Introduction and Episode Overview

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [00:00:00] One. Come, come, you saints. No toil nor labor fear, but with joy when you're away.

John Dehlin [00:00:34] Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories) Podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. It is July 31, 2019, and today we are beginning to broach a very sensitive and what some would say very important topic, very controversial topic, a topic that has been around for, you know, probably three decades, but has been addressed minimally for a lot of reasons, including the fact that it's incredibly complex, it's incredibly controversial, it's incredibly sensitive, and I think a lot of people are scared to talk about it. But I have had so many people reach out to me over the past 14 years bringing up this topic that I feel like it's super important to at least give it some brief, concise, as thoughtful as possible and as balanced coverage as I can. Today we are going Today I'm going to give just a brief introduction to this topic. It's just going to be me for this episode. And then the plan is to bring on some other experts or firsthand witnesses or accounts to help fill in with story some of the details and I'll just get right to it. Today, the topic of this, what will become a series, is the claims of satanic ritual abuse within Mormonism. And some of you are going to know exactly what I'm talking about. Others, you, other of you are going to be like, what the heck? What is he talking about? This doesn't happen. This isn't a thing. It's definitely a thing in the sense that it's very pervasive. People talk about this all the time and everywhere. And I recently have been kind of flooded or inundated with people wanting to talk about it. So we're going to talk about it and today again is going to be just kind of an overview. So I am going to give you first sort of an introduction to my history with claims of satanic ritual abuse. We are live streaming this episode. So of course we welcome you sharing this with anyone that you think might be interested in and we would welcome any comments or questions as you're listening to this introduction and I'll do my best to get to them. But let me start with an introduction and a little bit of context. So obviously I grew up orthodox, devout Mormon in Houston, Texas. I loved it. I loved rock music as well. And so the first I heard of anything related to kind of music, satanism or satanic ritual was as a kid, as I was falling in love with rock music. And I began to be exposed to AC DC and Ozzy Osbourne and Led Zeppelin and all those sorts of musicians. And then as I learned about Bruce R. McConkie and the book Mormon Doctrine, we began to be warned about anything that dealing with the occult or Satan, et cetera. I remember Ouija boards being forbidden and warned against by my seminary teacher. I remember reading Lex d' Azevedo's book Pop Music and Morality and how he tried to pin satanic worship on musicians like Led Zeppelin and was it Queen? I don't remember all the different people that were accused or artists. But of course ACDC was, you know, releasing albums like highway to Hell and Dirty Deeds and Hell's Bells. So a lot of people were like thinking about Satan and rock music. Ozzy Osbourne was like biting off the heads of bats and making friends or at least the appearance of friendship with this guy Crowley, Aleister Crowley I think was his name, who was, I believe at some point the head of the Church of Satan in the 80s. I don't, you know, I'm not gonna pretend to be historian here, but I'm just giving my recollections. I think there was even a song about Mr. Crowley on one of Ozzy Osbourne's albums. And so like, as a Mormon kid growing up in the 80s, you know, I definitely was exposed to ideas or thoughts around Satanism. I don't think much more of that sort of affected my life. Of course you'd hear these missionary stories of, of missionaries casting out demons by raising their right hand mission. You know, seminary teachers would love to tell those sorts of stories about how the priesthood could be used to cast out Satan. And of course, the temple ceremony, it turns out, definitely reinforced that idea. Of course, the Mormon scripture talks extensively about Satan and Lucifer and spirits and evil spirits. The whole teaching around a third of the host of heaven were kicked out of Heavenly Father's plan and were left as spirits to roam the earth. And so you'd grow up as a Mormon boy thinking about satanic spirits. And if you were tempted to do evil, it was because Satan or his angels were tempting you. That was all kind of in the, in my mindset. I remember the movie. I remember the movie the Exorcist where a girl gets possessed by demons and a Catholic priest tries to exorcise the demons from the girl. I remember some of the first horror movies I saw were the omen series, Omen 1, 2 and 3, where this boy Damian gets, you know, possessed by Satan and becomes Lucifer incarnate, if I remember correctly. And he began tormenting people. So this was kind of my upbringing in Mormonism in the eight. I don't remember. I do remember on my mission sometimes in Latin America, some of our investigators claiming to have been possessed by spirits. Again, there was a Catholic kind of tradition of exorcism and possession. And so it wasn't uncommon in Guatemala to have some kid who was either mentally ill or hysterical or whatever, either claim or have family members claim that they were possessed by evil spirits. We may have even tried to exercise an evil spirit out of someone at some point in my mission. I'm fuzzy on that, but there are definitely stories like that abounding in our mission. And of course, I've heard a lot of missionaries in Brazil or in the Caribbean, Jamaica, wherever, where there were stories of like voodoo and witchcraft and demonic possession. So that all affected me, of course, on my mission and into my BYU years. But then I don't think I remember hearing a lot about satanic ritual abuse until I was living in Seattle and working for Microsoft, as I recall, And Martha Beck's book came out. And the book was called Leaving the Saints. And for those of you who don't know, Martha Beck is Hugh Nibley's daughter. She went on to write magazine articles for Oprah, write some books, become kind of a guru. But when she came out with her book Leaving the Saints, and we read this book while we were living in Seattle, she made these claims that her dad, you know, famous Mormon scholar and apologist Hugh Nibley, she made the claim that he abused her sexually and that, you know, she made it sound like there was some ritualistic Egyptian kind of weird rituals integrated into his sexual abuse. Now, that's my memory. We're going to be talking about how fallible memory is. And so I invite you guys to correct me on any of the facts that I get wrong here. I am not going to be able to dedicate enough time to this to be perfect at how I talk about it. But I'm just giving you my memories. And so when Martha Beck came out with that book accusing Hugh Nibley of sexual abuse, it became very controversial because obviously, very quick, the church was quick to condemn any chance that Hugh Nibley would have been involved in any type of sexual abuse because obviously he was one of the church's lead apologists for decades. I remember my friend Boyd Peterson, who is the son in law of Hugh Nibley. He was married at the time, I think, to Zina Nibley. If I've got it correctly, Boyd came out with a biography defending Hugh Nibley. A lot of the Nibley family denounced Martha Beck's memories of this abuse. And Martha's story became interwoven with some phenomenons like recovered memory, hypnotism, hypnosis. And just to touch on that super briefly, as I understand Martha Beck, she. When she found a therapist who was helping her work through whatever issues she was working with, there was the use of hypnosis techniques to bring her back into her childhood and to recover memories that she, I don't even think claim to have had up through adulthood. And this dovetailed or intersected with a much larger phenomenon throughout the United states in the 80s and 90s, where people would grow up having never had any memory or recollection at all of any sexual abuse. But then three therapists would use techniques of doing either hypnotic techniques or other sorts of techniques where you brought the client in their mind to visualize their childhood. And by some reports, through suggestion, things like, hey, you were sexually abused. I think you're sexually abused. Oh, a lot of these symptoms that I'm hearing from you remind me a lot of my sexual abuse clients. Are you sure you weren't sexually abused? So sometimes people disassociate or block out those dark memories. Let's go back and see if we can recover those memories. And then that's how a lot of these memories end up. A lot of these claims end up coming out of this technique of recovered memory through clinical social workers or marriage and family therapists or whatever, hypnotists, et cetera. So Martha Bex claims were interwoven with a broader not only sort of hysteria in the 80s and 90s around satanic ritual abuse, but also in this hysteria movement of using recovered memory techniques, an emphasis on dissociative identity disorder or multiple personalities, all of that. And there were some child care scandals, which we'll talk about in daycares and other types of scandals. All of the Martha Beck stuff happened in the context of these broader movements that were going on in the United States. And so, you know, most of the outside Mormon world just were like, well, of course Mormons sexually abused people, because Mormons are weirdos. And of course, Martha Beck is telling the truth because she's really smart. And I think she went to Harvard. And so Martha became a big star, became an Oprah protege, became a life coach and a healer, whatever. But inside Mormonism, of course, we've all, you know, those of us who are believing and active, just dismissed her claims and wrote it off as hysteria or recovered memory. And I remember all this happening While I was living in Seattle working for Microsoft. Next, once I left Microsoft and came to Logan to begin Mormon Stories), I started in 2005. Immediately, listeners would tell me about claims of satanic ritual abuse that they claim or claimed loved ones had experienced in the 80s and 90s and sometimes even more recently. So I started as Mormon Stories) podcast host, hearing about claims of satanic ritual abuse from very early on in my podcast. And at the time I knew enough about Martha Beck and recovered memory to where I always had concerns or suspicions around these claims. And we'll get into why Sometimes these claims can be just really hard to believe. So over time then I had it wasn't just like listeners reaching out to me. I have had certain friends, close friends, dear friends, reach out to me over the past 10 years and tell me that they themselves experience firsthand satanic ritual abuse within a Mormon context, or ritualistic sexual abuse within a Mormon context. And sometimes it was victims or people who claim to be victims. Other times it was family members who claim who had a hard time believing or buying these stories. And in some cases it was even tearing apart these families because victims never, you know, the worst thing you can do is not believe a victim from the victim's perspective. But also there are family members that are just like, this can't have happened. I can't believe this has happened. These stories are too far fetched. And so, you know, people close to me either reported being severely negatively impacted by these claims or family members were telling me that these stories were tearing families apart. So that kind of took this level of severity to a new level for me. Then, interestingly enough, when I started my PhD in 2009 at Utah State University, there were one or two therapists or professors in my program who were huge advocates for believing and treating satanic ritual abuse. And so in my training, I would sit there with these other eight or ten graduate students getting their PhDs or their master's degrees and I would have a professor telling me these stories of like, you know, women being enslaved as sex slaves and women having babies that were hidden from the world and then they were forced to either sacrifice these babies or eat them and or children being sexually abused in satanic like, rituals by Mormons, by active Mormons, believing Mormons, bishops, stake presidents, like big, massive, severe, serious claims coming from one of my professors at Utah State University. And she made it sound like every week she had different clients and that for years and years and years she had treated hundreds of clients who made these sort of claims. And so as A, you know, as a, as a trainee, it's like, really mind boggling. Then when I was doing some clinical training with this one professor in particular, they started modeling for me some of these techniques of going back into people's childhood, having them envision their childhood, and then inquiring about sexual abuse and who's around. And are there any ominous figures that you can remember? And I'm not claiming that they were teaching me recovered memory per se explicitly, but there was a heavy emphasis on dissociative identity disorder, on split personalities, and there was a heavy emphasis on going back into childhood memories and seeing what could be harvested. And that was really troubling to me. And so I would go to other professors at Utah State University and say, man, some of these techniques are kind of really scary or potentially unethical. And all these other professors were like, yeah, we don't like that, but, but this person has a lot of power and influence in the department, and so we're just gonna leave that alone. And so again, I was left with some exposure to this sort of thing. Then just randomly out of the blue, someone emailed me, a listener emails me and says, hey, you know that professor professor's name that I just told you all about here on Mormon Stories)? This person was a therapist to my daughter for years. And after a couple years of therapy, they convinced my daughter that I had sexually abused her through recovered memory techniques. And, you know, I have never sexually abused my daughter, and it's wrecked my relationship with my daughter. And so again, totally out of the blue, unrelated to any of the stuff, I'd never really talked about it on Mormon Stories) that I can recall. I hadn't shown an interest in it. I've got people from the community telling me that professor you're studying under has wrecked my life by convincing my daughter I sexually abused her when I didn't. So, like, again, another instance of this issue touching me. So that was all kind of, again, weighing and weighing, weighing upon me. And as a Faith Transitions coach, once I graduated with my PhD and started doing coaching again, I've had several clients come to me and claim that they were involved in ritualistic sexual abuse, satanic or not, within a Mormon context. So again, more clients now, not just like listeners, but clients reporting it to me and wanting me to help them with the healing process. Then everything kind of exploded with the Harvey Weinstein thing, with the MeToo movement, with Bill Cosby, and then really exploded with the Joseph Bishop McKenna Denson story, with the Lowell Robinson Chris Swallow story that we covered. And with the Sterling Von Wagner and Sean Escobar outbreaks, it's just like whatever frequency of reports that had come to me about sexual ritual abuse within Mormonism, like tripled. And just every week somebody's coming to me saying, this happened to me. This happened to a friend of mine. This is tearing our family apart. And then of course, with the West Virginia settlement that was covered by Vice News, the sexual abuse within Mormonism, the Boy Scout abuses and thousands of others, it sort of like opened my mind to this idea that who knows what really has happened out there. But what we know for a fact is that Utah has rampant child sexual abuse, that the LDS Church has this long history of covering up sexual abuse, of discouraging family members from reporting sexual abuse to local authorities, of having Curtin McConkie field the phone calls from abuse victims and discouraging them from telling anyone or reporting this to the police, of protecting the church and sexual perpetrators at the expense of victims. And in the case of people like Sterling Von Wagenen or Laurel Robinson, rewarding pedophiles with like a mission presidency or stake presidency, or in the Sterling Von Wageningen case, being on a stake High council or even being in charge of, of directing the Mormon Church's temple videos even though they're a known sexual predator. And so like, you know, and who would have guessed that The Joseph Bishop McKenna Denson thing could have happened at all, that an MTC president, mission training center president in the 80s would rape a sister missionary in the MTC in a rape room in the basement of the MTC. And we have Joseph Bishop admitting this, you know, some form of sexual assault in his audio recording with McKenna Denson, but also to the Provo Police or the BYU Police previously. So like, it opened my mind to the idea that there is ritual abuse out there. There is, there are massive, there appear to be massive cover ups of sexual abuse within Mormonism. And it's kind of like blowing open in 2018, 2019. So then I learned about this book called Paper Dolls. And for those of you who haven't heard of this book called Paper Dolls, it's a book that was released, I want to say, in the. Let's see, I'm looking it up right now on, on Amazon. Yeah, it was released in 1992. Again, right at. Right at the maximum sort of point of these claims of ritualistic sexual abuse. And it basically, and I have not read the book, I'm not even going to do it justice, but I'll read the description the authors chronicle the trauma of sexual abuse as only individuals who have lived through this horror can. This book should be read by adults molested as children, therapists working with victims and perpetrators, and any person who has not yet confronted the reality of sexual abuse or denies it could happen in their family or neighborhood. And basically this book goes on to talk about how they were the victims and all the names are changed, but it basically tells the report of how every in Salt Lake City in I don't know if it's bountiful north Salt Lake or if it's the avenues, but sort of along the east bench Mormon corridor in the heart of Salt Lake City, writ large within actually entrenched elite Mormon families of wealth of means, that ritualistic sexual abuse was happening. And again, this book, it's out of print. It's horrendous the things that you read there. I have close friends who actually know some of the people upon whom you know this, you know, upon whose lives upon which this book was based. And it even goes so far as you know through several people that Russell M. Nelson, the current Mormon church's prophet, that his daughter and son in law were characters depicted in this book, if I have that memory correctly, and many of you will know that either this year or last year, Russell M. Nelson's daughter and son in law were named or anonymously or by name as, you know, perpetrators in a lawsuit against the church for protecting sexual abuse victims. And again, I'm not a lawyer, I'm not claiming to have any of these details right. But from several different sources it's been reported to me that Russell Nelson's daughter and son in law were personally involved in ritual sexual abuse. And somehow it was all tied to this, either this book, Paper Dolls or to other stories like that. Now I'm not claiming that Russell Nelson's daughter and son in law were involved in sexual abuse at all. I'm claiming that these reports have come to me through multiple varied sources and through people that I consider to be credible people. That doesn't mean that they always have their memories right or don't believe rumors, but like it's a thing and it's a thing that people are scared to talk about and they don't want to talk about. So that book Paper Dolls and I've had clients come to me and tell me, have you read Paper Dolls? The same thing that happened in Paper Dolls happened to me. So all of that has been a thing over the past year and then some of it has even been tied somehow to Elizabeth Smart. So apparently Brian David Mitchell, who was Elizabeth, you know, he had abducted Elizabeth Smart and was her rapist somehow. The rumors are, what I've heard is that Brian David Mitchell was involved in some of these ritualistic sexual abuse happenings in Salt Lake the years prior to him abducting Elizabeth Smart. So by last year, several of these happenings got reported to the news media. Abc, cbs, NBC, Vice News, lots of different media outlets. And there was a, you know, and because of the spotlight movie about sexual, you know, cover ups of sexual abuse and pedophilia in the Catholic Church, because of Harvey Weinstein, the MeToo movement, Bill Cosby and all that stuff, because of Joseph Bishop and McKenna Denson, all of these things generated a lot of interest in the news media covering these types of stories. So so many reporters, it seems, showed interest, even came to Utah, even conducted a ton of interviews. And in several instances that I was personally aware of or involved in stories of sexual abuse, stories of sexual abuse cover ups by the Mormon Church and even stories of satanic ritual abuse all got intermingled and reported to these news reporters. And that became significant to me because a lot of these reporters didn't know what to make. On the one hand, a lot of these reporters could definitely believe and want to investigate the possibility that the Mormon Church would cover up sexual abuse scandals with ecclesiastical leaders. But as soon as all that gets intermingled with, you know, women being held as sex slaves and babies being born and then the babies are being sacrificed and their hearts are being torn out and eaten and just these really extreme stories around, you know, abducting of babies, killing of babies, eating of hearts of babies. You know, journalists get like overwhelmed and it starts to sound crazy, a lot of these claims. And that's difficult because then there's always the risk of whatever legitimate claims there are that are out there, if they're intermingled with these other claims, there's always the risk that legitimate claims of abuse are completely ignored because they become associated with some of these other claims that are viewed of as completely crazy and scary. And so like, I was like. And to be honest, you know, Vice News did do a story on the West Virginia stuff. Nightline recently came out with its story on the West Virginia stuff. There probably are other stories in the works and we know that Curt McConkie tried to shut down a lot of those stories. What didn't happen is sort of this spotlight movement within Mormonism and hasn't happened yet where a huge avalanche of news stories and pressure and investigative reporting all come down and Pin the church for, you know, covering up really heinous stuff. And I'm not even saying that should happen. And that's not even my goal. And I'll get to that in a second. But what I know is that that all sort of happened, and I was somehow involved in a lot of that. So what I want to do is I want to begin this series, if we end up having one, I think we will, by talking about the Pace memo, because I think the Pace memo is the best way to sort of introduce this issue as it relates to Mormonism. And then we plan on going back and talking about some other things. But the Pace memo is a memo that was. That was released by Bishop Glenn L. Pace, who was a member, as I understand it, of the Presiding Bishopric. And he wrote this memo July 19, 1999, to the ironically strengthening Church Members Committee. And so I'll paste a link to the Pace memo in the live Facebook feed for those who want to check it out. But I'm going to be reading from the memoir, and I want to be clear. There are real risks that I'm going to talk about as we talk about satanic ritual abuse in Mormonism. And the primary risk that I see, I mean, there's a lot of risks. In fact, I'm just going to talk about the risks. Well, I'll talk about the two sides of the difficulty of this issue. So what do we know for sure? So before we read the Pace memo, here's some factors that I want to get out on the table on the side of victims or people who claim to be victims. Right. We know that the Mormon Church has, in Christianity at large and Islam has teachings about Satan and evil, whether that's in the Bible, interpretations of the Bible, whether that's in the Doctrine and Covenants, where it talks about casting out evil spirits, whether it's in Mormon folklore, whether it's in the Book of Mormon where it talks about gadianton robbers and secret combinations and evil spirits, whether it's in Mormon doctrine and Mormon folklore. You know, we know and we know it's in the temple ceremony, especially the old versions of the temple ceremony, where Satan's literally appearing, talking about his influence, talking about his, his. The hosts of heaven that are supporting him. I mean, this is core Mormon theology that Satan and his spirits can tempt and influence people. So, like, that's a thing. And then, of course, Bruce R. McConkie's condemning, you know, Ouija boards and the occult and all that stuff. And, you know, again, we've got all the stories of missionaries casting out demons. So like, we know teachings about Satan and evil are all throughout Mormonism. Right. And of course this was emphasized a lot more in the 80s and 90s than it is in 2019, but it hasn't been, you know, stricken from Mormon doctrine. Right. So it's there. We know that's a fact. Right? We know that abuse and even ritual abuse exists within Mormonism. Like, you know, Utah, as I understand it, is one of the leaders in the nation in child sexual abuse. Thousands and thousands of reports of sexual abuse and cover ups within Mormonism. You just can't turn over a stone without seeing it. We know that there's sex trafficking in and out of Mormonism. We know that there's child pornography in and out of Mormonism. Again, we've got the Paper Dolls book and Jonathan Streeter, you know, highlighted a very clear example of actual ritual sexual abuse. We have Warren Jeffs, like recordings of him in the temple with other women, standing around mixing temple ceremonies with his sexual abuse of young girls. And who knows if boys were involved. So we know that there's ritual sexual abuse that has happened in Utah and within a Mormon context, not to mention all the other reports, etc. We have the MeToo movement, which is real. We know that women and children and men have been sexually abused for decades and centuries and millennia and that it's been everyone, you know, people have been scared to talk about it. Power structures have protected perpetrators. We know that's real. We know about Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby and all the other perpetrators who did horrific things to victims and were protected again, we know about all the Joseph Bishop, Lowell Robinson, Sterling Von Wagner stuff. We know that the church has a massive history of covering up abuses and protecting abusers at the expense of abused. We know that cover ups are real. We know that people are genuinely afraid. We know that victims are vulnerable. And you know, what I've learned about rape is this movement of start by believing, which is the last, you know, we know that rapes most, the vast majority of rapes go unreported. And of those small percentage of rapes, let's just say one, you know, very small percent, maybe 1% that ever get reported, even, even a smaller percentage end in conviction because it often comes down to a he said, she said kind of thing. And one of the most disgusting things I've ever heard is when we did a series on Mormon stories on rape and one of the experts basically said, if you want to commit a crime, the best crime you can commit is rape, because the likelihood that you're going to get convicted is so incredibly low. And of course, the last thing any victim of sexual abuse needs to hear are, you know, we don't believe you, or you're at fault or somehow you're complicit. Like, that's heinous and egregious. And. And so the start by believing movement, which I know a little bit about, is basically saying whenever claims of false claims of sexual abuse are so rare that you should always start by believing, gather, provide as much support and love and care, get victims, people who claim to be victims, all the support they need, and then gather evidence sort of as a next step because, you know, but, you know, but start by believing. So that's all a bunch of arguments on the side of like, hey, we need to look into this stuff, right? But then there's a bunch of concerns about looking into this stuff. It begins with sort of this idea that memory can be super fallible or sketchy. Check out the free Brian Williams episode on the Malcolm Gladwell podcast. You know, learn about the Salem witch trials. You know, there is a long history within the human experience of social panics and hysteria. You know, conspiracy theorists exist and they, they often perpetrate crazy stories, whether it's again, you know, the Trilateral Commission, the New World Order, the, you know, the Masonic takeover of the world, or the Illuminati or, you know, New World Order. There's all that John Bircher stuff, there's the Salem witch trials. You know, there was the communist red scare and the McCarthy hearings in the 50s with communists and politicians and entertainers. Again, these Satan scares that happened all through the 80s and 90s, totally separate from Mormonism, but it included Mormonism. And then finally, you know, and there are other issues as well, including, you know, some daycare scandals that we'll be talking about as we talk about all this stuff. So there is such a thing as false and damaging conspiracy theories that at best distract and, you know, take people away from more important things and at worst can literally wreck lives in many ways. So that's, that's a reality. And I've seen conspiracies become their own religions. We know that if you go and read anything about dissociative identity disorder or multiple personalities disorder, it's highly controversial and fraught within the psychology mental health community. Hypnosis techniques are highly suspect. And the recovered memory concerns are real. And they're real outside of Mormonism. And, and they're real within the field of mental health. That's not made up that those things are deeply problematic. We have the whole false memory scandals that we'll be talking about. And we know that false accusations can destroy lives. Several people that were accused of satanic ritual abuse of leading daycares and then children were interviewed in ways that led children to accuse, you know, leaders of daycares, of horrible things. We now have. We now know of people that were put in prison or lives destroyed or reputations ruined over false accusations related to sexual abuse, ritual sexual abuse, or satanic ritual abuse. And the last thing we would ever want to do on Mormon stories is destroy lives through false accusations. And, and we know that anyone who. It's a very common thing that anyone who tries to apply skepticism or doubts even in the sexual satanic ritual abuse scandals in the 80s and 90s, journalists that tried to just gather the facts and show healthy skepticism on some of these claims were oftentimes maligned and their reputations were severely harmed or attacked just for trying to get to the bottom of facts. So, you know, what we're not trying to do in this series is give a comprehensive review of satanic ritual abuse within Mormonism. We're certainly not trying to spread more hysteria. I think there are a lot of reasons to bring a lot of skepticism to claims of satanic ritual abuse within Mormonism. We're also not trying to deny anyone's personal individual claim or tell some victim that their abuse didn't happen. That would be horrific. Right? We're not trying to determine what did or didn't happen in history. We can't do that. We're not trying to take any side of the issue. We're not trying to convince you to take any side of the issue. We're not trying to defend or protect the church. We're not trying to harm or destroy the church. We're not trying to defend or say that every satanic ritual abuse claim that's ever happened is true. But we're also not trying to deny or invalidate any claims of truth. What we're trying to do with this series is the following. We want to bring this important issue out of darkness into the sunlight, because we believe on Mormon stories that sunlight is the best disinfectant. We're trying to look at this objectively from as many sides, credible sides as possible. We want to bring in some experts to talk about this stuff. We want to at least bring on a few people, either as therapists or, you know, victims, victims of recovered memory or people who claim to be victims of satanic ritual Abuse. We want to bring them on and we want to help everyone learn all they can about the complexities of this situation. And most importantly, I had a dear friend whose name I don't have permission to mention, who spent a lot of time counseling people who claim to be satanic ritual abuse victims. She, as I remember what she told me, she claimed that whether or not these people who claim to be victims of satanic ritual abuse, whether or not those events actually happened, and this person believes that some did, and some things, sometimes these events really did happen and other times they weren't legitimate claims. Regardless, these people who are either victims or claim to be victims need help and support. And that's a fact. And so we have a goal with this series, if there's any way to do that to help promote healing and growth for anyone who's ever claimed to be a victim of abuse, sexual abuse, ritualistic sexual abuse, or satanic ritual abuse within a Mormon context. And if there's anything we can do to facilitate healing for people who claim to be either victims of sexual abuse and their family members, in other words, families torn apart by these claims, we would love to help heal broken families. And finally, if there is any need for justice for past actions, if there are perpetrators out there who have genuinely hurt victims or if it's still going on, it needs to stop and people need to be brought to justice. So if that can be an outcome of this, great. But everything that we do has to be based on evidence and it has to be based on the law, I think, because I think that's the only really safe way to adjudicate this stuff to any outcome that's satisfactory. And then finally, you know, I want to put out a call for people who want to share stories or, you know, give perspective or speak as an expert to these issues because these, because the more we have experts, the better the better things are. So I am going to pause because I don't want to just jump into the pace memo right now. It looks like we've been going about 45 minutes. And what I'm going to do is stop and read some of the comments from our listeners, see what people have been saying, and see if there's anything I am able to address. So David writes, in Argentina in the mid-70s. Oh crap, that comment just disappeared. So I will read some other comments. Rod writes, Jay's journal book by Beatrice Sparks was thinking about doing an indie film based on this, but it has so many problems. I've done a lot of research on this matter in Utah so Rod's saying he and others have thought about doing movies about this, but it's so problematic to get to the truth of it all that they haven't made progress. Leslie writes, I think recovered memories can be problematic, but if we can understand them as more of a reframing of memories and coming to a new understanding of current memories Survivor already has, that is more helpful in seeing how ritual abuse has taken place. Thank you, Leslie. I know that you have fought hard for this type of advocacy and I respect what you've done to try and help shed light on this and I appreciate that perspective and I definitely think helping people understand memory is a crucial component to this. Courtney writes, Love the Thrive shirt. I can't wait to get planning next year's Thrive event. So yes, we have a Thrive event coming up in November which is phenomenal. We're super excited about it. I'll be announcing that soon. But mark your calendars for November. Sunday, November 17th. We have a phenomenal event planned for that. Let's see what else do we have from listeners? Paul writes, wow. John Digging the facial hair. Thanks. I got a little goatee for my time on vacation. Let's see. Leslie Ann also writes, because victims think they may actually be believed now, they have been used to being silent not only about abuse, but even more about satanic ritual abuse. So yes, there are so many people who claim to be victims who have been scared to talk about it. And that's part of what we're trying to address here. Leslie writes, I've spoken with an FBI investigator who specializes in human trafficking who said he deals with ritual abuse cases daily. So yes, it is happening. We just do not recognize it as ritual abuse. I believe that's probably true. Alisa writes, Happened to me. The church protected my abuser. Police were never called. He did not lose his calling. And the bishop did not allow his daughters to play with me anymore. Alicia, we are so devastated for what's happened to you and we're trying to help prevent things like this from happening again. Leslie writes, yes, and despite the claims against Russell and Nelson's own family, they were promoted to mission president. So Leslie's talking about the son in law and daughter against whom some have claimed they were involved in ritualistic sexual abuse and the fact that they became mission president and mission president's wife. That's all part of the lore. We have no idea if there's any truth to that. And I'm not trying to say that there is truth, only that it's rampant that that's what people are saying. And if it's not true, it's heinous that people are making those false accusations. If it is true, it's heinous that those things were covered up. I'd love to get to the bottom of that. Eric writes, wah, I've never heard of this. Crazy and scary. Yes, it's crazy and scary, but it's also a thing. Eric writes, Hugh Nibley wrote a book about the Egyptian religion and how it's equated to the Endowment. So I can see how HN could have done the abuse. Hugh Nibley could have done the abuse with Egyptian religion stuff. The dude is completely nuts. Well, that's Eric's opinion, but it's an incredibly severe thing to accuse anyone of sexual abuse. And so I would not want to have just believed that Hugh Nibley sexually abused Martha Beck without evidence, credible evidence. So, you know, I don't know if we could ever get to the bottom of that. Brenton writes, does anyone remember the national news coverage of Lehigh, the town of Torment back in the 80s? No, but I hope to learn about that. Lots of comments about my beard. Trent writes, yes, in fact, the same therapist who was involved with hypnosis hypnotic memory retrieval in that case duplicated that disaster in an Alpine stake he was in. It was so horrible, so many lives were ruined for false accusations. So Trent is responding to Brent's comment about news coverage of recovered memory stuff happening in LEHIGH in the 80s and how that spread to Alpine and how a lot of people, according to Trent, were in the Alpine stake, were falsely charged. And, and again, I am as against, I hate false accusations as much as I hate actual abuse because both destroy lives. So we're against both of those. Leslie writes, there's also the possibility that they were made to think they happened like they were sewn into a dead corpse or birthed a baby when they were just a child, but did not actually happen, but in a child's mind it was very real to them. Thanks again Leslie, for all your sharing. Okay, so that's the main comments that I'm able to find right now. So what I'm going to do is sort of close this first episode as an introduction and then what I'm going to do for part two is I'm going to dig into the actual Glen Pace memo, which is a, I don't know, 20, 30 page memo that Glenn Pace wrote for the strengthening of the members committee. I think it's a 12 page memo that summarized an investigation that he himself conducted into Satanic ritual abuse in the late 80s and early 90s. So we're gonna read that, we're gonna discuss it, and then we are going to bring on several experts, whatever experts I can find, not just within Mormonism but in the broader context to talk to us about psychology, about memory, about social panics, about the satanic ritual abuse across the United States that happened completely oblivious to Mormonism. And then I have at least one person who I'm going to be bringing on who can, as a firsthand witness, testify to the use of hypnotics and recovered memory on them where they feel like they were manipulated into recovering false memories around sexual abuse that they say never happened to them. So they will be endorsing the awful techniques of manipulative recovered memory used by church sponsored mental health therapists in the 80s and 90s. And if there are any actual victims of satanic ritual abuse or experts along these lines who can share with us either firsthand accounts or evidence or reports of actual convictions, we don't want to spread hysteria or make false claims, but any firsthand claims with evidence or reports of actual convictions or whatever. I welcome them to come on Mormon Stories) because we need to get all this out in the open. So I hope you guys have enjoyed this introduction. Enjoyed is a tough word. I hope you found this interesting or useful in some way. And come back to the next hour where we're going to be talking about the Pace Memo and we hope to bring on Sandra Tanner because Sandra Tanner and Gerald Tanner did a response to the pace memo after it happened. So we hope to bring her on as well. So thanks for joining us today on Mormon Stories). I hope you guys value how I covered this introduction to the topic. If you have feedback, criticism, suggestions, please message me. Email me@mormonstoriesmail.com message me on Facebook. I will take all the feedback I can get. I want to handle this responsibly. I don't know if we'll only have two or three hours of this or if we'll have five or ten hours of this, but I know that I would love constructive feedback to help us cover this in a way that's useful. So thanks everyone for joining us and check back soon in just a short amount of time for more on this episode. Love you guys. Thanks for your support with Mormon Stories) and we'll see you guys very soon.

Historical Context of Satanic Ritual Abuse Claims

Evaluating the Claims and Their Risks

The Pace Memo and Closing Reflections

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [00:52:48] Come, come ye saints. No toil nor labor fear, but with joy when your way though hard to you this journey may appear Grace shall be as your day Tis better far for us to strive our useless care from us to drive to the San Jo your hearts will swell oh, all is well all is well. Why should we mourn? A thicker lie is hard Tis not so, all is right why should we think to earn a great reward if we now shun the fight? Gird up your lips lo. Fresh courage take Our God will never us for sake soon we'll have tale it tell oh, all is well all is well oh, well all is well. Sam. And should we die before our journey is through Happy day All is well we that are free from toil and sorrow too with the just we shall dwell but if our lives are spared again to see the saints there is obtain Or I will make this chorus well oh, all is well all is well all is well all is well all is well all is all is well. All is well all is.

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