Victim: Jeffs Case Was About Child Abuse

Jury Finds FLDS Leader Warren Jeffs Guilty Of Being Accomplice To Rape Of Girl, Then 14

(CBS/AP)  Jurors rejected a defense attorney's argument that the prosecution of a polygamous sect leader was religious persecution, convicting him as an accomplice to rape for forcing a 14-year-old follower to marry her 19-year-old cousin.

The victim in the case didn't accept it either, telling reporters the case was about child abuse.

"This trial has not been about religion or a vendetta. It was simply about child abuse and preventing abuse," the woman, now 21, said in prepared remarks after the verdict.

Warren Jeffs, head of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, could get life in prison after a trial that threw a spotlight on an insular community along the Arizona-Utah line where followers practice polygamy and revere him as a prophet with dominion over their salvation.

Jeffs stood and wore a stoic look as the verdict was read.

Prosecutors said Jeffs, who performed the ceremony, forced the girl into marriage and sex despite her objections. Jurors said they agreed that Jeffs rejected the girl's pleas and later refused to release her from the marriage when she complained about relations with her husband.

"He was pretty much her only ticket out of the relationship," said juror Jerry Munk, 36. "She was 14. She didn't have to say anything for a rape to occur."

Defense attorney Wally Bugden, who had told jurors that Jeffs was a victim of religious persecution, declined to comment.

"Religion was definitely involved, but I don't think it was about that," said juror Heather Newkirk, 32.

The jury deliberated about 16 hours over three days. On Tuesday morning, the judge replaced a juror with an alternate for undisclosed reasons.

At the trial, widely different versions of the relationship - and Jeffs' influence - were presented by the woman and her former husband, Allen Steed, 26.

At their wedding in 2001 at a Nevada motel, the woman said, she cried in despair when pressed by Jeffs to say "I do" and had to be coaxed to kiss her new husband. The woman testified that FLDS girls receive no information about their bodies or reproduction. She said she didn't even know sex was the means by which women conceived.

The woman said the couple was married for at least a month before they had intercourse, and that her husband told her it was "time for you to be a wife and do your duty."

"My entire body was shaking. I was so scared," she testified. "He just laid me on the bed and had sex."

Afterward, she slipped into the bathroom, where she downed two bottles of over-the-counter pain reliever and curled up on the floor, she said. "The only thing I wanted to do was die," she said.

The Associated Press generally does not name those who allege sexual abuse.