Recent attacks have been leveled on this board against the integrity and claims of Martha Beck.
I have known Martha Beck since 1993, when she and her then-husband John Beck publicly announced they were leaving their teachings positions at BYU--and exiting the Mormon Church, as well. I became aware of their departure from BYU and the LDS faith while watching a news broadcast on their resignations (before I and my former spouse left the LDS Church later that same year). After viewing the news report, I personally phoned them to congratulate them on their courage.
From my own interaction with Martha over the years, I have found her to be honest, believable, articulate, intelligent, talented, persuasive and credible. She is a Harvard-educated scholar, a published sociologist with recognized expertise in women's studies, a respected and popular book author, a national magazine columnist and an accomplished, versatile artist. (The last time I was in her home, I saw how she had decorated it with her amazing creations). When I went through my own post-divorce emotional upheaval, Martha was there as a strong support and a listening ear. Over the years, I have trusted Martha implicitly, respected her immensely and considered her a friend.
After leaving the Mormon Church, Martha and John moved to the Phoenix area, where she also resettled following the eventual dissolution of their marriage. Living in the same metroplex, we socialized with the Becks, including visiting their home, and she and John coming to ours.
During these times, we talked at length about Martha's life experiences. Years before eventually writing and publishing her book, "Leaving the Saints," she spoke to me of some of her realities growing up in the Nibley household, focusing particular attention on her encounters with her father.
For instance, she told me of how her father was fundamentally incapable of meaningful, interactive dialogue with his children, saying that when he "spoke" with them, he followed mechanical prompts from 3 x 5 notecards he held in his lap.
She said that, as a child, she was responsible for seeing to it that her siblings got off to school in the morning. She described the Nibley home of her youth as being eerily dark and quiet.
According to what Martha has shared with me, while her father was in some ways was a kind and good man, in other ways he was deeply psychologically unbalanced, emotionally scarred, fundamentally burdened with self-doubt, frustratingly mired in denial, continually seeking throughout in his life approval from the leaders of the Mormon Church and its members--and absolutely capable of committing the sexual abuse that Martha describes as having occurred.
Martha spoke of her father as someone who, in her opinion, had been deeply psychologically damaged, probably by his personal experiences in World War II military intelligence. She told me how once when walking outdoors with him as a child, he suddenly appeared to have a post-traumatic stress episode and ordered her to lay down and take protective cover. She did not tell me exactly what events during WWII may have been had a severe impact on her father's mental health but expressed the opinion that they may have been connected to possible involvement in abusive treatment of non-combatant civilians.
Martha told me her father had decided many years before (regardless of the evidence put forward against the Mormon Church by its critics) that he would always defend the LDS Church, despite any counter evidences mounted against its claims. She told me that her father was psychologically dependent on the support and admiration he received from the BYU students he taught, that he thrived on their adulation of him and that he needed their constant reinforcement to bolster his self-esteem.
With regard to his decades of devoted Mormon apologia (particularly his writings on the Book of Abraham), Martha told me that she found it curious and inexplicable how devout Mormons--when observing her Down Syndrome child Adam engage in primitive childhood vocalizations--would regard them as "gobble-de-gook," but that when her father spoke Mormon apologetic gobble-de-gook, they declared it to be divinely inspired.
I spent a good amount of time over the years talking with Martha about the experiences she eventually wrote about in "Leaving the Saints." Based on the consistency of her accounts over that period, I regard her claims of sexual abuse that she says occurred at the hands of her father to be compelling, true, reliable, consistent and evidentiarily sound--both as she has laid them out in her book and as she has relayed then to me personally in great detail before and after the book was published.
In describing what she calls her father's sexual abuse of her, she detailed to me how she remembers her father's face physically above her--with her hands immobilized--and how she then experienced a sharp pain in her vaginal area. In this context, she told me that her father believed he was engaging in higher spiritual connection with God through his study of ancient Egyptian religious/sexual rites and that she was utilized by him as a vehicle in those exploratory studies.
Martha's explicit descriptions of what she says took place (and when) at the hands of her father were spoken to me from her heart--and I have no doubt that they were actually experienced by her. Attempts by some in her family and other Mormon Church defenders to discredit her are, in my opinion, baseless, vindictive and, in some cases, driven by greed and jealousy. Martha told me later that her mother confided in her that Martha's father (according to Martha's account) was capable of doing what she described in her book as having had occurred.
During the times that Martha and John visited with us, John never disputed a single word of Martha's account. Later (and attendant to their divorce proceedings in which money became a significant issue of dispute), John began to openly criticize Martha's version of events that she said she experienced at the hands of her father.
It is important to emphasize that Martha's claim of sexual abuse by her father is not limited to recovered memory alone. Martha strongly reiterated to me that ever since she was a small child she has had memories of experiences related to her abuse by her father which she was eventually able to put into proper perspective and context.
Combined with that, Martha lays claim to evidence of severe physical trauma and scarring in her genital area that, contrary to some attempts at explanation, did not come from playing on the jungle gym as a little girl.
Martha compares the basis for her contention that she was sexually molested by her father to a three-legged stool. One leg of the stool are recovered memories, another leg of the stool are memories she has always had and the third leg of the stool are physical evidences of significant sexual injury.
This combination of evidence has also been a subject about which I have spoken with one of Martha's cousins, who firmly supports the veracity of Martha's claims and who has been steadfast in defending Martha against efforts to discredit her. This cousin personally told me that she was present in a setting where Martha attempted to have her father acknowlege to her the truthfulness of the charges she had made against him. *Martha told me that during this episode her father was detached, unemotional, unfocused and unresponsive, refusing to deal with the issues in any meaningful way).
Amazingly, for all she has been through, Martha speaks of her horrible abuse experiences with dignity, calmness, candor and stoicism, but I have nonetheless seen the anger spark in her eyes and heard her voice rise in indignation when she sees people attack her character, malign her account of what happened and dishonestly or ignorantly assail the people who mean the most to her. (I never met Hugh Nibley, so I cannot speak from any personal experience about him). Despite searing criticsm from members of her family along with with that from bands of Mormon faithful, Martha personally told me how the criticism has actually made her stronger and that she is at peace with herself.
When her father died in 2005, I received an early morning phone call from Martha, informing me of his passing and asking me if I wouldn't mind speaking in her defense to a reporter from "People Magazine." I told her unhesitatingly that I would (especially when she added that some of her friends were not willing to go public in her defense because of their fears of personal recrimination).
The following article, written by Michelle Green and entitled "Leaving Home: In a New Book, Author Martha Beck Accuses Her Father, a Mormon Scholar, of Sex Abuse," appeared in "People Magazine," (11 April 2005, vol. 63, no. 14):
"When Martha Beck receives the shattering phone call that everyone with an elderly parent half expects, she is sitting in her kitchen in Phoenix, talking about her provocative memoir 'Leaving the Saints.' Author of the 1999 bestseller 'Expecting Adam,' about her experience with a son born with Down syndrome, Beck has crafted a new book documenting the spiritual disenchantment that led to her break with the Mormon church. And there is more: In her book Beck alleges that she was molested by her father, Dr. Hugh Nibley--a prominent Mormon scholar and historian.
"Now . . . one of Beck's seven siblings is calling to say that Nibley, 94, has died. Wiping tears from her blue eyes, Beck, 42, says that she was told her father's last words were, 'I love Martha so much. She's my favorite.'
"Even as Nibley lay dying in Provo, Utah, he knew that Beck---a Harvard Ph.D., sociologist and 'O' magazine columnist who calls herself a 'life coach'--was going public with the accusations of 'ritual sexual abuse' that she had made privately years before.
"Now Beck confides that she had felt 'an overwhelming wave of peacefulness' when she was meditating earlier that morning. 'It would have been when he was dying,' she adds softly.
"But if Beck is feeling at peace, it is in spite of the maelstrom around her. Even before her book, subtitled 'How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith,' was published . . ., Mormons rushed to protest the fact that she wrote about sacred rituals, including her wedding (to John Beck, now 45 and the father other children Kate, 19, Adam, 16, and Lizzy, 14). They also hastened to defend Nibley, professor emeritus of ancient scripture at Brigham Young University. Church members conducted a campaign to send anti-Beck e-mails to Oprah, and Kim Farah, a church spokeswoman, told PEOPLE, 'Fair-minded readers will find ["Leaving the Saints"] at best unconvincing, at worst mean-spirited and at times absurd.'
"In addition, all of Beck's siblings have signed a statement claiming that the 'portrayal of our family [in the book] is false.' Says brother Alex, 49, a filmmaker: 'We stand together and say we saw no evidence of this abuse.'
"By Beck's account her siblings never witnessed the molestation, which began when she was 5 and continued until she was 8. 'What I remember [of the first incident] is this,' she says now. 'My mother had taken my little sister to the doctor and my other siblings were at school. My father told me that I had to have a special bath . . . and then,' she sighs, 'he tied my hands together and put them over my head. He was saying it was an Abrahamic sacrifice he had to make.'
"Beck describes 'having my legs shoved apart' and experiencing 'this horrible, horrible pain' that would produce ragged scar tissue gynecologists would note in later years. The memories did not stay with her; though she says she suffered from anorexia and depression, she remembered nothing of the abuse during the first eight years of her marriage to Beck, a professor and author, while they were studying at Harvard and later teaching at Brigham Young. (The two separated in 1993; Beck and the children now live with her partner, Arizona State University professor Karen Gerdes, 48.)
"It was in 1991, when her daughter Katie was 5, says Beck, that she began having 'these vivid flashbacks that crashed in on me like a wave.' Seeing her elder daughter at the same age, she theorizes, triggered the memories of the abuse: 'It was sensory, it was visual, it was overwhelming.'
"Knowing that the images were connected to her father, Beck first called her mother, Phyllis (who, Beck claims, initially said she believed the charges and then recanted); she then confronted her father in 1993. His response, she says: 'To think that my own child would act in league with Satan . . .'
"But if her family brushed off Beck's claims, others have not. Steve Benson, an editorial cartoonist for the 'Arizona Republic,' has known Martha and John Beck since 1993, and, like them, he and his [formner] wife, Mary Ann, have left the church. 'I believe Martha,' he says now. 'Years ago she told us about the sexual abuse. She wasn't sensational about it. She also told us her family was in deep denial.'
"Like any memoirist who claims the title of life coach, Beck--whose oeuvre also includes self-help guides like 'The Joy Diet' and 'Finding Your Own North Star'-—is able to see the hope that shines through the horror of her story. 'It was hard as hell to write it,' she says, 'but with every page there seemed to be a more clear space in me where there had been pain.'"
("Leaving Home: In a New Book, Author Martha Beck Accuses Her Father, a Mormon Scholar, of Sex Abuse," by Michelle Green, "People Magazine," vol. 63, no. 14, 11 April 2005, at:
http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20147332,00.html)