1111: The LDS Church’s Coverup of Sterling Van Wagenen’s Sexual Abuse of Sean Escobar and Several Others Pt. 2
Mormon Stories Podcast
Dr. John Dehlin
4.5 • 5.7K Ratings
🗓️ 9 May 2019
⏱️ 101 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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| 0:35.2 | Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host, |
| 0:55.7 | John DeLin. It's May 4th 2019. Again, may the fourth be with you. We're in part two of our |
| 1:02.0 | interview with Sean and Crystal Escobar. We just did a good three to four hours with Sean and |
| 1:09.5 | Crystal about their faith journey about their lives as teenagers. The sexual ashamed that they |
| 1:17.5 | dealt with as kind of semi-active Mormons. Then both serving missions and turning their lives |
| 1:23.8 | around from a church's perspective, getting married ultimately in the temple. And then the |
| 1:29.8 | joys in the sadness of trying to live this orthodox life on what we call the hustling for |
| 1:38.7 | worthiness sort of cycle. And ultimately how that led to a faith crisis for Will Sean and then |
| 1:46.4 | Crystal and how they've made sense of their faith journey now. And it was just a beautiful, |
| 1:55.3 | powerful, vulnerable and important session. So I'm very happy that we spent that time going |
| 2:01.7 | deep in the long format. Part two of this interview is now definitely equally as important in so many |
| 2:10.0 | ways. Some of you may have already heard the news and I'm going to tell the high level story before |
| 2:16.0 | we get into it. But you just need to know how important the story is. When Sean was a boy, |
| 2:22.4 | he was sleeping over at a friend's house. His friend was the son of Sterling Van Wagnon. |
| 2:30.7 | And Sterling Van Wagnon, for those of you who don't know, is one of the most famous Mormon |
| 2:35.3 | filmmakers of all time. He produced a film that ended up winning an Academy Award, which is rare |
... |
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