Documentary record Bound by Fear
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Conviction Christian institutions & contexts Latter-day Saint movements Salt Lake City, Utah, USA · 1994

United States: the highest-ranking LDS official ever convicted — 'exploited the religious respect' she held for him

Record class

Core record

Evidence status

Convicted

Authority role

General Authority, First Quorum of the Seventy (1975–89); former mission president

Organization

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Spiritual nexus

The victim's own testimony names the mechanism — religious respect for a General Authority, converted into access.

  • Pastoral or clerical authority

Evidence structure

Proceedings

  1. 1994-10-11 · guilty plea to a reduced charge; probation

    Third District Court, Utah, USA. George P. Lee, a member of the First Quorum of the Seventy from 1975 to 1989 and a former mission president — the highest-ranking Latter-day Saint official ever criminally convicted — pleaded guilty in October 1994 to attempted sexual abuse of a child, a reduced third-degree felony, and received eighteen months' probation. The victim, abused from the age of nine, testified that he exploited the religious respect she held for him. He was booked again in 2007 for failing to register as a sex offender and died in 2010.

Documented coercion mechanisms

  • the religious reverence owed to a General Authority, invoked in the victim's own testimony

Primary record

Sources

national newspaper court reporting plea report Deseret News: 'Lee accepts plea bargain in child sexual abuse case'.

Contemporaneous court report.

national newspaper court reporting conviction history report The Salt Lake Tribune, 2007 (archived): the failure-to-register arrest.

Later coverage confirming the conviction history.

Related record

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