The Structure of the Problem
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — commonly known as the Mormon Church — is the fourth largest Christian denomination in the United States, with approximately 6.7 million American members and 17 million worldwide. It operates more than 31,000 congregations globally and manages an investment portfolio that a 2023 SEC whistleblower complaint valued at over $100 billion through its Ensign Peak Advisors arm.
It is also the subject of over a hundred active civil lawsuits alleging child sexual abuse, more than 4,000 documented abuse reports catalogued by the independent database Floodlit.org, and a landmark Associated Press investigation that obtained thousands of pages of sealed court documents revealing in detail how the church routes abuse disclosures away from law enforcement and toward its own attorneys.
This article follows the primary record. Every claim is traceable to a court document, a sworn deposition, a named investigative source, or a matter of public record. The church disputes several of the characterizations in the cited investigations. Its position is noted where relevant. What follows is what the documents show.
The Helpline
In 1995, as lawsuits against religious institutions for child sexual abuse were on the rise nationally, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints established a 24-hour helpline for bishops to call when confronted with abuse disclosures. The church has publicly described the line as an innovative resource to help clergy navigate mandatory reporting requirements. The sealed court records tell a different story.
According to sworn statements from church officials obtained by the Associated Press and included as evidence in civil litigation, the helpline is staffed first by social workers affiliated with LDS Family Services — an agency associated with the church. When those social workers receive calls about abuse that may present a legal or reputational risk to the church — including abuse by prominent members, abuse during church activities, or especially severe cases — the calls are immediately referred to attorneys at Kirton McConkie, a 160-attorney Salt Lake City law firm that serves as the church’s primary outside counsel.
Once the call reaches Kirton McConkie, the church invokes attorney-client privilege. This means the contents of the call — including the identity of the abuser, the nature of the abuse, and the identity of the victim — become legally inaccessible to prosecutors or civil plaintiffs. The helpline records themselves are destroyed at the end of each day, according to sworn church testimony contained in the sealed records.
The critical structural point is this: the same law firm that created the helpline in 1995 is the firm that defends the church in sexual abuse lawsuits. Kirton McConkie attorneys who field calls about abuse are the same attorneys who later argue the church bears no liability for that abuse. A pretrial deposition in one sealed case, described by plaintiffs’ attorney Timothy Kosnoff, revealed that a Kirton McConkie attorney acknowledged the firm uses information from helpline calls to identify cases that present a high financial risk to the church.
The church has never disclosed how many calls the helpline receives annually. When VICE News asked the church spokesman Eric Hawkins for this data, he declined to provide it and declined to explain why. By contrast, the Catholic Church, since the early 2000s, has annually published the number of abuse-related reports its bishops make to civil authorities. The Mormon Church publishes nothing.
The Adams Case: Seven Years in Bisbee
Paul Douglas Adams was a U.S. Border Patrol employee living with his wife and six children in Bisbee, Arizona. In 2010, he confessed to his local bishop, John Herrod, that he had been sexually abusing his daughter. Herrod called the church helpline. According to the call log later obtained by the AP as evidence in civil litigation — and attached to a filing in the Arizona Court of Appeals — Kirton McConkie attorney Merrill F. Nelson took the initial call.
Nelson was not merely a church attorney. He was simultaneously a member of the Utah House of Representatives, elected in 2013. He received his undergraduate and law degrees from Brigham Young University, the church-owned institution in Provo, Utah. His phone number appeared in a list of attorneys to call, described as a “protocol,” that was included in sealed documents.
Nelson’s call log records an “initial case summary” dated November 7, 2011, based on a conversation with Herrod. It records “a description of legal advice” and notes additional communications with the bishop over the following months. The advice given, as Herrod subsequently described to federal investigators: “You absolutely can do nothing.”
The church excommunicated Adams. It did not call the police. It did not call child protective services. Adams went home. The abuse continued.
“They just said, ‘Hey, let’s excommunicate her father.’ It didn’t stop. ‘Let’s have them go to therapy.’ It didn’t stop. ‘Hey, let’s forgive and forget. And this will all go away.’ It didn’t go away. They just let it keep happening.”
MJ, daughter of Paul Adams — Associated Press, August 2022Over the next seven years, Adams continued raping his older daughter. He also began abusing a second daughter, starting when she was just six weeks old. He filmed the abuse and posted videos to the internet. Federal authorities arrested him in 2017 only because Homeland Security agents in New Zealand and the United States traced one of the videos to him. Adams died by suicide in federal custody before trial. His wife, Leizza Adams, pleaded no contest to two counts of child abuse and served two and a half years in state prison. The presiding judge called the case “one of the most horrendous cases of child molestation” he had ever encountered.
Three of the Adams children filed a civil lawsuit against the church in 2021 in Cochise County Superior Court. Their complaint alleged that the church “implements the Helpline not for the protection and spiritual counseling of sexual abuse victims, as professed in Church doctrine and literature, but for Kirton McConkie attorneys to snuff out complaints and protect the Church from potentially costly lawsuits.”
In November 2023, Cochise County Superior Court Judge Timothy Dickerson dismissed the lawsuit. He ruled that the clergy-penitent privilege under Arizona law excused the bishops and church officials from mandatory reporting requirements because the information came to them through a spiritual confession. The dismissal was appealed. In July 2025, an Arizona Court of Appeals reinstated the lawsuit, ruling that Adams’ admissions may not have been entirely protected by the privilege, and that the case could proceed.
The church’s successful dismissal argument in 2023 was that clergy-penitent privilege — the same privilege that protects confessionals — shielded its officials from Arizona’s mandatory child abuse reporting law. Critics, including the plaintiffs’ attorney Lynne Cadigan, argued this “completely eviscerate[s] the state’s child protection law.” The appeals court’s 2025 reversal means the question of whether church officials had knowledge of the abuse outside the confessional context will be decided at trial.
Ward Record Entries: Cases from the Court Record
The Adams case is not a single failure. It is a pattern documented in active litigation, criminal proceedings, and investigative journalism across multiple states. The following cases are drawn entirely from named court filings, criminal convictions, and published investigative records.
Kirton McConkie: The Firm That Built the System
Kirton McConkie is headquartered in Salt Lake City, a few blocks from Temple Square. It was founded by Latter-day Saints and has served as the church’s primary outside legal counsel for decades. The firm created the church’s abuse helpline in 1995. The same firm defends the church in abuse-related civil litigation. The same attorneys who field helpline calls are, in documented cases, later named as defense counsel in lawsuits arising from the abuse those calls concerned.
In a pretrial deposition in the West Virginia Jensen case — which was sealed by a judge and later described under oath by plaintiffs’ attorney Timothy Kosnoff — a Kirton McConkie attorney acknowledged that the firm uses information from helpline calls to identify cases that pose a high financial risk to the church. Kosnoff also stated under oath that the attorney did not know why the church does not instruct bishops to call police directly — as the Catholic Church does — instead of the helpline.
In another sealed deposition in the same case, obtained and described in the VICE News investigation, helpline calls were confirmed to be first answered inside the Salt Lake City offices of LDS Family Services before being transferred to Kirton McConkie for high-risk cases. Mohave County, Arizona chief deputy prosecutor James Schoppmann filed a formal complaint to the state bar after a Kirton McConkie attorney told him they “didn’t need to inform police that a child was being sexually abused.”
Suzanne Clarke, director of a victim advocacy organization in Kingman, Arizona, attended a Kirton McConkie presentation to local clergy in May 2018. She described the firm’s message to bishops as: “Whatever they said as attorneys to bishops or clergy was above the law, like confession was above the law, and they did not need to report child abuse.”
“The failure to prevent or report abuse was part of the policy of the defendants, which was to block public disclosure to avoid scandals, to avoid the disclosure of their tolerance of child sexual molestation and assault, to preserve a false appearance of propriety, and to avoid investigation and action by public authority, including law enforcement.”
Plaintiff complaint in civil litigation against LDS Church — cited in AP investigation, August 2022The Clergy-Penitent Privilege: Law as Shield
The clergy-penitent privilege is a recognized evidentiary protection in all 50 states. It exempts clergy from mandatory reporting requirements when information about abuse is disclosed during a confidential religious communication — analogous to a Catholic confession. Its purpose is to protect freedom of conscience and encourage moral disclosure within religious communities.
Critics, including multiple state prosecutors and child welfare advocates, argue the LDS Church exploits this privilege far beyond its intended scope. In the Adams case, the church applied the privilege not only to Bishop Herrod’s confession but to a second bishop who learned of the abuse in a separate context — and to church officials who, the plaintiffs’ complaint alleges, received information about the abuse through channels beyond any religious confession.
The Associated Press investigation found that lobbying by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Catholic Church, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses has successfully blocked legislation in multiple states that would have eliminated or narrowed the clergy exemption to mandatory reporting. These legislative efforts, by definition, are part of the public record.
| State | Clergy Exemption | LDS Lobbying Documented | Reform Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| Arizona | Yes — used in Adams dismissal | YES — AP documented | Appeals court partly reversed 2025 |
| Washington | Eliminated for clergy 2023 | Clergy now mandatory reporters | Law passed Feb. 2023 without exemption |
| Utah | Retained | YES — church headquartered in Utah | Exemption maintained |
| California | Retained with broad scope | Lobbying reported | ~100 lawsuits filed under lookback window 2025 |
The Bishop’s Interview: One-on-One with Children
A distinct and documented concern involves the practice of private one-on-one interviews between local bishops and youth members, typically conducted in the bishop’s office with the door closed. These interviews are described in church governance documents as part of annual worthiness assessments for youth preparing for ordinances, missions, or temple attendance.
Multiple former members and mental health professionals have documented that some bishops, during these private interviews, have asked sexually explicit questions of children and teenagers, including questions about masturbation, sexual thoughts, and sexual activity. Unlike clergy in many other denominations, LDS bishops are lay volunteers who receive no formal professional training in child psychology or appropriate professional boundaries with minors.
The organization Protect LDS Children gathered more than 100,000 signatures on a petition calling for the practice to end or require parental presence. The church modified its guidelines in 2018 to make parental presence optional. Critics noted that “optional” still means that a lay adult with no professional training can conduct private interviews with children about their sexual behavior without a parent present if neither party requests one.
The structural concern is documented: bishops are often the first church officials to learn about child sexual abuse, the first to call the helpline, and the first to be advised by attorneys on whether to report. A system that places untrained lay volunteers in private one-on-one contact with children, then routes any resulting abuse disclosures through a law firm, creates documented gaps in child protection.
The Boy Scouts Connection
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was the largest single sponsor of Boy Scouts of America troops in the United States for decades, responsible for approximately 18.5% of all BSA membership at the peak of the relationship. The church chartered more than 30,000 Boy Scout units. It formally ended its relationship with the BSA in 2019, effective 2020, citing a desire to develop its own youth program.
The timing coincided with an increasing volume of civil litigation arising from sexual abuse in BSA troops nationally. The BSA filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2020, citing more than 92,000 claims of sexual abuse. Court filings in the BSA bankruptcy proceedings identified church-chartered troops as the site of abuse in some of those claims. The relationship between the two institutions’ institutional failures and the LDS Church’s 2019 departure remains a subject of active legal analysis.
The Scale Problem
The challenge in assessing the total scope of child sexual abuse within the LDS Church is the same challenge that applied to the Catholic Church before mandatory reporting databases were established: the institution controls much of the information, the records are either destroyed or protected by privilege, and settlements are frequently accompanied by nondisclosure agreements.
What the available public record shows is significant. The independent database Floodlit.org has catalogued more than 4,000 documented abuse reports involving LDS church members, drawing on court records, news reports, and criminal conviction databases. The database maps over 1,000 locations across the United States where LDS church members have allegedly perpetrated sex crimes. These are not allegations made against the institution — they are documented cases, many with criminal convictions.
In California, a state lookback window allowing survivors to file civil claims regardless of when the abuse occurred produced nearly 100 lawsuits against the LDS Church in 2025 alone. The U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation declined to consolidate these cases into an MDL in April 2025, citing the unique factual circumstances of individual cases. In May 2025, the church agreed to settle more than 100 California lawsuits on undisclosed terms.
Nondisclosure Agreements and the Silence Economy
The church’s use of nondisclosure agreements as a condition of abuse settlements is documented in multiple cases. The practice is not illegal. It is the same mechanism used by other large institutions facing abuse litigation, including the Catholic Church and various corporate defendants. Its effect is to prevent survivors from speaking publicly about what happened to them, who was involved, and what the church knew. It also prevents survivors from knowing whether their abuser hurt other people.
In the Chelsea Goodrich case documented by the AP, the church offered Chelsea and her mother a settlement that included a nondisclosure agreement. The recordings of her meetings with church risk manager Paul Rytting, which Chelsea made without disclosure, showed Rytting working systematically to prevent Bishop Miller from testifying — the testimony that would have allowed the criminal case against Chelsea’s father to proceed. When the criminal case collapsed due to missing testimony, the church moved to the settlement offer. Chelsea eventually agreed. Her father was not prosecuted.
In the West Virginia Jensen case, the church settled for an undisclosed amount in March 2018 while trial was underway — at the moment when sealed depositions revealing the helpline’s architecture were about to become part of the public trial record. Plaintiffs’ attorney Kosnoff told VICE News that additional revelations about Kirton McConkie’s role might have come to light had the settlement not been reached when it was.
The documented cases share common features: a bishop receives an abuse disclosure and calls the helpline; a church attorney advises the bishop on whether to report; in several documented cases the advice is not to report; the church excommunicates or disciplines the abuser internally; the abuse continues; when litigation arises, the church invokes privilege, destroys records, and offers settlements with NDAs. No independent body audits the helpline. No public data is released about its operations. The church calls it innovative.
Financial Power and Institutional Incentive
Context for the church’s institutional behavior requires noting the scale of its financial interests. In 2023, the SEC fined Ensign Peak Advisors — the church’s investment arm — $5 million and the church $1 million for using shell investment funds to avoid disclosing its holdings. A whistleblower complaint to the IRS had previously alleged that Ensign Peak managed approximately $100 billion in assets. The fund had not been used for charitable purposes in the approximately 20 years of its existence at the time of the complaint, according to the whistleblower.
This financial context is relevant for a specific reason: a key question in all institutional child abuse litigation is what the institution knew and when, and whether financial calculations shaped how it responded. In the sealed deposition described by Kosnoff, a church attorney acknowledged that the helpline is used to identify cases presenting high financial risk. The legal architecture of the helpline — attorney privilege, daily record destruction, controlled information flow — is precisely what an institution worth $100 billion would design to minimize litigation exposure.
That is not speculation. It is the documented testimony of the church’s own attorneys, under oath, in sealed proceedings that were subsequently obtained through civil litigation and described in sworn public filings.
Comparison to the Catholic Church Response
The Catholic Church’s abuse crisis began receiving sustained public attention in 2002 following the Boston Globe investigation. In 2002 and the years following, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops established the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, created independent review boards in every diocese, and began publishing annual statistics on the number of abuse allegations and the number referred to civil authorities. The Dallas Charter requires that “any credible allegation of sexual abuse” be referred to civil authorities immediately.
The LDS Church has not adopted equivalent reporting transparency. It does not publish annual statistics on helpline calls or referrals to civil authorities. Its helpline routes disclosures to attorneys. Its settlements frequently require silence from survivors. Its lobbying record includes opposing mandatory reporting legislation in multiple states. Asked by VICE News to clarify why it does not instruct bishops to call police directly — as the Catholic Church does — the church declined to answer.
The comparison is not made to suggest equivalence of scope. The Catholic abuse crisis involved tens of thousands of documented victims across decades and systematic reassignment of known predators. The LDS record is not that scale — at least not in the public record. But the Catholic crisis also began appearing modest in scope before comprehensive reporting was mandated. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints currently operates a system explicitly designed to prevent comprehensive reporting from ever occurring.
What the Documents Show
The primary record documents the following with specificity:
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints established a helpline in 1995, during a period when legal claims against religious institutions for child abuse were rising. The helpline was created by the same law firm that defends the church in abuse litigation. When bishops call the helpline with disclosures of child sexual abuse, the serious cases are routed to attorneys who invoke privilege and advise on whether to report. Records of those calls are destroyed daily. The attorneys who field the calls later defend the church when victims sue. In multiple documented cases, the advice given to bishops was not to report. In multiple documented cases, the abuse continued for years after the helpline was called. The church has never disclosed the volume of helpline calls or the percentage referred to civil authorities. It has actively lobbied to maintain clergy exemptions to mandatory reporting laws in multiple states. It has resolved abuse lawsuits with nondisclosure agreements that prevent survivors from discussing what happened.
The church’s response to these findings, in public statements, has been that it does more than any other religious denomination to prevent and report abuse, and that the helpline is a resource designed to help bishops navigate state law. Its attorneys have argued in court that the clergy-penitent privilege protects the confidentiality of disclosures made during spiritual confession.
In Bisbee, Arizona, Paul Adams raped his daughters for seven years after his bishop called the helpline. His older daughter, now an adult, told the Associated Press: “I just think that the Mormon Church really sucks. Seriously sucks. They are just the worst type of people, from what I’ve experienced and what other people have experienced.”
She was six weeks old when the abuse of her younger sister began. The helpline had been operational for fifteen years by that point. No one called the police.