Stolen Innocence - Lisa Pulitzer [191]
Allen was then asked to explain his interpretation of placement marriage.
“I believe we have a God in heaven who looks down upon the earth. He sees his children and decides who should get married to each other, and then he tells his prophet, and he places the marriage together.” A shudder ran up and down my spine.
“Did you understand there was anything illegal or wrong about your marriage because you had a shared grandfather?”
“No,” Allen responded in a near whisper. At this time, his testimony was interrupted over and over again. He was so nervous he could not keep his volume up and he was constantly being stopped and asked to repeat what he’d said.
“So, did you propose to Elissa?”
“I believe I did. Yes, sir.”
Now my agitation became palpable. Up until this point, Allen’s testimony had been a series of misinterpretations and at best half-truths. With this line he began to spin a tale on Warren Jeffs behalf. Never was there anything even resembling a proposal between us. In fact the very idea that a man would propose to a woman ran counter to the concept of “placement marriage.” The FLDS just didn’t do that. Still, Allen rambled on, flying by the seat of his pants.
In discussing our wedding day, Allen was asked to detail his feelings, and the discrepancy between his and my own were glaring.
“I don’t remember too much about it—I was kind of you might say on cloud nine.”
“You were excited?”
“Very. Yes, sir.”
His smile and the weird look in his eyes began to make me gag.
“Did you have an understanding about how men and women make a baby?”
“Not really,” he responded. When the subject turned to our honeymoon, Allen continued to misconstrue the details.
“Did you become more comfortable with each other at that time?” Bugden asked.
“You could say that.”
“Was there any hugging going on?”
“Yes.”
“Kissing?”
“Yes.”
“Sure,” I thought, enraged. “If you call a one-hundred-dollar dare that I had been pressured to perform an actual kiss.”
“In public or in private?”
“More so in private.” Of course he would present it this way to make it seem as though I was cold with him in public and different when we were alone. When it came to the bedroom, it was his word against mine, and that was the best angle Allen could take. What followed was a grossly misrepresented tale of how Allen and I had learned about sex together, at first claiming that we hadn’t had any intimate contact for the first three months of the marriage and saying that he had exposed himself to me in the park as a means of making me feel more comfortable around him.
When asked to describe our first sexual encounter, Allen’s response cut through me like a knife. “She woke me up and asked if I cared about her,” he recounted. “She rolled close to me, asked me to scratch her back, and one thing led to the next. I felt like she was ready to go forward.”
As these words escaped his lips, I began to experience the symptoms of a classic panic attack; the pressure and pain had bottled up inside of me, and hearing this skewed interpretation of the sexual contact with Allen proved too much. Tears rolled down my cheeks, which were growing red hot with frustration. I became short of breath and my shoulders shook from my attempts to hold my sobs in. Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder. Looking up, I saw the kind face of the uniformed bailiff.
“Do you need to go out?” she whispered. She found her answer in my pleading eyes. I wasn’t sure if I was permitted to leave the courtroom during the testimony and was grateful that she’d noticed my pain and given me an out. Jumping up from my seat in the second row of the gallery, I followed her to an empty courtroom, where Lamont and Roger immediately joined me.
The defense was trying to label me a lying, adulterous woman. Before the trial I honestly did feel a sense of sympathy for Allen. He was both a victim of Warren’s power and a perpetrator, but after hearing Allen’s revisionist history of our marriage, any remorse I’d felt evaporated. I was enraged by his sheer audacity and his unwillingness to take responsibility