The room with two chairs
Almost everything in this topic runs through a small room off a chapel corridor, and through a conversation held in it between one adult and one child. The Latter-day Saint bishop is not a professional. He is a member of the congregation, called for a term of years, unpaid, untrained in law or clinical practice, and asked to hold interviews that determine whether a young person may be ordained, receive a temple recommend, or serve a mission. Those interviews have long included questions about sexual conduct.
The practice has been argued about inside the Church for at least half a century, and the arguing shows in the record. The 1976 handbook asked whether a candidate was "morally clean" and whether any "major transgression" had not "been confessed and adjusted"; the phrasing was tightened later that year to name the law of chastity specifically.1 In 1978 the First Presidency added language about "impure, unholy, or unnatural sex acts," and the addition promptly produced what its authors evidently had not intended: bishops asking married couples about their specific sexual activities. The First Presidency sent follow-up instructions that bishops "should never inquire into personal, intimate matters involving marital relations between a man and his wife," and that cautionary line has stayed in the instructions ever since.2
In October 1978 Boyd K. Packer took the matter to the pulpit. Interviews, he said, must be conducted as the Lord himself would conduct them: "there must be nothing immodest or degrading in your interview." Then the specific instruction: "It is not in order for a priesthood leader to list in detail ugly, deviant, or bestial practices and then cross-examine a member of the Church as to whether or not such things are practiced." He noted that the Church received occasional reports of leaders who had been "very indiscreet or indelicate."3 That he had to say it establishes that it was happening. That the instruction had to be repeated across decades establishes something about how a lay clergy scales.
A telephone number, 1995
By the early 1990s the Church was carrying real legal exposure. At a leadership meeting in Calgary in 1994, President Gordon B. Hinckley told local leaders that abuse cases "are costing the Church millions of dollars in lawyers' fees and settlements."4 In 1995 it revised its 1985 guide for ecclesiastical leaders and set up a telephone line those leaders were to call when they learned of abuse.5
Hinckley described it publicly the following year, reading an interview with Mike Wallace into general conference. Asked what the Church was doing about child abuse, he answered: "We are teaching our people. We are talking about it. We have set up a course of instruction for our bishops all across the nation... We have set up a help-line for them where they can get professional counseling and help with these problems."6 Six years later he was more specific from the pulpit: the Church had "established a telephone line where Church officers may receive counsel in handling cases," and "professional counselors, including lawyers and social workers, are available on this help line to advise bishops and stake presidents concerning their obligations in these circumstances."7
That sentence contains the whole later argument in miniature. The line is staffed by counselors and by lawyers. Its subject is the bishop's obligations. Whether that is a service to a frightened lay leader or an intake valve for institutional risk is the question the next thirty years would litigate.
Who answers the phone
The Utah Supreme Court described the line in 2014 as "a 1-800 number that bishops and other Church clergy can call when they become aware of possible abuse," available "24 hours a day, 365 days a year and staffed by legal and counseling professionals" who provide guidance on protecting the victim and on the legal issues involved.8 The legal half of that staffing is supplied by Kirton McConkie, one of Utah's largest firms and the Church's long-standing outside counsel.
Plaintiffs' complaints filed since 2024 put the same architecture in adversarial terms, alleging that help-line operators "transfer these calls to the Kirton McConkie attorneys, who advise the bishop not to report the abuse incident to law enforcement, misrepresenting clergy-penitent privilege laws as their reasoning," and that the firm uses information from help-line calls "to identify cases that pose a high financial risk" to the Church.9 These are allegations in pleadings, not findings.
The Church's counsel describes it very differently, and in public. At the FAIR conference in August 2025, Kirton McConkie attorney Randy Austin said the line gives a bishop access to "hundreds of years of experience dealing with child abuse — clinical and legal — to aid him from day one," and that "far more abuse gets reported when the bishop calls the helpline than if we didn't have one." He offered a worked example: a Scout told his bishop that his scoutmaster was abusing him, the bishop's instinct was to go talk to the neighbour, and the line instead told him to cancel the next day's campout and call police. The scoutmaster was arrested and convicted. Austin also said, of himself: "I've done this work for 30 years. I am a survivor of child sexual abuse."10
Bisbee
On 4 August 2022 the Associated Press published Michael Rezendes's account of what had happened in a ward in Bisbee, Arizona. A father in counselling with his bishop admitted that he was sexually abusing his five-year-old daughter. The bishop, who was also a family physician, followed policy and called the help line. He later told federal investigators what he was told: "They said, 'You absolutely can do nothing.'"11
He did not call police. He continued counselling the father and brought the mother into the sessions, apparently hoping she would protect the children. He told his successor, who also kept it quiet after consulting Church officials. The abuse continued for as many as seven more years, extended to a second daughter born after both bishops knew, and was recorded and distributed online. It ended in 2017 when Homeland Security agents arrested the father after New Zealand and Interpol traced the material. He was indicted on eleven counts and died by suicide in pretrial detention. The mother pleaded no contest in 2018 to two felony counts of child abuse for failing to protect the children.12
The AP's account rested on thousands of pages of sealed court documents. A follow-up story, based on two pages of a help-line call log and a deposition filed with the Arizona Court of Appeals, reported that the attorney who took the first call was Merrill F. Nelson — at the time both a Kirton McConkie lawyer and a sitting Republican member of the Utah House of Representatives — and that he had further conversations with the two bishops over roughly two years.13
The Church's answer
The Church replied the next day. "The nature and the purpose of the Church's help line was seriously mischaracterized in a recent Associated Press article," the Newsroom statement read. "The help line is instrumental in ensuring that all legal requirements for reporting are met. It provides a place for local leaders, who serve voluntarily, to receive direction from experts to determine who should make a report and whether they should play a role in that reporting."14 A second, longer statement followed, listing what the Church said the story got wrong and setting out a leader's duties in three lines: assure that child sexual abuse is stopped; help victims receive care, including from professional counselors; comply with whatever reporting is required by law.15
On the specific case, spokesman Sam Penrod said the bishop "was required by Arizona law to maintain the confidentiality of the father's limited confession," that he had nonetheless urged the family to report or to give consent for him to do so and been refused, and that he convened a disciplinary council and excommunicated the father. "It was not until law enforcement made an arrest of the father that the bishop learned of the scope and magnitude of the abuse that far exceeded anything he had heard or suspected."16
Two voices sat awkwardly across the line. Kate Taylor Lauck, an attorney who had worked on the help line and is herself a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, wrote in the Deseret News that the story broke her heart and that she read it from both sides at once.17 The Washington Post's editorial board took the other view: the advice given to the bishop "was false, and its consequences unspeakable," and the hotline could function "as a black box in which reports of sexual abuse have been hidden."18
Privilege, and who decides
The legal question underneath is older than the Church's involvement in it and is not one question but fifty. Clergy-penitent privilege is state law. It differs in every state, and in some it belongs to the clergy member, in some to the penitent, in some to both.19 Arizona's civil statute says a clergyman "shall not, without the consent of the person making a confession, be examined as to any confession made to him in his character as clergyman."20 Its reporting statute, section 13-3620, requires clergy to report — but excuses them where the belief arises from a confession and where confidentiality is "reasonable and necessary within the concepts of the religion."
FAIR's summary is that there are three classes of law, that two of them are mutually exclusive, and that a single global policy would therefore put some bishops in breach somewhere.21 That is not a rhetorical point; it is the practical reason a help line exists at all. Critics accept the premise and reject the conclusion: Sam Brunson argued that the Church, having the influence, should be pressing states to make clergy mandatory reporters rather than defending the exemption.22
On 30 July 2025 the Arizona Supreme Court settled the matter for that state. A unanimous court, Vice Chief Justice John R. Lopez IV writing, held that whether a statement is a confession, and whether keeping it confidential is reasonable and necessary within the concepts of the religion, are questions of religious doctrine that fact-finders may not review: "We may not substitute our interpretation of Church doctrine for the Church's reading of its own doctrine." The court reinstated the 2023 trial judgment and vacated an appellate ruling that had put the case back on track for a jury. Amicus briefs supporting the Church came from three Catholic dioceses, the Church of Scientology International and the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists.23 The statute lets the clergy member decide; the Constitution stops anyone reviewing the decision.
2018: the year the practice changed
The interview practice changed not because of a court but because of a former bishop. From 2017 Sam Young and his organization Protect LDS Children collected and published accounts of sexually explicit questioning of minors in bishops' offices and pressed for an end to one-on-one interviews. On 26 March 2018 the First Presidency announced changes to how bishops and stake presidencies conduct interviews with women and children and how they counsel abuse victims: children, youth and women may now invite an adult to join them.24 The current Handbook goes further, directing a leader meeting with a child, youth or woman to ask a parent or another adult to be in an adjoining room, foyer or hall, and requiring two adults in classrooms and on all youth activities.25
The Church has not credited the campaign. In September 2018 it excommunicated Young.26
The same year brought a second institutional test. Allegations were made publicly against a former president of the Provo Missionary Training Center concerning conduct in the 1980s. He was never criminally charged, and the civil suit against him and the Church was dismissed with prejudice; FLOODLIT's own case record lists the criminal disposition as "never charged, not convicted" alongside an admission of some conduct.27 What the episode changed was not a legal outcome but the Church's exposure: it demonstrated that a recording made by a survivor could put a senior leader's account and the institution's handling of a decades-old complaint into public circulation at once.
What the litigation record actually shows
The record does not point one way. In 2001 the Church paid $3 million to Jeremiah Scott of Oregon, abused at eleven by a ward member whose history the family said their bishop knew and did not disclose when they asked his advice about taking the man into their home. The plaintiffs settled only on condition that they be free to discuss the evidence; it was the first LDS abuse settlement figure ever made public. Church attorney Von Keetch defended the record-annotation system in the same coverage: an admitted abuser may repent and return, "but what I can't do is ever work with children again." The plaintiff's mother put the other case: "We cannot put our children at the mercy of the Church's sense of judgment."28
The largest known payout stayed secret for seven years. Six West Virginia families sued in 2013 after Michael Jensen — convicted that July and sentenced to 35 to 75 years — abused children in wards where, the complaint alleged, leaders knew of prior charges and did not warn or report. The case settled mid-trial in 2018. Only when the Church sued its own insurers to recover the cost did the numbers surface: a $32 million settlement and more than $27 million in defense fees, close to $60 million on one case. Roughly 12,000 pages remain sealed by order of the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals.29 In April 2025 a Utah federal court ruled for the insurers, writing that "once the Church had knowledge that Mr. Jensen posed a risk of abuse to Church members, the Church had a duty to its members to prevent the abuse. The Church had multiple opportunities to act and failed to do so." On 28 July 2026 the Tenth Circuit reversed and remanded, and the coverage fight continues.30
The Arizona case went the other way at every level after the trial court. Recent filings — the 2025 Oregon complaint, more than ninety coordinated California suits, three Washington suits, the federal MDL numbered 3150 — are pleadings. They allege; they have not been proved, and many California cases have settled without any finding of liability.31 Reporting a filed complaint as a proven fact is the single most common error in coverage of this subject, and it is made by advocates on both sides.
Counting
There is no authoritative number, and the reason is structural. The Church does not publish a registry of credibly accused members or leaders, and does not release aggregate data on help-line calls or disciplinary outcomes. The only volume figure anywhere in this record comes from Lavina Fielding Anderson, who reported in 2003 that a stake high councilor, speaking in her ward, let slip that the help line had taken roughly 20,000 calls from priesthood leaders in 2001 — about one every twenty-six minutes. FLOODLIT has not been able to find the underlying issue, and no comparable figure has been published since.32
Into that vacuum FLOODLIT built a database. It is an independent newsroom, and its stated inclusion criteria are public court records, police documents, formal charges and established news reporting, with primary sources preferred over secondary. Its disclaimer is explicit: "We make no representations regarding the truth of any allegations, nor do we suggest or imply any fault for any named parties." It does not remove entries after an acquittal, but flags the legal status. It publishes birth years rather than birthdates and city rather than street address for anyone not on a sex-offender registry.33
Its aggregate figures, as published: over 4,300 case reports, drawn from 6,255 cited sources and more than 33,000 obtained documents; 935 convicted sex offenders; 139 convicted former bishops, 37 of them alleged to have offended while serving as bishops; 234 former missionaries; 403 alleged failure-to-report cases; and at least $52.2 million in court-ordered or agreed payments across some thirty documented instances. The figure most likely to be misused is 2,908 Scout leaders, of whom 2,854 come from claims filed in the Boy Scouts of America bankruptcy — claims whose claimants may never be identified.34
What those numbers establish is a floor of what is publicly discoverable, not a rate and not a total. FLOODLIT says so itself: the database "simply shows what two reporters have found and catalogued in three years," without access to the Church's disciplinary records.35 Anyone converting it into a prevalence claim about Latter-day Saints, in either direction, is using it for something it was not built to do.
What is actually in dispute
Strip away the adjectives and the disagreement narrows to two empirical questions and one moral one. First: does routing a bishop's disclosure through the Church's outside counsel produce more reporting to police, or less? Austin says more, and offers an example and an assertion about studies; Greco and the plaintiffs' bar say the client is the institution and the incentive runs the other way. Neither side has produced, in anything the corpus holds, the underlying data that would settle it — because the Church holds it.
Second: does a strong clergy-penitent privilege protect children by giving offenders and victims a safe place to speak, or endanger them by insulating what is said there? This is a genuine empirical dispute, argued in good faith by people who are themselves survivors on both sides of it, and it is not resolved by the Arizona ruling, which decided only who gets to answer a doctrinal question, not whether the answer is good for children.
The moral question is the one the Arizona Supreme Court declined to reach. It noted that it "did not rule on whether the church behaved decently." Jana Riess had made the same distinction three years earlier: because Arizona does not require clergy to report, "what they did may have been perfectly legal. That does not make it right."36 Every party to this argument agrees, in words, that protecting a child comes first. What they disagree about is what an institution owes when its lawyers tell it that the law does not require what conscience might.