May 12, 2021, 9:35 PM

Joanna Rudenborg to Helen Keuning

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

Dear Helen,

Thank you for reaching out. I want to spend much of this email addressing one question you raised. I think this lays the foundation for any possible future communication I would consider having with the Diocese. As far as your team goes, I’ve only included Stewart and Brenda in this reply because you only included them in your email, but the collective “you” in this email is the whole team, so feel free to forward it to everyone else, if you like.

In your email you said:

And I am curious about how the breakdown in trust — either in us as a leadership team and/or in GRS — occurred in your minds?  

Here is my preliminary answer to that question, speaking only for myself: There was never any trust to break down in the first place.

Trust, in the best of cases, is earned, never attained for free simply for the wanting of it by either party in a relationship. I never expect strangers or new friends to trust me in any significant way. I know I have to earn this, slowly, over time, by demonstrating myself to be trustworthy to that person in ways they, specifically, can feel and accept. The fact that I feel myself to be generally trustworthy, or that I know I strive to be trustworthy, or that others have found me to be trustworthy in the past, means exactly nothing to the person I am just meeting. 

In fact, it is very likely that I am not a safe person for many people I may meet, in many ways, particularly if I am ignorant of certain crucial aspects of their lived experience, which I most certainly am, with many people. I do not, for example, expect BIPOC to trust that I will not harm them in any number of ways due to my ignorance of their lived experience of racism. I know that I have to earn their trust, over a long period of time, in relationship, by showing myself willing to sit with and absorb an experience I do not and will never share, and that even then their trust of me in this particular capacity will necessarily lag behind the trust they can have of other people who experientially share their trauma of living under the institution of white supremacy—an institution that privileges me at their expense.

Survivors of sexual assault and other deep trauma (such as institutional racism) cannot and should not trust people who do not share their trauma experiences to be safe or helpful to them, personally, in related matters, until and if those people demonstrate over time that they can and will consistently act in a way that specifically supports and protects rather than further emotionally burdening and re-traumatizing the survivor. In the meantime, the stated intentions of the “allies” are meaningless. Me calling myself “antiracist” only proves that I have learned a buzzword and perhaps wish to gain points with BIPOC by using it. My stated intentions mean almost nothing. My actions, particularly when situations become uncomfortable or dangerous or threaten my ego or identity, mean everything. I am never, ever entitled to the trust I desire from my friends who are people of color. I always have to earn it.

Survivors of trauma (whether sexual assault or systemic racism or any other trauma) are in an impossible spot, because we inherently need others to trust that we are telling the truth about the nature and extent of the harm done to us, and also that we are the ultimate experts on what we need other people to do to support us properly as we face that harm. But we cannot, in turn, trust that even those who say they believe and support us are trustworthy in any real way until we have seen the fruit of that in their actions, consistently, over a long period of time. They are, in fact, usually not trustworthy, in this sense, as my friends (?) from COLA have demonstrated over the past several months. The only times I have discovered something like “instant trust” inside this current post-rape-disclosure situation is with other survivors. There is a switch that flips when two survivors of sexual assault / abuse meet and share their stories. We can hear the certain tone and turn of phrase and desperate desire to be heard and acknowledged and believed, in the other’s story, and we know in turn that we are heard and acknowledged and believed, by the other person, in a deep, experiential way for which there is no otherwise available substitute.

So in communicating with your team, I am saddled with the almost impossible burden of constantly explaining myself and defending my very real needs to have things done in a certain way, to people I have to at least provisionally assume do not share my experiences and cannot very well put themselves in my shoes. By virtue only of our different experiences, you (the leadership team) cannot be even minimally trustworthy to me until you have proven yourselves so over a period of time. Which you have not yet done. 

Furthermore, trust is not a binary proposition. It is not that I either trust someone or distrust them. There are infinite dimensions and aspects to trust. The one I keep coming back to in this greater situation is the problem of intention vs. effect.

I can trust that my friends from COLA are well-intentioned people. But that does not mean I can trust them not to harm me. Their decisions in this situation harm me daily, and I have told them so, as patiently and kindly as I know how, for months, to my extreme exhaustion and ongoing re-traumatization. My godparents and former neighbors and childhood friend continue to make choices that harm me, and I continue not to trust them to do otherwise, because for me to trust them to do otherwise would be a textbook example of delusional thinking. As I told Fr. Rand in my emails to him that all of you read, I hold intention and effect very separate in my mind and heart. No matter someone’s intentions, if the effect of their actions is to harm me, and I have told them so repeatedly, and they do not change their actions, then I am forced to take measures to protect myself from that harm, out of a healthy sense of dignity, self-respect, and at some point, just basic survival.

Trusting that people generally have good intentions and trusting those people not to harm me repeatedly and grievously are two entirely different things. No situation has ever reinforced this truth to me as clearly and as painfully as the one in which I currently find myself.

So to return to your question, there was no breakdown in trust for me, personally, because I have never trusted the leadership team to be emotionally safe for me or to ultimately do what I need them to do to support me, as a victim. I have very deliberately, at great cost to myself, extended all of you the benefit of the doubt that you could listen, learn, educate yourselves, and eventually demonstrate through your actions that you support Mark’s victims in the ways we have explicitly told you we need you to support us, even if you could not experientially relate to the position we are in. 

That provisional “trust” that this could happen has always been a tenuous proposition. I, personally, have no prior relationship to any of you, and it is evidently poor judgment on anyone’s part to entrust their deepest traumas to six complete strangers and expect that those people will be safe and supportive and brave allies who do what needs to be done—regardless of how kind and concerned they may show themselves to be in a Zoom call or in some emails. As mentioned in the previous paragraph, people I have known nearly my whole life, who are close family friends, have turned out not to be emotionally safe or supportive of me, in this particular situation. How much less so would I expect this safety and support, then, from total strangers, especially total strangers to whom I am only connected socially through the exact people (COLA) who are currently causing me the most harm? 

The Anglican Church, at large, started out at an enormous trust deficit with me going into this, considering that I was raped and abused by one of your church leaders (yes, Catechist is an official leadership position, regardless of whether it’s paid), and considering that I have been an immediate witness to an entire Anglican church’s cruel shunning of a 9-year-old sexual assault victim and her family for going on two years now, with no abatement, as well as a truly staggering number of indefensible pastoral care failures on the part of the Diocese’ cathedral church in relation to the same family. I named my disillusionment with the Church in the close of my January letter to Stewart, although using the word “disillusionment” was me being necessarily diplomatic. Quite frankly, the Church has failed Cherin’s family to such an egregious extent in the last two years (though not even starting then) that I am continuously surprised she is still willing to communicate with any of you, or attempt to engage with this situation in any way, rather than just taking herself and her family as far away from the Anglican Church as possible, forever. That she has been willing to do so, up to this point, and as graciously as she has, all the way through her most recent letter, is a sacred gift to all of you the cost of which you can’t begin to appreciate.

I am quite honestly not sure how any of you thought I ever trusted you, beyond assuming you to be basically well-intentioned people, which I still do, just as I assume Fr. Rand to be a basically well-intentioned person, despite his categorically reprehensible actions over the last couple years and ongoing. To trust any of you in any deeper way would be the exact opposite of what any sane person in my position would do, in light of the available evidence.

I did not have any choice, given my position of relative powerlessness with relation to the Diocese, the last several months, except to hope against hope that you would all rise to the occasion. But I never assumed this. By virtue of my situation, I was always in a position of begging, and I begged with as much dignity as I knew how, given the obvious vast power differential between the Bishop’s team and my own. 

This has never been and never could be a conversation between people of comparable negotiating power, starting with the basic fact that Anne, the “independent” party choosing the investigator, is a paid employee of Rez, who has now apparently also hand-picked an “independent” committee of people—whose identities and social relationships and qualifications my team does not even know—to review and decide what to do with the investigation findings. 

My team has always been at the complete mercy of the Diocese. I have never had any option except to hope that this inherently lopsided dynamic somehow nevertheless would produce some sort of satisfactory result. Meanwhile, your team seems to have expected us to trust that the good intentions of those of you in this position of near-absolute power would be enough to produce the necessary actions—a trust you had no logical reason to expect from us, not because you aren’t well-intentioned people but because, as already explained, intentions, in the end, are irrelevant, and actions are everything, and we had no reason to trust that proper actions would be taken until and unless they were actually taken.

That is all that has been happening, since January. I was always begging you, from a position of powerlessness, to do certain things, and you were always in the process of potentially one day earning my trust according to how well you did or did not do those things. 

Meanwhile, by virtue of deciding to advocate for ourselves, rather than simply stay far, far away, as most victims in our position do, Cherin and I were forced into a space where we had to brace ourselves constantly to be deeply re-traumatized, while going ahead and doing the grueling advocacy work anyway. It was perpetually exhausting, and we were frequently disappointed with the responses (and many non-responses) we received, but we felt we had no choice except to continue to explain what we needed, politely and kindly, as many times as was required, and to continue extending your team the benefit of the doubt that you would eventually come through. We knew the learning curve was steep, and we knew the only way you would manage it was if you felt the deepest of convictions in your hearts, to make the leap to trusting us and following our lead. 

We could not expect you to do that. We could only hope, and continue to do the work we felt convicted to do, on behalf of ourselves, and [redacted], and all the victims. What other option did we have? What other option does any survivor have, if they don’t just leave, but to beg the institution that housed their abuser to please, please, do what the victims need done? Not to try to find some acceptable “compromise,” not to do what the leadership wants to do or arrogantly thinks is best, not to ignore certain survivor requests because they’re inconvenient or threatening to the institution, but to really, truly listen in every way to the victims and honor their needs no matter the cost to reputation or ego? Because even if you did this, even if you did every last thing we have asked you for, it would never, ever atone for or begin to undo the harm that Mark and COLA and various leaders and churchgoers at Rez have done in this situation. Never. We have asked for the bare minimum, and we have been abundantly clear about what that consists of, and polite about it to the point of repeatedly choking down our disappointment and heartache in order to preserve the dialogue between the teams, and we are absolutely and utterly exhausted and grieving that even the bare minimum has not been granted us. 

We have not shown you and will likely never show you the real depths of the stress or anxiety or weariness or physical pain this correspondence has cost all of us, these many months, because what good would that have done? We tried to stay appropriately vulnerable yet professional, to be careful with our words, to swallow our bitter disappointment when responses were deeply inadequate and only to speak to the inadequacies in ways we thought you could hear. Would you have listened harder and done things differently if we had spilled our emotions more freely? If we had grieved openly, for your viewing consumption? Or would you only have judged us as being too demanding, too angry, too lacking in grace? It does not matter; it was certainly not safe for us to do so, regardless. We pled with you for certain very specific things, over and over and over, already exposing more vulnerability than was ever emotionally safe for us to expose. But we didn’t straight up hand you our hearts, raw and bleeding, because you showed that you already could not hold what we were handing you. Instead we turned to each other for support. And we kept hoping to hear that this investigation would be what we asked for—that that much, at least, would be granted us.

It was not. It seems to appear to you that we bailed suddenly? Over and over we stuck it out and hoped for the best, despite our mounting concerns. With your entire team watching, we spent February—March explaining and reexplaining our priorities as Anne, tasked by Stewart to perform a daunting role, all by herself, for which she had no experience or training, became visibly overwhelmed by even our basic requests to the point that she finally stopped corresponding altogether. We then sat through six weeks of no communication about the investigation whatsoever (March—April), then received several horrifyingly dismissive emails in early May foreshadowing what we have now confirmed with Cherie: that our survivor perspective has been sidelined, and the Diocese will simply be proceeding however it sees fit, cherrypicking our input rather than treating it as the cohesive program it needs to be in order for this investigation to have any real benefit to us or Mark’s other victims or even the Diocese itself, if it truly wishes to take accountability and be transformed. 

We almost gave up hope and walked away countless times during this process. But we could hardly say so, to you. If we had told you at any point about the emotional roller coaster we were riding, we would have opened ourselves up to accusations of pressuring or manipulating the Diocese. Already our very restrained and professional input was too much for Anne, who recently told us she stopped collaborating with us in choosing an investigator because it was compromising her ability to be “independent.” Throughout the long months of writing and waiting, we wracked our brains for better ways to get through to all of you without jeopardizing our entire case, but there were none. We were thoroughly constrained by every aspect of our circumstance. All we could do was wait.

Hoping until the end that our efforts might yet be rewarded, and somewhat encouraged by Stewart’s letter, on May 7 Cherin brought our team’s most important bullet points from our February—March emails with Anne (and your entire team) to Cherie and asked her, one by one, what GRS’ policies and procedures were, concerning these. 

I am too tired, now, to write you another email explaining the many, many ways in which Cherie’s answers to Cherin’s questions mean this investigation is not remotely what we needed or asked for. Or the ways in which Stewart’s letter, however glad we were he wrote it, was insufficient. Or the ways in which Steve’s announcement was insufficient. Or the ways in which the entire launch of this investigation was not only insufficient but deeply counterproductive to its own stated objectives. Perhaps someone else on my team will do this additional work, if you really want to know. Or perhaps I will find more space in the upcoming days to copy-paste bullet points from my February—March emails into yet another email, to try to explain to all of you why the investigation your team has enlisted (because I do not hold Anne solely responsible for this) does not fit our painstakingly articulated definition of “independent,” or why it does not reach out to the public in a way that makes other potential victims safe to come forward, or any of the other numerous things about it that have left us despairing.

Right now I do not have the capacity. I am not sure how I even had the capacity to express my grief as much as I have in this email (which is still quite constrained), other than that it has finally begun to flow out almost uncontrollably, after months of me keeping it carefully at bay so that I could continue to do this advocacy work, according to your team’s timeline, without being buried in the depths of the trauma that’s awaiting me as soon as I allow myself to step fully into the horror that is Mark’s depraved actions and the gratuitous enabling by the institution and community that housed him.

Helen, I deeply appreciated our several emails back and forth a month or so ago. They are by far the most real and vulnerable communications I have received from the team. I feel very much that I saw your heart in them. Your current letter feels slightly shaming, as if you perhaps find Cherin and me to be ungrateful for Stewart’s letter or Anne’s research or the various steps that have been taken. Please remember that while you personally had nothing to do with this Mark situation, the harm that was done by your Church can never be repaired. The closest your team can come to restoring what was lost will still not be enough, but if and when that work is done, we will acknowledge that. Until that time, my diplomacy is spent. I am deeply grieved, and I have no more “thank yous” left. If that feels ungrateful to the team, then the team has not yet understood the situation, despite our best efforts. It is not up to us to explain it yet again. I am still discerning whether I have the wherewithal and the will to try to do so anyway.

I don’t think you missed anything by being in Minnesota. I believe you have been cc’ed on or forwarded all the emails, except a very painful one Cherin sent Stewart directly a week or two ago, explaining in detail some of the ways in which he and various leaders at Rez and Greenhouse repeatedly failed [Cherin’s family] and enabled Mark over the last two years. You could ask her if she is willing to share that email with you, if you are interested to know somewhat more about the trauma her family has undergone not just at Mark’s and COLA’s hands, but at those of Rez and Greenhouse. 

Meanwhile, if you and the rest of the team read back over all of our correspondence starting in January and do a careful side-by-side comparison of what we asked for, to what GRS themselves say they are doing and to Stewart’s and Steve’s public actions so far, and then you truly, truly still do not understand how the decisions that were made are not what we asked for and are not okay with us, and you truly wish to rectify that situation, by various members of the team taking very different actions than have been taken so far, please let me know; that may help my decision about whether to explain these things further.

Sincerely,

Joanna