The Polygamy Paradox

It was hard to listen to Jane Doe IV describe her marriage without hearing the sounds of a terrible crime. She recalled on the witness stand the moment when her new husband began undressing her. She begged that he not touch her. “‘I can’t do this. Please don’t,'” she remembered saying. “I was sobbing. My whole entire body was shaking, and I was so scared … He just laid me onto the bed and had sex. It hurt,” she said. “And I felt evil.” Later, she went into the bathroom, swallowed the contents of a couple of bottles of over-the-counter pain pills and curled up on the floor. “I just wanted to die,” she said.

The man she had married was her first cousin. And she was 14 years old.

What makes the drama in the St. George, Utah, courtroom so confounding is that while this was a rape trial, the husband who allegedly assaulted Doe was a defense witness, not a defendant. And while the headlines referred to it as the POLYGAMY TRIAL, that was not the charge either, though attitudes about polygamy are clearly being put to the test. The defendant, Warren Jeffs, the 51-year-old prophet of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints (FLDS), was being tried as an accomplice to rape for commanding Doe to agree to an arranged marriage despite her resistance and instructing her to submit to her husband “mind, body and soul” if she was to have any hope of salvation.

So this was really a case about what happens when the state’s interest in protecting children runs up against a church’s right to practice its beliefs, however repugnant others may find them. Jeffs’ defense lawyers challenge the very notion that he should somehow be held responsible for what goes on in the privacy of a marriage simply because he arranged it. But state prosecutors have long looked for some way to penetrate the remote FLDS enclave, whose apostate refugees tell stories of exploitation of children as workers, of incest and of sexual abuse. Sitting in court amid the throngs of reporters and silent church members was Utah attorney general Mark Shurtleff, a Republican and a practicing Mormon, come to offer moral support to his team. He has called Jeffs “a religious tyrant, a demagogue” with an “absolute disregard for the laws of the nation, of the state.” But charges involving polygamy are notoriously hard to prove, especially in a sect so secluded, so protective and so intent on making its own rules about what constitutes a marriage.

The FLDS was born more than a century ago when the Mormon church divided over the issue of plural marriage. Church founder Joseph Smith offered polygamy as one of the “eternal principles” of Mormonism, teaching that men would be exalted in heaven by marrying multiple wives on earth. In 1890, after years of penalties, persecution and seizure of church property, a new divine revelation inspired church leaders to reject the practice–which, among other things, paved the way for Utah’s statehood. But traditionalist Mormons thought the church was selling out and established their own fundamentalist sects, which continued the practice even as the larger church condemned it.

The largest community, with some 8,000 members, settled in the twin towns of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz., just south of Zion National Park, along the Utah-Arizona border. It is typical for men to have three wives and about 30 children, though some have many more. Women wear their hair long and braided, their clothes modest. They will carry their iPods with them all day so they can listen to Jeffs’ sermons. “Sister wives” share household chores and raise multitudes of children as their husbands rotate among bedrooms. It’s virtually impossible for child-welfare officials to track levels of sexual abuse. When girls are ready to marry, they “turn themselves in” for the FLDS prophet to arrange a “celestial marriage.” The husband may already have other wives, but because these are religious rather than legal unions, they do not violate laws against bigamy.

Doe first encountered Jeffs not as the prophet but rather in his earlier days as a teacher and then principal at her private church school, the Alta Academy, in Salt Lake City. He had been a top student, something of a computer geek, who trained as an accountant and liked to sing and write songs. But he was a stern headmaster, canceling an annual snow-sculpture contest because it smacked of idolatry. Doe recalled his lessons about proper conduct. Girls and boys were to treat each other “as though they were snakes,” she said. “There was nothing permitted romantically.” Leaving the matchmaking up to the prophet “frees you completely from all the terrible mistakes girls can make,” Jeffs said. His motto: Perfect obedience produces perfect faith, which produces perfect people.

In 1998, warning of impending apocalypse, Jeffs closed the school and moved to the twin towns, where he quickly established himself as more strict and inclined to separatism than his father, the Prophet Rulon Jeffs, who died in 2002. Warren Jeffs, who inherited many of his father’s estimated 75 wives, inveighed against newspapers, television, the Internet. Beware of too much laughter, he told followers, which causes the spirit of God to leak from your body. He outlawed basketball games and television and holidays, and when a child was mauled by a Rottweiler, he ordered that all the dogs in town be rounded up and killed. Men who fell out of favor were excommunicated, their wives reassigned, their children told to shun them.

Among advocates of polygamy, Jeffs stood out because he tended to arrange marriages of young girls–inspiring more mainstream-minded pluralists of the Big Love school to charge that he was giving the practice a bad name. At the same time, prosecutors were looking for a way to address growing rumors of abuses within the sect, and they turned to newly strengthened child-abuse and sexual-predator laws. In 2005, Jeffs was indicted for sex crimes in Arizona and Utah and became a fugitive. A year later, he was on the FBI’s 10-most-wanted list until his arrest in August 2006 in Las Vegas. Police found $53,000 in cash as well as cell phones, wigs and laptops. When he appeared at preliminary hearings, he seemed even more gaunt than before. He was reported to have gone for days without food or water and knelt so long in prayer that he got ulcers on his knees.

The trial was set in St. George, about 40 miles (65 km) from the twin towns, where many of the 126,000 residents are descended from early Mormon settlers: this was Brigham Young’s winter home. The once homogenous redoubt, which welcomes travelers at the Seven Wives Inn, is now a magnet for developers and retirees. The second fastest-growing urban area in the country, it has seen home prices triple in the past five years. Its golf courses number 10, and Starbucks has arrived. Polygamy is tolerated by some residents, ignored by others. Locals say if you want a house built cheap, hire a polygamist, whose use of child labor and indifference to worker’s comp laws may help him underbid everyone else. Residents express some resentment about welfare abuse; many plural wives qualify for food stamps and public assistance because they are legally single mothers. It took several days of questioning to find an impartial jury, seven women and five men evenly divided between newcomers to town and old-timers.

Doe, now 21, recounted the tale of her life as a frightened teenager at a loss for how to escape. She had never even been kissed when she was told she was to marry her cousin. Horrified, she went to Rulon Jeffs and pleaded to be allowed to wait a few years or be given to a different man. Though “Uncle Rulon” seemed sympathetic, it was Warren Jeffs, she says, who informed her that “your heart is in the wrong place. This is what the prophet wants you to do.” Her sisters, including one who was among Rulon’s wives, also opposed the marriage but felt powerless to stop it for fear of being banished.

And so they all stayed up late, frantically stitching a wedding dress. One sister testified that Doe was sobbing so heavily, it was hard to fit the lace on the bodice. “I felt like I was getting ready for death,” Doe said. She said she hung her head and cried during the ceremony when Jeffs told her to say “I do,” and she had to be told to kiss her new husband. Jeffs then instructed the couple to “go forth and multiply and replenish the earth with good priesthood children,” she testified. She got home to find a new queen-size bed in her room, decorated by her family with chocolates and cookies arranged in the shape of a heart.

She says Jeffs rebuked her when she later pleaded to be released from the marriage. “I told him I was sorry I had failed so severely … He told me that I needed to repent, that I was not living up to my vows, I was not being obedient, I was not being submissive, and that was what my problem was,” she said. She stayed married for more than three years–ultimately sleeping in a truck to avoid her husband–before she left to marry another man, whose child she was already carrying.

When it was the defense’s turn to cross-examine, attorney Tara Isaacson probed for holes in the story. Was she motivated by the fact that she was looking for a settlement in a civil suit against Jeffs? Didn’t she tell police that she partially blamed her mother for her marriage? Why did she never tell anyone she was being raped? Why is she smiling in her honeymoon pictures? Didn’t she agree to have sex with her husband to get things she wanted, like money, visits to her family, other trips?

Doe explained about her confusion, embarrassment, her effort to hide what she was feeling. But the heart of the defense was whether Jeffs could have actually known that sex between them was nonconsensual. “What did Warren Jeffs have to do with what was going on in her bedroom?” Isaacson asked in her opening statement. “Did he even know she was being forced to have sex against her will?” The age of consent in Utah was 14, the lowest in the country. You may think that’s too young, Isaacson said to the jury, but that doesn’t make it illegal. Isaacson called as witnesses men and women who testified that while marriages might be arranged, no one forced women to do anything. Joanna Keate, 25, told the jury “Uncle Warren” had counseled her and her husband to share interests and “hold hands” as a first step. Jeffs instructed couples that a man should have sex with his wife only if she invites it, the defense argued, so how can Jeffs be accused of being an accomplice to rape? “Pressure to marry,” Isaacson argued, “is different from pressure to submit to rape.”

Someone who holds down a woman while another man assaults her could be charged as an accomplice. But in this case, the state has to prove that Jeffs coerced the victim into having sex without her consent. “It’s basically an ill-fitting suit for the facts of the case,” argues Daniel Medwed, a professor of criminal law at the University of Utah College of Law. “It can be draped over the facts, but it doesn’t fit snugly. There’s wiggle room for the defense.”

Some St. George residents following the case, while having no use for Jeffs, see a complicated principle hanging in the balance. “I’m not saying polygamists are right or wrong, but what they are doing is part of their culture, their religion,” argues Randy Shaw, owner of the Little Professor bookstore in town. “I don’t think a 14-year-old should be married to her cousin, but you have to look at their culture and the fact that we have allowed it to go on for hundreds of years. With this trial, we are mixing government with religion. My question is, Why all of a sudden now? It’s been going on forever here.”

Whatever the outcome in this case, Jeffs faces multiple indictments in Arizona and possible federal charges for unlawful flight. But he has been planning for the next stage of his ministry for some time now. Already FLDS true believers have been relocating to other retreats, including a huge tract in Eldorado, Texas, where they have erected a large temple, far from any outside interference.