'John the Revelator': Mann Act conviction for transporting a girl told she would bear a redeemer
Request a correction or replyRecord class
Separate register
Evidence status
Convicted
Authority role
self-styled prophet within the Peace Mission movement, addressed by followers as a divine figure
Organization
Peace Mission movement (follower)
Archive classification
This is the archive's application of its published inclusion test. The cited record appears below.
Hunt held himself out to the girl as a divinely appointed prophet — a status other Peace Mission followers treated as genuine in their court testimony — and it was that claimed authority, in the specific form of naming her the Virgin Mary carrying a divine child, that secured her compliance and separated her from her family.
- Prophecy or divine command
- Threatened spiritual consequence
- Sacred sex, purity, or sexual-energy claim
Evidence structure
Proceedings
1937-01-01 · conviction and sentence
United States federal court, California. John Wuest Hunt, a follower of Father Divine's Peace Mission movement who took the name 'John the Revelator' and was addressed by followers as a divine figure, was convicted under the Mann Act of transporting a 17-year-old girl across state lines for immoral purposes and sentenced to three years. He had met her in Denver in December 1936, told her she was the reincarnated Virgin Mary destined to bear a new redeemer by immaculate conception, and transported her to California, where the sexual relationship began under that religious framing.
Documented coercion mechanisms
- claim that the victim was the reincarnated Virgin Mary destined to bear a new redeemer
- isolation from her family across state lines
- religious status treated as genuine by surrounding followers
Cited record
Sources
- contemporaneous court reporting trial report 'West Aid Reveals: Attorney in Mann Act Case Says Cultist Will Take Charge Out Here', Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), 25 June 1937, p. 3.
Contemporaneous press covering the federal Mann Act prosecution, the religious claims Hunt made to the girl, and follower testimony treating his prophetic status as genuine. Retrieved from the Library of Congress Chronicling America collection.
Source provenance
Source access and integrity log
This log records source retrieval and file integrity. It does not mean that an automated process independently confirmed every statement in the source.
- Source and tier basis
- https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83045462/1937-06-25/ed-1/?sp=3 Corpus classification: contemporaneous-court-reporting; evidentiary role: trial-report.
- Retrieval
- 2026-07-27 · Retrieval failed
- Bound by Fear automated source-preservation ledger
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