ACNA Witnesses: Former PRT Victim Advocate Speaks Out
Introduction
I am deeply grateful that Helen’s and Gina’s witness statements have been made public. These women are beyond reproach in their integrity and dedication in highlighting the trail of mistakes and missteps following the reports of sexual abuse by lay catechist Mark Rivera in the Diocese of the Upper Midwest. They represent the attempt, no matter the cost, to right the wrongs some in the Church committed against Mark’s survivors and their families.
We maintain that the ACNA must, in order to restore credibility, demonstrate the humility expected of any Christian leader and face their failings head on. And fix them. Christ’s words compel us in every Gospel to care for the weak, the sick, those in prison, those who have been exploited. The outcasts. The hurting. Until the ACNA reflects this commitment to humility with respect to ALL survivors of abuse in their churches, on their watch, there will be no change, and there will be only negative consequences attached to their witness to the world, like the proverbial millstone. That part of Matthew 18 is important too.
The official statements from the ACNA about the two ongoing investigations remain few and far between. The latest one (published on April 29) does not assuage confidentiality concerns for some survivors and it is factually incorrect in its assertions about the actions taken by the three of us who resigned.
Addressing the Questions re: Husch-Blackwell’s Confidentiality
As we have maintained, Christen Price, J.D, the Rev. Gina Roes and I were supportive and confident in Husch Blackwell’s experience and resources to conduct a survivor-centered, trauma informed investigation. Survivors have told us, and HB, however, that they are experiencing anxiety about giving their disclosures. These concerns should be taken seriously and re-considered.
Under the current contract, according to an HB representative, an ACNA leadership team will be given a separate report (with “unredacted names and information”) than what will be disclosed publicly. The effect of this, some survivors maintain, is that the Church is asking survivors to entrust their identities and most confidential and personal parts of their testimony to the top leadership in the very denomination that failed and harmed them, and perhaps to some of the very people who have failed and harmed them. That does not feel safe and may result in fewer disclosures and a less accurate report.
Equally concerning to survivors is the process reported by individuals who interviewed with Telios Law for the investigation into spiritual abuse in the Diocese of the Upper Midwest. Multiple people reported that they were read an extensive list of names and asked to rank the credibility of those names on a scale of 1-5. Expert advocate and attorney Rachael Denhollander, when shown correspondence from Telios detailing the credibility assessment process Telios is using in its investigation, asserted that:
“Having witnesses rank other witnesses or individuals is an inappropriate way to assess credibility. And frankly, it opens the door and makes it more likely that whoever is in power gets assessed as credible, because it is more likely that they will get higher rankings from other people in power who are close to them. Yes, assessing credibility is normal. No, the way they are doing it is not normal.”
Furthermore, to list aloud the names of some survivors to members of a small community in which it would be immediately understood that they made an allegation is at all times unsafe.
Addressing the Assertions Regarding Our Resignations
The insinuation that Gina, Christen, and I did not bring our concerns to the PRT before resigning is demonstrably false. (Below is the letter we sent to PRT members Alan Hawkins and Albert Thompson on Jan 10, 2022 explaining where we stood before we resigned).
No one representing the ACNA has offered any specific disagreement with anything we allege in our resignation letter, or our letter to the Archbishop.
After our resignation, Gina, Christen and I met with the Dean of Provincial Affairs, Bishop Guernsey, on February 11th, 2022. He offered no insight during this meeting, as to what the remaining PRT members disagreed with in our resignation letter, just that they disagreed. His concern was that we had made our disagreement with them public and he conveyed to us that “feelings were very hurt” by this. He offered a process of mediation within the PRT that included us sharing our documents with them using a third party that he would select as mediator. This was unacceptable to us, as Gina outlined in her recent letter.
About a month after this meeting, with our sense that it was unsuccessful, we wrote a letter to Archbishop Foley Beach and copied many Bishops in the ACNA. This letter has not been made public yet, but we feel, given the most recent official statement from the ACNA, that it is imperative that we do so now. We would prefer not to share our private communications publicly. But as time goes on, and the ACNA continues to make statements like “we continue to disagree with them”, it becomes very clear in our collective conscience that it must be done.
As you read this letter to the Archbishop dated March 6th, 2022 (included below), please note that after it was written, Bishop Guernsey said in an email addressed to the three of us on March 7th, 2022, that Gina, Christen and I had “chosen to make additional allegations without documentation backing them up” in our letter to the Archbishop. “In doing so,” he continued, “you have undermined the work I was doing to try to bring the groups [us, and the remaining five PRT members] together. So, I am withdrawing from direct involvement with you three on this matter. I would again ask that you provide directly to the other five PRT members the documentation you have that supports your allegations.”
The Archbishop responded to the attached letter similarly, directing us to provide documentation supporting our allegations to the remaining members of the PRT, instead of to him. We elected instead, to provide documentation of evidence, all 29 pages of it, back to the Archbishop and to as many Bishops as possible. The point was not to disobey orders. We no longer trusted the remaining PRT members, which was in large part why we had resigned and written the letter to the Archbishop in the first place.
We wanted full transparency with ACNA leadership in the hopes that someone might step forward with genuine concern and curiosity to get the investigation and relationships with survivors and the ACNA back on track, even if that meant hiring an outside expert to facilitate it. We hoped that expert would be attorney and advocate Rachael Denhollander, and we were disappointed when the Province passed up that opportunity.
As of today, May 2nd, 2022, we have received NO response from anyone in the ACNA to the 29 pages of documentation that we provided. This documentation was offered to substantiate what we wrote in our resignation letter, as well as our March 6th, 2022 letter to the Archbishop and the College of Bishops.
When things get messy or scary, the inclination of most communities, going back centuries, is to move away from it. Put a scarlet letter on it. Cast it out. Reach for what feels safe and return to normalcy as quickly as possible. This dynamic constitutes the foundation of how the Church fails victims of sexual abuse.
Autumn Hanna VandeHei
Victim Advocate
Letter from Former PRT Members to Abp. Beach
The following is a letter from The Rev. Gina R. Roes, Autumn Hanna VandeHei, and Christen M. Price, JD to Archbishop Foley Beach on March 6, 2022. It has been published here with permission.
March 6, 2022
The Most Rev. Foley Beach
Archbishop of the Anglican Church in North America
367 Athens Highway
Building 2200
Loganville, Georgia 30052
Dear Archbishop Beach,
We write regarding our resignation from the Provincial Response Team (PRT), to provide more information related to that decision. In addition to what we articulated in our resignation letter, which is attached, we wanted to make sure you also knew about the deception and conflicts of interest in this process, especially from PRT members who are senior Provincial officials. We offer further details about the lack of transparency on the PRT as well.
Misleading survivors
First, survivors and advocates in communication with Bishop Alan Hawkins in August 2021 were misled on at least two points as to the PRT’s composition and operation. They had raised concerns about Chancellor Jeffrey Garrety and Ms. Rachel Thebeau being on the PRT. Bishop Hawkins minimized their roles, implying that Mr. Garrety and Ms. Thebeau would not have a vote, but would need to be in the room for legal and communications purposes, respectively.
We were not aware of these representations until months later. In reality, Mr. Garrety and Ms. Thebeau played key, arguably controlling roles on the PRT. Mr. Garrety, for example, negotiated the contract with Husch Blackwell– including the investigation’s scope, which the three of us were not permitted to see. Mr. Garrety, Ms. Thebeau, and Bishop Hawkins met regularly apart from the rest of the PRT and often made decisions in those meetings.
Bishop Hawkins also assured survivors and advocates in August 2021 that the three of us would be vetting communications to ensure they were trauma-informed. Yet – as we described in our letter – extensive communications were in fact withheld from us, and our advice about other communications was disregarded. It thus appears the PRT was based on deception from its inception.
Survivor trust was further eroded by the delay in counseling support. The PRT first discussed counseling funds in October 2021. Rev. Roes prepared the necessary documents in early November 2021, but no such assistance materialized before we resigned. We raised this issue multiple times over the months, yet received no clear reason for the delay.
Conflicts of interest
Second, compounding the problem described above, Mr. Garrety engaged in two inappropriate actions regarding mishandling of abuse allegations, as a person seated on, advising, and in some instances controlling decisions for a team dedicated to oversight of an investigation into mishandling abuse allegations.
Mr. Garrety, without the three of us knowing beforehand, engaged in a private conversation with a clergy member, Fr. Keith Hartsell, accused of mishandling sexual abuse allegations in the Diocese of the Upper Midwest (UMD). Fr. Hartsell characterized the conversation as the PRT absolving him. Mr. Garrety told the PRT he told Fr. Hartsell that he believed Fr. Hartsell’s account of events and remarked upon how impressed he was with Fr. Hartsell and the problem of ruining good men’s lives.
It continues to be unclear in what capacity or under what authority Mr. Garrety held this meeting. Fr. Hartsell, as you know, is accused of forcing a child sexual abuse victim to reconcile with her abuser in front of others, while withholding the crime from the victim’s parents and the authorities.
[a paragraph here regarding a separate incident has been redacted for survivor confidentiality]
This potentially compromises the integrity of the investigation, not just because Mr. Garrety was permitted to negotiate the scope of the investigation after involving himself with accused persons, but because he is presumably covered by attorney-client privilege, which would allow him as well as other persons he has communicated with (such as Fr. Keith Hartsell) to withhold certain communications from the investigators.
Lack of transparency
Throughout the whole of our PRT tenure, Bishop Hawkins and Ms. Thebeau consistently withheld information from us, some of it for nearly five months. Even though survivors had been told we would be vetting communications to them, none of us had access to the PRT email account.
We were not aware – until survivors began contacting us directly – of numerous survivor and advocate communications to the PRT email account. These persons believed we had been receiving their communications and were either approving the often curt responses, or that we did not care enough to respond at all. We had communicated early in the process that any survivor or related communications must be forwarded to us, and when we received almost no emails, simply assumed the account was not much in use.
Moreover, many of the emails withheld from us provided relevant context for what the investigation’s scope needed to be – very much demonstrating the overlap between mishandling sexual abuse allegations, spiritual abuse, and abuse of power – wrongdoing that other PRT members insisted on separating.
This lack of transparency continued even after we discovered a letter originally sent to the PRT account when it was posted online. We confronted the team about this, and that still did not cause Bishop Hawkins or Ms. Thebeau to inform us of the other emails.
There were also a number of other irregularities in the PRT’s functioning, such as little information being put in writing, opaque decision-making where few questions were put to actual votes before the PRT members, and no minutes kept of meetings after mid-November.
Needless to say, for Provincial officials to be misleading survivors, shaping the investigative process despite their own conflicts of interest, and operating without transparency undermines both the integrity of this investigation and of the Province itself, and has led to a serious breakdown in trust with survivors, others affected, and their advocates.
Beginning to restore trust in both the Province and the UMD investigation will require, at a minimum, that the Province acknowledge these errors, include itself within the investigation’s scope, publish the investigative contract, and waive attorney-client privilege to the extent it could be used to shield Mr. Garrety or persons otherwise within the UMD investigation’s scope from disclosure. We hope the Province will act swiftly and unequivocally to rectify this situation. We would be happy to provide clarification and documentation as to the information described above.
Thank you, and please do not hesitate to let us know if we might be of additional assistance.
Best regards,
The Rev. Gina R. Roes
Autumn Hanna VandeHei
Christen M. Price, JD