$16 Million Judgment Against Warren Jeffs and His Church for Girl Married at 14 to Her 19-Year-Old Cousin
After trial: Default judgment entered September 5, 2017, after neither Warren Jeffs nor the FLDS Church appeared. Nothing was reduced and no appeal has been reported.
Won by Dewsnup King Olsen Worel Havas.
A girl of 14 was married to her 19-year-old cousin in a ceremony Warren Jeffs arranged and performed himself, over her objections, and then pressured to bear children. She sued Jeffs and the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in 2005 under the initials MJ. Neither defended. On September 5, 2017 Judge Keith Kelly entered a $16,000,000 default judgment: $4,000,000 in damages and $12,000,000 in punitive damages. Jeffs is serving life plus 20 years in Texas.
What happened
The plaintiff sued under the initials MJ, and this page keeps it that way.
She was 14 and a member of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints when Warren Jeffs, who controlled the church, arranged her "spiritual marriage" to a 19-year-old cousin. She objected. Jeffs performed the ceremony anyway, and afterward pressured her to have children with the husband he had assigned her. Miscarriages and a stillbirth followed. She later testified to lasting damage to her ability to trust.
She filed suit in 2005. Jeffs has been in custody since 2006; he is serving life plus 20 years in Texas for sexually abusing two girls he took as plural wives. Her testimony had helped convict him in Utah as well.
Neither Jeffs nor the church appeared to defend the civil case. On September 5, 2017, in the Third District Court in Salt Lake City, Judge Keith Kelly entered a default judgment for $16,000,000: $4,000,000 in damages and $12,000,000 in punitive damages. The judge found that Jeffs held absolute control, power and authority over her life, used it to require her, as a young girl, to enter an unlawful marriage, and then pressured her into childbearing.
Alan Mortensen, then of Dewsnup King Olsen, represented her. Asked about the punitive figure he said the point was that the church should feel the pain of what its doctrine had done to young girls, and that the judgment could be enforced against FLDS assets in several states and in Mexico and Canada. Mortensen later left to found Mortensen & Milne.
The $16,000,000 sits alongside a separate recovery. In 2016 she settled with the United Effort Plan trust, which holds FLDS property in Hildale, Utah and Colorado City, Arizona, for $2,750,000 in cash and property. That settlement is a distinct matter and is not part of this figure. A later $152,000,000 judgment entered for a group of other former FLDS members against Jeffs is a different case again.
Utah takes a share of punitive awards: under Utah Code 78B-8-201(3)(a), half of any punitive damages above $50,000 goes to the state. Applied to $12,000,000 that would leave the plaintiff roughly $6,000,000 of the punitive component. No source says whether it was applied.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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