Extreme Mormon Sect Member: It Wasn't Rape, It Was 'Spiritual Marriage'
This wonderfully creepy man, of the Yearning for Zion Ranch in Eldorado, Texas, faces 20 years in jail. But it was all just polygamist love, and you don't know and you weren't there he says.
Raymond Jessop allegedly has nine wives and is the first to be convicted (for sexually assaulting an underage girl) after the ranch, run by a sect called the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, was raided last year and 439 children were placed in foster care.
Among them, presumably, was the baby (now four) Jessop fathered with a 15-year-old. Experts said the child had a nearly 100 per cent probability of being his. Which was somewhat awkward for the defense. As were seized documents that show the girl, now 21, had been "assigned" to Jessop's brother but then passed over to him when she was 15. Who says romance is dead?
The sect's prophet, Warren Jeffs, is still awaiting trial in Arizona for being an accomplice to rape and for underage marriage.
All of this was an excuse, really, to run the picture. Which I can't stop looking at. I also can't shake the impression that the world would be a better place if women ran it.