PHOENIX (CN) — The man who used his power as a religious leader in a small Arizona town to marry and repeatedly rape 10 underage girls for nearly two years will spend the next 50 in a federal prison.
The young women once victimized by Samuel Rappylee Bateman faced him in a Phoenix courtroom for the last time Monday afternoon.
“I’ll never forgive you for what you did to me,” one former child bride told Bateman. “I hope you get everything in life you deserve. Which is absolutely nothing.”
Bateman began his string of sexual crimes in Colorado City, Arizona, in 2019, eight years after the arrest and life imprisonment of Warren Jeffs left a power vacuum in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. After declaring himself the new prophet of the religious sect, an offshoot of the main Mormon Church, Bateman amassed at least two dozen wives between 2019 and 2022, 10 of whom were children when he married and first had sex with them.
Each of the 10 child brides testified against two of Bateman’s male followers in a September trial, detailing the sexual activity Bateman and others forced them into on a daily basis. Three of the survivors returned to the same courtroom to see the ringleader of the abuse face retribution.
“A 14-year-old should never have to go through the harm that you put me through,” the first girl said. “But I am my own boss now. And you can’t control me anymore.”
Another survivor told the court that she now struggles to maintain relationships, especially with men and boys, because of the post-traumatic stress disorder she developed from two years of living with Bateman.
“As a child, I had no way of understanding what was happening to me,” she said. “I was deprived of the normal experiences that other children get to have.”
Despite the trauma she endured, she refused to let Bateman win.
“Sam, you have no more power over me,” she said. “I hope you feel all the pain you caused me as you sit rotting in your cell.”
Police arrested Bateman on child endangerment charges in August 2022 after a driver noticed a child’s hand sticking out of the box trailer Bateman hauled from his pickup truck near Flagstaff, Arizona. From the Coconino County Jail, Bateman ordered his adult wives and followers to delete incriminating messages from their phones, hide physical evidence, and “rescue” Bateman’s child brides from Arizona Department of Child Services custody.
Like some of his adult wives, Bateman pleaded guilty to two counts: conspiracy to transport a minor for sexual activity and conspiracy to commit kidnapping.
U.S. District Judge Susan Brnovich showed more mercy to the female defendants, as women in the FLDS typically hold little to no power and are beholden to the desires of the men put in charge over them. Those women Bateman coerced with threats of excommunication and eternal damnation after life.
“You turned some of them into felons because they followed your orders,” the Donald Trump appointee told Bateman. “The amount of harm you have caused is nothing short of unmeasurable. You are the one that made yourself into a prophet and used that to victimize these women.”
In an effort to reduce Bateman’s sentence, defense attorney Brian Russo said Bateman was raised the same way that his female victims were.
“Mr. Bateman believed in what he was doing, Russo told Brnovich. “He recognized it was wrong, but he still believed in it.”
Russo drew comparison to Josephine Bistline, an adult wife of Bateman who helped him collect his brides, often watched as he forced the girls into orgies and at least one time participated. She was sentenced in August to 15 years in prison, but the minimum suggested sentence for Bateman was 20 years.
Federal prosecutor Dimitra Sampson called the two cases incomparable, as Bistline participated in sex only once, while Bateman raped his brides nearly daily. She said 50 years is “the only appropriate sentence.”
Sampson played three video clips in the courtroom to display Bateman’s character, including one in which Bateman, surrounded by his wives in what looks like a living room, points to them and says “not one of these girls wanted to marry me.”
“Nothing about this ever felt right for the victims,” Sampson echoed. “He cannot control them anymore.”
Brnovich called Russo’s arguments unpersuasive and agreed to give Bateman the harshest sentence possible.
“You should never have the opportunity to be free,” she told Bateman. She assigned a fine of $7,200.
At the end of his prison sentence, Bateman, who is now 49 years old, would spend the rest of his life on supervised release.