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Our grassroots advocacy campaign has a simple goal - to empower retail investors to represent themselves while advocating for market structure reforms. She needed to be all of that and more in order to be heard.Īnd, in the end, Palmer proved Margaret Mead’s contention that it is the few caring people who change the world.Since the launch of We The Investors in March, 2022, we have had over 100,000 retail investors sign up to support our various efforts to advocate for five basic principles in market reform: transparency, simplicity and fairness, choice and control, best execution and better settlement and clearing. To anyone exposed to her unrelenting anger and what was, at the time, her seemingly incredible tales of abuse, Palmer could be exhausting and, at times, exasperating. The admonition to women and girls to Keep Sweet might have remained, spelled out in white stone on the mountainside above the government-funded school. Yet without her pioneering efforts, two former fundamentalist Mormon bishops - her stepbrother James Oler, and Winston Blackmore, her brother-in-law and stepson - might never have been convicted of polygamy, and Oler and Brandon Blackmore (another of Palmer’s stepsons) and his wife, Gail Blackmore, might never have been jailed for illegally taking their under-aged daughters to the United States for coerced marriages. With a growing number of people leaving the FLDS, the spotlight had shifted and Palmer retreated into private life - not even emerging for B.C.’s subsequent constitutional reference case or later trials. Palmer’s self-published and thinly disguised autobiography titled Keep Sweet: Children of Polygamy was briefly a Canadian bestseller in 2006, even though it was not readily available in Creston - the town nearest to Bountiful.īut by then, Palmer’s information was mostly historic.

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Jane is reserved, cautious and uncomfortable with the activist role that has frequently been forced upon her as a witness subpoenaed to testify against her ex-husband, her stepbrother and others.Īt that time, both were enmeshed in a series of other events that were unfolding - a schism between two factions in Bountiful, the manhunt for Warren Jeffs, the prophet of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and Utah’s and Arizona’s successful seizure of FLDS assets that were to be used to compensate polygamy’s victims, including the so-called Lost Boys forced out of their communities to make polygamy’s cruel arithmetic add up in favour of old men. Debbie was a passionate, emotional firebrand. The midwife and ex-wife of the once powerful bishop Winston Blackmore couldn’t have been more different. In 2004, Palmer’s sister Jane Blackmore also fled Bountiful. Over the years, Palmer became friends with Jon Krakauer, whose 2003 book, Under the Banner of Heaven, focused international attention on the fundamentalist Mormons. “I used to go home and not be able to sleep because I kept thinking, ‘How can this be happening here. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. “I met with every goddamned minister and everybody I could to talk about what was going on in there,” she told me in 2007. Rancher Faye Street had been on the committee that helped put the report together. It was so explosive that the government refused to release it.

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It questioned whether children raised there could ever be capable of exercising free choice, including giving informed consent to sex and marriage. The Life in Bountiful report revealed a pattern of forced marriages, rigid demands of obedience, and a “distinct culture … that limits individual rights to the point of virtually eliminating them.” (Ian Smith/Vancouver Sun) Photo by Ian Smith / Vancouver Sunĭisappointed, but not daunted, Palmer convinced then-women’s equality minister Penny Priddy to fund a report about polygamy and the physical and sexual abuse of women in “a religious community in B.C.” Article content Debbie Palmer, a former plural wife from Bountiful, in 2004.

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