A Salt Lake City man is facing 12 counts of rape after he allegedly took a teenage girl to Planned Parenthood for an abortion, court documents say.
The 34-year-old man is accused of raping his 15-year-old stepdaughter repeatedly in the past year. Court documents say that starting in September 2016, the man would message the girl via Facebook and tell her meet up with him.
He would instruct the teen to tell her mother that she was going to the library, and he would pick her up and take her to his home to have sex with her, according to the documents. Afterward, he would drop the teen back off at home.
The teen told police that if she didn’t agree to have sex with the man, he would threaten to hurt her or her family. When he found out the girl was pregnant, the man took the girl to three Planned Parenthood locations to get an abortion, the teen said.
Utah law requires a biological parent or guardian sign off on abortions for minors, and when the centers denied him, the teen said he gave her a drink to induce a miscarriage.
The girl’s mother found a plastic bottle of the liquid mixture in the teen’s room and contacted police, telling them she suspected her daughter had been raped, according to court documents.
In an interview with police, the man said he’d been having sex with the teen “once or twice a month for a year.” He also confirmed that he’d taken the girl to Planned Parenthood and gave her a drink to induce a miscarriage, documents state.
Other documents accuse the man of trying to get the abortion “to hide what he had done,” and say he “provided false information to the police in order to avoid prosecution for his conduct.”
