WARNING: This article contains graphic content.

EDMONTON—A man described by his victims as a “monster” stood in Edmonton court Tuesday quoting Bible verses trying to justify the repeated violent sexual assaults of his daughter as God’s will.

“What I am is a man in love,” he said, adding “that particular love is deemed forbidden by our social standards.”

He also quoted from the Bible, “the wicked know no shame.”

The man — who cannot be named to protect the identity of his victims — has pleaded guilty to 10 charges of sexual assault, sexual exploitation, incest, making child pornography and improperly storing guns in connection to the sexual assaults on his three daughters between 2014 and 2016.

According to an agreed statement of facts, the man isolated his family on a rented acreage he turned into a sort of paramilitary compound outside of the hamlet of Wildwood, Alta. There he kept two dozen restricted guns and more than 15,000 rounds of ammunition, and home-schooled his five children in using firearms, military combat tactics and survival techniques.

While he admitted to sexually assaulting all three of his teenage daughters — telling the girls it was to prepare them for married life — his second-born daughter endured the most horrific abuse.

Beginning in 2014, when their mother was away at work, the man would take his middle daughter into his bedroom and sexually assault her. These assaults would happen multiple times a week.

When she turned 16, he made an online account that he used to arrange for strangers to join him in the sexual assaults.

Twice, the man bound and gagged his daughter before driving her and the men he contacted online to an undisclosed location, where he filmed, directed and participated in the abuse.

He would make his daughter rewatch footage of the assaults.

Court heard the man tried to set up half a dozen similar assaults, including talking to men in the United States about arranging a “gang rape party,” where they would pay $250,000 to abuse her.

When these plans would fall through, the man drove his daughter home to assault her himself.

The abuse only stopped after his son’s girlfriend found a USB drive with videos and photographs of the middle daughter being abused in 2016.

In incredibly emotional victim impact statements read in court in June, his daughters struggled to put their trauma into words.

Through tears, they described him as a “monster.”

The youngest said he was like a “violent animal that would turn on me at any moment,” as she described being haunted by what her father had done.

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“(He) is still haunting me, even though he is behind bars,” she said.

During sentencing arguments Monday, the agreed statement of facts was amended to include new admissions that the man had used his father to continue to harass his daughters while incarcerated, much to their distress.

But while Crown prosecutor Suvidha Kalra called the man’s actions “the stuff of nightmares,” the man characterized his abusive relationship with his middle daughter as similar to being a “husband and wife.”

The courtroom was tense as the man spoke for two hours during his sentencing hearing Tuesday, waffling between professing his devotion to his family and condemning them to eternal hellfire for their “disgraceful abandonment of me.”

He freely admitted to having sexual contact with his middle daughter — but made no direct mention of the allegations of sexual assaults on his other daughters beyond calling them “rotten, despicable people” — and said he was only guilty under “non-biblical, man-made laws.”

“I honestly believe the system is wrong,” he said.

He claimed he was the victim of an RCMP “witch hunt” and that his family was making up lies, demanding they be subjected to a polygraph test to bolster his “truth.”

He said of his middle daughter that God “commanded you to love me.”

He complained of his mistreatment in prison — having alleged he was assaulted by other inmates while incarcerated at the Edmonton Remand Centre, treatment that violated his charter rights and for which the court is giving him credit off of his final sentence — saying he has to sleep with earplugs in to drown out the death threats from other inmates.

The judge is expected to render his final decision on a sentence Thursday, the Crown having called for the man to serve an “unprecedented” 29 years behind bars, while the defence argued for a sentence in the range of 16 to 18 years.

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