Ex-wife describes home life with NJ man accused of impregnating daughters

Ex-wife describes life in NJ incest rape trial

PATERSON, N.J. — A man accused of impregnating his daughters, insisting all offspring be born at home to avoid registration, constantly threatened his children with the reminder that no one knew they existed, his ex-wife testified Wednesday.

During two days of testimony, the woman offered a glimpse into a once-promising teenage romance that descended into a marriage of extreme behavior control, brutal physical abuse, and prosecutors say, rape and incest.

“He would say (to the children) that no one knew about their births, that if they spoke of anything he would kill us, that he would cut us up and bury us,” the woman said.

The man, who was arrested in 2006 and ruled competent to stand trial this year, has pleaded not guilty to 27 charges including sexual assault, lewdness, child endangerment and criminal sexual contact. He is accused of raping five of his daughters and impregnating three, who are believed to have given birth to a total of six children.

The Associated Press generally doesn’t identify victims of sexual crimes and is not naming the man or his former wife to protect the identities of their children, who are now all older than 18.

This week marked the start of the first of five trials, one for each child he’s accused of victimizing. The daughter at the center of the first trial is scheduled to testify next week.

Pretrial testimony and opening statements from the prosecution said the man was driven by apocalyptic visions to try to create “pure” family bloodlines by impregnating several of his teenager daughters so only his offspring would remain when the world came to an end.

The man’s former wife testified that he constantly read the Bible and other religious texts, spoke of being an incarnation of Jesus Christ and made her address him as “My God.”

On Wednesday, the woman described elaborate house rules imposed by the man, including a severely restricted vegetarian diet consisting sometimes of only rice and butter, prohibiting the couple’s nine children from ever attending school, and forbidding them from having friends or unsupervised interactions with the outside world.

Wednesday’s testimony included graphic descriptions of beatings on children as young as 2. The woman said her ex-husband used his fists, a wad of belts, and a steel-toed boot to strike his children, and in one instance, a wooden 2-by-4 plank to hit her in front of their children.

“I fell to the ground crying and I couldn’t feel my legs,” she said. “The kids were all there, but they couldn’t come to assist me — they knew not to.”

Although their first two children were born in hospitals, and a third was registered with the state to be eligible for a government food assistance program, the man eventually insisted on delivering the children at home. He forbade them from seeing doctors and told his wife that black parents like themselves shouldn’t allow vaccinations, which he believed were a plot to kill black children.

During cross-examination, the man’s attorney questioned how well the woman, now in her early 50s, could recollect decades-old events, and whether she had a history of distorting the facts.

Superior Court Judge Raymond A. Reddin ruled previously that testimony about the home environment and what happened to the other children would be narrowly allowed. The absence of such details, Reddin said in his ruling, could make the case totally unbelievable to jurors.

The woman was constrained in her testimony Wednesday about what she knew about the daughter who is scheduled to testify. She said only that she was surprised to discover that the girl, who had never been allowed unsupervised contact with outsiders and had never had a boyfriend, had become pregnant at age 15.

The woman said that shortly after learning of the pregnancy, she moved to New York with her daughter and several of her other children, separating from her husband and obtaining a restraining order against him.

The judge’s restrictions on including details from the other cases precluded the woman from talking about whether the pregnancy was the first of her children’s or what else led to her decision to leave.