More horrifying to me was finding out that one of my daughters recalled being spanked by a Northland faculty member and close friend of our family. My daughter cried as she explained how much she had feared him from that day forward. How could he do that to her and not tell us? Neither my husband nor I had ever spanked a child from another family. We couldn’t imagine having done so. Then we found out that several babysitters from the college had spanked our children too, even using the IFB method of pinching the kids under their arms and between their thighs. Our children remembered every incident as if it had happened yesterday.
How could it be legal to spank children in the state of Wisconsin? Why didn’t the government protect me from myself? As the popular saying goes, “When you know better, you do better.” Having grown up the way I did, I didn’t know better, but I was proud to be a law-abiding citizen. If the government said I wasn’t allowed to spank my kids, I wouldn’t have done it. You can’t hit an adult in our country without the potential of being charged with assault and battery. How could our laws allow a two-hundred-pound man to hit a thirty-pound child? I got incensed whenever I read comments online espousing the “terrific results” of corporal punishment and calls to use the rod to rid our country of “spoiled brats.” One post read, “I was beat with a belt and there isn’t anything wrong with me.” It was more than I could handle. How could the writer know? Had he had psychological tests conducted to make sure he hadn’t been harmed? Didn’t he know about all the scientific evidence proving that hitting children can cause brain damage?
Then I realized that fundamentalists were the ones dominating the debates I was reading and that they were refusing to look at the data. They had been unhappy when women got the right to vote, to work outside the home, and to use birth control. They were never champions of disenfranchised individuals, like women and children in a patriarchal subculture. It made sense that they wouldn’t want the government to label brutal forms of “spanking” abuse. When would the government stop catering to them and protect the children?
The specialists at CARES Northwest told us that all three of our daughters had given exceptionally detailed descriptions of their molestation by my father. This led them to believe the girls were telling the truth. The staff assured us they would write detailed reports and send them to Detective Tony O’Neill in Wisconsin.
I felt like we were heading into the ring for Round Four. First, I had discovered that the statute of limitations would make it impossible for me to criminally prosecute my father for abusing me. Second, Melissa had heard the same news about her abuse. Third, our two remarkably courageous daughters had spoken out about their own ordeals, only to be ignored by small-town police.
Once again, Detective O’Neill seemed evasive. After some time passed, He insisted that the reports from CARES Northwest still had never reached him. Then he said he had interviewed my father in July 2008 and Bart was denying everything. “There’s not enough evidence to prosecute,” he insisted.
A Family Death
Right after Bart was interviewed by the police, my brother Jeremy passed away. During the years I spent at BJU and through many after that, Jeremy endured seven brain surgeries and seven brain shunts. He lingered in a vegetative state for fourteen years because my father seized on a Bible verse that told him to choose life at all costs. He refused to let my brother go even though he was long past hope. None of us could legally intervene. He finally died in 2008.
Jason called Melissa to tell her that neither she nor I was welcome to attend his funeral. He said Bart had reserved several locations, just in case we showed up and they needed to move the service at the last minute. We found out later from friends that my father had an armed guard at the church door, ready to prevent our entering. It was a very sad time for Melissa and me because we still loved Jeremy deeply despite the abuse we had suffered at his hands.
The Lawsuit
Two months after Tony O’Neill interviewed my father in 2008, we received official notification that my father was suing us for libel and slander. We couldn’t find anyone in law enforcement willing to help us build a case to protect our children. But the man who had molested my daughters, my sister, and me had no trouble finding a lawyer ready to do battle to protect his “good name.” It was too much. I understood right then how unjust our justice system could be for those who have lived through sexual abuse and domestic violence. And it was now obvious the countless warnings we had heard in sermons about avoiding “worldly” actions like lawsuits didn’t apply to the church leaders when their empire was threatened.
We soon pinpointed the root of the lawsuit. When our third daughter spoke up, Joseph sent an e-mail to my brother Jason, telling him that another victim had come forward and warning him to keep a close eye on his own children around Bart. It had been well intended but, we now realized, supremely naive. Jason wasted no time forwarding Joseph’s e-mail to my father, and he was now using it to claim defamation in court. Colorado happened to have a so-called “long arm statute,” which dictated that, if a lawsuit was accepted, the defendant had to travel to Colorado for all legal proceedings.
We were stretched thin already—working three jobs between us, making two monthly house payments, paying off massive loans, trying hard to put food on the table for eight children, and helping them settle into their new surroundings despite obvious emotional trauma for at least three of them. Now my father was coming after us with the full weight of the cult behind him and, no doubt, unlimited funding. I knew he would be as ruthless in maneuvering against us as he had been at Northland. Bart’s actions had cost my husband his job that time. What would we lose now? It left us with two options: let him silence us forever, while the cult leaders spread whatever lies they wanted about us and Bart enjoyed free rein to continue his abuse, or fight back to protect our family and all the children who might fall victim to him in the future.
I knew most lawyers would caution a defendant like me to “keep quiet” until the trial, especially when the suit involved defamation, but doing something out of the ordinary was the only way to protect ourselves from a cult. And I had to fight for my freedom of speech. I had been guarded about sharing my history of abuse, always keeping it within a small circle. But now I knew I needed to get the truth out. Over the next two weeks I created a Web site and an audio file describing in detail for the first time what had happened to me at Northland and what the cult had tried to do to our family over the past three years. The night before I put it up on the Internet, Joseph and I lay in bed, petrified of what might happen next.
“Once that goes public, we could all be killed within a very short time,” Joseph warned me. “He said this is ‘war’ and I know he meant it.”
“But what other choice do we have?” I asked. “They’re going to try to take everything from us. And if the cult members don’t hear our side, they’ll do and say anything to back him. If Bart has other victims, it is very possible they may come forward as well, knowing they are not alone.” We knew the best way to protect our family was to bring as much public awareness and accountability to the situation as possible, so I uploaded the audio to the Internet and braced myself for the fallout. (Later I took the audio file down in the course of the litigation with my father.)
E-mails came flooding to my inbox from victims across the country. Later, it was reported to the court that the audio file had been viewed 32,000 times. I started to understand that I was far from alone; abuse was epidemic in the IFB subculture. That realization prompted me to call the FBI. Agents came to my home to meet with me, and I gave them as much information about the cult as I could, even drawing a large map of IFB connections and perpetrators throughout the country. Over the next few years I stayed in close contact with the FBI and wrote reports to the Department of Homeland Security. My number one goal was—and is—securing government intervention and accountability before the cult is able to do more harm.
After going public, Joseph and I hired one of the best lawyers we co
uld find and tried for five months to get my father’s lawsuit dropped. When the judge ruled it would go through, I countersued for sexual assault and battery.
I found out later that the IFB leaders had successfully circulated the story that I had initiated the lawsuit against my father unprovoked so their followers couldn’t blame them for involving the legal system. The way they spun it, Bart was simply acting in self-defense.
Meeting the Media
My Web site hadn’t been active long when Gary Tuchman, a national correspondent from CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, contacted me. He wanted to know everything about the cult, the abuse I had suffered, and my reasons for creating the site. I told him everything I had discovered about the “religious loophole” in the country that enabled untold abuses in private schools, colleges, group homes, and homeschooling families.
His next question surprised me. “Could CNN help expose the abuse you’re warning about in your audio file?” he asked.
Gary had done some preliminary research, but the IFB had lots of different names for itself at the time, and he was confused. He’d found information on the Fighting Fundamentalists, Separatists, Militant Fundamentalists, Independent Baptists, Fundamental Baptists, and numerous other groups. Growing up, we all knew these names were synonyms for various branches of the cult, all united under the Doctrine of Separation created by Bob Jones. But Gary explained that it would be impossible to expose them on a national level without a unifying moniker. He suggested I pick one default name to use for clarity and see if it caught on. That’s when I started using the term Independent Fundamental Baptists or IFB because it encompassed all of the various factions loyal to Hyles, Gothard, Jones, and other prominent pastors in independent Baptist churches.
That wasn’t the only sage advice Gary offered. He also encouraged me to develop a game plan and to set specific goals. So I enlisted help from several IFB cult survivors I knew and we developed five main objectives, which are now posted on my Web site:
1. COLLEGES/UNIVERSITIES:
Mandated accreditation (mandated regional accreditation if not a trade/tech school) of all colleges/universities who want to make the claim that they are giving out professional degrees in liberal arts fields (in order to call the institution a “college” or “university”).
2. PRIVATE SCHOOLS:
Mandated school counselors (unbiased and state licensed) for private schools (a person victims could turn to for help). Each private school being required to follow basic curriculum plans that ensure children are getting a thorough education.
3. STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS:
Longer statute of limitations for childhood physical/sexual abuse.
4. GROUP HOMES:
Mandated licensure of group homes in every state and more government oversight of reform schools.
5. HOMESCHOOLING:
More oversight of homeschooling families (at the minimum, required testing in public schools to ensure documentation in the system and to ensure each child is being legitimately educated).
Gary spent many hours with me, finding out everything he could about the cult’s beliefs and practices. Over the next few years, whenever news surfaced about the IFB, he would look for a way to weave it into a story for CNN. Meanwhile, I worked around the clock to keep the dialogue going through the cult survivors’ forum on my Web site because I knew there were children, women, and even men who needed rescuing from the clutches of the IFB just as my family and I had.
The IFB’s Fake “Doctor” Brigade
As the trial date approached for Bart’s lawsuit, my father lined up an IFB “dream team” of well-dressed white men who looked more like Fortune 500 CEOs than religious extremists. He put a slew of “doctors” on the witness list against me: “Dr.” Matt Olson, “Dr.” Steve Pettit, “Dr.” Wynne Kimbrough, “Dr.” Marty Von, and “Dr.” Les Ollila. Having no knowledge of IFB colleges and their unaccredited degrees, the judge would almost certainly fail to realize that not one of those men was a legitimate doctor with valid credentials. In fact, most of them had honorary doctorates just like Joseph’s from BJU, handed to them by high-ranking administrators as fast passes into the IFB’s old boys’ club. IFB college presidents are notorious for giving honorary doctorates to each other, sometimes even to leaders at their own colleges. They’re also famous in IFB circles for insisting their students and underlings call them “Dr.”
The cult has trotted out ersatz dream teams like Bart’s for decades to successfully discredit anyone who threatens it. On the rare occasions when a victim has attempted to confront her abuser in court, a posse of IFB big guns usually shows up in $1,000 suits and ties calling themselves “doctors”—and the judges generally buy into the lie. Women have escaped from the IFB only to lose their homes, their children (during horrific custody battles), their friends, and all their financial resources because the IFB “doctors” disparaged them as attention seekers and pathological liars—all the while protecting their abusers. If a disenfranchised victim of domestic violence is squaring off alone against a crew of powerful IFB godfathers with deep pockets, she has little hope of coming out on the winning end.
What’s more, the IFB leaders almost always have access to every person the defector from the cult has ever known—parents, siblings, high school teachers, college roommates, former colleagues, and employers—all of whom are eager to help protect the “cause of Christ” by providing whatever information is needed to discredit the “apostate.” It doesn’t matter if it’s true. It just needs to sound believable.
When I came forward, they planned to attack and discredit me in the same way. They decided that the most plausible story to explain the drastic measures they were taking against our family was to claim that I had faked having a brain tumor. I found out later that they had used the false-medical-claim tactic successfully in the past, giving their “expert opinions” that the victims were mentally or emotionally unstable. If a victim turned over medical records that didn’t note the illness she claimed, she could be discredited as a liar. If her claims were proven true, the victim could be painted as mentally or emotionally unstable. It had proven in the past to be a win-win strategy. Nearly every legal motion my father made was about medical fraud—not libel, slander, or false allegations. Not surprisingly, when the judge saw the names of a dozen or so IFB leaders on Bart’s witness list—each preceded by the title “doctor”—she assumed these were credentialed professionals ready to invalidate my medical claims, so she ruled that I had to produce all my medical records. I would also be forced to reveal my new address, my place of employment, and my telephone number to the man who had beaten me and threatened my life. It felt like the judge was giving him carte blanche to abuse me again and to endanger my family. It was appalling to see how adept the cult was at foisting its deception onto the public in a court of law. Joseph and I were brand-new to this, but they knew exactly what they were doing.
Bart’s years of brutal parenting worked to my advantage in one respect now: He had so drilled the importance of meticulous neatness, organization, and attention to detail into my head that I had kept scrupulous records of all my medical visits. I had no trouble producing documents from doctors at the Mayo Clinic and other respected authorities to support my diagnosis.
Depositions: Evading the Truth
During our deposition, Joseph and I had to answer all sorts of questions unrelated to defamation. How much did we owe on our house? What were our house payments? What other loans and income did we have? On and on it went. Finding out precisely how much money we had would enable the IFB leaders to know how effectively we could fight them and where we were weak.
A short time after releasing the medical records that validated my brain tumor to the court, we received a letter from the state of Wisconsin informing us that our daughters qualified for victims’ compensation and were entitled to counseling services. In essence, the state was admitting that it recognized my children as legitimate sexual abuse victims but telling us it was unw
illing to take action to prevent other little girls from being victimized.
Around that same time, almost a year after my husband’s inquiry, we finally received a letter from Marinette County DA Allen Brey stating that there was not enough evidence to prosecute my father for abusing our daughters. The letter went on to say that if more evidence surfaced the DA’s office would consider moving forward. How could two separate police departments’ assessments and a group as meticulous in its investigation as CARES Northwest not be “enough” evidence to prosecute these crimes? There were five alleged victims. How many more did they need? We were livid not only about the news but about how long the DA had taken to inform us, in spite of our repeated inquiries.
In his deposition, Bart denied every claim against him. He said the wooden dowel was only one-eighth-inch thick. He swore he had never removed our clothes and that I was exaggerating the beatings; they were no more than mild spanking sessions.
My brother Jason followed suit, downplaying the childhood abuse we had suffered. He didn’t deny the murders of the cats, but he said there were just a few “drops of blood” after only one beating that he could remember. It was insane! Jason had also hired the top criminal lawyer in Denver, and when our lawyer pressed him about sexually abusing me, he pled the Fifth Amendment. Six months before Bart filed his lawsuit, Joseph had written Jason to confront him about kissing and groping me and ejaculating against me in high school. Jason had e-mailed me a letter of “apology,” which I now believe was an attempt to appease me and keep me quiet. But I wasn’t appeased—not when he wrote an affidavit against me a year later, and served as the star witness in my father’s lawsuit.
I Fired God Page 28