Statement on the Recent Challenge to Helen Keuning’s Testimony
On Thursday, November 3, ACNAtoo received documentation and an assertion from Church of the Resurrection Deacon Will Chester challenging the veracity of an entry in our recent Timeline installment entitled Piecing It All Together: Breaking Point.
This statement addresses that challenge in depth, starting with the events that led us to include the testimony in question in our Timeline.
Background to the testimony in question
On October 12, 2022 a member of ACNAtoo and several others met on Zoom with attorney and advocate Rachael Denhollander. We knew that Rachael had been scheduled to consult with the Diocese of the Upper Midwest (UMD) in July of 2021, and that the consultation never materialized. We wanted to know why.
Rachael told us that Bp. Stewart Ruch had canceled on her, saying they were seeking local options. Her email records confirm this happened on July 6, 2021.
One of the people on the call with Rachael shared the fact of the cancellation with Helen Keuning several days later. Helen was a member of the UMD Bishop’s Council in July of 2021 and had attended a Zoom meeting where members were notified that working with Rachel would not be an option. In that meeting, Helen was tasked with reaching out to local alternatives to consult with the UMD. Helen was shocked to discover, over a year later, that Rachael had not canceled on the UMD, but the reverse.
Helen told us she clearly remembers the July Zoom meeting in which the assembled members of Bp. Ruch’s Crisis Response Team were told that Rachael Denhollander was responsible for the meeting cancellation.
Helen said she “would have been irate” if she had known in July 2021 that Bp. Ruch had canceled on Rachael, given Helen’s understanding of what an asset Rachael was likely to be in such a dire situation. Helen told us that she found herself, upon receiving this news that Bp. Ruch had canceled the meeting, “trying to find some way not to remember what I remember,” because she was still hesitant to believe Bp. Ruch could have misled those in the meeting. Yet ultimately, she told us, she simply could not deny her own memory of the conversation during the July 2021 Zoom call.
Helen’s clear memory of the meeting prompted us to include her testimony in our recent post:
Challenge to Helen’s testimony:
On November 3, 2022, ACNAtoo received the following email from Deacon Will Chester at Church of the Resurrection (Rez):
Here is the attached July 6, 2021 email from Brenda Dumper, on which Will Chester, Helen Keuning, Bp. Stewart Ruch, and others were cc’d:
Concerned we had made an error, we immediately removed the section in question from our recently published Timeline installment and sent Will this reply:
Our next step was to let Helen know about Will’s email and invite her to explain what might have gone wrong, so we could communicate that to our readers.
We contacted Helen the next morning, November 4, and sent her Will’s email with the attached screenshot of Brenda’s email. Several ACNAtoo representatives had a Zoom call with Helen around 9am that morning in order to better understand her account of what happened.
The following summary is based on our meeting notes. We have indicated Helen’s direct quotes where relevant and have verified this summary with Helen to ensure we represented her statements accurately.
Helen Keuning’s response to the challenge:
Helen was a senior member of the UMD Bishop’s Council and inside the small circle of Bp. Stewart’s Crisis Response Team in June 2021, when the first public allegations of UMD mishandling were made. She observed that this unexpected development catapulted church and diocesan leadership into a frantic response. Rez Communications Director Dawn Jewell was brought into most of the Crisis Response Team’s decisions and was tasked with reaching out to public relations firms for advice. Other Rez staff members were also brought into these discussions once the allegations against the church and diocese had been made public. Helen describes that period and the days/weeks following as an intense series of countless in-person, Zoom, and phone meetings among various Rez and UMD leaders.
During this time period the UMD had arranged a meeting with prominent attorney and survivor advocate Rachael Denhollander. The idea, said Helen, was that Rachael would step in as an expert third-party consultant to assist the UMD response. Helen knew the Diocese needed a trusted, trauma-informed expert to build a bridge between the alienated survivors and the Crisis Response Team. She remembers the “palpable sense of relief” she felt – and she believes others on the team felt – upon hearing the happy news that Rachael was on board.
The UMD scheduled a consultation with Rachael Denhollander for July 7, and Helen expected the Bishop and a few others to be on that call. Bp. Ruch wanted to limit the size of the group that met with Rachael in order not to overwhelm her with new faces, and Helen was someone he chose to include in that small group. She remembers feeling elated at the prospect of meeting one of her personal heroes.
However, a Zoom meeting took place around the date of July 5th with Bp. Ruch and several members of his Crisis Response Team.
Helen reported that on this call with her and others, Bp. Ruch delivered the unfortunate news that Rachael had, in fact, canceled her appointment with the UMD.
Because of the general emotional buildup around Rachael’s potential assistance, Helen was deeply disappointed and immediately curious as to why Rachael would cancel at the last minute.
Helen told us Bp. Ruch himself, in that Zoom meeting, expressed great disappointment in Rachael’s cancellation, a disappointment that was reflected by those assembled. Helen described it as an “emotionally charged moment” when the team found out Rachael was unavailable. Bp. Ruch did not make it clear to those gathered whether Rachael had indicated that she was ending her relationship with the UMD permanently, but he did emphasize that, because of the urgency of the situation, it was imperative that other options be explored immediately. The message Helen took away was that Rachael could no longer be involved as they had hoped, and it was time to move on.
Helen said she immediately asked why Rachael had canceled and was told Rachael had not given an explanation.
A discussion then ensued, Helen reported, as to why Rachael might have canceled. Helen does not remember who all contributed to this discussion, but she remembers some speculations Bp. Ruch put forth, as relayed in her contribution to ACNAtoo’s Timeline Part 5. She also remembers others postulating that since Rachael Denhollander is a nationally sought-after speaker and consultant, perhaps she was simply too busy or overbooked to focus on helping the UMD right then in the middle of summer?
Helen told us that at this Zoom meeting she was assigned the job of contacting local consultants to replace Rachael Denhollander. Immediately after the call, Helen reached out to the woman whom Rez would eventually choose for this position. Helen did not think much more about Rachael’s cancellation in the ensuing months and instead focused on the many other tasks at hand.
Helen’s response to Will’s email documentation:
In our Nov. 4 call with Helen, we asked her about Brenda’s July 6, 2021 email, since Helen, as Will Chester pointed out to us, was cc’d on the original email.
Brenda’s email reads:
NEW UPDATE and CHANGE IN PLANS - Wednesday’s call with Rachael is NOT happening right now. We’re going to put a hold on our consulting with Rachael because we’ve been given a few names of other consultants who are local and would like to pursue those local experts first.
Will’s Nov. 3 email to ACNAtoo contends that Brenda’s email demonstrates that Helen’s statement concerning her memory of the Zoom meeting is false and impugns Bp. Ruch’s character.
Helen, however, told us that rereading Brenda’s email did not challenge her recollection of the 2021 meeting in the least. She is very clear that in the Zoom meeting, Bp. Ruch affirmed that Rachael Denhollander had canceled her meeting with the UMD, and they began seeking local replacements for her – specifically through Helen’s research. As stated above, Helen remembers the conversation particularly well, because of both the emotional charge in the room around the loss of Rachael’s expected counsel (an expression of grief in which she says Bp. Ruch himself partook) and the ensuing speculations about why Rachael would have canceled. Helen stated that her husband can corroborate both her initial elation at the possibility of meeting directly with Rachael Denhollander and her deep disappointment after she was told that Rachael had canceled.
Helen said that she would surely have read Brenda’s July 6, 2021 email and would have registered it as a brief summary of what had happened, based on what was said in the recent Zoom meeting.
Helen explained that she would have glanced at this email at the time and thought, “Yes, we put it on hold because Rachael canceled, and the meeting is NOT going to happen. Yes, we have been given a few local names — mainly, because I did the online research to find her/them. Nothing in that short email would have sounded untruthful or jarring to me at the time. Sure, it never states directly that Rachael canceled the meeting herself, but I would have thought that was Bp. Stewart ‘saving face’ with his subordinates (as is common in my Asian American culture) or Bp. Stewart ‘massaging’ the message so as to not taint a possible future meeting with Rachael. Will Chester was not on the Crisis Response Team and I do not recall him being on this Zoom call, so he would not have firsthand knowledge of what was said there.”
Helen also told us that her extreme urgency in reaching out to alternative consultants starting immediately after the July Zoom meeting was based on the fact that she was led to believe Rachael Denhollander had canceled the July 7 appointment. “Why would I have scrambled so quickly or worked so hard to find a trauma informed expert during a holiday week had I known that we, in fact, had been the ones to shut down the opportunity to benefit from Rachael’s counsel? That would make no sense.”
Conclusion:
Dcn. Will Chester's request indicates that he believes Helen's recollection is a false statement that impugns Bp. Ruch's character, and he offers Brenda's email as evidence. However, Helen's account states that she believes her recollections to be accurate and does not see Brenda's email as contradicting them.
Helen stands by her statement that Bp. Ruch affirmed in the July Zoom meeting that Rachael Denhollander had, for an unknown reason, canceled her appointment with the UMD. She holds to the assertion that news of this cancellation precipitated subsequent speculation as to why Rachael would have done such a thing and conversation about how to proceed in the wake of this disappointing news.
We have therefore concluded that the public correction we initially planned to make is not warranted, and we have returned Helen’s original testimony regarding this Zoom call to our Timeline. We will also be adding a link to this explanation and its additional documentation provided by Rez to the same Timeline Part 5 post.
We appreciate Dcn. Will Chester bringing this email to our attention. If anyone has further documentation or testimony concerning the events in question, they are welcome to reach out to us at info@acnatoo.org.