Why I, an Investigative Journalist, Regret Telling My Survivor Story to an Investigative Attorney

NOTE: I am making this public statement in collaboration with two other whistleblowers. Please also read Audrey Luhmann’s statement and Libby Magee Coles’ statement.

I closed out my half-finished journalistic story on my computer, and opened the front door, hoping to squeeze in a walk before the kids got home from school. An envelope sat propped against the porch. I immediately knew what it was—the investigative report from Telios Law on U.S.-based Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF).

I ripped it open. I began reading. Then stunned, I sank to the ground.

A year ago, my husband, Brad, and I joined a multi-generational group of 15 total former MAF missionaries with a collective 200 years of overseas MAF service. We decided to ask the MAF-US board to hire an independent investigator. To make our request, we spent months gathering and documenting a list of 35 concerns. These included aviation safety concerns and from our observation, problematic sexual behavior of married male missionary pilots with local women overseas.

I put on my investigative journalist hat while I looked back through three years of my husband’s and my emails, legally recorded Zoom meetings with MAF leaders, and notes and journal entries from a traumatic time of life in Indonesia. Going through the documentation only deepened my concerns for this high-stakes work where small single-piloted airplanes fly more than a million miles a year for 400 churches and organizations around the world.

My husband, Brad, flying in Central Kalimantan where the float plane provided access for medevacs and supply runs for remote villages.

One of the largest mission aviation organizations in the world, MAF first became famous in 1956 when MAF pilot Nate Saint was martyred with missionary Jim Elliot, inspiring a generation of missionaries. In 2021, MAF gained attention for a medevac of actress Ashley Judd in Democratic Republic of Congo when a fall shattered her leg. Every day MAF pilots land on sides of mountains to bring “help, hope, and healing to the ends of the earth.” 

We’d surrendered 300 pages of documentation to Theresa Sidebotham, the investigative attorney MAF hired. In May 2023, desperate for change, I entered Theresa’s Colorado Telios Law office decorated with Indonesian baskets and offered my survivor¹ story into her open hands.

My questions, though, stayed with me. Would the pain of going back into our trauma make MAF safer and healthier for the communities tucked in jungles and mountains and war-torn regions? Would anything change?

We, former MAF staff, had found each other and had collectively found one answer. Together, we would try.

But reading Theresa’s investigative report in February, I had one more question. What in the world had gone wrong?

‘An opportunity to have a voice’

We had asked the MAF board to hire Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment (GRACE) or another trauma-informed organization. When MAF’s chief financial officer told us they hired Telios Law to conduct an external investigation, he sent a link to a Christianity Today article about a “new kind of abuse investigation” Theresa had just finished into historical abuse at a missionary boarding school in Japan.

“Telios Law prioritizes healing, reconciliation and truth in its investigations and is well equipped to work with you all,” the MAF CFO wrote to me.

I read the CT article and was moved by the whistleblowers’ ability to give direct input into Theresa’s investigation, the fact that the investigative report was made public, and the inclusion of alumni’s own public statements in the final report. I also remembered Theresa was known in missionary circles for the college scholarship Telios Law provides missionary kids. I felt encouraged.

But I had questions for her. She invited me to her office a few miles north of where I live to learn about her methods. With her permission, I recorded our conversation to share with the other MAF whistleblowers. She told me about the healing retreat that she’d just helped plan in connection with the investigation reported in the CT article, where missionary leaders gave heartfelt apologies to the Japanese boarding school victims. The retreat offered training to organizations about trauma, abuse, and organizational repentance, she told me.

Whistleblowers could be involved in shaping the investigation with their requests, she promised. 

“We can be a little bit creative about the approach or make accommodations,” she said. “We’re not just mediating their voices through our findings, but also giving them an opportunity to have a voice.”

I asked her, if a spiritual leader engaged in sexual misconduct, would she call it “abuse?” She answered knowledgeably about power imbalances. Could she consult an aviation expert regarding our safety-related concerns? Yes, she said. Her son’s a small plane pilot and an attorney colleague is an Air Force pilot, she said.

She said she gathers witnesses “from all sides,” but that we shouldn’t be nervous about this.

“You would be surprised,” she said. “In many ways that can also be very strong corroboration of what a complainant is bringing forward.”

I also asked about whether she’d done any work for MAF in the past. She said she’d consulted on one of its safeguarding policies but it wouldn’t affect her independence.

What about the final report? Would it be made public? She said she gives master reports for boards, but not to the public because of privacy issues, protection for victims, concern that people would read it as “soft porn,” and mainly that it could “cause more harm than good.” The decision about whether the summary report would be public was still undecided.

“What drives it is how broad is the audience who needs to know,” she said.

I thought of the hundreds of MAF staff scattered all over the world, the 400 organizations it serves, and the thousands of donors who make the work possible.

She also said she had grown up as a missionary kid in Indonesia, had returned as an adult to be a missionary, and spoke Indonesian. I wondered, where else would we find an investigator who could interview Indonesian MAF employees who were witnesses to some of our concerns, and to make sure the organization was treating them well, too?

For the first time in years, I had hope. Finally, someone was ready to help us be heard.

This is one of the times I got to ride along with Brad into Borneo’s rainforest. Villagers offered friendship and gifts like pineapples, rice, durian, and these beautiful woven hats.

The investigation

Theresa spent last summer traveling all over the United States, to MAF headquarters in Idaho, and all the way to Indonesia. I was impressed at this effort and knew the weight that comes with listening to survivor stories. I thanked her often. The week she was in Indonesia, I prayed for protection from malaria, dengue fever, and political unrest.

In September, I emailed Theresa to make a few requests. We’d learned that two of the concerning leaders we’d reported were the ones who’d emailed current staff In Indonesia to inform them about the investigation. Could Theresa intervene so that those leaders who were subjects of the investigation weren’t involved in administering it?

She declined the request. “(I)t seems to me appropriate for top leadership to encourage people to participate,” she wrote.

I’d also learned from a few friends who worked at MAF headquarters that they had no idea an investigation was happening. So, I asked Theresa if MAF could also inform former field staff and staff at headquarters, many of whom used to live overseas.

“We could have asked to reach out to all alumni, and I believe MAF would have cooperated, but we have gathered a LOT of information, including a great deal of travel, and believe we have enough,” she wrote back.

She also said she was done investigating and was compiling the final report. I was surprised that she hadn’t circled back to me to ask my response to any refuting answers the leaders had given in their interviews, as my research into how to conduct workplace investigations seemed to recommend. In fact, she didn’t ask any follow-up questions to my interview or my documentation. I found out later that she didn’t follow up with the other whistleblowers either. 

When I do journalistic investigations, I usually conduct multiple interviews with sources as new information emerges or to clarify vague statements. If the accused makes a counter accusation against a whistleblower or denies something happened, I return to the whistleblower to ask for more evidence or corroboration.

Also that fall, I was learning from the International House of Prayer-Kansas City scandal that not all so-called independent investigations are created equal. I learned about the dangers of investigations that don’t waive attorney-client privilege, which calls their independence into question, and of reports that aren’t made public. And I learned about attorneys who defend ministries against sex abuse allegations, but who, in other cases, perform the conflicted role of convincing victims to trust them for investigations. I’d learned that sometimes independent investigations—like two different ones that had investigated and exonerated now disgraced Ravi Zacharias—failed to get to the truth.

Theresa had told me in my initial conversation with her that the organizations that hire her for investigations are her clients. Months later, I consulted with an attorney about this who said that legal professionals are supposed to act according to the directions of their clients, who can make decisions regarding degrees of accountability that affect the organization’s reputation.

On her Telios website, Theresa actively markets her ability to investigate independently, and yet maintains control over input and output stressing the value of limiting disclosures. Her firm discusses “choices” of types of investigations with their clients—from “low-level internal investigation” to Telios Law attorneys doing the investigating with protection of attorney-client privilege. Is she marketing her ability to protect her client organizations from external accountability?

In my own situation, I felt behind. Every step of whistleblowing—and there are many—has its own steep learning curve.

Then I thought about Theresa’s reassurances that she had “a LOT of information” already, our 300 pages of documentation, and reports of our whistleblower group of more credible whistleblowers coming forward to speak to Theresa.

Surely, in this case, truth would prevail.

The report

But then Theresa’s report largely exonerated MAF of wrongdoing.

“The Board was relieved with the report that no acts of criminality, immoral behavior, or misconduct on the part of any current leader within MAF could be substantiated by the investigation,” the board chairman wrote in the report’s cover letter.

In response to our original 35 concerns, the summary report—not a full report— substantiated abuse of power or spiritual abuse in only one case—done by an unnamed, untitled leader who left MAF several years ago. The rest of the concerns we raised were chalked up to “misunderstandings, unmet expectations, unresolved conflict, added stress, and relational hurt,” the board chairman wrote.

I wish I felt relieved, too. But as I read, I noticed that Theresa’s conclusions about our own situation included many inaccuracies that favored leaders’ accounts over ours. She didn’t quote from any of the 300 pages of documentation we’d provided. It seemed to me like she was simply taking leaders’ word for it. In several cases she wrote that there were no corroborating witnesses to back up our claims, even though she never came back to us to say she needed more corroboration. I later learned she chose not to interview our entire list of witnesses either.

The summary report seemed to excuse leaders’ decisions by saying that staff need to realize and accept that MAF has an “authoritative and hierarchical nature.” And staff need to be better trained to know that “missionary life is still significantly more difficult than life at home.”

I thought of the airplane accident that came within feet of killing my husband, the complicated appendicitis that nearly killed my 3-year-old son, the time my baby had dengue fever, the tribal conflict that erupted with gunshots and machete fights a mile from our house, and the time we evacuated our young kids from uncontrollable fires and smoke that surrounded our city. These were a part of our story, but not the actual concerns we’d reported.

Side-by-side photos of the same bridge in our town of Palangkaraya to show normal conditions versus the 2015 smoky season. The Pollutant Standards Index rose to at least 1,500, five times what is considered hazardous for health.

Rather, we’d requested an investigation into possible leadership abuses and failures that we worried added unnecessary risk and harm to the already stressful, often traumatic lives we and our young kids lived. Did MAF really need to hire Theresa to “attorney-splain” to our group of mature, brave missionaries who’d served faithfully for years that life was hard overseas?

I was also concerned with how she’d addressed how MAF had handled instances of sexual misconduct between missionaries and Indonesian women. In my opinion, Theresa’s report was dismissive of power dynamics. Also, she seemed to indicate MAF doesn’t have a responsibility to involve local authorities in these situations despite our concerns about the possibility of misconduct of a criminal nature. And she seemed to disregard the risks of quietly moving pilots with complaints against them in and out of countries.

(See Theresa’s analysis here. Please read my response here.)

But to give her the benefit of the doubt, maybe her full report to the board offered more helpful information for substantial change?  I asked Theresa if I could see the full version that she’d given to the board. She declined, referring to unspecified confidentiality and privacy laws, defamation torts, and Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation. When I made the request to the board chairman, he emailed that the summary report “accurately summarized the findings in the full report.”

Then I remembered that in 2022, MAF had published on its website a full independent investigative report into a previous matter. The report—done by a different attorney—had concluded that a named former member care personnel had engaged in sexual misconduct with two women under his care. And MAF had “organizational gaps” that worsened the situation, including MAF’s two top HR personnel being unaware of Idaho’s universal mandatory reporting law for child abuse, the report said. But in MAF CEO David Holsten’s 2022 public statement, MAF promised “to be transparent and give voice to the women’s experiences, which we fully believe,” and to show a “clear commitment to stand against this type of destructive behavior within our organization.”

Months later, the two women sued MAF, pointing to the failures mentioned in the MAF investigative report. But I haven’t seen MAF post the lawsuit filing along with its statement on the investigative report, despite its commitments to transparency.

 (For its donor confidence score at MinistryWatch, updated in April 2024, MAF stated that no related parties had filed lawsuits against them in the last five years.)

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Screenshot from MinistryWatch’s 1000 database on ministries

Theresa wasn’t involved with the 2022 report. But she told me in an email that many factors affect whether to release more details in a report, like whether individuals give permission for the report to be published, risk level for the public, and whether criminal charges were made. (In the 2022 situation, the MAF report didn’t mention any criminal charges filed and the man is no longer with MAF.)

“The two situations are not at all similar,” Theresa wrote to me.

Before publishing this substack, I told Theresa I may issue a public statement with my concerns about her report. I asked her questions to make sure I accurately understood her thinking and give her a chance to comment. Here are her answers in her own words.

She told me she didn’t end up consulting any aviation safety experts like I’d requested, after all. She said this was because she’d determined that our concerns had to do with “individuals’ level of comfort.” Also, she determined, “no one was forced to fly in unsafe conditions.”

I wondered how she reconciled that with what she quoted in her summary report an MAF pilot saying: “If we don’t fly, then people die.”

The MAF board wrote they were grieved by any pain we experienced and offered a “mediated conciliation process.” But they offered no apologies, no leadership changes, and no offers to pay for counseling. The “full board” then affirmed the CEO, the executive leadership team, and the Indonesia leadership team and commended them “for their patience and perseverance throughout this arduous process.”

“It is our desire to move forward,” the board chairman wrote. “I thank you for your role in helping MAF to become a more effective organization in its mission of providing help, hope, and healing to the ends of the earth.”

Finding others with concerns about Telios Law    

In the days to come, the other MAF whistleblowers received their individualized reports, which had similar conclusions. We did our best to help each other process. Memories and nightmares of past traumas dominated my next few days and nights. I wrestled with regret, disillusionment, and shattered confidence.

But then the following week, I got some advice to look deeper into past work Theresa had done. I learned she also works as a defense attorney for ministries. Many evangelical Christian groups both considered and platformed her as an expert on how to properly handle abuse investigations. She served as a frequent speaker for Missio Nexus conferences, a speaker at the 2023 Evangelical Press Association conference, a podcast guest for MinistryWatch. She’s an expert panel chair of the Evangelical Council for Abuse Prevention. She serves as an advisor for Christianity Today’s Church Law & Tax site. She’d even written a book on the topic, which MinistryWatch gave as a thank you to donors in February.

But on the other hand, several whistleblowers, advocates, and a different third-party investigator have spoken publicly about her concerning methods. Telios Law was hired to investigate spiritual abuse by the province of the Anglican Church of North America. That church didn’t waive attorney-client privilege and never released the report to the public.

Sarah Klingler, an MK SafetyNet staffer, named Telios Law in a complaint on X that missionary kids have felt “blindsided, gaslit & re-victimized” by such investigations.

Pastor Matthew McNutt, the son of Ethnos360 missionaries, blogged in 2019 that Theresa didn’t notify him of the investigation into abuse of Ethnos360 missionary kids she was doing in Paraguay, despite the fact that he’d been a missionary kid on that field.

In an interview on YouTube, Ethnos360 missionary Nathan Morse said of Theresa’s Ethnos360 investigation that it is “not about truth or transparency” but rather “trying to make sure as little reputational damage to the organization is done as possible.”  

In solidarity with my statement here, two other whistleblowers, Audrey Luhmann and Libby Magee Coles, from two different institutions who hired Telios Law have offered their statements. Their concerns are stunningly similar to mine.

Professional Investigators International (PII) documented their concerns about Theresa in their third-party investigation for the Association of Baptists for World Evangelism. PII criticized Theresa for stating victims are trying to “attack” ministries using a “church sexual abuse reparations industry.” The PII report referenced a paper Theresa co-wrote in 2011.

“An informal alliance between plaintiffs’ attorneys, victims’ groups, the mainstream press, and the film industry has birthed the church sexual abuse reparations industry,” Theresa and her co-author wrote in that paper. “Religious leaders should recognize this as a business, with scores of law firms marketing their expertise, financially supporting and closely working with victims’ groups and issuing a steady stream of press releases to a seemingly insatiable press.”

Theresa’s paper also advocates for short statutes of limitations for criminal charges related to abuse and questions whether background checks are effective and worth “pastoral cost.”

 (When I asked whether she still stands by this 2011 article, Theresa told me it was written in the voice of a former partner “which is quite different from mine.” She said since then, she’s addressed the topics “in ways that I think better represent the complexities involved” and has removed the article from publication. However, her website still lists the title of the article in two places, once under a list of her “public speaking” opportunities at three conferences in 2011 and once under her publications. It is also listed in her credentials on multiple attorney search sites.)

In her book, “Handling Allegations in a Ministry: Responses and Investigations,” published in 2022, she devoted an entire chapter to show ministry leaders how to make sure information from investigations is protected by attorney-client privilege.

“The organization should respond by caring for people, but is not obliged to do so in a way that creates great legal or financial risk,” she wrote in her book. “Setting up an investigation in a way that creates more risk likely violates fiduciary duties to the nonprofit.”

In her book, she warns four times that victims may attack their leaders by speaking out with concerns, usually in a public way.

“It is not uncommon for survivors to attack ministry leaders (justly or unjustly) because of their own trauma, and they can say some nasty things,” she wrote. “Such attacks may be made publicly which makes them even more painful.”

(Please read my critique of Theresa’s book here.)

Painful. That’s a good word for what I’ve observed among our whistleblower group trying to make sense of Theresa’s investigation. It’s what I worry survivors from future Telios Law investigations and assessments will experience.² And it was also what we’d hoped to prevent for future MAFers—and its 48,000 passengers around the world.

One question still haunts me. Now what?

*A correction has been made to show that the province of the ACNA, not the Church of the Resurrection (an ACNA church) hired Telios.

1. I am not using the term “survivor” to indicate being a sexual abuse survivor, but rather I believe I survived different types of mistreatment.

2. The Kansas City Star reported Friday that the International House of Prayer-Kansas City has hired Telios Law to help it continue to deal with the aftermath of a major sex abuse scandal.