Death of Tom Kimball

[_Kishkumen]

For those of us who did not know him, what, if any, was the relationship between him and S.W.?

Both are descendants of Heber C. Kimball?

[_Dr Exiled]

Lindsay Hansen Park said:



This guy was a predator to the end. I'm kind of shocked this was the same Tom who posted here from time to time. One never knows who is behind the online personas or what people are capable of doing.

Yes, that news from Lindsay was extremely disturbing, but, unfortunately, not all that surprising. We have to imagine that he was extremely desperate as his life unravelled before his eyes. All of these years he secretly abused kids and took such great pains to hide it while maintaining a respectable façade. Now his life as he had known it was ending. For him it was a kind of death, and he was furious with the world and himself as he desperately looked for a way out. As painful as it would have been, facing up to his crimes was the better way to deal with it, but I can't imagine what it must have been like to be in his shoes. There must have been such great self-loathing. So much pain and guilt.

I doubt he would have gone to the trouble of hunting down Lindsay to harm her. His threat, however, is entirely consistent with other incidents that occurred when Tom was frightened and angry. One of his former Signature Books associates reported that in the past he had accosted her and verbally abused her in a wild and disturbing way when he felt she had been hired into a position that was, according to his view, rightfully his. The man that would do that would certainly threaten Lindsay in a desperate moment. I don't see, however, him actually following through on the threat. We should recall that his acts of physical aggression were carefully planned to maintain secrecy. He did not threaten them openly or talk about them openly. Therefore, an open threat of this kind is not the sort of thing he would likely have actually followed through on.

That said, yes, he was a predator to the end. Bullying of this kind is just another form of predation. It comes from the same place of sickness and fear. We cannot separate Tom the bully from Tom the sexual predator. It may be that Tom had a hole in him that freaked the ____ out of him and that he desperately needed to fill by making himself feel powerful anyway he could without regard for the health and safety of others. Tom died a predator. It is extremely sad. May his victims and family find healing.

Who knows? Maybe not hunt her down but one can envision a desperate predator, encircled, irrational and doing harm to someone who is about to be a witness against him or about to act as news reporter exposing those hidden secrets. If given the opportunity, this predator, I can imagine, could take out Lindsay if she were close to him in this moment of desperation. He made the threat and so had processed the idea in his mind. The next is whether or not he would make a substantial step toward taking her out with him or not. I don't know. Anybody is capable of anything when provoked sufficiently in my book.

Anyway, this is a sad story any way one looks at it. It brings up horrible thoughts about the Kimballs I knew growing up and I wonder if they might have been victims too. It brings up horrible thoughts about my distant cousin and the claims his wife made about her bishop father and the nasty deeds he committed against his daughters and how he got away with it because he had apostle and 70's friends in the ward where he was bishop. It brings up horrible thoughts of how the old Deseret Gym in SLC was a den of child predators and how some friends fell victim to these evil men and how the church brushed it under the rug. This has to change. I know child predation is all over society but I wonder if it is more prevalent in Utah and among Mormons due to the authoritarian, over-obsessed with sex culture that is there? I heard that child pornography is a big problem in Utah. Does anyone here know of the statistics on this? Is it more of a problem in Utah than in other areas of the country, world? I wonder how polygamy plays into this and the custom of marrying teenage brides a la Lorenzo Snow and Warren Jeffs? When one views women and children as chattel, without rights, anything is possible.

[_Meadowchik]

I have said it many times, but I think it always bears repeating: LDS culture is not really a safe place for kids. This is not to say that many kids can't go through life in the LDS Church without being abused. Of course they can. The safeguards against abuse are inadequate, however, and worse--there are structural elements of Church practice that simply will help abusers abuse kids. No child should be alone with an adult stranger to talk about private sexual matters. Full stop. There can be no exceptions to that rule.

People will respond by pointing out that Tom was an ex-Mormon and thus did not have the tools of personal priesthood interviews to use in perpetrating his crimes. Yes. Very true. But we need to understand that these interviews are part of a system of practices that goes back to early Mormonism that involves treating young people as adult partners and using one's own children as tools to build salvific family networks. You are considered strange if you DO NOT turn over your kids to the care of ward members.

That was my experience, anyway, and it really came to home to my wife and me when we our own children joined our family. We adopted our kids, and in doing so we learned about the issue of attachment. Adopting families must give attention to the issue of forming strong bonds with their kids, especially if they adopt kids in their toddler years or older. The Church system had no sensitivity to that issue. They expected us to turn our kids over to fellow ward members while we did our church service. We could see they would just not understand. In their eyes, we were wrong for not understanding how the Church worked. There was something deeply ingrained here regarding the thin boundaries between the nuclear family and the ward, and I really believe it was a Mormon phenomenon.

That is dangerous. It provides easy access for perpetrators like Tom. And we must consider the possibility that Tom himself was a victim in this social system. Lindsay Hansen Park strongly suspects this, and she knew him better than most of us did. So, it does not matter that Tom was not abusing kids through personal priesthood interviews. He was in a social system that unfortunately makes it very easy for sick predators to perpetrate crimes against children. Children are molded to be very trusting of fellow ward members. They are molded to trust priesthood holders with their intimate secrets. They are taught to obey and respect their elders. The Church expects members to trust their kids with other ward members and especially priesthood leaders.

Taken individually these may sound like decent values, but put together in this particular mix they set up kids for personal catastrophe. Tom may have been one of those kids, and he then took the damage done to him and thrust it on many, many young girls.

It has to stop. The Church needs to strengthen the boundaries between the institution and the family in this regard. No child should be put in a position where they can easily be victimized by sexual predators. The LDS Church system has failed to catch these perps, hold them accountable, and keep children safe on a large scale. The Church is not to be trusted until it makes the needed changes. This is something a mass of members must demand. Ex-Mormons, too, must feel obliged to take up the cause and keep at it. We were part of this, and we know it is broken. Family and friends are still in it. Kids you know are at risk. We should not rest thinking there is nothing we can do about this.

Lindsay Park did the right thing. Both of her posts were bang on. None of this can be hidden.

Indeed. We are lucky in this community to have brave, hard-working people of integrity like Lindsay. She is a treasure.

I really appreciate your points about excessive trust, which I think is unfortunately a feature in LDS culture. It goes along with the feature of certainty.

Close to the heart of these two things is in my opinion an existential dilemma that humans have not roundly solved, namely, that evildoing is not easy to spot. And there is no perfect rule to predict it. That is scary as hell. And we rely on trust to function in human community and civilization. Mormonism relies very heavily on trust and tends to extend resources with excessive trust as a kind of capital.

It requires energy to watch out for evil, and sometimes more energy can be extended at making easy labels for evil instead of doing the real work of fighting it.

Also, It is difficult to both manage uncertainty and not have the comfort of certainty. A sense of certainty is another feature that is depended upon excessively in Mormonism. The labels we make about "good" and "evil" often contribute to a false sense of security and therefore a false certainty about reality.

As human beings, I think that if we learn how to be better at managing uncertainty and coping in life without certainty, we will be better at dealing with the cognitive dissonance like what has punched us in the face just now, less likely to seek easy answers as the easy way through, and therefore better at opposing evil.

[_Kishkumen]

Tom the poster has a very clear preference for topics that discuss Mopologetics and it's various personalities. He seems, or if its Kimball, seemed really knowledgeable about the recent history, dating back the past few decades, of the inner-workings of the whole enterprise. If it's not him it's really a despicable thing to put on someone even though we're all by and large anonymous. It feels a little dirty thinking it. I hope it's not, but I suppose if we don't hear from him again, well it may not definitively answer the question for us, but..

I left some space in my mind for the possibility that it was Thomas Wayment, as his interests right out of the gate seemed pretty academically focused. That said, he contacted me about Gee's review of Ritner's book on ancient Libya, which Wayment's library access could have provided him. So, yeah, could be.

[_Kishkumen]

Who knows? Maybe not hunt her down but one can envision a desperate predator, encircled, irrational and doing harm to someone who is about to be a witness against him or about to act as news reporter exposing those hidden secrets. If given the opportunity, this predator, I can imagine, could take out Lindsay if she were close to him in this moment of desperation. He made the threat and so had processed the idea in his mind. The next is whether or not he would make a substantial step toward taking her out with him or not. I don't know. Anybody is capable of anything when provoked sufficiently in my book.

Sure. I'm just glad that it did not happen, and, in any case, your point about him being a predator to the end stands. We do not know that he did anything other than take himself out of the picture to address the damage he had done.

Anyway, this is a sad story any way one looks at it. It brings up horrible thoughts about the Kimballs I knew growing up and I wonder if they might have been victims too. It brings up horrible thoughts about my distant cousin and the claims his wife made about her bishop father and the nasty deeds he committed against his daughters and how he got away with it because he had apostle and 70's friends in the ward where he was bishop. It brings up horrible thoughts of how the old Deseret Gym in Salt Lake City was a den of child predators and how some friends fell victim to these evil men and how the church brushed it under the rug. This has to change. I know child predation is all over society but I wonder if it is more prevalent in Utah and among Mormons due to the authoritarian, over-obsessed with sex culture that is there? I heard that child pornography is a big problem in Utah. Does anyone here know of the statistics on this? Is it more of a problem in Utah than in other areas of the country, world? I wonder how polygamy plays into this and the custom of marrying teenage brides a la Lorenzo Snow and Warren Jeffs? When one views women and children as chattel, without rights, anything is possible.

I don't know any other Kimballs, and I don't have any statistical information on the incidence of child abuse in Utah or among Mormons. My sense is that everything you have raised is in some way tentatively pertinent as a consideration. Doubtless books could be written about this. There is no question in my mind that the LDS Church has a real problem here and that its culture and practices are deficient in certain respects that aggravate what is a pretty universal problem.

According to a long-term, anthropological perspective, pedophilia is a human phenomenon dating back many thousands of years. Some adults are attracted to children. Taboos against incest are in place for a reason. They would not have been cooked up because incest wasn't happening. Pederasty was a fairly common, if minority, phenomenon in Ancient Greece and Rome, as well as other ancient societies. Even today there are ritual acts of pederasty in certain small cultures. Pedophilia is a huge problem in, of all places, modern France.

So, Mormons are not unique in having this problem. That said, it is the LDS Church's unique combination of institutional structures, practices, and norms facilitating abusers' access to children and covering up abuse that we are concerned with, must be addressed, and really can be addressed.

[_Kishkumen]

I really appreciate your points about excessive trust, which I think is unfortunately a feature in LDS culture. It goes along with the feature of certainty.

Close to the heart of these two things is in my opinion an existential dilemma that humans have not roundly solved, namely, that evildoing is not easy to spot. And there is no perfect rule to predict it. That is scary as hell. And we rely on trust to function in human community and civilization. Mormonism relies very heavily on trust and tends to extend resources with excessive trust as a kind of capital.

It requires energy to watch out for evil, and sometimes more energy can be extended at making easy labels for evil instead of doing the real work of fighting it.

Also, It is difficult to both manage uncertainty and not have the comfort of certainty. A sense of certainty is another feature that is depended upon excessively in Mormonism. The labels we make about "good" and "evil" often contribute to a false sense of security and therefore a false certainty about reality.

As human beings, I think that if we learn how to be better at managing uncertainty and coping in life without certainty, we will be better at dealing with the cognitive dissonance like what has punched us in the face just now, less likely to seek easy answers as the easy way through, and therefore better at opposing evil.

Those are great insights, Meadowchik. I agree that we are really bad at spotting evil, and clearly different people have different heuristic devices that they prefer to use when they try to identify evil in people. Unfortunately, nothing is perfectly reliable. We are not absolutely defenseless here, but the careful reservation of trust after close verification beats relying on misleading rubrics. Tightly knit religious groups with strong structures of authority are going to carry much bigger risks than other kinds of groups. The LDS Church started as a small community based on trust, but that trust was violated at the earliest stages. Nevertheless, the promise of trustworthiness remains a key component of Latter-day Saint culture. Outsiders are suspect. Insiders are family. Brother Kish! Sister Kish!

[_moksha]

It brings up horrible thoughts of how the old Deseret Gym in Salt Lake City was a den of child predators and how some friends fell victim to these evil men and how the church brushed it under the rug.

What was this about? Did it have something to do with having the boys be nude in the pool during their swim classes?

[_Temp. Admin.]

(Dr. Shades here, posting under our "Temp. Admin." account.)

I'm kind of shocked this was the same Tom who posted here from time to time.

FULL STOP. Doctor Scratch merely wondered whether they were one and the same. He did not directly declare, unequivocally, that they are one and the same.

Let's not jump to hard conclusions too soon.

As painful as it would have been, facing up to his crimes was the better way to deal with it, but I can't imagine what it must have been like to be in his shoes. There must have been such great self-loathing. So much pain and guilt.

I doubt there was any of the latter. In my (observational only!) experience, there's statistically little chance of there being any self-loathing, pain, or guilt but statistically a far greater chance of wanting to escape paying the price for his crimes.

We do not know that he did anything other than take himself out of the picture to address the damage he had done.

Like I said, "addressing the damage he had done" was a far, far less likely motive than wanting to escape the legal consequences of what he did.

Did it have something to do with having the boys be nude in the pool during their swim classes?

I'm praying that this is just another one of your jokes.

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

Dr. Shades. How do you not know this? This was a very common occurrence in SLC back in the day.

- Doc

[_moksha]

Did it have something to do with having the boys be nude in the pool during their swim classes?

I'm praying that this is just another one of your jokes.

No, this was a practice at the Deseret Gymnasium. I was simply wondering if this had some tie-in with the allegation above about the Gymnasium and pedophiles. I think this nude swimming by the guys may have extended to the pool at BYU way back when in the last century. They probably got this from the ancient Athenians (maybe the Spartans too).

https://imgur.com/nD3CJpe