Warren Jeffs' Trial Highlights Polygamy Troubles
Sara Hammon has dedicated her life to helping girls leave the polygamous life.
Sept. 17, 2007 — -- In a Utah courtroom today a defense team will cross examine a 21-year-old woman known only as "Jane Doe the fourth" about how accused polygamist sect leader Warren Jeffs allegedly forced her to marry her 19-year-old cousin and have sex with him.
The showdown is one of the most anticipated in Jeffs' trial on charges of rape by accomplice. Doe initially took the stand to begin her testimony Friday.
At the time of the marriage, Doe merely was 14 years old and said after a month of unconsummated marriage her husband told her to "be a wife and do your duty."
"He completely overlooked the fact that this was something I did not want to do nor was willing to do," she said in the courtroom last week. "I said, 'Please don't do this,' and he just ignored me."
She recalled how her first cousin and husband allegedly raped her.
"He came over and pulled me over to the bed and I said, 'I can't do this. Please just don't,'" Doe recalled. "I was sobbing, and my whole entire body was just shaking because I was so scared and he didn't say anything. He just laid me on the bed."
Doe said she pleaded for Jeffs to let her divorce her husband.
"He paused for a moment and then told me that I needed to go and repent, that I was not living up to my vows," Doe said. "I was not being obedient. I was not being submissive to my priestly head and that was what my problem was."
Doe said the trauma of the situation led her to attempt suicide by downing two bottles of over-the-counter painkillers in a bathroom.
"The only thing I wanted to do was to die. I just wanted to die," Doe said.
As a sect elder and later a sect "prophet," Jeffs coupled the community's girls and women with the men he said God told him they were meant to marry.
The sect emphasizes that young girls and women should be obedient to their husbands and serve them to achieve salvation in the afterlife.
Jeffs' trial brings back some vivid and devastating memories for Sara Hammon. At age 14 Hammon became one of the youngest people to escape from the world of polygamy when she left Jeffs' home base in Colorado City, Ariz., 18 years ago.
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