After taking his pregnant daughter to Missouri so that she could marry her rapist, an Idaho man has now been sentenced to spend about four months behind bars.
According to the Idaho State Journal, the father pleaded guilty to injury to a child and a judge sentenced him to 120 days in jail and a three-year period of supervised probation.
This 120-day sentence isn’t arbitrary—it represents the approximate length of the marriage. Seventh District Judge Gregory Moeller told the man at sentencing, “While you sit in jail, you will sit and think about the 120 days your daughter was in a vile farce of a marriage to a rapist because of you.”
The father’s reasoning for his outrageous action was simply that a man should marry a woman whom he gets pregnant.
The 24-year-old man, who has since been charged with felony rape and sentenced to 15 years in prison, met the victim because their families worked together. She found out she was pregnant in the summer of 2015, according to the Associated Press. She and the man claimed they were in love and wanted to raise the child together—so the girl’s father took them to Missouri to get married without telling her mother. The Idaho State Journal reports that the couple stayed together for about four months before the marriage was annulled and the pregnancy ended in a miscarriage. While the father claimed he never wanted to hurt his daughter, the judge had harsh words, saying, “Clearly, your daughter underwent great bodily harm based on some of your choices.”