The Oregonian | By Maxine Bernstein | March 7, 2024
Tania Culver Humphrey, who alleges Mercy Corps failed to properly investigate her complaints that her father sexually abused her and others for years, seeks to amend her lawsuit to ask for up to $54 million in punitive damages against the global charity.
On Thursday, her lawyer filed sworn declarations from a retired FBI profiler and a clinical psychologist to support her allegations that Mercy Corps acted “with malice” in its investigation, violated best practices in its interviews and caused Humphrey more harm.
“Uncovering the truth in order to hold the perpetrators accountable was never Mercy Corps’ goal,” Humphrey’s attorney, Michael Fuller, wrote in his proposed amended complaint. Instead, he and Humphrey allege the charity wanted the information simply to get ahead of any potential public disclosure.
A Mercy Corps spokesperson issued a statement in response.
“The independent investigation process that Mercy Corps commissioned at Ms. Culver Humphrey’s request consistently took account of her wellbeing. Mercy Corps treated Ms. Culver Humphrey with dignity and respect throughout, and we fundamentally disagree with the characterizations of Mercy Corps’ actions alleged in this lawsuit,” the spokesperson said by email.
In previous court documents, the global charity has repeatedly acknowledged “its failure to properly respond” to Humphrey’s initial disclosure in the 1990s of the sexual abuse she suffered by her father as a child in the 1970s and 1980s, its lawyers wrote. Mercy Corps subsequently conducted a multi-phase investigation, and said it “took numerous and extensive steps designed to prevent any such failures again, including reporting potential criminal activity to the FBI,” according to its court filings.
A year ago, Multnomah County Circuit Judge Judith H. Matarazzo ruled Humphrey’s lawsuit, first filed in September 2022, could go forward, denying the charity’s motion to dismiss.
Outside consultants hired by Mercy Corps released their report in 2021 substantiating findings of The Oregonian/OregonLive’s 2019 investigation into how Mercy Corps’ late co-founder Ellsworth Culver serially abused Humphrey when she was a child and later sought to quash her allegations when she came forward as a young woman.
The report was part of a 2020 settlement between Humphrey, now 53, and Mercy Corps that paid Humphrey an undisclosed amount of money and for some of her counseling.
Mercy Corps commissioned Freeh Group International Solutions, a risk management firm led by former FBI Director Louis Freeh, to examine “the deficiencies in Mercy Corps’ prior response” and to identify others who may have been sexually abused by her father when he was still working for Mercy Corps, according to the settlement.
The Mercy Corps report 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.
In the new filing, James Clemente, a retired FBI profiler and supervising agent, alleges the interviewers “intentionally” barraged Humphreys with aggressive questions with a “callous disregard” that their tactics were causing Humphrey severe distress, fear and humiliation.
From his review of records, he found that the investigators questioned Humphreys for more than 100 hours, typically for eight hours a day, sometimes for days in a row, with no breaks beyond a lunch break. Interviewers set fake deadlines and put “false limitations” on her ability to recount her story to police or others, he wrote.
The suit alleges Humphrey was threatened about being sued if she disclosed her information to anyone other than the investigators hired by Mercy Corps and was told this was her only opportunity to disclose the alleged crimes.
The proposed amended complaint alleges the interviewers failed to forward to law enforcement at least 10 names of other alleged offenders Humphrey had identified and others whom she said could corroborate her allegations.
“Although Ms. Humphrey had undertaken these grueling interviews for the primary purpose of identifying perpetrators to law enforcement and identifying and supporting additional victims, she was given no evidence that the perpetrators’ names or crimes were ever reported to authorities,” the psychologist, Lauren Maltby, wrote.
Humphrey’s lawyer hired Maltby, an assistant professor of clinical pediatrics at UCLA Geffen School of Medicine, to separately interview Humphrey. Maltby trains forensic interviewers and medical residents on how to question victims of abuse and recently gave expert testimony before a New York jury on behalf of E. Jean Carroll, who was awarded $83 million in her defamation case against former President Donald Trump.
Maltby said the investigators for Mercy Corps violated a guiding principle that calls for interviewers to safeguard an abuse victim’s physical and mental health.
They ignored Humphrey’s numerous physical and mental signs of distress, including an inability to breathe, panic attacks and suicidal thoughts, Maltby wrote.
At least one of the investigation’s interviews with Humphrey was held in a bedroom at the downtown Portland Hilton where Humphrey said she had previously been sexually abused, Maltby wrote. Other interviews were held in a car without access to a restroom.
Humphrey also wasn’t allowed to have a lawyer, a therapist, an advocate or anyone present for support during the interviews, Maltby noted.
And despite promises by Mercy Corps’ investigators to use its resources to track down other alleged victims located outside the United States, “it does not appear they followed up on the leads,” Maltby wrote.
Maltby found that it was not surprising that the Mercy Corps’ investigation “left Ms. Humphrey with the impression that she was simply used and consumed by the investigative team for the purpose of identifying possible perpetrators and protecting the organization by getting ahead of any future, public disclosures.”
