A man who has 150 siblings has explained exactly what it was like growing up in a 'cult'.
Warren Blackmore, from Canada, is the son of the country's 'most famous polygamist', Winston Blackmore, in Bountiful, British Columbia.
Advert
The Bountiful group was founded by Winston's father Ray Blackmore and was linked to the Fundamentalist Church of the Latter-Day Saints, a Mormon fundamentalist denomination.
However, in 2002, the FLDS Church president Warren Jeffs ex-communicated the Blackmore family after he took over the church from his father.
Now, Warren, 21, and his half-brother Murray, 19, and full-brother Merlin, also 19, who have all left Bountiful, have opened up about the bizarre life they experienced in a family of 27 mothers and over 100 children.
In a video posted to TikTok, Warren said: "Me and Merlin are full brothers and actually best friends. And then Murray we grew up in the exact same house and did everything together, our moms are sisters.
"Instead of hating each other like a lot of siblings do, we build each other up and we let each other know we could do whatever we put our minds too.
Advert
"This is pretty wild, but my father had 27 wives at one point. There were six different groups of sisters.
"There was two groups of three different sisters and there was four groups of four different sisters from another family."
Speaking about his time at school, Warren said he had 19 children in his class, all of who were born in 1999.
He said: "I had five brothers, four sisters, seven cousins and two nephews in my class. I went to school with my nephews, we were the same age."
Advert
Merlin, who now lives in the US, talked about how he left the community and decided to speak about it openly.
He says he is a 'triplet' as he has a half-brother and a half-sister born on the same day but to different mothers.
And despite what people might think, he said it was 'pretty normal' to have so many siblings - even at birthday parties.
Advert
Merlin said: "It wasn't like 150 people show up to every person's birthday party. It was more as your closest friends and the kids that closest to you in age.
"It was mainly your biological siblings that came and got your birthday presents and your closest friends.
"Sometimes if there were a whole bunch of birthdays close together we would celebrate them as one big birthday party, but that didn't happen very often.
"For the most part, each kid would celebrate his birthday as any kid around the world would."
Advert
Discussing the split in the church, which saw their family cast aside, Murray said it fostered a 'cult-like mentality'.
He said: "When Warren Jeffs became the prophet, my family was kicked off to the side.
"Because how intermingled everything was, all at once people so many people lost all connection to their families.
"And so they started holding a tight grip to the ones they had left, trying to deal with all this trauma from that religion, my family tried to project that back onto themselves, instilling the same fear they encountered onto the future generations.
"So if you grew up in this family and weren't part of the religion, people would openly judge and criticise you in a cult-like mentality.
"Basically s*** is changing, and we're moving from more of a cult into a family."
In 2018, Winston Blackmore was sentenced to six months house arrest on polygamy charges.
Featured Image Credit: TikTok