Estimated read time: 4-5 minutes
- A federal lawsuit alleges a fundamentalist polygamous community in Davis County forced a 16-year-old into incestuous marriage.
- The complaint accuses leaders and members of sex trafficking, sexual abuse, and coercion into an incestuous marriage to maintain "pure Kingston blood."
- The lawsuit follows a similar 2024 case against the Kingston family, which involves 10 other women formerly members of the "order."
SALT LAKE CITY — A federal lawsuit has been filed alleging leaders of a fundamentalist polygamous community in Davis County forced a girl into a marriage with her uncle, as a third wife, when she was 16 years old.
This suit, filed Jan. 22, follows another filed in May 2024 by 10 women against the Latter Day Church of Christ, its numerous organizations, and its alleged leaders, the Kingston family, making similar claims against the group.
Some members of the Kingston family were sent to prison in 2023 for a billion-dollar tax fraud scheme that one Internal Revenue Service investigator called "one of the most egregious examples of tax fraud in U.S. history."
In the 2025 complaint, prosecutors call the community "a racketeering enterprise, hate group, and corrupted polygamous cult," while accusing leaders of sex trafficking in violation of federal and Utah law, sexual battery and abuse of a child, sexual battery and rape of an adult, negligent sexual battery and abuse of a child, infliction of emotional distress and civil conspiracy.
Paul Elden Kingston is head of the "Kingston Clan," the complaint says, claiming "power and authority" over members of the fundamentalist religious order "based on decades of beliefs and practices" that trace the family's bloodline directly back to Jesus Christ. Members are coerced into incestuous marriages to "maintain pure Kingston blood," court documents allege.
"The order teaches members that only those with pure Kingston blood will survive the coming apocalypse," according to the complaint.
The woman at the center of the lawsuit, now 20, alleges she was trafficked as a child into an "underage, incestuous and bigamous 'order marriage.'"
Paul Elden Kingston's brother married his daughter, the suit says, the daughter being only 14 at the time. Their child was made to choose between her biological uncles to marry when she was 16, according to court documents, settling on her mother's brother because he "was the youngest of these three uncles," born in 2001.
The girl's husband (and uncle) had already married two other wives, court documents say. The May 2024 lawsuit claims the man's first wife was also his cousin, his second wife was his cousin and niece.
The girl was taken "in and out of Utah for marriage ceremonies," according to the 2025 complaint. In February 2021, she was taken to New Mexico "where an illegal ceremony was performed in the middle of a cold night on the side of a road in what she describes as 'the middle of nowhere'" for a "secret order marriage."
The next month, she was flown to Rhode Island to "unlawfully obtain" a marriage license and hold a ceremony, the complaint says, where they "dubiously relied on an antiquated Rhode Island law that (an order attorney) claimed allows marriages of kindred members of certain ancient Jewish sects."
That marriage was found to be "prohibited" by Utah's 3rd District Court in December 2023, and an annulment was granted to the woman.
Back in Utah, the community held "a large, lavish, extravagant" ceremony. During her marriage, the girl was "sexually abused and occasionally raped" by her uncle, becoming pregnant multiple times, giving birth at 17 and having a miscarriage later, according to the lawsuit.
The group flags "sexual unions with the highest risk of birth defects," according to court documents, by having all "order" children's blood tested, cataloged and kept in a database.
Amniotic testing showed one of the woman's children would have birth defects, the lawsuit alleges, so Paul Elden Kingston encouraged her to get an abortion and continue reproducing.
The complaint says the woman "now realizes that the blood testing, grooming ... coercion, marriage ceremonies, sexual abuse, rapes, and amniotic testing she experienced took place for the intended purpose of impregnating her in an effort to lock her into the order and to provide things of value to defendants, including, for example, her order marriage, children with pure Kingston blood, her labor for defendants and the order, the labor of her children, defendants' increased status and standing within the order, and by growing the order's population, control and wealth."
Both cases referenced are still in early stages, with the complaint from the 10 women being amended after "a bevy of motions to dismiss" were submitted by defendants. In the January case, parties have been notified, but no answers have yet to be filed.
