Utah woman recalls being raised in a cult after leaders started taking their blood

Amanda Grant (@amandaraegrant on TikTok), who was born and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, said she was part of a polygamous incestuous cult. When she found out church leaders were drawing blood from young church members, she realized she was in a cult.

“My dad has three wives. The first is my mom’s older sister, and the third wife is his own half sister,” Grant told TikTok. This setup alone would ring alarm bells for anyone. Polygamy may not be a norm, but that’s not the concerning bit—it’s that her father is married to his own half-sister.

Grant says she was in the cult for a total of 17 years. During her teens, she said she was social with a lot of the girls in the group. “It actually helped me put the pieces together,” she said. Her innate curiosity and sociability may have been what saved her from the cult.

“One night, I was talking to a group of girls, and the topic of blood testing came up,” Grant mentioned. “I started piecing it together… The common theme was girls from a certain age range were getting their blood taken out of them by a member of the church.”

Why was the cult taking members’ blood?

Grant said that the girls were given different reasons for the blood test. One of the leader’s daughters spoke up. Grant noted that the church leader had 27 wives—some of them his own half-sisters and nieces. This daughter was one of the hundreds of children he had.

“Yeah, they took my blood, but they were telling me it was to make sure that I didn’t get sick,” the girl said at the time.

Grant reacted to her recollection, “Girl? When has The Order ever cared if we were sick or not? As a matter of fact, when did they even care whether we lived or died?”

Suspiciously enough, Grant confirmed that the so-called church was averse to hospitals.

“The amount of times there were deaths of children, of women. They were preventable deaths that happened because they were so anti-hospitals is alarming,” Grant claimed. If true, it would make taking blood samples from members highly unusual.

After she dug deeper, Grant made a disturbing discovery.

“The reason they’re pulling blood out of these kids is to see which sibling can marry which sibling, which uncle can marry which niece with the least amount of deformities,” she said.

“I realized this as a teenager, and I was like, ‘You guys, they’re breeding us.'”

What “cult” was Grant referring to on TikTok?

She didn’t need to mention the blood sampling. The moment she mentioned that her father is married to a half-sister and that the church’s leader is married to several family members should’ve been a hint that the group is not a normal religious organization. It’s all by design, and her revelation that blood samples were being drawn from members proved that incest is a fixture of the cult.

These are just some of Grant’s many disturbing stories about ‘The Order,’ otherwise known as the Latter-day Church of Christ. Not to be confused with the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), this is a separate, offshoot Mormon group that also practices polygamy.

Grant is an outspoken critic of the cult and was also part of a documentary, Escaping Polygamy. Thankfully, she did escape before she was forced to marry her cousin—which is another story for another day.

(featured image: Amanda Rae Grant)

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