LANCASTER (OH)
Matter News [Columbus OH]
June 26, 2025
By Any Downing
Decades after Elizabeth LaPorte Thompson said she was molested as a child by a fellow parishioner more than two decades her senior at Faith Memorial Church in Lancaster, Ohio, she has finally started to make her way back toward the light.
In March 2019, Elizabeth LaPorte Thompson drove nearly 650 miles from Savannah, Georgia, to Lancaster, Ohio, and Faith Memorial Church – a place she frequented throughout childhood but hadn’t set foot inside for decades.
The years leading up to that moment had been fraught for Thompson, 42. As a teenager, she dropped out of Circleville Bible College amid struggles with drug and alcohol addiction and an associated eating disorder that she said at one point left her weighing just 82 pounds. She also self-harmed, managing to keep the habit hidden from her family until 2006, when her mother, Kay LaPorte, took her to be fitted for a sleeveless wedding dress and broke down upon seeing the trail of scars on her daughter’s arms, which Thompson had grown accustomed to concealing beneath baggy clothes on those rare occasions when she was home after turning 16.
For a time, marriage and new motherhood combined to introduce a degree of stability. Thompson’s alcohol abuse continued, though, eventually overpowering her after her husband was struck on his motorcycle by an elderly driver in November 2009 and left paraplegic. The two divorced a year later, and Thompson spiraled.
Early in 2019, as Thompson finally began to claw her way back from the darkness that had almost devoured her whole, she was overcome by an instinctual need to return to Faith Memorial Church and to the site of the childhood incidents she now understands as a painful inflection point from which all the traumas to follow extended.
It was there that Thompson said she was molested on multiple occasions by a fellow parishioner more than two decades her senior, the alleged assaults taking place in the church during services beginning in 1994, when she was 10 years old.
“Stepping back into the sanctuary again, I remember feeling frozen, terrified, not able to move,” said Thompson, who eventually took a seat in the same pew in which she said she had been groped as a child, her eyes locked on the pulpit but her thoughts existing somewhere deep in the past.
Faith Memorial music and worship pastor Mike Kotora soon broke the solitude, entering the sanctuary and seating himself at the organ, where he began to play a series of hymns. The lights were dim, the church completely empty save for the two. The pair eventually struck up a short conversation when Kotora abandoned his instrument and approached Thompson – compelled, he said in February, by his belief that she appeared to be in distress.
“I didn’t know what led her into the church, and it didn’t matter, because the church is open to everyone. But I felt like she needed someone there, so I sat down with her,” said Kotora, who kept private the details of the conversation, comparing it to the sanctity with which a priest receives the sacrament of confession. “But I prayed with her, and I asked God to lift her heart and to heal her. And then I asked her, ‘Do you think you’re going to be okay?’ And she said, ‘Yes, I really appreciate it.’ … After that, I went back to my office, and when I came back in to check on her, she was gone.”
The brief encounter proved transformative, Thompson recalling it as the first time she felt someone associated with the church heard her account of sexual abuse and didn’t immediately dismiss the accusations as fantasy. In one of several email exchanges, Thompson wrote of the chance meeting: “That was the point of impact that needed to be heard and addressed, and it was. Sadly, I’m afraid that’s what all survivors need in order to feel whole again. I know many won’t get it. Had I not been met by such loving understanding, I don’t think I ever would have been freed from the darkness I had been engulfed in.”
In a January phone interview, Thompson described the damage done to her spiritual life as the deepest lasting wound resulting from the experience she said she suffered as a child, recalling how the experience ripped the anchor of faith from her grasp, leaving her feeling more adrift and alone in those decades she struggled with substance abuse. “I think there are a lot of people who have been impacted by the church, and not just by sexual abuse, but these transactions that still tear at the spirit,” Thompson said. “The church is supposed to be there to help us spiritually, but there are a lot of people whose spirits are in shambles because of the church. They’re not holding up their end of the deal.”
Victor Vieth, director of the Center for Faith and Child Protection at the Zero Abuse Project, said that children who experience abuse, particularly within the church, often deal with lingering crises of faith.
“The vast majority of maltreated children are spiritually wounded in some way. They may leave the church. They may want nothing to do with organized religion but haven’t abandoned that search for meaning. They may still pray. They may read the Bible. … I often say to Christian leaders, aren’t you supposed to go after lost sheep? Where is the proactive ministry to pursue those who are spiritually wounded?” said Vieth, who co-authored an article on the subject for Mitchell Hamline Law Review. “Survivors, like many people, turn to their spirituality to make sense out of the suffering. And yet, that’s often the part of the psyche most damaged as a result of the abuse. … There’s a study out of Australia that compared people who are sexually abused by a priest with those abused by, say, a father figure. And if you’re abused by a religious leader, according to that study, you’re four times more likely to have suicidal thoughts or actions, because where do I turn for hope?”
This lingering spiritual fracture is one Thompson knows all too well, and she said she recently came to understand that this break is what led her to finally speak up all these years later, rather than some desire for retribution against her alleged abuser. (Thompson said she didn’t need the man’s name to appear in this story. “To me, this is more about the spiritual abuse, manipulation and control,” she said.)
“It is important to me that ministers read this and see a humble but firm cry for correction,” Thompson wrote in one of many email exchanges shared over the last seven months, describing the ways survivors such as her can become outcasts within their faith communities, subjected to gossip and judgment, and labeled by church leaders and their fellow parishioners as heretics, liars, and black sheep. “So in the end, not only are we abused, we are silenced. … We are shown to the congregation as unstable. We are shunned from our family and friends. We are pushed out into the world for speaking the truth. We are victimized over and over.”
Vieth said it was incumbent on the church to take steps to repair these harms, describing faith leaders as largely ignorant of child abuse and ill-equipped to deal with the spiritual fallout associated with the trauma. In 2014, Vieth said he conducted an analysis of the course offerings at every accredited U.S. seminary, only 3 percent of which included references to child maltreatment in any of their classes. Beyond that, Vieth said the faith community needed to adopt a theological approach to address the fallout from the history of child abuse within its ranks.
“I think until we begin to take seriously the stories of Jesus and engage theologically with the multiple accounts of trauma in the Bible, we’re just not a credible institution for survivors of abuse,” he said. “There’s no doubt there are people within faith communities who are kind, and who have maybe gone the extra mile and taken it upon themselves to learn something about trauma-informed care. But show me the faith community where this is a high priority. Show me the faith community that periodically gives a sermon about child abuse, where they have a good collaboration with the local children’s advocacy shelter, where they even know what the SAMHSA standards are for being trauma-informed, much less meet those standards. And that’s still the lay of the land, which is shocking when you consider how many lawsuits, how many billions of dollars, how much damage to the church, and how many people have walked away because the church just doesn’t get it.”
Even at home, Thompson said she sometimes struggled to find support for her claims as a child, convinced at the time that her parents, Kay and Tom LaPorte, had taken the word of former Faith Memorial pastor Mel Truex over hers. “The pastor brainwashed my parents into believing I would lie,” she said. “And it wasn’t until years later they realized I was being truthful.”
In a January interview, Kay and Tom said they initially struggled with how to process the information as it was relayed to them by former Faith Memorial youth pastor Steve Schellin, with whom Thompson said she shared her claims of being molested only after being caught smoking at the church in 1997, when she was 13. The situation was further complicated by the relationship between the LaPortes and the family of the accused, who Tom and Kay previously considered close friends (the two said they are godparents to the couple’s children). They haven’t spoken with the family since the allegations broke decades ago.
“My initial reaction was probably shock and just trying to get a handle on how to move forward. I mean, there were no books, no guidelines,” Kay LaPorte said. “And there was never anyone – not a friend, not a pastor – who ever said anything like, ‘Oh, my goodness. Let’s get to the bottom of this. This can never happen to anyone. Let alone a child.’”
Instead, the family said it was met by the church with stonewalling, Thompson and her parents recalling a meeting with Truex and Schellin that took place at their home, during which the adults sat on the opposite side of a long, rectangular table from the 13-year-old. “And I remember thinking, ‘What is this? It’s like a judgment seat,’” Kay LaPorte said. (Schellin, now the senior pastor at Southland Community Church in Greenland, Indiana, did not respond to multiple calls and emails requesting an interview.)
Later, Thompson said she listened from the top of the staircase as Truex told her parents that because she had been adopted, there was no way of knowing what mental health issues she might have.
Reached by phone in February, Truex, currently a pastor at Oakthorpe Church outside of Thornville, Ohio, said this meeting never took place, describing Thompson as “a liar from the get-go” and making unprompted mention of her adoptive status. Truex also said the Lancaster Police Department fully investigated the claims and found them to be without merit.
Both Thompson and her parents said that when the teenager first brought the alleged molestation to church officials in 1997, however, Truex and others appeared more interested in protecting the reputation of Faith Memorial than fully investigating the claims. Thompson recalled how church officials pledged to “keep an eye” on the accused, as she explained it, rather than involving police, a detail supported in interviews with her parents. And in the weeks after the visit Schelling and Truex made to the family’s home, as rumors of the allegations began to spread throughout the congregation, Tom LaPorte said another man who served as an elder at the church visited him unprompted at work. “And his goal was to put an end to what was going on,” he said.
It wasn’t until 2001, four years after the initial meeting with church officials at the LaPorte home, that anyone reported the allegations to the Lancaster Police Department, which then opened an investigation, a copy of which Matter News obtained in April via a records request. Thompson, who filed the report, said she only did so after seeing her alleged abuser in the hallway outside of the church with a different young girl. She said she then confronted Truex, who she said told her that the church would maintain domain over any business that took place within its walls, a claim Truex denied.
“He told me it was unbiblical to go [to] the law before the church,” Thompson wrote in a journal entry dated Dec. 18, 2001, images of which were provided to Matter News and also appear in photocopied form in the police report. “I have been to the ‘church’ countless times! What part of that doesn’t he understand?”
In her journal, Thompson expressed her frustration with what she viewed as a lack of progress being made in the investigation by Lancaster Police detectives Mike Peters and Jim Neader. She also questioned the influence of Truex, who joined the family of the accused in its December 2001 interview with Neader, at one point telling the detective that he “was aware of some emotional and behavioral episodes over the years that [Thompson] experienced,” as Neader wrote in his report. (Reached via text message, Peters and Neader, neither of whom is still active with Lancaster PD, both declined to comment.)
Following the investigation, an attorney with the Office of the Prosecuting Attorney for Fairfield County sent a letter in July 2002 to Peters informing the detective of the office’s decision to not pursue charges in the case owing to a lack of evidence. The decision mirrored what Peters had written in his report four months earlier: “Basically, short of there being additional victims, the suspect confessing, or some other way to verify this, it would be nearly impossible to prove in a court of law.”
Since meeting with Kotora in March 2019, Thompson said she has experienced a series of positive developments, some of which she said she could only describe as the work of divine provenance. Through April 2019, Truex continued to appear in the monthly Faith Memorial Church bulletin, his given title listed as “member care.” But his name is not listed in the May 2019 bulletin or in any subsequent editions, all of which are available on the church’s website. (Kotora said he never told anyone about his conversation with Thompson, and that he had nothing to do with the ending of Truex’s long-running association with the church, with Truex saying he left of his own volition after taking the position at Oakthorpe Church.)
Other developments have been more self-motivated, including a gradual return to church, which Thompson opened up about in a letter she sent to Kotora in April 2019, a copy of which she shared with Matter News. “I don’t scare easily, but … that first Sunday … the amount of inner trembling was so great I could hardly bear it,” she wrote.
In more recent times, this quaking has stilled, with Thompson experiencing a deep solace that she said had been absent since childhood, and which has imbued her with a belief that perhaps her best days are yet to come. “The peace that surrounds me now is just amazing,” she said in one of our last phone conversations. “It’s important to me that other people feel it, because for a long time I couldn’t. It was Hell on Earth. And no one should have to live like that.”
Author
Andy is the former editor of Columbus Alive and has written for The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Stereogum, Spin and more.