Sally Denton

Acclaimed author Sally Denton brings to life every dimension of the extraordinary Helen Gahagan Douglas in The Pink Lady, a compelling account of Douglas's incomparable life as stage star, politician, and public intellectual. A three-term congresswoman who ran for the U. S. Senate against Richard Nixon just thirty years after women gained the right to vote, Douglas was also a Broadway star, opera prima donna, friend of FDR, lover of LBJ, and passionate New Dealer. Tagged "The Pink Lady" during a brutal 1950 Senate campaign waged by Nixon and brought down by the same McCarthyist anti-Red hysteria that was sweeping Hollywood, Douglas is restored through Denton's rich narrative to her rightful place as a pioneer in American politics and torchbearer for progressive ideals.

On the morning of 4 November 2019, an unassuming caravan of women and children was ambushed by masked gunmen on a desolate stretch of road in northern Mexico controlled by the Sinaloa drug cartel. Firing semi-automatic weapons, the attackers killed nine people and gravely injured five more. The victims were members of the LeBaron and La Mora communities—fundamentalist Mormons whose forebears broke from the LDS Church and settled in Mexico when their religion outlawed polygamy in the late nineteenth century. The massacre produced international headlines for weeks and prompted President Donald Trump to threaten to send in the US Army. In The Colony, bestselling investigative journalist Sally Denton picks up where the initial, incomplete reporting on the attacks ended, and delves into the complex story of the LeBaron clan. Their homestead—Colonia LeBaron—is a portal into the past, a place that offers a glimpse of life within a polygamous community on an arid and dangerous frontier in the mid-1800s, though with smartphones and machine guns. Rooting her narrative in written sources as well as interviews with anonymous women from LeBaron itself, Denton unfolds an epic, disturbing tale that spans the first polygamist emigrations to Mexico through the LeBarons’ internal blood feud in the 1970s—started by Ervil LeBaron, known as the “Mormon Manson”—and up to the family’s recent alliance with the NXIVM sex cult, whose now-imprisoned leader, Keith Raniere, may have based his practices on the society he witnessed in Colonia LeBaron. The LeBarons’ tense but peaceful interactions with Sinaloa deteriorated in the years leading up to the ambush. LeBaron patriarchs believed they were deliberately targeted by the cartel. Others suspected that local farmers had carried out the attacks in response to the LeBarons’ seizure of water rights for their massive pecan orchards. As Denton approaches answers to who committed the murders, and why, The Colony transforms into something more than a crime story. A descendant of polygamist Mormons herself, Denton explores what drove so many women over generations to join or remain in a community based on male supremacy and female servitude. Then and now, these women of Zion found themselves in an isolated desert, navigating the often-mysterious complications of plural marriage—and supported, Denton shows, only by one another. A mesmerising feat of investigative journalism, The Colony doubles as an unforgettable account of sisterhood that can flourish in polygamist communities, against the odds.

La historia al interior del clan: cr menes, pactos de sangre y fe en la tierra prometida. El 4 de noviembre de 2019 un grupo de hombres armados abri fuego contra tres veh culos en los que viajaba la familia LeBar n. Murieron tres mujeres y seis de sus hijos, apenas ni os, mientras que otros cinco resultaron heridos. Las v ctimas pertenec an a la comunidad mormona que se instal en el norte de M xico cuando en su pa s, Estados Unidos, se prohibi la poligamia. La masacre atrajo a la prensa internacional y Trump amenaz con enviar tropas a la frontera mexicana. Qu pas esa fat dica ma ana? A partir de diversas fuentes y entrevistas con mujeres an nimas del clan LeBar n, la periodista estadounidense Sally Denton viaja dos siglos atr s para entender una historia de traici n y asesinatos, interpretaciones mesi nicas de la Biblia, relaciones pol gamas, tr fico sexual, confrontaciones por el agua y disputa del territorio entre c rteles del narcotr fico. Los patriarcas de LeBar n cre an que el c rtel los hab a atacado, mientras que otros sospechaban de los agricultores con quienes existe una lucha por el agua acaparada por los LeBar n para sus enormes huertos de nuez. A medida que Denton se acerca a las respuestas sobre qui n cometi los asesinatos y por qu , La Colonia LeBar n revela una red de lazos de sangre unidos por la corrupci n en M xico y Estados Unidos. Un libro que deja al descubierto uno de los hechos m s cruentos de la historia reciente de M xico.

A harmless, unassuming caravan of women and children was ambushed by masked gunmen in northern Mexico on 4 November 2019. In a massacre that produced international headlines, nine people were killed and five others gravely injured. The victims were members of the La Mora and LeBarón communities—fundamentalist Mormons whose forebears broke from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and settled in Mexico when polygamy was outlawed. In The Colony, the best-selling investigative journalist Sally Denton picks up where initial reporting on the killings left off, and in the process tells the violent history of the LeBarón clan and their homestead, from the first polygamist emigration to Mexico in the 1880s to the LeBaróns’ internal blood feud in the 1970s to the family’s recent alliance with the NXIVM sex cult. Drawing on sources within Colonia LeBarón itself, Denton creates a mesmerising work of investigative journalism in the tradition of Under the Banner of Heaven and Going Clear.

In the 1850s, Jean Rio, a deeply spiritual widow, was moved by the promises of Mormon missionaries and set out from England for Utah. Traveling across the Atlantic by steamer, up the Mississippi by riverboat, and westward by wagon, Rio kept a detailed diary of her extraordinary journey. In Faith and Betrayal, Sally Denton, an award-winning journalist and Rio's great-great-granddaughter, uses the long-lost diary to re-create Rio's experience. While she marvels at the great natural beauty of Utah, Rio's enthusiasm for her new life turns to disillusionment over Mormon polygamy and violence against nonbelievers, as well as the harshness of frontier life. She sets out for California, where she finds a new religion and the freedom she longed for. Unusually intimate and full of vivid detail, this is an absorbing story of a quintessential American pioneer.

In September 1857, a wagon train passing through Utah laden with gold was attacked. Approximately 140 people were slaughtered; only 17 children under the age of eight were spared. This incident in an open field called Mountain Meadows has ever since been the focus of passionate debate: Is it possible that official Mormon dignitaries were responsible for the massacre? In her riveting book, Sally Denton makes a fiercely convincing argument that they were. The author-herself of Mormon descent-first traces the extraordinary emergence of the Mormons and the little-known nineteenth-century intrigues and tensions between their leaders and the U. S. government, fueled by the Mormons' zealotry and exclusionary practices. We see how by 1857 they were unique as a religious group in ruling an entire American territory, Utah, and commanding their own exclusive government and army. Denton makes clear that in the immediate aftermath of the massacre, the church began placing the blame on a discredited Mormon, John D. Lee, and on various Native Americans. She cites contemporaneous records and newly discovered documents to support her argument that, in fact, the Mormon leader, Brigham Young, bore significant responsibility-that Young, impelled by the church's financial crises, facing increasingly intense scrutiny and condemnation by the federal government, incited the crime by both word and deed. Finally, Denton explains how the rapidly expanding and enormously rich Mormon church of today still struggles to absolve itself of responsibility for what may well be an act of religious fanaticism unparalleled in the annals of American history. American Massacre is totally absorbing in its narrative as it brings to life a tragic moment in our history.

Las Vegas--the name evokes images of divorce and dice, gangsters and glitz. But beneath it all is a sordid history that is much more insidious and far-reaching than ever imagined. The Money and the Power is the most comprehensive look yet at Las Vegas and its breadth of influence. Based on five years of intensive research and interviewing, Sally Denton and Roger Morris reveal the city's historic network of links to Wall Street, international drug traffickers, and the CIA. In doing so, they expose the disturbing connections amongst politicians, businessmen, and the criminals that harness these illegal activities. Through this lucid and gripping indictment of Las Vegas, Morris and Denton uncover a national ethic of exploitation, violence, and greed, and provide a provocative reinterpretation of twentieth-century American history. Now this neon maelstrom of ruthlessness and greed stands to not as an aberrant "sin city," but as a natural outgrowth of the corruption and worship of money that have come to permeate American life.