A mom in Utah is accused of taking her 5-year-old daughter to a cult that promotes Bitcoin as a way to get rid of an overbearing government and keeping her there for over a year while she was going through a divorce.
According to court documents from Utah, Kimberly Dell Davidson-Drolet planned for 14 months to take her daughter from her home in Utah and bring her to a cult “compound” in Missouri run by Paul Dean on January 23, 2023.
According to an opinion piece in the Springfield Daily Citizen, Dean is a white Christian who started two Native American churches in the Show Me State and called himself “Man Found Standing.” He is 54 years old.
The feds did not say that Dean did anything wrong in this case.
Court papers made public last week show that Davidson-Drolet, 53, and her daughter went missing in January 2023. At that time, she and her husband Laurence Drolet were in the middle of a divorce and custody case. Files say the mom sold her car, took all the money out of her bank account, and left her cell phone at her home in Utah so that she could not be found until June 27.
The mom put her things in boxes and duffle bags and put them in her cousin Jaxson Davidson’s truck the day her daughter was taken. According to the documents, Davidson then drove Davidson-Drolet and the girl to stay in a house that was given to them by a Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints “type cult.”
The girl’s name wasn’t given in court records, but the Daily Mail said her name was Gracyn Drolet.
The court papers say that Davidson-Drolet broke her custody agreement with Laurence and a court order by taking the daughter out of state without approval.
The mother stayed away from the police for more than a year by only using pre-paid burner phones, which she regularly switched out. She sent letters to her other children through her sister Kristine Merrill and got help and housing through the cult, according to court papers.
The mom made the girl have a different name, too, the court papers said. A GoFundMe page set up to help find the girl said that her name could be Peppa.
Police had been looking for the girl since February 2, 2023, and Davidson-Drolet had an arrest warrant out for her on December 20, 2023.
The mother told her cousin Dallas Davidson (who would send Davidson-Drolet new phone cards) through text messages that she felt safe in Missouri because “they don’t participate in extradition.”
The charge sheet said she also told Dallas that she and Paul Dean had been talking about plans to run away to Thailand.
Davidson-Drolet, her sister Merrill, and her cousins Jaxson and Dallas are all charged with kidnapping and plotting to do it.
Official papers say that federal officials want Davidson-Drolet to be jailed because she is a danger to her daughter and has shown that she can’t be trusted not to run away.
“The defendant did everything possible to avoid being caught and made a complex plan to use different family members to get the child out of Utah,” the arrest papers said.
The government also said in papers that she “holds Sovereign Citizen beliefs that suggest the federal and state courts have no jurisdiction over them.”
A story from Law & Crime says Dean said in a podcast in 2017 that he thinks bitcoin is the answer to the federal government “robbing us, stealing our value from us… through inflation.” This is because bitcoin “isn’t controlled by governments.”
“No reasonable condition that could be placed on her to ensure that she would appear in the district of Utah,” the jail papers said. “She is a threat to the victim child because she has proven that she puts her needs above the child’s needs.”
The papers from the court say that Davidson-Drolet no longer has control of her children. It wasn’t clear where Gracyn was right away.
Law & Crime reported that Dean started two churches, the New Haven Native American Church and the Spirit of Truth Native American Church. In an “introductory video” on the YouTube page “Man Found Standing,” he said that he is a “natural practitioner and principal medicine chief of the New Haven Native American Church.”
The Daily Citizen article said that he talks about the psychedelic drug peyote being used as a sacrament and sweat caves as places to heal.
At first, it wasn’t clear who the lawyers were for the four people on trial.
