Paul Rytting listened as a woman, voice quavering, told him her story.
When she was a child, her father, a former bishop in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, had routinely slipped into bed with her while he was aroused, she said.
It was March 2017 and Rytting offered his sympathies as 31-year-old Chelsea Goodrich spoke. A Utah attorney and head of the church’s Risk Management Division, Rytting had spent about 15 years protecting the organization, widely known as the Mormon church, from costly claims, including sexual abuse lawsuits.
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Audio recordings of the meetings over the next four months, obtained by The Associated Press, show how Rytting, despite expressing concern for what he called John’s “significant sexual transgression,” would employ the risk management playbook that has helped the church keep child sexual abuse cases secret. In particular, the church would discourage Miller from testifying, citing a law that exempts clergy from having to divulge information about child sex abuse that is gleaned in a confession. Without Miller’s testimony, prosecutors dropped the charges, telling Lorraine that her impending divorce and the years that had passed since Chelsea’s alleged abuse might prejudice jurors.
You’re getting dragged but you’re right. Clergy is legally allowed to report whatever they want unless the confession is considered by the state to be “protected religious conversation owned by the confessor”. That’s what is happening here. The first article links a second that covers it in greater detail. It’s super fucked up.
If clergy shared their confessions regardless, they’d likely lose their position with the church and could be sued by the confessor, having violated clergy-penitent privilege, but I’d willingly sacrifice my job to keep someone from raping children. These assholes, though, are indoctrinated from the beginning to believe that the confession process is a magical “get out of jail free” card that just puts people on the path of recovery because they showed penitence. How? Native American Jesus, Joseph Smith, and magical hats. Fucking magic.
The last half of your response is bigoted, but I appreciate the words of logic about the issue at hand. I’m not aware of any situations where a bishop has been censured for reporting crimes that they became aware of through a confession, and from my own service in the Church I find such a thing unlikely.
So really, the risk to Bishop Miller in this case has very little, if anything to do with the Church and everything to do with the fact that it would be illegal for him to testify against John Goodrich, and even if he did, his testimony would be inadmissible.
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Making blanket statements about an entire group being brainwashed certainly qualifies as a form of bigotry.