Phoenix • She was 14 years old in 2021 when Samuel Bateman decided he wanted her as a wife — and the self-proclaimed prophet took her as one of 20 women and girls he “spiritually married.”
Bateman was leading a sect that broke off from the polygamous Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and the girl’s mother was one of the man’s followers. The teenager said a few weeks after her mom gave her to Bateman to marry, he started having sex with her.
“I wasn’t old enough to consent,” the girl said, speaking to Bateman in an Arizona federal courtroom on Monday, “and you know it.”
During Bateman’s sentencing hearing, the girl read off a list she wrote in red ink on lined paper, telling him all the things that she has been able to do since the leader was arrested in 2022 — and she and eight other child brides were taken from their homes along the Utah/Arizona border and put into foster care.
No longer under his control, she is in high school now. She has her driver’s license, and wears whatever style of clothes she wants. She dyed her hair. She was in a school play.
“Now you can see I never needed you,” she told Bateman. “And I hope you get everything you deserve. Which is absolutely nothing.”
(Coconino County Sheriff's Department via AP) This undated photo provided by the Coconino County Sheriff's Office shows Samuel Bateman.
While arguing for what is essentially a life sentence for the 48-year-old man, federal prosecutor Dimitra Sampson displayed photos on a screen of this girl and the nine others that Bateman took as his wives — identifying each by name, as those in the courtroom Monday looked at their youthful, smiling faces. The youngest were 9.
“These girls,” she said, “are the definition of strength and resilience.”
Bateman, Sampson argued, was not a prophet or a man of God. He was the leader of a child sex abuse ring that traumatized the women and girls he forced into marriage and sexual activity. And for that, the prosecutor said, Bateman deserved decades in federal prison.
U.S. District Judge Susan Brnovich agreed, sentencing Bateman on Monday to 50 years in federal prison.
Read more: How a Utah couple infiltrated a new polygamous sect and helped put its abusive leader behind bars.
When given a chance to speak on Monday, Bateman shook his head from side to side — he had nothing to say.
Bateman rose to power among several polygamous families in 2019 after claiming that he was a new prophet. Originally charged with more than 50 felonies, he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit transportation of a minor for criminal sexual activity and conspiracy to commit kidnapping.
In a plea agreement, he acknowledged that he had spiritually married 20 wives, including 10 underage girls. His intent in marrying the girls “was to engage in sexual activity with minor girls,” he admitted.
“And he did so on a regular basis,” the plea agreement he signed states.
The defense
Sampson wrote in a sentencing memo that the only reason Bateman was given the plea deal was in an effort to spare his victims from testifying at trial, and because he took accountability for what he did. She noted, however, that the girls did end up on the witness stand describing the sexual abuse they endured, after two male followers went to trial — and lost.
Bateman’s defense attorney, Brian Russo, had asked Brnovich to sentence Bateman to 20 years of incarceration, and for him to be able to serve that sentence at a treatment center. Russo cited the opinion of a psychiatrist hired by the defense who said Bateman was “mentally ill” and “delusional.”
The psychiatrist opined, according to Russo, that Bateman’s “upbringing in a certain lifestyle was an indoctrination that normalized certain behavior that is otherwise criminal conduct.”
Bateman was raised as a member of the FLDS faith in Short Creek, the community in Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona, where the polygamous sect was historically based. He, like other FLDS members, believed that Warren Jeffs is their prophet. Jeffs is currently imprisoned in Texas for sexually assaulting two underage followers he had taken as “wives.”
But Brnovich, the federal judge, was not swayed by the defense attorney’s arguments.
“You are the one who manipulated the rules of this religion,” she said, speaking about Bateman’s twisting of the FLDS faith. “You are the one that made yourself into a prophet, so to speak. And used that to victimize these women [and girls] who, as the government points out, are now survivors.”
Prosecutors argued that the men took advantage of the leadership void left with Jeffs behind bars, after their leader had gone largely silent and stopped approving marriages and banned the FLDS faithful from having children.
Bateman and two of his male followers, they said, declared Bateman as the new “prophet” to get what they wanted: “new wives, sexual activity, and more children.”
“These men were not victims of the FLDS teachings,” Sampson wrote in a sentencing memo. “They created their own ideology to serve their selfish interests, and they elevated the defendant as their new leader to accomplish their goals.”
‘Justice was served’
Sampson noted that if it weren’t for a “few brave people” who told law enforcement what was going on with Bateman and his followers, the men “fully intended to grow this conspiracy.”
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Christine Marie speaks to one of Samuel Bateman's victims after he was sentenced to 50 years at the federal courthouse in Phoenix, Arizona, on Monday, Dec. 9, 2024.
A Utah couple, Christine Marie and Tolga Katas, was among those who gave critical evidence to the FBI about Bateman. Marie runs a nonprofit called Voices for Dignity, which helps those in Short Creek. And Katas is a professional filmmaker who documented hundreds of hours of footage of Bateman and his followers, which he forwarded to the FBI. Their evidence, along with the testimony of one of Bateman’s followers who became disillusioned, helped prosecutors bring the federal charges.
The couple wiped tears from their cheeks as several of Bateman’s former child brides spoke out against him in the Arizona courtroom Monday, and tightly embraced each other outside the towering courthouse after the sentencing.
“Justice was served,” Marie said, her eyes brimming with tears. “I’m proud of the FLDS women that were strong enough to take a stand against abuse. And I’m proud of every one of those girls that spoke up.”
‘My innocence was stolen’
Sampson, the prosecutor, noted that there are still adults who remain loyal to Bateman — and some of them are the parents of the girls who were victimized. The parents come to court, she noted, not to support their daughters, but the man who sexually abused them.
“These girls have become the adults in the room,” she said. “And they are the role models for others that their parents should be for them.”
One of the girls, now 17, told the judge that she wanted to speak on Monday for her younger self, who didn’t have a voice, and felt like a “slave” who was being exploited. She wanted to speak for herself and the nine other little girls who suffered “at the hands of the man sitting in the defendant chair today.”
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Three of Samuel Bateman's ten underaged wives cling to each other following his arrest in Colorado City, Arizona, on Wednesday, Sept. 14, 2022.
“You hurt me deeply,” she said to Bateman. “What you did was evil. It was wicked and shameful.”
“You left wounds that will never heal in my life,” she added before turning to look towards her abuser, who was wearing a jail jumpsuit with his hands shackled in front of him.
Another survivor told the judge on Monday that she was just 9 years old in 2020 when Bateman took her as a “wife” and began sexually abusing her.
“As a child, I had no understanding of what was happening to me. I was too young,” she said. ”… My innocence was stolen.”
The girl, now 14, then addressed Bateman, telling him he no longer had control over her.
“Despite what you think, I am no longer a little puppy running to your every command,” she said. “I am a proud young woman, continuing to grow older and stronger every day.”
