Published in 2024
11 hours and 44 minutes
Emily Benedek is a journalist and author who writes about the American West, land conflict, crime, and terrorism. She graduated from Harvard College. Her articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Vogue, The Dallas Morning News, Mosaic, Tablet, and on NPR, among others. Her first book, The Wind Won’t Know Me: A History of the Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute, was a finalist for the Robert F. Kennedy Book Prize. She is the author of Beyond the Four Corners of the World: A Navajo Woman’s Journey, and a memoir, Through the Unknown, Remembered Gate. She is also the author of Red Sea, a thriller about terrorism and counter-terrorism. She has two daughters and lives in New York City. Her new book is Hometown Betrayal: A Story of Secrecy and Sexual Abuse in Mormon Country.
What is this book about?
No one believed it could happen in their town. But it did.
Valarie Clark Miller seemed to have it all. Smart and beautiful with a wealthy, successful husband and growing family, Valarie appeared to be the picture-perfect Mormon wife. But it was all a façade. Inside, she was crumbling from the pressures of long-repressed memories of a childhood filled with sexual and physical abuse.
In Hometown Betrayal, author Emily Benedek brings you behind the closed doors of the remote Mormon community of Clarkston, Utah. With the help of hundreds of individual stories, she pieces together not only what happened to Valarie, but also the conditions and culture that allowed it. Hometown Betrayal culminates in an account of the Miller family’s fight to hold accountable the men—including the local cop—who abused Valarie and controlled the systems designed to look the other way.
