Mother of child brides testifies in Az polygamist sex abuse trial
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The mother of two underage girls married to religious leader Samuel Rappylee Bateman testified Wednesday in the trial of two Arizona men accused of aiding and participating in Bateman’s child sex abuse ring.
Julia Johnson, a former member of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, told 15 jurors Tuesday morning that four of her daughters were given to Bateman in spiritual marriages in 2020. Two of them were 10 and 14 when Bateman married them and began having sex with them.
Bateman married his first child bride, the nine-year-old daughter of Johnson’s husband Moroni Johnson, in March 2020. Johnson said Maroni and codefendant LaDell Bistline Jr. helped Bateman amass more than two dozen wives by asserting himself as a prophet and spiritual leader to replace Warren Jeffs, who led the FLDS until his arrest in 2006 and subsequent life imprisonment.
“It was a devastation,” Johnson said of the community’s response to Bateman’s assertion of power. Because Jeffs was in prison, no marriages could be approved in the roughly 8,000-person community in Colorado City, Arizona. But Bateman preached that men could receive permission directly from God and spread his new teaching to justify taking wives, Johnson said.
“It meant we were leaving the Church,” she said. “Not being obedient.”
“I couldn’t comprehend why there wasn’t a marriage ceremony that allowed her to consent,” she said of Bateman’s marriage to her eldest daughter, who was 17 at the time.
Johnson detailed multiple instances in which Bateman, Moroni Johnson and LaDell Bistline Jr. organized group sex with their many wives, adult and child alike, in hotel rooms in Lincoln, Nebraska. She was present for two of them, and watched one via video chat. On one occasion in November 2020, Bateman wanted to reenact the Bible story of Jesus washing his Apostles’ feet. He washed the feet of Maroni and LaDell Bistline Jr., then tried to have sex with Maroni “to bond them as brothers,” Johnson said.
Content retrieved from: https://www.tucsonsentinel.com/local/report/091224_polygamist_abuse/mother-child-brides-testifies-az-polygamist-sex-abuse-trial/.
