Last week, a 35-year-old woman, who was adopted as an infant by a Mormon couple, discovered her name in an unexpected place: It was in the first item on a list of damaging information an LDS Church-hired attorney had compiled about her birth mother.
That mother was the one who has alleged she was raped in 1984 by Joseph L. Bishop, then the president of the Missionary Training Center in Provo, while she was an LDS missionary.
And the extensive list revealed the lawyer’s efforts to assess the accuser’s credibility, an aggressive response that some say could scare away other sexual assault victims and prevent them from stepping forward.