Joe.My.God. LGBT News
Courthouse News reports:
The man who used his power as a religious leader in a small Arizona town to marry and repeatedly rape 10 underage girls for nearly two years will spend the next 50 in a federal prison. The young women once victimized by Samuel Rappylee Bateman faced him in a Phoenix courtroom for the last time Monday afternoon. “I’ll never forgive you for what you did to me,” one former child bride told Bateman. “I hope you get everything in life you deserve. Which is absolutely nothing.”
Bateman began his string of sexual crimes in Colorado City, Arizona, in 2019, eight years after the arrest and life imprisonment of Warren Jeffs left a power vacuum in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. After declaring himself the new prophet of the religious sect, an offshoot of the main Mormon Church, Bateman amassed at least two dozen wives between 2019 and 2022, 10 of whom were children when he married and first had sex with them.
From a 2022 Daily Beast report:
Samuel Bateman, a self-proclaimed “prophet” of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, had 20 wives, many of whom were under the age of 15, according to an FBI investigation.
Bateman drank wine and had sex with a male follower, Moroni Johnson, in a motel room in Lincoln, Nebraska, in front of his underage wives, new court documents show, some of whom were Johnson’s own daughters.
The FBI said the women and girls were required to stand naked and watch the “binding of brothers.” Bateman also forced his wives to have sex with other male followers, the documents say.
There’s more in the video report below.
BREAKING: Samuel Bateman will spend the next 50 years in federal prison — essentially a life sentence for the 48-year-old.
— The Salt Lake Tribune (@sltrib.com) December 9, 2024 at 6:31 PM