SALT LAKE CITY (ABC 4 News) - We've all heard the expression trophy date, but these days the women are getting younger and some of the men come from the ranks of Utah's most conservative churches.
Some of these men attend services on Sunday, but play during the week with the help of a website designed to connect young attractive women with older men who have money.
Tommy who is 63-years-old connected with 21-year-old Monte. They've been together for two years. On the surface this couple looks like a typical May December relationship, but their relationship can better be described as an arrangement. "He's like I can help you get through school easy and you just travel with me have fun," Monte said.
They're an established sugar-daddy and sugar-baby. "When you walk into a room and you have a beautiful woman with you it's a complement to you," said Tommy.
Monte is one of Tommy's 7 sugar babies and he met them all on the website seekingarrangement.com, but is this legal for men to pay women to spend time with them even though it might end up with an intimate relationship?
"Some people would call this prostitution, but what does the law say about this?" asked ABC 4's Noah Bond. "I think this one here falls in the gray area. They (police) can't shut it (the website) down because it's not explicitly selling sex," said Attorney Greg Law.
Apparently as long as a woman is being paid for services besides sex, such as companionship, the act does not classify as prostitution. It's the same argument made by the owner of the website. "If the sugar daddy is in fact meeting a girl, um for sex and money then they're using website in violation of our terms of agreement," said seekingarrangement.com creator, Brandon Wade.
Wade says 71 percent of sugar daddy's in the beehive state identify as a Latter-day Saint and it's not just the men who are LDS, with only a few phone calls ABC 4's Noah Bond found a sugar baby who said she was raised Mormon, even though she has since stopped participating in Church activities. She doesn't want to be identified so we'll call her Molly.
"It's a mutually beneficial thing," she said.
A mutually beneficial relationship maybe but a sexual relationship too if the price is right. "$2,000 to $5,000 monthly," Molly said. Molly says she grew up in a large family in a small Provo home. She found men who wanted to pay her for her company when she was broke and had no where else to turn.
"Sign me up. They want to support you. They want to help you," said Molly.
I learned she had three relationships with what she said were older, active Latter-day Saint men. They enjoyed her intimate companionship on the days they weren't in church. To be clear the Latter-day Saint Church strictly prohibits sexual relations outside of a marriage.
Her oldest relationship was with a man in his fifties, a man old enough to be her grandfather. "After awhile I got a little bit more comfortable with the age difference. It was a lot nicer being at his house because being out in public it was so so awkward," Molly said. "People would sit there and stare at you, make you feel like you were doing something wrong," said continued.
In some ways the relationship was good to Molly. She could pay her bills, had extra money and life was easy.
"Is this a good thing? Is this the way to go?" Bond asked. "I would have to say no honestly," replied Molly.
In time, the lies and discomfort from dating a man at least forty-years-older became too much. "You'll sacrifice a lot of integrity. A lot of family relationships. I don't know how many times I've had to lie about who I was with or what I was doing," said Molly.
She ended her relationships and took her name off the website and she's hoping to never turn back. "It's a lot more rewarding to get a job and work for it," Molly said.
According Wade, there are 2,200 sugar daddies and over 14,000 sugar babies in Utah.
