Mormon YouTuber put on trial and excommunicated explains why he still follows rules on coffee and alcohol

A Mormon YouTuber says he was 'put on trial' after speaking out about allegations of child safeguarding issues and secret stockpiles of money. Despite being excommunicated in 2024, he still follows the church’s rules prohibiting coffee and alcohol.

Douglas Stilgoe - known as Nemo the Mormon online - was summoned before church leaders one month after speaking about his faith on LADbible’s Honesty Box.

He was accused of apostasy (abandoning his religion) and kicked out of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This means he's now banned from giving a eulogy at his parents’ funeral and speaking at family weddings. According to some interpretations of scripture, his excommunication condemns him to the Mormon version of hell, called outer darkness.

LADbible’s new documentary Nemo vs the Mormon Church: The Cost of Speaking Out follows Stilgoe as he fights to defend himself against what he calls the LDS church’s ‘Stasi-esque level of control’.

Yet, despite his brutally honest critiques of church leaders, he continues to follow Mormon rules prohibiting tea, coffee and alcohol.

Nemo was put on trial for speaking out against the church (LADbible Stories)

Speaking to LADbible, he said: “I'm still really Mormon in just so many ways. You could describe me as Mormon still, even though they've taken my membership away, in just so many parts of my life. I am still the same as I always was.”

In the doc, Stilgoe explains he was ‘very proud, very in your face’ about his faith as a child, but as he grew older, he became aware of what he alleges are troubling hypocrisies from church leaders.

It started with claims from a whistleblower in 2019 that the LDS church had secretly stockpiled $100 billion of its members’ money.

Mormons are expected to give 10 percent of their income to the church. According to the church’s website, the money is meant to be spent on church operations, alongside educational and missionary work and ‘welfare and humanitarian efforts’.

Stilgoe said: “I grew up in a household with a single mother who paid tithing very fastidiously. And so I saw the sacrifices she'd made to pay tithing. I looked at the sacrifice I'd made in my own life to pay tithing.

Allegations about tithe money started Nemo on a path of discovery (LADbible Stories)

“And then to see that the church had been amassing that money instead of using it for charitable purposes or anything like that really bothered me," he claimed. “I feel like it was my first understanding that the church could be dishonest and could not be fully transparent with its members.

“They distrust us so much to think that if we found out how wealthy they were, we would just stop obeying a commandment. That's kind of how I saw it at the time.”

It ultimately prompted Stilgoe to start his Nemo the Mormon YouTube channel in 2020, which now has almost 47,000 subscribers.

He says he learned more and more: from the age of founder Joseph Smith’s wives (the youngest was 14), to chilling claims about ‘worthiness interviews’ in which some bishops would allegedly ask children as young as 12 about masturbation and pornography.

While Stilgoe felt he had to speak out about these issues on his channel, he was also keen not to be forced out of the community he’d grown up in, describing excommunication as a ‘looming threat’.

Nemo still follows church rules on coffee and alcohol (LADbible Stories)

“I'd done my best to make sure that everything I said was factual and defensible and so if they did try and excommunicate me, I would always be able to say ‘Well, all I've done is tell the truth'."

Part of the reason for the tightrope walk of challenging the church, yet not going so far as to be excommunicated, was because, while he found his trust in church leaders challenged, he did not have doubts about his own personal Mormon faith.

“Many people describe what I went through as a faith crisis, and I don't know whether I would actually describe it that way.

“I would talk about it as a trust crisis. I lost my trust in the institution. I realised I couldn't trust this institution that I trusted implicitly because they couldn't keep the standards of honesty they had required of me as a member of the institution.

“So I lost my ability to trust them, and yeah, that's separate to personal faith.”

Since his excommunication, he’s ‘spent a lot of time outdoors, up mountains, just gaining a new perspective on things’.

He also suffered from a stroke in 2025, which meant he temporarily lost the ability to walk.

“I think between the excommunication and the stroke, my life has changed a lot and in many ways for the better.

"I think the values the church instilled in me are still there, particularly values around honesty and looking for the truth.

“It's just a shame [church leaders] weren't willing to live up to those values, I suppose.”

LADbible Group has contacted the LDS Church for comment.

Nemo vs the Mormon Church: The Cost of Speaking Out is available to watch on LADbible Stories YouTube now