Authors: Elissa Wall
Even before the trial began, I felt a sense of relief. At least my voice was going to be heard. I was no longer a vulnerable fourteen-year-old girl with someone else’s convictions being shoved down my throat; I was a strong twenty-year-old woman, ready to confront the person who had squandered my childhood.
In the days after the preliminary hearing, word had quietly spread that the key witness in the case was me. Legally, my identity had to be revealed to Warren prior to the trial, and had been used in the preliminary. As a result, I went from being Jane Doe IV to being Elissa Wall more quickly than I had imagined. I received such an outpouring of affection and encouragement through a long chain of supporters. I realized that there must have been members of the FLDS who were secretly praying for me, and I could feel their silent support. I had even received word from friends of ours in Oregon who had begun an international prayer chain. To hear that so many people were praying for a fair outcome provided some much needed comfort. I no longer felt like Lamont and I were standing alone; rather, we had all these people to walk right beside us through the mud.
But we’d traveled a long and arduous road to finally arrive at this day. Over the previous year, Lamont and I had moved several times, taking our two small children to keep our identity and location from being compromised. To make matters more difficult, in the months after the charges against Warren were officially filed, members of both of our families shunned us. Lamont’s relatives who were still in the FLDS were particularly thorny, and at times we felt as though we’d collapse from the unrelenting pressure and stress. On the other hand, some of our greatest support and encouragement came from my close family and Lamont’s relatives no longer in the FLDS.
As in the preliminary hearing, arrangements had been made to bring us into the courthouse through an alternate door to protect us from the swarms of media gathering outside. In the previous months, I had experienced a small taste of this chaos, but now the media contingent had expanded further than I could have imagined. The rear parking lot of the courthouse was crammed with satellite trucks from local TV stations and major networks from across the country as well as from abroad. I worried about being subjected to the throngs of people shouting “Elissa!” and demanding responses to their questions.
Once inside the building, I worked to gather myself up. Glancing down at my outfit, I felt professional and well presented. I’d acquired some classy suits to wear, relieved not to have to hide under my tentlike maternity dresses anymore. Today I felt strong and free in a knee-length skirt, pin-striped blazer, and purple top. I wore my hair down with a thin black headband to keep it out of my face. I must have run through my hair with my straightening iron at least five times that morning, just to ensure that every strand looked perfect. Now, in these clothes, with my hair swinging defiantly across my back, I was ready to stand up to Warren Jeffs. I looked like the person I felt like inside, and this is a magical thing when it has been denied for so much of your life.
Whereas I’d been allowed to sit in the jury box at the preliminary hearing, now I was directed to take a seat among the spectators in the gallery. It had taken the lawyers three and a half days to pick the five men and seven women of the jury. Eight of the twelve would decide Warren Jeffs’s fate. Soon they would be entering the courtroom and looking to me to testify for the prosecution in this very high-profile case. Among the jurors were at least two Mormons from the mainstream LDS church.
I was uneasy sitting in the second row squeezed between my husband and Roger. In the chairs in back of us and to our right, reporters and television journalists were sizing me up. Behind us, I felt the eyes of at least ten FLDS loyalists who’d come out to show their support to their prophet. As I waited for the proceedings to begin, I could feel their angry stares boring into the back of my head. I understood the full importance of a guilty verdict in this case; if Warren were to be set free, the implications for the girls of the FLDS community were grave. Winning a conviction, on the other hand, would send a message to the priesthood and hopefully slow or put a stop to the practice of underage marriage.
Unzipping my purse, I snuck a peek at the photo of Ally and Sherrie I’d tucked inside, drawing strength from their cheerful faces as I waited on pins and needles for the judge and jury to enter the courtroom. As soon as Warren was led in, we heard all the seats of the third row snap back as his followers stood in respect. They’d also done this during the preliminary hearing, but after this display, Warren’s attorneys advised them to discontinue this practice. They apparently didn’t want the jury to see this show of the obvious control that Warren had over his people.
Brock Belnap delivered the opening remarks for the prosecution, keeping his points short, not condemning Warren Jeffs with any suggestive language or trying to sway the opinions of the jury before they heard the evidence. Instead, he simply stated that we were here because there was substantial evidence to support the fact that I was raped. He also illuminated for the jury that the prosecution was not there to make a case against the religion or even polygamy. Rather, it was strictly about accomplice to the rape of a minor.
Not surprisingly, Tara Isaacson made several comments in her opening statement that frustrated me, at one point telling the jury that in this case part of their duty was to put aside their personal feelings about whether or not fourteen was too young to have sexual intercourse. Their job as she described it was to determine if I was raped at all. Then she said, “For me, it would have been too young,” as if to imply that it was too young for her, but not for me. She also said that in Utah, a child of thirteen engaging in sexual relations is considered to have been raped no matter what. A child of fourteen, though, is not being raped unless he or she is “not consenting.”
In my mind, the difference between thirteen and fourteen is small. Images of forced encounters with Allen pulsed through my mind—him above me in bed, yanking my underwear off, forcing those stale kisses onto my mouth as I tried to keep it shut tight. If shouting “No,” fleeing the scene for my mother’s arms, crying beneath his body, and begging him to stop did not count as protest, what would? As far as I knew, and as far as I intended to show everyone in that courtroom, I was raped—even though at the time I had no understanding that what Allen was doing to me had a name. It had taken the past year working with members of law enforcement for me to accept what had really happened. But I knew in my soul that even though Allen had been told to do those things, and had been told by Warren Jeffs, he still chose to hurt me, and that when I sought help from Warren he turned a blind eye instead sending me home to repent and submit.
Isaacson’s opening statement utilized a PowerPoint presentation complete with a “time line” of my marriage to Allen. One caption read, “Pregnant with Lamont’s Child and Left.” It was clear that the defense was trying to establish that I was an adulterous wife, but I wasn’t going to stand for blatant misrepresentations being shown on the projector. I tapped Brock on the shoulder and whispered that she had no right to present that caption to the jury. The judge had ruled that the testimony in this case be narrowed to a specific time frame, and here she was already violating the terms of the trial. After being respectfully asked to follow the court’s ruling, Tara rolled her eyes and begrudgingly placed a piece of white paper over the projector to cover the words.
Her demeanor was cold and her exterior impeccable. She never had a strand of hair out of place, and her eyes reminded me of a villain from an old Superman movie who could shoot deadly laser beams at her enemies with a simple glance.
After the opening statements, I was called to the stand as the first witness in the trial. I was nervous, but I just worked to put one foot in front of the other as I walked toward the witness stand to be sworn in. I tried to prevent my voice from wavering as I promised to tell the truth, so help me God. It was ironic that I had to make that oath to God. I’d been telling God the truth for years; now it was time to share it with others.
I looked out into the packed courtroom and locked eyes with my husband. He was my anchor, the one true witness to my tumultuous parting from the FLDS. As I gave my testimony, Lamont would sit quietly stunned, learning for the first time about many of the most intimate and upsetting details of my previous marriage. While he’d long known that I had been abused, I had always tried to keep certain parts of my story buried. I hadn’t wanted my connection with Lamont to be soiled or tarnished by the devastating details of that marriage.
Memories flooded my mind as the prosecuting attorney, Craig Barlow, rattled off his first few questions. Though I was not as comfortable with him as I was with Brock, I knew Craig to be a caring and gentle man, with teddy bear features and a calm, even tone. He had joined the legal team at Brock’s request some months earlier. Craig was actually from the Utah Attorney General’s Office in Salt Lake City, but his successful prosecution of an earlier case involving similar legal theories made him a valuable resource to the prosecution. Ironically, this Craig Barlow is a distant relative of Lamont’s, but his family line was never a part of the FLDS Church. I found amusement in the fact that Warren was being confronted by members of the two family surnames he’d long detested: Wall and Barlow.
Craig crafted his questions to make me feel safe and secure. He spoke in an easy, conversational tone that allowed me to push some of my pain and anger to the background and answer clearly. He asked about the context in which I knew Warren Jeffs. I explained that he had been my principal and teacher at Alta Academy, later the first counseler and mouthpiece to our prophet, and ultimately the prophet himself. I knew that to the jury, much of this seemed strange, and in truth, much of it is. But somehow I found encouragement in the faces of these strangers. They were there to listen and I was there to tell the truth.
When my eyes fell on Warren Jeffs, I felt uneasy. While I’d seen him at the preliminary hearing, I couldn’t get past the discomfort of being in the same room with him again after all of this time. His face had long been etched in my mind, one of many mental symbols of the pain I’d left behind. There had been so many times when I had gone to Uncle Warren seeking comfort and found nothing but scorn, punishment, or abandonment. Now his expression was just as I had expected it would be—stoic and unchanging. This person who had once represented God on earth to me had transformed himself into something totally different. As I spoke, I noticed that he was furiously scribbling notes on a pad of paper. I wondered why he was doing this, but then realized that he was not strong enough to cover up how uncomfortable he was hearing the details of what he had done. It seemed his only option was to bury himself in an activity.
Craig asked me in what context Warren Jeffs had taught me over the years. It was hard to articulate how a set of beliefs can consume your entire mind and everything you understand to be true. How could his words and the words of those before him have permeated my existence so absolutely? I explained about morning devotional, home economics classes, and all of those hours spent listening to Uncle Warren’s sermons on tape. My pulse raced as I recalled walking around my home with a Walkman turned on, Warren Jeffs’s flat, frightening voice trickling into my ears, telling me how to live my life. I explained that the tapes would play over the sound system at the Jessop home as we cleaned. As I spoke, I pictured myself at twelve and thirteen, sweeping or scrubbing or changing a diaper, all the while hearing the sound of that hypnotic voice. As a child it was all I had known. Now it seemed so foreign, so unsettling.
To hear myself speak about these customs in front of a roomful of people who had grown up in “normal” homes, outside of the FLDS, was strange. I felt conflicted about some of the things we discussed. Even though growing up in the FLDS had hurt me in so many ways, I still felt there was a lot of good in many of the church’s followers. It was difficult and maybe a little embarrassing for me to explain how we had lived, how we had learned, and how we had loved when I knew that it was extremely foreign to almost everyone in the room. Although I realized that it was part of the professional atmosphere of the courtroom, the jurors’ unchanging expressions made me a little uneasy. I couldn’t read what they were thinking, and I tried to keep my focus on Craig Barlow so I wouldn’t get flustered.
I was asked to explain how children of the FLDS were taught to treat people of the opposite sex, and I replied—“as snakes.” I detailed how if someone was forced to leave the community, popular speculation was that they had behaved in an “unclean” way. That for all our reserved behaviors, people of the FLDS, like people in any other society, had never been free of gossip and social assumption. I tried to show the members of the jury what it was like to grow up in that world, illustrating that to touch or look at a boy in an “unclean” way was a major offense.
By the same token, I had to explain the immediate shift in male/female relations once marriage occurred. No matter the age of either party, a couple would spend their entire lives premarriage with no romantic or sexual contact with anyone. After the union, there was a drastic change, just as I had experienced. Suddenly, within as little as a few hours, a child would go from having absolutely no sexual understanding, experience, or basis of discussion to being told that it was time to lie down and make a baby. The point was made clear through Warren’s teaching of “bars up, bars down.” Before marriage, a woman is to keep the “bars” and her defenses up, and as soon as she is married, she is to let the “bars” down completely and give herself fully to her husband.
I blushed a little when I was asked what I’d been taught about female and male anatomy and about sex. Of course I had to tell them that we hadn’t heard a word on either subject in any context. Once married, I explained, women and girls were to give themselves wholly to their husband and obey his every word. If you refused, eventually you lost your home, family, society, and everything else.