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Frank Curtis
Frank Curtis is an alleged serial child abuser, allegedly covered up by the church elders of the Mormon church. Over 18 years, Frank Curtis had sexually victimized people in seven different states in North America and after each incident, he was moved to a different ward. This case is chronicled in the book “The Sins of Brother Curtis: A Story of Betrayal, Conviction, and the Mormon Church,” by Lisa Davis (Simon & Schuster).

Frank Curtis was seventy-three years old and lived in an apartment in the back of the Southgate Animal Clinic. He held some sort of caretaker job at the clinic, and the apartment came with the deal. The clinic consisted of two buildings – Frank’s apartment was in the back of the larger building – with a wide asphalt parking lot between them where someone had erected a basketball hoop.

Curtis ingratiated himself into the lives of young boys from working-class Mormon families where money was tight, and was accepted by mothers and fathers who saw him in a kindly uncle or grandfather figure who enjoyed the blessing of the church. Having gained the families’ trust, Curtis became fiendishly helpful, offering to supervise trips or overnights out of the sight of parents, when he could manipulate his victims or ply them with alcohol. Curtis sometimes hosted neighbourhood boys from the Mormon church for a sleepover in his apartment. During one such evening, the atmosphere inevitably turned to child's-play, and a water-gun fight broke out using large syringes from the veterinary clinic where Curtis worked. He would order everyone to take off their wet clothes and the horseplay would continue through the small apartment. There was no chance of anyone running outside, as the doors were secured with dead-bolt locks to which Curtis held the key.

Brother Curtis also became the boys’ connection to contraband, as they grew closer to adolescence. He’d walk to a store on 82nd Avenue to buy cheap beer and allowed the boys to drink at his apartment in defiance of both the law and the Mormon religion, which forbids alcohol consumption. Occasionally Brother Curtis produced a small pile of “adult magazines”, such as Playboy, and left them on the floor for the boys to look at. Manny leafed through the pages, curious at the content, only briefly. He figured that sooner or later it would land him in trouble. The older boys pursued the magazines more seriously.

Retribution and Tim Kosnoff
In 1997, Seattle attorneys Tim Kosnoff and Joel Salmi took on the case of 18-year-old Jeremiah Scott, who, at age 12, was repeatedly abused by Brother Frank Curtis, an elder in Scott's Portland, Ore., Mormon community. When Scott's mother reported the abuse to her Mormon bishop, she was told the church was aware of Curtis's problem. So though Curtis had since died, the Scotts wanted to sue the church for failing to protect Scott. Kosnoff and Salmi soon discovered Curtis's pattern of molestation stretched back decades and across state lines.

As Kosnoff began to investigate the case, he discovered that the Sunday school teacher, Frank Curtis, possessed a long and violent prison record before he was welcomed into the church, where he became a respected elder entrusted with the care of prepubescent Mormon boys. Tim Kosnoff and his partners tirelessly assembled the case against the church, sifting through records, tracking down victims, and convincing them to testify about Curtis’s acts. What began as a case of one plaintiff turned into a complex web stretching across multiple states in North America. Joined by what would become a team of attorneys and investigators, Kosnoff found himself up against one of the most insular institutions in the United States: the Mormon church.

The Mormon Church
When children or adults abused as children come forth to complain about a sexual predator, they come forth to the adult men of the Mormon congregation. The Mormon Church is an insular religious community: Its bishops and stake presidents insist on handling all allegations internally, and they strongly discourage intervention by outside authorities. Church leaders often cover up or turn a blind eye to evidence of child sexual abuse and attempt to deal with pedophilia exclusively as a matter of sin and not as a crime or a grave threat to children and families. LDS Church General Authorities in Utah have known of the wide spread nature of this problem but continue to deny it and refuse to implement meaningful reforms that can better protect LDS children.

Anyone raised in the Latter Day Saints (LDS) organization is taught great reverence for the power and authority of the priesthood. Too often, protecting the power and image of the male leaders who possess the priesthood is the driving rationalization for covering up their crimes against children.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teaches that baptism into the church is a complete cleansing, an absolution of all sin. It is the mission of the church to call people to repentance. In his well-known Mormon text, The Miracle of Forgiveness, Mormon apostle Spencer W. Kimball discusses the church’s belief in repentance and rebaptism: “The effect of the cleansing is beautiful. These troubled souls have found peace. These soiled robes have been cleansed to spotlessness. These people formerly defiled, having been cleansed through their repentance – their washing, their purging their whitening – are made worthy for constant temple services and to be found before the throne of God associating with divine royalty.”

From the moment of baptism or rebaptism, according to LDS belief, the sins of the past are literally washed away and can no longer be acknowledged. The baptized Mormon starts anew with a ‘clean slate’. Mormons who have been excommunicated, as Frank Curtis had been, may work through a period of repentance that ultimately leads to rebaptism and, once again, a clean state. Using this line of reasoning, the church argued to the court that it could not consider Frank Curtis’ past sexual molestation of children after he’d been rebaptized. It would be a violation of the Mormon faith to consider his history of molesting children prior to rebaptism in any decision to call him to a position within the church. The church applied its clean-state argument to nearly every issue in the case. Its lawyers even seemed to be arguing that Jeremiah had somehow accepted the risk of encountering a pedophile in following the Mormon religion. In a motion asking the court to protect the church’s records, its lawyers wrote: “Plaintiff, having voluntarily agreed to abide by, and be governed by, church law cannot now challenge the procedure, for and effect of a fellow member’s rebaptism into the church. Because church doctrine holds that a member’s past history is essentially wiped clean upon rebaptism, plaintiff should not be permitted to inquire into facts and events which occurred prior to Curtis’ rebaptism in October 1984.”

The church’s lawyers maintained that to examine whether or not its officials knew about Frank Curtis’ past would be to examine the Mormon religion itself, which would violate the Free Exercise Clause. The court, they argued, should not allow the Scott team to use any information on Frank Curtis prior to his rebaptism. It should abide by the Mormon belief that Frank Curtis’ history of molesting children no longer existed. The lawyers insisted that “the church member starts with a ‘clean slate’. Since the Church doctrine is the belief that a re-baptized individual starts anew with a ‘clean slate’, it would be in violation of the First Amendment to allow a civil court to test the credibility or wisdom of that belief by allowing plaintiff to obtain information concerning Curtis’ actions prior to the rebaptism… The First Amendment requires that the court respect the Church’s internal procedures and policies, particularly with regards to church membership.”

By filing a lawsuit against the church for failing to warn the Scott family about Frank Curtis’ history of molesting children, the church’s lawyers argued, the Scotts were “most definitely challenging” the wisdom of the Mormon belief that at the time he was rebaptised, Curtis started with a clean slate. The First Amendment prohibited that sort of religious challenge. The LDS church’s lawyers quoted the Utah Supreme Court again in briefs they wrote to Judge Ceniceros arguing the First Amendment issue: “It is not the role of the secular court to pass (judgement) on the wisdom of the ecclesiastical decision to forgive, even if that decision allegedly creates negative consequences to third parties.”

The Mormon church has a deeper historical connection to the Constitution than any of the Scott team lawyers had realized. Even Tim Kosnoff, who by now had become the group’s resident expert on Mormon culture, didn’t fully grasp the importance of the Constitution in Mormonism. The church teaches that the Constitution of the United States was divinely inspired by men whom God chose as its authors. One Mormon prophet wrote of being visited in a Mormon temple by the Founding Fathers, who instructed him that the church must protect the Constitution. The idea that the Constitution was handed down from God, “by the hands of wise men”, is canonized in the Doctrine and Convenants, one of the fundamental works of the church. In 1957, Mormon president J. Reuben Clark Jr., a former undersecretary of state for whom the law school at Brigham Young University is named, gave a well-known address on the Constitution, in which he said: “I declare that the divine sanction thus repeatedly given by the Lord himself to the Constitution of the United States as it came from the hands of the Framers with its coterminous Bill of Rights, makes of the principles of that document an integral part of my religious faith. It is a revelation from the Lord. I believe and reverence its God-inspired provisions. My faith, my knowledge, my testimony of the Restored Gospel, based on the divine principle of continuous revelation, compel me so to believe. Thus has the Lord approved of our political system, an approval, so far as I know, such as he has given to no other political system of any other people in the world since the time of Jesus.”

Frank Curtis Timeline of Victims
Reference

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/addressing-pornography/resources-overview?lang=eng

A. Casanova (2018), Mormons - 10 Things to Know about the Church of Latter Day Saints,  ChristianHeadlines.com Contributor, Christianity.com, Published: May 21, 2018 https://www.christianity.com/church/denominations/are-mormons-christians-10-things-to-know-about-the-church-of-latter-day-saints.html

Landa. A (2012), Lawyer See Pattern in Mormon abuse, The Lantern Project: supporting victims of child abuse. CA: Fairfield, California Daily Republic http://www.lanternproject.org.uk/library/abuse-and-the-churches/abuse-and-the-mormon-church/lawyer-sees-pattern-in-mormon-abuse/

Lawton. C (2011), Lisa Davis Explores Betrayal and the Mormon Church in ‘The Sins of Brother Curtis’, Phoenix New Times. Phoenix, AZ: https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/arts/lisa-davis-explores-betrayal-and-the-mormon-church-in-the-sins-of-brother-curtis-6566257

Publishers Weekly https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-4165-9103-0

https://www.booktopia.com.au/ebooks/the-sins-of-brother-curtis-lisa-davis/prod9781451612851.html

https://www.goucher.edu/learn/graduate-programs/mfa-in-nonfiction/student-alumni-work/the-sins-of-brother-curtis

Goucher College (2019), 1021 Dulaney Valley Road Baltimore, MD 21204

2012, ''I read a book called: The Sins of Brother Curtis. A true story of a pedophile,'' Recovery from Mormonism,  https://www.exmormon.org/d6/drupal/Brother-Curtis-Pedophiles-in-Mormon-Church

2018, Man testifies in suit alleging Mormons overlooked sex abuse, AP News https://www.apnews.com/5fb8f3fb59fe4681bcb65fff3ef0798f

A. Casanova (2018), Mormons - 10 Things to Know about the Church of Latter Day Saints,  ChristianHeadlines.com Contributor, Christianity.com, Published: May 21, 2018

https://www.christianity.com/church/denominations/are-mormons-christians-10-things-to-know-about-the-church-of-latter-day-saints.html

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/addressing-pornography/resources-overview?lang=eng