Letter from Joanna Rudenborg to the PRT

An email from Joanna Rudenborg to the ACNA Provincial Response Team, dated Thursday, Jan 6, 2022

Yesterday Joanna received an email from the ACNA’s Provincial Response Team inviting her to “vote” between 2 firms in their investigative firm selection process. Today, she replied.

Dear Alan, the rest of the Provincial Response Team, Abp. Beach, et al.,

I have been polite with you for many months. I am done pulling punches.

My vote is no. 

No, I will not participate in this empty pageantry.

No, I will not play the role you’ve cast me in as “survivor who should be grateful to accept the crumbs we scraped off the Archbishop’s table for her.”

This “voting process” you’re trying to sell me is an absolute insult, and you know it.

You know as well as I do that “choose A or B” is a method you use with toddlers so they will focus their energy on the options you give them and not argue about wanting C or D or E or…

How dare you treat sexual assault survivors like 2-year-olds.

How dare you treat me like some nuisance agitator to be placated with a string of fake choices.

You chose two firms that suited you, so you win either way.

You ask me to choose between your chosen firms as if that is an actual choice, all the while refusing to disclose the concrete processes and parameters that you, the client, will be asking whichever of these firms you hire, to follow.

Did you think I would glance at the female lawyer who uses the term “trauma informed” on her homepage and find her softer and more appealing than the guy who more or less brags on his homepage about how he can protect clients from, for all practical purposes, people like me?

Did you think I would go, “Oh, that one seems better, so glad I got to vote, that made such a difference, now I suddenly feel fine about the fact that the Province has taken 6 months to choose a firm to do an investigation of inadequate scope with undisclosed processes and parameters, after they responded to my detailed and clearly articulated questions about said investigation with a giant pile of corporate nothingness”?

Did you really think this would work? Do you think I am this foolish? this naïve? after three years of being played by a narcissist sexual predator and his abuser sidekick, eight subsequent months of dealing with a Bishop and his colleagues scrambling to cover their child-abuse-complicit asses, and another six months of waiting for the Province to do something constructive while the Archbishop issues empty statements and the COO tries to placate me and other survivors and advocates with behind-the-scenes “confidential” unfulfilled promises?

Did you really think I would fall for your fake election trick?

Do you really have the nerve to tell me to my face that this is “empowering survivors”?

How dare you.

For your reminder, and for the public record, here’s how the Province “empowers survivors”:

First, of course, the Province refused to so much as acknowledge our July Open Letter. But we expected that. Institutions hate open letters. They feel very threatening somehow. The Province could barely handle that a number of female clergy signed a very restrained (and I should say, obviously timely and appropriate) open letter back in July merely extending sympathy for and solidarity with survivors – let alone a ragtag group of abuse survivors and lay advocates asking that credibly accused people go on leave and a real investigation be done.

So of course the Open Letter was a no-go. We tried to work with the Province behind the scenes to let you do what the letter asked for while still saving corporate face by sticking with your policy of not directly responding to such letters.

Back in August, Alan, you offered to let ACNAtoo vet the proposed PRT members for you, a task for which you gave us a ridiculously short 24-hour window. You presented this as some kind of great gift, when really all it was was more work and hassle for us as we scrambled to try to make sure the PRT had someone on it we thought might go to bat for survivors. 

Some of my fellow team members naively thought it would do some good, that you would actually care about our input, that it wasn’t just the first grand charade in the Provincial phase of this mishandling saga. I suspected differently, but I went along with it.

We buckled down as a team that evening and background-checked and googled all your proposed candidates, and we caught a UMD-related conflict of interest the Province had apparently missed, saving you the embarrassment of having to remove that person from the PRT after its member list was made public. 

You used our research to eliminate that one candidate and dismissed our other concerns.

Last fall, Alan, you talked with other ACNAtoo advocates because I was too traumatized to talk much to anyone in the ACNA hierarchy after what Bp. Stewart Ruch and his people did to me and my team in the first half of 2021. 

You kept feeding our new advocates hopeful tidbits along the lines of “Soon! We’ll be taking action soon!” and hinting that the actions would be great, we would love the actions, survivors would be so thrilled. But of course we must stay very quiet about it, you said. Don’t leak anything, you said. You were so nervous even telling our advocates some of what was in the works, you said. You were giving us top secret information. Implication: we should be so honored. Feel so empowered.

Then…nothing happened. Hints of great things fizzled. We were left waiting for months with no real updates, with a strongly-implied mandate to stay quiet, to not get belligerent on Twitter again, while you worked your magic behind the scenes. 

Where’s the magic, Alan? Where are the miraculous wonders you promised? You know what I’m talking about. I’m still preserving your confidentiality in this matter, for what reason now I do not know.

In November, after months of me staying dutifully subdued on Twitter re: the Province, you, the PRT, sent me a rubric you said you would use for narrowing down investigative firms. You asked for my input, because, as you keep saying at every turn, you’re “empowering survivors.” 

I gave you my input, which was that the rubric was ultraspecific about certain things the Province could use to avoid hiring the firm survivors wanted (GRACE), and painfully vague about everything I needed to know to be safe as a survivor, including providing any concrete, action-based definition whatsoever for nice-sounding terms like “trauma-informed” and “victim-centered.” 

You basically responded, “thanks for your input,” and apparently changed nothing. I certainly never saw an updated rubric taking my feedback into account.

Also in November, I sent the eight of you an extremely long and emotionally vulnerable letter culminating in ten detailed, direct, and eminently reasonable questions about the investigation, questions that were of vital importance to me as a survivor and advocate.

You took three weeks to respond and then you sent me a pile of nothingness masquerading as answers. Amidst this nothingness you passively refused even to make the most basic commitments I asked of you: to waive ACNA privilege and provide survivors with the full investigative report. You skirted, you deflected, you ignored, and yet amidst all that you dared to say yet again that you seek to “empower survivors.”

Now this. Now you send me another email purporting to care about survivors.

You toss stale breadcrumbs of caring into my inbox and you want me to be thankful for the opportunity to gather them up and choke on them?

[Redacted] has already written you a long and eloquent letter explaining, as if you didn’t know, why it is pointless for survivors to vote between two random investigative firms when the firm (given GRACE not being in the picture) is comparatively irrelevant, while the investigation processes and parameters you as the client tell that firm to use are everything.

You knew this already. You knew it, or you haven’t read a damn thing I’ve published since I took this whole disgusting scandal in your Upper Midwest Diocese public.

I will not write it out again for you. If you actually care, which I do not believe you do, then read my early Twitter threads. Read my reply to your rubric proposal. Read ACNAtoo’s Open Letter to the Archbishop. Read last year’s email correspondence with Bp. Ruch’s team that we are about to publish on acnatoo.org. Read my 10,000-word letter to all of you. Read the questions in it. Read where I warn you that this is just the beginning. Read where I warn you that the ACNA is not exempt from the abuse reckoning that is sweeping this country. Read where I warn you that you have only just scratched the surface of the sexual and spiritual and other abuse situations littered throughout your denomination.

Read all this.

Or don’t. I have been raped and abused and gas lit and dismissed and patronized quite enough by ACNA leaders for one lifetime. Do what you please with your denomination.

I know there are people in ACNA leadership who are convinced that I am out to burn the ACNA down. I couldn’t if I wanted to, but nor would I need to. It is already burning. What I’m actually doing is discovering the fires faster than you are.

Do you know why, Alan? Christen? Gina? Rachel? Autumn? Albert? Jeffrey? Eric? (Fr. Gross? Abp. Beach?)

Do you know why I know about so many fires in the ACNA?

Because I took my story public and people could see that I was telling the truth. They could see that I was dead serious, that I was not afraid of anyone in the ACNA, that I was not backing down – and far too many of them could relate to various parts of my experience.

So now your denomination’s abuse survivors contact me and ACNAtoo. They contact us and they tell us about rape and assault and harassment and grooming and domestic violence and silencing and bullying and spiritual manipulation and narcissistic control and all the other horror perpetrated on them by certain pastors and youth pastors and catechists and priests and bishops and others in your denomination.

So do what you will with your investigation into the UMD. I can’t make you order a good one. I’ve done far too much of your work for you already, trying to get some semblance of justice for survivors – most especially one now-12-year-old rape survivor and her family, who have been fighting this cruel, corrupt system a full 1.5 years longer than I have.

If I can’t get a decent investigation out of you, as the absolute loudest public abuse survivor in your denomination, no one can. I will not counsel others to try. I will counsel them to get out of their abusive situations, to find safety and support, to heal, to warn others who may be in danger, to go public if they feel it is the right choice for them, and to sue the ACNA or their diocese as appropriate to recoup some small bit of their damages and hopefully force you to listen to money where you will not listen to your wounded when they cry out directly.

This is not where I was, psychologically, a year ago. A year ago I was appealing to Bp. Ruch graciously, human being to human being, extending him the benefit of the doubt that he wanted to do the right thing, that he just needed help seeing how serious the situation was.

Now I know better. Now I know why you reaching out in July immediately put me on edge, Alan. It wasn’t just some triggering of fresh trauma. It was a prescient bodily intuition about waves of trauma yet to come.

So no, I will not take part in any more of your performative “survivor empowerment” rituals.

I will leave you to your corporate theater and continue to focus my energy on actually empowering your denomination’s abuse victims, one by one, survivor to survivor.

I hope you do better with the rest of this investigation process than I have any reason to believe you will.

With sorrow but not surprise,

Joanna Rudenborg