1968–2026

Sexual Abuse and the Institutional Response

Reporting, the abuse help line, and clergy-penitent privilege

11 people, ordered by how much of this topic turns on them. Each note describes the person's part in this topic, not a biography — the same person carries a different note on another topic.

GH

Gordon B. Hinckley

1910–2008

Church President, 1995–2008

Hinckley presided when the abuse help line was created in 1995 and was the first Church president to describe it publicly, first in a 1996 interview with Mike Wallace that he read into general conference and again from the pulpit in April 2002. His framing — publications, a telephone line for Church officers, professional help through LDS Family Services — is still the shape of the Church's own account. He also told a 1994 leadership meeting in Calgary that abuse cases were costing the Church millions in legal fees and settlements.

Wikipedia Image: Public domain

RS

Richard G. Scott

1928–2015

Apostle; conference addresses on abuse

Scott gave the two most-cited general conference addresses on abuse, in April 1992 and April 2008, and is the Church's standard citation for the teaching that victims of abuse are not guilty of sin. The 1992 address also cautioned against "excessive probing into every minute detail of your past experiences" and against therapy that might produce false accusation — language critics read as discouraging disclosure and defenders read as a warning against the recovered-memory practices of that decade.

Wikipedia Image: CC BY 2.0 — Jonathan Chartrand and family

MR

Michael Rezendes

Associated Press investigative reporter

Rezendes, formerly of the Boston Globe Spotlight team, published the August 2022 AP investigation of the Bisbee, Arizona case, built on thousands of pages of sealed court records. His reporting introduced the phrase "help line" to a national audience and produced the follow-up story identifying the Kirton McConkie attorney who took the first call. Nearly every subsequent argument, in either direction, is a response to his account.

Wikipedia Image: CC BY-SA 4.0 — CmdrDan

LC

Lynne Cadigan

Tucson attorney for the Adams children

Cadigan represented three of the Adams children in the Cochise County suit against the Church and two bishops, filed in November 2020. She pressed for release of the Church's disciplinary records and won an order from Judge Laura Cardinal requiring them; she is the source of the public characterization of those records as the Church's "secret records." The case ended against her clients at summary judgment and, ultimately, in the Arizona Supreme Court.

MN

Merrill F. Nelson

Utah state representative; Kirton McConkie attorney

AP reporting based on a help-line call log and a deposition transcript, filed in the Arizona Court of Appeals, showed that Nelson took the initial call from the bishop who reported the Adams abuse and had further conversations with two bishops over roughly two years. He was simultaneously a sitting Republican member of the Utah House and a lawyer for the firm that staffs the help line, which is why his role became a public question about the overlap of legislative and institutional-legal interests.

SY

Sam Young

Former bishop; founder, Protect LDS Children

Young campaigned publicly from 2017 to end one-on-one interviews in which bishops ask minors sexually explicit questions, collecting accounts from members and staging a hunger strike and a march. In March 2018 the First Presidency announced that children, youth and women could invite an adult into such interviews. Young was excommunicated in September 2018. He is the clearest case in this topic of a member-driven campaign that produced a policy change and cost the campaigner his membership.

RA

Randy Austin

Kirton McConkie attorney; Church crisis counsel

Austin is the Church's lead outside controversy-and-crisis counsel and the most detailed public defender of the help line. At the 2025 FAIR conference in Lehi he described it as serving 31,000 bishops and branch presidents, argued that "far more abuse gets reported when the bishop calls the helpline than if we didn't have one," and said that clergy privilege, which he counted as law in 37 states, increases rather than suppresses disclosure. He also stated publicly that he is himself a survivor of child sexual abuse.

PR

Paul Rytting

Director, Church Risk Management Division

Rytting appears throughout the litigation record as the Church officer who manages abuse exposure. His emails to insurers during the 2018 West Virginia trial, later unsealed in the Church's suit against those insurers, record settlement positions in dollar terms. FLOODLIT's contention that his 2012 sworn statement that "the first lawsuit against the Church relating to sexual abuse was brought in 1989" is contradicted by a 1984 Arizona filing is the sharpest documentary challenge to the Church's account of its own institutional memory.

JI

John R. Lopez IV

Vice Chief Justice, Arizona Supreme Court

Lopez wrote the unanimous opinion of 30 July 2025 that ended the Adams children's suit. The holding was narrow in subject and broad in effect: 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 the First Amendment bars courts from reviewing. In his words, "We may not substitute our interpretation of Church doctrine for the Church's reading of its own doctrine."

Image: CC BY-SA 3.0 — Gage Skidmore

SG

Suzanne E. Greco

Survivor-scholar; Dialogue author

Greco published "Confronting Men's Violence Against Women and Girls in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints" in Dialogue 58:3 (Fall 2025), a peer-reviewed article written openly from her position as a survivor and advocate. She argues that clergy-penitent law "has the unintended consequence of enabling harm in cases of child sex abuse," that the help line's client is the institution rather than the victim, and that the absence of Church-collected data is itself a structural finding.

LA

Lavina Fielding Anderson

b. 1944

Editor; co-founder, Mormon Alliance

Anderson's 1993 Dialogue article on ecclesiastical abuse and the Mormon Alliance's Case Reports, which she co-edited with Janice Merrill Allred, established the vocabulary of institutional harm that later advocates use. She was excommunicated in 1993. She is also the source of one of the only figures ever attached to the help line's volume: her 2003 report that a stake high councilor let slip that the line took roughly 20,000 calls from priesthood leaders in 2001.

Wikipedia