Teenage bride: ‘I felt betrayed’

When the 14-year-old 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, who is 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 presided over by Jeffs in a Nevada hotel, 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 squoze 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.

The alleged victim 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, she said, were ignored.

“I felt betrayed by the people I trusted the most,” she said in four hours of tearful testimony that is likely to be the linchpin of the prosecution of Jeffs, who faces the possibility of life in prison if convicted.

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

Jeffs’ attorneys also said she spent several months living apart from her husband in Canada but did not flee, and never made it clear to Jeffs that she was being raped. “Pressure to marry is different than pressure to submit to a rape,” defense attorney Tara Isaacson told jurors Thursday.

Jeffs, 51, spent nearly two years as a fugitive, landing on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list before being arrested in a Cadillac Escalade outside Las Vegas in August 2006. His roughly 10,000 followers in southern Utah and northern Arizona believe he is a prophet and that his words are the word of God.

The importance of his prosecution to the state of Utah was underscored by the presence of the state’s attorney general, Mark Shurtleff, in the front row of the courtroom Friday. Shurtleff, who said he could not comment on the case, watched as Craig Barlow, one of his deputies on loan to local prosecutors, carefully questioned the woman.

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

In her testimony, the woman said that after she was told she was to marry Steed, she demanded a meeting with Rulon Jeffs. She said she tearfully told the elderly prophet she was too young and did not want to marry her cousin.

“Follow your heart, sweetie,” Rulon Jeffs told her, she testified. “Follow your heart.”

Feeling spared, she walked out of the meeting with Warren Jeffs, who quickly 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,” she said, “like I was getting ready for death.”

The next morning she climbed into a minivan next to Steed and rode to Caliente, Nev., with two of her stepsisters, who were also getting married.

Barlow asked how she felt on the ride. “So scared,” she said. “So extremely scared and overwhelmed.”

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 that he had intercourse with her despite her protests. Steed has not been charged with a crime.

In the FLDS faith, she added, women must obey their husbands and bear as many children as possible. Still, 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 she told him.

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.”

Defense attorney Isaacson said Steed would testify later in the trial and describe in very different terms his relationship with the alleged victim. Isaacson said it was unclear there was ever a rape.

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nicholas.riccardi@latimes.com