Out now wherever you get your podcasts. Video / Ben Dickens / Jason Dorday
Opinion by Murray Jones
Murray Jones is the creator and host of Heaven’s Helpline, a six-part podcast about abuse in the Mormon church in NZ. He also works as an investigative reporter for BusinessDesk.
When Murray Jones launched the podcast Heaven’s Helpline, he had no idea he would receive responses across five continents. After a two-year investigation, he reflects on how the church has reacted, and the heartbreaking messages he’s received.
One month ago, the New Zealand Herald released the first episodes of the podcast Heaven’s Helpline − my six-part investigation into the Mormon church in New Zealand, and its mishandling of reports of physical and sexual abuse within its membership.
Since then, I’ve received more than 100 emails and responses from all over the world − Australia, the US, Canada, the UK, South Africa, Japan and beyond. The stories told in the series really seem to have struck a chord.
The thing is, we know abuse isn’t just a Mormon problem. It happens in all sorts of institutions, in all walks of life.
Just this month, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon officially apologised for decades of abuse of up to 200,000 children in state and faith-based institutions in New Zealand.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, head of the Anglican church, resigned for his failure to refer a prolific abuser in his ranks to the police.
The Jehovah’s Witnesses in New Zealand were revealed to have a number of paedophiles in their ranks, and the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care criticised the church for “a lack of reporting to external authorities and inadequate consequences for abusers within the faith”.
And the secretive sect known as the Two by Twos or The Truth has faced scrutiny this year after a member from Kerikeri pleaded guilty to historical child abuse charges spanning three decades.
Yet what I learnt from more than two years of digging into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or “LDS” (who no longer officially call themselves “Mormons”) is that there are specific elements within its doctrine, norms, beliefs and practices that have set the stage for sexual abuse to flourish within the church community.
And that’s not even the worst of it. When credible reports of abuse come to light and are reported to church leadership, the LDS church has developed a very specific and uniquely legalistic method which prevents some cases of sexual abuse from reaching civil authorities.
The Catholic church is more than two decades into its journey of fitful acknowledgement of its abuse cover-ups. In 2018, Pope Francis issued a letter of apology after a grand jury report found that over 1000 children were abused by priests in Pennsylvania over decades, while complaints were hidden in a secret archive and officials never reported them to police.
“Let us beg forgiveness for our own sins and the sins of others,” he wrote.
By contrast, the Mormon church remains far more confident of its ability to handle sexual abuse within its congregations.
The church has claimed that: “We are unaware of any organisation that does more than the church to stop and prevent abuse,” describing its efforts as “comprehensive” and the “gold standard”.
But, when it comes to the appropriate handling of reports of abuse, the facts about the LDS church don’t match its rhetoric.
The horrors continue
A couple of weeks ago, the final episode of Heaven’s Helpline was published, so if you want to get the full picture of the two-year investigation, I encourage you to listen to the series.
Now that it’s all out there, I’ve taken some time to look at all the responses online – the Reddit threads, the blogs, the angry Facebook comments, the live YouTube discussions, and all the emails from listeners.
I’ve heard from members of the church, past and present, who felt moved to share their experiences with sexual abuse.
People in New Zealand have told me they were sexually abused by a member of the church that they had trusted but then felt shamed, blamed and discarded by their church leaders after reporting it to them.
I’ve heard from a former “high councillor” – a middle-ranking regional official – who said they sat in a church disciplinary council and were instructed not to tell anyone about the confessed child abuser in their midst.
I’ve received testimony from current LDS members in Utah – the historic hub of the entire faith – with one telling me that they, too, had asked the church for advice about suspected child abuse and were told not to report to civil authorities.
And I’ve read swathes of accounts from bystanders, all with similar stories about a suspected predator in their congregation being protected by church leadership, while those raising concerns were ignored.
I heard of two unrelated but astonishingly similar cases, one in Los Angeles, the other in Hamilton, where an alleged abuser had been reported to civil authorities, only to be buoyed up by a wave of public support from others in their congregation, even after their conviction.
These new accounts are just allegations at this point, I’ve not had a chance to verify them like the stories you’ll hear in the podcast.
But these testimonies, sent from five continents by people aged from 18 to 80, are remarkably faithful to the playbook that became apparent during my research.
On reflection though, it does stand to reason, because some of the structures that enable abuse and protect abusers are baked deep into the fundamental beliefs of the church.
There’s the patriarchal structure that codifies male authority over women, in both the domestic and the spiritual sphere.
There’s the rigid, vertical hierarchy of “priesthood holders” which gives church leaders carte blanche to engage in and interfere with nearly every aspect of a member’s life.
There’s the instinct to deal with issues in-house, embedded by a historical sense of persecution and a duty to protect the church’s reputation, that leads to members reporting even the most serious of crimes, such as the rape of children, to their bishop rather than to police or child protection services.
This in turn means many of these abusers are dealt with by confidential church “courts”, known as disciplinary councils, with breathtakingly light punishments.
And finally – and this is where the podcast got its name - there is the curiously corporate character of the church, which is why, when a bishop receives news of abuse in his ward, he’s instructed to immediately call an “abuse helpline” which will instantly loop him into a network of senior church lawyers – who are typically members of the church themselves.
Victims and perpetrators, bystanders and rescuers
That’s what it looks like in the abstract: a complex system of secrecy, in-house reporting of crimes, internal courts and church lawyers.
But of course, it’s a system entirely composed of people. So a core goal of Heaven’s Helpline was to tell the stories of some of those people – to understand how members of the church, current and former, were part of a system that demanded loyalty, and how that has shaped their own sense of duty, priorities and self.
Heaven's Helpline. Episode 2. Illustration / Paul Slater
In the series, we hear from people like Caroline (not her real name), the woman who set me on the path of this whole investigation. Her husband exploited his “priesthood leader” status over Caroline to violently abuse her.
After enduring years of extreme sexual violence and coercive control, Caroline fled to Auckland, where she sought protection from local church leaders, telling them she feared her tormenter might pursue her.
Sure enough, a year after she’d escaped, her ex-husband tracked her down. But rather than protect her, the Auckland church leaders arranged for Caroline to meet her abuser in a small room, where she was pressured into “forgiving” him.
We hear from Jenny, who says she was sexually assaulted by an elderly male church member when she was just 10 years old. When Jenny told her mother, she was taken to the bishop to explain.
In his office, the bishop asked Jenny’s mother to leave the room, and the door was locked from the inside. Then the bishop instructed her to tell him what had happened at the man’s house but to make it crystal clear, she needed to demonstrate it – on him, the bishop.
We meet Jade (not her real name). On the night Jade learnt her husband had been sexually abusing her young sister for years, starting at age 8. The couple had an emergency meeting with their bishop, where the bishop counselled Jade to stay with her husband.
Heaven's Helpline. Episode 3. Illustration / Paul Slater
She followed the counsel, and that led to further years of pain and emotional torment. Her husband became violently abusive towards her and, meanwhile, his punishment for the confessed child rape was a slap on the wrist from the church’s in-house disciplinary system. He was later promoted to senior church posts.
Doing the right thing
But we also hear from the people in the church who did their very best to help, or to put things right.
People like John Campbell, who was serving as the branch president in the Western Australian town where Caroline was being abused. He rescued her from her psychopathic husband. Caroline says John saved her life; John’s church leaders scolded him for breaking up a family – a sacrosanct unit in the LDS faith.
We hear from Quintin Howard and Ganesh Cherian, who both served as bishops in Wellington. Kind and hard-working, they each tried their best for their congregation. But they also outlined the problematic practices that bishops must engage in, including so-called “worthiness interviews” in the bishop’s office, where teenagers are asked whether they are obeying the law of chastity, including questions about masturbation and sexual activity.
Quintin and Ganesh talked about how unready they were, as bishops, to deal with some very serious issues, such as spousal abuse or rape. Rather than receiving comprehensive training, they were told to trust in their God-given gifts of “inspiration”, and the “power of discernment”, and to find ways to keep families together at almost any cost.
The podcast also hears from those who have taken direct action to try to protect the most vulnerable.
There is an extended interview with Doug Graves and Anahera Herbert-Graves who, in Kaitāia, tried to blow the whistle multiple times about an abuser in their Mormon church community. Their concerns weren’t taken seriously, and the couple watched as the abuser, a popular church leader called Daniel Taylor, was promoted to a teaching role, giving him even more opportunities to groom and sexually abuse boys and young men.
Heaven's Helpline. Episode 5. Illustration / Paul Slater
After two years, Doug finally went outside the church and reported Taylor to authorities. Within weeks Taylor was arrested.
As I investigated the LDS church, it became obvious to me that there is no shortage of good, ordinary people who want to do the right thing – for their families, and their community.
But they’re inside a system where it takes extraordinary bravery and persistence to call out bad behaviour, and then to follow through and ensure that action is taken.
That’s partly because this is an institution whose core beliefs require members to obey, to believe, and to put the institution’s reputation over the well-being of individual members.
This means good people can be complicit in bad things. And in the cases we explore in Heaven’s Helpline, the church has instructed leaders to cover up some of the worst crimes imaginable.
What’s wrong with a helpline?
The LDS church hierarchy is built on layers of “priesthood leaders”, from the father in the home to the bishop in a ward, to the stake president overseeing a region or country, all the way up to the global leader, president and prophet - currently Russell M. Nelson, who turned 100 in September.
The church’s culture of unquestioning obedience, and veneration of leaders, means that when a church member learns of abuse, their first instinct is to tell their bishop, in the belief that this divinely inspired leader is the perfect person to remedy the situation.
That’s what Jade did, it’s what Jenny’s mother did, it’s what Doug did.
We also know, from the church’s own handbook, that those bishops are then instructed to call the 24/7 church abuse helpline immediately. This connects them to a church lawyer.
These conversations are confidential - protected by attorney-client privilege. But what we know from a horrific case out of Bisbee, Arizona, is that the church also relies on another privilege - priest-penitent privilege - to ensure that confessions remain confidential.
The perpetrator in the Arizona case was called Paul Adams. He was a US border agent and he had been raping his daughter since 2010 when she was just 5 years old. He also sexually abused his other, even younger, children. He was arrested in 2017 and committed suicide in custody.
Yet the most shocking part of the Paul Adams case, brought to light by the Associated Press (AP), was that Adams had already confessed to his crimes, a full seven years before his arrest.
Adams was a member of the LDS church − and two bishops had known about the abuse and never reported it to police. The first bishop became aware of it all the way back in 2010.
AP revealed these bishops hadn’t independently decided not to report Adams to the police. Rather, they had kept this damning information under wraps on the advice of the church’s lawyers, after having called the abuse helpline.
It’s not as if the church wasn’t concerned by Adams’ abuse: a “disciplinary council” was held where as many as 15 more local church leaders were made aware of Adams’ crimes and confessions, and in 2013 he was excommunicated.
From the church’s perspective, the system had worked – the offender in their midst had been rooted out. Except for this: no one told police, and Adams continued to rape his children for four more years.
Arizona is a state that has “mandatory reporting” which means people in certain roles have a legal obligation to report suspected child abuse. But the church has argued, and told these two Bisbee bishops, that the priest-penitent privilege overrides the mandatory reporting obligations.
Quite simply, the church’s hardline interpretation of priest-penitent privilege, which is contested, enabled Paul Adams to carry on abusing his daughters for seven years.
How to put things right
Fixing a broken system is never easy, but occasionally internal reform works.
In the final episode of Heaven’s Helpline, we hear from Sara Delaney, who led a relentless, and ultimately successful, campaign within the UK LDS church to introduce mandatory background checks for anyone working with children or vulnerable adults in a church context.
It was an unusual development for a church that doesn’t look fondly upon public criticism from its members.
Sara Delaney remains in the church to this day, but others who have publicly campaigned for change have been excommunicated, including American Sam Young, who sought reforms of the worthiness interviews where teenagers are regularly asked gratuitously explicit questions about sex and masturbation.
So on current evidence, I doubt the Mormon church is ready to unpick the patriarchy and obedience that’s baked into its theology. I don’t expect the church’s most senior global leaders to throw away their privileges and rank. It could be a while before the church stops giving inexperienced lay bishops far too much power over the day-to-day lives of members.
But there are achievable external changes that could take risks out of the system.
In Heaven’s Helpline, we set out three specific gaps in New Zealand law.
Firstly, we have no mandatory reporting laws. In many jurisdictions teachers, carers, doctors (and sometimes clergy) are legally required to report to the authorities if they learn of any child abuse.
In New Zealand, they’re not, but that could change if there was the legislative will.
Secondly, priest-penitent privilege is law in New Zealand. In fact, we have one of the most strongly written versions of the privilege in law anywhere in the world. Again, that law could be rewritten.
Thirdly, in civil court, New Zealand has a six-year limitation date, including for historic abuse. If you take a civil case against an organisation where you were sexually abused, it can successfully defend itself, if the abuse occurred more than six years ago. This is ludicrous when you consider that it takes survivors of abuse around 25 years on average before they’re ready to report what happened.
Reading and hearing about abuse can make one feel hopeless. The capacity for human depravity that I came across during this project was often hard to comprehend. The violent damage done to body, mind and spirit can often never be repaired.
But the part I truly struggle to understand is the calculating corporate mindset of the LDS church. It appears the church has tolerated the abuse of its members, including children, because it sees such a situation not as an urgent moral tragedy but as a risk to be managed. A risk not to members, but a risk to the church’s reputation; a risk to its bank balance.
So sure – we could sit back, and naively hope that such a church will suddenly start doing the right thing.
But we shouldn’t be holding our breath. We shouldn’t be waiting for the church to make the first move. New Zealand’s lawmakers have already got three moves of their own that they could start making tomorrow.
We sought comment from the LDS church in response to the allegations discussed in the Heaven’s Helpline series. 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 abhor abuse of any kind. As a church, we invest heavily on prevention and response; and will continue to do so. Our priority is the welfare of the victim and following the law of the land with respect to the abuser facing the consequences of their actions.”
The full statement from the church can be read here.
