Forced marriage detailed in polygamist's trial

ST. GEORGE, Utah — When the 14-year-old girl refused at her wedding to hold the hand of the man she was being forced to marry, Warren Jeffs took her hand and placed it in her prospective husband's.

"I just sat there with my head hanging," the woman, now 21, told a jury Friday in the trial of Jeffs, the leader of a polygamous sect who is charged with being an accomplice to her rape by forcing the marriage.

At the wedding in a Nevada hot-springs hotel presided over by Jeffs, he told her to say she took her 19-year-old first cousin, Allen Steed, as her husband.

"The room was completely quiet," she remembered. "He had my mother stand up and take my hand. ... He asked me again after quite a bit of silence. My mother just [squeezed] my hand. I said, 'OK, I do.' "

She said Jeffs then commanded the couple to "go forth and multiply and replenish the earth with good, priestly children." The girl rushed to a restroom, locked the door and sobbed.

She testified that Steed eventually forced her to have sex, an event so traumatic that she swallowed two bottles of sleeping pills. Her pleas to Jeffs to dissolve the union were ignored, she said.

"I felt betrayed by the people I trusted the most," she said in four hours of tearful testimony against Jeffs, who faces possible life in prison if convicted.

He is charged with two felony counts of rape as an accomplice.

Defense attorneys did not cross-examine the woman Friday, but they said in opening arguments that she has a financial incentive to portray Jeffs in the worst light: She has a lawsuit against him and his Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS).

Defense attorney Tara Isaacson told jurors Thursday, "Pressure to marry is different from pressure to submit to a rape."

Jeffs, 51, spent nearly two years on the run, landing on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list before being arrested in August 2006. His roughly 10,000 followers in southern Utah and northern Arizona believe he is a prophet and his words are the word of God.

In April 2001, the girl and her mother had been taken from their excommunicated father in Salt Lake City and moved to the home of a top church official in Hildale, Utah. At that time, the sect's leader, called a prophet, was Jeffs' ailing father, Rulon. But Warren Jeffs was considered his father's top spokesman, and he became the prophet after Rulon Jeffs died in 2002.

The woman testified that after she was told she was to marry Steed, she demanded a meeting with Rulon Jeffs. She said she told him she was too young and did not want to marry her cousin. "Follow your heart, sweetie," Rulon Jeffs told her, she testified.

Feeling spared, she walked out of the meeting with Warren Jeffs, who dashed her hopes. "Your heart is in the wrong place," she said he told her.

Her stepfather also told her to marry, and she tearfully joined some of her sisters in the all-night ritual of sewing a wedding dress. "I felt like I was getting ready for death," she said.

After the wedding she fended off her husband's increasingly aggressive sexual overtures, spending some nights in her mother's room. Eventually, she said, Steed told her she had to have sex. "He looked at me and said, 'It is time for you to be a wife and do your duty,' " she testified.

She said she told her husband, "I can't do this," but he had intercourse with her anyway. Steed has not been charged with a crime.

She went to Warren Jeffs and pleaded for a release. "Allen was touching me and doing things to me I was not comfortable with," she said.

Jeffs, according to her, replied that "I needed to go repent, that I was not living up to my vows, I was not being obedient."

Denied a divorce, the woman said she became depressed. She finally left her marriage and was forced out of the FLDS community in November 2004 after she became pregnant with another man's child.

Material from The Associated Press is included in this report.