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If you or a loved one suffered physical or sexual abuse while attending a school that you believe may have been overseen by the SDA, then you may be entitled to recover compensation. Why choose us?
We know what you are going through, from working with many victims already. Don't go this alone. Help is here, speak with lawyers that represent church sexual abuse victims.
In his own research, Dr. William Chunestudy discovered at least 523 reports of sexual abuse between 1994 and 2013. The reports come from Adventist Risk Management, the official insurance company for the Seventh-day Adventist Church and its ministries across the globe.
Related Reading: Sexual Abuse In The Independent Fundamental Baptist Movement
Dr. Chunestudy worked as the insurer's Educational Resource Specialist for over 3 years and so, in 2013, he set out to understand the scope of insurance claims filed over incidents of sexual abuse. Over less than a decade, the insurance company had been made aware of over 500 sexual abuse cases, ultimately paying out around $30 million in compensation to survivors.
Only 2 of the case reports, Chunestudy says, had been filed in relation to abuse committed by strangers, people unconnected to the Seventh-day Adventist Church. In one incident, a young member of the Church met a sexual predator online using a school's computer. The vast majority of abusers, however, were affiliated in some way with the Church.
Two types of perpetrator stood out from Dr. Chunestudy's research, due both to their ubiquity in the claims data and their proximity to children: teachers and Pathfinders.
Together, teachers and principals are named in 94 insurance claims, in large part, Chunestudy says, because teachers have the most "face time" with children. Between 1993 and 2014, Adventist Risk Management paid out nearly $8 million in damages to compensate the victims of teacher-related sex abuse. Skip to read different reports and complaints in the SDA community in the United States and Internationally.
An official department within the Seventh-day Adventist Church, the Pathfinder Club (or just "Pathfinders") is an organ of the Church's youth ministry. Similar to scouting, young Pathfinders between the ages of 10 and 15 hike, camp, volunteer within their local communities and, most importantly, take Bible study classes.
As we've seen, at least 40 reports of sex abuse in the Church name Pathfinders as perpetrators, but it's not entirely clear whether we're talking about adults who supervise Pathfinder activities or youths who participate in the program. Child-with-child abuse, Dr. Chunestudy has found, is extremely prevalent. In fact, these incidents, in which one child or teen victimizes another, may well be the leading source of insurance claims in Chunestudy's review.
As he reviewed the case documents, Dr. Chunestudy began to notice a pattern. "In most cases when these events have occurred, there was inadequate supervision." Chunestudy noted bathrooms, play areas, rest areas and remote hallways as the areas of particular risk, but also said that the Church had paid insufficient attention to "down time" between Church services.
"We need oversight," Chunestudy says, and "we need oversight of those who are chosen to supervise." Another problem according to Dr. Chunestudy? Training. "Many of our volunteers and supervisors simply weren't trained," the expert says. He also identified lapses in screening protocols, where a Church volunteer or worker wasn't subjected to a background check that could have kept the person away from children, or out of the Church entirely.
Organizations who tend to the care and education of children are bound to protect the young people under their charge. This legal and moral duty includes an obligation to protect children from sexual abuse. And it covers religious and secular organizations alike. If your child was abused in the Seventh-day Adventist Church, you and your loved ones may be eligible to file a civil lawsuit against the Church.
As educational institutions, every Seventh-day Adventist school, academy and boarding school is compelled to do everything in its power to protect kids from abuse. The same legal standard applies to Church congregations, where Pastors, Deacons and employees are charged with momentous responsibility of encouraging the spiritual development of children and ensuring their physical and emotional security.
Isolated on 200 acres of rolling hills and forest in West Virginia's portion of Appalachia, Miracle Meadows Christian was ruled by the "iron fist" of Susan Gayle Clark, the school's founder, and director. In 2016, Clark was convicted of two misdemeanor criminal violations, child neglect creating a risk of injury and failure to report child abuse.
Many Christian boarding schools are known for their harsh disciplinary tactics and, for some parents, rigorous education in Biblical principles is desirable.
The students sent to Miracle Meadows often trailed a history of disobedience and misconduct. Many had been diagnosed with behavioral conditions, from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder to oppositional defiant disorder. Some chose the school to avoid lengthy prison sentences.
Secluded from general society, the often-rebellious students at Miracle Meadows were, in some ways, the "perfect victims," attorney Laurence Banville told the Washington Post. Along with Banville, the two former students who have filed a lawsuit over the alleged abuse at Miracle Meadows are represented by Guy R. Bucci.
In their complaint, the men, now adults, have named the school's founder, Susan Gayle Clark, a former teacher named Tim Arrington, the Seventh-day Adventist Church and Advent Home Learning Center, a second Christian boarding school.
Miracle Meadows Christian is now closed. The school's state-authorized education status was revoked in 2014, the Charleston Gazette-Mail reports, after numerous complaints of abuse and mistreatment came to the attention of Michael Martirano, West Virginia's Superintendent of Schools.
Martirano shuttered the boarding school and removed its 19 students - all between 10 and 17 years of age - after an investigation conducted by the State's Department of Health and Human Resources discovered that officials at Miracle Meadows had failed to report at least one instance of sexual abuse.
The State's inspection also found evidence that a school janitor had "restrained students in handcuffs until their wrists bled and choked others who misbehaved," according to the Daily Beast.
Before its closure, Miracle Meadows had already fended off three previous attempts to shut the school down, evading state education officials for at least 23 years. West Virginia's courts blocked efforts to hold the boarding school to higher standards of scrutiny, even as complaints of abuse and mistreatment piled up.
These complaints, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by the Associated Press, detail horrifying allegations of sexual misconduct, including an incident in which a 16-year-old student pimped his own 10-year-old sister out to other students.
Investigating the complaints, though, was a challenge, says Patricia Dettori, an assistant prosecutor for Harrison County. When implicated, the school's employees, many of whom had entered the United States on religious work visas, would "disappear," the attorney told reporters at Insurance Journal.
Likewise, students who could corroborate reports of mistreatment would be removed from the boarding school, eluding Dettori's questions. The case only broke in June of 2014, when state officials became aware of four recent complaints against Timothy Arrington, a teacher at Miracle Meadows.
In a criminal complaint filed shortly afterwards, West Virginia prosecutors recounted three alleged incidents of child abuse, in which police said Arrington had handcuffed and choked a student, left a second student chained in handcuffs overnight and locked a third child in a room before forcing the student to strip down to his underwear. The school's director, Susan Gayle Clark, was fully aware of these events, prosecutors said.
Clark and Arrington were soon arrested and arraigned - Arrington on three felony counts of child abuse creating risk of bodily injury and Clark for two counts of failure to report child abuse, one count of obstructing a law enforcement officer and two felony counts of child neglect resulting injury. Clark's charge of obstructing an officer came after students were discovered at her home, in violation of a court order, according to the West Virginia Metro News.
The conviction came a year later. Susan Gayle Clark received six months in jail for misdemeanor child neglect and 30 days on a guilty plea for misdemeanor failure to report. Arrington's case, on the other hand, was taken off the court's docket, although prosecutors say the charges could be reinstated at some point.
In subsequent interviews, representatives of Miracle Meadows have attempted to downplay and deflect these accusations. The school's corporate president, Kingsley Whitsett, appeared to defend the institution's practices, telling a reporter at the Washington Post that "strong tactics" were a necessary tool in subduing rebellious children.
"These kids are very conniving," Whitsett said, "and they lie a lot. So you have to understand that and work with them a little differently than you would with your average students [...] there were consequences, but none of that was meant to be like abusing kids or whatever."
One staff member, who had previously worked as a jail guard, even tried to justify the disciplinary merits of handcuffing students, saying that cuffing a child "was perfectly legal if you had a student out of control."
In an interview, prosecutor Patricia Dettori called Miracle Meadows a "rogue school," suggesting that the abuse and neglect that appears to have occurred at Miracle Meadows was isolated to one boarding school.
However, as you can see from our complaint, a student at another boarding school, Advent Home Learning Center, stepped forward to allege similar types of abuse. Beneath the claims of child abuse and neglect is a constant theme: secrecy.
These former students allege in their complaint that the Seventh-day Adventist Church organizations create an environment that allows mistreatment, not only to occur but to continue. In fact, there's even a self-proclaimed (according to their website) "dedicated ministry" within the SDA, Women & Men Against Sexual Harassment & Other Abuses (WASH), devoted to ending sex abuse within the denomination - in part by "interrupt[ing] the [Church's] cycle of denial."
The Office Of General Counsel for the Seventh-Day Adventist Church denies that WASH is an Adventist organization.
In 2014, two men from Oregon filed suit against local and national branches of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, claiming Church elders had knowingly hired a convicted sex offender to run youth programs.
Despite having been convicted in 1970 for fondling a child, Les Bovee was pegged to run a chapter of the Pathfinder Club, the Seventh-day Adventists' youth ministry. Five years later, Boyee was still overseeing the youth group, Oregon Public Broadcasting reports, even though reports had surfaced that the man was again abusing the children in his charge. The Church eventually settled at least three cases of child abuse committed by Bovee.
Overseas, the situation appears to be just as bad. In Australia, the Seventh-day Adventist Church has been hit with "scores of complaints of sexual abuse," according to The Australian. After a 15-year-old student at Brisbane Adventist College was abused by her teacher Daniel Kyei, even Church officials admitted that the case had been severely "mishandled," saying leaders at the college had taken an "excessively defensive posture[,] following legal counsel rather than their hearts."
While Kyei was fired after reports of his abuse first surfaced, the Church refused to tell parents and students why he had been terminated. Rather than notify the school community of Kyei's heinous acts, school principal Jack Ryan chose to describe the soccer coach's departure as "regrettable," suggesting that Kyei had left of his own accord "for private and personal reasons." Ryan actually "thanked" the abuser "for his contribution" to the school, despite the concerns of a private investigator, who worried that Kyei had groomed and abused other students.
These tragic cases are not isolated incidents. Over the last five decades, the Seventh-day Adventist Church's record on sexual abuse has been unmistakably "dark," writes Nigel Sumerlin, a student at Union College, an Adventist-run institution in Lincoln, Nebraska.
After reviewing Church records of abuse between 1992 and 2011, which represented the claims of 525 child victims, Sumerlin could not help but conclude that Church organizations had repeatedly failed to protect young people, noting "an apparent lack of action by the Adventist church to prevent sexual abuse against children." Little appears to have changed in the intervening years, except for the willingness of survivors to step forward.
Led by Laurence Banville, a former prosecutor in Montgomery County's Sex Crimes Unit, the child abuse attorneys at AbuseGuardian.com are now investigating allegations of physical and sexual abuse and neglect in Christian schools nationwide. Along with claims of child mistreatment at Miracle Meadows Christian, we are currently exploring cases of alleged abuse at Advent Home Learning Center, a residential "treatment center" for boys with ADHD in Calhoun, Tennessee.
In our review, the international reach of sex abuse in the Adventist community became clear. While most of the cases hail either from the United States or Australia, we also found sexual abuse complaints scattered across the globe, from Africa, where nearly 8 million people are registered members of the faith, to Finland, with a small Adventist population hovering around 5,000.
Needless to say, our review of media reports and civil court documents is likely to represent only a fraction of the actual sexual abuse cases linked to the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Secrecy is a common theme among the myriad allegations covered on this page. In report after report, sexual abuse survivors accuse Church leaders of hiding sexual misconduct from secular authorities. Some cases suggest that Adventist officials may have become aware of sexual abuse years ago, but never told the police or only did so decades later.
In 2004, a group of five men filed suit against the Church claiming they had been abused during the 1980s by teachers at the Monterey Bay Academy, an SDA boarding school in La Selva Beach, California, the Clocktower reports. After trying to report the abuse to other faculty members, the lawsuit says, the boys were punished. The two teachers who were accused of misconduct were successful in having four of the five victims expelled from the school.
In a 2008 lawsuit, a former SDA associate pastor accuses the Southern California Conference of Seventh-day Adventists of firing her in retaliation for her report of sexual assault, Courthouse News reports. The plaintiff claims that, for 5 months, she was sexually harassed by a married pastor. The man, named as Howard Small, exposed himself to the woman in a Church office on repeated occasions and "forcibly attempt[ed] to perform oral sex on her," the lawsuit says. Ultimately, the man showed up at her door, threw her down and raped her, the plaintiff claims. When she reported the assault, the complaint continues, the president of the South California SDA put her on a leave of absence and reduced her pay.
In January 2018, police in San Jose arrested a youth pastor at Iglesia Adventista Del Séptimo Día San José (San Jose Seventh-day Adventist Church) on suspicion of sending a 13-year-old congregant sexually-explicit pictures of himself, the Mercury News reports.
A teacher at Miami Union Academy, an Adventist secondary school in Florida, was charged on 5 counts of sexual battery, along with 15 counts of lewd molestation, for allegedly forcing an eighth grade student to perform oral sex, according to Adventist Today.
A worker at Horeb French Seventh-Day Adventist was convicted for molesting a 9-year-old girl who had been enrolled in a youth program at the Miami church, the Miami New Times reports. The victim's family has filed a civil lawsuit against the church, saying it was negligent to hire Jerry Ameris, who pleaded guilty to assaulting the girl.
In July 2014, a deacon in Idaho was sentenced to 5 to 15 years in prison for molesting a 12-year-old girl in a storage room of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Nampa. When he was caught by police, Alexander Gonzalez Garcia told officials that he believed Satan may have taken possession of his body. Garcia pleaded guilty to sexual abuse of a minor and must register as a sex offender, News Radio 1310 says.
In 2013, according to our sex abuse lawyers in Maryland, Joseph Edgar Davis was convicted of sexually molesting 3 young girls in Maryland's Howard County Circuit Court. Davis worked until 2012 in the audio-visual department at the Seventh-day Adventist Church's headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland. He had been using the facility's computers, prosecutors found, to store pornographic images of the girls, who were between 5 and 8 years old at the time. Davis was sentenced to 150 years in prison, according to the Baltimore Sun.
A former music professor at Atlantic Union College, an SDA college in South Lancaster, Massachusetts, was accused of sexually abusing four male students in a civil lawsuit filed in January 2008. The case, reported by the Worcester Telegram, claims that officials at the school dismissed the students' allegations, then expelled them in retaliation.
A 46-year-old member of the Niles Westside Seventh-day Adventist Church in Berrien County, Michigan was sentenced to 15 years in jail, Adventist Today writes, after pleading guilty to molesting a 9-year-old girl. Michigan prosecutors also secured the man's conviction for failing to register himself as a sex offender, telling a reporter at the South Bend Tribune, "he's done this before. He said that he couldn't control himself with children."
A 2013 civil case filed in the US District Court of Michigan accuses the Peterson-Warren Academy, a private SDA school in Inkster, Michigan, of failing to protect a young student from the predatory intentions of an assistant principal. The man, USA Today reports, began to groom the student when she was 15-years-old, plying her with gifts and expensive horseback riding trips. Grooming soon escalated to inappropriate sexual conduct. The assistant principal sent her texts that read "I love you" and, "sometimes," USA Today writes, "he would lock the door to the classroom and kiss and touch her inappropriately." Eventually, they began to have sex, "in his car, hotels, his house and once during a 2009 senior class trip to Disney World."
In 2002, the Oregon Conference of Seventh-Day Adventists was ordered to pay $2 million in compensation to a young girl who claimed she was molested by the son of Pastor Dennis Pumford, who served as the pastor at the South Salem Seventh-Day Adventist Church. During a trial held in the Marion County Circuit Court, attorneys for the girl demonstrated that officials at the Church knew about the boy's sexual activity, but failed to adequately supervise his contact with young children. The case was reported by the Statesman Journal in a piece hosted in-full at Jehovahs-Witness.com.
In 2006, Tyler Elliot Lambie, the 28-year-old son of a teach at Oregon's Milo Adventist Academy, was arrested and charged on misdemeanor counts of sexual abuse for molesting two 17-year-old students, according to the Oregonian.
In 2014, two men from Oregon filed suit against the Seventh-day Adventist Church, accusing the Church of hiring a known pedophile to lead the Veneta-based Pathfinder Group. Both men claim that they were abused in the 1970s by Leslie Bovee, who was hired to run the youth ministry, which takes boys and girls between the ages of 10 and 15 on outdoors trips. Prior to his appointment, the lawsuit claims, Bovee had been imprisoned for molesting 3 young boys. Even so, officials at the SDA Church permitted Bovee to head a program where he would be working with children, the two survivors say. Apparently, Bovee was allowed to run the Pathfinder chapter, despite the Church's knowledge of his past misconduct, because "he repented and was re-baptised," Reuters reports.
On March 31, 2016, Donald Mansell, a former basketball coach at the Livingstone Adventist Academy, was arrested and charged on 3 counts of sexual abuse. Police believe that Mansell abused two female students at the K-12 school, which is located in Salem, Oregon, between 2010 and 2014, KGW8 reports.
A family in Texas filed suit in 2014 against the Texas Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, saying their teenage daughter was assaulted by her teacher and basketball coach at the Burton Adventist Academy. The Star-Telegram says that Carlos E. Rodriguez, the teacher, pleaded guilty to charges of sexual abuse of a child under 14. He was sentenced to 30 years in jail without the possibility of parole.
In May 2017, a deacon at the West Houston Seventh-day Adventist Church was arrested for sexually molesting 2 young boys, including a 2-year-old who he allegedly raped in a closet of the Church, according to Click2 Houston. During the course of police investigations, a 7-year-old boy stepped forward to accuse Barry Todd Durrell, the former deacon, of assaulting him at a local mall and in a motel. Durrell is a repeat offender, police say. He was convicted of sexual molestation in California three decades ago, also admitting a later charge in Oregon. Durrell became deacon of the West Houston church in 2003. He was not a registered sex offender; law enforcement officials aren't sure why not.
In August 2016, Adventist Today reported on a new case of sexual abuse. Douglas Allison, formerly the principal at Mountain View Christian School in Sequim, Washington, pleaded guilty to rape of a child and child molestation. The former principal "admitted to sexual contact and intercourse with the female victims, then 10 and 11 years old starting in September 2015," reporters for the Sequim Gazette Reporter say. The victims have filed a civil lawsuit against the SDA-affiliated school, demanding $5.25 million in damages.
A lawsuit filed in February 2017 says that teachers and administrators at Miracle Meadows Christian, a boarding school in West Virginia run on Seventh-day Adventist Church principles, concealed years of physical and emotional abuse. Our own attorneys are representing two former students at Miracle Meadows, now adults, who claim they were beaten and raped on numerous occasions during their tenure at the boarding school.
A woman in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe stepped forward to accuse Brighton Ndebele, pastor for the City Centre Adventist Church, of sending her sexually-explicit test messages. She went to the secular police, a report from Adventist Today says, because the SDA Church where she is a member "declined to punish the pastor."
The Seventh-day Adventist Church's history of abuse begins early in Australia. Throughout the 20th Century, Indigenous Australians were forcibly removed from their homes and taken to live on Christian missions, including the Seventh-day Adventist mission of Mona Mona. Physical, emotional and sexual abuse reigned supreme at the mission, National Indigenous Television reports. The Church started its Mona Mona Mission in 1913 and closed it in 1962. In 2014, over 70 Indigenous Australians were awarded compensation from the state of Queensland's government for their historical mistreatment at Christian missions.
A former PE teacher at Nunawading Seventh Day Adventist Primary School pleaded guilty to 30 counts of indecent assault and 1 count of rape in 2002, The Age reports. James Paul Dunne, a 46-year-old living in Lilydale, Victoria, Australia, molested a young male student over a period of nearly 4 years.
In October 2004, six men from the Pitcairn Islands, a British territory in the Southern Pacific with a population of residents hovering around 50, were convicted of sexually abusing young girls. The charges included incest, gang rape and indecent assault, the Advertiser, a paper based in Adelaide, Australia, reports. While Seventh-day Adventism isn't the official religion on the Pitcairn Islands, but nearly everyone on the islands is an Adventist.
In November 2013, an Australian court case against the Seventh-day Adventist Church revealed evidence that an SDA-affiliated school botched its own internal investigation into a series of sexual assaults occurring in the 1970s, according to the Sunraysia Daily. The man's victims, court documents suggest, were under the age of 9 at the time. At least one victim says she was "labelled a liar" by the Church. The Seventh-day Adventist Church, plaintiffs claim, became aware of the assaults in the 1990s, but only referred the case to police authorities in 2012.
Another 2015 case comes from Australia, where leaders at a Seventh-day Adventist church in Brisbane came out to admit botching an investigation into the abuse of a 15-year-old victim by Daniel Kyei, who worked as a teacher and soccer coach at Brisbane Adventist College. The Australian has more on the story. Australia's Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, established in 2012, received more than 6,700 reports of sexual abuse, 59% of which occurred in religious institutions. Over 60 of the cases were linked to a Seventh-day Adventist Church.
On August 21, 2017, a former teacher at Australia's Bunbury Seventh Day Adventist Primary School was charged for sexually assaulting a young student sometime between 1979 and 1983. The man, whose name was not published by the Melville Times, has also been charged for molesting a second student between 1987 and 1988.
At least 10 boys, most under the age of 16, were molested at an Adventist boarding school in Finland, Finnish investigators announced in 2003. The alleged abuse occurred over the course of 20 years at Toivonlinna, a school in Piikkiö, Finland. "The main suspect," a pastor at the Church, "resigned" in 2002, Poynter reports, "but police say that a number of other people have also been implicated."
Elder Steyn Venter of the Bloemfontein SDA Church in South Africa was fired for issuing "improper advice" in his role as a marriage counselor, according to Adventist Today. Newspaper reports from the time suggest that Venter had "encouraged young couples to engage in public nudity." The pastor kept naked photographs of at least one couple, which could be considered child pornography depending on the couples' ages.
Alongside these reports of alleged sexual abuse, Adventist Today also noted two cases in which an Adventist-associated teacher had been charged with non-sexual criminal activity. In one report, a fifth grade teacher at an Adventist school on Grenada was charged with murder after a 19-year-old woman's body was discovered in a trash can. The second report comes from India, where a teacher at the SDA school in Virudhunagar was charged under the country's Juvenile Justice Act for hitting a 7-year-old girl with a ruler.
A church elder in South Africa has been accused of raping a 10-year-old girl, the New Age reports, but in June 2017, her parents said the Oudtshoorn Seventh-day Adventist Church isn't honoring its zero-tolerance policy on child abuse. Eight months after the alleged incident, the accused, Areal Haarder, was still "active in the ministry."
In 2015, the Jamaica Gleaner reported on the case of Dalton Leslie, a police sergeant in St. Andrew, who was accused of sexually molesting a 15-year-old boy. A member of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, Leslie was chosen to lead a youth group at the Church, a position in which he remained despite the accusations against him.
An elder at a Seventh-day Adventist Church in Jamaica was arrested on suspicion of sexually assaulting a minor in February 2017, according to a report from the Jamaica Observer. A second report says the man was referred to police for allegedly having sex with a 14-year-old girl.
In 2013, a Canadian woman who was first abused by her adoptive father as a toddler filed suit against her mother, the Seventh-day Adventist Church and two SDA schools alleging they failed to protect her as a child. Her lawsuit, reported by the Vancouver Sun, claims that teachers and administrators at Fraser Valley Adventist Academy in Aldergrove and Cariboo Adventist Academy in Williams Blake knew that her now-dead adoptive father was raping her but failed to report it to law enforcement officials.
