1110: The LDS Church’s Coverup of Sterling Van Wagenen’s Sexual Abuse of Sean Escobar and Several Others Pt. 1
Mormon Stories Podcast
Dr. John Dehlin
4.5 • 5.7K Ratings
🗓️ 9 May 2019
⏱️ 80 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In February of this year, the Truth & Transparency Foundationreleased an audio recording made by Sean Escobar as he confronted his abuser as a child, Sterling Van Wagenen—co-founder of the Sundance Film Festival and director of many LDS Church-produced films, including the films shown in LDS temples. The story of the abuse and its impact has now made national news, spurred by the continuing coverage of The Truth and Transparency Foundationas it was revealed that even though the abuse was reported to LDS Church authorities, Sterling was not excommunicated, but went on to work as a professor at Brigham Young University and produce many LDS Church films.
Since the release of the audio recording by TTF, Sterling has since pled guilty to separate charges of child sex abuse in Utahand is currently awaiting sentencing.
In this interview, we share the complete audio recording of Sean's confrontation with Sterling, and then we process how the abuse affected Sean's life, including the fallout related to sharing the audio recording with The Truth and Transparency Foundation including the discovery of more victims.
Transcript
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| 0:55.7 | Hi. How are you? How are you? Good. This is Crystal. |
| 1:02.9 | Yeah, come on in. It's an early catch. Your directions are great. |
| 1:06.8 | Yeah, without the direction, good luck. Yeah, it's a little tricky. Good luck finding it. |
| 1:12.9 | Well, Crystal is just going to go down the stairs and watch some TV. |
| 1:16.8 | Yeah. And you and I can wait for you. That's why we're here. |
| 1:22.8 | Unless you had any, I mean, yeah, I think it'd be better if you're not here. I'd like to |
| 1:28.5 | watch action. Whichever you prefer. Yeah, no, that's fine. Okay. Yeah, just go, just go watch TV |
| 1:35.2 | downstairs, babe. Yeah, I go that for you. I appreciate that. Yeah, not the fun of circumstances |
| 1:42.5 | to meet under. No, but you know what? I saw the buyer encourage in doing this. I can't, I can't |
| 1:49.2 | tell you how great I think you are to follow through on this. Yeah, I understand that. I can't |
| 1:58.0 | hold all weekend. I keep feeling like, yeah, let's just bag it. You know what I mean? |
| 2:04.5 | I've been suck every day of the weekend and all weekend, I just felt sick. Like, you know, like, |
| 2:10.8 | why am I doing this to myself? You know, is it really necessary to do this to myself? |
| 2:16.2 | But it just keeps resurfacing for me. Sure. And I don't like to be one of those people, but |
| 2:29.0 | dwells on things. I don't like to be one of those people, but I don't want my past to define me, |
| 2:36.6 | but at the same time, my whole life, you know, I've wondered, there's a lot of things I've wondered. |
... |
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