“This was supposed to be my miracle,” said Andrew.
The then 22-year-old was just back from his mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and was struggling with the pressure to marry a woman.
Andrew, who is identified by a pseudonym in a new report by The Salt Lake Tribune and the investigative news outlet ProPublica, is gay. The day he spoke with his bishop about it was the same day the bishop had learned about a therapist who worked with gay men. It seemed perfect.
But over time with therapist Scott Owen, their sessions became increasingly physical and sexual.
KUER’s Pamela McCall spoke with Salt Lake Tribune investigative reporter Jessica Miller.
Warning: this conversation discusses sexual assault. If you or someone you know need assistance or resources, you can call Utah’s 24-hour sexual violence crisis hotline at 888-421-1100.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Jessica Miller: Andrew started going to Scott Owen not really for conversion therapy or to change who he was, but to understand these two parts of himself that were at odds with each other. He's gay. He's an LDS Church member. How can he be both of those things? Can he marry a woman? He's really grappling with a lot of things as a young 22-year-old student. He goes to these sessions and he says that Scott Owen ended their first session with a hug. And then the second time that hug was longer. And from there, this type of touching, Andrew says, increasingly escalated to the point where there was kissing, there was groping. He was encouraged to take his clothes off. And this was all under the guise of a therapeutic approach to teach him how to accept intimacy.
Pamela McCall: When Andrew went back to talk to his lay bishop about this, his bishop advised him to go to the Utah Division of Professional Licensing. How did they respond?
JM: So when Andrew first went to the division of licensing, they did an investigation. But from what we can tell, the investigation relied on going to the therapist who denied the accusations, asking that therapists take a lie detector test and the therapist said no. Then they offered that option to Andrew, asking him as the victim if he would take a polygraph test. He did take the test, and it showed that he was deceptive. A lot of research has been done around this. Polygraph tests aren't accepted in courts because they're very unreliable, and when it comes to victims of sexual assault or trauma, they are even more unreliable because a lot of those same trauma responses are the same responses that show you're deceptive in a lie detector test.
After that polygraph showed that Andrew was deceptive, it really took the momentum out of the investigation, and it really sent Andrew's mental health spiraling. That's a really hard thing for sexual assault survivors to feel like they're not believed and then to have a test that shows that they're deceptive.
And so once he got that result, he reached out to the investigator and said that he did not want to participate in the investigation any longer. Once that had happened, the state did end up negotiating with the therapist, and he was put under a public reprimand. But there was no disciplinary action beyond that.
PM: You called this case an example of a “flawed and misleading system.” The Division of Professional Licensing puts disciplinary records online and says people should use those to vet professionals. What was available online about therapist Scott Owen?
JM: The interesting part about this is they do want the public to go on their website and vet a professional this way. But the vast majority of these disciplinary actions that are public are these negotiated settlements. And so it's like the equivalent of a plea deal though this is not a court setting, it's not [a] criminal proceeding. But the professionals are admitting to lesser conduct than what they were accused of. So for Andrew's report, he's obviously alleged very serious, inappropriate, sexual touching. What the therapist admitted to in the document was that he hugged a patient in a nonsexual way. So what Andrew alleged and what Scott Owen admitted to were vastly different from one another.
PM: And Owen's version was online.
JM: That's correct.
PM: Owen was never required to disclose his disciplinary action to other patients. Why not? And how could that kind of disclosure have changed things for others?
JM: So in Utah, there's no law that requires professionals to disclose this type of misconduct. Obviously, it is available online. People can go and find it, but they don't have to alert their patients. The licensors say that sometimes they will do that. But we've researched thousands of records and found just a handful of times that had happened that we could see doing keyword searches. There are other states that do require this, but it's not common.
But as I continued this reporting, there was another alleged victim that I spoke with who was going to Scott Owen at the exact same time that this public reprimand process was underway, and he was questioning whether this kind of touching was therapeutic. He was questioning whether this was abusive. He was really doubting himself. And looking back at this, had he been notified that his therapist was under reprimand for how he touched another patient, that probably would have really helped this victim understand that what was happening to him felt abusive.
PM: Where does Owen stand right now with his therapy practice?
JM: Scott Owen gave up his license in 2018, two years after Andrew's report. This happened after two other patients came forward — at least two that we know of. Licensors don't give information about how many patient complaints they received, so we don't know how many [in] total there were. But I know of at least two that led to him giving up his license.
However, he still co-owns Canyon Counseling, the business that he founded back in 1998. So he is still working in the therapy world, though he's no longer a therapist. He owns this business. He's the registered agent listed on business records now.
PM: From the data you've seen, which you say is incomplete, how big is this problem in Utah?
JM: The partnership that we're in is investigating sexual assault in medical settings. We saw just in preliminary analysis that mental health workers had a higher proportion of sexual misconduct cases. So we took that question to licensors, asking them “Do you know this? Do you think about this when you're disciplining these mental health professionals?” And they sort of answered the question. [They] said that they understand that there are professions that have more propensity for certain types of violations — giving the example of like a CPA probably has a higher chance of taking someone's money because they have access to money. They say that they understand these patterns, and they take them into account when investigating these cases.
