Reposted by Goel. Do not distribute without permission. Copyright 2025.
Here at Relentless Hope, we’re an Utah based organization with a staggering number of Latter Day Saint perpetrators who abuse our clients, survivors of horrific abuse. This abuse takes place in both ritual and non-ritual contexts, and one of our major obstacles in exposing and dealing with the endemic problem of sexual abuse in Utah has been the institution we might have expected to be our ally: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
The Church has obstructed virtually every attempt at reform Relentless Hope and other organizations have supported to make it easier for survivors to obtain justice and services. A listing of those reforms are as follows:
Repealing the priest-penitent privilege, which enables any sexual predator to avoid his bishop or stake president reporting him to law enforcement as long as he confesses to church authorities. This privilege-and it is a privilege-enables sexual predators to run amok in wards and stakes with impunity, while their victims are intimidated from reporting criminal sexual abuse to the police by their bishops and stake presidents, and bludgeoned into forgiving their abusers who have never asked for forgiveness and show zero regret for raping and torturing their victims.
Retroactively abolishing the civil statute of limitations for victims who were abused prior to 2018, so that survivors can sue their abusers for raping and molesting them. Currently, if you were abused before 2018, your abuse falls under an old statute of limitations that gives you a mere 4 years after your 18th birthday to file a lawsuit against your abuser.
Strengthening the punishment for rapists of adults and children, given that a rapist faces a mere 5 years to life as a starting sentence, unless the rape was committed against an incapacitated individual or caused serious bodily injury or had a prior conviction for grievous sexual offense. In a state with a prosecution rate under 12%, and a conviction rate of 2.97% for rape, it isn’t likely that the rapist will face more than the 5 year to life sentence, but even if he rapes an incapacitated individual or causes serious bodily injury to his victim, the rape statute actually says the following: “If…a court finds that a lesser term than the term described in Subsection (3)(b) is in the interests of justice and states the reasons for this finding on the record, the court may impose a term of imprisonment of not less than six years and which may be for life…[or] 10 years and which may be for life or six years and which may be for life.” You can read the statute here, and you can ponder how a lesser sentence could be in the interests of justice for raping an incapacitated individual or causing serious bodily harm.
Of course, when one considers these abominably lenient sentences and the church’s role in obstructing punishment and enforcement of sexual abuse statutes, or running interference against civil suits for rape survivors via a restrictive statute of limitations, the question is why? Why would a church whose own doctrine bars sex outside of legal matrimony be so concerned with leniency for members and non-members who prey upon children and vulnerable women?
Exhibit One: When President Russell M. Nelson’s daughter Brenda Miles and her husband Dick Miles were being sued for raping and abusing children in the Eighties, the Utah Supreme Court rule that claims barred by the old statute of limitations (four years after the victim turns 18) gave the alleged rapist a “vested right” to a statute of limitations.
In their decision, the Utah Supreme Court analogized rape to 19th century inheritance disputes, to argue that men who allegedly raped and sexually assaulted others had a right to rely on the old statute of limitations, which meant that the recently reformed statute of limitation could not apply retroactively by adding 35 years after the 18th birthday of a survivor. This was done in Mitchell v. Roberts, and Dick and Brenda Miles filed an amicus curiae brief in that case for obvious reasons: they didn’t want to have the claims that they had sexually abused the children of their old friend Bill Carstensen adjudicated in court, claims that extended to forcing those children to imbibe feces and urine laced Kool Aid.
Of course, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints didn’t want its prophet, seer, and revelator Russell M. Nelson to sit for a deposition in that civil suit examining his efforts to quash ecclessiastical membership councils and law enforcement investigations into those allegations while he was a newly minted apostle. A deposition would have likely revealed how Nelson covered up the abuse committed by his daughter and son in law against children.
Thus, the reformed statute of limitations could not provide relief to those children, who had survived into adulthood waiting for their turn at justice.
 |
Exhibit Two: Wade Christofferson, the brother of First Presidency member D. Todd Christofferson, was arrested and booked into the Salt Lake County Jail on November 20th, pending criminal charges for child sexual abuse. According to Floodlit, Wade Christofferson has seven child victims and counting, and was previously excommunicated and rebaptized for raping children. Two individuals told Floodlit that Christofferson had sexually abused them in Illinois in the Eighties and Nineties. He was allegedly released from his position at first counselor in Crystal Lake, Illinois after a child reported that he attempted to sexually assault them.
After his rebaptism, Christofferson served as 2nd counselor in the Young Single Adults 2nd Ward in Columbus, and as 2nd counselor in the stake Sunday School Presidency in the Columbus Ohio North Stake. This arrest occurred after D. Todd Christofferson was called and sustained to be one of the top three leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Days on October 14, 2025.
Christofferson’s ascent up the ladder of LDS authority was unimpeded by the fact that his pederast brother was actively raping and assaulting children throughout the Nineties. Todd Christofferson was sustained as a member of the First Quorum of the Seventy on April 3, 1993, while his brother ran rampant in Illinois and Ohio as a child predator.
Conclusion
The scourge and the corruption of abuse by Latter Day Saint elites and their children and siblings will end when rank and file Saints who actually follow the Law of Chastity decide they’ve had enough of funding a church that bullies victims into silence with tithing revenues that are hidden in 13 shell companies, money that is used by Kirton McConkie to suppress and conceal the extent of child sexual abuse committed by Saints with family ties to their leadership. Since the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has shown no inclination to help abuse survivors-despite having a reported $265 billion in assets-while demonstrating their willingness to use their money to bully survivors who have the courage to come forward with prolonged civil litigation, we’re asking Latter Day Saints and others who walk the walk to fund the treatment of our clients with their donations. If the Church won’t be part of the solution, perhaps the members who tithe their 10% in order to buy a temple recommend will be part of the solution.
Here’s where your money is going to go at this stage:
- $150 per EMDR, neurofeedback, and talk therapy session for those who were raped and abused by predators who hid behind the name of Christ in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Saints, the Catholic Church, and other institutions who didn’t bother to enforce their own rules to protect children. Those survivors will require years of therapy and services to heal from their abuse.
- $1,500 per full scope medical exam to prove the physical damage done to survivors whose rectal and vaginal canals were permanently damaged, as a first step to helping them obtain treatment for their impacted colons. Relentless Hope has personally reviewed survivor medical records in which vaginal canals of female survivors were described by medical professionals as resembling “shredded meat” due to the brutal object rape committed on a regular basis by adult abusers.
- Thousands of dollars to relocate those survivors willing to leave Utah for year long residential treatment programs in other states, where their medical, psychiatric, and security needs will be met by partner non-profits. Many of our clients still reside with their parents and grandparents and relatives who abused them as children, and the first step to recovery is to relocate them to a location where they can actually feel safe. We need to get them out of their abusers’ homes into a safe residential location as the first step to their recovery. We need money to transport them, and we need money to support their post-recovery transition into life as functioning adults, which includes help with rent, with continued psychiatric and medical care.
This is not television or a movie. These are individuals who were abused by the very people who should have protected them: parents, church leaders, doctors, and others.
It may appear from the tone of this article that Relentless Hope has an issue with Latter Day Saints, but I want to make it clear that any Latter Day Saint who actually follows the Law of Chastity or lives the principles of their Church is not our opponent. We have three sets of Latter Day Saints we take issue: abusers, and those who enable abusers by bullying survivors into silence, and those who look the other way as survivors come forward with their stories. We appeal to those Latter Day Saints and others who are tired of a corrupt, bloated, and cruel institution whose efforts and money have been spent to cover up to the extent of this abuse.
Cruelty is the defining behavior of abusers and their enablers; it takes the forms of DARVO: Deny the abuse, Attack the victim, and Reversing the Victim and the Offender. We at Relentless Hope are finished with diplomatic approaches to this problem. For three years, we have appealed to the better angels of those we have asked for help. We have abstained far too long from identifying the institutional corruption that has compounded the suffering of adult survivors whose lives have been ruined by extreme childhood abuse.
We are realistic: we do not expect to obtain meaningful reform or increased enforcement against child sexual predators who lean on their membership in a church or their familial connections within that church to avoid culpability. What we do expect is that those reading this will no longer look away, and choose those institutions and their standing in those institutions over the healing of victims.
No one at Relentless Hope draws a salary or a wage. Our advocates, our officers, and everyone else involved in this organization do so as volunteers, and we have spent three years as volunteers on a shoestring budget. We’ve got a mere $15,000 in our accounts at this moment, and if you want to support survivors with services, we need you to donate. We need you to subscribe to this Substack, to share our content, and to pray for us and our survivors.
Ritual abuse is real. All sexual abuse is satanic. War is the answer in the face of evil. You can give your 10% to an organization that will use it to quash victims, or you can give it to organizations who support the healing and restoration of victims. Every dime you give us will go to providing services in the form of therapy and treatment for victims whose abuse has been denied for decades by corrupt institutions who minimize or deny that the abuse ever occurred. The answer to evil is to do good, and to recognize the problem and validate the victim with services that can help them heal.
You can donate in ten dollar increments at Stripe via this link. You can donate at relentlesshopeforyou.org. You can scan the QR code below. Either way you choose to do something, do something for victims.
 |
Goel
Executive Director, Relentless Hope
 | A guest post by
|