Rick Bowmer/AP
This week’s episode of Reveal, a collaboration with the Associated Press, exposes the secret legal playbook used by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—widely known as the Mormon church—to hide evidence of sexual abuse from law enforcement.
AP reporters Michael Rezendes and Jason Dearen zoom in on Chelsea Goodrich, who says her father, John Goodrich, a former bishop in the church, sexually abused her as a child.
After Goodrich’s arrest on charges of abusing his daughter, Chelsea and her mother began meeting with the director of the church’s risk management division, Paul Rytting. Their goal was to convince him to allow a local Idaho bishop, who’d heard John confess to abusing his daughter, to testify against him in court. Instead, Rytting deployed a number of tactics to stop this key piece of Chelsea’s case from moving forward—discouraging the bishop and offering Chelsea hundreds of thousands of dollars for her silence. The audio recordings of their conversations provide an unprecedented glimpse into the Mormon church’s efforts to keep child sexual abuse in its ranks under wraps.
(The episode first aired in December 2023 and was updated this week to include a major update on Chelsea’s case.)