Arizona women face prison time in polygamist sex abuse case
Published By admin with Comments 0
Three Arizona women were sentenced to a total of seven years in prison Wednesday for obstructing an investigation into child sex abuse among members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
Brenda Barlow, Marona Johnson and Leia Bistline are three of more than 20 wives of Samuel Rappylee Bateman, a self-proclaimed prophet and leader of the Mormon Church offshoot, who rose to power after former leader Warren Jeffs was imprisoned. Nearly a dozen of Bateman’s wives, whom he took between 2019 and 2022, were minors at the time of their marriage.
Barlow, Johnson and Bistline regularly participated in group sex with Bateman and his other wives, including child brides as young as nine, according to an FBI investigation. After Bateman was arrested in August 2022 on child endangerment charges, the three deleted messages between Bateman and themselves and attempted to hide other evidence.
They each pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit tampering with an official proceeding, a class C felony, earlier this year on the terms that other charges, ranging from kidnapping to transporting minors for sexual activity, be dropped.
Shirlee Draper, who grew up in Colorado City, Arizona, where the FLDS community mainly resides, now provides social services to women and girls who have been abused in polygamous communities. She testified before the sentencing to the unique circumstances of women in the community.
While the FLDS has always been patriarchal, Draper said, Warren Jeffs’ rise to power in 1998 came with a new level of subjugation and indoctrination.
“He started to use women as currency,” she said. He would take a woman from one man as punishment and give her to another man as a reward.
He also eliminated public schools and libraries, restricted access to the internet, and started taking brides as young as nine years old, Draper testified. With no access to information outside the immediate community, young women and girls born into the religion around Jeffs’ rise to power had little agency to question authority.
Content retrieved from: https://www.tucsonsentinel.com/local/report/080124_flds_polygamist/arizona-women-face-prison-time-polygamist-sex-abuse-case/.
