Before his disastrous press conference in June 2022, no one associated David Leavitt with ritual abuse. No one had accused David Leavitt of being a ritual abuser, because no one had any reason to do so. David Leavitt proactively injected himself into an active criminal investigation, publicizing a victim’s statement from a 2012 to 2014 criminal case few people knew about on any level. In doing so, Leavitt provided the foundation for David Lee Hamblin and Roselle Stevenson to object to the Utah County Attorneys Office’s involvement in their criminal prosecution.
Previously, the only involvement the Utah County Attorneys had with respect to the current investigation into David Hamblin was Deputy County Attorney Chad Grunander’s objection to Hamblin’s expungement motion. Grunander and Leavitt had faced off in the Republican primary in 2018, each seeking the Republican nomination.
In today’s hearing before Judge Lunnen, an extraordinary revelation occurred: Grunander’s efforts to oppose Hamblin’s motion to expunge the record of his 2012 to 2014 case was done despite David Leavitt’s opposition to Grunander’s effort. In short, Chad Grunander was defying his boss in order to oppose the expungement of Hamblin’s earlier case, which included a taped apology to his daughter which included Hamblin’s explicit acknowledgement of guilt: “I am sorry for raping you.”
David Leavitt had previously exposed the investigation into ritual abuse by Utah County Sheriff Mike Smith when Leavitt held his press conference. The public was unaware to that point of any investigation into ritual abuse by the Sheriff’s office. It was Leavitt’s press conference that forced the case into the public consciousness.
The press conference forced the hand of Utah County Sheriff’s Office investigators, who were now no longer in control of the timeline or the narrative. Leavitt accused Utah County Sheriffs Office Public Information Officer Sgt Spencer Cannon of leaking the victims statement to the public. According to Leavitt, the leak of Katherine Hamblin’s victim statement was a political dirty trick intended to derail his reelection campaign. He accused Cannon and Cannon’s boss Mike Smith of attempting to smear him with ritual abuse allegations.
Sheriff Smith denied that Leavitt was the target of his investigation, and vehemently condemned Leavitt for characterizing Katherine Hamblin as a “tragically mentally ill individual.” A year before, Leavitt had referenced Katherine Hamblin as someone he knew to be a victim of ritual abuse during a documentary interview with Amy Herdy. During that interview, Leavitt analogized training a child to comply with ritual abuse to training a dog to do tricks.
Today’s hearing confirmed what was alleged in the Hamblin case in American Fork, which was the Utah County Sheriff’s year plus long involvement with Roselle Stevenson as a cooperating witness. During the UCSO’s interviews with Stevenson in her living room, the investigators allegedly revealed key details about their strategy and tactics in the investigation of Stevenson’s ex-husband David Lee Hamblin, as well as information about the witnesses in Emily Sheets’s case, who happened to be Stevenson’s daughters Rachel Hamblin and Eliza Bradford.
Given that the allegations against Stevenson were well known from the earlier case against her ex-husband, due to hundreds of pages of victims statements filled out by her daughters, it is absurd that the UCSO would discuss anything with Roselle Stevenson pertaining to their strategy, tactics, or any other information with respect to Emily Sheets. Stevenson was or should have been a suspect.
As a result of the UCSO’s actions, Stevenson’s attorney and Hamblin’s attorneys have been able to argue that the disclosures made by Sgt. Elise Hines and others were discoverable rather than privileged. It would appear that the UCSO’s employees made disparaging remarks about the credibility of their chief witnesses to Emily Sheets’s abuse, Rachel Lee Hamblin and Eliza Bradford. Those remarks about the credibility of Hamblin and Bradford are now being utilized to sow doubt as to the veracity of their claims in 2013 and now.
In the context of those earlier claims, David Leavitt’s actions in June 2022 are explained by his alleged role within the Church of Satan: according to the Hamblin sisters, Leavitt was the Conspirator, and the Conspirator’s role was to spread rumors and attack the credibility of anyone who threatened the CS and its members with exposure. Leavitt’s actions in June 2022 and the months afterwards fit exactly with the allegations made by the Hamblin sisters in their earlier victims’ statements. He alleged that the entire investigation into ritual abuse was a political ploy to ruin his reelection chances, asked the county to fire Mike Smith or force Smith’s resignation, and lambasted Spencer Cannon as the individual who leaked the victims statements without ever once citing any evidence to prove his allegations.
This also signaled to David Lee Hamblin that he needed to move quickly to contain the fallout from the earlier allegations against him between 2012 and 2014. Hamblin filed to expunge the records entirely. This in turn resulted in Utah County Deputy Attorney Chad Grunander filing in opposition to the expungement request, apparently in defiance of his boss David Leavitt. The resulting conflict was entirely David Leavitt’s creation: first, with respect to the press conference; second, with respect to Leavitt’s public and baseless claims that Mike Smith was attempting a political hit job, which Leavitt presented zero evidence to substantiate; and third, with respect to David Lee Hamblin’s expungement request triggering a Utah County Deputy Attorney to file in opposition before Hamblin was charged in the Emily Sheets case.
David Leavitt’s ploy, while initially seen as stupid by many, was actually quite effective. He ensured that the prosecuting office with jurisdiction-his own office-would appear to have a conflict of interest. Leavitt also ensured that the rancor generated by his tactics as the County Attorney among his subordinates would figure prominently in any future criminal prosecutions against the Church of Satan’s alleged members, while recasting Mike Smith’s investigation as a political hit job rather than a good faith effort to substantiate credible allegations of abuse.
David Leavitt was not liked by his employees, the prosecutors of the Utah County Attorneys Office. He was disliked by the local and county law enforcement agencies who referred criminal cases to his office for prosecution. Leavitt turned this animosity into the means by which the current criminal cases against David Lee Hamblin and his ex-wife Roselle Hamblin would be delayed for years. In short, David Leavitt turned his weaknesses into an asset, and he brought himself time.
While David Lee Hamblin twisted in court hearings for close to two years, David Leavitt managed to get out of the country and buy a castle in Scotland. He rebranded himself as the American rehabbing an ancient castle on social media, and negotiated a reality television show around his remodeling of Knockderry Castle.
The victims of ritual abuse who were cooperating with the Utah County Sheriff’s Office investigation were delayed for two years, and many of them have opted out of testifying or engaging in further cooperation. The criminal case against Hamblin and Stevenson for their abuse of Emily Sheets has been slow walked for two years, as Special Prosecutor Ryan Peters and Hamblin’s attorneys Michael Petro and Leah Ashton wrangled over the discovery file.
That file was apparently assembled into a four to five inch thick binder before the current charges were filed against David Lee Hamblin, because Craig Barlow of the Utah State Attorney General’s Office held the binder up on camera during a Webex hearing. A year and a half later, that binder of discovery material had not been turned over to Hamblin’s attorneys by Ryan Peters or the Utah County Attorneys Office employees who attempted to take over the prosecution after Peters was nominated to a judgeship. It was only turned over to the defense when newly designated special prosecutor Nathan Evershed obtained it from the Attorney General’s Office, redacted the privileged items, and released the discoverable information to Hamblin’s attorneys.
This is consistent with virtually every other Utah sexual assault prosecution Investigations in Ritual Abuse has examined. Utah prosecutors slow walk sexual assault cases rather than moving towards a trial. Of the 11.6% of rape cases prosecutors charged in Utah, there are still rape cases from 2013 that have not gone to trial. The victims in those cases have waited over 11 years to see a trial date.
13 year old Claudia Kite was raped by 16 year old Joshua Homer in 2012, and Homer was charged with felony rape of a child, but pleaded to a misdemeanor count of sexual battery. Kite wasn’t Homer’s first accuser. KSL Investigators identified 12 women and girls who alleged that Homer had raped them. Homer was only charged twice. For eleven years, Claudia Kite watched as her rapist was accused by other victims over and over again, and she watched as those victims were rejected by prosecutors. Even with 12 accusers and a prior conviction for sexual battery, Joshua Homer remained a free man. Prosecutors repeatedly declined to prosecute him, even though the allegations against would indicate that Homer is a serial rapist.
As of 2022, 18 victims were awaiting the trial of their alleged rapists.
That is consistent with what has taken place in the Hamblin case. Prosecutors appear to approach rape cases with apathy. Victims can wait a decade or more after their abuser is charged for a trial. By this standard, Emily Sheets is lucky: she’s only been waiting two years since David Lee Hamblin was charged in her case.
The strategy of rapists in Utah is clear: delay. They are aided in this strategy by prosecutors and law enforcement as well as judges, who characterize convicted rapists as “extraordinarily good [men]” who have made mistakes. One does not mistakenly rape a female by errantly penetrating her. Rape is a deliberate act.
Earl Morris, the former Utah Valley University Police Chief, made his position clear with respect to rape victims when he addressed the UVU athletes, warning them about Mormon girls.
“If you’re not used to a Mormon community, folks, I’m here to tell you, the Latter-day Saints community — young ladies, they may have sex with you. I don’t know if they’re going to have guilt afterwards, but they’re going to go talk to their minister, their bishop, priest, whatever you want to call it,” Morris said as some players laughed.
“He’s going to say, was it consensual?" he continued. "I can tell you that oftentimes it’s easier to say, no, no, no, that wasn’t consensual. And then what happens? Now there’s an investigation.”
Morris oversaw the law enforcement professionals that rape victims on UVU’s campus would report their rapists to, and his attitude was indicative of a culture within his department that discouraged reporting and prosecuting and doubted the veracity of rape allegations. Morris was not alone: UVU is located in Logan, Utah, and Logan Police Chief Gary Jensen also addressed the university’s athletes on the topic of sexual assault:
“[W]e want you guys to play ball. That’s what we want. We want you guys to play good ball. That’s what we want. And we will work with you to the best of our ability.”
If you are accused of rape, and you are an athlete who plays good ball, the Logan Police Department will work with you to the best of their ability. This is not the message that Jensen and Morris conveyed to rape victims. It’s the message they conveyed to perpetrators, because multiple UVU athletes and students were accused of rape during Morris’s tenure. It wasn’t just the police in Logan and on the UVU campus: UVU football coach Blake Anderson stated that “it has never been more glamorized to be a victim” when addressing his players on the topic of rape. In three successive years, Anderson’s team would produce players who were accused of rape.
The glamour of being forcibly sexually abused was too much for victims to resist.
Victims in Utah such as Emily Sheets and Tobias Schroeder face a system that is wholly slanted in favor of perpetrators. Not only is there rampant skepticism about sexual assault, there is an overwhelming tendency to be dismissive of any type of ritual abuse allegation. Even a man like David Lee Hamblin, who explicitly told his daughter “I am sorry for raping you” on a recorded call that the Provo Police had in their possession, can count on men like Utah County Deputy Attorney David Sturgill to concoct a reason to dismiss his criminal case. Sturgill claimed that he was having issues getting discovery over to the defense when he moved to dismiss the case against David Lee Hamblin in 2014.
Less than a decade later, Utah Deputy Attorney General Craig Barlow held up a four inch thick binder of discovery material pertaining to David Lee Hamblin when he insisted the State had plenty of evidence against Hamblin. If that discovery evidence was in the State’s possession in 2022, where the hell was it in 2013 or 2014? Sturgill claimed that he couldn’t obtain the medical records and other discovery materials in 2014 due to the time that had elapsed between the abuse and charges against Hamblin.
In 2023, Hamblin’s attorney Michael Petro was referencing discovery materials including a medical examination of Eliza Hamblin from the early 2000s that he claimed turned up no evidence of sexual abuse.
Someone is lying.
It is not that the Utah County Attorney’s Office should be disqualified from prosecuting David Lee Hamblin or Roselle Stevenson due to the appearance of a conflict or even an actual conflict with regards to David Leavitt. It is that the entire state of Utah’s prosecutorial system has an egregiously horrific record when it comes to prosecuting and convicting rapists. It is that the entire state of Utah’s judicial system has an even worse record when it comes to punishing convicted rapists, which was evident when Provo district Judge Thomas Low referred to the convicted rapist standing in front of him as “an extraordinarily good man.”
Hamblin’s attorneys were never forced to proffer what David Leavitt would be called to testify about with respect to Emily Sheets in his American Fork case before Judge Roger Griffin. To this day, we don’t know if David Leavitt will be called to testify to anything material with respect to Emily Sheets’s allegations against Hamblin or Stevenson because their attorneys have yet to be forced to say what Leavitt’s testimony will focus on with respect to Sheets.
The mere fact that Leavitt might be called to testify was cited as grounds to disqualify the Utah County Attorneys Office in the American Fork case by Judge Roger Griffin, as was the purported animus between Leavitt and his successor Jeff Gray, who never made any allegations against Leavitt with respect to ritual abuse. The fact that Leavitt created the entire conflict with his preemptive press conference outing himself as a possible suspect in a ritual abuse investigation-which Sheriff Mike Smith denied-was not the fault of either the Utah County Attorneys Office or Mike Smith.
Nevertheless, it was the grounds to delay the prosecution of David Hamblin, who has enjoyed two years of watching his victims wait for their day in court as one special prosecutor was nominated for a judgeship, and the initial successors to that prosecutor in the Utah County Attorneys Office were disqualified in the American Fork case, while those prosecutors had to battle through multiple hearings in the Manti case in order to remain on the case. The refusal of the Utah Court of Appeals to even consider the interlocutory appeal by the Utah County Attorneys Office with respect to Judge Griffin’s decision to disqualify them means that the issue was never decided on the merits.
Judge Griffin never held a single evidentiary hearing with respect to the apparent conflict that emerged from the possibility that David Lee Hamblin might call David Leavitt to testify. Judge Griffin never asked Hamblin’s attorneys to proffer exactly what Leavitt’s testimony would touch on, or whether or not that testimony would be material to the allegations against Hamblin. Judge Griffin simply said there was the appearance of a conflict, without ever specifying how the appearance of a conflict was relevant or material to the allegations made by Emily Sheets.
Nowhere in Hamblin’s criminal information is David Leavitt mentioned as an accomplice, a witness, or a source with exculpatory or inculpatory evidence. The same is true of Roselle Stevenson’s case.
Judge Marvin Bagley took a different tack with Hamblin’s attorney Brian Frees: he required him to specify what David Leavitt’s testimony would touch on in order to establish if that testimony was material. A week afterwards, Frees and Hamblin decided that they would not be calling David Leavitt as a material witness. That is likely because he is not a material witness.
The only way we can know if David Leavitt is a material witness in the American Fork or Provo proceedings is if the judges in those cases require the defense to proffer exactly what Leavitt will testify to with respect to Hamblin and Stevenson’s alleged abuse of Emily Sheets. That has yet to happen, and it isn’t likely to happen.
Instead, Emily Sheets will wait. She has waited for decades as it is, given that her abuse occurred three decades ago. She will wait, and the clear aim of making her wait is to cause her to give up. Her life and the life of Tobias Schroeder have been upended. Emily Sheets purportedly struggles to function in day to day life as she wrestles with the enormity of what happened to her at the hands of David Lee Hamblin and his accomplices in the Church of Satan. She is isolated from the other victims, barred from speaking to them lest the defense raise the issue of contaminated testimony.
This is the context in which David Leavitt’s actions in June 2022 should be framed, because his press conference was not a lark or lapse in mental acuity. It was a deliberate effort to cloud, to obfuscate, and to obstruct, and it has been massively successful. It has enabled David Lee Hamblin to draw out his criminal cases for two years and counting.
The core of those cases is simple enough: who will a jury believe? Will they believe Emily Sheets and her eyewitnesses and fellow abuse victims Rachel Hamblin and Eliza Bradford, who were in the room with her when David Hamblin and Roselle Stevenson abused Emily? Will the jury believe David Lee Hamblin, a man who admitted that he sexually abused his patients as a clinical psychologist, a man who apologized on a recorded line to his daughter by saying “I am sorry for raping you”?
The jury will not believe David Lee Hamblin. That is why Hamblin’s strategy has been to delay, delay, and delay, in order to frustrate and exhaust Emily Sheets and Tobias Schroeder while also deterring his other accusers. The last place Hamblin wants to be is in a trial before a jury. That is why getting him to trial is vitally important. He will lose at trial, if and when he ever goes to trial.
These cases should not have taken two years, and they wouldn’t have taken two years, were the system in Utah not so completely and obviously corrupt. The government will plead incompetence to avoid conviction on charges of corruption. David Leavitt was not stupid when he held his press conference. He was corrupt, and he knew what his actions would lead to: delays as the State Attorney General was forced to find a special prosecutor in the Hamblin case, and further delays when Governor Spencer Cox nominated that prosecutor to a judgeship, and more delays when that prosecutor, Ryan Peters, motioned to transfer the case back to the Utah County Attorneys Office only to be denied by Judge Roger Griffin, with further delays coming when Judge Larsen in Manti recused herself from the Hamblin case there because she had carpooled with employees from the Utah County Attorneys Office twenty years ago.
Delay, delay, delay, deny victims their day in court and their moment at trial, deny victims the opportunity to have a jury decide if their allegations are true. The reality is that if David Hamblin faces a trial, he has every incentive to turn on David Leavitt and his other alleged accomplices in the Church of Satan. That is why he has not faced a trial. That is the context in which the issue of David Leavitt’s possible testimony in the Sheets and Schroeder cases should be considered.