April 4, 2018 UPDATE:  New information has now emerged demonstrating that the LDS Church has mishandled this scandal to a greater extent than contemplated even in the above essay.  You can read about it here.  It’s now known that the outside attorney hired by the Church responded to the existence of the taped conversation with Joseph Bishop by compiling a voluminous dossier against the victim, which not only included criminal charges brought against her, her LDS church discipline history and the occasions when employers fired her, but the name of the illegitimate child whom she gave up for adoption.  The lawyer then sent a letter to Greg Bishop, who is Joseph Bishop’s son and attorney, in which all such information was contained.  Not surprisingly, the younger Bishop released much of said information to the media in his own letter, in which he urged the media to consider the source of the allegations against his father, but redacted the name of the victim’s female child.  However, the daughter’s name was somehow thereafter leaked to the media as well. Said child, who is now a  35-year old adult, was shocked to read her name in the newspaper identified as the victim’s daughter, together with her whereabouts.

Said daughter had not been told about her birth mother because the record of the adoption had been sealed by the LDS Church’s adoption agency when the adoption took place.  Through considerable effort on the daughter’s part, she was able to find out on her own who her biological mother was, despite the Church’s sealed agency records.  Apparently, what the Church originally sealed in the interest of protecting the privacy of the victim, her daughter and the adoptive parents, it freely divulged to its outside attorney, despite the complete irrelevance of said information to the case.  In fact, the victim’s criminal history, whatever it consists of, her church membership history and her job terminations were all completely irrelevant to the matter, since the LDS church had Joseph Bishop’s own admissions on audiotape demonstrating that the allegations against him were true in every way material to church action against him.  To compile a dossier against the victim for the purpose of discrediting her, when it knew she was being truthful, was evil, and it was compounded by the initial press release detailed above wherein the church dishonestly pretended not to know who was telling the truth.

Moreover, said Church action, as many have now pointed out, will have a pronounced chilling effect on other victims who might be considering telling their own sexual abuse stories.  Recent events seem to indicate a tendency on the part of the Church to say, “Air our dirty laundry and we will drag your name through the mud, truth be damned.”