How “Forgive and Forget” Buried a Church’s Dark Secret

Description

Host Jessica Lussenhop received an unusual email: A prosecutor had major concerns about a case in Minnesota. A man had pleaded guilty to felony child sexual abuse, but it seemed like the church he belonged to, the Old Apostolic Lutheran Church, might have played a part in keeping the abuse quiet. Lussenhop teamed up with reporter Andy Mannix, and they discovered this case was just a symptom of a much bigger problem in the OALC.

Read the original reporting here.

If you or someone you know needs help, the National Sexual Assault Hotline can be reached at 800-656-HOPE (4673).

If you have information about the OALC, contact Andy Mannix and Jeremy Kohler.

Transcript

Editor’s Note: “Paper Trail” is produced as an audio series. If you are able, we encourage you to listen to the series. Transcripts are for reference only and may contain typos. Please confirm accuracy before quoting.

Jessica Lussenhop: ProPublica. Investigative journalism in the public interest. 

Just a heads up: Today’s episode discusses child sexual abuse and how adults failed to protect children. We aren’t going to discuss acts of abuse in great detail, but please still take care while listening. 

In late 2024, I was living in Minneapolis, covering my home state of Minnesota for ProPublica, when an email landed in my inbox that really surprised me. A prosecutor named Mike Ryan wanted to talk. 

INTERVIEW TAPE, Lussenhop: You’ve been in this role now for how long?

INTERVIEW TAPE, Mike Ryan: No, as a prosecutor, not that long. 

Lussenhop: I went to talk to him in his office at the courthouse. 

INTERVIEW TAPE, Ryan: I was a defense attorney about 10 years before that.

Lussenhop: I’m not used to getting tips from prosecutors. In my experience, they’re more comfortable handling things in the courtroom rather than in the media. But he had real concerns about a case he’d been working on, a really sad child sexual abuse case. The crimes had happened in a small, rural community on the outskirts of Duluth and involved a church that I had never heard of called the OALC, the Old Apostolic Lutheran Church. Before this case, Mike didn’t know much about it either.

INTERVIEW TAPE, Ryan: I knew it was tightly knit, sort of insular community, but I didn’t really know anything beyond those aspects of it and the fact that it was religious.

Lussenhop: The OALC has tens of thousands of members, a lot of them in the Midwest. But it’s not related to mainstream Lutheranism, and members don’t socialize much with people outside the church. And they also followed some unusual customs, like not dancing or listening to music or watching TV. The church traces its roots back to 1800s Sweden, and in many ways, it’s still a very Old World church. 

INTERVIEW TAPE, Ryan: Men run stuff there, and the OALC, it’s just, that’s the way that they approach it.

Lussenhop: Men are the heads of the family. Women marry and get pregnant young. Ryan met with several women from the church — alleged victims in the case he’d been preparing — and was immediately struck by the way they spoke to him.

INTERVIEW TAPE, Ryan:  Like, the affect of the women I spoke with was, I guess, relatively flat? And there was a lot of acquiescence.

Lussenhop: The man accused of the abuse was a well-known, well-liked churchgoer. The alleged abuse had gone on for so long that it was kind of an open secret, Ryan said. In fact, some of the abuse had even happened in church, in the pews during service. Victims or their family members had gone to the church leaders about it.

INTERVIEW TAPE, Ryan: These things were, like, reported to somebody. They were known. 

Lussenhop: But they kept it quiet. The guy was still a welcomed member of this community. Plus, Ryan told me, while building his case, some of the victims decided not to testify.

INTERVIEW TAPE, Ryan: I think there was outreach to try to get these girls to either tone down their position on it or just to not cooperate. I think they were afraid that there was gonna be a, a solidarity tantrum among the people in the, in the church, basically, and were gonna wall things off and essentially shun them. 

Lussenhop: Even with all this pressure, Ryan was able to get six alleged victims to agree to testify. The jury was selected; the trial had begun. The women were there, ready to tell their stories. And then, suddenly, the defendant makes a surprise decision to plead guilty.

Everything screeches to a halt. The abuser would be going to prison. Case closed. But Ryan told me something was still bothering him. 

INTERVIEW TAPE, Ryan:  This couldn’t have been the first time that this process played out. 

Lussenhop: The preacher who knew, things being kept quiet, the abuse happening seemingly out in the open?

INTERVIEW TAPE, Ryan: This was like a fucking machine, like, it would … that was basically trying to roll over these girls, and I think they were afraid of exactly that.

Lussenhop: Ryan was worried that the plea deal he’d just accepted was just another part of that machine. That rather than a defendant accepting his guilt, avoiding a trial was really just a way to keep a lid on things. And to keep the victims from putting details out in public by testifying. And he suspected that people in the church knew about more abuse than what he and the police had been able to uncover. 

INTERVIEW TAPE, Ryan: I suspect there’s still quite a bit of people that aren’t gonna ever say anything.

Lussenhop: The problem, though, was that Ryan’s job was basically done. The guy he’d built the case on was going to prison. The law enforcement side of this was winding down. And he wanted to know, could I, an investigative reporter, get to the bottom of what was happening in this church? 

Lussenhop: What’s your, what’s your memory of the first conversation that we had about this?

Andy Mannix: I remember my first, uh, skepticism was like, “Well, if this guy’s already been convicted, then, then what’s the story, right?”

Lussenhop: One of the first things I did was call my now colleague at ProPublica, Andy Mannix. At the time, he was an investigative reporter at the Minnesota Star Tribune. Andy had experience investigating abuse in lesser-known subcultures. Not long before this, he’d published this bombshell investigation that required a lot of trust from multiple victims. I knew he’d be an asset, but I was also being selfish. These kinds of stories can sometimes be too heavy for just one reporter to shoulder.

Lussenhop: What were some of your first big reporting questions? 

Mannix: Who knew about the abuse? You know, I grew up in the Catholic Church, and I couldn’t imagine someone being, you know, sexually abused in the pews during a service without people knowing. You know, another way to put that is: Were there opportunities to stop it? Were there opportunities to protect these children? 

Lussenhop: So Andy and I wound up spending the next year and half going deep on the church, talking to everyone we could to find out: Was there something bigger and darker going on under the surface of the  Old Apostolic Lutheran Church? 

INTERVIEW, Kyla Chamberlin: There are many, many, many good people in that church, but many of those good people also knew what was going on and did nothing about it.

Lussenhop: I’m Jessica Lussenhop. This is “Paper Trail.” If the culture of this church was allowing abuse to happen, we needed a way to understand that culture. There wasn’t a ton to go off of online, almost no news articles, some blogs by former members, a barebones Wikipedia page. So the prosecutor, Mike Ryan, suggested that we talk to one of the alleged victims who’d been especially outspoken. She had left the church years ago and was willing to talk.

INTERVIEW TAPE, Chamberlin: Um — do I need to do, like, a check, check? I’m just kidding. 

Lussenhop: Her name is Kyla Chamberlin. 

INTERVIEW TAPE, Mannix: Just again, start at the beginning. Just a little bit about your family, just, you know, early memories.

INTERVIEW TAPE, Chamberlin: Um, four siblings. I have one baby sister.

Lussenhop: Kyla grew up in an OALC community in a tiny town. Big families all living super-close together meant she was never short on playmates. 

INTERVIEW TAPE, Chamberlin: Some of my great memories are we’d ride four-wheelers, go up the mountain, well, the hills, and go fishing and just kind of free rein as kids. 

Lussenhop: In some ways her childhood sounded almost idyllic, a rough-and-tumble country kid’s paradise. But there were also a lot of rules.

INTERVIEW TAPE, Chamberlin: Couldn’t play sports. You know, we were athletic kids, but we couldn’t be in anything that was competition. So it was technically a sin to compete.

Lussenhop: There were a lot of things that were sins: drinking, dancing, listening to music or even owning a TV. And Kyla was taught that there was a specific way she should look as a woman. Wear long skirts, no open-toed shoes, no makeup, no jewelry.

INTERVIEW TAPE, Chamberlin: Do not change your appearance in any way other than the, in the form that God made you. So If you have tattoos, you’re changing your skin the way that God intended you to look. If you have piercings, you are damaging the body that God gave you. If you cut your hair, you’re changing the way God intended you to be.

Lussenhop: On Sunday mornings, the girls would sit and let their mom do their very long hair.

INTERVIEW TAPE, Chamberlin: Um, you know, and we have to wear scarves in church. We have to cover our hair.

Lussenhop: And then they’d sit for hourslong services that were tough for a little kid; it was hard to sit still for that long.

INTERVIEW TAPE, Chamberlin: And we’d all sit down, and we knew that Dad’s arms were a mile longer than normal because if you were talking in church, and you’re like, “Where’d his arm come from?”

Lussenhop: Her dad would give them candy to try to keep them quiet during the services. 

INTERVIEW TAPE, Chamberlin: We’d sit there and eat our candy and be quiet and, and fall asleep and wake up to when church is over, and when church is over, it’s the sound of crying. And that’s something that I, I don’t know, it’s kinda burned in me, in, in my memory, I guess.

INTERVIEW TAPE, Lussenhop: Who’s crying?

INTERVIEW TAPE, Chamberlin: At the end of every service, whoever is preaching that day will kind of like tell his sins and ask the congregation for forgiveness, and everybody turns to each other and is asking, going to other people and asking for forgiveness, crying, and it’s so loud of just crying and sometimes wails, and I hated it. In a way, it was kinda good, but in another way, it was kind of … don’t say the F word, messed up. You know, just because you’re brainwashed to think that you can do wrong as long as you ask forgiveness.

Lussenhop: Church is how Kyla and her siblings met Clint Massie. He was from a big family in the community.

INTERVIEW TAPE, Chamberlin: As far back as I can remember, they were friends of the family.

Lussenhop: And he started babysitting them when he was in his late teens. According to what she’d later tell police, the abuse started around the age of 7. Touching during games and sleepovers.

INTERVIEW TAPE, Chamberlin: I didn’t know it was so wrong. I didn’t know that it was illegal.

Lussenhop: She was even more confused by the way she remembers Massie speaking to her about it.

INTERVIEW TAPE, Chamberlin: I was told that’s what love is. “This is what love’s supposed to be like, and I love you.” “Don’t ever tell anybody, but this is what God wants. It’s between us and God”-type bullshit. “Um, nobody else, and it, it, you’re gonna get in trouble.” So I never said anything.

Lussenhop: At the time Kyla didn’t tell her family, or anyone. But over time she recognized it as abuse, and it left her with an anger that festered for years.

INTERVIEW TAPE, Chamberlin: And my mom, she always wondered what happened to my sweet little girl. For so many years she wondered, “What happened?” She didn’t know. I will say when your, your innocence is taken from you, you don’t have a childhood. You never got to be a child. Said I was done crying. It sucked. 

Lussenhop: In her 20s, after many unhappy years, Kyla finally left the church. 

INTERVIEW TAPE, Chamberlin: I loved the basic fundamental church. But behind the scenes, the truth behind it, it’s all a facade to me now. You know? It made me doubt God.

Lussenhop: Giving up the church meant giving up a lot: For a time, she lost her family, her whole community. She was out in the world on her own for the first time, struggling to function and struggling to make sense of everything she’d been raised to believe. But about 10 years later, Clint Massie was charged, and she felt she could finally speak openly about the abuse. We reached out to Clint Massie many times, and he didn’t respond. But we found a letter in court documents where he denied abusing several alleged victims, including Kyla. Kyla has since reconciled with her parents, and her family is no longer in the church. And they’ve supported her speaking out, even to reporters like us. And what she told us was that we needed to dig deeper: There were more abusers, and there were people protecting them. 

INTERVIEW TAPE, Chamberlin: I mean, who protected me when they were supposed to?

Lussenhop: She told us to look at the preachers who led the congregation. Preachers, she said, were incredibly influential in the community. They were seen as speaking directly for God.

INTERVIEW TAPE, Chamberlin: There are many, many, many good people in that church, but many of those good people also knew what was going on and did nothing about it. If they truly cared about the children of God, why weren’t they protecting us?

Lussenhop: Andy and I needed to understand what Kyla meant by that. Were members of the church standing by and doing nothing? To help us answer that question, we needed the complete Massie case file. We made a request for everything the police had, and over the course of several weeks Andy and I got hundreds and hundreds of pages of police records, including interrogation video and phone call recordings. 

Mannix: Some of the things jumping out at me are there was a lot of victims who had come forward over a really long period of time.

Lussenhop: We saw that the first time police became aware of allegations that Clint Massie had abused children was in 2017, when he would have been in his early 40s. Three years later,  there were anonymous tips called in that said Massie had sexually assaulted “little girls” over the course of three decades. The police summary of the tips was cryptic but also telling. For instance, one said, “Church knows but no action.” Both times, local prosecutors decided that they didn’t have enough to make a case against Massie.  But the case broke wide open in 2023, when an adult woman came forward to say that Massie had abused her as a little girl. She said she knew of other victims. One alleged victim led to another and another. Eventually, there were nine altogether. And they told remarkably similar stories about what Massie did to them. 

POLICE PHONE CALL, Investigator: Do you have a couple minutes to talk? 

Lussenhop: In the files was a recorded phone call between a woman in her 20s and the lead investigator on the case. I’m not going to play her side of the conversation, to protect her identity.

POLICE PHONE CALL, Investigator: OK, I know you made a report, uh, uh … Well, actually, tell me what, what you’ve heard and why I’m calling you.

Lussenhop: She tells the investigator she’s been waiting for his call. She starts telling the story of what’d happened to her some 15 years earlier. 

POLICE PHONE CALL, Investigator: OK. And how old were you then? 

Lussenhop: In kindergarten, she says. She says after the abuse began, she’d told her mom about what was going on. After that, she says she was at home with her dad one day and he said, “We gotta go somewhere.” He was taking her to have this kind of meeting with Massie, her dad, and this preacher from the church. She says she screamed and cried all the way there.

POLICE PHONE CALL, Investigator: OK, and what happened during that conversation between you, your dad, and Clint, and the preacher?

Lussenhop: She remembered the three men standing around her. She says they were all crying. And hugging her. She says, “It was one of the worst things ever because it was so scary.”

POLICE PHONE CALL, Investigator: So did your dad and the preacher allow Clint to hug you as well?

Lussenhop: Yes, she says.

POLICE PHONE CALL, Investigator: How did that make you feel?

Lussenhop: She says, “I hated it.”

POLICE PHONE CALL, Investigator: OK. Did, did Clint talk to you? Did he say anything to you?

Lussenhop: “He asked forgiveness from me,” she says, and then again that she “absolutely hated him touching” her. After this, she said she was told explicitly not to discuss it ever again.

POLICE PHONE CALL, Investigator: So your mom and dad know about it. The church knows about it.

Lussenhop: What she was describing in this call sounded a lot like what Kyla had told us about the end of church services: everyone asking for forgiveness. The adults all in tears. 

POLICE PHONE CALL, Investigator: Can’t even imagine what you’re going through, uh, not having the support of who should be supporting you, not just your parents, but your church. That’s why we believe in a higher power.

Lussenhop: As Andy and I continued combing through the records, we started to see a pattern. Multiple women, living in different states who had no contact with one another, describing similar abuse. A preacher in the OALC who knew what was going on. And the same prescription for the problem: forgiveness.

Mannix: We forgive and forget.

Lussenhop: Forgive and forget.

Mannix: And then I began seeing that term everywhere, in police reports, in court documents, in testimony. People would say, “Yeah, you know, and then we forgive and forget,” or, “And then we had to forgive and forget.”

Lussenhop: We kept poring through the records and talking to former members and started to understand how, according to church doctrine, forgive and forget actually worked.

Mannix: You know, the Bible talks about forgiveness and, and there’s a part in the King James Bible that talks about getting forgiveness from another believer. And how that sort of washes the sin away. And, and the idea is it’s gone. It’s like it never happened. Uh, we don’t talk about it anymore. And, and if you bring it up, it’s like you’re not letting it go, you know, the sin kind of falls to you. You, you have an unforgiving heart. So that’s kind of on you now.

Lussenhop: This version of forgiveness was often encouraged by the preachers themselves, according to police records. And several of the women in the case files we read said the same preacher who’d led the meeting described on that call knew about their abuse, too. His name was Daryl Bruckelmyer.

Mannix: And it was like, he knows there are others, so he knows that whatever they wanted to do to handle it internally wasn’t working. 

Lussenhop: If Bruckelmyer knew about all of this abuse, why didn’t he go to police? 

Mannix: I think that that was really, really hard to understand why someone wouldn’t do more to protect these kids, especially someone who was really kind of in the only position to do that, as these preachers were.

Lussenhop: We reached out to him repeatedly, and he said he wouldn’t talk to us. A spokesperson for the local church wrote in an email that “the church has fully complied with the law in the referenced case and it’s a matter of legal record. We have no further comments regarding this case.” So we made another request for records specifically related to Bruckelmyer. We got back a police video interview with him, just a few days after Massie’s arrest.

POLICE INTERVIEW, Daryl Bruckelmyer: Daryl Bruckelmyer. 

POLICE INTERVIEW, Investigator: Daryl. Good to meet you.

Lussenhop: On tape, Bruckelmyer is answering questions from investigators. 

POLICE INTERVIEW, Investigator: How many female victims do you think have come forward and said something to you?

POLICE INTERVIEW, Bruckelmyer: There’s only been a few. One, two, three I know.

POLICE INTERVIEW, Investigator: OK. Well, I have six right now that have mentioned you by name that they’ve talked to you. 

POLICE INTERVIEW, Bruckelmyer: Hmm. I wonder who they are. 

Lussenhop: Before this, I figured that maybe, despite what the victims told police, Bruckelmyer might deny knowing anything about Massie. But here he was, on video, calmly admitting that he knew.

POLICE INTERVIEW, Investigator: Do you know what the mandated reporting laws are in the state of Minnesota? 

POLICE INTERVIEW, Bruckelmyer: We have looked at them some. 

POLICE INTERVIEW, Investigator: Have you ever been told about them? 

POLICE INTERVIEW, Bruckelmyer: But, but, but it’s, it’s hard for us to interpret everything clear.

Lussenhop: Under Minnesota law, mandated reporters — like teachers and doctors and clergy — are required to report allegations of child abuse to police. The investigator asked Bruckelmyer if he was aware of those requirements.

POLICE INTERVIEW, Investigator: So, no, nobody’s ever discussed them with you? 

POLICE INTERVIEW, Bruckelmyer: No.

Lussenhop: This was not true. It turned out there was tape of a call from three years earlier, when another investigator read him the state law. 

POLICE INTERVIEW, Investigator: Well, I just listened to the, the audio recording and it was line for line, and you said you understood what they were. 

POLICE INTERVIEW, Bruckelmyer: Yeah.

Lussenhop: Bruckelmyer seems surprised.

POLICE INTERVIEW, Investigator: So why do you not turn them in as a mandated reporter per the statute of Minnesota? 

POLICE INTERVIEW, Bruckelmyer: Well, we, we, we feel, we felt, unless it’s changed, that as a part of the church, that we, we, we keep silent.

Lussenhop: Bruckelmyer says as part of the church, we keep silent. But he said the victims and their families were free to go to law enforcement themselves.

POLICE INTERVIEW, Bruckelmyer: By us, by us telling them that they’re free to go to the law, which we did — We, we didn’t, we didn’t not stop this. It’s, it, it — that you can go and talk to the law or doctors or anything. You’d be free to do that.

Lussenhop: Bruckelmyer said they warned Massie to stay away from the congregation’s kids.

POLICE INTERVIEW, Bruckelmyer:  He’s been warned against this. We have told him so.

POLICE INTERVIEW, Investigator: Right. But warning against it and doing something the right way — Right, because, you’re just keeping a pedophile in your church.

POLICE INTERVIEW, Bruckelmyer: Right.

Lussenhop: Then Bruckelmyer says, hey, we actually have our own language that we use to talk about abuse in the church. 

POLICE INTERVIEW, Bruckelmyer: We have, we have guidelines in the church that we, we are told and instructed as a protection for both.

Lussenhop: He was referring to a document he shared with the investigators. 

POLICE INTERVIEW, Bruckelmyer: We read these guidelines in front of the church. We’ve had gatherings about this and to make it open.

Lussenhop: The document is from the OALC, it’s titled, “Guidelines for the prevention of violence, harassment and sexual abuse, and how to handle such incidents.”

POLICE INTERVIEW, Bruckelmyer: … and we don’t protect either one. We don’t.

Lussenhop: We don’t protect either one, meaning we don’t protect the perpetrator or the victim. Andy and I thought it was pretty chilling to hear it put that way. 

Mannix: It was just a little bit surprising to me that, that he kinda said the thing that we were trying to verify. But in a way that he was almost presenting as if it would absolve him.

Lussenhop: We got a copy of those church guidelines. They talked about things like educating members about abuse, recommending counseling, but we zeroed in on a couple lines in the policy that seemed to describe what we started calling a forgiveness session: “When harm has taken place: Individual conversations with the victim …”

Mannix: “If possible, individual conversations with the abuser. Later, but only if appropriate, a conversation with both parties together.”

Lussenhop:  To us, this document an important piece of evidence that could show forgive and forget was essentially an official way that the church handles sexual abuse. 

Mannix: It says: “We respect the law and the expertise of authorities….We should preserve good relationships with the authorities.” But at no point is it like, “Call the police and inform them as you are required to by law as a mandatory reporter.”

Lussenhop: Yeah, it kind of just, like, leaves it up to them.

Lussenhop: None of the preachers in Duluth have been charged with failure to report. A lawyer representing the church told us that because the preachers are unpaid, Minnesota’s mandatory reporting law may not apply to them.   

Lussenhop: I think the last thing that really stood out to me about this document was that at the very top it says something like OALC of America, or …

Mannix: Mm-hmm

Lussenhop: It seems to gesture at not only is this a written policy, it doesn’t say OALC of Duluth, it’s OALC of America.

Mannix: I think that reporting this story led us to the question of: Is this happening elsewhere in this church?

Lussenhop: We tried one last time to talk to Bruckelmyer. So on a Sunday morning, we went to church. The OALC spokesman who met us in front of the 1,000-seat sanctuary was firm: We would not be allowed to speak to Bruckelmyer, and they would not be answering questions. But we were welcome to stay for services. After three hours, the service closed with forgiveness. Congregants rose from their seats and turned to each other. Some went up to the preachers. Others turned in the pews to their spouses, children, friends. And they all asked each other for forgiveness. We watched men burying their faces in each other’s necks, weeping. It was just like Kyla had described. As we looked around during service, it was impossible not to notice that there were lots of children in the pews. Sitting on parents laps, running around with toys and snacks. Was Clint Massie just just one bad apple, or could abuse still be happening in this church? Could it be happening in other churches? How widespread was it really? Not long after that visit, we got an answer. That’s next. 

---

After months of reporting on sexual abuse in the OALC, we published our first story about how preacher Bruckelmyer knew about the abuse and how the forgive and forget sessions allowed the abuse to happen over and over again. And then a flood of messages hit our inboxes.

Mannix: You know, a lot of the people who, who reached out to you and me, in a way it was almost like a cry for help. They were like, “You care about this, and I didn’t think anyone cared about this,” and like, “You don’t even know the, the, the half of it.”

Lussenhop: People responded from all over the country. Delaware, Michigan, the Dakotas. 

Mannix: And then ultimately what we did is we, we went to a bunch of these locations. So we would go to law enforcement there and say, you know: “Are you aware of this church? Has anyone been charged related to this church?”

Lussenhop: Andy found that yes, law enforcement in other places had turned up very similar cases of abuse involving members of the church. He found stories in Washington state, Wyoming, Nebraska and other places in Minnesota. And he spoke to more victims. He heard story after story that sounded a lot like the ones we’d heard in Duluth. 

Mannix: One big commonality was the preachers, right? They said, you know, I have a preacher who is doing something really similar, and everyone kinda knows about this abuser, but it’s been dealt with through the forgive-and-forget sessions. And it was very clear to us that that was something that was permeating throughout this society, you know, coast to coast.

Lussenhop: He also heard stories that went farther back in time. One woman  told him that she, her mother and her daughter had all been sexually abused by different men in the church. Three generations of abuse in one family. 

Mannix: And the question that we then began to ask is, you know, how deep does it go? 

Lussenhop: Where did it start? Andy ended up connecting with a former church member named Terry-Lee Marttinen, who told him her own grandfather had brought the first OALC church to Canada from Finland in 1951. Terry-Lee is one of the few historians who’s researching gender-based violence in the OALC. And she explained how the church started as the Laestadianism religion in northern Sweden, then spread to Finland and Norway and became the OALC in North America. And at first, Andy spoke to her for that historical expertise. But then she told Andy her mom, Eija, wanted to share her own story.

Mannix: Terry-Lee provided us with this newspaper clipping from 1951. There’s probably 18 people or so, including Eija, um, and they’re in Finnish sailor suits, and they’ve just gotten off the boat in the port of Halifax. And they’re with their suitcases. You can see Eija in that photo smiling. She’s a 9-year-old girl. She looks ecstatic to be, having landed in, in this new world. And when I talked to Eija, she told me, “I had already been abused by that point.”

Lussenhop: Wow.

Mannix: I asked her: “Why didn’t you tell your dad? Why didn’t you tell anyone?” She said that the consequence would be she would have to forgive and forget. So even back then that was the practice.

Lussenhop: Andy would go on to confirm that related branches of the church all over Scandinavia also practiced forgive and forget, and that there were hundreds of reported incidents of child sexual abuse going back to the 1950s. Andy was able to get one of those police reports, too. 

Mannix: And what did they find, the police? The practice of forgiving and forgetting led to the abuse being considered settled internally.

Lussenhop: Wow.

Mannix: And therefore no, no, um, outside accountability necessary. 

Lussenhop: Andy reached out to the Swedish church. They said the cases he found were isolated incidents but that it was possible that some “matters,” as they called it, had been handled “improperly.” They added that church guidelines were being reviewed. Reps from the North American branches of the church said they also didn’t see a pattern of behavior here. They added that forgiveness is central to Christianity, and that no one was coerced to forgive. Such “matters,” they said, “must come freely from the heart.” 

The victims we spoke to did not see this abuse as isolated; they saw it as a part of a cycle. And in order to break that cycle, outside accountability seemed essential. But Andy and I, along with another reporter, Jeremy Kohler, had found more than a half dozen cases around the country where OALC members had been charged with child sexual abuse crimes. And those cases hadn’t attracted much, if any, attention. Some of those perpetrators were convicted without anyone seeming to call out the bigger problem with the church. The criminal justice system hadn’t really dug out the roots of the issue. 

SENTENCING HEARING, Judge: Thank you. Please be seated.

Lussenhop: Late in our reporting, Andy found a recording that really made all of this click into focus for me. Made me see why the prosecutor Mike Ryan had reached out to us in the first place.

SENTENCING HEARING, Judge: The jury having found Mr. Tikka guilty of two counts of rape of a child in the first degree.

Lussenhop: This recording is from a sentencing from one of the convicted OALC abusers we’d found. He’d been convicted in 2017 in Washington of raping a 9-year-old boy. 

SENTENCING HEARING, Carsie Tikka: Not, unto us, O Lord, but unto thy…

Lussenhop: What you’re hearing is the convicted perpetrator, Carsie Tikka, reading a personal statement before the judge hands down his sentence. Typically, this is a time when defendants express remorse, sometimes in the hope that the judge might reduce their time behind bars. 

SENTENCING HEARING, Tikka: However, God gave David the honor …

Lussenhop: Tikka reads a Bible passage.

SENTENCING HEARING, Tikka: That through the mouth of the prophet, he forgave his sins and said, “I have found a man after my heart.” 

Lussenhop: There it was again, that word. Forgiveness.

SENTENCING HEARING, Tikka: My conscience here today is clean, washed in the blood of the lamb. But where will everyone else in this courtroom be when the angel of death comes to cut the knife cord?

Lussenhop: Then, he turned to everyone else in the room. 

SENTENCING HEARING, Tikka: I forgive everyone that was in — that was a witness in the trial for all their lies and deceptive — and deceptions. I forgive my attorney, Tony, for being the worst attorney on the planet and sailing me up the river because it is God’s will. I forgive the prosecutor for all her lies and being so vindictive during the trial. If anyone belongs in prison, it is you. And I forgive you, Judge, for being partial to the prosecution, even though your job is to be a nonpartial and fair judge upholding our laws. I pray that you retire and give up your robe to someone more deserving of your title. 

Lussenhop: The judge was not amused. 

SENTENCING HEARING, Judge: You clearly by your statement here are not remorseful. You put the blame on everyone else.

Lussenhop: But Tikka dug in.

SENTENCING HEARING, Tikka: I take blame for what I did wrong. But you know what? My sins have been forgiven. Have yours? 

SENTENCING HEARING, Judge: So with that, I will impose the life sentence without any chance of parole.

Lussenhop: Tikka is in prison now. He did not respond to our requests for an interview.

But here’s what I took away from this: A conviction doesn’t always mean full accountability. And even a life sentence for a single person might not prevent future abuse from happening in a system like forgive and forget. This is why the prosecutor had originally reached out to me and kicked this whole investigation off. OALC member Clint Massie had taken a plea deal, but it wasn’t clear at the time that it would do much to stop the wider pattern of abuse. And it didn’t feel like enough, especially for Kyla Chamberlin, one of Massie’s alleged victims.

INTERVIEW TAPE, Chamberlin: I was pissed. Like, 30 years, and you’re gonna take away my chance to even tell what he did to me? 

Lussenhop: She didn’t get a chance to speak before the court to put what happened to her on the record.

INTERVIEW TAPE, Chamberlin: I said, “What is the fucking point in ever saying anything if you don’t even get your fucking voice heard?” 

Lussenhop: She told prosecutor Mike Ryan exactly what she thought of the plea deal.

INTERVIEW TAPE, Chamberlin: Said: “I’ve been fucking waiting for this day, and you took it, Mike? You took a plea.” Like, I was not nice. But he said I had every right to be, and he said, “Please come back for the sentencing.” And I said, “If I feel like it.”

Lussenhop: Andy and I had wondered what would Kyla’s alleged abuser, Clint Massie, say at his own sentencing? Would he defend himself, wrap himself in the protection of forgive and forget? Or would he take responsibility — would he admit that he’d hurt these women? The night before, Andy and I drove up to Duluth. We didn’t know if Kyla would be there.

INTERVIEW TAPE, Chamberlin: I was not gonna go to the sentencing, and the night before, bought a plane ticket and went. 

Lussenhop: Andy and I met up with her outside the courthouse beforehand, and we all walked in together. Massie’s entire side of the court was packed. His friends and family had written over a dozen letters of support which repeatedly stated that he had been forgiven. 

Mannix: Usually by the time someone gets to that point in a criminal case, the — their support system has kind of waned, you know? Um, like, like people aren’t showing up by the dozens to say, “I stand with him,” uh, for someone who’s being convicted of a child sexual abuse crime. 

Lussenhop: And then meanwhile, on the other side of the courtroom, it’s just Kyla, and she’s all alone. It’s usually the opposite. It’s usually the mirror image, you see all the support on the victim’s side of the courtroom and not the perpetrator, and it was completely the opposite. 

Mannix: It was Kyla. She had one friend who was local who kind of came there to support her. Um, and then us.

Lussenhop: We weren’t allowed to record the sentencing. But I sat right next to Kyla in one of the first rows. She was shaking. She was scared to look behind her at all the people on Massie’s side. When Massie got his chance to speak, he said he felt responsible for his “horrible acts” against children. And that he begged for their forgiveness. Kyla didn’t speak, but a statement on behalf of several of the victims, including her, was read aloud by Mike Ryan. “Your Honor, this case is not just about one predator. It is about an entire system that he used against the survivors and has enabled abuse, silenced victims, and created a cycle of trauma that continues to destroy lives in its wake. It is about generations of suffering that will continue unless action is taken to break this cycle.” And at the end, the judge gave Massie seven and a half years in prison.

INTERVIEW TAPE, Chamberlin: As you guys know, I was the only victim that was there for that. And I, uh … He had to look me in the eye, and that was the justice that — what I needed. He walked in, in chains, and he walked out in chains. So I have to find some peace in that, I guess.

Lussenhop: In that moment, Kyla told us she wasn’t angry anymore. And that she had a little hope that something might change.

INTERVIEW TAPE, Chamberlin: Maybe it’s just time that finally people aren’t gonna be quiet anymore about it. They’re sick of it. They won’t be silenced anymore. And I think this is the start of the end of the cover-ups of child sexual assault. I do. 

Lussenhop: The OALC is hardly the only church, hardly the only powerful institution that has had a problem addressing the abuse of its most vulnerable members. Silence is often what allows those institutions to carry on without feeling much need to self reflect and reform. But, at least in the OALC, that silence is crumbling. 

Because of people like Kyla, we were able to tell this story. We’ve received emails and calls from men and women who said they feel empowered to speak up, sometimes for the first time. It’s playing out in online support groups.

INTERVIEW TAPE, Chamberlin: More girls are coming forward. People are screaming now. They feel like they can be heard now because Clint went to prison. They’ve seen that something will happen now. You can speak now, and it won’t be just brushed under the rug or forgive and forget, trust and obey. Fuck that. Open your mouth. You have a voice.

INTERVIEW, Lussenhop: Yeah, do you — I mean, it sounds like — is there anything you’d wanna say directly to somebody? 

INTERVIEW TAPE, Chamberlin: Yeah. You don’t, you don’t have to be scared. You deserve to not live in hell. Do not let anybody, religion, church, preachers, anybody, family, tell you not to tell the truth, tell you that, “Ah, forgive and forget.” Bullshit. Sorry. Trust your gut. Something feels off, it’s probably off. Be able to trust, not live in fear. Let somebody love you someday, cause what someone tells you is love is not always love. But someday you’ll know what it is. You do have a voice, and I don’t care if you have to scream it. Scream it.

Lussenhop: If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, the National Sexual Assault Hotline can be reached at 1-800-656-4673. We are still reporting on the OALC. Andy now works at ProPublica, and he and our colleague Jeremy Kohler would like to hear from anyone who has more information. Find out how to contact them in our show notes. This episode was produced by Gabrielle Berbey and Katherine Wells and edited by Julia Longoria. Fact checking by Darya Marchenkova. Sound design and mixing by David Herman. Music by Julian Sartorius, Filippo Ansaldi and Simone Sims Longo, with additional music by Epidemic Sound. Our team also includes Sabby Robinson and Emma Talkoff. Special thanks to Leila Navidi at the Minnesota Star Tribune for recording the audio of Kyla Chamberlin.