The San Diego Union-Tribune recently reported a story on Brad Davis, a former instructor at El Cajon-based Christian Youth Theater who pleaded guilty to sexually abusing a 16-year-old girl from the program. Davis was one of two men charged in October of 2021 with sexually abusing girls in the Christian Youth Theater program. The criminal complaint against Davis shows that the crime was committed in 2011 when the victim was 16-years-old. At the time of the offense, Davis would have been 29 or 30. David Franklin Hott, the other man charged in 2021, faces two felony charges in an unrelated case that also involved a girl who attended Christian Youth Theater. According to the prosecutor, Hott’s case is still pending. Allegations of sex abuse within Christian Youth Theater first surfaced in July 2020. The El Cajon-based nonprofit educational organization operates chapters nationwide. In March, six former students sued the organization, alleging the founders and longtime leaders of Christian Youth Theater ignored, dismissed, and covers up sexual abuse within the organization for more than two decades. The plaintiffs claim that the founders of the organization knew about the abuse as early as 1992, yet failed to act. They also contend that…

On May 15, 2022, a report was released detailing rampant sexual abuse within the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) along with widespread efforts to ignore victims and cover-up allegations.  The report included a list of hundreds of credibly accused offenders with abuses spanning decades.  If you or a loved one suffered sexual abuse at any church in the Southern Baptist Convention, you deserve justice. At Estey & Bomberger, LLP, we are passionate about holding perpetrators of sexual abuse and the institutions that protect them accountable for their actions.  We have a 100 percent success record in sexual abuse cases and will fight for justice on your behalf. The Extent of Sexual Abuse Within the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) The report, published by independent investigators at Guidepost Solutions, offered a list of over 700 names, more than 400 of which were affiliated with the SBC.  The list was collected by an employee of the SBC and includes church volunteers, staff, and leadership, including those at the top of the church’s organization ladder.  While the data collection began in 2007, incidents dating as far back as the 1960s were uncovered. Recently, we wrote at length about the report.  Despite the size of the…

The Houston Chronicle has published an article reporting that for over 20 years, leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention – including a former president now accused of sexual assault – routinely silenced and trivialized sexual abuse survivors, ignored pleas to enact systems to stop predators, and disregarded reforms that they privately acknowledged could protect children but, in doing so may cost the Southern Baptist Convention money if abuse victims later sued. These are just a sample of the findings unearthed during a shocking, third-party investigation into decades of alleged misconduct by leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention. This report comes nearly a year after 15,000 delegates of the SBC church demanded their executive committee turn over confidential documents and communications as part of an independent review of abuse reports that were seemingly mishandled or outright concealed since 2000. The report, published by an independent firm Guidepost Solutions, conducted over 300 interviews, and reviewed twenty years of internal SBC files during the seven month investigation. Over its nearly 400-pages, the report reveals how under the guise of preventing abuse, a small, isolated, and influential group of church leaders, “singularly focused on avoiding liability for the Southern Baptist Convention to the exclusion of other considerations.”…