You may use my name, I resigned from the Church a couple years ago and I am not afraid of the Church discipline or threats anymore. ” A current active bishop raped my 12-year-old daughter. In the middle of a night at 3:30 am she came to me hysterical and told me what happened. I…
Lisa O. Idaho, USA My story takes place in the 1980s, in a town of about 30,000 people in Los Angeles County, California. One Sunday when I was about 15 years old, all the girls were brought together to watch a film called “Morality For Youth” (1982). The video used a group of teens on…
Local church leaders conduct worthiness interviews with their members, even the children. Every child in a Mormon congregation will have at least one interview with the presiding member of their congregation (Bishop or branch president) at age 7-8, and several more from the age of 11 to 18 prior to temple attendance or full-time missionary…
“’You asked me once,’ said O’Brien, ‘what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.’” -1984 by George Orwell. Those words hit me to my core when I read 1984 in my senior…
During one of my earliest worthiness interviews as an adolescent, the interviewer asked if I masturbated. I needed a definition because I hadn’t experienced it yet. Then I was asked, “Have you ever tried to have sex with an animal?” (I don’t remember if they said bestiality first and then had to define it when…
I support the stories shared here, and am now willing to publicly share my own. After just turning 12, I was scheduled for my first “worthiness interview” with my bishop before becoming a deacon and receiving the Aaronic Priesthood. Having already been molested by a close Mormon relative at the age of 10, I was…
Like most teenagers, I masturbated. During a worthiness interview, I was asked if I had masturbated. I was honest and admitted that I had. I don’t remember the details of everything the bishop said, but remember him telling me I couldn’t take the sacrament for two weeks and that I needed to read the Miracle…
I did not realize until I started typing how difficult this might be to share. I am flooded with so many emotions. I grew up in a very devout Mormon family. I was never sexually abused, but for some reason I discovered my sexuality in my childhood and began masturbating even before I was a…
I was a 14 year old child. I was raped. Had just had a lesson on “virtue”, the week before. I was so traumatized. I didn’t tell my parents because of the whole “it would be better to have your child come home in a pine box than to lose their virtue”, rhetoric. I went…
My childhood bishop was a good man. I write this story not to blame him but to blame the system that would put an untrained man in a room with young children asking sexual questions. In my first interview with him, he asked about masturbation. I didn’t know what that word meant, and I mistakenly…