ST. GEORGE, Utah — The leader of a polygamous Mormon splinter group was convicted Tuesday of being an accomplice to rape for performing a wedding between a 19-year-old man and a 14-year-old girl.
Warren Jeffs, leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, blinked when the verdicts were read, but showed no emotion. None of his followers in the courtroom reacted.
Jeffs could get life in prison after a trial that threw a spotlight on a renegade community along the Arizona-Utah line where as many as 10,000 of Jeffs’ followers practice plural marriage and revere him as a mighty prophet with dominion over their salvation.
Jeffs succeeded his father in 2002 as president of the FLDS. Former members say he rules with an iron fist, demanding perfect obedience from followers and exercising the right to arrange marriages as well as break them up and assign new spouses.
The 51-year-old was convicted of two counts of being an accomplice to rape related to a marriage he conducted in 2001 between Elissa Wall, who was 14, and Allen Steed, 19.
The first rape count occurred between April 23, 2001 — the day Jeffs conducted Wall’s marriage — and May 12, 2001, when she and Steed took a trip to Canada to visit her sisters.
The second count occurred between May 13, 2001, and Sept. 30, 2003.
Jeffs waived the 45-day deadline for sentencing, and no sentencing date was set.
While polygamy itself was not on trial — the couple were monogamous — the case focused attention on the practice of polygamy in Utah, where it has generally been tolerated in the half-century since a government raid in 1953 proved a public relations disaster, with children photographed being torn from their mothers’ arms.
The mainstream Mormon Church, or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, renounced polygamy more than a century ago, excommunicates members who engage in the practice, and disavows any connection to the FLDS church.
Elaine Tyler of the Hope Organization, a group that opposes forced marriages in polygamist communities, said she hopes the verdict will prevent young women from being told to marry against their wishes.
“It represents, hopefully, a change in that polygamist community,” she said.
At the trial, widely different versions of the relationship — and Jeffs’ influence — were presented by the woman, now 21, and her former husband, Allen Steed, 26.
At their wedding in 2001 at a Nevada motel, the woman said, she cried in despair when pressed by Jeffs to say “I do” and had to be coaxed to kiss her new husband. The woman said the couple were married for at least a month before they had intercourse, her husband telling her it was “time for you to be a wife and do your duty.”
“My entire body was shaking. I was so scared,” she testified. “He just laid me on the bed and had sex.”
Afterward, she slipped into the bathroom, where she downed two bottles of over-the-counter pain reliever and curled up on the floor, she said. “The only thing I wanted to do was die,” she said.
But Steed testified that his teenage bride initiated their first sexual encounter, approaching him after he fell asleep.
For reasons prosecutors have never explained, Steed has not been charged with a crime.
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