Mary wrote:Res Ipsa wrote:And how is your personal experience relevant to deciding whether or not the grandfather molested the daughter in this case?
I have already stated up thread that I am personally convinced by the same evidence you are looking at, that Micklesen abused K. Because I am convinced of that I interpret the documentation differently than you.
Then that is our point of departure. I don't interpret the documents to get to a pre-determined conclusion. I'm trying to look at all the evidence we have and to figure out what happened. If you approach the documentation with a belief that the molestation occurred, of course you are going to interpret the documentation differently than I do.
Mary wrote:I am using my own experience of lds royal families and of the handling of abuse cases in the church that I am personally aware of, to guage whether Ron's account is probable and if so to what extent.
That's another point of departure. I'm not interested in whether Ron's account is probable. I'm interested in figuring out what actually happened.
Mary wrote:The * Hank *situation written about in Paper Dolls is interesting because it may establish a pattern for how sex abuse is dealt with when a high ranking apostle's family members are implicated.
I'm not really concerned with how what Ron describes may fit with some pattern or other when the evidence in the case contradicts significant portions of his story.
Mary wrote:I wasn't aware of that case, were you and what do you think of the way the church handled it?
No. I'm not familiar with that case. Given what we know about the Catholic pedophilia scandals and numerous cases of sexual abuse by sexual predators embedded in churches, to find similar abusers in the LDS church is not surprising. It's also not surprising that there are documented examples of leadership handling those cases in terrible and stupid manners. None of that has any bearing on Ron's credibility when he tells us this story.
This case is full of good examples of terrible handling of the situation. The mother never should have reacted to her daughter's story the way she did. Mickelson should never have called Ron's brother on the carpet the way he did. Regardless of whether she felt the daughter's story amounted to a violation of Utah's sexual abuse law, the police detective should have conducted a proper interview of MIckelsen. The Q12 shouldn't have failed to answer Ron's letters. The Eldest son shouldn't have been told that he had to love and forgive his grandfather or he couldn't go on a mission. The list goes on. But none of that points to a coordinated conspiracy to coverup known pedophilia at the highest ranks of the LDS church.
And none of it is evidence of whether the grandfather actually molested his granddaughter. All we have for that is the daughter's recollection, the circumstances under which she first expressed her recollection, and Ron's description of a phone call he wasn't a party to.
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
