Nelsons daughter and son-in-law accused of sex abuse

[_Lemmie]

That there are victims is convincing, exactly how far the accusations go is the question...

Here I disagree entirely, unless you are referring only to accusations about the father. I agree the father probably abused the children; the evidence seems to support that, that abuse is awful enough and needs to be addressed.. The accusations related to Snow's involvement in this lawsuit that go beyond that one person, however, have been thoroughly and completely discredited. There is no justification to continue addressing Snow's debunked theories of the 80's as though any aspect of them were true.

[_cinepro]

Apart from me using Eileen instead of Janice, (I have a weird way of remembering names) what was inaccurate about what I said? I was speaking solely to Marion Smith's account.

This is what you said:

Going over the Marion Smith account again, the timeline begins with her lesson she gave at church, upon request, about the symptoms of sexual abuse. Children would come forward after that, then were referred to therapists including Snow. According to Smith's account, I might need to adjust what I said, in that the concerns about sexual abuse were already raised before the children spoke to Snow.

As I said, that is definitely not where the timeline begins. And even I began too late. The timeline for the accusations against the Miles begins in 1980 with the book "Michelle Remembers", and then continues with the McMartin and Kern County cases. The Utah portion starts in 1985 where I started my timeline.

My biggest concern now is how those who are arguing the case against the Miles are trying to carefully craft the narrative to omit the strong context that indicates they are obviously innocent and the charges against them have no more merit than the charges that Dr. Snow leveled against the 40 people in Lehi.

The theory that there was a sex ring involving babysitters, teenagers, Bill Carstensen and the Miles has serious problems and many of those problems are introduced by Marion Smith's own retelling of the story (I suspect her sincerity blinded her to the problems she was including).

In these cases, there were many times that false accusations were made as a result of counseling sessions. There were several false confessions. All of that is a normal and expected part of the SRA moral panic, and it's not surprising to see them present in the Miles' case as well.

But no one can explain to me how a child molester and member of a neighborhood sex ring could insist that his own child be taken to a therapist that has already shown herself to be capable of discovering sex rings (since she had already "outed" a member of the very sex ring he was a member of!)

People insist Bill "confessed" that the Miles were involved, but if you read the actual purported "confession", he barely knows what's going on, and Smith herself is introducing all the information and even admits Carstensen didn't add anything to the story. As with other such "confessions", Carstensen was probably at a point where he thought things had happened that he couldn't remember, so Smith must have been telling him the truth about things he had done, and he was doing his best to remember it and figure out what happened. He twice uses the word "conceive" when discussing the Miles, as in he's trying to imagine what happened. He's not remembering it.

Maybe Bill was a child molester. But at this point, I'm not taking Marion Smith's word for it.

[_Meadowchik]

I don't mind if you want to adjust my quote to make your point, but please then indicate that YOU are the author of the strike-outs, not me. I specifically used "full and irreparably" because I don't think there is a way to untangle the aspects.

Sorry about that. That was thoughtless of me to not attribute the strikeouts properly to me. (I think I was all to excited that I figured out to use the strikeout function.)

[_Meadowchik]

That there are victims is convincing, exactly how far the accusations go is the question...

Here I disagree entirely, unless you are referring only to accusations about the father. I agree the father probably abused the children; the evidence seems to support that, that abuse is awful enough and needs to be addressed.. The accusations related to Snow's involvement in this lawsuit that go beyond that one person, however, have been thoroughly and completely discredited. There is no justification to continue addressing Snow's debunked theories of the 80's as though any aspect of them were true.

I'm referring to the father's abuse. I have no interest in defending Snow's discredited techniques. I am interested in seeing what product might be salvageable through a combination of testimony from survivors today and a careful study of what remains of the testimony produced then.

[_Meadowchik]

Apart from me using Eileen instead of Janice, (I have a weird way of remembering names) what was inaccurate about what I said? I was speaking solely to Marion Smith's account.

This is what you said:

Going over the Marion Smith account again, the timeline begins with her lesson she gave at church, upon request, about the symptoms of sexual abuse. Children would come forward after that, then were referred to therapists including Snow. According to Smith's account, I might need to adjust what I said, in that the concerns about sexual abuse were already raised before the children spoke to Snow.

As I said, that is definitely not where the timeline begins. And even I began too late. The timeline for the accusations against the Miles begins in 1980 with the book "Michelle Remembers", and then continues with the McMartin and Kern County cases. The Utah portion starts in 1985 where I started my timeline.

My biggest concern now is how those who are arguing the case against the Miles are trying to carefully craft the narrative to omit the strong context that indicates they are obviously innocent and the charges against them have no more merit than the charges that Dr. Snow leveled against the 40 people in Lehi.

The theory that there was a sex ring involving babysitters, teenagers, Bill Carstensen and the Miles has serious problems and many of those problems are introduced by Marion Smith's own retelling of the story (I suspect her sincerity blinded her to the problems she was including).

In these cases, there were many times that false accusations were made as a result of counseling sessions. There were several false confessions. All of that is a normal and expected part of the SRA moral panic, and it's not surprising to see them present in the Miles' case as well.

But no one can explain to me how a child molester and member of a neighborhood sex ring could insist that his own child be taken to a therapist that has already shown herself to be capable of discovering sex rings (since she had already "outed" a member of the very sex ring he was a member of!)

People insist Bill "confessed" that the Miles were involved, but if you read the actual purported "confession", he barely knows what's going on, and Smith herself is introducing all the information and even admits Carstensen didn't add anything to the story. As with other such "confessions", Carstensen was probably at a point where he thought things had happened that he couldn't remember, so Smith must have been telling him the truth about things he had done, and he was doing his best to remember it and figure out what happened. He twice uses the word "conceive" when discussing the Miles, as in he's trying to imagine what happened. He's not remembering it.

Maybe Bill was a child molester. But at this point, I'm not taking Marion Smith's word for it.

Thanks for providing more context. FTR I was getting at a specific point as made from a reading of Smith's account and was certainly not attempting to provide a complete contextual picture. I was specifically trying to address the timing of first disclosures in relation to Snow's involvement. And I did get it wrong.

[_Meadowchik]

But no one can explain to me how a child molester and member of a neighborhood sex ring could insist that his own child be taken to a therapist that has already shown herself to be capable of discovering sex rings (since she had already "outed" a member of the very sex ring he was a member of!)

People insist Bill "confessed" that the Miles were involved, but if you read the actual purported "confession", he barely knows what's going on, and Smith herself is introducing all the information and even admits Carstensen didn't add anything to the story. As with other such "confessions", Carstensen was probably at a point where he thought things had happened that he couldn't remember, so Smith must have been telling him the truth about things he had done, and he was doing his best to remember it and figure out what happened. He twice uses the word "conceive" when discussing the Miles, as in he's trying to imagine what happened. He's not remembering it.

Maybe Bill was a child molester. But at this point, I'm not taking Marion Smith's word for it.

I wouldn't take her word for it, either. The assumption for me is that a given element of Marion's story is only relevant inasmuch as it can be individually corroborated. We don't just take one person's narrative and set it to a jury. Facts and evidence must be introduced.

[_Lemmie]

That there are victims is convincing, exactly how far the accusations go is the question...

Here I disagree entirely, unless you are referring only to accusations about the father. I agree the father probably abused the children; the evidence seems to support that, that abuse is awful enough and needs to be addressed.. The accusations related to Snow's involvement in this lawsuit that go beyond that one person, however, have been thoroughly and completely discredited. There is no justification to continue addressing Snow's debunked theories of the 80's as though any aspect of them were true.

I'm referring to the father's abuse. I have no interest in defending Snow's discredited techniques. I am interested in seeing what product might be salvageable through a combination of testimony from survivors today and a careful study of what remains of the testimony produced then.

I see. I thought you were discussing the lawsuit. Focusing on just the father will be difficult in the context of this legal case, which is not making that distinction, as cinepro pointed out:

My biggest concern now is how those who are arguing the case against the Miles are trying to carefully craft the narrative to omit the strong context that indicates they are obviously innocent and the charges against them have no more merit than the charges that Dr. Snow leveled against the 40 people in Lehi.

The theory that there was a sex ring involving babysitters, teenagers, Bill Carstensen and the Miles has serious problems and many of those problems are introduced by Marion Smith's own retelling of the story (I suspect her sincerity blinded her to the problems she was including).

[_cinepro]

I see. I thought you were discussing the lawsuit. Focusing on just the father will be difficult in the context of this legal case, which is not making that distinction,

I just re-read the court filing, and it's tough, because it sounds like the accusations from the step-kids are totally different than the original "touching-party" accusations. For one, there doesn't appear to be a therapist involved. They appear to be normal memories.

But the problem is that the step-kids aren't relevant to the Miles case, and it seems to be the Miles-Nelson connection that they're going for in order to make a case for dragging the Church into it.

I'm also a little confused by the insistence that the Church was derelict in not disciplining Carstensen and the Miles. Setting aside any claims of discernment, doesn't Church discipline usually follow law enforcement investigation? I mean, you have the Miles adamantly denying it, law enforcement investigating it and not finding anything, and yet the Church is supposed to excommunicate them anyway? Really?

And it wasn't just two beat cops warning the Miles that they were coming over the next day to poke around.

Investigators at the city and county level at the time found no evidence of a Bountiful sex abuse ring allegedly involving the Mileses. A state investigation also found no evidence to corroborate more than 220 claims of ritual sex abuse in Utah that mirrored a national trend of accusations later attributed to the counseling techniques of recovered-memory therapy, a practice now widely rejected by research psychologists because of the possibility of planted memories.

David Jordan, an attorney with Stoel Rives who is assisting the church in this matter, provided declarations under oath from the lead investigators and prosecutors who examined claims of two alleged sex rings in the Mueller Park neighborhood in Bountiful. They say church officials did not try to shape the investigation.

Decades-old Bountiful case alleges church connection to abuse allegations

Obviously, once people think it's a conspiracy the denials just become evidence of the conspiracy. But it is what it is.

[_Mary]

One of the new pieces of information I gleaned from David Eccles Hardy's posts was that the police investigation entailed giving 24 hours notice of a house search to both the Miles and the Carstensen's. More than enough time to ensure the houses are clean of evidence. Personally, I've never heard of the police being so helpful to alleged perpetrators, but along with Snow's discredited methods on some cases, perhaps it was just the way they did things back then (sarcasm).

Cinepro and the Miles motion to dismiss takes a position that the abuse of the Carstensen children was a case of Satanic Ritual Abuse. That then enables a line of reasoning that suggests a timeline back to a moral panic begun by Padzer and continuing into Utah via warned and trained therapists.

Yet SRA is not being suggested in the Carstensen case, and Cinepro would have to be clear on what constitutes SRA and then explain why many elements of SRA according to his definition do not infact appear in the Miles case.

We know, I think, that Barbara Snow met with the Carstensen girls twice sometime in January, where on the 2nd meeting they both disclosed the abuse of Janice and two male accomplices. No SRA, just a babysitter engaging in sex play with the kids. That wasn't disproved. The babysitter later committed suicide and Smith engaged with the parents and told them to get the child (16) therapy. They had no intention of bringing charges against her.

Back to Snow. We know she met twice with the girls in January of 1986. Hardy also informs us the girls also met with other therapists. So Snow is a part player in this among a field of therapists. In a 3 to 6 week window, one of the girls disclosed to her mother the abuse of the Miles and then the abuse of the father. Hardy confirms this through the Mother and Snow, who knew nothing about the Miles. The suggestion categorically didn't come from her.

So, I can understand why the Miles team would want to include this case wholely under the category of SRA and Snow, but the case is much more complicated than that.

[_Meadowchik]

I see. I thought you were discussing the lawsuit. Focusing on just the father will be difficult in the context of this legal case, which is not making that distinction, as cinepro pointed out:

I am still interested in the lawsuit. The victims are saying they were abused by the Miles and their father. From the beginning of this thread, people have tried to dismiss all claims of abuse due to the association of Snow with the case. Yet the is concrete evidence that the children were victims of sexual abuse and a documented confession from the father. Therefore, the accusations cannot simply be dismissed, not those made against the father or the Miles.

In other words, what is used to wholesale dismiss the abuse claims is invalid.