MEW MEXICO
The New Mexican
By Phaedra Haywood | The New Mexican
A woman in her 30s is suing Temple Baptist Church of Santa Fe, saying that as a child she was molested by two teachers at a school run by the church in the 1990s.
After years of abuse, the woman’s complaint says, she married and had children with one of her abusers — whom she says was the grandson of church leaders — and didn’t realize until she had a “triggering event” in 2015 that what had been done to her was wrong and illegal.
“The perpetrators were both uncertified male teachers who had been raised in the culture of the Temple Baptist Church and School,” according to her complaint filed last month in District Court.
“The second perpetrator teacher essentially ‘dated’ Plaintiff as a 12-15 year old child, and groomed her to participate in his sexual abuse of her in those years as part of a ‘relationship’ and ‘God’s will.’ ”
As a child, the complaint says, the woman “did not comprehend that the tickling, grabbing, rubbing, massaging and penetrating of her private parts by adult male teachers was ‘sexual abuse,’ nor the harms it would be causing.”
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