Lawsuit alleges child marriage, rape in Utah polygamous sect

FORT COLLINS, Colo. — Girls who had been members of a Utah polygamous group mentioned in a lawsuit that they had been pressured into underage marriages through which their husbands raped them and that they needed to carry out little one labor within the group’s companies.

The northern Utah-based Kingston Group, also called the Order, organized such marriages in order that women would develop into pregnant and beholden to their husbands and the group, alleges the lawsuit filed Wednesday in state court docket in Salt Lake Metropolis.

“Order women are taught from delivery that their main functions in life are to be obedient, a submissive spouse, and to bear as many youngsters as attainable,” the lawsuit states.

The lawsuit filed by 10 individuals in opposition to Kingston Group members, together with chief Paul Eldon Kingston, seeks a jury trial and unspecified damages.

The group sought to keep up “Pure Kingston Blood” by arranging marriages between cousins and different shut kinfolk and shunning relationships that weren’t between white individuals, the lawsuit alleges.

The group teaches its members that solely these with so-called pure blood will survive the apocalypse, in keeping with the lawsuit.

The lawsuit describes a patriarchal group and a doctrine often known as “The Legislation of One Above One other,” through which everybody has a rank within the group’s hierarchy. Girls and women, after they’re married, undergo their husbands and males reply to higher-ranked males.

Males rise in prominence by being obedient and “pure” of blood and by having massive households that may “produce some huge cash and employees” for the group, in keeping with the lawsuit. Girls achieve standing by being “pure” of blood and obedient, turning into the primary wives of higher-ranking “numbered males,” and bearing many youngsters, the lawsuit alleges.

However ladies who’re disobedient and fail to bear youngsters — together with as a result of they miscarry — face ostracism, the lawsuit alleges.

“It’s a frequent and intentional apply within the Order to require women and girls to submit sexually to their husbands even when the sexual submission is in opposition to their will as a result of having youngsters ends in employees for the good thing about the Order,” the lawsuit states.

5 of the ladies suing alleged they had been coerced into marriage as juveniles and raped by their husbands; three others together with Amanda Grant, who alleges that she endured years of sexual abuse by a half brother as a baby, mentioned they fled to flee such a destiny. Grant would later seem on the tv sequence “Escaping Polygamy.” The Related Press usually doesn’t title individuals who say they’ve been sexually assaulted until they arrive ahead publicly.

Additionally suing is a younger little one. The lawsuit mentioned the kid was raped by his or her father, who allegedly raped the mom.

The lone man suing mentioned three Order males raped him when he was 16 or 17 and that when he left the group and introduced he was homosexual, was tracked down and severely overwhelmed by a gaggle of boys “appearing on the course of the Order,” the lawsuit alleges.

Exhibiting LGBTQ+ “tendencies” can point out “impure” blood, in keeping with the lawsuit.

John Gustafson, a consultant of the Davis County Cooperative Society, an affiliate of the Kingston Group, disputed the lawsuit’s claims Friday.

“A lot of what we have now reviewed seems frivolous and unfounded,” Gustafson mentioned in an emailed assertion. “We don’t anticipate any of the claims to prevail in a court docket of regulation.”

The group has drawn authorized consideration earlier than.

Throughout a 2020 trial for a California businessman accused of finishing up an almost $500 million biodiesel fraud scheme with a member of the Kingston Group, attorneys for the businessman referred to as the Kingstons an “incestuous” polygamous group that’s at all times scheming to defraud the U.S. authorities in what the group calls “bleeding the beast.”

A spokesman for the group, Kent Johnson, referred to as these allegations “categorically false.”

The Kingston Group just isn’t affiliated with a polygamous group based mostly on the Utah-Arizona line that’s run by imprisoned chief Warren Jeffs, who’s serving a life sentence in Texas for sexually assaulting women he thought of brides.

The teams, whose members imagine polygamy brings exaltation in heaven, are offshoots of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Polygamy is a legacy of the early teachings of the mainstream church, which deserted the apply in 1890 and now strictly prohibits it.

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Brady McCombs in Salt Lake Metropolis contributed to this report.

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Observe Mead Gruver at https://twitter.com/meadgruver