How Whistleblowing is an Agonizing Waiting Game
(With ideas on how to cope)
It’s been three years since she blew the whistle on her former megachurch employer Andy Wood and Lori Adams-Brown told me she’s still waiting.
She’s waiting for a transparent investigation rather than the one that exonerated her former pastor but was challenged by whistleblowers.
She’s waiting (and working on) full healing.
And she’s waiting for the greater culture to change to provide better support for whistleblowers who speak up about abuse in powerful institutions.
“So often it’s the survivors themselves that are bearing the brunt of that and they’re already exhausted,” she said. “Is there going to be more of a time when people who haven't directly experienced this, who aren't still getting triggered and traumatized and discredited because they're speaking about their own story, where more people come in?”
Lori is no stranger to bearing difficult burdens. She grew up as a missionary kid in South America. As an adult, she served in Indonesia, worked in tsunami relief, sometimes living in uncertain conditions. Her background has given her important skills and resilience for hard times. And yet, she told me her whistleblowing journey has been long, hard, and painful. She shared some of her story with journalist Julie Roys. Lori also has a fantastic podcast called “A World of Difference,” where in these episodes she shares more of her whistleblowing experience.
She has a desire to use her own painful story to help other whistleblowers just as many advocates have helped her.
“We had skills from our time overseas that taught us to wait through adversity, but we would not be standing today if it weren’t for the people that waited with us and helped us in ways we never knew we would need,” she said. “You can’t survive it without support.”
Here are some ways she and I discussed in which whistleblowing is an agonizing waiting game. At the end of this newsletter, Lori gives some tips for coping.
You wait to understand what happened to you.
Survivors of abuse don’t always immediately recognize it as abuse. An abuser may convince a sexual abuse survivor that she’s a temptress, or that the violations are actually based in love. Society may call a situation an “affair” rather than Adult Clergy Sexual Abuse. A bullying victim may believe they just need to try harder to meet their boss’s approval. Survivors may try to forget the experience until one day something clicks.
For Lori, that “something” was when another woman told her she’d experienced a similar disturbing interaction with their pastor. But then Lori had to come to grips with making an important decision.
“How do I address this?” she said. “What do we do?”
You wait for a clear way to report your concerns.
When your bully boss is a megachurch pastor, to whom do you report concerns? Also, who could Lori trust to be an advocate? Was the meeting that was planned to discuss her concerns going to be safe or traumatizing?
Meanwhile, Lori also had to weigh the risks of whistleblowing. Could she lose her job? What about her husband’s job? He also worked for the same church.
She kept in mind an exit plan while also trying different avenues for reporting.
“You're kind of testing the waters along the way like, ‘Is this going to work?’” she said.
You wait for a response (good or bad).
You may make an initial report of abuse to a supervisor, and then you wait to see what he or she will do. Another option is to go to HR. Will they investigate or just file paperwork? Should you then go to the board?
Lori’s husband, Jason, had trusted one particular pastor to be their advocate. But when that pastor told him they needed to find other jobs, Lori said they were in shock.
“The cards started to fall immediately, like there’s no going back,” she said. “So, it was waiting for the next shoe to drop.”
Their employer asked them to sign a nondisclosure agreement to get a severance package. Both Jason and Lori declined. Lori said they then tried to take their concerns to the board. This step involved more waiting. Documenting for the board what had happened was re-traumatizing, Lori told me.
“Both of us were barely eating so just basic human needs weren’t being met,” she said.
Going to the board didn’t help their situation, but Lori holds onto hope that it has paved the way for others to speak up.
“I needed to lay down in the mud so people can walk over me to get to the other side,” she said. “And it turns out there were others after me. So, in that sense, I would do it again.”
You wait to be believed.
Reporting abuse to various people within her church and then experiencing retaliation rather than help took its toll, Lori said. At the heart of it was knowing people didn’t believe her, even people on the board who she thought were her friends.
“They asked their questions and interrogated me and do things that they do to women whistleblowers like make you look crazy and make you look like you’re exaggerating and hysterical and making it up all up and trying to bring a good man down,” she said. “I’ve never felt that way ever, like people just took my insides out and stomped on them right in front of me, my good friends with boots on.”
After that, “there wasn’t a clear next step,” she said.
Now unemployed, they had to figure out how food stamps worked, how to get medical insurance, wondering when this whole nightmare would be over.
You wait for justice.
Lori eventually shared her concerns with journalist Julie Roys.
“People think people are hasty to go to reporters and attorneys—and I do thank God for reporters and attorneys because they’re doing God’s work,” she said. “But I think we tried for a solid year to do backdoor conversations. We tried every possible way.”
While Lori has spoken out publicly and has forgiven those who harmed her, she told me she still hasn’t seen justice.
“You have a hope deep inside you that things will get better, that someday repentance will take place, that someday they will own any ounce of the harm that they did to you or to all the others,” she said.
Rather, with Lori’s story now public, she hears often from others who’ve also been harmed by this pastor.
She told me, “When you carry your story and it's connected to other stories, I think that's sometimes something people don't understand: That waiting can be more brutal than your own.”
You wait to be able to move on with your life.
Even if the immediate whistleblowing steps finally wind to a close, life doesn’t simply return to normal. You may have had to change jobs or careers. You may have lost your trust in churches. Your community has shifted.
“Some people assume, ‘Oh, that happened years ago, you must be over that,’” Lori said.
But now, you wait for healing, Lori said. You wait for the nightmares to stop at night. You wait to be able to drive past your previous place of work without having a panic attack. Even with therapy, it can take years to quiet the triggers and stress of abuse and whistleblowing, Lori said.
“We want a trapdoor out of this nightmare,” she said. “Nobody wants this.”
Tips for Coping
Amidst the losses, the key to surviving this is to find people who will support you, Lori said.
“I needed a village of people to help me survive this and help me wait and help me heal,” she said.
Lori hand-selected several people for her village. She hired career coach Eric Woodard to help her pivot from years of ministry into a job working with leaders in the tech industry. Leadership coach and Lead Stories podcaster Jo Saxton gave Lori tools to lead through adversity. Lori has a spiritual director who has helped her lament and heal spiritually from what she endured.
Also, Lori and her husband joined a months-long cohort with Kineo to help them process their experience. She’s also learned from African American women who’ve been advocating for justice for decades.
But many other members of her village were people who simply showed up with meals.
“It's sometimes the people you least expect,” she said.
People offered to advocate for them, gave them an Airbnb getaway, and stopped by with a willingness to listen to them tell their story “as many times as it takes,” Lori said.
“Our brains did not know how to process it,” she said. “(They’d) empathize every time and hear the same thing again and again, because those onion layers needed to be unpacked.”
(Disclaimer: This is my own personal opinion, intended as general information, and not meant to replace legal or psychological advice for your specific situation.)
This is exactly the way it is. It has certainly been so for me. Thank you Lori for sharing, and Rebecca for publishing this.
Honored to be interviewed by the outstanding Rebecca Hopkins for this important conversation as a whistleblower in waiting.
It’s hard work to wait, and even harder work to watch others get abused and wait along with me due to a system that enables bullies who fill megachurches and are backed by bro club cronies.
One of these days, I hope someone stops Andy Wood. I speak as one of the privileged few without an NDA from him.