In August 2022, the Associated Press published an investigation by reporter Michael Rezendes, built from nearly 12,000 pages of sealed court records tied to a civil lawsuit in Arizona. At its center is a Bisbee, Arizona family: a father confessed to his Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints bishop in 2011 that he was abusing his young daughter, and the bishop, following church procedure, called the church's help line, a service that connects local leaders to advice on reporting obligations.
What the AP reports happened next, and what the church says happened next, do not agree. The AP's account, drawn from the sealed records, is that church attorneys reached through the help line instructed the bishop not to report the abuse to police, citing Arizona's clergy-penitent privilege. The abuse continued for roughly seven more years, the AP reports, and extended to a second child. The church excommunicated the father in 2013, an internal disciplinary step that did not, on the AP's account, come with a report to law enforcement.
The church's own public response, issued the same week the AP story ran, calls that account "seriously mischaracterized" and "oversimplified and incomplete." Its statement describes the help line's actual purpose as ensuring local leaders comply with every legal reporting requirement, giving volunteer bishops access to expert guidance on whether and how to report, and states that help-line conversations cover stopping the abuse, caring for the victim, and meeting reporting obligations, in the church's words, "even in cases when the law provides clergy-penitent privilege."
This atlas records both accounts as what they are: the AP's own documented investigation, and the church's own public response to it, neither smoothed into the other. The father was never tried for the abuse itself; he was arrested by the FBI in 2017 on separate charges after Interpol discovered child sexual abuse material linked to him, and died by suicide in jail before any trial. No one involved is named here, a deliberate choice explained in this file's own header.