October 30, 2024 • 47 mins
Warning: This episode contains content related to child sex abuse. Listen with care.
The seizure of a video from a New Zealand paedophile sparks a dizzying chain of events in faraway Arizona: an arrest, a suicide – and revelations that a serial child rapist had confessed to his Mormon bishop, and the church had used its “Abuse Helpline” to cover it up.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Before we dive into this episode, you should know that
it contains pretty disturbing details about child abuse and incest,
so listen with care. But there's also some people who
tirelessly fight against this sort of stuff. Have a look
at our show notes for numbers for support services if
you need them.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
It's dawn in Rural Whitkator, November twenty sixteen. Simon Peterson
is about to execute a search warrant.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
There was a farm down Cambridgeway. A bunch of officers
invests for all the year, rocking up to your house,
knocking on the door.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Inside the rundown house is a suspect. Simon and his
team have been monitoring for two months.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
We had an interest in this particular person. In this
chat room. They were sharing material, so they were committing offending.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
And now it's time to confront the man, or, as
Simon rather delicately puts it.
Speaker 3 (01:02):
Kind of invading your space for a while to try
and establish the offending and find the evidence.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
At first, there was some denial from the forty seven
year old farm worker.
Speaker 3 (01:12):
A lot of people won't I meant to us some well,
but a lot of people won't to it. So the
work's on us to find the evidence and that's what
we'll do. So we're typically looking for devices that could
have been used to offend.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Simon's at the house for six hours.
Speaker 3 (01:27):
So we found the devices that were interested in as
phone was one of them, and he had more material
already stored, which was enough for us to seize the
devices and aristom as well.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
They took him to Hamilton Police Station where he was
processed and interviewed, and soon he was in court.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
He played guilty pretty quickly. He wasn't mucking around.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
Guilty of possession of child sexual abuse material. The man
was sentenced to home detention and his name was added
to the child's sex offenders registered. It was a depressingly
routine police operation with a depressingly routine outcome, but what
happened next was far from routine. That morning raid in
(02:13):
rural New Zealand set off a chain of events that
would drastically change lives in a tiny Arizona town and
reverberate all the way to Salt Lake City, Utah.
Speaker 4 (02:26):
In an interview with investigation associates abuse let it keeping,
they clearly tolerated the abuse.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
I'm Maurray Jones and This is Heaven's Helpline, a six
part New Zealand Herald investigation into the Mormon Church in
Altero and beyond, Episode four the Helpline. Simon Peterson is
the Chief Customs Officer in the Child Exploitation Operations Team
(03:02):
at New Zealand Customs.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
Predominantly we deal with the movement of child sexual exploitation
material or objectionable publications, so we're looking at people who
are trading this material with other people around the world,
across our cyber border we call it.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
In late twenty sixteen, Simon was a year into his
role in the unit.
Speaker 3 (03:24):
So as a new investigator, but.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
Even as a newbie, he'd still seen some horrific things
in the dark corners of the Internet or on people's
phones or on their hard drives. You have to develop
a pretty thick skin for this work and good coping mechanisms,
including stepping away from your screen.
Speaker 3 (03:44):
You don't know when something's going to hit you and
it just doesn't feel right. So that's always a possibility
is you'll come across something you can't conceive of and
you just need to go and take a break.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
After the dawn Raiding Cambridge, Simon began the routine process
of going through the offender's cataloging all the files, including
still images and videos.
Speaker 3 (04:05):
There's fully simple prices of chicking it against what we
are in you marking the ones we don't know.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
Simon needs to catalog the material for the purposes of prosecution.
But the thing that he said about separating what we
already knew from the ones we don't know. What he's
talking about there is something that arises from the disturbing
fact that once a child's sexual abuse video has been
posted somewhere on the Internet, it's basically out there.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
Forever, we could have a thousand stuff and still not
touch the sides of us. Is that much going on?
Speaker 2 (04:37):
No matter how many people might be arrested for possessing it,
no matter how many hard drives and phones get seized,
there'll always be another copy of it being shared or
sold or swapped online, year after year after year. So
law enforcement agencies have developed an international system where each
(04:57):
offending computer file is indexed using what's called a hash. Basically,
they generate a digital fingerprint of that file. This means
investigators like Simon don't have to watch and rewatch every
single abuse video on the countless devices they sees, they
can instead compare the hash values to that database and
(05:18):
go right, that's one of the ones we already knew about,
and that means it's easy to spot if an image
or video is new to the Internet because it won't
already be on Interpol's database.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
So one of those videos, when we put it throughout
international collaboration, we checked it against the hash databases. It
came back as it's not known, so it's the first
red flaggers that's not been No other law enforcement in
the world has indicated that they've seen this by hashing out.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
This nine minute video that was found on the phone
of a man in Cambridge and New Zealand hasn't been
seen by law enforcement before, so it was probably created
relatively recently. And that's really important.
Speaker 3 (06:05):
Behind every investigation though, is a concern for the victims
that are shown on material that we're dealing with.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
And this video from the Cambridge raid, it contained some
strong potential leads.
Speaker 3 (06:16):
That video had some good markers on that for victim identification.
We could see that I could tell straight away it
was American and that it was probably West Coast American.
I won't go into all the details, but excent was
pretty clear, and there are a couple of other features
that I won't describe that made us think it was
probably West Coast America.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
So Simon uploaded it to the Interpolar system and marked
it for investigators in the US.
Speaker 3 (06:40):
And see, you guys might want have look at us.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
Simon's upload was acknowledged by the United States National Center
for Missing and Exploited Children or NCMEC. People call it NICKMK.
Speaker 3 (06:54):
In the ind of win quiet and it always does.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
It's incredibly hard to identify and locate children who are
being abused in this type of material. In most cases,
Simon doesn't hear anything more.
Speaker 3 (07:07):
And that's cool. We know we don't need to hear back,
but in this particular case we did.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
Early one Friday morning, a couple of months after the
Cambridge case referral to Interpol, Simon sat down at his
l shaped desk at the office in Central Auckland.
Speaker 3 (07:26):
Logged on, fired up the computer, opened up the email
that was sitting in the inbox. They just had a
simple message in there saying great news. We've identified the
offender and he's been arrested. And we've subsequently identified and
safeguarded the cat as well. I still remember it. Sorry,
(07:48):
I had to get up and walk out. It's pretty shaky. Yeah,
I don't know why I get emotional about it.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
I think it's understandable.
Speaker 3 (08:02):
Yeah, I guess it was probably my first, the first
case that i'd had that had that sort of outcome
communicator back. That's probably why the response was installers quite viscable.
I've done cases since then and I don't respond the
same way, so maybe that's what it does. It was, Yeah,
(08:24):
quite powerful. Ultimately, that's the point of what we're doing,
is to particulards and get the Metahum's way.
Speaker 4 (08:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (08:32):
And it doesn't happen often. Sorry, when it Heavens is good.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
The kid from the video that Simon helped to save
she had been living at the end of a dirt
road on the outskirts of Bisbee, a small old copper
mining town in Arizona, about eighteen kilometers north of the
Mexican border, population five thousand. I need to give you
another content warning here. The next couple of minutes is
pretty graphic and deals with child sexual abuse. This was
(09:04):
the Adam's household, father Paul, mother Lisa, and six children
living in a three bedroom home surrounded by desert, out
of the way of prying eyes. Lisa Adams was in
charge of household duties, getting the children off to school
and to church on Sunday. Paul Adams worked as a
US Border Patrol agent. Legal documents paint a picture of
(09:29):
a disordered house, littered with piles of clothing. I've seen
photos of their house up on a shelf, a sign
saying family sits below a large picture of Jesus. A
wall hanging reeds bless this family as it dangles from
a curtain rail. Also around the house were containers of lubricant,
which Paul Adams would use when he sexually abused his daughters.
(09:55):
He began raping one daughter, referred to as MJ and
media report from the age of five, possibly even younger.
He started sexually assaulting one of MJ's younger sisters when
she was six weeks old. When Adams was assaulting MJ,
he would make her hold his smartphone to record it
(10:16):
on video. He would then upload the videos to internet
chat rooms, where he bragged he was living the perfect
lifestyle because he could rape his daughters whenever he wanted,
and his wife knew and doesn't care. And one of
those videos a nine minute clip recorded when MJ was
ten years old. It was shared and re shared until
(10:40):
about two years later it ended up on at Cambridge
pedophile's phone that was seized in a raid. Then US
authorities use facial recognition technology to search for the offender,
and because Paul Adams was a border guard, a federal employee,
he was swiftly idd. Agents descended on the border station
(11:02):
in Naco, Arizona and arrested Adams. Under interrogation, he admitted
to raping MJ and sexually assaulting her younger sister and
uploading videos of the assaults to the Internet, and after
raiding the Adams home, agents found four thousand photos and
one thousand videos of child sex abuse, many featuring his daughters.
(11:30):
Paul Adams was arrested and charged, but before his case
got any further, he committed suicide. Lisa Adams, the mother,
pleaded no contest to child sex abuse charges and served
two and a half years in state prison. Three of
the Adams children went to live with members of Lisa's
extended family, while the other three were taken in by
(11:53):
local families. Unbelievable, unspeakable, trauma for these girls, but at
least they had been rescued from that house, rescued by
a chain of strangers, by a customs officer on the
other side of the world, by officials at Nitmick, by
the Homeland Security agents who got a confession out of
(12:16):
Paul Adams that day at the US Mexico border. Which
makes the next part of this story all the more
astonishing because and you're probably way ahead of me here,
Simon Peterson wasn't the first person outside of the Adam's
household or a dark web chat room to learn about
the abuse. Paul Adams had been a member of the
(12:36):
Mormon Church, and two of his bishops had known about
the abuse and never told police. The first bishop learned
about the abuse in twenty ten. Paul Adams was arrested
in twenty seventeen, seven years of lost opportunity to stop
(13:01):
a pedophile whose offending was about as extreme and blatant
as it's possible to get extreme. But there are similarities
to what we've already heard from Mormons in Altai Rowa.
You know the drill. There's abuse, a bishop is told,
(13:21):
then nothing much happens. But in twenty twenty two, the
Associated Press broke a story that contained astonishing new insight
into how and why those cover ups happened. This was
the AP story that I heard midway through my own reporting,
the one that forced me to reevaluate what I thought
(13:43):
I knew about cases like this. The AP story broke
five years after Paul adams arrest and suicide because when
the Adam's children got older, three of them decided to
sue the Mormon Church over the bishop's failure to report
what they knew.
Speaker 5 (14:01):
Peter Mario has a shocking story in Tonight's Use for
Tucson Investigation.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
This twenty four page civil complaint was just filed in
Coachie's County against members of a Bisbee church, accusing them
of not protecting their youngest members. And as that lawsuit
kicked off, it became obvious that the cover up of
Paul Adams's abuse went way higher up the church hierarchy
than just the local bishops. The details get complicated, but
(14:30):
boiled right down, here's what happened. MJ was just five
when her father first confessed to a bishop that he
had sexually abused her. This was Bishop Herod. He was
a doctor by profession. Lisa Adams was one of his patients.
Bishop Herod called the church for advice. He was told
(14:50):
that confessions are confidential and that he could be sued
if he reported it to the police, so he didn't. Instead,
he tried to count Paul Adams to repent, to move
out of the home, to turn himself in, but Adams
continued to rape his daughter, so Bishop Herod tried another attack.
(15:12):
During a counseling session with Adams, he invited Lisa Adams
along in the hope that as the mother, she might
be able to protect her children. Did that work? No,
it didn't. The rapes continued and Adams started uploading videos
onto the Internet. Then a new bishop took over the ward.
(15:34):
This was Bishop Mawsey. Before Bishop Herod left, he passed
the details of the Adams situation to Bishop Morsey, and
Bishop Morsey called the church just like Herod. He wanted
some guidance on how to handle this nightmare, and just
like Herod, he was warned not to contact the police,
but he was offered a new suggestion, convene a disciplinary counsel,
(15:58):
you know, like the one Jade faced after admitting to
an affair. And this church court did its job. Adams
was excommunicated kicked out of the church. From the church's perspective,
the matter was resolved well. Except for this, Paul Adams
kept raping his daughter and no one told the police.
(16:23):
It would be another four years, during which time another
daughter was born and almost immediately victimized before Adams was arrested.
In a response to the AP story, the church said
AP had misrepresented the extent of the abuse that the
bishops were aware of. It argued that the first Bishop, Herod,
was only aware of a single case of abuse from
(16:46):
a limited confession from Paul Adams, and was not aware
if it was ongoing. But when questioned by law enforcement,
Herod said he assumed the abuse had stopped and never
asked if it picked up again.
Speaker 6 (17:00):
Just said, hey, let's excommunicate her father. It didn't stop,
Let's have them go to therapy. It didn't stop. Hey,
let's forgive and forget and this will I'll go away.
It didn't go away. They just let it keep happening.
Speaker 2 (17:20):
That was MJ speaking to the Associated Press for that
twenty twenty two report. By then she was sixteen. Her
foster parents talked about her remarkable resilience and how she
was doing well at school. New Zealand customs officer Simon
Peterson was interviewed for that AP report as well. It
(17:40):
was five years since he'd started the chain of events
that would save MJ, but it still hit him hard.
Speaker 3 (17:48):
It's a mux. It's hippy, said, you said, because of
what's happened, you said for the kid. But you're happy
as well that this is with you right now. You know.
They go through a lot once, as arristed in the
situation as ended, it could hiss a deal with so
much that they shouldn't have to deal with most ay
lots don't have to worry about.
Speaker 2 (18:16):
Look, after hearing the stories from New Zealand, from people
like Caroline and Jade, people like Neville and Jenny, perhaps
I shouldn't have been so shocked by the Paul Adams
story and the church's failure to report his crimes.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
But I was.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
I was dumbfounded, to be honest, because after hearing the
New Zealand stories, I'd been getting the sense that there
was a culture, an instinct perhaps for local church leaders
to want to deal with things in house, and a
lot of it seemed to be based on an absolutist
view about keeping the family together at all costs. But
(18:53):
this case from Arizona, and the really detailed coverage of
who told which bishop when, and which bishop did what next,
and exactly what the church advised and how they delivered
that advice. It showed that in the American Church at least,
this wasn't just an instinct or a culture. This was
(19:13):
church policy. The church guidelines were that if a bishop
was told about sexual abuse within a ward, the first
thing they should do was pick up the phone and
call a dedicated sexual abuse helpline run by the church itself,
(19:34):
a helpline not for victims, but rather for bishops and
state presidents. In the Paul Adams case, when bishops rang
that number, they soon found themselves talking to a lawyer,
and that lawyer told them not to call the police.
The ap story lifted the lid on a systematic, organized
(19:57):
process overseen by church lawyers, enabled through this helpline. And
the crazy thing is the church wasn't even breaking the
law by giving this advice. After the break, I'll explain
how that could even be possible.
Speaker 6 (20:21):
I must confess to you.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
We need to talk.
Speaker 6 (20:24):
I must tell someone.
Speaker 2 (20:26):
About something called priest penitent privilege.
Speaker 5 (20:29):
I want to make a confession.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
It's actually a pretty familiar idea. If you're a Christian
and you've done something wrong and you're seeking God's forgiveness,
you are technically known as a penitent, someone who repents,
and in many Christian denominations you're encouraged to act on
that by finding a priest and making a confession. The
interesting bit is that everything a penitent says to a
priest in the privacy of the confession is automatically confidential,
(20:58):
which is why there are so many books and movies
like that nineteen fifties Hitchcock thriller that you just heard
a clip from, where the plot revolves around something like
a murderer confessing to a priest and the priests getting
tied up in knots about what to do next. In
certain countries, this confidentiality between a penitent and their priest
is not just a church thing. It's actually part of
(21:19):
the law of the land, a legal privilege. And there's
your name, priest penitent privilege. And I'm going to say
it so many times in the next three minutes that
I'm going to call it PPP for sure. Now In
jurisdictions where PPP is a thing. A priest, a pastor,
or a bishop whatever, cannot be forced in a trial
to reveal the contents of a confession they have received
(21:40):
from a member of their faith. So back to Arizona
and the awful Paul Adams case. There it was PPP
that the church was leaning on when it advised those
two Arizona bishops not to report the abuse of MJ.
The bishops have said the advice they got was that
they risk being personally suit or the church being sued
(22:02):
if they went to police. But the fact is the
church doesn't just lean on PPP, it also works hard
to prop it up. Mormon politicians and lobbyists have fought
really hard to preserve priest penitent privilege in more than
thirty US states. Alongside other religious groups, they've successfully pushed
back against new laws which would make it easier to
(22:24):
report sexual abuse revealed during a confession. To make this
extra confusing is the fact that Arizona also has mandatory
reporting laws, which means certain people such as doctors, teachers,
and social workers are actually legally required to pass information
(22:44):
about child sex abuse to civil authorities. In other words,
if they do not report abuse, they can face criminal prosecution,
but the church argues that PPP overrides these reporting obligations.
But quite aside from whether that legal advice to the
Arizona bishops was right or wrong, the thing that really
(23:07):
stuck out for me in that AP story was the
way the bishops got that advice.
Speaker 5 (23:13):
What the policy of this church is is to call
what's called a helpline.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
The idea of a sexual abuse helpline. It sounds sensible, right,
But why is it bishops who get to call it
rather than victims? Why do those bishops end up connecting
with church lawyers rather than I don't know, train sexual
abuse counselors. In the church's online manual of Guidelines and Procedures,
(23:39):
they say the helpline is an effective way to inform
untrained leaders of their legal obligations, which I guess makes
sense sort of, And in response to the AP story,
the church said that the abuse helpline has everything to
do with protecting children and has nothing to do with
cover up. It's a a yes. The purpose of the
(24:00):
helpline is in part to directly report the abuse to authorities,
regardless of legal exemptions from reporting requirements. When it is
known that a child is in imminent danger. The church
claims that the helpline routine reports cases of child abuse
to authorities. But when I spoke to this guy.
Speaker 5 (24:19):
My name is Timothy Kaskov.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
He had a pretty different take on the helpline.
Speaker 5 (24:25):
I'm a lawyer. I live in Seattle, Washington. Although my
law practice representing survivors of child sexual abuse as a
national practice.
Speaker 2 (24:35):
Tim Kosnov has been handling cases against the Church on
behalf of victims for nearly twenty five years, and midway
through our zoom call, I read him some of the
church's official response to the AP investigation. Dave said, the
suggestion that the helpline is used to cover up abuse
is completely false. The Church abuse helpline has everything to
(24:58):
do with protecting children and has no nothing to do
with cover up. Outside experts who are aware of the
helpline have regularly praised it.
Speaker 5 (25:06):
Excuse me, I think I am going to throw up
in my mouth.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
Tim has practiced law for forty years. He was a
prosecutor and a defense attorney. Then at the turn of
the century he set up a firm focusing on representing
survivors of child sexual abuse. He's taken on the Catholic Church,
the Salvation Army, the Jehovah's Witnesses. But his first case
with this new firm.
Speaker 5 (25:29):
My very first case in Baldimaron Church, and thus began
the journey.
Speaker 2 (25:35):
That case blew Coosnov away.
Speaker 5 (25:38):
I mean, the first case I thought was one in
a million case, because you know, a church wouldn't deliberately
put a child in harm's way, put him in a
home with a serial child molister.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
That was the story of Franklin Curtis, which we don't
have time to go into here. But Curtis was a
Mormon church leader who sexually abused children in seven US
states over eighteen years from the nineteen seventies to the
nineteen nineties, and after each incident he was simply moved
to a different ward. Kosnov represented one of those children
(26:14):
who was suing the Mormon Church. Twenty five years and
thousands of clients later, Kosnov realizes Curtis's case wasn't as
rare as he'd thought. He's been driven to keep doing
these cases by a couple of things.
Speaker 5 (26:28):
The predominant emotion which carried me through all those cases
was anger. Anger, they say is a useless emotion, But
I actually think it's a pretty useful emotion if it's
channeled in the right direction. And for me, it was
both anger and in an intellectual curiosity a question that
(26:51):
the answer just kept eluding me, which is why do
they do this? Why does a church do this?
Speaker 2 (27:00):
It's exactly the question that was in my mind as
I heard these New Zealand stories and as I read
about the Arizona case. So Tim, take it away. Why
did the church in the mid nineties set up a
centralized abuse helpline which bishops and other church leaders are
told to call before they've talked to anyone else.
Speaker 5 (27:21):
They've set up a system that involves their lawyers at
the very first communication.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
Kosnos gives a hypothetical example to explain how it might
play out.
Speaker 5 (27:34):
So there's a bishop in West Virginia and he's got
a child there and is reporting that she's being incested
by her stepfather.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
The bishop is thinking about calling the police because he
knows that the state has mandatory reporting laws.
Speaker 5 (27:49):
But instead he knows, because it's right there in the handbook,
right on his desk, call this one eight hundred numbers.
So he calls and it's supposedly, you know, to help
the child. But it rings into the offices of Curtain mccakey.
Speaker 2 (28:03):
Kern mconkie. That's the law firm that represents the church,
the largest law firm in Utah.
Speaker 5 (28:09):
It doesn't go to a social worker or a therapist
or somebody qualified. It rings in to the offices of
Curtin mccakey, and they've got staff attorneys and they rotate
twenty four to seven. If the office is closed, it
goes to one of the cell phone numbers. Whether it's
two in the morning or nine in the morning or whatever,
some lawyer is going to answer that call. Okay, Now
(28:31):
what happens. Now you've got a bishop who's an agent
of the church legally speaking to his lawyer, a lawyer
for the church. Now, everything that's said in that communication
is attorney client.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
Privilege, another privilege, and this privilege is crucially important for
the church.
Speaker 5 (28:54):
Because a lawyer can't be compelled to testify about his
or her communications with their client.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
This immediate looping in of a lawyer pressing go on
attorney client privilege at the first available opportunity. It's really
quite the trick.
Speaker 5 (29:09):
That's something that I mean the Catholic Church doesn't even
do that one, whether Jehovah's witnesses or any of that.
Speaker 2 (29:17):
That attorney client privilege means it's generally impossible for us
to know what is said when a bishop calls the
abuse helpline and speaks to a church lawyer. But Kosnov
does have an interesting little window into what probably goes
on because when the abuse helpline was first set up
in nineteen ninety five, calls didn't go direct to a lawyer. Instead,
(29:38):
the one eight hundred number would take you to the
church's Office of Risk Management, which is kind of interesting
given that other risks managed by the office reportedly include injuries, fires, explosions,
chemical spills, and severe weather. So the original system was
that if you were a bishop and rang the helpline,
you'd get through to the office of Risk Management, and
(30:01):
a worker would step you through a checklist, a kind
of screening questionnaire. If that screening showed the case was serious,
the worker would transfer you onto a lawyer, and bam.
That attorney client privilege kicks in this checklist. Cosnov got
his hands on it during one of his early cases
against the church, and it's since been leaked online. So
(30:23):
anyone can now see this one secret in house document
and Cosnov reckons the checklist is extremely revealing.
Speaker 5 (30:31):
That form just made crystal clear what the real purpose
of that helpline was and still is.
Speaker 2 (30:39):
I've got a copy of the protocol for Abuse Helpline
Calls in front of me. The title is in all
caps comic sands. Look, this was the mid nineties, so
we can forgive this crime against typography. There's a section
at the top for dates, call his name, position, ward,
and phone numbers. And there's a list of six questions,
(31:01):
each with two little checkboxes at the end, one for yes,
one for no.
Speaker 5 (31:05):
Question one. Did the abuse occur on church property, that's
a lawyer question. Did the abuse occur during a church
sponsored activity, that's a lawyer question. Those are liability questions.
Those are oh we could get sued questions.
Speaker 2 (31:25):
The remaining four questions ask if the alleged abuse are
used a church position of influence to accomplish the abuse,
if they were employed by the church, if they had
any record of previous abuse, and whether they were currently
a missionary. And above the six questions, there's a line
saying that if the answer to any of these questions
is yes, you must immediately transfer the call to legal counsel.
(31:47):
The word immediately is underlined. There's a bunch of other
pieces of guidance as well. A bit further down under
reporting issues, they're told that the caller, the bishop or
whoever it is, should use their first name only with
no identifying information. It warns that during the screening process,
abuse helpline personnel should quote never advise a priesthood leader
(32:12):
to report abuse. So those are the lines that really
stuck out to me when I was reading the protocol.
To be fair, there is also some more sensible sounding
advice on there. It asks helpline workers to find out
whether the civil authorities have been told about the abuse,
and if not, then the bishop should encourage the victim
or perpetrator, or a third party who knows about the
(32:35):
abuse to report it. That is an interesting bit of
advice when you think about it. When I first read it,
I thought, oh, great, so this is a scenario where
a bishop might be advising an abuser to dop himself
in or others who know about the abuse to report
to authorities. That seems quite responsible advice from the church.
(32:55):
But first of all, how many abuses do we really
think would take this advice to turn themselves in. Second
of all, we know that in cases of abuse, particularly
child abuse, it is often only the perpetrator and the
victim who are aware of what's going on, so appealing
to third parties to report abuse if they know about
(33:17):
it will miss a huge proportion of cases. The protocol
also says if bishops encourage the perpetrator to report, then
they should also recommend that the abuser obtain legal counsel,
and that, says Tim Kosnov, is actually pretty cynical advice, because.
Speaker 5 (33:35):
If you go to a criminal defense lawyer, he's going
to say, no, you're not going to go to the
police and give a statement.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
So actually this is just another way to reduce the
odds of the police hearing anything at all.
Speaker 5 (33:47):
So they prevent the abuser from implicating himself and thereby
implicating the church.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
Like I said, this protocol document dates back to an
earlier version of the helpline set up. It's reasonable to
presume the protocols and the processes for connecting to lawyers
won't be identical thirty years on. Reports vary about the
current practice of who first answers the call. Senior Church
officials have testified that callers are initially fielded by church workers,
(34:18):
while in other cases, such as the Arizona case, it
appears that lawyers directly answer the cause. But Kosnov says,
this remarkable secret document still tells you all you need
to know about the goals behind the creation of the
helpline in the first place.
Speaker 5 (34:34):
Take a look at that, and you'll see how devious
this thing really is, what its real purpose is, which
is to protect the church and to kill any possible
involvement of the Church in criminal or civil proceedings by
preventing it from ever coming to the attention of the
(34:55):
civil authorities.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
Actually, there is one other thing we'd do know about
the current day helpline in the US, which is that
records of cause are destroyed at the end of each day.
At least that's what senior church lawyers have said during
a recent court case in the US. SO first names
only privileged conversations, destroying documents confidential courts. It appears that
(35:21):
the system the Church created is about as far from
transparent as it's possible to be. It's really quite difficult
to take seriously the church's claim that the helpline is
all about protecting victims. So for Kosnov, the helpline's goal
is clear to keep reports of abuse from reaching civil authorities.
(35:42):
But what about the deeper question, why would the church
want to do that? What's the upside of keeping things quiet? Well,
let's not overthink this. There are a couple of pretty
obvious motives. If an abuse report led to a criminal
investigation or worse still, the conviction of individual church members
or leaders, that's pretty embarrassing. So keeping things quiet serves
(36:06):
to protect the church's reputation. Then there's civil litigation. If
the church is sued by survivors of abuse and it's
in a jurisdiction where the legal setup is friendly to victims,
settlements against the church can run into the millions of dollars.
So shutting things down is also a way to protect
the church's money, reputation money, and of course sometimes you've
(36:33):
got to make a trade off between the two. Spend
money to protect reputation, like when the church offers secret
cash payouts and non disclosure agreements NDAs to keep victims
quiet and stop them from suing, because yep, they do
that too. Eighteen months after the Associated Press reported on
(36:56):
the abuse Helpline's role in the Paul Adams case in Arizona,
they broke another story.
Speaker 4 (37:01):
We do begin tonight with claims from a former bishop's
daughter accusing her father of sexually abusing her for more
than a decade. Now in her mid thirties, Chelsea Goodrich
says the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints
tried to pay her three hundred thousand dollars for her silence.
Speaker 2 (37:17):
Remember the Office for Risk Management. While in twenty seventeen,
the head of the Office of Risk Management was a
guy called Paul Writting, And recently AP got their hands
on a recording of Paul Writting talking to a woman
called Chelsea Goodrich.
Speaker 5 (37:29):
I have authorization up to three hundred thousand dollars.
Speaker 2 (37:33):
And Chelsea alleges that when she was nine, she was
abused by her father, John, a former Mormon bishop. And
that's the sound of Paul Writting offering Chelsea three hundred
thousand dollars us on the condition that she never used
her story as a basis for a lawsuit against the church.
The other conditions keep this document secret and destroy all
(37:56):
the recordings Chelsea was making of her meetings with Writting.
In other words, an NDA and a big cash payout
to keep quiet, a little bit of money to save
a lot of reputation. Oh and by the way, all
the way back, when Chelsea's father, John made a confession
to his bishop, that bishop called the abuse helpline. As
(38:19):
a result, Chelsea's father was excommunicated, but of course the
church never told police. Then when Chelsea, as an adult
went to the police herself, the first prosecution against her
father fell over because the church discouraged that bishop from
giving court testimony about the confession he'd heard and the
(38:42):
call he'd made to the helpline. And that's when Paul
Ritting flew across the country to meet Chelsea in person
and start talking about dollar signs. That's a lot of
work at an extremely senior level to keep an abuse
case from reach court. Here's how Tim Kosnov sees that
(39:03):
kind of balancing act.
Speaker 5 (39:05):
Money's not the issue. The church doesn't give a damn
about well, it cares about the money. But you know,
a few million here, a few million there, that's just
pocket change. They can spend more money than God. What
is expensive is the loss of credibility among the faithful.
Speaker 2 (39:24):
One last side note here, that guy the Church's a
risk fixer, Paul Writting. He was last seen working in
New Zealand as the church's head legal counsel for the
Pacific Office that's New Zealand, Australia and the Pacific Islands.
(39:45):
After reading that first piece about Paul Adams and then
going down the rabbit hole of the abuse helpline, it
was impossible for me to keep thinking that the New
Zealand cases I knew about was simply the human failings
of individual bishops, you know, regret outcomes from a conservative
church culture that wasn't particularly well informed about sexual abuse.
(40:06):
Now it seemed obvious to me that they were actually
part of something much more deliberate. The church isn't just
turning a blind eye to child sexual abuse and other
crimes within its community. It has a centrally managed, legally
watertight system for reacting to these horrific cases. The crimes
(40:28):
aren't being viewed as urgent moral tragedies that require intervention
and rescue, but as risks that need to be managed,
not risks to the people in its care, but risks
to its reputation, risks to the church's bank balance. I'd
been thinking the church had been dropping the ball on this,
but as Tim Kosnov puts it, it was starting to
(40:50):
look more like.
Speaker 5 (40:51):
They're dealing with the problem exactly the way they intended.
They are handling these cases knowingly, intentionally, and in accordance
with direction from the highest levels of the church.
Speaker 2 (41:08):
Okay, so what about New Zealand. It's not as if
ALTIROA has the same set up as the US with
its SEU in court culture, its mega lawsuits, it's mega payouts, right. Well,
that's true, but in some important ways, the legal setup
here is just the same as in the US. New
Zealand law does actually recognize priest penitent privilege PPP, that
(41:33):
special status that keeps confessions confidential. It's hardly ever been
tested in court, but it's there. It was rewritten into
the New Zealand statute books as recently as two thousand
and six. And of course we all recognize the confidentiality
between a lawyer and their client, what Americans would call
attorney client privilege. So those are the two key privileges
(41:57):
that the LDS Church relies on as it runs the
abuse helpline in the United States. Plus in New Zealand,
unlike Arizona and many US states, there are no mandatory
reporting laws. If a priest, teacher, or doctor here learns
of child abuse, there is no legal duty to report.
(42:19):
So the next obvious question is there a New Zealand
church abuse helpline. Uncovering the helpline in the US was
a big deal. There were lawsuits and highly motivated attorneys
like Tim Kosnov, and relentless digging by Pulitzer Prize winning
investigative journalists. So I was going to have my work
(42:41):
cut out for me. I summoned everything I had learned
in my career so far, and thought back to my
investigative journalism training in London and googled New Zealand Mormon
abuse helpline And yeah, there it is on the church's website,
(43:02):
a nine digit number with Auckland's zero nine area code
and the words the helpline is available for bishops and
state presidents to call twenty four hours a day, seven
days a week. Actually, there are loads of helplines on
this page. There are numbers for the US and Canada,
a number for the UK, for Ireland, for France, for Australia,
(43:23):
But the New Zealand helpline is the one I'm interested
in How often is it used, What kind of calls
do they receive? Does the call go straight to a
church lawyer? Are details of abuse cases reported back to
Salt Lake City, Utah? But most importantly, what advice are
bishops and state presidents receiving? Are they being instructed to
(43:44):
keep quiet and to hide behind priest penitent privilege? So
many questions and who better to answer them than whoever's
picking up the calls. When a bishop in New Zealand
picks up his phone, taps in these nine digits and
waits for an hour answer, I guess there's a simple
way to find that person. It's time to call the
(44:07):
LDS Church Abuse helpline. Who was speaking to next time
on Heaven's helpline? He's a strange man in his name's
Daniel and adult no.
Speaker 3 (44:20):
So I went right into my office and I called
the heartline and.
Speaker 5 (44:23):
I said, I think I've got something to report.
Speaker 2 (44:37):
We sought comment from the Church in response to the
allegations in this episode. The church did not address the
allegations directly, but in a statement said as followers of
Jesus Christ members of the Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter day Saints, A poor abuse of any kind. As
a church, we invest heavily on prevention and response, and
(44:58):
we will continue to do so. When a lay leader
of one of our congregation learns of abuse, they are
asked to immediately call a helpline to assist them, to
protect the victim, and to ensure that perpetrators face the
consequences of their actions. Most of the reports of abuse
that come to the attention of church leaders come from
victims or their families and involve abuse away from church
(45:21):
buildings and church activities. Helpline staff offer advice that is
focused firstly on protecting and caring for the victim. Working
with local church leaders, the helpline ensures compliance with legal
reporting obligations, encourages the victim or victim's family to report
the abuse to civil authorities, and helps connect victims with
(45:43):
professionals who can provide counseling assistance. Heaven's Helpline was funded
by New Zealand On Air and The New Zealand Herald
for enz Edme and iHeartRadio. It was researched, written and
presented by Me Murray Jones. My producers were Adam Dudding,
(46:04):
who co wrote the series, and Kirston Johnston from Popsot Media,
who edited and sound designed it Phil Brownlee as our
sound engineer. Music was by Thomas Arbor and Anita Clark.
News clippings came from Fox News thirteen, Utah, twelve News,
NBC and ABC four Utah. Audio of Paul Ritting was
(46:25):
supplied by Reveal and the Associated Press. Thank you to
Microzendees and Jason Doorday for your dedicated investigative work on
the church. Ethan Sills is executive producer here at New
Zealand Herald. If you have a story you'd like to
share with me about the LDS Church, or just want
to get in touch, email me securely at Murray Reports
(46:49):
at Proton dot m E or dm me on X
at Murray Reports. And for more on this podcast, head
to NZ Herald dot co dot nz slash Heaven's helpline.
It's time intensive doing investigations like this, so if you
(47:10):
value this kind of journalism, please support it by going
to your podcast platform and rating and reviewing the series
Before we dive into this episode, you should know that
it contains pretty disturbing details about child abuse and incest,
so listen with care. But there's also some people who
tirelessly fight against this sort of stuff. Have a look
at our show notes for numbers for support services if
you need them.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
It's dawn in Rural Whitkator, November twenty sixteen. Simon Peterson
is about to execute a search warrant.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
There was a farm down Cambridgeway. A bunch of officers
invests for all the year, rocking up to your house,
knocking on the door.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Inside the rundown house is a suspect. Simon and his
team have been monitoring for two months.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
We had an interest in this particular person. In this
chat room. They were sharing material, so they were committing offending.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
And now it's time to confront the man, or, as
Simon rather delicately puts it.
Speaker 3 (01:02):
Kind of invading your space for a while to try
and establish the offending and find the evidence.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
At first, there was some denial from the forty seven
year old farm worker.
Speaker 3 (01:12):
A lot of people won't I meant to us some well,
but a lot of people won't to it. So the
work's on us to find the evidence and that's what
we'll do. So we're typically looking for devices that could
have been used to offend.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Simon's at the house for six hours.
Speaker 3 (01:27):
So we found the devices that were interested in as
phone was one of them, and he had more material
already stored, which was enough for us to seize the
devices and aristom as well.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
They took him to Hamilton Police Station where he was
processed and interviewed, and soon he was in court.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
He played guilty pretty quickly. He wasn't mucking around.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
Guilty of possession of child sexual abuse material. The man
was sentenced to home detention and his name was added
to the child's sex offenders registered. It was a depressingly
routine police operation with a depressingly routine outcome, but what
happened next was far from routine. That morning raid in
(02:13):
rural New Zealand set off a chain of events that
would drastically change lives in a tiny Arizona town and
reverberate all the way to Salt Lake City, Utah.
Speaker 4 (02:26):
In an interview with investigation associates abuse let it keeping,
they clearly tolerated the abuse.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
I'm Maurray Jones and This is Heaven's Helpline, a six
part New Zealand Herald investigation into the Mormon Church in
Altero and beyond, Episode four the Helpline. Simon Peterson is
the Chief Customs Officer in the Child Exploitation Operations Team
(03:02):
at New Zealand Customs.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
Predominantly we deal with the movement of child sexual exploitation
material or objectionable publications, so we're looking at people who
are trading this material with other people around the world,
across our cyber border we call it.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
In late twenty sixteen, Simon was a year into his
role in the unit.
Speaker 3 (03:24):
So as a new investigator, but.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
Even as a newbie, he'd still seen some horrific things
in the dark corners of the Internet or on people's
phones or on their hard drives. You have to develop
a pretty thick skin for this work and good coping mechanisms,
including stepping away from your screen.
Speaker 3 (03:44):
You don't know when something's going to hit you and
it just doesn't feel right. So that's always a possibility
is you'll come across something you can't conceive of and
you just need to go and take a break.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
After the dawn Raiding Cambridge, Simon began the routine process
of going through the offender's cataloging all the files, including
still images and videos.
Speaker 3 (04:05):
There's fully simple prices of chicking it against what we
are in you marking the ones we don't know.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
Simon needs to catalog the material for the purposes of prosecution.
But the thing that he said about separating what we
already knew from the ones we don't know. What he's
talking about there is something that arises from the disturbing
fact that once a child's sexual abuse video has been
posted somewhere on the Internet, it's basically out there.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
Forever, we could have a thousand stuff and still not
touch the sides of us. Is that much going on?
Speaker 2 (04:37):
No matter how many people might be arrested for possessing it,
no matter how many hard drives and phones get seized,
there'll always be another copy of it being shared or
sold or swapped online, year after year after year. So
law enforcement agencies have developed an international system where each
(04:57):
offending computer file is indexed using what's called a hash. Basically,
they generate a digital fingerprint of that file. This means
investigators like Simon don't have to watch and rewatch every
single abuse video on the countless devices they sees, they
can instead compare the hash values to that database and
(05:18):
go right, that's one of the ones we already knew about,
and that means it's easy to spot if an image
or video is new to the Internet because it won't
already be on Interpol's database.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
So one of those videos, when we put it throughout
international collaboration, we checked it against the hash databases. It
came back as it's not known, so it's the first
red flaggers that's not been No other law enforcement in
the world has indicated that they've seen this by hashing out.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
This nine minute video that was found on the phone
of a man in Cambridge and New Zealand hasn't been
seen by law enforcement before, so it was probably created
relatively recently. And that's really important.
Speaker 3 (06:05):
Behind every investigation though, is a concern for the victims
that are shown on material that we're dealing with.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
And this video from the Cambridge raid, it contained some
strong potential leads.
Speaker 3 (06:16):
That video had some good markers on that for victim identification.
We could see that I could tell straight away it
was American and that it was probably West Coast American.
I won't go into all the details, but excent was
pretty clear, and there are a couple of other features
that I won't describe that made us think it was
probably West Coast America.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
So Simon uploaded it to the Interpolar system and marked
it for investigators in the US.
Speaker 3 (06:40):
And see, you guys might want have look at us.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
Simon's upload was acknowledged by the United States National Center
for Missing and Exploited Children or NCMEC. People call it NICKMK.
Speaker 3 (06:54):
In the ind of win quiet and it always does.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
It's incredibly hard to identify and locate children who are
being abused in this type of material. In most cases,
Simon doesn't hear anything more.
Speaker 3 (07:07):
And that's cool. We know we don't need to hear back,
but in this particular case we did.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
Early one Friday morning, a couple of months after the
Cambridge case referral to Interpol, Simon sat down at his
l shaped desk at the office in Central Auckland.
Speaker 3 (07:26):
Logged on, fired up the computer, opened up the email
that was sitting in the inbox. They just had a
simple message in there saying great news. We've identified the
offender and he's been arrested. And we've subsequently identified and
safeguarded the cat as well. I still remember it. Sorry,
(07:48):
I had to get up and walk out. It's pretty shaky. Yeah,
I don't know why I get emotional about it.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
I think it's understandable.
Speaker 3 (08:02):
Yeah, I guess it was probably my first, the first
case that i'd had that had that sort of outcome
communicator back. That's probably why the response was installers quite viscable.
I've done cases since then and I don't respond the
same way, so maybe that's what it does. It was, Yeah,
(08:24):
quite powerful. Ultimately, that's the point of what we're doing,
is to particulards and get the Metahum's way.
Speaker 4 (08:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (08:32):
And it doesn't happen often. Sorry, when it Heavens is good.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
The kid from the video that Simon helped to save
she had been living at the end of a dirt
road on the outskirts of Bisbee, a small old copper
mining town in Arizona, about eighteen kilometers north of the
Mexican border, population five thousand. I need to give you
another content warning here. The next couple of minutes is
pretty graphic and deals with child sexual abuse. This was
(09:04):
the Adam's household, father Paul, mother Lisa, and six children
living in a three bedroom home surrounded by desert, out
of the way of prying eyes. Lisa Adams was in
charge of household duties, getting the children off to school
and to church on Sunday. Paul Adams worked as a
US Border Patrol agent. Legal documents paint a picture of
(09:29):
a disordered house, littered with piles of clothing. I've seen
photos of their house up on a shelf, a sign
saying family sits below a large picture of Jesus. A
wall hanging reeds bless this family as it dangles from
a curtain rail. Also around the house were containers of lubricant,
which Paul Adams would use when he sexually abused his daughters.
(09:55):
He began raping one daughter, referred to as MJ and
media report from the age of five, possibly even younger.
He started sexually assaulting one of MJ's younger sisters when
she was six weeks old. When Adams was assaulting MJ,
he would make her hold his smartphone to record it
(10:16):
on video. He would then upload the videos to internet
chat rooms, where he bragged he was living the perfect
lifestyle because he could rape his daughters whenever he wanted,
and his wife knew and doesn't care. And one of
those videos a nine minute clip recorded when MJ was
ten years old. It was shared and re shared until
(10:40):
about two years later it ended up on at Cambridge
pedophile's phone that was seized in a raid. Then US
authorities use facial recognition technology to search for the offender,
and because Paul Adams was a border guard, a federal employee,
he was swiftly idd. Agents descended on the border station
(11:02):
in Naco, Arizona and arrested Adams. Under interrogation, he admitted
to raping MJ and sexually assaulting her younger sister and
uploading videos of the assaults to the Internet, and after
raiding the Adams home, agents found four thousand photos and
one thousand videos of child sex abuse, many featuring his daughters.
(11:30):
Paul Adams was arrested and charged, but before his case
got any further, he committed suicide. Lisa Adams, the mother,
pleaded no contest to child sex abuse charges and served
two and a half years in state prison. Three of
the Adams children went to live with members of Lisa's
extended family, while the other three were taken in by
(11:53):
local families. Unbelievable, unspeakable, trauma for these girls, but at
least they had been rescued from that house, rescued by
a chain of strangers, by a customs officer on the
other side of the world, by officials at Nitmick, by
the Homeland Security agents who got a confession out of
(12:16):
Paul Adams that day at the US Mexico border. Which
makes the next part of this story all the more
astonishing because and you're probably way ahead of me here,
Simon Peterson wasn't the first person outside of the Adam's
household or a dark web chat room to learn about
the abuse. Paul Adams had been a member of the
(12:36):
Mormon Church, and two of his bishops had known about
the abuse and never told police. The first bishop learned
about the abuse in twenty ten. Paul Adams was arrested
in twenty seventeen, seven years of lost opportunity to stop
(13:01):
a pedophile whose offending was about as extreme and blatant
as it's possible to get extreme. But there are similarities
to what we've already heard from Mormons in Altai Rowa.
You know the drill. There's abuse, a bishop is told,
(13:21):
then nothing much happens. But in twenty twenty two, the
Associated Press broke a story that contained astonishing new insight
into how and why those cover ups happened. This was
the AP story that I heard midway through my own reporting,
the one that forced me to reevaluate what I thought
(13:43):
I knew about cases like this. The AP story broke
five years after Paul adams arrest and suicide because when
the Adam's children got older, three of them decided to
sue the Mormon Church over the bishop's failure to report
what they knew.
Speaker 5 (14:01):
Peter Mario has a shocking story in Tonight's Use for
Tucson Investigation.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
This twenty four page civil complaint was just filed in
Coachie's County against members of a Bisbee church, accusing them
of not protecting their youngest members. And as that lawsuit
kicked off, it became obvious that the cover up of
Paul Adams's abuse went way higher up the church hierarchy
than just the local bishops. The details get complicated, but
(14:30):
boiled right down, here's what happened. MJ was just five
when her father first confessed to a bishop that he
had sexually abused her. This was Bishop Herod. He was
a doctor by profession. Lisa Adams was one of his patients.
Bishop Herod called the church for advice. He was told
(14:50):
that confessions are confidential and that he could be sued
if he reported it to the police, so he didn't. Instead,
he tried to count Paul Adams to repent, to move
out of the home, to turn himself in, but Adams
continued to rape his daughter, so Bishop Herod tried another attack.
(15:12):
During a counseling session with Adams, he invited Lisa Adams
along in the hope that as the mother, she might
be able to protect her children. Did that work? No,
it didn't. The rapes continued and Adams started uploading videos
onto the Internet. Then a new bishop took over the ward.
(15:34):
This was Bishop Mawsey. Before Bishop Herod left, he passed
the details of the Adams situation to Bishop Morsey, and
Bishop Morsey called the church just like Herod. He wanted
some guidance on how to handle this nightmare, and just
like Herod, he was warned not to contact the police,
but he was offered a new suggestion, convene a disciplinary counsel,
(15:58):
you know, like the one Jade faced after admitting to
an affair. And this church court did its job. Adams
was excommunicated kicked out of the church. From the church's perspective,
the matter was resolved well. Except for this, Paul Adams
kept raping his daughter and no one told the police.
(16:23):
It would be another four years, during which time another
daughter was born and almost immediately victimized before Adams was arrested.
In a response to the AP story, the church said
AP had misrepresented the extent of the abuse that the
bishops were aware of. It argued that the first Bishop, Herod,
was only aware of a single case of abuse from
(16:46):
a limited confession from Paul Adams, and was not aware
if it was ongoing. But when questioned by law enforcement,
Herod said he assumed the abuse had stopped and never
asked if it picked up again.
Speaker 6 (17:00):
Just said, hey, let's excommunicate her father. It didn't stop,
Let's have them go to therapy. It didn't stop. Hey,
let's forgive and forget and this will I'll go away.
It didn't go away. They just let it keep happening.
Speaker 2 (17:20):
That was MJ speaking to the Associated Press for that
twenty twenty two report. By then she was sixteen. Her
foster parents talked about her remarkable resilience and how she
was doing well at school. New Zealand customs officer Simon
Peterson was interviewed for that AP report as well. It
(17:40):
was five years since he'd started the chain of events
that would save MJ, but it still hit him hard.
Speaker 3 (17:48):
It's a mux. It's hippy, said, you said, because of
what's happened, you said for the kid. But you're happy
as well that this is with you right now. You know.
They go through a lot once, as arristed in the
situation as ended, it could hiss a deal with so
much that they shouldn't have to deal with most ay
lots don't have to worry about.
Speaker 2 (18:16):
Look, after hearing the stories from New Zealand, from people
like Caroline and Jade, people like Neville and Jenny, perhaps
I shouldn't have been so shocked by the Paul Adams
story and the church's failure to report his crimes.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
But I was.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
I was dumbfounded, to be honest, because after hearing the
New Zealand stories, I'd been getting the sense that there
was a culture, an instinct perhaps for local church leaders
to want to deal with things in house, and a
lot of it seemed to be based on an absolutist
view about keeping the family together at all costs. But
(18:53):
this case from Arizona, and the really detailed coverage of
who told which bishop when, and which bishop did what next,
and exactly what the church advised and how they delivered
that advice. It showed that in the American Church at least,
this wasn't just an instinct or a culture. This was
(19:13):
church policy. The church guidelines were that if a bishop
was told about sexual abuse within a ward, the first
thing they should do was pick up the phone and
call a dedicated sexual abuse helpline run by the church itself,
(19:34):
a helpline not for victims, but rather for bishops and
state presidents. In the Paul Adams case, when bishops rang
that number, they soon found themselves talking to a lawyer,
and that lawyer told them not to call the police.
The ap story lifted the lid on a systematic, organized
(19:57):
process overseen by church lawyers, enabled through this helpline. And
the crazy thing is the church wasn't even breaking the
law by giving this advice. After the break, I'll explain
how that could even be possible.
Speaker 6 (20:21):
I must confess to you.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
We need to talk.
Speaker 6 (20:24):
I must tell someone.
Speaker 2 (20:26):
About something called priest penitent privilege.
Speaker 5 (20:29):
I want to make a confession.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
It's actually a pretty familiar idea. If you're a Christian
and you've done something wrong and you're seeking God's forgiveness,
you are technically known as a penitent, someone who repents,
and in many Christian denominations you're encouraged to act on
that by finding a priest and making a confession. The
interesting bit is that everything a penitent says to a
priest in the privacy of the confession is automatically confidential,
(20:58):
which is why there are so many books and movies
like that nineteen fifties Hitchcock thriller that you just heard
a clip from, where the plot revolves around something like
a murderer confessing to a priest and the priests getting
tied up in knots about what to do next. In
certain countries, this confidentiality between a penitent and their priest
is not just a church thing. It's actually part of
(21:19):
the law of the land, a legal privilege. And there's
your name, priest penitent privilege. And I'm going to say
it so many times in the next three minutes that
I'm going to call it PPP for sure. Now In
jurisdictions where PPP is a thing. A priest, a pastor,
or a bishop whatever, cannot be forced in a trial
to reveal the contents of a confession they have received
(21:40):
from a member of their faith. So back to Arizona
and the awful Paul Adams case. There it was PPP
that the church was leaning on when it advised those
two Arizona bishops not to report the abuse of MJ.
The bishops have said the advice they got was that
they risk being personally suit or the church being sued
(22:02):
if they went to police. But the fact is the
church doesn't just lean on PPP, it also works hard
to prop it up. Mormon politicians and lobbyists have fought
really hard to preserve priest penitent privilege in more than
thirty US states. Alongside other religious groups, they've successfully pushed
back against new laws which would make it easier to
(22:24):
report sexual abuse revealed during a confession. To make this
extra confusing is the fact that Arizona also has mandatory
reporting laws, which means certain people such as doctors, teachers,
and social workers are actually legally required to pass information
(22:44):
about child sex abuse to civil authorities. In other words,
if they do not report abuse, they can face criminal prosecution,
but the church argues that PPP overrides these reporting obligations.
But quite aside from whether that legal advice to the
Arizona bishops was right or wrong, the thing that really
(23:07):
stuck out for me in that AP story was the
way the bishops got that advice.
Speaker 5 (23:13):
What the policy of this church is is to call
what's called a helpline.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
The idea of a sexual abuse helpline. It sounds sensible, right,
But why is it bishops who get to call it
rather than victims? Why do those bishops end up connecting
with church lawyers rather than I don't know, train sexual
abuse counselors. In the church's online manual of Guidelines and Procedures,
(23:39):
they say the helpline is an effective way to inform
untrained leaders of their legal obligations, which I guess makes
sense sort of, And in response to the AP story,
the church said that the abuse helpline has everything to
do with protecting children and has nothing to do with
cover up. It's a a yes. The purpose of the
(24:00):
helpline is in part to directly report the abuse to authorities,
regardless of legal exemptions from reporting requirements. When it is
known that a child is in imminent danger. The church
claims that the helpline routine reports cases of child abuse
to authorities. But when I spoke to this guy.
Speaker 5 (24:19):
My name is Timothy Kaskov.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
He had a pretty different take on the helpline.
Speaker 5 (24:25):
I'm a lawyer. I live in Seattle, Washington. Although my
law practice representing survivors of child sexual abuse as a
national practice.
Speaker 2 (24:35):
Tim Kosnov has been handling cases against the Church on
behalf of victims for nearly twenty five years, and midway
through our zoom call, I read him some of the
church's official response to the AP investigation. Dave said, the
suggestion that the helpline is used to cover up abuse
is completely false. The Church abuse helpline has everything to
(24:58):
do with protecting children and has no nothing to do
with cover up. Outside experts who are aware of the
helpline have regularly praised it.
Speaker 5 (25:06):
Excuse me, I think I am going to throw up
in my mouth.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
Tim has practiced law for forty years. He was a
prosecutor and a defense attorney. Then at the turn of
the century he set up a firm focusing on representing
survivors of child sexual abuse. He's taken on the Catholic Church,
the Salvation Army, the Jehovah's Witnesses. But his first case
with this new firm.
Speaker 5 (25:29):
My very first case in Baldimaron Church, and thus began
the journey.
Speaker 2 (25:35):
That case blew Coosnov away.
Speaker 5 (25:38):
I mean, the first case I thought was one in
a million case, because you know, a church wouldn't deliberately
put a child in harm's way, put him in a
home with a serial child molister.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
That was the story of Franklin Curtis, which we don't
have time to go into here. But Curtis was a
Mormon church leader who sexually abused children in seven US
states over eighteen years from the nineteen seventies to the
nineteen nineties, and after each incident he was simply moved
to a different ward. Kosnov represented one of those children
(26:14):
who was suing the Mormon Church. Twenty five years and
thousands of clients later, Kosnov realizes Curtis's case wasn't as
rare as he'd thought. He's been driven to keep doing
these cases by a couple of things.
Speaker 5 (26:28):
The predominant emotion which carried me through all those cases
was anger. Anger, they say is a useless emotion, But
I actually think it's a pretty useful emotion if it's
channeled in the right direction. And for me, it was
both anger and in an intellectual curiosity a question that
(26:51):
the answer just kept eluding me, which is why do
they do this? Why does a church do this?
Speaker 2 (27:00):
It's exactly the question that was in my mind as
I heard these New Zealand stories and as I read
about the Arizona case. So Tim, take it away. Why
did the church in the mid nineties set up a
centralized abuse helpline which bishops and other church leaders are
told to call before they've talked to anyone else.
Speaker 5 (27:21):
They've set up a system that involves their lawyers at
the very first communication.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
Kosnos gives a hypothetical example to explain how it might
play out.
Speaker 5 (27:34):
So there's a bishop in West Virginia and he's got
a child there and is reporting that she's being incested
by her stepfather.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
The bishop is thinking about calling the police because he
knows that the state has mandatory reporting laws.
Speaker 5 (27:49):
But instead he knows, because it's right there in the handbook,
right on his desk, call this one eight hundred numbers.
So he calls and it's supposedly, you know, to help
the child. But it rings into the offices of Curtain mccakey.
Speaker 2 (28:03):
Kern mconkie. That's the law firm that represents the church,
the largest law firm in Utah.
Speaker 5 (28:09):
It doesn't go to a social worker or a therapist
or somebody qualified. It rings in to the offices of
Curtin mccakey, and they've got staff attorneys and they rotate
twenty four to seven. If the office is closed, it
goes to one of the cell phone numbers. Whether it's
two in the morning or nine in the morning or whatever,
some lawyer is going to answer that call. Okay, Now
(28:31):
what happens. Now you've got a bishop who's an agent
of the church legally speaking to his lawyer, a lawyer
for the church. Now, everything that's said in that communication
is attorney client.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
Privilege, another privilege, and this privilege is crucially important for
the church.
Speaker 5 (28:54):
Because a lawyer can't be compelled to testify about his
or her communications with their client.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
This immediate looping in of a lawyer pressing go on
attorney client privilege at the first available opportunity. It's really
quite the trick.
Speaker 5 (29:09):
That's something that I mean the Catholic Church doesn't even
do that one, whether Jehovah's witnesses or any of that.
Speaker 2 (29:17):
That attorney client privilege means it's generally impossible for us
to know what is said when a bishop calls the
abuse helpline and speaks to a church lawyer. But Kosnov
does have an interesting little window into what probably goes
on because when the abuse helpline was first set up
in nineteen ninety five, calls didn't go direct to a lawyer. Instead,
(29:38):
the one eight hundred number would take you to the
church's Office of Risk Management, which is kind of interesting
given that other risks managed by the office reportedly include injuries, fires, explosions,
chemical spills, and severe weather. So the original system was
that if you were a bishop and rang the helpline,
you'd get through to the office of Risk Management, and
(30:01):
a worker would step you through a checklist, a kind
of screening questionnaire. If that screening showed the case was serious,
the worker would transfer you onto a lawyer, and bam.
That attorney client privilege kicks in this checklist. Cosnov got
his hands on it during one of his early cases
against the church, and it's since been leaked online. So
(30:23):
anyone can now see this one secret in house document
and Cosnov reckons the checklist is extremely revealing.
Speaker 5 (30:31):
That form just made crystal clear what the real purpose
of that helpline was and still is.
Speaker 2 (30:39):
I've got a copy of the protocol for Abuse Helpline
Calls in front of me. The title is in all
caps comic sands. Look, this was the mid nineties, so
we can forgive this crime against typography. There's a section
at the top for dates, call his name, position, ward,
and phone numbers. And there's a list of six questions,
(31:01):
each with two little checkboxes at the end, one for yes,
one for no.
Speaker 5 (31:05):
Question one. Did the abuse occur on church property, that's
a lawyer question. Did the abuse occur during a church
sponsored activity, that's a lawyer question. Those are liability questions.
Those are oh we could get sued questions.
Speaker 2 (31:25):
The remaining four questions ask if the alleged abuse are
used a church position of influence to accomplish the abuse,
if they were employed by the church, if they had
any record of previous abuse, and whether they were currently
a missionary. And above the six questions, there's a line
saying that if the answer to any of these questions
is yes, you must immediately transfer the call to legal counsel.
(31:47):
The word immediately is underlined. There's a bunch of other
pieces of guidance as well. A bit further down under
reporting issues, they're told that the caller, the bishop or
whoever it is, should use their first name only with
no identifying information. It warns that during the screening process,
abuse helpline personnel should quote never advise a priesthood leader
(32:12):
to report abuse. So those are the lines that really
stuck out to me when I was reading the protocol.
To be fair, there is also some more sensible sounding
advice on there. It asks helpline workers to find out
whether the civil authorities have been told about the abuse,
and if not, then the bishop should encourage the victim
or perpetrator, or a third party who knows about the
(32:35):
abuse to report it. That is an interesting bit of
advice when you think about it. When I first read it,
I thought, oh, great, so this is a scenario where
a bishop might be advising an abuser to dop himself
in or others who know about the abuse to report
to authorities. That seems quite responsible advice from the church.
(32:55):
But first of all, how many abuses do we really
think would take this advice to turn themselves in. Second
of all, we know that in cases of abuse, particularly
child abuse, it is often only the perpetrator and the
victim who are aware of what's going on, so appealing
to third parties to report abuse if they know about
(33:17):
it will miss a huge proportion of cases. The protocol
also says if bishops encourage the perpetrator to report, then
they should also recommend that the abuser obtain legal counsel,
and that, says Tim Kosnov, is actually pretty cynical advice, because.
Speaker 5 (33:35):
If you go to a criminal defense lawyer, he's going
to say, no, you're not going to go to the
police and give a statement.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
So actually this is just another way to reduce the
odds of the police hearing anything at all.
Speaker 5 (33:47):
So they prevent the abuser from implicating himself and thereby
implicating the church.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
Like I said, this protocol document dates back to an
earlier version of the helpline set up. It's reasonable to
presume the protocols and the processes for connecting to lawyers
won't be identical thirty years on. Reports vary about the
current practice of who first answers the call. Senior Church
officials have testified that callers are initially fielded by church workers,
(34:18):
while in other cases, such as the Arizona case, it
appears that lawyers directly answer the cause. But Kosnov says,
this remarkable secret document still tells you all you need
to know about the goals behind the creation of the
helpline in the first place.
Speaker 5 (34:34):
Take a look at that, and you'll see how devious
this thing really is, what its real purpose is, which
is to protect the church and to kill any possible
involvement of the Church in criminal or civil proceedings by
preventing it from ever coming to the attention of the
(34:55):
civil authorities.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
Actually, there is one other thing we'd do know about
the current day helpline in the US, which is that
records of cause are destroyed at the end of each day.
At least that's what senior church lawyers have said during
a recent court case in the US. SO first names
only privileged conversations, destroying documents confidential courts. It appears that
(35:21):
the system the Church created is about as far from
transparent as it's possible to be. It's really quite difficult
to take seriously the church's claim that the helpline is
all about protecting victims. So for Kosnov, the helpline's goal
is clear to keep reports of abuse from reaching civil authorities.
(35:42):
But what about the deeper question, why would the church
want to do that? What's the upside of keeping things quiet? Well,
let's not overthink this. There are a couple of pretty
obvious motives. If an abuse report led to a criminal
investigation or worse still, the conviction of individual church members
or leaders, that's pretty embarrassing. So keeping things quiet serves
(36:06):
to protect the church's reputation. Then there's civil litigation. If
the church is sued by survivors of abuse and it's
in a jurisdiction where the legal setup is friendly to victims,
settlements against the church can run into the millions of dollars.
So shutting things down is also a way to protect
the church's money, reputation money, and of course sometimes you've
(36:33):
got to make a trade off between the two. Spend
money to protect reputation, like when the church offers secret
cash payouts and non disclosure agreements NDAs to keep victims
quiet and stop them from suing, because yep, they do
that too. Eighteen months after the Associated Press reported on
(36:56):
the abuse Helpline's role in the Paul Adams case in Arizona,
they broke another story.
Speaker 4 (37:01):
We do begin tonight with claims from a former bishop's
daughter accusing her father of sexually abusing her for more
than a decade. Now in her mid thirties, Chelsea Goodrich
says the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints
tried to pay her three hundred thousand dollars for her silence.
Speaker 2 (37:17):
Remember the Office for Risk Management. While in twenty seventeen,
the head of the Office of Risk Management was a
guy called Paul Writting, And recently AP got their hands
on a recording of Paul Writting talking to a woman
called Chelsea Goodrich.
Speaker 5 (37:29):
I have authorization up to three hundred thousand dollars.
Speaker 2 (37:33):
And Chelsea alleges that when she was nine, she was
abused by her father, John, a former Mormon bishop. And
that's the sound of Paul Writting offering Chelsea three hundred
thousand dollars us on the condition that she never used
her story as a basis for a lawsuit against the church.
The other conditions keep this document secret and destroy all
(37:56):
the recordings Chelsea was making of her meetings with Writting.
In other words, an NDA and a big cash payout
to keep quiet, a little bit of money to save
a lot of reputation. Oh and by the way, all
the way back, when Chelsea's father, John made a confession
to his bishop, that bishop called the abuse helpline. As
(38:19):
a result, Chelsea's father was excommunicated, but of course the
church never told police. Then when Chelsea, as an adult
went to the police herself, the first prosecution against her
father fell over because the church discouraged that bishop from
giving court testimony about the confession he'd heard and the
(38:42):
call he'd made to the helpline. And that's when Paul
Ritting flew across the country to meet Chelsea in person
and start talking about dollar signs. That's a lot of
work at an extremely senior level to keep an abuse
case from reach court. Here's how Tim Kosnov sees that
(39:03):
kind of balancing act.
Speaker 5 (39:05):
Money's not the issue. The church doesn't give a damn
about well, it cares about the money. But you know,
a few million here, a few million there, that's just
pocket change. They can spend more money than God. What
is expensive is the loss of credibility among the faithful.
Speaker 2 (39:24):
One last side note here, that guy the Church's a
risk fixer, Paul Writting. He was last seen working in
New Zealand as the church's head legal counsel for the
Pacific Office that's New Zealand, Australia and the Pacific Islands.
(39:45):
After reading that first piece about Paul Adams and then
going down the rabbit hole of the abuse helpline, it
was impossible for me to keep thinking that the New
Zealand cases I knew about was simply the human failings
of individual bishops, you know, regret outcomes from a conservative
church culture that wasn't particularly well informed about sexual abuse.
(40:06):
Now it seemed obvious to me that they were actually
part of something much more deliberate. The church isn't just
turning a blind eye to child sexual abuse and other
crimes within its community. It has a centrally managed, legally
watertight system for reacting to these horrific cases. The crimes
(40:28):
aren't being viewed as urgent moral tragedies that require intervention
and rescue, but as risks that need to be managed,
not risks to the people in its care, but risks
to its reputation, risks to the church's bank balance. I'd
been thinking the church had been dropping the ball on this,
but as Tim Kosnov puts it, it was starting to
(40:50):
look more like.
Speaker 5 (40:51):
They're dealing with the problem exactly the way they intended.
They are handling these cases knowingly, intentionally, and in accordance
with direction from the highest levels of the church.
Speaker 2 (41:08):
Okay, so what about New Zealand. It's not as if
ALTIROA has the same set up as the US with
its SEU in court culture, its mega lawsuits, it's mega payouts, right. Well,
that's true, but in some important ways, the legal setup
here is just the same as in the US. New
Zealand law does actually recognize priest penitent privilege PPP, that
(41:33):
special status that keeps confessions confidential. It's hardly ever been
tested in court, but it's there. It was rewritten into
the New Zealand statute books as recently as two thousand
and six. And of course we all recognize the confidentiality
between a lawyer and their client, what Americans would call
attorney client privilege. So those are the two key privileges
(41:57):
that the LDS Church relies on as it runs the
abuse helpline in the United States. Plus in New Zealand,
unlike Arizona and many US states, there are no mandatory
reporting laws. If a priest, teacher, or doctor here learns
of child abuse, there is no legal duty to report.
(42:19):
So the next obvious question is there a New Zealand
church abuse helpline. Uncovering the helpline in the US was
a big deal. There were lawsuits and highly motivated attorneys
like Tim Kosnov, and relentless digging by Pulitzer Prize winning
investigative journalists. So I was going to have my work
(42:41):
cut out for me. I summoned everything I had learned
in my career so far, and thought back to my
investigative journalism training in London and googled New Zealand Mormon
abuse helpline And yeah, there it is on the church's website,
(43:02):
a nine digit number with Auckland's zero nine area code
and the words the helpline is available for bishops and
state presidents to call twenty four hours a day, seven
days a week. Actually, there are loads of helplines on
this page. There are numbers for the US and Canada,
a number for the UK, for Ireland, for France, for Australia,
(43:23):
But the New Zealand helpline is the one I'm interested
in How often is it used, What kind of calls
do they receive? Does the call go straight to a
church lawyer? Are details of abuse cases reported back to
Salt Lake City, Utah? But most importantly, what advice are
bishops and state presidents receiving? Are they being instructed to
(43:44):
keep quiet and to hide behind priest penitent privilege? So
many questions and who better to answer them than whoever's
picking up the calls. When a bishop in New Zealand
picks up his phone, taps in these nine digits and
waits for an hour answer, I guess there's a simple
way to find that person. It's time to call the
(44:07):
LDS Church Abuse helpline. Who was speaking to next time
on Heaven's helpline? He's a strange man in his name's
Daniel and adult no.
Speaker 3 (44:20):
So I went right into my office and I called
the heartline and.
Speaker 5 (44:23):
I said, I think I've got something to report.
Speaker 2 (44:37):
We sought comment from the Church in response to the
allegations in this episode. The church did not address the
allegations directly, but in a statement said as followers of
Jesus Christ members of the Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter day Saints, A poor abuse of any kind. As
a church, we invest heavily on prevention and response, and
(44:58):
we will continue to do so. When a lay leader
of one of our congregation learns of abuse, they are
asked to immediately call a helpline to assist them, to
protect the victim, and to ensure that perpetrators face the
consequences of their actions. Most of the reports of abuse
that come to the attention of church leaders come from
victims or their families and involve abuse away from church
(45:21):
buildings and church activities. Helpline staff offer advice that is
focused firstly on protecting and caring for the victim. Working
with local church leaders, the helpline ensures compliance with legal
reporting obligations, encourages the victim or victim's family to report
the abuse to civil authorities, and helps connect victims with
(45:43):
professionals who can provide counseling assistance. Heaven's Helpline was funded
by New Zealand On Air and The New Zealand Herald
for enz Edme and iHeartRadio. It was researched, written and
presented by Me Murray Jones. My producers were Adam Dudding,
(46:04):
who co wrote the series, and Kirston Johnston from Popsot Media,
who edited and sound designed it Phil Brownlee as our
sound engineer. Music was by Thomas Arbor and Anita Clark.
News clippings came from Fox News thirteen, Utah, twelve News,
NBC and ABC four Utah. Audio of Paul Ritting was
(46:25):
supplied by Reveal and the Associated Press. Thank you to
Microzendees and Jason Doorday for your dedicated investigative work on
the church. Ethan Sills is executive producer here at New
Zealand Herald. If you have a story you'd like to
share with me about the LDS Church, or just want
to get in touch, email me securely at Murray Reports
(46:49):
at Proton dot m E or dm me on X
at Murray Reports. And for more on this podcast, head
to NZ Herald dot co dot nz slash Heaven's helpline.
It's time intensive doing investigations like this, so if you
(47:10):
value this kind of journalism, please support it by going
to your podcast platform and rating and reviewing the series
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