Letter from Joanna Rudenborg to the PRT
An email from Joanna Rudenborg to the ACNA Provincial Response Team, dated Sun, Nov 7, 11:06 PM.
Christen, Gina, Rachel, Autumn, Albert, Jeffrey, Alan, and Eric:
You will likely recognize me as the one fully-public survivor of sexual abuse by former Catechist Mark Rivera, and as the person who wrote the initial #ACNAtoo Twitter thread that set in motion the events that led to Bp. Stewart Ruch going on leave and your team taking over the investigation in the Upper Midwest Diocese.
For the record, I am writing this email on my own behalf, as an #ACNAtoo survivor, not in an official capacity as a member of the #ACNAtoo advocacy team.
I have some specific questions surrounding the upcoming investigation, which I will ask toward the end of the email. The bulk of the email tells the story of my past year’s experience with the ACNA hierarchy and the conclusions I’ve reached through this experience.
I’m writing this story out in response to Alan’s communications to me, beginning in early July, that the Province was inviting the survivors of Mark Rivera’s abuse to be involved in the process leading up to the new investigation, as opposed to us merely participating in the investigation itself. This open-ended option to involve myself with the Province as a survivor has weighed heavily on me the last four months, primarily because of the unique position I find myself in as the default public face of #ACNAtoo. I’ve felt as if I am expected to engage the Province directly, since it was my disclosure that set all this in motion—as if because I called on the Province publicly to get involved, I therefore now need to give more private guidance on what it is I, as a survivor, want them to do.
I have, in fact, made it clear what I want them to do, by helping to write and publicly signing #ACNAtoo’s July 15 Open Letter to Abp. Beach, the contents and background of which the #ACNAtoo team has explained in further detail in a recent six-part blog post series. However, I am afraid that if I do not go on record with the PRT and explain myself personally, I open myself up to future accusations that I did not participate in the process to the Province’s satisfaction, and therefore lack the grounds to criticize that process, if that is, indeed, what I end up needing to do.
In fact, it has not been a realistic option for me to communicate at length directly with the Province at all, until recently. While I’ve been finding somewhat more mental space to do that, this letter has been in the works for weeks now, and I’ve abandoned it and returned to it multiple times, debating if it is worth the effort to explain this all again, after all that other survivors and I have already said about the situation on public platforms.
The account in this letter will explain why communicating with the Province in a substantive way has not been an option for me, and why it is still not an option in the spirit in which it was offered: an invitation to enter into open-ended private correspondence with the Province’s representatives.
I think if the PRT seeks to involve survivors in the pre-investigation process it’s important for you to understand how that sort of open-ended proposition feels to one of the survivors who was, over the past year, most engaged with an ACNA diocese’s internal (private) processes of responding to abuse allegations.
Before I get to my story, though, a note on the general context of the PRT involving other Mark Rivera victims: My partner survivor in advocacy with the UMD last winter and spring was Cherin, who was representing her daughter, Mark’s nine-year-old victim (now twelve years old). Cherin is now only in touch with the Province through her lawyer, as she and her family no longer have the emotional resources to continue seeking accountability within the ACNA after almost two-and-a-half years of compounding trauma at the hands of the UMD.
Cherin and I have long been the point people for most of the self-identified survivors of Mark Rivera’s abuse. She started advocating on their behalf with the UMD in 2019, and I joined her in late 2020. Some of these survivors have now told their stories publicly, either through Religion News Service or on the #ACNAtoo website. Several more are considering doing so. Some we only became aware of recently because they contacted us after we went public. Some participated in the UMD’s Grand River Solutions investigation and would likely participate in the upcoming one. I am not aware that any of them has the time, resources, or desire to involve themselves with the PRT’s pre-investigation process, but I have not asked any of them directly, since the PRT has not offered any trauma-informed avenue for survivor engagement, only this email address and an open-ended invitation to “reach out.” As I explained to the Province publicly back in July, those survivors whose allegations Cherin brought to UMD leaders back in 2019 already have over two years of confirmation that the ACNA does not care about Mark Rivera’s abuse of them. A vague invitation from the Province to reach out to the PRT before the PRT even existed, coupled with a defensive follow-up from the ACNA Communications Director, has not so far inspired me to encourage any other survivors of Mark Rivera’s abuse to contact the PRT.
More broadly, with respect to everyone’s path being different, at this point in my evolution as a survivor and an advocate I would not personally recommend to any survivor that they involve themselves substantially in the internal processes of the institution where their abuse occurred. I specifically recommend against survivors investing mental and emotional labor in privately educating the institution on how to properly investigate abuse allegations or provide care for survivors, a recommendation I will explain through the telling of my own story.
It would somewhat contradict my own just-stated recommendation if I wrote this long story I’m about to write and only sent it to the PRT. Instead I’m going to write my story, followed by my questions, and post this entire letter online, as well as any response I receive. In doing this I’m fulfilling an institutional advocacy role I took on almost a year ago, while modeling doing it in the only way I now recommend any survivor to do it: on the record, with sufficient supportive witnesses present.
I specifically recommend against survivors investing mental and emotional labor in privately educating the institution on how to properly investigate abuse allegations or provide care for survivors, a recommendation I will explain through the telling of my own story
Two disclaimers before I begin: First, I want to acknowledge that telling a detailed first-person story about your traumatic experiences can inadvertently come across as self-pitying. I do not pity myself, and I do not want your pity, or anyone’s pity. If my UMD story had no greater advocacy implications, I would not be sending it to you, and I would certainly not tell it publicly. I’m not excited about the vulnerability hangover I will experience from posting it for the world to see. For present purposes, though, while this is my personal story, I present it primarily as a case study and an education piece that echoes many stories of survivors who advocate for themselves or others. Mine corroborates those stories and will perhaps serve to help other survivors, advocates, and institutional representatives who read it. My feeling is that my difficult experiences are not wasted if other people can relate to or learn from them.
I also want to be clear that in telling this story I am not asking you for anything except answers to the questions at the end of the email. My account speaks extensively to the labor others and I have invested in our advocacy efforts because my objective in relaying it is to demonstrate what it often takes behind the scenes for survivors and advocates just to get to the point of having an institution do anything of substance to address harm done. Elaborating this is not a covert threat on my part to sue the UMD or the ACNA, or a passive-aggressive way to ask for restitution of any kind. I have honestly not had the time nor space to think through those options clearly. If I ever get to the point of formally seeking restitution, I will simply announce this directly.
A History
Here is an account of my past year’s experience advocating for survivors with the ACNA:
I disclosed Mark Rivera’s two rapes and more than two-and-a-half years of abuse of me to the Christ Our Light community and others in November 2020 via a painfully detailed 11,000-word email that filtered almost instantly up to Bp. Ruch. With no break to begin therapy or other healing work, from December to May I worked the equivalent of a full-time job researching, communicating with other survivors and advocates, synthesizing information, convincing the Bishop to take action, meeting with the Bishop’s response team, and writing copious emails in a futile attempt to elicit a proper independent investigation into Mark Rivera’s possibly two decades of sexual abuses within the UMD and leadership mishandling of survivor allegations starting in 2019.
The UMD spiritual abuse stories the #ACNAtoo advocacy team and I have fielded since my June 26 Twitter thread (some of which the survivors have sent you, as well) are plentiful and sobering, and they form the cultural backdrop for the growing number of sexual abuse stories emerging from the same setting. This is the diocesan culture I waded into somewhat naively last November when my Mark Rivera abuse story made its way to the Bishop and I quickly realized that if I did not challenge the Bishop to take more action, he would content himself with an exorcism for Mark and in-house pastoral counseling offered to victims and abuser alike. (Bp. Ruch also did finally suspend operations at Christ Our Light in late 2020, but this was an obvious move given that in the preceding year and a half all the church’s leadership had been implicated in either perpetrating, mishandling, or covering up sexual abuse.)
This is the diocesan culture I waded into somewhat naively last November when my Mark Rivera abuse story made its way to the Bishop and I quickly realized that if I did not challenge the Bishop to take more action, he would content himself with an exorcism for Mark and in-house pastoral counseling offered to victims and abuser alike.
So on January 19, 2021, I sent the Bishop and three other prominent UMD leaders (Fr. William Beasley, Fr. Eirik Olsen, and Fr. Keith Hartsell) a 13,000-word email containing crucial background information, accounts of Mark Rivera’s grooming and abuse involving ten different victims, and a list of trauma-informed third-party resources the UMD could turn to for help in addressing this issue. In this email my centerpiece request of the Bishop was that he enlist a proper independent investigation for the sake of finding any other survivors and bringing accountability, education, and transformation to the Diocese. I explained at length what I had learned myself in the previous two months about how abusers groom communities to enable and overlook their abuses. I stressed that the UMD was not only morally obligated to find and help other victims their Catechist had abused, but to do the hard work to understand how they had collectively failed Mark’s known and unknown victims and by extension other sexual abuse survivors in their congregations. (A redacted version of this email to UMD leaders and other correspondence with the Bishop and his team will be available at ACNAtoo.org when the team is able to sort, organize, and publish all such evidence, but I can send you this email in the meantime, if you would like, as well as the November 19, 2020 email in which I first detailed my rapes and abuse. For reference, each of these emails is longer than the email you are currently reading.)
The Bishop responded to my January 19 email graciously, thanked me for writing it, admitted the UMD needed third-party help, offered to collaborate with survivors and advocates in the process of enlisting it, and assembled a six-person response team to communicate with us as they chose an investigator. Counting the several weeks it took to compose the January email, three other women and I worked on this diocesan advocacy project for what ended up being six months. We did all of this quietly, out of view of the public, the media, and social media, going through the UMD’s official channels. At every step in this process we tried to meet the UMD where it was—which is to say, despite initial friendliness, apparently ignorant of and ultimately resistant to acknowledging or repairing the ongoing harm it inflicted on sexual abuse survivors.
This indefinite advocacy work re-traumatized and exhausted me. Day in and day out, when I was not directly corresponding with the Diocese, I was immersed in all the relevant angles of research I knew the Diocese would not undertake itself. The mental requirements of that type and level of advocacy work do not allow for emotional breakdown and deep grieving. In order to remain focused and productive I stayed almost perpetually locked in my typical trauma response: extreme emotional detachment.
Counting the several weeks it took to compose the January email, three other women and I worked on this diocesan advocacy project for what ended up being six months. We did all of this quietly, out of view of the public, the media, and social media, going through the UMD’s official channels.
Flash forward to August 2021, just before the PRT formed: In a Zoom meeting discussing the formation of the PRT, Alan made an apparently joking comment in passing to #ACNAtoo advocates that he hoped we “weren’t playing a game of chess” with the Province. In other words, he hoped #ACNAtoo was engaging in good faith and not simply trying to outmaneuver the ACNA in some way. This is the one Zoom call in which Alan and I met, and during the meeting, due to general overwhelm, I mostly just listened to other advocates speak with him. His metaphor stayed with me because it struck me instantly that my smaller team had been playing a game of chess with the ACNA for over six months at that point, but not because we wanted to. As a survivor trying to convince an institution to respond better to abuse allegations, I had not only had to research proper independent investigation techniques, I had had to ascertain the entire lay of the land of failed institutional responses to abuse allegations. This included researching a variety of scenarios by which institutions resist best practices, so that I could recognize that resistance as it happened and make alternate plans accordingly, including taking everything public, down the road, if the UMD ultimately failed to honor survivors via internal processes. The particular way in which the UMD resisted survivors was one of the more subtle and confusing game scenarios: they responded in January with an outpouring of compassion and apparent desire to collaborate, then completely switched gears months in—all while maintaining a humble and deeply concerned public face. Even with all my research into similar scenarios, as an advocate, this was incredibly confusing and traumatizing to experience in real time, as a survivor. However, because of my team’s careful process I had a paper trail to fall back on as of May 2021. I had a particularly good paper trail because I both engaged in good faith and had my wits about me to stay strategic; these are not, in fact, mutually exclusive propositions, although doing both simultaneously (maintaining integrity and thinking several steps ahead) is an extraordinary amount of work. So everything about navigating the UMD from December to May was, in fact, a giant chess game, far more intricate than I have space to elaborate on here. The upshot of it was that the inherent power dynamics involved meant that the survivor team started the game with a number of our pieces missing and with the diocesan team’s pieces advanced halfway across the board towards us. So it was incumbent on us to become chess experts as we played—despite the fact that we wanted nothing more than not to be forced into playing a game in the first place.
Because of the chess game the UMD played with us I dedicated hundreds of hours to these advocacy efforts, beginning with the weeks spent writing my November 2020 disclosure letter and including the background research and communication with survivors and advocates on my end that in turn went into my diocesan correspondence. During these months I spent my days poring over relevant articles and books, listening to podcasts and radio interviews with survivors and trauma-informed experts, watching topical documentaries, and consulting with various people at length to compare notes and piece together the story of Mark Rivera’s involvement in the UMD and greater community for the past two decades.
The three women I worked with also donated hundreds of collective hours of their own mental and emotional labor, not to mention the years of relevant academic, experiential, and professional expertise they brought to the situation and freely contributed to the UMD. Cherin, one of the three, had attempted in vain to advocate for her own daughter and other survivors with Christ Our Light, Church of the Resurrection, and the Diocese starting in 2019. Before I arrived on the scene in late 2020, Cherin had already clocked hundreds of painful hours of meetings, phone calls, emails, travel, and just privately picking up the pieces after each additional round of empty rhetoric and unfulfilled promises UMD leaders inflicted on her and her family.
I personally participated in our four-person pre-#ACNAtoo diocesan-level phase of advocacy (late 2020 to mid-2021) amid moving from Illinois to Utah (to escape Mark Rivera and his enablers), traveling separately back to Illinois to file charges with police, corresponding with the Kane County Sheriff’s Department, and engaging with a series of crushing personal emails from Illinois friends and neighbors and Christ Our Light church leaders who initially seemed receptive to my disclosure and concerned for my well being, but who ultimately chose to side with Mark over his victims. Amid the emotional and logistical messiness of having to move suddenly out of my home, I managed to establish Utah residency and submit the necessary paperwork to gain health insurance here and finally reach the top of the waiting list for a local trauma-informed therapy provider—after being bumped from the top once for paperwork delays on my end during a harrowing trip back to Illinois to pack up and move into storage the contents of the apartment where Mark had raped and abused me. I moved out of this apartment largely by myself, for obvious social reasons related to the ongoing situation. In doing far too much physical labor in too short a time, I injured my arm and ended up curled up on a friend’s couch for the better part of a week exhausted, re-traumatized, and unable to do anything but marathon Netflix shows until I reached a place where it seemed mentally and physically safe to drive the two long days back to Utah.
The inherent power dynamics involved meant the survivor team started the game with a number of our pieces missing and with the diocesan team’s pieces advanced halfway across the board towards us.
So it was incumbent on us to become chess experts as we played—despite the fact that we wanted nothing more than not to be forced into playing a game in the first place.
So I started therapy this summer around the same time I made #ACNAtoo public, after months of delay stemming directly from the mounting complications of the same situation that most acutely drove me to need therapy. To date, I remain unemployed, living off savings and the generosity of friends, because I have not yet found the mental, emotional, or logistical space to both do this advocacy work (now mostly in the form of working with the #ACNAtoo team) and seek out, let alone perform, a paid job.
As I said above, I explain all this not to gain your pity, which I do not want, but to give you context for my situation as well as a small taste of the sorts of social, emotional, physical, spiritual, and financial ordeals survivors undergo when their communities abandon them and support their abusers. Many survivors experience far worse than I did. I had some money saved and plenty of supportive friends outside the sphere of Mark and the UMD, so I had somewhere safe to escape and resources to begin to advocate. Still, just from my own experience I could go on for pages detailing how the mishandling of abuse allegations becomes a death by a thousand cuts for survivors.
In late April 2021, after five months of eating, sleeping, and breathing abuse survivor advocacy, I looked forward to taking a break for the duration of the impending independent investigation the UMD had promised us. I specifically paid up three months’ rent in advance and set aside May, June, and July to allow myself to break down, grieve deeply, go to therapy, plant a garden, do some writing that wasn’t emails to the UMD, wander the hills of Utah, and reckon directly with all that had happened to me in the past three-and-a-half years. I figured I would deal with the aftermath of the investigation after that break, and be in a far better place to do so then.
However, as I’ve documented at length on Twitter, at the same time I was planning this break the Diocese was sidelining our supposedly collaborative effort, refusing to answer our questions, giving us conflicting reasons for refusing to answer our questions, and signing the contract to begin an “investigation” that had all the markings of a coverup. The Bishop launched the investigation in a highly problematic May 4 announcement, and further communications with him and with the investigator confirmed that the UMD did not intend to respect our wishes or receive our feedback. So instead of embarking on my advocacy break, I pivoted. I spent May and June familiarizing myself with Twitter and continuing to research case studies of abuse allegations mishandling and the aftermath. In particular I watched #SBCtoo survivors and advocates battling the Southern Baptist Convention to try to get some of the same basic commitments we had requested from the UMD. When I felt it was finally time, I wrote a Twitter thread outlining the Mark Rivera abuse and mishandling story and naming names, hoping some media outlet would find the story and report on it, putting public pressure on the UMD to do better.
I say “wrote a Twitter thread” as if I sat down and typed it in an afternoon. In fact, other advocates and I spent dozens of hours over several days composing the story carefully to fit the Twitter format, then fact-checking, copy-editing, proofreading, deliberating over content choices, searching online, taking screenshots, and redacting evidence. Each of my several early ‘evidence’ threads was a painstaking ordeal involving reopening fresh wounds and putting them on public display with no guarantee that it would accomplish anything. Nor could survivors afford a single public misstep or minor factual error that might be used to discredit us. Being your own amateur journalist as an abuse survivor is far more grueling and nerve-wracking than you can imagine if you haven’t done it.
I say “wrote a Twitter thread” as if I sat down and typed it in an afternoon. In fact, other advocates and I spent dozens of hours over several days composing the story carefully to fit the Twitter format, then fact-checking, copy-editing, proofreading, deliberating over content choices, searching online, taking screenshots, and redacting evidence.
Still, the effort was worth it. One Twitter thread did more in six days than all our direct advocacy with the UMD had done in six months. Almost instantly survivors and advocates flooded my DMs, Religion News Service contacted me, and I found myself juggling correspondence morning to night, day in and day out, seven days a week. RNS wanting to report our story fulfilled the objective of going on Twitter in the first place, and on top of that concerned lay people now wanted to help fight abuse in their denomination. This was more success than I had dared hope for.
Within three days of my first Twitter thread, Bp. Ruch issued an announcement making a major concession he had refused to make prior to the public pressure (committing to make the investigator’s final report public), while disingenuously portraying this concession as not being a concession but rather his plan all along. Reading this announcement was when I knew I was done wasting my energy privately educating the ACNA hierarchy on how to handle abuse properly. Internal communications had proven pointless; going public got instant results. And the results themselves threw into stark relief just how little the Bishop had ever respected survivors or intended to do anything for us without the spotlight of public scrutiny.
The night of the Bishop’s second announcement I couldn’t sleep, so in a rare moment of felt grief I cried and wrote a Twitter thread lament. With barely a break after this, I printed out every email the Bishop’s team and mine had ever exchanged, scoured them, made notes, took dozens of screenshots, and on July 3 published a lengthy play-by-play thread overviewing these months of correspondence. It was exhausting. If you finish reading this email, then read every Twitter thread and article and announcement I’ve linked to in it, including every screenshot in every tweet, and feel tired by it all, you will understand the tiniest fraction of the weariness my smaller advocacy team and I felt over those many months.
In addition to his June 29 online announcement, on Sunday, July 4, Bp. Ruch conducted an impromptu in-person, off-the-record ‘FAQ’ meeting with parishioners after each of the two Church of the Resurrection morning services. During these meetings the Bishop spoke of our case without any direct way for us to know what he was saying about us. In fact, we wouldn’t have known he was saying anything if we hadn’t happened to hear from a confidential source, that morning, that the meetings were taking place. This source, who attended one of the sessions, reported that the Bishop asked those present to keep what was said “within the Rez family” and only provided responses to pre-selected questions, saying leaders would answer further questions only after the investigation concluded. A prominent sign on the table in the meeting room specifically forbade attendees from recording the sessions. In his 15-20 minute presentation, Bp. Ruch told a version of the two-year-long mishandling saga that, much like his two online announcements, omitted or twisted relevant facts and gave the impression that the UMD had not made mistakes beyond what the Bishop had admitted in his original announcement: the “regrettable error” of not telling the Church of the Resurrection congregation about the allegations against Mark and ordering an independent investigation sooner. Our source said that the Bishop’s wording, for instance, would lead those in attendance to believe that the UMD had, in fact, called the authorities at every relevant juncture in the story, as opposed to them failing, as mandated reporters, to call any authorities for a full year and a half (until November 2020, when another survivor and I came forward)—and, in fact, pressuring a mother not to report her child’s abuse to authorities. In these sessions, as in his June 29 announcement, the Bishop also failed to address my team’s numerous published concerns about the deficiencies of the GRS investigation, including a licensed professional counselor’s opinion that the investigation process as it was being conducted could further harm as-yet-unidentified survivors.
I was absorbing the implications of the Bishop’s online and in-person narrative-crafting in the background of near-constant communication with survivors, advocates, and media. The first RNS story about the situation would come out July 9, less than two weeks after I went public.
When Alan wrote to me on behalf of the Province on July 8, the same day Bp. Ruch announced he was going on leave, it came as a complete surprise. I had gone public hoping to create pressure on the Bishop to fix the investigation situation; amidst the whirlwind of activity, I had not prepared ever to speak directly to the ACNA again. I supposed vaguely that I should be glad the Province had somehow gotten the Bishop to go on leave and taken over the investigation themselves. Isn’t this what all unheeded survivor advocates want? For the highest level of the institution in question to notice their efforts and promise to address the problem, including speaking to the survivors directly about it? Didn’t this mean real change was now within reach?
Yet I struggled to respond to Alan’s email, not immediately understanding my own reaction of complete overwhelm. I was somehow able to find energy to engage with fellow survivors and advocates who wanted to create a grassroots campaign. I had also rallied to get through the lengthy process of media interviews and follow-up fact-gathering correspondence with RNS. And I had already managed to focus for months writing Bp. Ruch’s team incredibly detailed emails full of hyperlinks to our research and cogent explanations of survivor priorities. But everything about attempting to engage with the Province in early July felt impossible. As I read Alan’s emails the words swam on the screen and my brain clouded over with a sense of exhaustion and futility.
Looking back I can see this shutdown was a trauma response. At the point Alan reached out I was quickly discovering what you have presumably seen from the emails piled up in your inbox: the culture of abuse in the UMD runs deep and exhibits clear patterns of pastoral malpractice, enabling and covering up various forms of abuse, and over the last decade or so a cult of personality consolidated around the now-Bishop that has centralized and shored up power in a way that all but ensures these abuses and coverups will continue. So as I scrambled to figure out this new #ACNAtoo phase of advocacy work (now as a very public survivor), I was simultaneously processing the Bishop’s treatment of our original four-person advocacy team in light of the emerging corroborating accounts of spiritual abuse. If I had known in December 2020 what I learned within two weeks of going public in June 2021, I would have known that what we were doing for six months was categorically futile aside from the paper trail it left.
The culture of abuse in the UMD runs deep and exhibits clear patterns of pastoral malpractice, enabling and covering up various forms of abuse, and over the last decade or so a cult of personality consolidated around the now-Bishop that has centralized and shored up power in a way that all but ensures these abuses and coverups will continue.
Perversely, the kind and inviting tone of Alan’s email outreach was specifically triggering to me. What I had experienced across the board with leaders in the UMD from Catechist Mark Rivera up to Bp. Ruch was that they would act however suited them without regard to my or others’ safety or wellbeing, but since they spoke to me of their deep concern and care for me while doing so, I was, in their eyes, obliged to be satisfied with and even grateful for their attention, regardless of the harm they did. Even as Bp. Ruch betrayed survivors in every concrete way this past May, his final emails, like his public statements, spoke of how deeply he appreciated us and cared for us and grieved for our suffering. Bp. Ruch’s team also exuded empathy and deep concern in emails and in meetings. Christ Our Light leaders and members did the same in personal correspondence with me last winter and spring, even as they failed to support Mark’s victims or appropriately distance themselves from Mark. So as of July, kind words from ACNA representatives not only fell flat, they activated my nervous system to brace for more abuse. I mention this not to preclude future kind words, but to reiterate how deeply broken this situation was before any of you were called into it.
The Province reaching out in July, then, did not feel like a Good Samaritan finally coming to rescue us. It felt like starting over completely from scratch (except now with even more trauma to explain) begging for scraps from an entirely new and far more powerful entity who knew nothing about the situation except what I had written on Twitter and whatever misinformation the Bishop had given them. So the cumulative trauma from my dealings with the UMD—piled directly on top of the trauma of two sexual assaults and years of abuse—returned in the form of instantaneous physical weariness and brain fog whenever I tried to write Alan any substantial email back. In fact, I quickly reached a point, after rehashing my team’s UMD correspondence for the July 3 Twitter thread, where I couldn’t physically reread those email exchanges any more. Any attempt to write or review communications with the ACNA became virtually impossible because my brain refused to process the words on the screen.
In general, I was hitting a physiological wall. As my therapist gently points out to me again and again, I can only stay in fight mode so long. I was raped and manipulated by one ACNA leader. Another ACNA leader covered this up and tried to shame me into not coming forward. A third ACNA leader who was in authority over these two refused to go to bat for me after I did come forward. I appealed to four more ACNA leaders higher up the chain, all of whom turned out, along with other leaders in their diocese, to have themselves mishandled the Mark Rivera case or other sexual abuse situations. In the subsequent months I corresponded with a group of six ACNA leaders who would ultimately continue the pattern of mishandling.
By the time I tagged the ACNA Archbishop in a Twitter thread in late June, I had spent months holding it together in order to appeal carefully and respectfully to ACNA leaders who kept delivering spiritual-sounding words of care while making it clear through their actions that they did not actually care about sexual assault survivors. It did not matter that I freely handed over sordid details of my abuse to them or begged them just to make the most obvious choice of centering survivors or did their research for them and spoon fed them information on how to do so.
I was raped and manipulated by one ACNA leader. Another ACNA leader covered this up and tried to shame me into not coming forward. A third ACNA leader who was in authority over these two refused to go to bat for me after I did come forward. I appealed to four more ACNA leaders higher up the chain, all of whom turned out, along with other leaders in their diocese, to have themselves mishandled the Mark Rivera case or other sexual abuse situations.
I am surprised about and grateful for the almost superhuman emotional suspension that carried me through those months of advocacy. Still, politely explaining and reexplaining myself in the face of spiritually abusive resistance was putting constant strain on my nervous system, even if I couldn’t admit it yet. By the time Bp. Ruch began doubling down on his public disinformation campaign in late June, I could no longer choose not to feel the layers of trauma unraveling inside me.
The unexpected success of my #ACNAtoo Twitter launch created an extra few weeks of public advocacy momentum, but I was running on fumes. As desperately as I wanted to stay in the fight, to keep up with what I’d helped start, early July was for all practical purposes a race to turn the day-to-day work of #ACNAtoo over to competent and motivated advocates before I fell off the emotional cliff created by hyperfocusing for eight months at the increasing expense of my personal wellbeing.
So with the Province reaching out, I pivoted again. Instead of responding at length, I told Alan that I would need advocates to help me communicate with the ACNA. I contacted the growing group of survivors and advocates that had emerged in late June and early July, and together we wrote an open letter asking for several concrete action steps from the Province, including an expanded independent investigation into all abuses of power in the UMD.
The Open Letter was meant to simplify #ACNAtoo’s relationship to the Province. We wrote it expressly to hold the ACNA publicly accountable to UMD survivors, but also in doing so to save survivors and advocates more work, more stress, more heartache, and the confusion of being invited vaguely to “engage” behind closed doors with the Province when private engagement with the Province was never something the survivors sought out, and was something I, personally, as the default face of #ACNAtoo, could not even mentally or physically bring myself to do at that point.
Section Five of the #ACNAtoo Open Letter, in essence, says to the ACNA, the Provincial leadership, and now the PRT: ”The UMD is riddled with abuse. Please investigate the entire thing, and please do it right.” While the #ACNAtoo team is still waiting, almost four months later, for direct responses to any section of the Open Letter, it is Section Five’s request in particular that drives my engagement with the PRT here, as I am still personally committed to advocate, as much as I can find the energy to do so, for the proper independent investigation we asked Bp. Ruch for starting in December (now in its requisite expanded form).
I have looked up the members of the PRT online and I follow a couple of you on Twitter. I am glad to see the four women on the team have resumes that indicate a likelihood you understand sexual trauma and abuse. Alan has pointed to your credentials to assure our group that the PRT is very competent to hire an investigator and to set parameters for a survivor-centered investigation.
I hope this is true. I hope you are consulting with trauma-informed experts in the field. I hope you will choose a competent investigator, and I hope that your first move in this respect will be to inquire with the organizational gold standard, GRACE, to see if they will do the investigation. I hope you will publish the exact parameters of the investigation as laid out in the contract signed with the investigator, and I hope those parameters will reflect best practices per GRACE. I hope the investigator’s final report will be published online in full, and that it will be comprehensive, protect survivors, not protect abusers or enablers, and rigorously document the cultural problems that facilitate and cover up abuse in the UMD (see GRACE reports for examples).
That said, even the best investigation will constitute a fraction of the work the ACNA needs to do to honor UMD survivors, and it won’t begin to restore what we lost or compensate us for our suffering. Enlisting an excellent investigation is a first step, and I will be watching to see if the PRT takes it. Given my own and others’ experience with the UMD and my past year’s research into the subject of sexual abuse allegations mishandling across denominations and ministry settings, I remain skeptical.
The likelihood of an investigative failure, though, concerns me somewhat less than it did during the months I attempted to collaborate with the Bishop’s response team. Truly independent investigations are important, and they are the baseline of what any institution should do in such a circumstance, but they are only one contributing factor to a much broader, long-overdue movement to dismantle rape culture in our society. This larger movement is underway regardless, propelled forward by survivors, grassroots advocates, and journalists; it is up to the ACNA, and the Church generally, whether or not they will listen and respond with humility to the prophetic voices the movement lifts up to them, or fall behind.
What I have learned in the past three months, in particular, since going public with my story, is that a critical mass of survivors telling their stories publicly (whether in person or via social or traditional media) is what drives change. Institutions that perpetrate, enable, and cover up abuse are able to do so by effectively silencing victims. The institution’s image management apparatus guarantees nothing will be done internally, and there is little to no external pressure because those on the outside are insufficiently aware of the situation. Telling our personal stories, though, in places where people cannot easily look away, breaks through the institutional silencing and reaches receptive hearts and minds, creating new advocates who will go on to change communities and institutions from within. Simultaneously, public disclosure allows other survivors to see their own stories reflected in ours, inspires them to come forward and connect with public survivors and with each other, and often leads them to finally tell their stories to friends and family and therapists. As these non-public survivors heal they privately help other survivors to heal, and healed survivors in turn become private and public advocates, and the ripples continue outwards. I have experienced this in real time since late June, and this transformative process is 100% where my heart is. If I have an advocacy regret at this point it is that I did not go public with my story sooner.
This larger movement is underway regardless, propelled forward by survivors, grassroots advocates, and journalists; it is up to the ACNA, and the Church generally, whether or not they will listen and respond with humility to the prophetic voices the movement lifts up to them, or fall behind.
My role, then, on the #ACNAtoo team and in the wider #ACNAtoo movement, going forward, will largely be to connect with, believe, support, learn from, and (if they choose to share publicly) platform other survivors. I will support them to share their stories on #ACNAtoo’s website and social media, amplify their stories on my own Twitter account, and when possible connect them to news media. And whether or not they wish to speak publicly, as I expect most will not, #ACNAtoo and I will listen to and validate them, encourage them to seek local support, community, and professional trauma-informed therapy, and connect them with other resources as we are able. By doing this we’re doing what UMD leaders repeatedly failed to do and what is most urgently needed: caring for survivors first and foremost.
While I do this work I will be keeping an eye on the PRT and the upcoming investigation. I will hope for it to go well, but I am prepared for it not to. As I have done with the UMD, I will levy public critiques or conversely approval, as warranted. I may check in at various points, as I am doing with my questions below, to ask for concrete information. I cannot guarantee the PRT or survivors that I will be able to do more, since at this point my emotional capacity is limited in terms of corresponding with the ACNA. I largely rely on the growing team of advocates and contributors under the #ACNAtoo umbrella to continue to educate the public on abuse in the ACNA and hold the Province publicly accountable to taking institutional action on behalf of all #ACNAtoo survivors (not just myself, and not just Mark Rivera’s victims).
So I can’t say what shape my ACNA-related advocacy work will take, beyond directly working with survivors. The one thing I know I will not do, as you have ascertained by this point, is what I did with Bp. Ruch: attempt to hold anyone’s hand through their own institutional processes by engaging in private communications explaining what is, in fact, publicly available information that a dedicated response team can easily access for themselves, including names of trauma-informed experts to hire on as consultants. In other words, I will not provide further free behind-the-scenes consultation to ACNA leaders to help them learn to respond well to abuse survivors, including input on how to enlist a proper independent investigation. I’ve seen too many survivors offer themselves up indefinitely, to their own emotional detriment, to try to work with and educate the institutions that harmed them. And I’ve seen the same institutions complain that survivors still did not perform the labor the institution required they perform and therefore lack the grounds to publicly criticize the institution’s failure to care for them—as if it is the job of deeply wounded people to teach the Church how to care for deeply wounded people, as opposed to this being the primary basic competency the Church is supposed to bring to the world.
What I have discovered these last months, and what I now tell all #ChurchToo survivors looking to advocate for themselves and others, is that survivors advocating for themselves behind closed doors rarely works and that more importantly it is not our job. The assault survivor naked and bleeding by the side of the road is the last person the Church’s leadership should ever call upon to educate them on how to start being Good Samaritans. The Christian Church has had 2000 years to get this right. If any church’s reflexive posture is not that of tending thoroughly to survivors (which includes actively figuring out how to do so, without further harming the survivors), I personally recommend the survivor flee that church community as soon as they are able and find Good Samaritans wherever they are to be found. In doing so they can become a direct source of help to others as they are ready to do so in the course of their own healing process. It is our right as survivors to help ourselves and then to help each other, and not our obligation to delay or impede our healing journeys in retraumatizing encounters with institutions who have already collectively passed by on the other side of the road, but who now profess vaguely that they wish to do better.
The assault survivor naked and bleeding by the side of the road is the last person the Church’s leadership should ever call upon to educate them on how to start being Good Samaritans.
That said, there’s often a strong compulsion for survivors to advocate with the institutions where our abuse occurred because we feel deeply that we are in a unique position, if anyone will listen to us, to prevent others from being harmed in the specific context in which we were harmed. We know that the same events that traumatized us simultaneously made us experts in how an abuser operates in the particular sphere in which we were abused. It’s hard to keep a lot of survivors, myself included, from returning again and again to continue begging resistant institutions to change, because nobody wants to prevent abuse more than those who have experienced it.
So I now recommend that if the survivor does return, amid their healing process, to advocate with the institution in question, that they only do so with a critical mass of supportive witnesses and that they keep all interactions on the record, to decrease the chance that they are engaging in this necessarily vulnerable and re-traumatizing process in vain.
This brings me to the second objective of this letter: to ask you, in front of my witnesses—who are in this case the public at large—a series of questions concerning how the PRT plans to center #ACNAtoo survivors in its investigative process.
I hope that I am understanding correctly, based on somewhat vague ACNA announcements, that the PRT will be enlisting an independent third party investigation into the following:
Mark Rivera’s sexual and spiritual abuses of children and adults during his more than two decades in membership and leadership roles at Church of the Resurrection and Christ Our Light Anglican
UMD leadership’s mishandling of the abuse allegations against Mark Rivera that survivors brought to them starting in May of 2019
All other alleged abuses of power and mishandling of abuse allegations within the UMD that are reported to the investigator
If this is correct, I hope to submit extensive personal evidence to this investigation concerning (1) and (2) and to encourage other survivors to submit evidence of (1), (2), and (3). I will, however, only do this if the PRT demonstrates that it is safe and worthwhile for all of us to do so—in other words, if the PRT hires GRACE or (in the event that GRACE says they cannot investigate) publicly communicates an investigation process and parameters that explicitly hold to the gold standard set by GRACE.
In light of this, I submit the following questions. I hope you will answer these thoroughly and directly, in writing, for the record:
Scope: Can you confirm whether I correctly described the current scope of the UMD investigation in my three-part list above, and if I did not can you clarify exactly what that scope is? Are you planning one comprehensive investigation or multiple concurrent investigations? If the latter, will all investigations be done by an independent third party?
Consultation: Have you consulted outside experts in trauma-informed independent investigations? If so, whom, and what have you learned?
Process: Have you specifically contacted GRACE to see if they are able to do this investigation? If they are not, will you commit to ensure that the investigation will be conducted according to GRACE’s standard process and parameters, including but not limited to the investigator providing their full final report to all survivors, the ACNA fully waiving UMD and Provincial privilege so all relevant information is accessible to the investigator, and the investigative team creating a truly safe space for survivors to come forward?
Timeline: What is your expected timeline for hiring an investigator and announcing this publicly?
Transparency: Will you commit to publishing online the contract you sign with the investigative firm, so that the public is fully aware of the investigation parameters and process and so that survivors at large can make an educated decision about whether it is safe and worthwhile for them to participate in the investigation?
Survivor care: On August 20 the ACNA announced the Province would take up “oversight of the pastoral care of survivors.” An August 28 announcement says the PRT is specifically tasked with “coordinating the care of survivors.” Given that standard pastoral care is not trauma care, and given that most of the currently identified UMD sexual abuse survivors no longer attend an ACNA church, will the ACNA only offer in-house pastoral care, or will it facilitate professional, trauma-informed care for survivors? If the latter, when will this be made available? What is the process to apply? Who qualifies? What about those survivors who have already found counselors and have been paying for that counseling themselves? Or do “coordination” and “oversight” refer only to the PRT providing counseling referrals, and not to financial assistance?
Defining abuse: I am wondering how the PRT defines “abuse of power” for the sake of the upcoming UMD investigation(s). Here I want to call attention to examples listed in #ACNAtoo’s recent blog post. In addition to leadership mishandling abuse allegations brought directly to their attention as such, we are looking at sweeping cultural issues being uncovered in the UMD, one story at a time, most of these stories still private: domestic abuse cases in which pastoral leaders advised and even pressured those in their care to stay with emotionally and physically abusive spouses; pastoral figures misclassifying sexual abuse as consensual sexual contact and shaming the victim for their own abuse; pastoral abuses of LGBTQ+ individuals both overtly through discredited conversion therapies and covertly through various forms of discrimination; inappropriate pastoral care practices in which leaders demand detailed accounts of parishioners’ sexual activities; insular and unaccountable leadership structures resulting in a myriad of power imbalances that facilitate abuse; and (adding my own observations to #ACNAtoo’s list) a culture that strongly pushes a particular narrow social ideal of stay-at-home mothering, large family size, homeschooling or private schooling, and related expectations—an ideal which is then weaponized to varying degrees against single people, working women, divorced people, those with fewer or no children, those lacking the financial resources to conform, and other groups who do not live the lifestyle promoted as spiritually superior by Bp. Ruch and his wife. Given the wide range of abuse allegations, will the PRT be defining “abuse of power” in advance of the investigation(s), or will you be empowering the investigator broadly to gather whatever abuse allegations are brought forward and to report the patterns they find?
Independence: I am concerned that the Province has publicly solicited survivor “engagement” for months now without being clear what that means, and that the PRT continues to collect survivor accounts of abuse at this email address without publicly clarifying the purpose of collecting this information or how it will be used. I know #ACNAtoo initially encouraged abuse survivors outside the Mark Rivera case to share stories with you if they felt so inclined, in hopes that a critical mass of evidence would convince you to expand the UMD investigation scope and possibly provide a pre-investigative shortcut to survivors inside and outside the UMD receiving care and leaders under credible suspicion of abuse being put on leave pending investigation. But the number and severity of stories received now seem to have led you to agree to some sort of expanded investigation scope, multiple implicated leaders are on leave, and I am still unaware of any process being in place for survivor care. So is there a specific purpose, at this point, in the PRT accumulating a database of survivor information internally, rather than the soon-to-be-hired independent investigator gathering accounts directly from survivors according to third party investigative best practices?
Participation: The idea has been floated to advocates that survivors will have a “vote” in how the investigator is chosen. I’m curious how you plan to empower the broad spectrum of self-identified abuse survivors (or even just survivors of Mark Rivera’s abuse, depending on the scope of the investigation) to participate meaningfully in any such internal PRT process, when independent investigations are a subject area that Cherin and I, as a survivor and a survivor’s mother, still had to spend substantial hours in research and consultation in order to understand, so that we could advocate for best practices? Do the other survivors have to put in this much research, or already have this unusual knowledge, in order for you to enlist a proper investigation on their behalf? Also, who will qualify as “survivors” in this case, when allegations of Mark Rivera’s abuses range from single instances of unwanted physical touch, to patterns of grooming, to rape, to serial child sexual assault? Who “counts” as a survivor when Mark groomed an entire community over two decades to accept inappropriate behaviors and unwanted touching performed in public in full view of other church leaders and members? Assuming you are able to systematically identify who does and does not qualify as a survivor for the sake of voting purposes, how will you reach the people who qualify? I am currently in contact with several UMD sexual abuse survivors who have never been mentioned in any of our correspondence with the ACNA and who have not themselves contacted the PRT. Like most of the other UMD sexual abuse survivors known to me and previously mentioned to Bp. Ruch, they do not currently attend an ACNA church and do not stay current on ACNA news; they contacted me or #ACNAtoo because they came across our public outreach or the RNS articles or heard through word of mouth. So given the many logistical hurdles, what is your official plan to connect with, differentiate among, and involve (in a trauma-informed way) those who would self-identify as survivors in this case?
Other dioceses: I am currently aware of five different ACNA dioceses / districts in which there are open cases of abuse allegations mishandling at the highest level. In every case a Bishop has been implicated as being abusive himself and/or in mishandling allegations. In three of those cases (Upper Midwest, Pittsburgh, Via Apostolica) survivors have now gone public because they were unable to find accountability through official ACNA channels, despite months or years of attempts on the part of multiple survivors to do so. (The other two cases, which also involve mishandling dating back months or years, I mention anonymously for the confidentiality of the survivors, though I know one is known to at least two members of the PRT and the other is known to the PRT generally.) So within four months of #ACNAtoo existing publicly, we have five known cases of long term mishandling of abuse allegations at the diocesan leadership level, none of which, to my knowledge, have been remotely resolved to the satisfaction of those most affected, and all of which continue to cause emotional, psychological, and spiritual harm to the survivors. Meanwhile, the PRT is a temporary body of eight volunteer members initially assembled only to intervene in the case of ex-Catechist Mark Rivera in the Upper Midwest Diocese. As the current Provincial point of contact for this growing body of abuse allegations, will you be recommending that the Archbishop or the College of Bishops (whichever makes sense to Anglican polity) create a robust permanent dedicated response team to handle these cases and others that will emerge, so that the ACNA can pursue independent investigations into abuse allegations mishandling outside the UMD?
Thank you in advance for answering these questions.
As stated, I will be posting this letter in its entirety online, as well as your responses. I hope you would agree that nothing you send in response to my concerns around the investigative process is “confidential,” since Archbishop Beach has committed the ACNA to “conduct this investigation with transparency and integrity.”
I also hope you understand my necessary skepticism surrounding this process. This skepticism is not directed at any individual, of course, since I do not know any of you personally. Although my tone could suggest otherwise, I do, in fact, assume you are all good people who love your families, treat friends and strangers kindly, and take your faith commitments seriously. This past year has further confirmed to me what I’ve known for a long time: that most harm is enacted by people who do not intend harm but who fail to break the unconsciously habituated patterns of harm set before them to repeat.
My skepticism that the PRT will fail to break the ACNA’s patterns of harm is based in part on my extensive research into situations similar to this one. It is also obviously based on my firsthand experience thus far with the ACNA hierarchy below the Province, in particular the numerous individuals in positions of power in the UMD who professed a desire to serve survivors but whose words proved empty.
It is also based on the observation that after more than three months of Provincial oversight, UMD survivors have no assurance anything will go better than it did under Bp. Ruch. In fact, given the hard-won concession of a public final report extracted from the Bishop in late June (for the ostensibly now-halted GRS investigation), we currently have quantitatively less assurance that the interventions we started begging for last winter will ever materialize. With the Provincial takeover of the situation we find ourselves in essentially the position my smaller advocacy team was in this past winter, just facing a different, more powerful entity which has so far largely followed the pattern set by the previous entity.
This past year has further confirmed to me what I’ve known for a long time: that most harm is enacted by people who do not intend harm but who fail to break the unconsciously habituated patterns of harm set before them to repeat.
Like the Province, Bp. Ruch “involved” survivors. He involved us so much that we spent months freely contributing our mental and emotional labor researching and writing and replying to his response team’s emails—input that was encouraged and applauded by his team, only to be cast aside in the end even as the Bishop used us as pawns in his public announcements. Like Bp. Ruch before you, the Province has pronounced their collective grief, acknowledged the gravity of the situation, and expressed deep care for survivors. Like Bp. Ruch, the Province has spoken of transparency and a desire to “walk in the light,” as if stating this intention magically makes it so, regardless of concrete action steps. Like the Bishop, the Province has given survivors no choice but to trust that this intensely vulnerable open-ended process in which we are asked to engage will ultimately honor us, even as it makes no explicit commitments to ensure this. Like Bp. Ruch, the Province has, four months into the process, not yet even promised a specifically trauma-informed investigation in which best practices will be followed, including all client privilege being waived and a full unedited final report being made publicly available at the close of the investigation. The longer this lack of public commitment continues, the more concerned I become that survivors and the Province are only reenacting the charade my smaller team fell into with Bp. Ruch this past December to May.
I hope my skepticism proves unfounded. I hope the PRT reverses the precedent set by the UMD and enlists an excellent investigation that honors all UMD abuse survivors. And I hope this investigation contributes to transforming the UMD, and the ACNA as a whole, into truly safe places for vulnerable people.
Respectfully,
Joanna Rudenborg