Tag: child abuse

State Lawmaker Advised Mormon Bishop Against Reporting Church Member Who Sexually Abused Daughters, Lawsuit Filings Say

A Utah state representative told a Mormon bishop not to report a church member’s sexual abuse, advice that led to seven years of rape and abuse committed by the church member against his own daughters, according to new lawsuit documents.

State Rep. Merrill Nelson (R-UT), a prominent lawyer for the Mormon church, allegedly answered the first call from a help line when Bishop John Herrod told him that Arizona church member Paul Adams had admitted to sexually abusing two of his daughters. For more than two years, Nelson communicated with Herrod and another bishop who knew about the abuse allegations, according to call records, the Associated Press reported.

Nelson told Herrod “that he could be sued if he reported, and the instruction by counsel not to report Paul [Adams] to the authorities was the law in Arizona and had nothing to do with Church doctrine,” according to the plaintiff’s filings. However, as the AP reported, Arizona law allows blanket immunity for those who report child sexual abuse or neglect.

The sex abuser’s two daughters and one of his sons are trying to gain access to records from the Mormon church, but the church has refused them based on confidentiality. After a county judge ruled in the victims’ favor to see the records, the Mormon church took the case to the Court of Appeals.

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Former Utah mayor, bishop arrested for sex abuse of multiple children, including toddlers

A former bishop of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been arrested as part of an ongoing sex abuse investigation involving multiple victims over the course of several decades.

Carl Johnson, 77, was arrested in Orem on Wednesday and booked into the Davis County Jail on seven counts of aggravated sexual abuse of a child.

Detectives say Johnson abused children as young as 2 years old and held numerous positions of trust in the Church, including as a bishop. Johnson also served as Mayor of West Bountiful City in the 90s.

“In all these cases, the victims were told not to tell anyone else about what happened to them. In some cases, these crimes were suppressed in one way or another by Johnson when any disclosures were made. Johnson used his position of trust to influence any disclosures,” a police affidavit says.

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Prosecutor for State’s Child Protection Division Arrested on Multiple Charges for Preying on Children

For 12 years, before he retired without notice in 2020, Gary Lee Bell was the assistant attorney general from the Utah Attorney General’s Office where he worked in the Child Protection Division, prosecuting individuals who harmed children. His years of service are now being called into question, however, as he was arrested this month for that very act.

Bell was arrested on August 24th by Utah County sheriff’s deputies and charged with six counts of sexual exploitation of a minor. According to police, the investigation into Bell was launched on May 22, 2022, after they received a tip about child sex abuse material being uploaded to social media.

According to the tip, submitted to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, Bell was distributing images and videos on an unnamed social media app of children under the age of 10 being sexually abused.

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Former US Postal Service employee was removed from Georgia’s sex offender registry only to re-offend months later

Stacy Keith Wisener was removed from Georgia’s sex offender registry in 2017 by a Paulding County Superior Court judge. A few months later, Wisener began sexually molesting an 11-year-old girl. The abuse continued for approximately four years, the Justice Department reported.

The now 60-year-old former U.S. Postal Service employee was sentenced to three decades in prison for abusing the young girl, producing child pornography, and stealing mail.

“Wisener’s decision to continue to exploit children, even after working to get off the sex offender registry, now puts him in prison for decades,” said Keri Farley, Special Agent in Charge of FBI Atlanta.

Wisener was placed on Georgia’s sex offender registry in 2003 after he pleaded guilty to molesting a child under the age of 16. For that crime, Wisener dodged jail time and was instead sentenced to probation.

Wisener remained on the registry for 14 years. He petitioned the court in 2017, asking to be removed from the list, and his request was granted. A few months later, Wisener began abusing his next underage victim.

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Utah FBI employee charged with sexually abusing multiple children

A man who works for the Federal Bureau of Investigation was arrested last week and charged with molesting multiple children.

Robert Alexander Smith, 65, faces four 1st-degree felony counts of aggravated sexual abuse of a child, four class-A misdemeanor counts of lewdness involving a child, and two class-B misdemeanor counts of lewdness.

According to court documents, Smith was arrested after a young girl told her mom in June that she wanted to talk about something “very uncomfortable.” She said that on multiple occasions, Smith had forced her to touch him inappropriately under his clothes in 2020.

Interviews were then conducted with the girl, as well as four other girls who said Smith had engaged with them in inappropriate ways. One of the girls said Smith forced her to do the same thing as he did with the first victim, and three other girls said Smith had touched them inappropriately under their clothing.

The arrest report states that Smith “occupied a position of special trust as it pertains to the victims in this case.”

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Trans Pedophile Still Free After Attempting to Meet Child, Baby for Sexual Abuse

Berkeley Police allowed a suspected pedophile to walk away from a sting conducted by predator hunters despite being shown evidence that he had been expressing interest in molesting multiple children, including an infant.

On August 20, anti-pedophile vigilante group Predator Poachers uploaded footage of a sting they conducted in Berkeley, California to YouTube involving a trans-identified male who had been purportedly seeking to meet a 9-year-old for the purposes of sexually abusing her.

The girl was in fact a decoy established by the group as part of a months-long investigation into the man, who went by the name Sophia Westfall.

Speaking to Reduxx, predator hunter Alex Rosen says Westfall first contacted the decoy’s Instagram account in April, and soon after began initiating sexual conversations with the child.

Rosen is a full-time anti-pedophile vigilante, and he and his small team have traveled across the United States conducting stings on predators since 2019. Ample evidence is gathered prior to a confrontation, and police are then called.

Rosen told Reduxx that the sting uploaded on the 20th had actually been conducted on June 7 when he and his team were in California.

“Sophia was one of the reasons we were in California but we actually had multiple suspects in the state,” he explained, noting that Sophia had been picked up by two different decoys on two different platforms — Instagram and Telegram. Rosen says both decoy accounts had been populated using altered and AI-generated photos.

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Resurfaced Documentary Uncovers Accusations of Child Abuse Against Former Mormon President Gordon B. Hinckley

The documentary The True Story of Mormon President Gordon B. Hinckley and its accusations against Mormon Church leadership has not been seen by the public in almost 30 years — until now.

In late May, the Utah County Sheriff’s Office announced an investigation into “ritualized child sexual abuse” in 3 different Utah counties. Following that announcement, The Last American Vagabond (TLAV) produced a series of 5 articles focused on the sheriff’s investigation, as well as claims of child sexual abuse in Utah at large, and within The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS).

In our 5th report we investigated the history of claims of child abuse within the Mormon Church. From the Pace Memo to Paperdolls, accusations of various church members and officials participating in and/or covering up organized sexual abuse of children are not hard to find in LDS history.

On the heels of our reporting on these historical accusations, The Associated Press dropped a bombshell of an investigation which is causing headaches for the LDS. Their reporting shows that church leadership used their “help line” to cover up reports of pedophilia.

The AP obtained almost 12,000 pages of previously sealed records from a child sex abuse lawsuit against the Mormon Church in West Virginia. These documents and testimony from victims make it clear that the so-called help line can “easily be misused by church leaders to divert abuse accusations away from law enforcement and instead to church attorneys who may bury the problem, leaving victims in harm’s way.”

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Counselor For Sex Offenders Defends “Minor-Attracted Persons”

A counselor for sex offenders who works with the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections has stoked controversy after defending “minor attracted persons” and comparing pedophilia to a normal sexual preference.

In a video posted to YouTube that has since been clipped and posted to Twitter, Miranda Galbreath describes adults who are sexually attracted to children as “probably the most vilified population of folks in our culture.”

“The term pedophile has moved from being a diagnostic label to being a judgmental, hurtful insult that we hurl at people in order to harm them or slander them,” Galbreath insisted.

“I also like to use person-first language that recognizes that any label we apply to a person is only part of who they are and doesn’t represent everything that they are,” she added.

Asserting that “many minor-attracted persons never act on their attraction,” Galbreath complained that saying mean things about would-be child molesters is harmful to an “already marginalized population.”

Galbreath sought to remove agency from pedophiles, suggesting that their sickness isn’t their own fault and that their sexual perversions should be accepted on the same level as heterosexuality or homosexuality.

“[Minor-attracted person] simply means that the person has an enduring sexual or romantic attraction to minors. They have not chosen this attraction, just as the rest of us have not chosen whatever our attraction is,” Galbreath said.

“You don’t get to choose to be heterosexual or to be gay or whatever you are, and you don’t get to choose to be a minor-attracted person,” she added.

According to Galbreath’s website, she has 20 years of experience working in the mental health field and also conducts “evaluation and treatment services in the community and within state prisons to folks who have committed sexual offenses,” including for the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections.

The video clip is yet another illustration of the end game of sexual progressivism – the absorption of pedophilia under the LGBTQ+ umbrella.

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The Same FBI That Just Raided Trump Ignored Hundreds of Child Rape Victims and Warnings of Mass Shooters

Former president Donald Trump announced on Monday that his that his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida was “under siege, raided, and occupied” by federal agents taking part in an “unannounced raid.” The raid was conducted over allegations that Trump unlawfully removed and destroyed classified White House records after he left office in January 2021.

In February, the National Archives and Records Administration confirmed it had found 15 boxes of classified material at Trump’s home, all of which was reportedly taken from the White House.

The case is similar in kind to the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton in 2016, in which classified emails turned up during an investigation into Anthony Weiner’s sexting of a 15-year-old girl from NC. Weiner is Huma Abedin’s estranged husband and Abedin was one of Clinton’s closest confidants involved in the scandal and owned the home in which many of the classified emails were located.

Nothing would ever come of the investigation into Clinton, however, and the same will likely be true for Trump. Nevertheless, the sheer man hours devoted to such acts of political grandstanding are notable given the seeming lack of these hours devoted to investigating child sex trafficking and mass shooters.

As TFTP reported at the time, less than six weeks before the Parkland shooting, someone the FBI described as “a person close to” to the shooter, reached out to the agency and desperately pleaded for their help. The person reported the Parkland shooter’s “gun ownership, desire to kill people, erratic behavior, and disturbing social media posts, as well as the potential of him conducting a school shooting.”

Instead of investigating the tip, the FBI later admitted that its agents failed to “follow protocols,” and did not follow up. But this was not the first time the FBI received reports of the Parkland shooter’s violent threats.

In September 2017, the mass murdering teen left a comment on a YouTube video that said, “I’m going to be a professional school shooter.” The user who uploaded the video immediately took a screenshot of the comment and submitted it to the FBI. While agents from a local field officer were quick to respond and followed up with an in-person interview, they never fully followed through with an investigation into the shooter.

The Parkland shooter also left comments on YouTube videos claiming that he was “going to kill law enforcement one day,” which should have added to the red flags that would have led to an investigation. But nothing happened.

In similar fashion — leading to the suffering of countless children — multiple agents within the FBI not only failed to investigate but knew about the rampant sex abuse of hundreds of children in the USA Gymnastics program and looked the other way.

The FBI knew about the abuse and allowed the depraved child predator, Larry Nassar, to continue preying on little girls for more than a year after finding out.

According to a report from the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Justice, the Indianapolis FBI office facilitated this abuse as it violated agency procedures, made false statements and exhibited “extremely poor judgment” in the handling of 2015 sexual abuse allegations against Nassar.

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