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

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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

Archive classification

This is the archive's application of its published inclusion test. The cited record appears below.

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

Pastoral or clerical authority

Evidence structure

Proceedings

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

Cited 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.

Source provenance

Source access and integrity log

This log records source retrieval and file integrity. It does not mean that an automated process independently confirmed every statement in the source.

Source and tier basis: https://www.deseret.com/1994/10/11/19135762/lee-accepts-plea-bargain-in-child-sexual-abuse-case/ Corpus classification: national-newspaper-court-reporting; evidentiary role: plea-report. SHA-256 5db6020db494024443ac143ba2c673804bb30fae33bdadbe6971a80c6bff7372
Retrieval: 2026-07-20 · Preserved; Bound by Fear automated source-preservation ledger
Source and tier basis: https://www.bishop-accountability.org/news2007/07_08/2007_07_31_Carlisle_ExLds.htm Corpus classification: national-newspaper-court-reporting; evidentiary role: conviction-history-report. SHA-256 90a1c4006b95ecd169d237e9dae637b912b639888107db2b8f82f0f2c062c1f1
Retrieval: 2026-07-20 · Preserved; Bound by Fear automated source-preservation ledger

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