Thread by @ladyjessicahaze

Dear Twitter:

I am exhausted.

I am angry, I am heartbroken, and I am grieving.

I want to say the announcement @esaumccaulley links to here is a victory.

In some ways it is.

But it is a small victory won at far too great a cost.

https://twitter.com/esaumccaulley/status/1410041410460569601

“What’s wrong?” concerned observers will ask. “You made a public statement and the Bishop responded. He says he is deeply grieved, and he is taking some steps you asked him to take. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

No, it isn’t what I wanted.

I never wanted any of this.

I never wanted to be forced to spend yet more precious, irretrievable hours of my life painstakingly laying out a 30-tweet thread that may or may not gain any traction or inspire any advocacy.

I never wanted to be forced to go public with my own horrific rape story in order to hold an ACNA diocese that was not even my church home accountable for mishandling child sexual abuse allegations.

Nobody wants to do any of this with their lives.

I live in the Utah mountains now.

It’s amazing here.

I live with good people who love and support me.

My roommates are a wonderful couple, their 5 amazing kids, a goldendoodle, 2 cats, 2 horses, 2 goats, 1 strangely fluffy rabbit, and 12ish chickens with ridiculous names.

I have a beautiful life.

I want to garden, read books, hike the mountains, laugh with my friends, go to therapy, and work on healing from the two rapes and years of grooming and abuse.

I never wanted to be a #ChurchToo advocate.

I never wanted to have to take to Twitter to beg for help because my fellow victims---little girls and teenage girls and young adult women---and I were not important enough to Bp. Stewart for him to honor the pleas some of us made to him politely, in private.

I wanted him to listen.

Not to say kind words.

Not to say he’s grieved.

Not to perform empathy.

I wanted him to *be* grieved. Grieved enough to say, from the bottom of his heart:

“I'm so sorry. What can we do for you? What can we ever do, if anything, to make this right?”

I wanted Bp. Stewart to honor the *literally hundreds of hours* of research, consulting, writing, and advocacy work that broken, traumatized people did in order to educate him on how to do right by us.

This is what I wanted. This is what we all wanted.

Five different times in our email correspondence with the Bishop’s team we asked for the investigation’s final report to be made public.

FIVE times. There may have been more. I do not have the emotional capacity to dig through more emails right now to check.

Jan. 19: I describe a proper investigation, including a public final report.

Apr. 24: I ask for commitment to a public final report.

May 5: A victim’s mother asks for the same.

May 7: I ask again.

May 28: The victim’s mother expresses grief that Stewart won’t commit to this.

Every time he put us off and evaded commitment.

Then, on June 29, one man with public clout and social standing was able to get Bp. Stewart to make this basic, obvious commitment that a whole team of survivors and advocates couldn't extract from him despite months of begging.

I do not know Esau McCaulley.

We have never communicated.

I appreciate that he saw my Twitter thread and immediately went and spoke to Bp. Stewart on the victims’ behalf.

Unlike Esau, though, I am not “grateful” for what Stewart has done.

I am not grateful because Bp. Stewart has quite clearly not made this commitment out of a concern for the needs of Mark Rivera’s victims.

He has made it because my Twitter thread and the advocacy it elicited backed him into a corner he could not get out of.

Bp. Stewart ignored 5 pleas to make the final report public.

He made no mention of a public report in his May 4 announcement.

He ignored our polite requests.

He ignored our grieving, emotional appeals.

His new update implies that publicizing the report was always the plan.

It was not always the plan.

If it had been he would have told us when we asked. One of the many times we asked.

I am glad the final report will be made public.

I am grateful for Esau’s advocacy.

And I am deeply grieved and angry that this is what it took to extract this simple concession that should never, ever have been in question to begin with.

There is so much more to be said about this. About these two announcements, about the two years of perpetual re-traumatization this Diocese’ reprehensible actions and inaction have caused victims, about the months of thankless work the victims and our advocates have done.

There is much more to be said about Bp. Stewart's disingenuous framing of information, about the holes still left in this process, about the absolute lack of faith any of us have in this investigation regardless of the hard-won commitment to publish the final report.

There is so much more, but I am weary. I have been at this for months, day after day, holding it together, setting aside my deep, raging sorrow in order to do the work of truth and justice.

I am utterly exhausted.

I will be back to Twitter to explain more, because I am committed to this.

On behalf of the 9-year-old child whose body and soul were brutally violated.

On behalf of the victims whose voices have not been heard.

I will be back, and I will not leave until this is finished.

But right now I need a moment away. I'm going to take a brief Twitter break to go be in the beautiful Utah mountains, to tend to my own soul, so that I can keep doing this work.

Thank you to all of you who have reached out. Please keep doing so. I will get back to you soon.

Thank you also to everyone who is advocating to the extent of their personal capacity and social capital, especially those who do this work without public recognition, quietly and steadily and in some cases anonymously for their own safety.

We see you, and we appreciate you.