'Sect leader made me marry at 14': US citizen
A US woman sobbed on the witness stand as she described the terror and despair she felt on the eve of her wedding in a religious sect when she was just 14-years-old.
“I kept thinking I felt like I was getting ready for death,” she testified last night, on the second day of the Utah trial of Warren Jeffs, polygamous leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
Jeffs is charged with two counts of rape as an accomplice. Prosecutors say he used his religious authority to coerce the ceremonial marriage and pressure the teenage bride to have sex with her 19-year-old cousin against her objections.
The woman, now in her twenties, said she was shocked when she learned she had been selected for the marriage by Rulon Jeffs, Warren Jeffs’ father, the church prophet at the time, who is now dead. The woman said she pleaded with Rulon Jeffs to delay the marriage until she turned 16 or to be given to another man.
Her efforts to avoid the union failed, said the woman, who cannot be identified because she is alleging sexual assault. She testified that Warren Jeffs told her: “Your heart is in the wrong place; this is what the prophet wants you to do.”
The marriage took place in 2001. Describing her emotions during the wedding ceremony, the woman said: “Trapped. Extremely overwhelmed. Immense pressure.”
She said she hung her head and cried in despair when pressed by Jeffs to say “I do” and had to be coaxed to kiss her new husband.
Jeffs then commanded the new couple to “go forth and multiply and replenish the Earth with good priesthood children,” she testified.
In the FLDS community, marriage and motherhood are considered the highest achievements for women, who pray to be prepared to marry and follow a worthy man from a young age. But girls receive no information about their bodies, sexual relations or procreation, the woman testified, and she said she did not even know sex was the means by which women had babies.
Married for at least a month before they had intercourse, the woman said her husband told 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.”
