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Updated Sept. 26, 2007, 3:51 p.m. ET
Ex-husband of victim in Warren Jeffs trial is charged with rape


Allen Steed
Allen Steed testified last week for Warren Jeffs' defense that he did not force his young bride to have sex with him.

ST. GEORGE, Utah (Court TV) — A day after polygamous sect leader Warren Jeffs was convicted of rape as an accomplice for forcing a 14-year-old girl to marry her older cousin and have sex with him, the woman's ex-husband has been charged with rape.

Allen Steed, 26, was charged with one count of rape in Washington County, Utah, for having sex with Elissa Wall after their arranged wedding in 2001.

Wall testified last week during Jeffs' trial that Steed forced himself on her in the weeks following their April 23, 2001, wedding, although she had begged him to wait.

Wall told the jury that she dreaded the wedding and begged both Warren Jeffs and his father, Rulon, who was the group's leader at the time, to intercede, but Warren Jeffs insisted that she go through with it.

Later, after she reported the rape to Warren Jeffs, she testified, he told her to return to her husband and give herself "mind, body and soul" to him.

"He told me that I needed to go home and repent," Wall told the jury. "He said I was not living up to my vows, I was not being submissive to my priesthood head, and that was what my problem was."

Jeffs, 51, who is considered the prophet of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), faces 10 years to life in prison on two counts of rape as an accomplice when he is sentenced Nov. 20.

The FLDS, which broke from the Mormon church in the 1890s over polygamy, believes that plural marriage is a path to eternal salvation.

Steed, a truck driver who has not remarried since Wall left the FLDS community in 2004 with another man, testified for the defense that he never raped his wife. He claimed that his wife initiated their first sexual encounter, and that the use of force is forbidden in the FLDS. The rape charge carries a sentence of five years to life.

Speaking after the verdict Tuesday, jurors said that Steed's credibility was compromised by discrepancies in testimony. Although he said the sex with his wife occurred a month after their marriage, he later admitted that it was within three weeks of their marriage.

Steed also described an incident in which he exposed himself to his wife before their first sexual encounter, thinking that might relax her.

"It was my clumsy way of trying to make her feel comfortable with me," Steed said.

Under Utah law, 14 is the age of consent. But a jury can find lack of consent if the alleged victim was "enticed" into doing something she would not have normally done by a person who occupied a special position of trust. Washington County prosecutors argued during Jeffs' weeklong trial that, as the spiritual leader of the sect, Jeffs had the power to entice Wall into submitting to the will of her husband.



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