Judge Randall Skanchy issued his Memorandum Opinion in the ongoing stalking case involving Joe and Lee Bennion today, and it is rife with misrepresentation and error. I filed two motions to dismiss the case, the second of which the Bennions never responded to within the designated time limit. I filed the motion to dismiss on October 7, 2024; the Bennions did not answer until November 27, 2024. While the Bennions enjoyed the luxury of my timely responses and answers to each of their filings in compliance with the Rules of Civil Procedure, they routinely ignored the same requirements of those rules in their filings.
With respect to discovery, the Bennions filed broad requests well beyond what would be permitted under the Rules, and they were allowed to do so by the Sixth District. They never filed any answer to my discovery requests within the 28 day time limit. This would typically give rise to the court deeming the requests for admissions to be admitted as true. Here are the specific requests for admissions from my First Discovery Request on September 8, 2024.
It would have been simple enough to deny or admit under oath each of the 15 requests; instead, the Bennions ignored the entirety of discovery. While the requests were broad, at this juncture the Sixth District had allowed the Bennions free rein to engage in broad discovery requests, which culminated in their deposition of Ken Krogue, whose actions in dusting his feet off on the steps of Horseshoe Mountain Pottery were admittedly his own. In the deposition and during his testimony in the evidentiary hearing, Krogue testified under oath-truthfully-that I had never instructed or encouraged him to commit that specific action or any other act in approaching the Bennions or their property.
In fact, I explicitly instructed readers of this Substack not to approach or harass or confront any alleged member of the Church of Satan. I did so in multiple articles. The Bennions cited a specific article which Judge Skanchy referenced in his memorandum opinion, and that article contained the following meme:
As you can see, the meme explicitly rules out physical attacks against the fat, retarded, infertile demon worshippers. The article is referenced in the Verified Petition filed by the Bennions with the following quote:
As the meme says, they are fat, retarded, infertile demon worshippers. Treat them as such, with their rainbow flags and their pandering embraces of whatever flavor of the moment is being pushed by cable news. They deserve your ridicule, and they deserve to be excluded and even bullied because they are weird and inappropriate. The price of membership in the Restored Church is that you play by the rules, and these people clearly don’t. It is entirely appropriate to expel them and exclude them before they rot the Church from within even more than they already have. We are also entitled to say what we will and will not tolerate in our communities and neighborhoods.
According to Judge Skanchy, advocating for the excommunication of those whose personal beliefs and practices constitute apostasy according to the very Church they attend is stalking. Ridiculing the absurdity of Latter Day Saints who support abortion, gay marriage, transgenderism, and a host of other unbiblical positions and practices is stalking, because its mean and it makes those Latter Day Saints uncomfortable. If they say it makes them fear for their lives and well-being, that’s sufficient to make your acts stalking according to the Bennions and Judge Skanchy.
The article in question made it clear that I was encouraging Latter Day Saints to excommunicate those who clearly do not believe what the Church teaches, and whose actions are completely out of alignment with the Church’s doctrine:
Every Latter Day Saint ward I have ever attended, like every Southern Baptist Church I have ever attended as a child, has at least one mother hen with a will of iron and an eagle’s eye. Most wards and churches and parishes have multiple such women, all colluding to police their congregations with ruthless vigilance. Let them do it, with acid tongues and wicked, pithy wits. There are plenty of older men, hardened by life and marriage, who can do the same thing, if only they are free to do so without having to worry about being classified as bigoted jerks.
The likes of David Lee Hamblin and Joe Bennion would be nothing more than sawdust after encounters with such men and women, who do not suffer weird or inappropriate behavior. The men and women who carved a livable existence out of the frontiers of Zion were not soft. They hung and shot those who behaved like David Lee Hamblin and Joe Bennion and Gordon Bowen, and they were right.
Christ came to offer grace, but those who reject grace with their depravity are entitled to wrath. The problem that we have today is that we have falsely conceptualized mercy as a panacea for even the most degenerate behaviors, and we have bought into a notion of forgiveness that extends to those who do not request forgiveness and make no sincere effort at contrition. You have to say you’re sorry, and ask for forgiveness, and then be sorry and turn away from the conduct you engaged in that caused harm or offense in order to confirm that you are sorry.
In a year and four months of working on the Hamblin case, I have encountered example after example of a false grace extended to those who made a request of forgiveness from their victims but demonstrated no real contrition or change either before or afterwards. Their victims were obligated to accept the apology, to forgive, to forget, and to move on, but the abusers were free to continue abusing with impunity. This is wrong.
We’re right to be mean to those who act like David Lee Hamblin and David Leavitt and Joe Bennion. This is an easy battle as long as we don’t accept the terms that they impose on the debate or the argument, and those terms are clearly unbiblical and dishonest. I challenge everyone to stop making this more complicated than it needs to be, because these men did plenty of things that would have warranted excommunication and disfellowship before you even get to the allegations of child rape and murder.
In short, what I advocated for in the article was for Latter Day Saints to show some backbone and stand up for what they purportedly believe by addressing the legions of Saints whose behavior and public embrace of sinful conduct-and their attempt to normalize or classify sin as righteousness-with membership councils. The reality is that Joe Bennion, David Lee Hamblin, Paul Larsen, and others were engaged in the use of peyote in Native American religious ceremonies as part of James Mooney’s Oklevueha Native American Church, whose doctrines and believes are incompatible with those of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. There is no reasonable interpretation of LDS belief that accommodates the use of a Schedule I substance in a religious context.
Writing that pioneer Saints would have hung and shot those who raped and murdered children is not a controversial statement: it is the truth. Capital punishment was real in 19th century Utah. It’s real today. At no point in that paragraph did I say for modern day Saints to “take the law into their own hands to shoot or hang anyone.” In fact, I explicitly made it clear that I was committed to achieving my objectives through the legal process, a fact that the Bennions acknowledged in their own filings and which Judge Skanchy conveniently omitted in his memorandum opinion.
Writing that those who publicly belong to the Church while espousing positions that are biblically an doctrinally opposite that of the Church should be excommunicated is not a controversial or unreasonable statement: it is the truth, and it is what churches do to those who reject what the church believes. The churches who don’t tolerate the presence of members whose obvious purpose is to undermine and erode the church from within by discrediting its doctrines with their behavior.
If you belong to a club, you have to follow the club’s rules. The members of the CS do not follow the rules, even before you get into whether or not the allegations of child rape and murder are true. They were and are heretics. David Lee Hamblin and Gordon Bowen were excommunicated, as was James Warren “Flaming Eagle” Mooney. The question is why Joe and Lee Bennion were not, even as they publicly embraced and supported gay marriage, abortion, and transgenderism.
The net effect of Judge Skanchy’s ruling is this: members of a church are unable to engage in criticism or mockery of the obvious absurdity of a Latter Day Saint who supports unbiblical and apostate positions without running the risk of a heretic running to the courts to get a stalking injunction. They cannot castigate or object to an alleged child rapist or child murderer holding a ward calling that gives them access to children without running the risk of the court considering their acts as a violation of the stalking statute. In short, Judge Skanchy puts the courts in the business of regulating what ward members may or may not say in opposition to open apostasy within their own church. I advocated for membership councils for CS members, and that was cited by the Bennions in their filings as stalking.
The Bennions admitted in their filings that they could not show that any of the harassing phone calls they allegedly received were connected to my writing. They could not show that the egging of Horseshoe Mountain Pottery was connected to me. Ken Krogue explicitly testified that I never instructed him to dust his feet off on the steps of Horseshoe Mountain Pottery.
The memorandum opinion appears to state that my desire to “make offenders uncomfortable” is proof of my objective to harass and annoy Joe and Lee Bennion, even though that statement references those who rape and murder children rather than the Bennions. My goal in identifying, disclosing, and destroying” those who engage in child rape was held up by Judge Skanchy as evidence of stalking with respect to the Bennions, which is odd. If the Bennions do not engage in such activities, there is nothing for me to expose or destroy, and the Bennions have no reason to be uncomfortable.
The fact that Joe and Lee Bennion refused to answer any question as to their alleged membership or participation in the criminal acts outlined in the Hamblin Victims Statements under oath speaks volumes. The Bennions fought to avoid being deposed on those issues, and to avoid being questioned at the evidentiary hearing about those allegations, which they included in their own Verified Petition. As such, those issues were relevant to the case. They were relevant to the Bennions’ status as reasonable people under the stalking statute.
In essence, Judge Skanchy-as well as the other two judges who handled this case in the Sixth District-enabled alleged child rapists and murderers to contend that writing about the criminal acts against them were stalking, while avoiding any obligation to address whether or not the allegations were true. Every accused criminal in the state of Utah can point to this case to argue that anyone who reports on the allegations against them and advocates for punishment and excommunication if those allegations are true is guilty of stalking. That’s the net effect of this memorandum opinion.
A reasonable and innocent person would have zero issue denying that they were members of the Church of Satan under oath. They would have no issue denying that they participated in child rape and murder.
When I cross examined Joe Bennion under oath and went through each act within the stalking statute, he had to admit under oath that I had not committed a single act under the statute. This would mean that the initial injunction was not warranted. Joe Bennion testified under oath that his position was that writing about the allegations against him constituted a violation of the stalking statute. That has always been the Bennions’ position, and it has always been the purpose of this lawsuit: to stifle any attempt to examine, investigate, or determine the truth or falsity of the allegations against them.
That is the goal of the Bennions, and it is apparently a goal shared by Judge Randall Skanchy. As a matter of law and fact, Judge Skanchy’s decision is plain error. I will appeal it. The courts have zero business using a criminal or civil statute to regulate or curb speech, even speech that is offensive. If the Bennions feel that I have defamed them, they can sue me for defamation. The fact that they have not speaks volumes, as does the fact that they have never sued Rachel, Eliza, or Katherine Hamblin for defamation.
Instead, the Bennions have sought to sue Jason and Alexia Preston of We Are the People Utah for defamation, even though their show clearly couched the reporting against them in the context of an allegation. It is lawfare, just as the stalking proceedings are lawfare. It is further confirmation of the Hamblin sisters’ allegation that Utah is place where members of groups like the CS can rely on a deeply corrupt and unfair establishment to run interference on their behalf to keep them from facing membership councils in their wards, or from being investigated by journalists. This is accomplished through the abuse of the legal process.
It will not go unopposed.
I’ll see them in the appellate courts as far as I have to go to get this overturned. I will not stop writing about these allegations, or continuing to investigate.
Deus Vult.