February 15, 2021, 11:15 AM

Joanna Rudenborg to Anne Kessler

Cc: Eve Ahrens, Cherin Marie, [Advocate A], Brenda Dumper, Stewart Ruch

Anne,

Thank you for all the information. I plan to look through the curriculum very soon, as well. And I’m glad you’re continuing to pursue leads on any organizations you discover. The more information we have, the better. Please send along anything that seems promising. In fact, please send it all along; I’m genuinely curious what the landscape for this is, out there, including organizations that are not doing it well.

I second what Annemarie said in her email, except I have not personally checked out Aequitas, yet. I want to share my own overlapping thoughts. 

In terms of an investigation establishing guilt or innocence (beyond Mark, whose guilt is not in question): I am very clear that I’m not on a mission to locate a few “guilty parties.” Our culture at large is guilty of ignoring and downplaying sexual harm, at every turn, and dangerously ignorant as to how perpetrators routinely abuse with impunity. Rez is a part of that culture just as I am a part of that culture. We’re all guilty.

“Guilt,” though, connotes blaming, pointing fingers, and imputing motives, rather than everyone across the situation becoming aware of the planks in their own eyes. So I prefer the concept of accountability to that of guilt. Hundreds of people around Mark over the years failed to identify an abuser (some with more blatant evidence before them than others). It’s possible we are all innocent of malice (I hope so), but in terms of being enablers, at this point, the number of people accountable for doing harm is far too widespread to think in terms of some guilty parties. Not because the Rez sphere is worse than most communities, but because it is typical.

An ideal investigation, for me, uncovers and details a story of an abuser, his victims, crucial individual enablers, and the greater enabling community. An ideal assessment would then use that story to name specific community dynamics that would have enabled abuse regardless if the most enabling individuals were replaced, or had not been there to begin with, and regardless if the abuser were Mark or someone else. The now-distinct failure before us is a church system that did everything wrong in dealing with abuse allegations, from multiple mandatory reporters not reporting to the police, to an entire church shunning and vilifying the victim and her family for going to the police. That in itself is tragic, and needs more detailing, and better apologies and amends, but the greater tragedy still to be uncovered is how the system was blind to Mark’s red flag behavior long before he had a chance to abuse [Cherin's daughter], and how statistically speaking it has likely been blind to other abusers, and inevitably will continue to be, barring a widespread, fact-based education in how abusers manipulate communities.

Many of the sex abuse scandals in the news cycle involve actively complicit enablers who knew abuse was occurring and just didn’t care. Our situation very well may not. There may be no direct accomplices. All the more reason to understand how a massive collection of good people failed so utterly, to prevent this. Because there were signs. Now that I know what grooming is, I know I wouldn’t have caught the signs, if I had been a Rez member in the late ‘90s watching Mark interact with children. But if I could time travel, with the knowledge I’ve gained in the last three months? I would see them. A few people did, in other settings, over the years, but they didn’t trust their own instincts enough to follow up. (Maybe some people at Rez did the same.) But the signs were there. 

Furthermore, and this is counterintuitive, but I think crucial to exchanging the idea of guilt for that of accountability: The people Mark manipulated the most are not automatically the “worst” or “most sinful” people among us; they are the people Mark found most conveniently situated, to be useful to him. There is not necessarily a proportionality between how morally corrupt people are, and how susceptible they are to enabling abuse. It is more a combination of the individual's (culturally widespread) blind spots, the skill of the manipulator, and the incidental position of the individual enabler within the system. 

I say this confidently, and with deep grief, in part because my closest friends back in Big Rock, Molly Ritchie and Kim Ritchie, have, by my analysis, done some of the gravest harm, in the last 21 months, in this situation, and yet I know personally that they are amazing, strong, loving women who nurture children and animals with the utmost tenderness, and who deeply feel themselves to be defenders of the least of these. I believe Mark deceived them, like he deceived me, and as he did with me, leveraged a combination of their vulnerabilities, strengths, and unique positions within the community, to facilitate evil. I want them held accountable, and I have no qualms about stating their mistakes boldly, to them or anyone else, in the process of truth-telling. But my desired outcome is for them to realize their blind spots and the harm they caused. And I want those around them, who enabled less directly, to realize that in those positions, without the benefit of hindsight, they may easily have done the same. 

I know this is redundant to other things I’ve written, but I can’t emphasize this enough. It would be easy if we could find five people in the whole 25-year story, who really messed up, and demote them or fire them or reeducate them. We can’t. It’s vastly deeper and broader than that.

So my top priority outcomes for the overall investigation / assessment / development process are the following: 

1. Every one of Mark’s unknown victims that can possibly be reached feels safe to come forward, privately or publicly, and is fully facilitated to take whatever steps they need to take, to heal. (This search for additional survivors seems to be an investigation piece, which is why it is so essential that any investigator be expertly equipped to facilitate and handle this process—a.k.a. trauma-informed—by being staffed to both bring forth and properly field a possible flood of survivors.)

2. Every one of us from Mark’s greater community becomes thoroughly educated in the ways that abusers use communities to build credibility, gain access to victims, and cover for their evil actions, so that going forward we can spot predatory behavior a mile away, intervene at the earliest possible moment, and educate people in all our various circles to do the same. (A good investigation would tell a detailed story of what happened, then an assessment would study that story to identify the particular vulnerabilities of the community in question, to abusers. Then a good training program would connect the community’s particular vulnerabilities to a well-established, research-based understanding of the patterns of community-enabled abuse, and through this education turn former enablers into expert advocates. I don’t think a solid curriculum is sufficient here, though; those few who would be teaching that curriculum to others would themselves need to be trained, first, by an expert third party. Theoretically one organization could do investigation, assessment, and training, or two or three different parties could be involved.)

3. Every currently known and soon-to-be-known victim of Mark finally receives the private and public apologies and amends they need to get closure and repair whatever personal and institutional relationships can still be repaired. (While there will need to be some initial public acknowledgment of failure, to get the investigation underway, I believe the real apologizing is a down-the-road result, post-investigation-and-assessment. Some apologies have been made, but they are still inadequate. I do not believe a community can even understand how to apologize well to victims and their families until it has undergone the full process of disclosure, education, grieving, repentance, and ongoing commitment to cultural change. Besides that process being the actual proof of apology, there’s the problem that the harm done by enablers is so disproportionate to anything those enablers can really conceive of, at the outset of the process.)

As far as lawyers or not-lawyers, all I care about is that those investigating are qualified, trauma-informed professionals ready to unearth the entire arc of a 25-year narrative of Mark’s involvement in the system, and that they will listen to and center victims, every step of the way. My most important question for a potential investigator is, “How will you find the other survivors, and what’s your plan for dealing with them once you find them?” I think how they answer that says everything about whether they’re suitable.

Thank you for entertaining another long email, and for all the work you’re doing on this.

Joanna