Washington Post Report Details How Andy Biggs Protected “Polygamist Religious Group Accused of Sexually Abusing Girls”

Washington Post Report Details How Andy Biggs Protected “Polygamist Religious Group Accused of Sexually Abusing Girls”

Former GOP State Lawmaker: “Women and Children Suffered Three Years Longer” 

New reporting from The Washington Post details how Andy Biggs has “faced criticism from fellow Republicans” for his record of siding with predators when he was Arizona’s State Senate president by blocking reforms to “crack down on a polygamist religious group accused of sexually abusing girls in rural Arizona,” leading to years of additional abuse as “women who fled FLDS also kept raising alarms.”

The report outlines how “momentum was growing” for the reforms, but it “never got a vote in the state Senate.” Republicans “blamed then-Senate President Andy Biggs (R) for the bill’s failure to advance in that chamber,” with Michelle Ugenti-Rita, a former GOP state lawmaker, saying, “Women and children suffered three years longer than they should have because he protected the bad guys.” The predatory group – which was known for “forcing girls into underage marriages” – was led by Warren Jeffs, who “was placed on the FBI’s most-wanted list and convicted in 2011 of sexually assaulting a 12-year-old and a 15-year-old, both of whom he forced into marriage.”

Read more below from the Washington Post: 

• Momentum was growing in 2013 to crack down on a polygamist religious group accused of sexually abusing girls in rural Arizona…But a bill designed to strip authority from the marshal’s office never got a vote in the state Senate. Its Republican sponsor blamed then-Senate President Andy Biggs (R) for the bill’s failure to advance in that chamber.
• “I would rather vote for somebody who has made a stand for women and children above religion,” said Buster Johnson, a longtime Republican supervisor for the county at the center of the controversy. He said he cast an early ballot against Biggs in the primary.
• Authorities say a secretive religious sect wielded enormous power over the community — controlling public services, discriminating against nonmembers and forcing girls into underage marriages.
• The group, known as the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS), split from the Mormon Church after the latter banned polygamy more than a century ago. It drew renewed attention this year with the release of a Netflix documentary on a self-proclaimed FLDS prophet, Samuel Bateman, who prosecutors said sexually abused child “brides” as young as 9. Bateman was sentenced to prison in 2024 and convicted on additional charges this summer.
• Scrutiny of the sect grew in the 2000s when officials charged its leader at the time, Warren Jeffs, with sex crimes. Jeffs was placed on the FBI’s most-wanted list and convicted in 2011 of sexually assaulting a 12-year-old and a 15-year-old, both of whom he forced into marriage.
• The Justice Department sued the twin border towns in 2012, alleging that the Colorado City Marshal’s Office — which served both cities — acted as the “enforcement arm” of FLDS. Prosecutors said the marshals applied the law selectively and carried out the edicts of FLDS leaders, recounting how they killed dogs banned by the church and worked to return an underage bride to FLDS officials after she fled.
• In Arizona, top officials called to disband the marshal’s office. The Republican attorney general, Tom Horne, put his weight behind the 2013 bill. It would have created a mechanism to strip local departments of their authority in extraordinary cases in which many officers lost their certification. The legislation was designed to target the Colorado City Marshal’s Office.
• “Women who have wanted to escape have been forcibly held by the marshals against their will,” Horne said at a January 2013 news conference.
• The bill passed the state House 52 to 7, but it stalled in the state Senate and never made it to a vote. Asked last year in a TV interview about accusations that he helped kill the bill, Biggs said that officials were trying to gather more information and that he is “not sure we ever got to” the conclusion that the marshal’s office was fully corrupt.
• “What I was concerned about is, did we have enough as a state to step in, as a state legislature?” Biggs added.
• Others argue there was plenty of evidence. “They had more than enough,” said Flora Jessop, who left FLDS and then helped others escape.
• “I thought, it’s never going to change, the community,” said Fawn Broadbent, another woman who left.
• Over the next few years, Arizona officials launched reviews into alleged misconduct by six more officers in the marshal’s office, according to state records; local news reported at the time that one officer who eventually gave up his certification was accused of lying about sex-crime evidence. A county sheriff testified in 2016 that his department would not alert the marshal’s office when it got called to respond to child custody disputes, because deputies feared they would arrive to find the child gone. Residents accused the marshals of unlawful arrests, court documents show.
• “Women and children suffered three years longer than they should have because he protected the bad guys,” Michelle Ugenti-Rita, then a Republican state lawmaker, said after the federal government won its FLDS lawsuit.
• One of Biggs’s lesser-known rivals in the governor’s race, businessman Scott Neely, has sent out texts telling voters that Biggs “blocked reforms against child predators in Colorado City.”

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