A Florida-based Christian organization with a history of child sex abuse allegations against it has been hit with a lawsuit claiming one of its missionaries sexually assaulted a minor overseas 15 years ago.
Ethnos360, a nonprofit formerly known as New Tribes Mission, sends missionaries and their families throughout the globe. In 2019, multiple women told NBC News that they had been sexually abused decades earlier by their “dorm dads” — missionaries who were supposed to care for children at the mission’s boarding schools while their parents served in foreign countries.
The group settled several suits related to those allegations and issued a public apology to the abuse survivors following the 2019 NBC News report. It also said it had “incorporated significant child safety training” after an independent party commissioned by New Tribes Mission shared recommendations in 2010 amid the abuse allegations.
But Wednesday’s lawsuit, filed in Circuit Court in Seminole County, Florida, says the group “failed to offer any care or professional assistance” to the family of an American child who came forward to report inappropriate sexual conduct in 2012, two years after those recommendations were issued.
The girl, Kayla McClain, is now 24, lives in Michigan and recently graduated from nursing school. NBC News does not normally identify alleged victims of sexual assault, but McClain opted to be identified by her full name in the legal filing.
“I’m tired of being quiet and tired of being invisible,” McClain said in her first public remarks about the case. “I just want people to know what really happened and that there’s actually a face and a name behind what’s going on.”
David Doyle, an attorney for Ethnos360, said the group “takes allegations of this nature very seriously” and “categorically denies any merit to allegations made against it.”
McClain was around 5 years old in 2005 when she met her alleged abuser, Nate Horling, the lawsuit said. Like McClain and her family, Horling lived with his wife and children in housing in Indonesia provided by what was then New Tribes Mission. He had a child about McClain’s age whom McClain would play with, the legal complaint said, adding that the alleged abuse by Horling started with inappropriate touching while McClain was playing with his child. Afterward, Horling would allegedly tell McClain “he was sorry and instructed her not to tell anyone and blamed her for what occurred,” the lawsuit said.
The abuse escalated after both families relocated to a different part of Indonesia in 2009, where Horling later allegedly sexually assaulted McClain in a closet, according to the lawsuit.
Horling, who is not named as a defendant, told NBC News in an email that he “absolutely” denies all allegations.
The lawsuit comes less than a year after another legal filing against Ethnos360, which alleged the group failed to protect a girl from repeated sexual misconduct by a peer at its missionary training center in Missouri in 2016 and failed to adequately investigate the abuse allegations.
That lawsuit is ongoing, though Ethnos360 has filed a motion to dismiss it, arguing in court documents that because the alleged abuse occurred in private residences on Ethnos360 property, not while children were under Ethnos360 staff supervision, the group did not have “any right and /or duty to control, occupy, or monitor the families and activities within the residences.”
Boz Tchividjian, the attorney who filed last year’s lawsuit as well as Wednesday’s, said Ethnos360 needs to examine why it has faced so many allegations of inappropriate behavior.
“It’s not in a vacuum. This is over, and over, and over again,” said Tchividjian, who was the founder and former executive director of Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment, or GRACE, the group hired to make the 2010 recommendations on handling abuse to Ethnos360 when it was called New Tribes Mission. He is no longer part of GRACE.
Wednesday’s lawsuit said the GRACE report outlined multiple instances of sexual abuse within Ethnos360 and accused the organization’s leadership of failing to properly respond to child sexual abuse allegations. On its website, Ethnos360 acknowledges past missteps and has a section dedicated to child safety, in which it says it has safeguards to protect kids, including background checks for anyone applying for Ethnos360 membership and specialized training for all new members.
Yet the lawsuit claims that when McClain’s family contacted Ethnos360’s child safety leadership team in Indonesia, there was limited response.
McClain said her father had reached out to the child safety team in 2012 after she disclosed to her parents that she was engaging in sexual conduct with other children — a behavior that can be an indicator of a child being abused by an adult. The lawsuit said that several members spoke with her parents in the months that followed but did not open an investigation into the sexualized behavior. It also said Ethnos360 did not offer any care or help to McClain or the other minors and acted as if the conduct “was typical sexual exploration between children.”
McClain said it was not until years later that her parents found out she had been sexually abused by an adult. Her attorney said that, at that time, her emotional state was too fragile to consider filing charges.
“The child safety team never talked to me. I really needed someone who was trained to and knew how to talk to a kid in this situation, because I didn’t know how to share what had happened,” McClain said.
McClain started struggling profoundly with her mental health in 2018 once she and her family returned to the United States from Indonesia, the lawsuit said, adding that she had flashbacks of her alleged abuse and attempted to take her own life in 2019. After undergoing treatment, she decided to report her experience to Ethnos360 in 2021 through IHART, a review team commissioned by Ethnos360 to investigate claims of abuse, according to the lawsuit. After several hours-long interviews, Ethnos360 allegedly offered no counseling to McClain and did not report the allegations to child protection agencies, the lawsuit said.
The lawsuit accuses Ethnos360 of negligence in failing to protect McClain from abuse and failing to provide adequate training to its employees to identify and report child abuse. It seeks unspecified damages and a jury trial.
McClain said her experience has caused her to have post-traumatic stress disorder and has made her question her view of God.
“The abuse that happened was horrible, but what has really affected me is the response from Ethnos and the child safety team and IHART,” she said. “They need to be held accountable. I want the silence to stop.”
If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, call the National Sexual Assault Telephone Hotline at 1-800-656-4673. The hotline, run by the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), can put you in contact with your local rape crisis center. You can also access RAINN’s online chat service at www.rainn.org/get-help. Confidential chats are available in English and in Spanish.
If you or someone you know is in crisis, call 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. You can also call the network, previously known as the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, at 800-273-8255, text HOME to 741741 or visit SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for additional resources.
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