How unreported abuse sparked a religious liberty case

When a member of the Latter-day Saints religion admitted to child abuse three times in front of the group’s leaders in Arizona, LDS leaders encouraged him to report himself to police. But police didn’t learn of the abuse until six years after that first confession, when law enforcement found a video of the man’s crimes that he posted online.

Paul Adams confessed in front of a bishop, again before Adams’ wife, Leizza, and the same bishop, and a third time during a disciplinary council meeting. His children later sued the LDS organization, contending it failed to follow mandatory reporting laws.

The Arizona Supreme Court disagreed last Wednesday, finding that state laws and the First Amendment shield clergy from being required to report information learned during confidential confessions. The justices said that courts can’t second-guess what counts as confessions in a religion. While constitutional experts say the court upheld religious freedom protections, advocates for abuse survivors argue the ruling doesn’t prioritize children’s safety.

Arizona law protects clergy members from being required to report child abuse that they become aware of through confession or confidential communication. But if clergy members learn about the abuse outside of a confession, state law requires them to inform legal authorities.

In 2011, Adams confessed to Bishop John Herrod, who led a temple in Bisbee, Ariz., and was counseling Adams, that he had sexually abused one of his children. Herrod then met with Adams and his wife, where Adams again made the same confession. The bishop began counseling the couple and recommended that either Adams turn himself in or that Leizza should report the matter to the authorities. Herrod also called an LDS abuse help line, where church lawyers told him he should not mention the abuse to any authorities, according to an Associated Press investigation.

Robert Kim Mauzy later succeeded Herrod as bishop, and Herrod disclosed Adams’ confession to the new leader. Mauzy excommunicated Adams from the temple in 2013. Adams appealed his expulsion, and during a disciplinary hearing, he again admitted to the abuse in front of members of the disciplinary council. The council upheld his excommunication.

No religious leaders reported the abuse to law enforcement or government authorities. In 2017, the Department of Homeland Security arrested Adams after law enforcement officers in New Zealand discovered one of his videos he posted online of the sexual abuse. Adams had sexually abused all six of his children between the ages of 6 weeks and 12 years old.

That year, a grand jury indicted Adams and Leizza on charges related to his abuse. Leizza pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 2½ years in prison. Adams confessed his actions but killed himself before he could go to trial.

Three of Adams’ children filed a lawsuit against the church in 2020, contending that the religious group broke its fiduciary duty. Religious leaders failed to comply with Arizona’s mandatory reporting law, as Adams’ repeated confessions did not fall under clergy’s confidential communications protections, the children said.

Latter-day Saints leaders argued that Adams made all of his confessions in front of clergy during confidential communications. Under religious doctrine, leaders had a duty to keep private information disclosed in confidence, the group said.

In 2023, the Cochise County Superior Court dismissed the children’s lawsuit and sided with the Latter-day Saints. But a state appeals court reversed that in 2025, finding that a jury should be able to determine Adams’ clergy-penitent privilege regarding his confessions in front of his wife and in front of the disciplinary hearing. The appeals court said a jury should evaluate whether the Latter-day Saints correctly defined these meetings as confidential under its doctrinal handbook.

But last week, Arizona’s Supreme Court unanimously rejected that decision. The clergy-penitent privilege doesn’t apply in this case, Vice Chief Justice John Lopez IV wrote for the court, adding that the children filed the lawsuit against the religious organization, not Adams, which invokes the mandatory reporting statute. But the clergy members involved in the case are exempt from the statute due to the confidential nature of the confessions, Lopez said.

The vice chief justice distinguished between the clergy-penitent privilege, which protects the person making the confession and does not apply, and the clergy exemption to mandatory reporting of abuse, which protects the clergy member and does apply.

The First Amendment bars the court from second-guessing whether religious leaders correctly applied their own religious doctrines when they defined Adams’ confessions as confidential, according to Thursday’s opinion by the Arizona Supreme Court. Instead, courts must defer to a religion’s own decision of what counts as a confidential confession. “A court may not determine matters of religious doctrine,” Lopez wrote in his opinion for the court.

WORLD reached out to Latter-day Saints leaders for comment but did not receive a response prior to publication.

While mandatory reporting laws require doctors, social workers, and more to disclose information on abuse, they exempt clergy members during confessionals, similar to attorney-client privileges, explained Tom Berg, a constitutional law professor at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis. The government recognizes that if clergy didn’t have this exemption, individuals would likely not make their confessions. With or without this law, the government wouldn’t gain any additional information on potential cases of abuse, Berg said.

Almost all states carve out this exemption for clergy, said Howard Friedman, a University of Toledo professor and the founder of the Religion Clause blog. Without the exemption, clergy are forced to go against their religious requirements, which violates the First Amendment. “Priests, in particular, have said they will go to jail rather than breach the secrecy of the confessional,” Friedman said.

Several dioceses of the Roman Catholic Church backed the Latter-day Saints in this case, noted Angela Walker, the executive director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. She said her organization advocates that authorities should overturn these exemptions for clergy.

“The children should be the priority in this case; it seems pretty clear-cut,” Walker said. “SNAP feels so strongly that laws like this should be overturned in order that we protect another generation of children.”

But Berg said the Arizona Supreme Court emphasized that courts should be careful about questioning a religious group’s assertions on what counts as confidential.

“The overall message [of the opinion] is, ‘don’t second-guess the church’s understanding,’” Berg said. “Courts have to give the church a lot of deference on that.”