Felix Urioste - a.k.a. Leasa Jensen, "wife" of Bruce Jensen - went public Monday night on tabloid television and told the world his husband did in fact know he was a man but wouldn't dare admit it.
"Beyond a shadow of a doubt," Jensen knew the person he was married to was a man, Urioste told "Inside Edition."Jensen, who was 39 at the time of the couple's marriage in the Salt Lake LDS Temple, replied, "It's a lie. A flat-out lie. I didn't know." The show airs in 95 percent of America and throughout Europe.
The TV tabloid ran exclusive interviews of the soon-to-be divorced Bountiful couple who were married as man and wife for 31/2 years. For the past several months, the two have been involved in a strange mix of deception and gender bending, ultimately ending in credit card fraud and court sentencing.
It all started when Jensen met Urioste, then posing as a woman named Leasa, at the University of Utah, he told the TV show. The couple fell in love and were married in the winter of 1991.
But in April 1995, Jensen filed a missing persons report when his "wife" took off after the marriage apparently went under due to excessive debt.
When found in Nevada, Jensen's wife was not a woman, Bountiful police told Jensen.
"They called me and said, `Your wife's a man,' " Jensen said. "It put me right down on the floor. . . . First I didn't believe it, then they verified it to me and said they had a physical with her, and it was a man."
When asked about sexual relations and how it could be that Jensen didn't know Urioste was a man, Jensen said, "Because she looked like a woman, physically. She took female hormones for 20 years."
After three months of marriage, Leasa told Jensen she was pregnant, and there were no more relations, ever, Jensen contends.
Not according to Urioste.
"It was a normal (sex life)," he said. "Once a week, I would say, at a minimum" for 31/2 years.
Urioste said he told his husband he was pregnant because Jensen "treated me good, and to me it was to make sure that this relationship worked."
After the wedding, Urioste claims Jensen found out his wife's true gender, but "he would rather die than admit the truth," Urioste said.
Urioste was sentenced last month to a year in jail for forging Jensen's name on a $1,500 check used to leave Bountiful.