The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sex abuse survivor wants action over words
SBC plan is to release list of alleged abusers.
When David Pittman was contacted by independent investigators last fall about sexual abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention, his first thought was “it’s about time.”
Pittman is one of the survivors identified in the 288-page report by Guidepost Solutions, released Sunday. It painstakingly detailed how — over decades — the SBC leadership and lawyers failed to address and covered up allegations of sexual abuse. Survivors were either stonewalled, met with disbelief or hostility.
It came just weeks before next month’s 2022 SBC Annual Meeting & Pastors’ Conference in Anaheim, Calif., when officials expect to come up with permanent ways to address the issue.
Pittman, 54, grew up in Tucker and attended Tucker High School.
He was abused by his church youth minister for three years, starting when Pittman was 12. He hid that secret for decades.
“You didn’t talk about sex, much less sexual abuse in the Southern Baptist church,” he said.
Pittman said he didn’t feel a sense of relief at the report’s release, he just finally feels like “somebody might believe us now because it’s in black and white, in a legal document and filed by a respected organization. Our stories are in one place and that is important because we got brushed aside and hateful things were said to us. At least now they can’t logically say none of it happened.”
On Thursday, the committee plans to made public a secret list they deem credible compiled by a former interim president of the executive committee. The names of survivors who do not want to be identified, confidential witnesses, and details regarding any unsubstantiated allegations will be redacted before the document is published.
The creation of a publicly-accessible database was one of the
Guidepost recommendations.
Since the report came out, the SBC Executive Committee, Guidepost Solutions and members of the Sexual Abuse Task Force, formed after the 2021 annual meeting to supervise the independent investigation, have been fielding calls from survivors regarding allegations of sexual abuse. The landmark report covers a period from Jan. 1, 2000, to June 14, 2021.
The SBC Executive Committee, the denomination’s governing body, has entered into an agreement for Guidepost to maintain a confidential hotline for survivors or their representatives to submit allegations of abuse within the SBC.
Survivors will be notified of options for care and will be put in touch with an advocate. (The hotline is 202-864-5578 or Sbchotline@guidepostsolutions. com).
During a Zoom meeting on Tuesday, the Rev. Rolland Slade, chairman of the Executive Committee said he could not imagine the pain that survivors are going through or the pain they have endured for decades. He asked for patience as the leadership continues to process the report.
It’s a “new day” in the Executive Committee of the SBC, he said. “Our commitment is to be different and do different. Now that we know, we need to do better.”
Still, patience has worn thin for some survivors.
Pittman wants people to be held accountable and changes to be made in the SBC.
“Words are hollow and meaningless without action,” Pittman said. “As a survivor of abuse at the hands of a Southern Baptist minister, that’s the only way I’ll believe it.”
Pittman now lives in Florida with his wife, Linda, who is also a sexual abuse survivor, though hers did not occur in the church.
David Pittman serves as director of Together We Heal, a nonprofit that advocates for survivors of childhood sexual abuse; and as a trainer for Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment (GRACE).
He said his alleged abuser still has a role in a Georgia church, although it’s no longer affiliated with the SBC.
Pittman’s pain nearly destroyed him.
He covered it with drugs. “I didn’t have a drug of choice, it was whatever I could get my hands on.”
He hated God. He hated the church.
He didn’t walk through the doors of a church for 25 years.
Now he’s clean and helping other survivors. He knows God isn’t to blame, but the man who took his innocence away.
Over the years he has become friends with some of the other survivors mentioned in the report. It’s a friendship birthed from pain.
While he knew others had been abused by people in various churches they once trusted it was disturbing to read details of that abuse.
“It was hard to really get through,” he said. “I’m a friend to all of those survivors, not because we wanted to become friends. We would never have met had we not been molested or raped by these predators.”
There are more than 3,370 Southern Baptist churches in Georgia. Nationwide, Southern Baptist represent the largest Protestant denomination with roughly 14 million members.
Mike Mcdonnell, communications manager for SNAP (Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests) , has been fielding calls and emails from survivors nonstop since the report was released.
He said survivors have battled the pain of abuse for years, sometimes silenced by fear of retribution and fear of being shunned by their faith communities. Some victims will never come forward. He said the average age for someone who suffered from childhood abuse to come forward is age 52. “Trauma takes time,” he said. The Executive Committee “has the opportunity right now to act quickly and begin reversing those years of self-serving secrecy and release the name now,” said Mcdonnell. “It will help them begin to clean up the wreckage of the past so true transparency and accountability can be achieved.”
Americans on the cusp of retiring are facing a tough choice as they watch their nest eggs shrink: Stay the course or keep working.
A stock market slump this year has taken a big bite out of investors’ portfolios, including retirement plans such as 401(k)s. The S&P 500, the benchmark for many index funds, is down about 17% since its all-time high in early January.
The sharp reversal after a banner 2021 for Wall Street has been particularly unsettling for those who had been planning to retire sooner rather than later, banking on a healthier stock portfolio to help fund their post-work lifestyle.
It doesn’t help that the cost of everything from gasoline to food is up sharply amid the highest inflation since the 1970s. And that the Federal Reserve’s recipe for fighting inflation — hiking interest rates — has heightened fears the U.S. economy will slide into a recession. All of that is bad news for corporate earnings growth, which is a key driver of stock prices.
The market skid has financial planners hearing more often from anxious clients seeking advice and reassurance in equal measure. They say some clients are opting to push back their retirement date in hopes that will buy time for their investments to bounce back. Meanwhile, retirees already tapping their investments may have to consider beefing up their savings with a part-time job or putting off major travel or spending plans.
“From late 2020 through 2021, we saw a wave of clients retire because of the large gains in the stock market and because they no longer wanted to work in the COVID ‘new normal’ work environment,” said Mark Rylance, a financial planner in Newport Beach, Calif.
This year, half of the clients who discussed retirement opted to retire while the other half decided to hold off, he said.
Historically, the stock market has tended to deliver positive returns within a year following steep declines. But unlike younger investors who can ride out Wall Street’s sharp swings, workers closing in on retirement don’t have as much time to make up losses from hefty market downturns.
“I am a little afraid — I don’t want to work until I’m 70,” said Nancy Roberts, 60, a librarian in Meridian, Idaho.
Roberts is counting on her IRA to fund her retirement, which is a little over four years away. But the market decline has her feeling stressed.
“I do know I’ve lost money, but I’m trying not to freak out and look at it every day,” she said.
Many soon-to-be retirees are also terrified about inflation, which can be “devastating” over decades, said Mark Struthers, a financial adviser with Sona Wealth Advisers in St. Paul, Minn.
Social Security has a built-in inflation adjustment that doesn’t keep up with real inflation, he said, and pensions — which far fewer workers have these days — often max out the inflation adjustment at 1.5%.
“Compounding is magical when it is working for you but devastating when it’s working against you,” Struthers said.
He advises retirees who are worried about getting by on their savings to be willing to cut back on spending on big-ticket items. That could mean taking a big vacation every other year instead of annually, or waiting 10 years rather than seven to buy a new car. Struthers also strongly recommends that retirees work part-time.
When stocks are in a downward spiral, investors traditionally shift money into bonds, which are less risky than stocks. But bonds have not been a refuge from losses lately. High inflation has made bonds, and the fixed payments they make, less attractive. One index of high-quality U.S. bonds has lost more than 9% this year.
Despite the market’s decline, investors like Mark Bendell in Boca Raton, Fla., are sticking to their retirement timeline.
The 62-year-old engineer decided early last year that he would retire before the end of
this year. He met with a financial adviser and came away confident he would be able to live off his nest egg, which includes a 401(k) plan he’s been contributing to for about 34 years, a small pension, savings and Social Security. His wife, Laurie, a teacher, plans to retire next year.
Not that watching the stock market plunge hasn’t been difficult.
“I have a stiff drink about a couple of times a week and then I take a look at my investments,” Bendell said. “I don’t look as much as when the market was climbing.”
Other than tweaking his 401(k) to make sure it wasn’t heavily invested in more speculative holdings, Bendell hasn’t made any major changes to his investment strategy since he started his retirement countdown.
“I stayed the course,” he said. “Trying to time the market doesn’t work.”
That approach, even during big market slumps, is typical among investors with 401(k)s or IRAS. A Fidelity Investments review of 24,000 retirement investment plans found that only 5.6% of people with a 401(k) made a change to their plan’s allocation in the
first quarter.
That compares to 5.3% in the last three months of 2021 and 6.4% in the first quarter last year, the company said.
The set-it-and-forget-it strategy helped but didn’t shield investors entirely from losses this year. The average Fidelity 401(k) plan balance stood at $127,100 in the first quarter, down 2% from a year ago and off 7% from the fourth quarter.
Wall Street has been racking up gains more often than losses over the past decade. The market plunged 34% in March 2020 at the height of the pandemic lockdowns and climbed to new highs a few months later. Last year, the S&P 500 scored its third-best performance in the last decade, delivering a total return of nearly 29%, including dividends.
That’s why Americans who have long been socking away money into 401(k)s and other retirement accounts are likely still well ahead. Consider: The 1.7 million investors who have had a 401(k) through Fidelity the past 10 years saw their balance soar by an average of nearly fivefold to $383,100.
However, as of the end of 2019, only about 60 million employed Americans had a 401(k) plan, according to the Investment Company Institute, an association representing investment funds.
Previous years’ stock market gains are hard to keep in perspective when one’s retirement account balance shrinks by the day, however.
Having the bulk of her retirement savings in her IRA as the market declined has been “unnerving,” said Roberts, the librarian, so she’s leaving it in the hands of her financial adviser, who sends her regular updates and has moved some of her money from higher-risk investments into mutual funds.
“They’ll move some money to cash if they have to, temporarily,” Roberts said.
Roberts works four days a week at a library, spending the rest of the week caring for her elderly mother and taking her to doctor’s appointments. If she had to, she could try to work five days a week, though it would be a strain.
“I want to have some time to spend with my adult daughters, so I’m really hoping that my IRA hangs on,” she said.
The Nashville-based African Methodist Episcopal Church has filed a complaint against the Rev. Jerome Harris, the former executive director of retirement services and 10 others alleging they conspired to defraud and embezzle millions from the denom- ination’s Ministerial Retire- ment Annuity Plan.
The lawsuit was filed May 25 in United States District Court in Memphis.
In addition to Harris other defendants are Symetra Financial Corporation, Robert Eaton, Jarrod Erwin, Ran- dall Erwin, Financial Freedom Group., Motorskill Asia Venture Group, Motorskill Asia Ventures 1, LP, Motorskill Venture Group, Motorskill Ventures 1, LP and Rodney Brown & Company.
This is the latest lawsuit making its way through courts over the missing money. In one, as much as $90 million could be missing, although Attorney Fred Tromberg , who is representing several pension fund beneficiaries in a separate lawsuit believes it could be much more.
According to the latest filing, Harris served as executive director of the plan from 2000 until July 2021. He retired when his term ended.
The irregularities were uncovered when new lead- ership in the denomination’s Department of Retirement Services assumed control, according a previous article.
According to the filing, Harris provided reports to the AMEC (African Methodist Episcopal Church) Commission on Retirement Ser- vices of the General Board. AMEC has “since learned that Dr. Harris’ reports have been intentionally deceptive, false, and grossly inflated. In 2001, Dr. Harris began what would become a long-running conspiracy to, among other things, defraud and steal from AMEC. “
The complaint lays out a complex scheme by Harris to divert funds to newly created entities and investments into risky ventures.
The AME Church, the oldest historically-black denomination, has said there is an ongoing investigation by law enforcement, although it did not specify which agency. It’s unclear how many employees of the AME Church have their retirement or pension funds invested there, but church officials, clergy and bishops are among the beneficiaries.
The lawsuit alleges, among other things that, Harris moved millions of dollars around and created AMEC Financial Services, a limited liability corporation, in 2002 “to engage in risky investment schemes and risky business relations with third parties.”
Separately, at least two lawsuits, seeking class action status, have been filed against the AME Church.
The AARP Foundation has joined as co-counsels in a Maryland lawsuit filed on March 22 in U.S. District Court in Maryland by the law firm Kantor & Kantor.
The Maryland lawsuit claims AME leadership and its retirement services depart- ment violated the Employee Retirement Income Security
Act and breached their contractual and fiduciary duties and that bad investments were made in a “risky venture capital company and an ultimately valueless real estate deal,” according to the Maryland filing.
There are more than 500 AME churches in the Sixth Episcopal District in Georgia.
The denomination said a special task force committee, representing the Department of Retirement Services Commission, the General Board, the Council of Bishops and AME Church members at large, has been formed to develop a plan of reorganization, recovery and restoration for fund participants.