CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- Technically, Kathy Jo Nicholson's first wedding dress still fits, but in many ways it doesn't fit at all and never did.

She was 14 when she started sewing it herself.

"I knew I would be a multiple wife. I didn't know who my husband would be, if he would be a young man or an old man," she said.

Nicholson grew up in polygamist communities in Utah and Arizona. She left at age 18 and now lives in south Charlotte. She’s speaking out to bring attention to the young women taken from the polygamist compound in Texas.

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LINK: Nicholson's Web Site

RAW VIDEO: Nicholson Describes Her Childhood

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“It's been generation upon generation of abuse and neglect and imprisonment,” she said. “You really do live in fear. They strip you of everything.”

"And so you had three moms?" asked Eyewitness News anchor Kim Brattain.

"Three moms," she said.

“Your mom felt pain when your dad took another wife?” Brattain asked.

“The first mother was crushed when my mother came. When the third mother came, of course my mother was crushed because she was his princess. She was beautiful,” Nicholson said.

Nicholson said she knows she has at least 13 siblings, and maybe more. Many still live the polygamist life. In fact, her oldest sister Joanne and her younger sister Barbara Jean married the same man.

But Nicholson began to question that lifestyle when she was a teen.

Nicholson attended the school of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. It was run by Warren Jeffs, the leader of the controversial church, who is now in prison for two counts of rape as an accomplice. Jeffs had Nicholson expelled.

“I had a bad attitude,” she said. “I did interact with the opposite gender, nothing of substance, no handholding even, just talking and passing some notes.”

Nicholson was sent to work for a church-operated factory and met a young man also disillusioned with the church. They married, and while it didn't last, it did seal her exit from the church.

“I was afraid someone was going to hunt me down because that has been known to happen, where fathers will drag their girls back,” she said.

That didn't happen. In fact, her father and mother were there nearly seven years ago when she married again.

“(It) was the very best day of my entire life,” she said. “My mom begged to be able to come to the wedding, so they packed up the van and all came out to the wedding, which was wonderful, and my father did walk me down the aisle.”

She credits her husband, Bryan, with helping her sort through her past. He said he credits her with bravery and an incredibly strong will.

"I commend her, you know. She's a survivor, getting through that and fighting and getting the help and the therapy she needed, and really standing up and thinking for herself," he said.