| In Warren Jeffs hearing, former teen bride describes arranged marriage | |
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By Harriet Ryan Court TV | |
ST. GEORGE, Utah — The woman at the center of the rape case against Warren Jeffs told a rapt courtroom Tuesday that she had never heard of sex and did not know where babies came from when the polygamist leader ordered her, at age 14, to marry and "go forth and multiply" with an older man who was her first cousin. Weeping and blotting her reddened face with a tissue, the woman, now 20, testified that her upbringing in Jeffs' Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was so sheltered that she gasped in confusion and horror when her new husband unzipped his pants. "What is that? Put it away," she recalled shouting at him soon after their April 2001 wedding. She said she was repulsed when the 19-year-old man, whom she had known her entire life, touched her. She said she fought off his advances for weeks until he forced her to have intercourse, saying, "This is what men and wives do." According to the witness, when she tearfully confided in a married sister, "she said, 'Do you know you are having sex with him?' And I said, 'What is sex?'" Her five-hour account was the centerpiece of the first day of a preliminary hearing to determine whether prosecutors in Washington County have enough evidence to try Jeffs, 50, the "prophet" or spiritual leader of the FLDS, on two counts of rape as an accomplice. District Court Judge James Shumate adjourned the hearing until Dec. 14, when prosecutors will call additional witnesses. In questioning the alleged victim and two of her sisters Tuesday, prosecutors focused on Jeffs' role in arranging the marriage and counseling the distraught teenager afterwards. They have not pursued rape charges against the husband, who was identified in court as Alan Steed. An arranged marriage The witness said that she talked to Jeffs twice before the ceremony, telling him both times that she felt too young to be a wife. She said he told her God had revealed to the prophet, a post then held by his ailing father Rulon but inherited by him the next year, that the two cousins were to be married and that to refuse the marriage was to reject God. She said that once she was married, she visited Jeffs five times, telling him that her husband was touching her private parts. She asked to be released from the marriage. "I never came out and said, 'We are having intercourse.' But he knew without a doubt what I was talking about," she said. The witness said Jeffs reminded her of the FLDS teaching that a woman's path to heaven was through her husband, and claimed he told her "to be obedient and submissive to" her husband. During one visit, he suggested she break off contact with her mother, who was her best friend, "and give your loyalty to your husband." Another time, he told her to have a baby because a child might make her fall in love with Steed. "He told me that I needed to go home and give myself mind, body and soul to Alan because he was my priestly head and he knew what was best for me," she recalled. She said that she tried to make the marriage work for nearly a year, but that the relationship deteriorated. The woman left the church in 2004 after becoming pregnant by another man. She is now married to that man and is expecting another child in two weeks. Jeffs, dressed in a gray suit, stared intently at the woman throughout her testimony. Women in the FLDS wear prairie dresses and pull their hair back in long braids, but the witness wore her blond hair long and dressed in pants and a white maternity blouse with black velvet trim. When she discussed being forced to have intercourse with her husband, she cried and warned the judge that it was very difficult to discuss such things. In the audience, about a dozen of Jeffs' supporters, all men, shifted uncomfortably in their seats or looked at the floor. Jeffs, however, never took his eyes off the witness. On cross-examination, Jeffs' lawyer implied that the woman was overstating how bad things were in her marriage, perhaps to advance a civil suit she has filed against Jeffs. Pointing to snapshots from the day of the wedding, defense lawyer Tara Isaacson said, "You have a bouquet of flowers and (Steed) has his arm around you?" "They had said, 'Smile and look happy,'" the woman replied. "So all this is completely fake?" the lawyer asked. "Yes," she answered. Isaacson suggested that the woman never directly told Jeffs she was being forced to have sex. "Isn't it true that all you said, at most, was something vague about body parts?" she asked. "I told Warren that he was touching me and doing things to me that I didn't like and I did not know was right," the witness said. Pressed by Isaacson, the witness acknowledged, "I didn't tell anyone 'I am being raped,' no." The lawyer produced love notes Steed wrote to the woman, including one in which he referred to her as "the love of my life." Isaacson noted that the witness had rebuffed his romantic overtures. "You didn't treat Alan very well, did you?" she asked. "I was 14!" the witness shouted back. 'We could have some problems' Some of the woman's account was corroborated by her older sister, Rebecca Musser, who lived in the FLDS town of Hildale at the time of the marriage and subsequently left the church. She recalled helping her mother sew a wedding dress for her teenage sister the night before her wedding. "We would try it on her, and she would just be crying so hard. My mother would say, 'Do you like this?' and she would just say, 'I don't care what it looks like,'" she testified. "When we tried to pin the lace on the dress, she was shaking so hard we couldn't. We had to wait for her to stop." Rulon Jeffs took Musser, 30, as one of his many wives when he was 83 and she 19. She said her position in the prophet's house allowed her to have many conversations with Jeffs, including one in which he encouraged her to counsel her sister to stay in the marriage. "If this falls apart, we could have some problems," she quoted him as saying. When she asked him what he meant, she said, he replied that "there was some recent laws passed that made the severity of the crime in Utah and Arizona and (the alleged victim's) marriage could cause problems because of these laws,"Musser said. Another sister, Teresa Blackmore, who also left the church, briefly testified Tuesday. She described how her sister miscarried Steed's baby the year after the marriage. Asked about her sister's emotional state at the time, Blackmore replied, "She was basically a body with no soul." At the next hearing, Shumate is expected to bind Jeffs over for trial on the two rape felonies. The standard of proof at a preliminary hearing is probable cause, or reasonable belief, which the judge noted Tuesday was a very low standard. Jeffs will remain in jail without bail until then. If convicted, he faces five years to life in prison. | |
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CourtTV.com Originally published November 22, 2006 | |
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