A polygamous sect leader already serving a 50-year federal prison sentence for orchestrating sex involving children was convicted Friday on state child abuse charges after girls were found in an unventilated trailer he was hauling through Arizona.
Someone alerted authorities about the trailer in August 2022 after seeing small fingers reaching through gaps in the doors. Police stopped Samuel Bateman’s vehicle as he was driving through Flagstaff and found three girls inside, who were ages 11 to 14 at the time. The trailer was enclosed with a makeshift toilet, a sofa and camping chairs.
In the federal case, Bateman was convicted of coercing girls as young as 9 to submit to sex acts with him and other young adults, and for scheming to kidnap girls from protective custody, the story of which is the focus of a Netflix series, “Trust Me: The False Prophet.”
Bateman previously claimed to have more than 20 “spiritual wives,” including 10 girls under the age of 18. He testified in his own defense in the state case, telling jurors he would never harm the people he loves. He acknowledged during cross-examination that he knew the girls were in a hot trailer for hours and the ventilation wasn’t good, but downplayed the conditions.
“I just trusted myself as a driver,” he said. “I asked God to bless me every time we hopped in that vehicle.”
He claimed he thought the girls had gotten out when they stopped. He said he was as “shocked as could possibly be” when he learned that they were still inside when he was pulled over.
There’s a bit of a difference between FLDS style polygamy and modern polyamory.
Polygamy is about being married to multiple people, but to most people generally refers to situations where men have multiple wives. A “polygamous sect” in Utah generally means a man who is worshipped in a cult-like situation by a group of oppressed women. The wives are groomed through the religion from a very young age to believe that their path to heaven lies in obeying their husband who is closer to god. They’re taught that it’s sinful to think “sinful thoughts” or to question anything their husband says.
In this case he, quite literally, told them all he was god’s prophet, the successor to Warren Jeffs, the equivalent of Jesus, and his followers needed to stop thinking and live in worship, give him their daughters to be his wives, give him their money and work for him, let him control every aspect of their lives and thank him for the beautiful opportunity to be allowed to worship a real prophet and be one of god’s chosen.
Not the first time this has happened and not the only active polygamous sect around there. It’s super fucked up even without the child sex offenses.
On the other hand polyamory is generally about ethical non-monogamy and involves people having multiple loving relationships (married or not). One of the reasons the term was invented (aside from removing the connotations of polygyny and marriage) was to distance polyamorous people from the FLDS which was often the only kind of non-monogamy that people knew about.