SALT LAKE CITY (UT)
Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)
January 3, 2018
By Brendan Joel Kelley
Last week, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints’ (FLDS) “prophet,” Warren Jeffs, along with three other church leaders, were accused in a Utah lawsuit of ritualistic rape of the unnamed plaintiff beginning when she was eight years old
The FLDS is a polygamist, white supremacist, homophobic cult that Jeffs ruled with an iron fist, a splinter group that broke from the mainstream Mormon church when it abandoned the doctrine of polygamy in the late 19th century. In 2005, the Southern Poverty Law Center designated the FLDS as a hate group due to Jeffs’ racist, anti-LGBT, misogynistic teachings.
As “prophet,” Jeffs assigned marriages of underage girls to male FLDS members. FLDS members who did not comply with Jeffs’ decrees were separated from their families and lost their homes. Jeffs is serving a life sentence in a Texas prison for raping two of his own child brides, ages 12 and 15, who were among his 78 wives.
The allegations in the new lawsuit go far beyond the child bride practice, though. The plaintiff, now 21 years old, accuses Warren Jeffs, along with his brothers Lyle Jeffs and Seth Jeffs, and Wendell LeRoy Nielsen — all leaders in the FLDS at one time, to varying degrees — along with 20 unnamed John Does, of gathering underage girls and ritualistically raping them while other FLDS members watched and documented the abuse.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.