People of Praise, religious cult with ties to SCOTUS Justice Amy Coney Barrett, faces sexual abuse of children reckoning

[jserraglio]

WASHINGTON POST

EXCLUSIVE https://www.washingtonpost.com/investig ... isconduct/

EDEN PRAIRIE, Minn. — In December, Katie Logan called the police in this Minneapolis suburb to unearth a buried secret: Her high school physics teacher had sexually assaulted her two decades earlier, she said. She was 17 and had just graduated from a school run by a small Christian group called People of Praise. He was 35 at the time, a widely admired teacher and girls’ basketball coach who lived in a People of Praise home for celibate men.

Logan told police she reported the June 2001 incident to a dean at the school five years after it happened. Police records show the dean believed Logan and relayed the complaint to at least one other senior school official.

But the teacher, Dave Beskar, remained at Trinity School at River Ridge until 2011, when he was hired to lead a charter school in Arizona. In 2015, he returned to the Minneapolis area to become headmaster of another Christian school. Beskar denies that any inappropriate sexual activity took place.

“People of Praise leaders failed me,” Logan, 37, said in an interview with The Washington Post. “I think they wanted to protect themselves more than they wanted to protect me and other girls.”

Logan was encouraged to go to police by a founder of “PoP Survivors,” a Facebook group formed last fall after the Supreme Court nomination of Amy Coney Barrett, who has deep roots in People of Praise and who served on the board of its schools years after Beskar left. Barrett’s ascendancy to the nation’s highest court has forced a painful reckoning in People of Praise, an insular Christian community that emphasizes traditional gender roles. The former members are now demanding that the group acknowledge their suffering and that it mishandled complaints, prompting People of Praise to hire two law firms to investigate allegations of abuse.

[barney]

What a sadly familiar story.

[maestrob]

What a sadly familiar story.

Indeed.

There is something incredibly nauseous about the power dynamic in religious institutions between older men and younger people, be they boys or girls. But it's not just there, it's in sports and music as well.

I've stated here before that i was propositioned by a voice teacher during my high school years. I had the good sense not to allow myself to be trapped in such a situation, but others cannot break themselves free and must live with that for the rest of their lives.

I'll never, thankfully, understand what drives authority figures to such warped behavior.

[barney]

It's like adultery, Brian - the biggest driver is opportunity. Authority enhances opportunity, for people so inclined, of whom alas there are too many.