Polygamy is also illegal, and in recent weeks law enforcement has turned up the heat on the FLDS.
On Friday, Jeffs was indicted in Arizona on charges that he had arranged a marriage between a 28-year-old man, who was already married, and a 16-year-old girl.
He faces two years in prison if convicted, though he hasn't been arrested and is thought to be in Texas.
A few days earlier, a Utah judge froze the assets of the United Effort Plan, an FLDS trust that owns most of the homes and land in the polygamous towns. And on May 24, the records of the financially troubled Colorado City Unified School District were seized to prevent any evidence of potential wrongdoing from being spirited away, according to the Arizona attorney general's office.
At the same time, Jeffs is being sued by five of the Lost Boys, who claim he conspired to banish them so church elders would have less competition for wives.
Jeffs has not responded to the lawsuit, filed in Utah's 3rd District Court, leaving him open to a default judgment from the bench.
"There is a virtual Taliban down there. You tell people this stuff happens and they don't believe it," said Dan Fischer, a former FLDS member and dentist living outside Salt Lake City who helps educate and house the exiled teens. The exodus "has been far more dramatic in the last year."
FLDS officials rarely speak to the media. But church lawyer Rodney Parker, who isn't a member of the faith, said some of the ousted boys were delinquents or proved unable to live up to the community's strict moral code.
"I think many are minimizing their own behavior," he said. "These places are very different and very strange. But broad-stroke claims about what goes on down there are exaggerations -- and often fiction."
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About half a dozen boys who spoke recently say it's all too real.
Tom Sam Steed said he was put on "religious probation" at 15 for sneaking off to see the film "Charlie's Angels." Shortly after, he said he was ejected from the FLDS, living temporarily in a tool shed. When he begged to return to the church, he said he was refused.
"I was really into the religion. I would have been the first to drink the poison Kool-Aid," said Steed, now 19. "I felt [the faith] was the only way to go to heaven."
He said he made a personal plea to Jeffs, meeting him in a Colorado City print shop.
