 people living in Utah’s roughly 11 polygamous communities or religious groups, whose adherents believe plural marriage brings exaltation in heaven — a legacy of the early Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The mainstream Mormon church abandoned the practice in 1890 but it lived on in numerous splinter groups, despite plural marriage being a felony in the state for the better part of a century.

In 2020, the Utah legislature passed a law decriminalizing polygamy, reducing it from a third-degree felony to an infraction on par with a speeding ticket.

“Bigamy had been a felony in Utah since 1935 and it clearly didn’t do what the law, I think, or the people who put that law intended it for it do,” Lt. Governor Deidre Henderson told the AP.

“It didn’t stop people from engaging in polygamy. It ended up driving people underground, created a wall of secrecy surrounding some communities.”

Popular interest in the topic has been fuelled by the reality TV series Sister Wives and more recently the Netflix documentary Keep Sweet, which looks into another Mormon polygamist cult, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), and the widespread underage sexual abuse of its members.

Warren Jeffs, the president of the FLDS, is currently serving a life sentence after being convicted of child sexual assault in 2011.

Mafi has watching the Netflix show and sharing her thoughts with her TikTok followers.

Commenting on Jeffs’ claim to members that “if you’re questioning me you’re questioning God”, Mafi said that was a big part of the Mormon religion.

“This is where they keep a lot of control,” she said.

“So you’re not allowed to question – if your prophet tells you to do something, you do it. This is how the marriages are arranged and everybody puts up with it, this is how daughters are sold, this is how people lose their homes, their businesses, because they’re not allowed to question if the prophet tells them to do something.”