From Deseret News archives:
Ex-FLDS bride's book released
Elissa Wall's much anticipated autobiography, "Stolen Innocence," hit bookstore shelves on Tuesday, at a time when interest in the FLDS is at a national high because of the raid in Texas. The book was published by William Morrow, a division of HarperCollins.
Wall devotes most of the 431-page book to her upbringing in the FLDS Church and her marriage that led to the criminal charges being filed against Jeffs, spending the last third devoted to the high-profile trial and her views of it from the witness stand.
It was Wall's testimony that led to Jeffs' conviction on charges of rape as an accomplice for performing the marriage between the then-14-year-old girl and her 19-year-old cousin.
"I wanted to run as Uncle Warren droned on with the vows," she wrote of the wedding ceremony at a Caliente, Nev., motel in 2001.
After repeatedly being asked if she took Allen Steed to be her husband, and even having her mother stand beside her, Wall finally responded: "OK. I do."
"My soul was broken," she wrote. "I was now going to be Allen's wife for eternity and there was nothing I could do about it."
She wrote about attempting suicide the night she first had sex with her new husband, the night she also alleges she was raped. Wall writes in the book that her attempts to be "released" (divorced) from her husband were rebuffed by Jeffs.
"Warren knew without a doubt what I was talking about, even though I had no idea how to talk about such personal, secret things with the most powerful man in our community," she wrote. "I didn't even know words such as sex or rape, but I communicated to Warren the only way I could, and I knew that he understood."
She was told to go back to her husband, where she said she attempted to make their marriage work, but was secretly miserable.
A flat tire and getting stuck in the mud during a miscarriage led to her first introduction to Lamont Barlow, the man to whom Wall is now married. She details his history in the FLDS Church, and the affair that led to her leaving Steed, pregnant with Barlow's baby.
Wall writes that a law enforcement investigation was already under way into her marriage to Steed when she first received a phone call from Roger Hoole, who would later become her attorney.
Jeffs' criminal defense attorneys accused her of filing a civil lawsuit against Jeffs before going to law enforcement, but she writes that she had already been working with Washington County prosecutors before she filed suit.
