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, 51, 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, like his 15 followers in the courtroom, stood stoically as the verdict was read. Prosecutors said Jeffs forced the girl into marriage and sex against her will.
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 testified that Fundamentalist Church of Latter-day Saints girls receive no information about their bodies or reproduction. She said she didn’t even know sex was the means by which women had babies. For reasons prosecutors have never explained, Steed has not been charged with a crime.
The mainstream Mormon Church renounced polygamy more than a century ago.
