Mormonism Explained
The Mormon Church Lawsuits: Is Abuse Being Covered Up?
A jury was told that Mormon bishops knew about a child rapist for seven years and said nothing. A state supreme court ruled those bishops followed the law. Both sentences are true. This is the story of how — and of what a decade of lawsuits actually proved.
Before We Begin
This article discusses child sexual abuse. It contains no graphic detail. If you or someone you know needs help, call or text the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-422-4453, the RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-4673, or 911 in an emergency. The Church’s own resource page is at churchofjesuschrist.org/get-help/abuse.
Key Takeaways
- On April 3, 2025, the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation declined to consolidate roughly fifty Mormon church abuse lawsuits alleging a nationwide concealment policy, finding the cases too varied. (MDL No. 24-2990)
- Arizona courts — including the Arizona Supreme Court in 2023 — ruled the bishops in the Adams case acted within the state’s clergy-penitent privilege; a 2025 appeals ruling revived the case only on the question of waiver.
- 33 states maintain a clergy-penitent exemption to abuse-reporting laws, applying to every faith. (AP, 2022)
- In the most-cited cases — Arizona, West Virginia, Idaho — the perpetrator was a family member or fellow congregant, not clergy acting in a church role.
- The largest publicly reported figures — a $32 million West Virginia settlement and a rejected $250 million Boy Scouts offer — are press-reported; most terms are confidential.
Search “Mormon church abuse lawsuit” — or its higher-stakes cousin, “Mormon church sexual abuse lawsuit” — and you will find two kinds of pages: law-firm advertisements soliciting clients, and headlines announcing that Mormons — members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — belong to an institution that hides child abuse the way the Catholic Church once did. What you will not easily find is anyone walking through the actual court record, case by case, and asking the only question that matters: does the evidence support the claim?
So that’s what this is. We took the lawsuits that generate nearly all of the coverage — Arizona, West Virginia, Idaho, and the Boy Scouts bankruptcy — and ran each through the same test we apply in every investigation: what was known, when it was known, what the law required at that time and place, what the written policy said, what was actually done, and what a court ultimately concluded. Survivor testimony is not on trial here; it never is in our work. Institutional claims are.
The Case Everyone Cites: Arizona
In 2022, the Associated Press published an investigation built around a horrifying case from Bisbee, Arizona. A member named Paul Adams confessed to his bishop, John Herrod, that he had abused his young daughter. The bishop called the Church’s abuse help line. The abuse continued for years, ending only when Homeland Security agents — acting on a tip traced from New Zealand, with no help from the Church — arrested Adams in 2017. He died by suicide in custody. His children sued the Church in 2021. The AP’s frame: the help line is a system for diverting abuse away from police.
Here is the timeline the courts saw — much of it drawn from the Church’s August 17, 2022 statement and the court record — that most coverage compressed or skipped:
Seven Years, Four Refusals
The Adams Case Timeline
What the bishop did after the confession, per the Church’s published account and court filings
Verified
Church Account
2010–2011
Adams makes a limited confession to Bishop Herrod. Herrod calls the Church abuse help line and is advised the confession is privileged under Arizona law.
Refusal 1
Herrod asks Adams to report himself to police. Adams refuses.
Refusal 2
Herrod asks Adams for permission to make the report himself. Denied.
Refusal 3
Herrod brings in Adams’s wife, Leizza, and urges her to report. She refuses — and later serves a prison sentence for failure to report.
Refusal 4
Leaders urge professional counseling, which would trigger a mandatory report by the counselor. The family refuses.
2013
Adams is excommunicated. He rarely attended church before or after his confession.
2017
Federal agents arrest Adams after tracing videos he posted online. The Church states it learned only then, from media reports, that the abuse had continued and included a second child born after his excommunication.
Sources: Church Newsroom (Aug. 17, 2022); Cochise County Superior Court record; Arizona Supreme Court ruling (Apr. 2023); AP reporting. Stamps: VERIFIED = multiple independent sources or court findings. CHURCH ACCOUNT = the Church’s published narrative, consistent with but not independently established by the court record.
Then the courts spoke. In 2023, Cochise County Superior Court dismissed the case, ruling the clergy-penitent privilege excused the bishops from Arizona’s mandatory reporting law. The Arizona Supreme Court had already sided with the Church on the privilege’s scope. In July 2025, an appeals court revived the case — but read the ruling carefully: it holds that a jury should decide whether Adams waived the privilege by repeating his confession with his wife present and at a disciplinary hearing. That is a technical waiver question. It is not a finding that anyone ignored a duty to report. As of this writing the litigation continues, and we will update this page as it does.
The Claim
“Mormon bishops knew a child was being raped for seven years and the Church’s system buried it.”
What the Record Shows
A bishop who sought reporting four ways and was refused each time; a state law — written by legislators, not the Church — that courts up to Arizona’s highest ruled the Church followed; and abuse that continued in a home, hidden from leaders, after excommunication.
The Hard Cases — Because Objective Means All of It
If the Arizona record runs the Church’s way, two other cases run harder against it, and we will not skip them.
West Virginia (Jensen). Families alleged the Church failed to warn congregations about Michael Jensen, a young member later sentenced to 35–75 years for child abuse, whose babysitting was recommended within his ward. The Church settled in 2018 after trial began — a figure reported at $32 million, though the terms are confidential REPORTED. When the Church sued its insurers to cover the settlement, it lost: U.S. District Judge Tena Campbell wrote that the Church “had multiple opportunities to act and failed to do so.” That is a real judicial rebuke in a specific case, and no honest accounting omits it.
Idaho (Goodrich). The AP reported that after Chelsea Goodrich accused her father — a former bishop — of abusing her as a child, a Church attorney offered a settlement conditioned on confidentiality and on destroying recordings of their meetings. Charges against John Goodrich were initially dropped when the Church declined to waive the clergy privilege for a bishop’s testimony; he was later arrested on new charges after additional accusers came forward. The Church notes he was excommunicated and has not been readmitted. The settlement-and-recordings offer is, at minimum, terrible optics that the Church’s critics did not invent DISPUTED CONDUCT.
The Boy Scouts chapter. Mormons chartered a large share of America’s Scout troops for 105 years, ending in 2019. In the BSA bankruptcy — driven by roughly 82,000 abuse claims against Scouting nationwide — the Church offered $250 million to the settlement trust; a judge rejected that deal in 2022 because the liability release it sought swept too broadly. The scale here belongs to Scouting as an institution spanning every sponsor, but the Church’s deep entanglement with it is part of this record.
The Biggest Test the Cover-Up Claim Ever Faced
Here’s the moment almost nobody covered. In early 2025, attorneys representing dozens of federal plaintiffs asked the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation to consolidate roughly fifty abuse lawsuits against the Church into a single national case. Their theory was the cover-up claim in its purest form: a nationwide policy of concealment, run through the help line, uniform enough to try as one scheme.
Consolidation is exactly what federal courts grant when uniform institutional conduct plausibly ties cases together — it’s how the Uber assault litigation and countless corporate MDLs proceed. So this was the claim’s best shot: one panel, every case, the whole theory on the table.
On April 3, 2025, the panel said no. It ruled that “centralization is not necessary” — because the cases were too varied to be one thing: perpetrators ranging from congregants to missionaries to family members, allegations spanning five decades, and church policies that changed repeatedly across that span. Read that reasoning again. The panel was asked to treat these lawsuits as a single national scheme, and what it found instead was the opposite of uniformity — the exact quality a scheme requires. VERIFIED
Be precise about what this is: a procedural ruling on consolidation, not a merits verdict. No one was acquitted of anything on April 3. But that’s also why it cuts so deep — consolidation was denied because the factual pattern the cover-up theory predicts is not what the record contains. The plaintiffs’ own vehicle for proving one national scheme couldn’t get out of the garage.
The Claim
“The Church maintained a nationwide policy of concealing sexual abuse.” — the theory placed before the federal panel
What the Panel Found
Cases too varied to centralize: different perpetrators, five decades, changing policies, dozens of jurisdictions. Asked to treat it as one national scheme, the panel said no. (JPML, MDL No. 24-2990, Apr. 3, 2025)
Now Look At Who the Perpetrators Actually Were
The panel’s reasoning points straight at the structural fact almost no coverage states plainly. The Catholic crisis — the “Spotlight” pattern — was clergy abusing children in their clerical role, with a hierarchy reassigning them. Look at who actually committed the abuse in the most-cited Mormon cases:
Who Was the Perpetrator?
The most-cited cases in coverage of “Mormon church abuse” — not a census of all cases
Arizona — Paul Adams
Family abuse in the home. The lawsuit is about whether clergy who heard a confession had to report it.
West Virginia — Michael Jensen
A young congregant, not a leader. The lawsuit is about failure to warn families.
Idaho — John Goodrich
Family abuse in the home. The lawsuit is about whether clergy who heard a confession had to report it.
BSA Bankruptcy
Claims against Scouting across all sponsors over decades; the Church was Scouting’s largest charter partner.
Pattern: family and congregant abuse followed by disputes over reporting law — a structurally different phenomenon from institutional abuse by clergy acting in church roles. Individual clergy-perpetrator cases exist and are prosecuted; they do not drive these headline lawsuits.
This matters because it changes what the lawsuits are actually about. They are overwhelmingly fights over state confession laws — laws the Church did not write and every major faith in America shares.
The Real Battlefield: 33 States
Mandatory reporting and clergy-penitent privilege are two different legal questions, and conflating them is where most misleading coverage starts. Per the AP’s own reporting, 33 states maintain a clergy-penitent exemption; the federal Child Welfare Information Gateway tracks the state-by-state detail. These laws protect Catholic confession, Protestant pastoral counseling, and Latter-day Saint confession alike.
What does current Church policy say inside that legal patchwork? The General Handbook and the Church’s published abuse resources instruct leaders to fulfill all legal reporting duties, to never disregard a report of abuse, and to never counsel a person not to report criminal activity. The help line’s published purposes include reporting directly to authorities — regardless of legal exemptions — whenever a child is in imminent danger. Whether practice matched policy is exactly what each case above tests; the policy itself is the opposite of a concealment directive.
Abuse Has No Denomination
One more piece of context the cover-up narrative can’t survive. The closest thing that exists to a cross-denominational measuring stick is insurance data. In the only such dataset ever published, the three companies insuring most U.S. Protestant churches told the AP they received upward of 260 reports per year of sexual abuse of minors — against roughly 228 per year from Catholic churches in the same period.
Reported Abuse Claims Per Year, by Church Insurance Data
The only published cross-denominational dataset (2007, Associated Press)
Source: AP via Insurance Journal (2007); Church Mutual, GuideOne, Brotherhood Mutual, insuring 165,495 congregations. The dataset is dated — it remains the most-cited figure in the field precisely because no institution publishes audited abuse-report data. A report is an accusation, not a finding of guilt. No comparable audited Latter-day Saint dataset exists. DATA GAP
Federal data adds the uncomfortable baseline: roughly nine in ten child victims are abused by someone they or their family know — most often in the home, not the pew. Abuse is a societal scourge that follows children wherever children are: families, schools, sports, and every religious tradition. Which is why serious observers judge institutions not on whether abuse ever occurred among their members, but on response systems — and why the next article in this series goes inside the Church’s help line with two attorneys who answered it.
What Would a Real Cover-Up Require?
“Cover-up” is a systemic claim. Systemic claims require systemic proof. Here is the checklist — and what a national investigation with subpoena-powered litigation behind it has actually produced:
Not Found – A directive instructing leaders to conceal abuse or obstruct reporting. Published policy states the opposite.
Not Found – A documented cross-jurisdiction pattern of suppressed reports. The AP’s evidence base — including 12,000 pages of sealed West Virginia records — yielded individual disputed cases, not a pattern finding by any court.
Found – Specific failures and disputed conduct in individual cases (Jensen; the Goodrich settlement terms), documented above.
Found – A genuine transparency gap: no independently audited data on help-line calls and outcomes, from the Church or anyone else. DATA GAP
Critics have had the subpoenas, the sealed records, and the headlines. The systemic proof hasn’t come.
The Bounded Verdict
Cover-up is a systemic claim, and systemic claims require systemic proof. After a national investigation built on 12,000 pages of sealed records, litigation that reached the Arizona Supreme Court, and a federal panel that — asked in 2025 to treat these cases as one national scheme — said no, that proof has not surfaced. On the central question — did bishops break the law by not reporting? — every Arizona court to reach it answered no; what remains in litigation is a technical question about waiver, not duty. The most-cited cases turn out to be family abuse — fathers and babysitters, not clergy acting in church roles — and the real dispute is over confession laws that legislatures wrote and every major faith shares. Specific failures happened; we documented them above, because that is what objective means. But the evidence for a church designed to hide abuse isn’t thin. After all this looking, it’s absent.
Real, and Documented
- Judicial rebuke in the Jensen insurance ruling
- The Goodrich confidentiality-and-recordings offer
- No published, audited outcome data
Claimed, Not Established
- A system designed to conceal abuse
- Bishops breaking reporting laws (courts ruled otherwise)
- A Catholic-style clergy-perpetrator pattern
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the Mormon church being sued for abuse?
Yes — in Arizona, West Virginia, Idaho, California, Oregon and elsewhere. In the most-cited cases the perpetrator was a family member or fellow congregant, and the legal fight centers on clergy reporting duties under state law.
Did courts find that the Mormon church covered up abuse?
No court has found a systemic cover-up. Arizona courts found clergy acted within the state’s privilege law; a 2025 ruling revived the case on the narrower waiver question. The Jensen matter produced a case-specific judicial criticism, not a systemic finding.
Are Mormon bishops required to report abuse to police?
It depends on the state: 33 states maintain a clergy-penitent exemption. Church policy instructs leaders to fulfill all legal duties, never disregard a report, and never counsel anyone not to report.
Did a court consolidate the Mormon abuse lawsuits into one national case?
No. On April 3, 2025, the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation declined to consolidate roughly fifty federal lawsuits alleging a nationwide concealment policy, finding the cases too varied — different perpetrators, five decades, changing policies. It is a procedural ruling, not a merits verdict, but it means no court has accepted the one-national-scheme framing.
How much has the LDS Church paid in abuse settlements?
No audited total exists. Reported figures include a $32 million West Virginia settlement and a rejected $250 million Boy Scouts trust offer; most terms are confidential, so public numbers are press-reported, not verified totals.
Sources
Church Newsroom, “Church Provides Further Details about the Arizona Abuse Case” (Aug. 17, 2022) · ChurchofJesusChrist.org, “Protecting Members and Reporting Abuse” and “Abuse Help Line” · Arizona Supreme Court ruling (Apr. 2023) via Deseret News, Salt Lake Tribune · Arizona Court of Appeals ruling (Jul. 2025) via Arizona Capitol Times, Axios SLC · Cochise County Superior Court dismissal (Nov. 2023) via Salt Lake Tribune · AP investigations (2022–2023) via PBS NewsHour · Fox 13 Salt Lake City, insurance ruling coverage (2025) · U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation, order denying transfer, In re Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints Sexual Abuse Litigation, MDL No. 24-2990 (Apr. 3, 2025), via AboutLawsuits · Floodlit reporting on the BSA settlement offer (2025) · AP/Insurance Journal, church insurer data (2007) · Child Welfare Information Gateway, clergy reporting overview. Case facts current as of July 20, 2026; this page is updated as litigation develops, per our corrections policy.