After Exposing The FLDS Church, Mike Watkiss Retired From Journalism
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The new documentary “Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey,” which explores an underground cult headed by convicted child rapist Warren Jeffs, is topping charts on Netflix.
Now, the living conditions and bizarre rules applied to members Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints—once only legend to locals and church members—are out in the open for all to examine.
And beyond the documentary producers, and the excommunicated church members who brought us here, there is one passionate, hard-charging journalist you can thank for that: former newsman Mike Watkiss.
Who is Mike Watkiss?
Mike Watkiss is a retired television journalist who spent 40 years staking out stars like Liz Taylor, O.J. Simpson, and Michael Jackson, according to a recent profile of Watkiss from Pheonix Mag. He was the LA bureau chief of A Current Affair, a popular tabloid television program.
He is an award-winning journalist.
While Mike Watkiss covered his fair share of sensationalized celebrity news, he is an extremely well-respected investigative reporter for the work he put into investigations of the FLDS. While an investigative reporter at KTVK he won awards for his gripping exposé of Warren Jeffs and the FLDS.
Mike recently published a memoir.
In a new memoir that I will absolutely be picking up, Mike Watkiss guides readers through decades of a breakneck news schedule.
“I’m the luckiest guy in the world in that I found a job that panders to all of my worst instincts,” he told the magazine.
The memoir, which Watkiss began work on upon retiring in July 2018, according to AZ Central, is available on Amazon now. It’s called "Story Hustler": Murder-Mayhem-PTSD.
"It's kind of the stories behind the stories: How I got into a jail cell with the Night Stalker, ambushing Elizabeth Taylor on an airplane, things like that," he told the newspaper in 2018 when he was about half-finished writing the book. "Honestly, I feel like the luckiest guy in the world. I'm just a hyperactive kid, sort of a storyteller, and I've serendipitously been in the right place at the right time. Or wrong time: I was there the morning they found Ron Goldman and Nicole Simpson's bodies."
What’s he doing now?
Mike Watkiss has been bitten by the acting bug! The TV newsman always had a penchant for acting—he played himself in Dumb and Dumber.
But more recently, he worked on a few independently produced films that are part of The Dark Side of Opulent trilogy, which is about an Arizona town run by the Russian mob. Watkiss plays the “token Italian gangster,” he told Pheonix magazine. He has also appeared recently in two other low-budget productions called The Day of the White Lotus, and Some Nudity Required.
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