Politics & Power Quote by Jeanne Tripplehorn

Tripplehorn’s line lands with the bluntness of someone admitting how a cultural stereotype gets installed: not through deep knowledge, but through whatever the “news version” of a group happens to be. She starts with a civics-flavored observation - polygamy isn’t really prosecuted - then immediately pivots to the stuff that still triggers state force: welfare fraud, child abuse. The effect is a quiet confession about how legality and morality get braided together in the public imagination. If the law shrugs at the relationship structure, the story has to find another hook, and it usually grabs the ugliest one available.

The key subtext is her self-awareness about media-driven bias. “So that was all I’d really heard” is doing a lot of work: it frames her prior view as secondhand, incident-based, and shaped by headline logic. Most people don’t encounter polygamists in daily life; they meet them through sensational prosecutions, reality TV, and moral panic. When that’s the pipeline, “polygamist” becomes shorthand for “scam” or “abuse,” even when those are crimes adjacent to, not synonymous with, plural marriage.

As an actress, Tripplehorn is also signaling research-as-unlearning. The quote reads like a behind-the-scenes moment from preparing to portray a community often flattened into villains or victims. It’s less a defense of polygamy than a critique of how modern society decides which lifestyles are tolerated quietly and which get policed loudly - not always for what they are, but for what they can be made to represent.