“It is a fact, so well known, that the Twelve and their adherents have endeavored to carry on this spiritual wife business in secret, that I hardly need mention it here, and have gone to the most seameful [shameful] and desperate lengths, to keep it from the public. First, insulting innocent females, and when they resented the insult, these monsters in human shape would assail their characters by lying, and perjuries, with a multitude of desperate men to help them to effect the ruin of those whom they had insulted, and all this to enable them to keep these corrupt practices from the view of the world. I could bring facts which can be established in any court of justice, in relation to these vile abominations practiced under the garb of religion that would make humanity blush. No falsehood too great, and no perjury too daring, in order to conceal these heaven-daring abuses of mankind …

“How often have these men and their accomplices stood up before the congregation, and called God and all the holy Angels to witness, that there was no such doctrine taught in the church; and it has now come to light, by testimony which cannot be gainsaid, that at the time they thus dared heaven and insulted the world, they were living in the practice of these enormities; and there were multitudes of their followers in the congregation at the time who knew it.”

Sidney Rigdon, Messenger and Advocate – Volume I, No. 1. (Pittsburgh, PA: The Latter-day Saint’s Messenger and Advocate, 15 October 1844), 14.