(L-R) Lauren Rohs, Sheri Autrey and Michael Havet – pictured here as children
Robert Corfield, a man who abused a boy in Canada in a secretive Christian church in the 1980s, has spoken publicly about what happened for the first time.
He was confronted by the BBC as part of a wider look into claims of child sexual abuse spanning decades within the church, known as The Truth.
His name is one of more than 700 given by people to a hotline set up to report sexual abuse within the church.
The sect says it addresses all abuse allegations.
The church, which has no official name but is often referred to as The Truth or The Way, is believed to have up to 100,000 members worldwide, with the majority in North America.
The potential scale of the abuse has been captured through a hotline – set-up last year by two women who say they were also sexually abused by a church leader when they were children. People have phoned in claiming they too were abused, with testimonies stretching back decades through to present day.
The highly secretive and insular nature of the church has helped abuse to thrive, say former and current insiders who spoke to the BBC. It has many unwritten rules, including that followers must marry within the group and keep mixing with outsiders to a minimum.
The church was founded in Ireland by a Scottish evangelist in 1897 and is built around ministers spreading New Testament teachings through word-of-mouth.
One of its hallmarks is that ministers give up their possessions and must be taken in by church members as they travel around, spreading the gospel. This makes children living in the homes they visit vulnerable to abuse, the insiders said.
Warning: This article contains details some readers may find upsetting
Robert Corfield (L) told the BBC he sexually abused Michael (R) for six years.
Former church member Michael Havet, 54, told the BBC he was abused by Robert Corfield in the 1980s, from the age of 12.
“People called me ‘Bob’s little companion’ – I just felt dirty and still do,” says Mr Havet, speaking from his home in Ottawa.
After abusing him, Mr Havet says Mr Corfield would force him to kneel beside him and pray.
“I had to work hard to get past that and find my prayer life again,” he says.
When confronted about the child abuse allegations by the BBC, Mr Corfield admitted that they had taken place for about six years in the 1980s.
“I have to acknowledge that’s true,” he said.
Mr Corfield was a minister – known within the sect as a “worker” – in Saskatchewan, Canada, at the time of the abuse.
This is the first time he has publicly admitted to child abuse, though he has previously been confronted by church members and wrote two private letters to Mr Havet in 2004 and 2005 which asked for forgiveness and said he was seeing a therapist. In one letter, Mr Corfield said he was “making a list of victims”.
“We don’t want to miss anyone who has been a victim of my actions,” he wrote.
However, when asked about this by the BBC, Mr Corfield said that there were no other victims “in the same sense that Michael was”, and that he had given two or three other teenagers massages.
Abuser given ‘fresh start’
Mr Havet is among a dozen people who have told the BBC that widespread abuse has been ignored or covered up in The Truth for decades – with some of the accused remaining in powerful positions for years.
The way his own case was dealt with by the church is a prime example, believes Mr Havet.
He reported his abuse in 1993 to Dale Shultz, Saskatchewan’s most senior church leader – known as an “overseer”. Overseers are the most senior members of the church and there is one for each US state and Canadian province where there is an active following.
But Mr Shultz didn’t go to the police – and, says Mr Havet, violently assaulted him a few weeks later because he thought he had told others of the abuse claims.
“He grabbed my shoulders yelling at me, slamming my head against a concrete pillar,” says Mr Havet, “splitting it open and causing it to bleed.”
Mr Havet says Mr Shultz then “encouraged” him to leave the church – while his childhood abuser, Robert Corfield, was just moved to be a minister across the border, in the US state of Montana.
Mr Corfield told the BBC that he believed it was Mr Shultz’s decision to send him to Montana, where he remained in post for 25 years.
“It was suggested it would give me a fresh beginning and probably also put space between me and the victim,” he said.
Mr Corfield was removed as minister last year after being confronted about Michael’s abuse by another congregation member, according to internal church emails seen by the BBC. One email also suggested “it is possible there may be additional victims”.
The ex-minister told the BBC that he “voluntarily stepped down when the accusations of Michael were presented” against him, and that he had “not been informed of any allegations beyond that.”
When contacted by the BBC, Dale Shultz said via email that “much of the information that you have received concerning me is distorted and inaccurate”. However he declined to go into any further detail.
A global crisis
Mr Havet is one of more than 1,000 current and former members of the sect to have contacted a hotline set up by campaign group, Advocates for The Truth.
The group was founded last year by Americans Cynthia Liles, Lauren Rohs and Sheri Autrey.
They say they have been given the names of more than 700 alleged perpetrators in 21 countries, including the UK, Ireland, Australia and Russia. They plan to build cases against those on the list and take them to the police.
All the women used to belong to The Truth and Lauren Rohs and Sheri Autrey say they were abused by the same man.
That man was Ms Rohs’ father, a senior minister called Steve Rohs.
Lauren Rohs traced Ms Autrey after reading her anonymous online account of childhood sexual abuse, in 2019.
In the post, Ms Autrey described how her abuser would sing Maneater by 80s pop duo Hall & Oates to her when she was in his bedroom at night.
Ms Rohs knew immediately that the man being described as the perpetrator was her own father, as it was the same song she remembers him singing to her as a child.
“I sat there stunned,” says the 35 year-old. “It disoriented me beyond belief.”
She says that her father subjected her to years of sexual, physical and emotional abuse from as early as she can remember.
Meanwhile, Ms Autrey says Steve Rohs stayed at her family home in Tulare County, California, for two months in 1982 – when she was turning 14 – and molested her daily.
He would sing Maneater because “a part of his manipulation was that I was this wild seductress”, the 54-year-old says.
Sheri Autrey
Sheri Autrey, seen here as a child
There is a 20-year age gap between the two women. By the time his daughter was born, Mr Rohs had given up his role as a worker and started a family in San Diego, California. They later moved to Washington state, Idaho and Colorado.
Lauren Rohs says her father gave various reasons for their constant moving, including that “God needs us in a new place”.
The BBC put all the allegations to Mr Rohs in emails and social media messages, but he did not respond.
Abuse culture persists
Ms Rohs says during her time in the church in the 1990s and 2000s, workers were like “demigods” and never questioned, and that callers to the abuse hotline confirm that this culture persists today.
Like Mr Havet, Ms Autrey says she spoke out about her abuser – and he was protected.
In 1986, she confided in her mother about being abused by Steve Rohs.
“I felt scared, dirty, ashamed, embarrassed, and guilty,” says Ms Autrey, who was 17 at the time and believed she would be in “big trouble”.
But her mother believed her right away and reported the man to the California state overseer, who has since died.
In a letter dated 11 May 1986, written by Mr Rohs and seen by the BBC, he admits to the overseer that he and the teenager “did kiss and touch each other intimately” and that he had “begged for forgiveness” ever since.
Mr Rohs was later brought to Ms Autrey’s home by workers where he verbally apologised to her.
“I responded that he was not sorry for what he had done or he would have apologised long before,” Ms Autrey recalls.
Sheri Autrey
Steve Rohs, pictured in the 1980s
Despite admitting to child abuse, Mr Rohs remained a respected and influential member of the church. His daughter says he was even promoted in 1994 to being a church elder – a person of seniority who holds meetings in their own home.
The BBC understands he now lives in Minnesota with Ms Rohs’ mother – their daughter is estranged from them both. He works as an insurance agent and was an active member of The Truth until April last year, after his daughter and Ms Autrey brought their allegations to the state’s overseer and he was removed from meetings.
The floodgates open
The catalyst for the hotline was the death of Oregon’s overseer, Dean Bruer, in 2022.
He was one of The Truth’s most respected leaders and had worked for the group for 46 years, across six US states.
An internal letter was written by his successor which stated Mr Bruer had a history of abuse including “rape and abuse of underage victims”.
It is not clear what the motivation behind writing the letter was but it leaked and soon found its way onto Facebook and TikTok.
Then more people started coming forward to tell their own stories of abuse.
“I think we thought the hotline was solely for Dean Bruer victims but what the hotline did was just open the floodgates,” Ms Rohs says.
The friends say they now want the kind of justice they didn’t manage to get for themselves.
“When I found Sheri it was a really rather rare and massive healing,” says Ms Rohs.
“It has been distressing as survivors to go back and hear the amount of filth and evil,” Ms Autrey says.
“Ours was bad enough but to see other people in such terrible situations – it’s beyond angering. It’s been ugly but also very rewarding.”
Ms Autrey stepped down from the Advocates in December.
Advocates For The Truth
Michael Havet, 54, continues to be affected by the sexual abuse he experienced as a child
Because The Truth has no official leader, the BBC instead put the allegations to more than 20 overseers in North America, via email.
The only one to respond was Rob Newman, the overseer for California.
“We actively address all abuse allegations involving participants in our fellowship,” he wrote in an email, before Mr Corfield’s confession.
“Our paramount concern is that victims receive the professional help that they need. We take all allegations of abuse seriously, strongly recommend mandated reporter training to all, and encourage everyone to report issues to the proper legal authorities.”
Ms Autrey believes change will not happen before any culpable overseers are jailed.
“It’s an extremely well-oiled machine for criminals,” she says.
“It’s a perfected system that has gone on for 12 decades.”
NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. syphilis epidemic slowed dramatically last year, gonorrhea cases fell and chlamydia cases remained below prepandemic levels, according to federal data released Tuesday.
The numbers represented some good news about sexually transmitted diseases, which experienced some alarming increases in past years due to declining condom use, inadequate sex education, and reduced testing and treatment when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Last year, cases of the most infectious stages of syphilis fell 10% from the year before — the first substantial decline in more than two decades. Gonorrhea cases dropped 7%, marking a second straight year of decline and bringing the number below what it was in 2019.
“I’m encouraged, and it’s been a long time since I felt that way” about the nation’s epidemic of sexually transmitted infections, said the CDC’s Dr. Jonathan Mermin. “Something is working.”
More than 2.4 million cases of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia were diagnosed and reported last year — 1.6 million cases of chlamydia, 600,000 of gonorrhea, and more than 209,000 of syphilis.
Syphilis is a particular concern. For centuries, it was a common but feared infection that could deform the body and end in death. New cases plummeted in the U.S. starting in the 1940s when infection-fighting antibiotics became widely available, and they trended down for a half century after that. By 2002, however, cases began rising again, with men who have sex with other men being disproportionately affected.
The new report found cases of syphilis in their early, most infectious stages dropped 13% among gay and bisexual men. It was the first such drop since the agency began reporting data for that group in the mid-2000s.
However, there was a 12% increase in the rate of cases of unknown- or later-stage syphilis — a reflection of people infected years ago.
Cases of syphilis in newborns, passed on from infected mothers, also rose. There were nearly 4,000 cases, including 279 stillbirths and infant deaths.
“This means pregnant women are not being tested often enough,” said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a professor of medicine at the University of Southern California.
What caused some of the STD trends to improve? Several experts say one contributor is the growing use of an antibiotic as a “morning-after pill.” Studies have shown that taking doxycycline within 72 hours of unprotected sex cuts the risk of developing syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia.
In June, the CDC started recommending doxycycline as a morning-after pill, specifically for gay and bisexual men and transgender women who recently had an STD diagnosis. But health departments and organizations in some cities had been giving the pills to people for a couple years.
Some experts believe that the 2022 mpox outbreak — which mainly hit gay and bisexual men — may have had a lingering effect on sexual behavior in 2023, or at least on people’s willingness to get tested when strange sores appeared.
Another factor may have been an increase in the number of health workers testing people for infections, doing contact tracing and connecting people to treatment. Congress gave $1.2 billion to expand the workforce over five years, including $600 million to states, cities and territories that get STD prevention funding from CDC.
Last year had the “most activity with that funding throughout the U.S.,” said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors.
However, Congress ended the funds early as a part of last year’s debt ceiling deal, cutting off $400 million. Some people already have lost their jobs, said a spokeswoman for Harvey’s organization.
Still, Harvey said he had reasons for optimism, including the growing use of doxycycline and a push for at-home STD test kits.
Also, there are reasons to think the next presidential administration could get behind STD prevention. In 2019, then-President Donald Trump announced a campaign to “eliminate” the U.S. HIV epidemic by 2030. (Federal health officials later clarified that the actual goal was a huge reduction in new infections — fewer than 3,000 a year.)
There were nearly 32,000 new HIV infections in 2022, the CDC estimates. But a boost in public health funding for HIV could also also help bring down other sexually transmitted infections, experts said.
“When the government puts in resources, puts in money, we see declines in STDs,” Klausner said.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists can’t know precisely when a volcano is about to erupt, but they can sometimes pick up telltale signs.
That happened two years ago with the world’s largest active volcano. About two months before Mauna Loa spewed rivers of glowing orange molten lava, geologists detected small earthquakes nearby and other signs, and they warned residents on Hawaii‘s Big Island.
Now a study of the volcano’s lava confirms their timeline for when the molten rock below was on the move.
“Volcanoes are tricky because we don’t get to watch directly what’s happening inside – we have to look for other signs,” said Erik Klemetti Gonzalez, a volcano expert at Denison University, who was not involved in the study.
Upswelling ground and increased earthquake activity near the volcano resulted from magma rising from lower levels of Earth’s crust to fill chambers beneath the volcano, said Kendra Lynn, a research geologist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and co-author of a new study in Nature Communications.
When pressure was high enough, the magma broke through brittle surface rock and became lava – and the eruption began in late November 2022. Later, researchers collected samples of volcanic rock for analysis.
The chemical makeup of certain crystals within the lava indicated that around 70 days before the eruption, large quantities of molten rock had moved from around 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) to 3 miles (5 kilometers) under the summit to a mile (2 kilometers) or less beneath, the study found. This matched the timeline the geologists had observed with other signs.
The last time Mauna Loa erupted was in 1984. Most of the U.S. volcanoes that scientists consider to be active are found in Hawaii, Alaska and the West Coast.
Worldwide, around 585 volcanoes are considered active.
Scientists can’t predict eruptions, but they can make a “forecast,” said Ben Andrews, who heads the global volcano program at the Smithsonian Institution and who was not involved in the study.
Andrews compared volcano forecasts to weather forecasts – informed “probabilities” that an event will occur. And better data about the past behavior of specific volcanos can help researchers finetune forecasts of future activity, experts say.
(asterisk)We can look for similar patterns in the future and expect that there’s a higher probability of conditions for an eruption happening,” said Klemetti Gonzalez.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Waymo on Tuesday opened its robotaxi service to anyone who wants a ride around Los Angeles, marking another milestone in the evolution of self-driving car technology since the company began as a secret project at Google 15 years ago.
The expansion comes eight months after Waymo began offering rides in Los Angeles to a limited group of passengers chosen from a waiting list that had ballooned to more than 300,000 people. Now, anyone with the Waymo One smartphone app will be able to request a ride around an 80-square-mile (129-square-kilometer) territory spanning the second largest U.S. city.
After Waymo received approval from California regulators to charge for rides 15 months ago, the company initially chose to launch its operations in San Francisco before offering a limited service in Los Angeles.
Before deciding to compete against conventional ride-hailing pioneers Uber and Lyft in California, Waymo unleashed its robotaxis in Phoenix in 2020 and has been steadily extending the reach of its service in that Arizona city ever since.
Driverless rides are proving to be more than just a novelty. Waymo says it now transports more than 50,000 weekly passengers in its robotaxis, a volume of business numbers that helped the company recently raise $5.6 billion from its corporate parent Alphabet and a list of other investors that included venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz and financial management firm T. Rowe Price.
“Our service has matured quickly and our riders are embracing the many benefits of fully autonomous driving,” Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said in a blog post.
Despite its inroads, Waymo is still believed to be losing money. Although Alphabet doesn’t disclose Waymo’s financial results, the robotaxi is a major part of an “Other Bets” division that had suffered an operating loss of $3.3 billion through the first nine months of this year, down from a setback of $4.2 billion at the same time last year.
But Waymo has come a long way since Google began working on self-driving cars in 2009 as part of project “Chauffeur.” Since its 2016 spinoff from Google, Waymo has established itself as the clear leader in a robotaxi industry that’s getting more congested.
Electric auto pioneer Tesla is aiming to launch a rival “Cybercab” service by 2026, although its CEO Elon Musk said he hopes the company can get the required regulatory clearances to operate in Texas and California by next year.
Tesla’s projected timeline for competing against Waymo has been met with skepticism because Musk has made unfulfilled promises about the company’s self-driving car technology for nearly a decade.
Meanwhile, Waymo’s robotaxis have driven more than 20 million fully autonomous miles and provided more than 2 million rides to passengers without encountering a serious accident that resulted in its operations being sidelined.
That safety record is a stark contrast to one of its early rivals, Cruise, a robotaxi service owned by General Motors. Cruise’s California license was suspended last year after one of its driverless cars in San Francisco dragged a jaywalking pedestrian who had been struck by a different car driven by a human.
Cruise is now trying to rebound by joining forces with Uber to make some of its services available next year in U.S. cities that still haven’t been announced. But Waymo also has forged a similar alliance with Uber to dispatch its robotaxi in Atlanta and Austin, Texas next year.
Another robotaxi service, Amazon’s Zoox, is hoping to begin offering driverless rides to the general public in Las Vegas at some point next year before also launching in San Francisco.
