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.
That’s a fair analysis, although I’m not sure if it qualifies as bigotry. I don’t like skinheads, does that also make me a bigot?
I was raised in a Mormon dominated town and my wife, despite from being an area of the country that is heavily not Mormon, is an ex-Mormon. What are the odds? Regardless, we’ve seen firsthand the damage the church causes to communities, families, and individuals, plus read a ton of anecdotal reports and professional analysis on their beliefs and actions. Like how they provide aid in impoverished countries, but it’s contingent on those being aided joining the church, and reports like these, where the church hides behind the laws they lobbied for and engages in borderline unethical (and sometimes absolutely unethical) practices to protect itself, generally to the detriment of the victims of these crimes.
We’re not fans.
Making blanket statements about an entire group being brainwashed certainly qualifies as a form of bigotry.