One Man, Two Chairs
On November 7, 2011, a man named Merrill F. Nelson wrote an “initial case summary” after a phone conversation with a bishop named John Herrod. The summary concerned Paul Adams, an active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Bisbee, Arizona, who had confessed to sexually abusing his five-year-old daughter. The summary was part of a call log maintained by the church’s abuse helpline. Nelson’s instructions to Herrod, per the bishop’s later recorded interview with federal investigators: do not report.
What the call log also shows, and what the court records make clear, is who Merrill F. Nelson was at the moment he wrote that summary. He was a shareholder — a partner-equivalent — at Kirton McConkie, the Salt Lake City law firm that was created and operates the LDS abuse helpline. He was also a member of the Utah House of Representatives. He had earned both his undergraduate and law degrees from Brigham Young University, the church-owned institution. He was, by every institutional measure, a member of the community whose interests he was simultaneously serving as a legislator.
He occupied two chairs at once. In one chair: a Utah state lawmaker with a vote on legislation governing clergy reporting of child abuse. In the other: the attorney who answered the helpline call when a bishop reported a child was being raped, and who told that bishop the law did not require him to act.
The Dual Role, Documented
The details of Nelson’s dual role emerged from sealed court records obtained by the Associated Press and appended to a filing in the Arizona Court of Appeals in 2022. The filing included a transcript of deposition testimony and excerpts from the helpline’s call log — records the church had fought to keep sealed, arguing they were protected by attorney-client privilege. The call log showed Nelson’s direct involvement with Bishop Herrod and a second bishop, Robert “Kim” Mauzy, over a two-year span beginning in 2010.
Nelson was not an incidental participant. Church records disclosed in the lawsuit showed that the helpline protocol — the internal document listing questions to ask before routing calls to Kirton McConkie attorneys — contained the names and direct phone numbers of the firm’s attorneys, including Nelson’s. He was structurally embedded in the system. When a bishop called about serious abuse, the protocol directed it to people like Nelson. In the Adams case, it did.
The Advice Was Wrong
The most precise indictment in the public record is not what Nelson did — it is what he said. Bishop Herrod, in a recorded interview with Department of Homeland Security agents, said he called the helpline and was told that Arizona law barred him from reporting Adams’ abuse, and that he could face a lawsuit if he did report it.
That is not what Arizona law says. It says the opposite.
The gap between what Herrod was told and what the law actually says is not a matter of legal interpretation. Arizona’s reporting immunity is not ambiguous. Whoever advised Herrod — and the call log confirms Nelson took that initial call — either misread the statute or made a deliberate decision to characterize the law in a way that would discourage reporting.
William Maledon, the attorney representing the church in the Arizona lawsuit, said in a July 2022 interview that all calls in the Adams case were handled by Kirton McConkie attorneys or para-professionals. “None of them in this case were with anyone other than an attorney or attorney staff.” Maledon argued that the word “immediately” in Arizona’s mandatory reporting statute was open to interpretation, and that the clergy-penitent privilege applied. His position rested on the legal architecture that had been built over years — in part by the man answering the helpline calls.
“How do you explain to young victims that a rapist’s religious beliefs are more important than their right to be free from rape?”
Lynne Cadigan, attorney for the Adams children — Salt Lake Tribune, November 2023The Statement He Made Before He Knew
The sequence of events in September and October 2022 is worth documenting with precision, because it illustrates how the dual role operated in plain sight.
In August 2022, the Associated Press reported that a Utah legislator-attorney had told a bishop not to report Adams’ abuse. Nelson gave an interview to the AP in September. He did not reveal that he was the attorney who took the call. He defended the helpline. He said it “seems to me like it did operate as intended.”
Those were his words on record. The helpline told a bishop not to report a child rapist. A second child was subsequently abused from six weeks of age. A federal investigation eventually led to an arrest. The church never called law enforcement. And the attorney who took the initial call said the system “operated as intended.”
In October 2022, AP obtained the call log through sealed records. The log confirmed Nelson personally took Herrod’s first call. The Adams children’s attorneys filed an amended lawsuit seeking to add Nelson and Kirton McConkie as defendants. Nelson announced his retirement from the Legislature. He did not return the AP’s subsequent requests for comment.
The Bills That Never Got a Hearing
In thirty-three states, clergy members are exempt from mandatory child sex abuse reporting laws when the information comes through a penitential confession. The Associated Press documented this in its September 2022 investigation, finding that lobbying by the LDS Church, the Catholic Church, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses had “successfully persuaded lawmakers to maintain the exemption” across multiple states and over multiple legislative cycles.
In Utah, where the majority of state legislators are members of the LDS Church, the record is specific. After the AP’s investigation broke, there was momentum. Survivors rallied at the Capitol. Both Republican and Democratic lawmakers opened bill files. The Salt Lake Tribune reported “there was really a lot of momentum.” Then the behind-the-scenes conversations happened.
Senate President Stuart Adams — himself an LDS member — acknowledged that discussions with “a broad base of religious groups” had influenced the Legislature’s posture. His public statement explained why the bills died: “I think they have First Amendment rights and religious protections” — adding that he did not want to put clergy in a position where they faced excommunication or jail for following church instructions. The result: four separate proposals in the 2023 session received no hearings. None advanced. None were debated on the floor.
Nelson’s own public statements on the clergy-penitent privilege were entered into the legislative record through his years of advocacy. “Without that assurance of secrecy, troubled people will not confide in their clergy,” he argued. “Secrecy is essential to the privilege. It encourages full disclosure without fear of unauthorized disclosure.” These arguments, deployed against reform legislation, are structurally identical to the arguments used to justify the helpline’s non-reporting advice — the same advice he had personally given to a bishop years earlier.
A man who operates a church helpline that routes abuse disclosures away from law enforcement — who personally took the call in the Adams case, advised non-reporting, and maintained that advice over two years — was simultaneously serving as a state legislator voting on laws that would require him, in his attorney role, to change that conduct. He was on both sides of the same question. He chose, in both roles, the same answer: secrecy is essential. The privilege must be preserved.
Utah as a Case Study in Institutional Capture
Utah is not the only state where this dynamic plays out. The AP’s review found that religious lobbying has blocked clergy-reporting reform in California, Missouri, New Mexico, and Pennsylvania among other states. In Pennsylvania — heavily Catholic — forty bills touching mandatory reporting over two decades left the clergy privilege untouched. In Utah, the numbers are direct: the majority of state legislators are members of the church that runs the helpline whose attorney was telling bishops not to report.
When the legislative leader of Utah’s Senate explicitly cites First Amendment protections for clergy confidentiality as the reason four separate reform bills cannot receive a hearing, he is not making a neutral constitutional argument. He is making a policy choice on behalf of an institution that provides blanket exemptions to mandatory reporting — and that has systematically fought in statehouses and courts to keep those exemptions in place.
The AP found that over the past two decades, lawmakers in various states had proposed more than 130 bills seeking to create or amend child sex abuse reporting laws. All either failed to close the clergy loophole or amended mandatory reporting statutes without touching clergy privilege, “amid intense opposition from religious groups.” In every case where documented lobbying by the LDS Church, the Catholic Church, or the Jehovah’s Witnesses was present, reform stalled.
Arizona’s child sex abuse reporting law (per AP, KUER, Salt Lake Tribune): Arizona law provides blanket civil and criminal immunity to anyone reporting information about child sex abuse to civil authorities.
The Court Agreed: The Privilege Holds
In November 2023, Cochise County Superior Court Judge Timothy Dickerson dismissed the Adams children’s lawsuit against the church. His ruling applied precisely the legal doctrine that Nelson had spent years defending in the legislature and at the helpline. The judge found that the clergy-penitent privilege excused the bishops and other church officials from the state’s mandatory reporting law because Adams had initially disclosed during a spiritual confession.
Judge Dickerson’s written ruling stated: “Church defendants were not required under the Mandatory Reporting Statute to report the abuse of Jane Doe 1 by her father because their knowledge of the abuse came from confidential communications which fall within the clergy-penitent exception.”
Attorney Lynne Cadigan, representing the Adams children, announced she would appeal. Her question to the press after the ruling captured the core legal and moral tension with precision: “How do you explain to young victims that a rapist’s religious beliefs are more important than their right to be free from rape?” She also stated that the ruling, if allowed to stand, would “completely eviscerate the state’s child protection law.”
The court’s ruling did not address Nelson’s specific advice — that Arizona law barred reporting, and that the bishop could face civil liability if he reported. The ruling was broader: the confession created privilege, and privilege superseded mandatory reporting. The question of whether the legal advice given was accurate — and whether providing inaccurate legal advice that deters a mandatory reporter constitutes its own violation — remains unaddressed in the public record.
“The problem in the United States — and this is particularly acute in a state like Utah — is that the lobbying power of these religious organizations is so extraordinary.”
Marci Hamilton, constitutional scholar on religious organizations and child protection law — AP investigation, September 2022What the Dual Role Reveals
The significance of Nelson’s dual position is not primarily personal. He is one attorney, now retired from the Legislature. The significance is systemic. In Utah — the jurisdiction where the LDS Church is headquartered, where the helpline law firm operates, where the church’s attorneys and member-legislators govern — the architecture designed to prevent reporting was defended at every level simultaneously.
The helpline routed calls to attorneys. The attorneys advised non-reporting based on privilege. The privilege was protected by lobbying. The lobbying operated in a legislature where the majority of members belonged to the church. And one of the attorneys answering the helpline also had a seat in that legislature, a vote on those laws, and a public record of opposing any change to them.
This is not coincidence. It is institutional architecture. The same thing that made Part 1’s helpline effective — routing calls through the law firm — made it possible for the man answering those calls to sit in two rooms at once and defend the system from both sides of the same wall.
Part 4 of this series examines the room where the architecture touches children directly: the private bishop’s interview, where lay volunteers with no training ask sexually explicit questions of children as young as twelve, alone, behind a closed door — and where the same institutional culture of secrecy applies.