The Oregonian | By Maxine Bernstein | September 7, 2022
Tania Culver Humphrey filed a negligence lawsuit Wednesday against Mercy Corps, saying the investigation commissioned by the global charity co-founded by her father didn’t go far enough into her allegations of sexual misconduct and abuse.
The suit alleges that the yearlong review by an outside firm “buried” alleged criminal activity and instead worked to protect the Portland-based Mercy Corps, its board members, staff and other dignitaries. The 31-page report was compiled by the Freeh Group International Solutions, a risk management firm led by former FBI Director Louis Freeh.
The investigators released their report last year substantiating findings of The Oregonian/OregonLive 2019 investigation into how Mercy Corps’ late co-founder Ellsworth Culver serially abused Humphrey when she was a child.
The report also found that eight people previously affiliated with Mercy Corps, including Culver, may have sexually abused as many as six children in the 1980s. The report also made public additional sexual abuse allegations by Humphrey that a 9-year-old girl in Thailand had died after a night of abuse by Culver and others.
Yet Humphrey’s lawsuit called the investigative report a “whitewash” that glossed over her accusations and didn’t name other alleged abusers.
Her lawsuit also doesn’t identify anyone but her father by name as an abuser.
Mercy Corps’ chief executive officer Tjada D’Oyen McKenna said in a statement that she was shocked by what she called Humphrey’s “distorted and untrue characterization of the independent investigation.”
“The investigation by Freeh Group was entirely independent and objective and was published on Mercy Corps’ website. We categorically deny any accusation that Mercy Corps sought to influence or otherwise downplay any contents of the Freeh Group’s report,” McKenna said. “Names of individuals who were identified by Ms. Culver Humphrey as abusers, along with information about the reported abuse, was reported to law enforcement in collaboration with Ms. Culver Humphrey.”
Humphrey’s suit says Mercy Corps tried to intimidate and silence her by repeatedly telling her she could be sued for defamation.
Despite over 200 hours of interviews and meetings with Humphrey from June 2020 through May 2021, investigators produced an incomplete report, with critical facts missing, “downplayed or ignored,” according to the suit. Humphrey also gave the investigators her personal journals with dates, towns, names and descriptions, according to the suit and her lawyers.
The suit includes an allegation that Humphrey, now 51, became pregnant at age 12 after a sexual assault by an unnamed Mercy Corps leader and had a forced miscarriage, and that she was abused at Mercy Corps headquarters.
When the Mercy Corps-commissioned report was released, the investigators said the passage of time made it difficult to confirm the child’s death in Thailand and some of the other allegations, but they nonetheless turned them over to the FBI.
Humphrey expected the FBI to get involved in the investigation, but she never heard from a federal agent, the suit says.
The suit also revealed that Mercy Corps quietly wrote checks totaling at least $682,347 to the nonprofit’s former chief executive officer, Neal Keny-Guyer, after he resigned in the wake of the Oregonian/OregonLive investigation that showed the organization’s executives twice dismissed sexual abuse allegations against Culver.
Mercy Corps, a $520 million-a-year charity, provides disaster relief and other aid to people in more than 40 countries.
Humphrey’s suit filed in Multnomah County Circuit Court alleges negligence and intentional infliction of emotional distress. It seeks $1 from Mercy Corps, but her lawyers intend to amend the suit to seek unspecified punitive damages, with 70% to be paid to the state “to deter powerful corporate entities from engaging in similar tactics in the future.”
Kim Sordyl, one of Humphrey’s lawyers, declined to say if Humphrey and Mercy Corps reached an earlier financial settlement. Attorney C.J. Graves, who had represented Humphrey in the past, declined to comment on whether an out-of-court settlement had been reached with Mercy Corps.
Mercy Corps’ current chief executive officer noted the nonprofit covered the costs for Humphrey’s counseling, costs associated with over a year of therapy from multiple providers, legal services, a security system at her home, as well as housing and travel costs during the course of the investigation.
“We have at all times been available and responsive to any communication from Ms. Culver Humphrey and her representatives, and we refute any allegation to the contrary,” McKenna’s statement said.
The Oregonian/OregonLive reported in 2019 that Ellsworth Culver raped and sodomized Humphrey starting in preschool and continuing to her high school years. Humphrey told three Mercy Corps leaders in 1992, but they determined her account and medical records weren’t enough to remove Culver. They kept him in a senior vice president’s role and allowed him to travel the world as the public face of Mercy Corps.
The Oregonian/OregonLive stories led to the resignations of Keny-Guyer, senior legal counsel and corporate secretary Barnes Ellis and board member Robert Newell.
