Steve Duin: Memory and moral suicide in Happy Valley

By Steve Duin
Oregonian
April 28, 2015

http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/steve_duin/index.ssf/2015/04/steve_duin_memory_and_moral_su.html

Michal Mitchell, Mike Sperou's niece, testifying Monday in the pastor's sex-abuse trial.

Bryn Garrett is one of seven women who allege they were abused as children in the 1990s by Happy Valley pastor Mike Sperou.

Pastor Mike Sperou testified in his defense Tuesday.

Shannon Clark's allegations of sex abuse by Mike Sperou resulted in three felony charges.

Mike Sperou, surrounded by children, in the early days of the North Clackamas Bible Community.

Bill Hartman told a Multnomah County jury he doesn't believe that Pastor Mike Sperou abused his daughter, Jessica Watson.

On an otherwise beautiful afternoon in downtown Portland, the niece took the stand Monday in the felony sex-abuse trial of Mike Sperou, the Happy Valley pastor.

Michal Mitchell remembers growing up so "very happy" in Sperou's church. In her courtroom testimony, she also recalled depression, extreme anxiety, Prozac, nightmares, suicide attempts, the bipolar diagnosis and – starting when she was in the 6^th grade – how often she spent the night in her uncle's bed.

She usually wore Calvin Klein boxers and a t-shirt, she said. Her pastor and spiritual mentor came to bed in boxer shorts, and frequently hugged the long pillow – that he dubbed "Sally" – that separated them. Asked how long this bizarre sleeping arrangement continued, the 30-year-old Mitchell said, "Until now."

Mike Sperou is on trial for three counts of unlawful sexual penetration of a child under the age of 12.  Mitchell is, mind you, a witness for the defense.

For 18 years now, seven other women who grew up in the shadow of Sperou's bed have insisted he molested them. Their graphic accounts prompted a soul-searching schism at the North Clackamas Bible Community in 1996, but the allegations didn't spark criminal charges until the women once again brought the complaints to police in 2013.

Only Shannon Clark's accounts survived the statute of limitations, bringing her into Judge Cheryl Albrecht's courtroom and face-to-face with the man of God she once felt duty-bound to comfort.

Sperou is now 64, a bundle of unnerving tics, the residue of childhood trauma and a stint in Vietnam. In the courtroom, he is the antithesis of poetry in motion, endlessly fidgeting, never comfortable. Coming out of the lunch break Monday, he spent three minutes attacking his gums with a toothpick. Whether he is reaching for a molar, his New Testament or the back of an adjacent chair, Sperou's hands always seem to end up where they don't belong.

At long last, a Multnomah County jury will decide whether that happened by design or by accident with Shannon Clark when she was fresh out of kindergarten.

Church loyalists and Steven J. Sherlag, Sperou's attorney, argue that only memory has been corrupted here. Memory is "dynamic," Sherlag claims, evolving or eroding each time a group of seven women compare notes on how often their pastor was drunk, drug-addled or making out with their mother.

But you only need to listen to Sperou's defenders to realize how boundaries in this community were obliterated by the demand for subservience and the desire for acceptance, no matter how perverse.

It's bad enough when Michal Mitchell complains that Clark – whom she still regards, she says, as a friend – always craved attention: "In my experience, she seemed hyper-sexual. She would talk about sex in ways that seemed inappropriate at that age."

In the hyper-sexual, boxers-only world of Father Mike? Imagine that.

But it is far more infuriating to hear parents of two of the seven women – Jessica Watson and Jennifer Olajuyin – rise in court to deride their daughters' claims that they were abused as children.

Last week, Watson's parents – Bill and Karen Hartman, both of whom remain faithful to the church, if not their daughter – told the jury they don't believe Watson was abused. "The accusation," Karen Hartman said, "doesn't make sense to me."

Olajuyin's father, Greg Kirchem, an assistant pastor at what's left of the church, went further still, dismissing his daughter's pain: "My reaction was, 'Don't try to come up with something as a reason for blaming other people for your circumstances.' You know, Jennifer is kind of a miserable person. I don't know if you call that depressed ... but she's not very happy."

Ken Garrett – who left the church in 1996 after his daughters, Bryn and Rachel, said they were abused – heard that fatherly counsel with absolute abhorrence:

"When Greg Kirchem savaged his daughter from the witness stand, it's the only time in these proceedings – despite hearing painful things about my children, and revisiting horrific times in my family's life – that I stood up and left the courtroom. I walked down the hall like a zombie, because I loved his daughter."

Now the pastor at Grace Bible, Garrett lived in community – and claustrophobic rental homes – with Sperou and his flock for 12 years. He was blind, he concedes, to "the insidious movement to unravel the marriages in the church, so that husbands didn't trust wives, wives didn't trust husbands, and children were unprotected."

While repairs are ongoing for those children, now in their late 20s and early 30s, I have little faith that a jury can resolve how often Sperou wasn't satisfied with Sally the pillow.

But the trial has already betrayed the price we pay to remain faithful to a charismatic charlatan.

"Moral suicide," Garrett calls it. Thirty years ago, Sperou's disciples "never dreamed that allowing and cherishing a lie would corrupt their entire character," he said. "Where they would actually sit in a courtroom, look in the faces of the daughters who came to them and said they were molested, and call them liars. They never dreamed they would end up here. Now that they're here, they're numb."

Deaf, numb and blind to the daughters they abandoned and the truth in the room.