User:Hodgdon's secret garden/John Bishop sexual abuse allegations

Allegation of attempted sexual assault

In March 2018, MormonLeaks released a recording made in December 2017 between Bishop, then 85, and an unnamed 55-year-old woman who accused him of abusing her, including tearing open her blouse and pulling up her skirt, in January 1984 while she was a missionary at the MTC.

Within the recording, Bishop says he does not remember his interactions with the woman transpiring in that manner yet says that while mission president over the MTC he engaged in inappropriate behaviors of which he regrets, involving more than one young women missionaries training there, including his giving a back rub to a female missionary that became "too frisky." Before the half-way point within the over two-and-a-half hour interview, Bishop says that some young women missionaries at the MTC would have flashbacks to previous experiences of sexual trauma and would seek pastoral counseling from MTC leaders within one-on-one mandated "worthiness interviews"; Bishop says he was "the last person who should have been" providing pastoral counseling to these young women.

LDS Newsroom issued a statement that the church is continuing to investigate these allegations and decrying all instances of ecclesiastical abuse.

The woman had initiated an investigation by the Brigham Young University police department in November 2017. According to the investigaion, Bishop told police he had taken the woman into a "preparation room" in the MTC's cafeteria "and while talking with her, asked her to show him her breasts, which she did."

"I have no reason to doubt the victim’s disclosure, and would have likely prosecuted Mr. Bishop but for the expiration of the statute of limitations," deputy Utah County attorney David Sturgill told BYU police. (In 1984, Utah's statute of limitations regarding rape was four years.)

The woman told the Deseret News that she had not authorized MormonLeaks' release of the recording.

Bishop family spokesman Greg Bishop said Bishop, then recovering from surgery, lacked much mental acuity when the recording was made and within it mostly expressed !confusion.

Greg said no sexual assault of the accuser occurred and she had exposed her breasts unsolicitedly to Bishop during the 1984 encounter and Bishop was expressing his regret in the recorded conversation for anything he may have done to provoke such a response. Regarding the missionary Bishop gave the backrub, a troubled young woman Bishop later allowed to live with his family for a time, Bishop quickly realized this intimacy was inadvised. Greg gave reporters legal records showing that the woman has a criminal history and various jurisdictions' police reports saying that over a half-dozen times she has reported she was assaulted. These charged were not prosecuted. In some cases the woman subsequently said her original report was false.

External links

• Joseph L. Bishop records, Weber State University Archives
• Works by or about Hodgdon's secret garden/John Bishop sexual abuse allegations in libraries (WorldCat catalog) (additional Worldcat listing)