Polygamists "who use duress, who engage in domestic violence — they should be prosecuted," Llewellyn said, "Girls like Rachel are collateral damage. They are expendable for the sake of a policy to appease the polygamists."

Rachel Strong is now 22 and a Snow College student. She did not attend the news conference because she was taking a final exam. But in an interview, she backed up Llewellyn's charges. So did her mother, Pauline Strong, who belonged to the True and Living Church, known locally as the TLC, for nine years.

Pauline Strong said she was living in Enterprise, Washington County, in the early 1990s when a friend invited her to Manti, where Harmston was starting up the TLC. She went to one of his lectures and was impressed. In 1994, she moved to Manti, and in 1995, she said, she became his third wife.

Between 1994, when she joined, and 2002, she estimates the church grew to about 800 members. But when Harmston "started taking wives from his closest apostles," she said, key leaders started to leave and membership declined. She estimated current membership is less than 200.

Pauline Strong said Rachel came to Manti at age 11. Harmston became a father figure to Rachel, her mother said. When Rachel was 16, she became the second wife of a TLC member who was a few years older than she, but the marriage fell apart.

Within three months after Rachel left her first husband, she married Harmston, Pauline Strong said. "It was a horrible experience for Rachel."

Harmston could not be reached for comment. Standing on the sidelines for part of the press conference was Elaine Harmston, his first wife, who said she is legally married to him. In an interview, she rejected the claim that Rachel Strong was coerced into marrying Harmston.

"She asked him to seal her to him," Elaine Harmston said. "She got up in front of a hundred people and asked him. Now she wants to make it sound like he is a dirty old man."

Rachel Strong recently said that Harmston had told her that if she didn't marry him, he would send her back to her first husband.

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