The Globe and Mail, by John Doyle (Nov 15, 2002)

Leaving Bountiful is the true, disturbing and often terrifying story of Debbie Palmer. Bountiful is a community in British Columbia where members of a breakaway group from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints live and practise their orthodox Mormon belief in polygamy. Palmer was married at age 15 to a 57-year-old man and later married twice to older men, all of whom had multiple wives. When Palmer grasped that her third husband has sexual designs on her 13-year-old daughter, she filed a complaint with the RCMP, set fire to her house in Bountiful and fled with her children.

The program takes an unusual approach. It takes the viewer through Debbie Palmer’s life as she has lived it and through her self-propelled re-education. It isn’t lurid. It’s sympathetic to Palmer and her once-strong belief in her Church and its laws. Today, Palmer is at the center of a complex legal case, one that Palmer herself believes is about the “illegal cross-border trade in Canadian and American female children for sexual and breeding purposes.”