Written by Goel from Investigations in Ritual Abuse.
This is an excerpt from his article.
The so-called “Satanic Panic” has been used to gaslight and invalidate the very real phenomenon of ritual abuse for decades. It is time to put a stop to that once and for all. This past legislative session, we managed to get a ritual abuse enhancement bill past the Judiciary Committee on a 10-0 vote. In the coming legislative session, we intend to press forward to get legislative reform on the governor’s desk for his signature.
It is clear that incumbent Governor Spencer Cox and many within his circle oppose ritual abuse legislation. Cox and his wife are friends with several of the alleged ritual abusers within David Lee Hamblin’s LDS Church of Satan, including Joe and Lee Bennion and Kevin and Khalil Kelly. I will never tell the readers of this Substack who to vote for, but I will tell you that a vote for Spencer Cox’s re-election is a vote for more of the same gaslighting and suppression of the truth where ritual abuse is concerned.
I have reason to believe that Centracom, the Internet provider in Sanpete County that was founded by the Cox family in 1903 as Central Utah Telephone, operates as a choke point for communications in Sanpete County and elsewhere. There are items in Caleb Proulx’s discovery requests and interrogatories that he did not procure knowledge of from this Substack or from any podcast appearance I did. Before he was tapped to serve as lieutenant governor by Governor Herbert after a short 288 day stint in the Utah House of Representatives, Spencer Cox worked at Centracom as vice president.
His father Eddie still works at Centracom as its president, and his uncle Branch Cox works as Centracom’s CEO. Put simply, the Cox family is in a position to monitor all Internet communication in Sanpete County that goes through its servers, and I have reason to believe that Centracom does exactly that. The Cox family claims that they hold no current ownership stake in Centracom, having divested their shares when Centracom was bought out in 2001. However, Branch and Eddie Cox still work at Centracom, and Centracom’s owners LICT Corp. donated to Spencer Cox’s campaign.
In return, Centracom has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in public funds under the Cox Administration. The University of Utah alone paid Centracom $2.66 million in 2023, and with total payments over a decade long period totaling more than $21 million. CentraCom Interactive was approved to receive $839,708 in grant funds from the American Rescue Plan Act combined with $279,903 of matching funds to connect a high-speed fiber network to 473 households in Millard County. Centracom stands to receive even more funding from the $317.4 million of federal funding through the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program to expand high-speed internet (broadband) access to locations without it.
Governor Cox effectively kneecapped the criminal cases against David Lee Hamblin for eight months when he nominated Special Prosecutor Ryan Peters to a judgeship in October 2023. By May 2024, Hamblin’s defense attorneys had filed motions to dismiss for failure to prosecute after Judge Roger Griffin in American Fork refused to allow Utah County Attorney Jeff Gray to prosecute the Hamblin case on the grounds that David Leavitt might be a witness in that case, and UCAO’s prior history with Leavitt, their former boss, would give the appearance of a conflict of interest and bias.
Utah is an incestuous state where conflicts of interest abound. It’s a state that is above the national average in only one category of violent crime: rape. Utah managed to convict a mere 393 out of 13,212 alleged rapists over a decade between 2012 and 2022. That’s a 3% conviction rate. It’s actually less, given that only 12% of victims report their rapes to the police. The Washington Post puts the actual rate of felony convictions for rape allegations at 0.7%.
For over forty years, as allegations of ritual and non-ritual sexual abuse mounted, Utah looked the other way. Its government officials refused to do anything about the issue, and they have continued to obfuscate on the issue of sexual assault. The State Supreme Court struck down reform to the statute of limitations for sex crimes, saying that the reform couldn’t apply retroactively without amending the state constitution.
Judge Robert Lunnen, who is the judge in David Hamblin’s ex-wife Roselle Stevenson’s sexual abuse case for crimes committed with Hamblin against Emily Sheets, dismissed the case filed by 94 women against OB-GYN Dr. David Broadbent, alleging he sexually assaulted them during examinations. Lunnen found that since Broadbent was a doctor, the case had to be filed under medical malpractice law rather than laws that apply to sexual assault. Sexual abuse by a doctor was medical care.
While Spencer Cox signed the legislative reform that clarified that sexual assault was not health care falling under medical malpractice statutes, the law is not retroactive. Those 94 women will have to wait for the Utah Supreme Court to overrule Lunnen, or for a constitutional amendment to allow the reform to apply retroactively.
That’s what IRA and every ritual abuse survivor is up against. That, and individuals like Joe and Lee Bennion, who contend that writing about the allegations against them constitutes stalking and warrants an injunction. If the Bennions succeed, survivors will find that the media will be extremely wary of writing about their allegations and stories, or investigating those allegations. After all, journalists could be subject to restraining orders for stalking even if they never contact or set foot on the property of an alleged ritual abuser.
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