The two men have never met. One lives in the northwest part of the country, the other in the southeast.
They are not friends, never even communicated over social media or texts.
Yet they share a story. A haunting one that changed them when they were teenagers just trying to survive inside a southwest Missouri boarding school now under criminal investigation.
And it’s taken them more than a decade to publicly divulge the pain they endured when they say they were sexually assaulted by a group of staff members. One said he was attacked in 2009; the other, the following year.
The pair say they’re speaking out now to protect the boys currently inside Agape Boarding School from the high-level staffers who left them with wounds that may never heal. At least six of those staffers are still associated with the school and an additional one is at another unlicensed reform school in Missouri.
The Star is not naming the nine men who the two former students say were involved in their assaults because they haven’t been charged with a crime.
“I was a boy. And they took me and they broke me and they made me experience things I should have never felt — and carried that into adulthood,” said Denzyl Dudley, now 29, of Georgia, who attended the Christian reform school around 2006 and stayed for about a year and a half. He went back in 2009. “We’ve got to get them babies out of there. Because they’re still babies, they still got a chance out here.”
More than 2,300 miles away in Idaho, Jason Britt wrestles with the same demons. Months after Dudley ran away from the school, Britt ended up at Agape. His parents hired two strangers to haul him off in the middle of the night, with zip-ties binding his hands, and drop him off at Agape.
Several months after his arrival, Britt said, multiple staff members held the 16-year-old face down on the floor while three took turns raping him.
“The best way I can describe it is like a group of savages going after their prey,” said Britt, 27, who spoke to The Star in a series of interviews spanning more than five hours. “I think it was just evil. I think they were trying to humiliate me in a way that I wouldn’t recover from, that would break my spirit.”
But, Britt said, they never broke his spirit.
He recently spoke to a Missouri Highway Patrol trooper by phone and detailed what had happened to him in the early fall of 2010. The patrol is working with the Missouri attorney general on an abuse investigation at Agape, which is in Cedar County.
Britt, though, doesn’t anticipate much coming from that investigation. At least, he said, not for survivors of sexual abuse like him.
The trooper told him that he would include his statement in his report, Britt said, “but don’t expect anything.”
Staff members named by Dudley and Britt — including one man who allegedly assaulted both former students — did not respond to emails requesting comment. Agape leaders have not responded for several other stories in the past seven months.
The Star has been investigating Missouri’s unlicensed Christian boarding schools since last summer. Allegations of physical and emotional abuse — restraints, withholding food and water and forcing students to do excessive labor and workouts — led to legislation passed last month that would place some state oversight on these schools. The measure awaits action by the governor.
Before the attorney general’s office began looking into allegations at Agape, it spent months investigating Circle of Hope Girls Ranch, another Cedar County unlicensed boarding school. That investigation led to 100 criminal charges against owners Boyd and Stephanie Householder, including statutory rape, sodomy and physical abuse.
Dozens of former Agape students interviewed by The Star said although the criminal investigation is focusing on physical abuse, for decades there has been a deep-rooted culture of sexual violence against boys that no one talks about. Two civil lawsuits have been filed this year and another former student settled with the school several years ago, a decade after the staff member who attacked him was convicted of first-degree sodomy.
Former students fear survivors of sexual assault won’t be heard or see any justice from the current investigation. And that the staff members accused of rape will never be held accountable.
“If they don’t take this seriously, a lot of kids are going to end up right when they turn into an adult being incredibly messed up psychologically,” Britt said. “It’s been a battle for me for 10 years, and it’s still a battle every day.
“I mean, you’re taking someone’s chance at a normal life away. There’s not too much worse you can do.”
The padded room
A key staff leader called Britt to his breakfast table one morning in 2010. He held a letter the 16-year-old had written to his family.
“I was trying to tell my parents that this was not what they thought it was,” Britt said. “And that this was a dangerous place. ... It’s a place you don’t think even exists when you’re that young.”
Britt had been at the school about four months. He had seen fellow students get restrained, two had attempted suicide and some had been kicked down stairs by staff. Showers were limited to five minutes, the water often ice cold. Boys in trouble had their food restricted.
Students were told that if they complained or tried to report the problems to parents, no one would believe them because they were troubled boys. Britt felt trapped.
Raised in a religious home in Washington state, he attended Christian schools through middle school. Once he entered public school, he admits he started skipping class, partying with friends and moving in at 15 with his then-girlfriend and her mother.
His mom came across Agape on the internet and signed him up, sight unseen, after communicating with staff, Britt said.
While at his girlfriend’s home, two men came into the bedroom in the middle of the night and ordered him to get up. They bound his hands with zip-ties and escorted him to a waiting car, he said.
Outside, his parents and football coach waited. His mom told him he was going to Agape Boarding School in Missouri. And for the next several months, he wouldn’t talk to his parents or see them in person.
The letter was his way of trying to send his parents a “cryptic message” that he wanted — and needed — to come home.
But at Agape, mail and phone calls were strictly monitored. School officials controlled all communication coming into and going out of the facility, dozens of former students have told The Star.
If letters contained criticism about the school or people there, they said, the documents were censored or never sent. And those who wrote them were punished and sometimes publicly humiliated.
Britt, who says he kept to himself, focused on school work and stayed out of trouble in the months he was there, stood before the leader that morning and was told to read his letter to everyone. He refused.
“I told him, ‘I’m sure you can read yourself,’” said Britt, who was then ordered to go to what was called the “brown table,” referring to kids who are in trouble and must wear brown T-shirts.
A staff leader instantly commanded Britt to begin doing an exercise that involved going from a jumping jack to a push-up. After the first jump, and before the push-up, Britt said the leader grabbed his shirt.
“Did you just try to hit me?” the leader yelled at the teen, who was standing near him as he began following the commands. “I said, ‘No, sir. .. I was not trying to hit you. I’m sorry if it felt that way. Do you want me to go further away to do them?’”
The leader again accused Britt of trying to hit him.
Within seconds, Britt said, several staff members surrounded him and hauled him to a downstairs room where gym mats covered the walls. He had heard about this room and knew it was where they took kids to “beat them up.”
In the room, he said, one staffer threw him to the carpeted floor. Britt, a blue belt in jiu jitsu, tried to fight him off but said other staffers then joined in. With the teen’s face to the floor, he said, they restrained him by putting extreme pressure on specific parts of his body.
At one point, he said, they started to remove his clothes.
He thought they might be putting him in a brown shirt.
But the key staffer — the one who had ordered him to read the letter — stood up. When Britt was able to turn his head and look up, he said he saw the man with his pants down.
Then Britt said the man sexually assaulted him. Another staffer — a man The Star discovered had been charged with aggravated assault in another state before being hired by Agape — did the same. Britt said he tried to fight back, but the pressure of grown men on his body kept him down.
A third staffer then grabbed what appeared to be a plastic mop or broom handle that was nearby, Britt said.
“Sorry, brothers,” Britt recalled hearing the man say. “I’m not gay. I can’t do it like that.”
Britt said it felt like the third staffer had put lubricant on the handle. That assault, he said, lasted much longer than the first two.
Three of the five men sexually abused him, he said. A fourth helped hold him down. And a fifth stood guard.
“It was like clockwork,” Britt said. “Everything. … I don’t remember there being any communication. It was like they’d already planned what they were going to do.”
Trail of sexual assaults
The Star has uncovered five incidents of alleged sexual assault of students by Agape staff — from long-timers to junior members. The cases span more than 15 years, beginning in the late 1990s shortly after the school relocated to Stockton, Missouri.
Agape had come under scrutiny in two other states, and former students said leaders looked at the Show-Me State as the “Promised Land” because it had no oversight of such schools.
Some students waited years before telling their families about the sexual assaults. Others still stay silent. Some are just starting to come forward in an effort to encourage more former students to do the same.
In Missouri, there is no statute of limitations in criminal court for rape or attempted rape, sodomy or attempted sodomy.
Two young men have recently filed lawsuits alleging they were sexually assaulted at Agape.
Both said they were abused by other students, and one said he also was molested by a junior staff member who was in the process of becoming a full-time staffer.
There’s no evidence that these cases were reported to or investigated by the Missouri Department of Social Services.
John Doe I and John Doe II filed separate lawsuits in February. Josh Bradney, in a series of interviews with The Star, has identified himself as John Doe II. The lawsuit alleges that Bradney was subjected to physical, emotional and sexual abuse by students and a staff member.
Now 19, Bradney was a student at the school from 2014 through 2016. He said the staff member first approached him in the bathroom.
“He started by just pushing my head against the wall and grabbing the back of my neck and making sure I couldn’t turn around,” Bradney told The Star. “And he said if I say anything, he’ll literally bash my head against the wall.”
Bradney, who was 14 at the time, said he was too afraid to report anything.
“No one knew,” Bradney said. “Because if I told anyone about it, he literally would come after me. And he was a staff member. So it was his word against mine.”
One lead staffer, who allegedly was involved in the 2010 gang rape, would force Bradney to sit at a specific table in the corner of the dining hall, telling him that “all fags go there.” The staffer also would put John Doe I and a few other students at that table, Bradney said.
A third lawsuit, filed in 2015, involved a sexual assault more than a decade before that resulted in a criminal conviction. It was settled for an undisclosed amount.
In that case, the former student — who was middle-school age — alleged that a staff member repeatedly took him to the bathroom stalls at night and raped and sodomized him. The staff member, who was 18, threatened him.
“(The suspect) would often place a knife to plaintiff’s throat to intimidate and force himself upon plaintiff, and (he) threatened to cut off plaintiff’s private parts and stuff them in his mouth and kill him if he told anyone,” according to court records obtained by The Star.
The suspect pleaded guilty to three counts of first-degree statutory sodomy and now is a registered sex offender.
The lawsuit in that case states that the victim was not the only minor child the suspect sexually abused at Agape. Though the staff member — also a former student at the school who said he had a ninth grade education — was charged in another case, that charge was later dropped.
“Defendants knew or should have known that (he) was using his staff position and authority to sexually abuse young boys,” the suit said.
Bradney left Agape in 2016 and ended up in several other boarding schools across the country. While at a Utah facility, he said, he told a therapist about the physical and sexual abuse he suffered at Agape.
That therapist reportedly alerted Missouri officials, though nothing ever came of that, he said.
Today, Bradney said he still deals with the aftermath. He can’t shower without locking the bathroom door and even then said he sometimes barricades it with a heavy object. At night he often locks his bedroom door to keep people out.
And when someone tries to embrace him, he turns and gives them a side hug.
“I just don’t trust what people will do,” he said. “Some people will just grab around me and like, it just reminds me of the sexual abuse, you know, what people would do to me.”
Another former student, who had epilepsy and suffered from seizures, told The Star that he was sexually assaulted repeatedly by an older student who was a section leader in his dorm and then later by an older student who was 18 and becoming a staffer.
Matt Lawson, who attended Agape from 1998 to 2003, said he was about 12 and among the youngest students at the school when the dorm leader would pull him from his bed in the middle of the night.
“He raped me for almost three months straight,” Lawson said.
Another student reported it, he said, and both Lawson and the dorm leader were questioned by a key staff member. Lawson said the staffer accused them of lying, moved him out of the younger boys’ dorm and punished them both. His punishment, he said, included 20 swats with a paddle, standing with his face against a wall for 2½ weeks and sleeping at the front of the dorm room with the lights shining on him.
Lawson said he later was sexually abused again, this time by the 18-year-old junior staff member during an out-of-state football camp. A former staffer told The Star that workers were alerted about the incident in the fall of 2002 but said it wasn’t reported to police or state child welfare officials.
Now 34 and a father of three in Ohio, Lawson said he went through years of counseling to try to deal with what happened at Agape. He’s coming forward now, he said, in hopes that his story can help others.
“I feel like we’re all brothers,” he said. “I want to cry, just feeling the pain of what the boys are going through there now.”
Kim Lawson, Matt’s mother, talked to The Star in late December — the day her son told her what he went through at Agape. She also spoke again on Tuesday.
“I’m just now finding this out,” she said in December. “No one ever told me when it happened. I had no idea what was going on.”
Matt’s father died when he was 2, Kim Lawson said. So when she started having problems with her son, “I didn’t really have anyone.”
“When there isn’t a father, they act like they’re going to be the great father to your kid, teach him to be a good man,” she said of Agape. “I just thought it was overly strict. But they were dishonest. They blamed everything on Matt and said he just wasn’t cooperative.
“The last time I went for a visit, they told me that Matt was doing second grade work. That’s when I said, ‘Get his stuff. I’m taking him home.’”
After she pulled Matt out of Agape, she said she spent $70,000 on therapy to try to “deprogram” her son and get him to the point where he felt safe attending a public school.
“That place needs to be shut down,” she said. “I can’t believe they’re still open. Parents have no idea. They need to know. They really need to talk to their kids.
“It was like being in prison. They made it sound like this private, religious boarding school. That’s not religion. I paid for them to abuse my son for four years.”
‘It felt like dying’
Dudley has never heard the details of what Britt experienced. But his description of what he said happened to him the year before Britt’s incident was eerily similar.
Having grown up in a military family, Dudley first ended up at Agape around 2006. His parents were divorced and his mother was being deployed to Iraq. Dudley said she didn’t want him to stay with his dad while she was overseas.
“My parents were strict,” he said. “I got in some trouble. But I never did anything to warrant getting sent to a boarding school in my eyes. ... I wasn’t even experimenting with drugs back then.”
After driving to Stockton, his mom took him shopping for clothes and other supplies, he said. The next morning, she drove him to Agape, gave him a $100 bill, a kiss and a hug and left the school, leaving him alone with strangers.
He was in his early teens.
Dudley recalls being taken directly to the “intake” room and stripped of his clothes. He started to put on the new jeans and shirt his mom had just bought him, but a staffer grabbed them. Dudley tried to pull them back, saying, “That’s mine; you can’t do that.”
That’s when the teen said he was restrained for the first time.
“I’m trying to defend myself. I feel like I’m fighting for my life,” he said. “That’s how I got introduced to this place. My mother couldn’t even have been out of the county by this time. My first hour (at Agape) was spent in restraints.
“It felt like dying. You do wish death on yourself. Because you can’t push a child’s body to its physical limit and think that’s OK.”
He said he would be restrained many more times during his first 1½-year stint at the school. But it was during his second time there — in 2009 — that the pain and abuse intensified.
Staff called him names, Dudley said, many of them racist, including the “n-word” and “boy.”
“Every kind of degrading term they could think of,” he said.
Dudley, 17 at the time, admits that he fought back against the staff. And if he knew they were going to restrain him, or he saw it coming, “I’ll be the aggressor.”
A month into his second time at Agape, Dudley said, he “got into it” with one of the staff member’s kids. Nothing physical, he said, just an exchange of words.
Soon after, he was sitting in the dining area when staffers came up and yanked him from behind, flipping the table over.
The five men — whom he referred to as the “Power Five” — hauled him to an upstairs room that former students refer to as the “padded palace,” Dudley said. The staffers restrained him, he said, and after fighting back he saw one of the men break what looked like a broomstick over his own knee.
One man stood guard at the door. Another staffer pulled down the teen’s pants, Dudley said, and the group repeatedly sodomized him with the object.
It was the first of four or five sexual attacks Dudley said he endured by Agape staff.
Immediately after that first assault in early 2009, he said he wasn’t allowed to shower or change clothes.
“My pants were bloody, my shirt was all ripped up,” Dudley said. “And they made me stand on the wall.”
The next morning, because he wasn’t moving fast enough, Dudley said a staff member pushed him down the shower bay stairs.
“It’s just a big mind game,” he said. “Got to break your will to break a man.”
In academics, Dudley said he excelled. He focused on his schoolwork and concentrated on graduating. He was popular with the students, he said, and that bond got him through.
But some staff members targeted him, Dudley said, mocking him and calling him racial slurs. They ordered him to do excessive workouts and excluded him from certain fun activities.
One day, he said, an employee gave him an explanation for the staff’s treatment of him, referring to Dudley’s popularity and academic success. Dudley hasn’t forgotten his words: “They don’t like to see their monkeys do tricks,” he said the staff member told him.
The sexual attacks by the group of men occurred several more times, Dudley said. And he said he’s certain some other students endured similar assaults.
“It was kind of one of those forbidden subjects amongst the students,” he said. “We didn’t really speak on it. But we all kind of knew.”
Dudley said he became desperate to escape Agape. One day, while in Stockton on a work detail, he took his chance and bolted. He stole a Chrysler Cirrus that was parked outside a carpet store with the keys in the ignition, according to court documents obtained by The Star.
A probable cause statement outlining charges filed against Dudley said an Agape employee who was with the student went into the store. When he came out, the employee said, Dudley and the Chrysler were gone.
The Agape employee said there was no one else around who could have taken the vehicle, according to the statement.
Dudley drove to nearby Polk County, where he stole another car, documents said. Then he went to the Waynesville area, where his older brother was living.
“I went to turn myself in, tell them what was going on,” Dudley said. “I told my lawyer and everything. Told everybody what was going on.”
His parents bonded him out of jail that night, he said. Dudley told them what he had been through, but said they wouldn’t listen.
The then-teen was charged in August 2009 with stealing and tampering with a motor vehicle, both felonies. He pleaded guilty in February 2010 to the tampering charge. The stealing charge was dropped, and he got probation.
“They kind of just wanted to sweep it under the rug,” he said of his parents. “It was like, ‘All right, we hear you.’ But I don’t think nobody really ever believed me.”
A forensic psychologist who evaluated him at the time, however, appeared to suspect that something bad had happened to Dudley.
In an October 2009 assessment report, which was included in his court file that The Star obtained, the counselor wrote that he had met with Dudley six times. And he said he felt that there was “further information that the client is actively blocking out.”
“What is clear is that the client felt threatened and was in a ‘flight or fight’ mood when he took the vehicle to return to the safety of his home,” the counselor said.
While at Agape, Dudley experienced “a frightening situation” and developed self-doubt because of it, the counselor said.
“His genuine fears led him to attempt to escape the situation in what his then tunnel vision felt was the only out — steal a car and go home.”
Once he was out of Agape and back with family, Dudley said he didn’t get the counseling and therapy he needed. And he feels the lasting impact from his time at Agape every day.
“Yeah, I got anger problems,” he said. “Yeah, I got major trust issues, I’m very defensive. It changed my whole persona. I feel like they knocked out a lot of potential of what I could have been. … Put me on a downward spiral.”
He said he’s been suicidal and “went to jail for numerous things.” And he ended up turning to drugs because he said he couldn’t face what happened.
“I’ll sit back and I’ll cry to myself sometimes,” Dudley said, emotion evident in his voice. “It killed me. I was a kid, and now I’m a grown man. And some days, I don’t know how to function.
“And the people that did this to me are still just walking around free.”
Parents take action
Blood gushed from Britt’s forehead, just over his right eyebrow. At some point during the 2010 assault, he said his face was cut.
And now the blood was staining his shirt. Staffers hauled him to the showers, he said, and took all of his clothes. They ordered him to clean up.
There — in the same shower bay where he said one boy had tried to hang himself in recent weeks — Britt watched pools of his own blood swirl down the drain. He recalls feeling an odd sense of relief. For the first time in his four months at the school, the water wasn’t ice cold.
“For whatever reason, they allowed me to take a 25- to 30-minute-long shower — and the water was warm,” he said. “I remember literally, directly after all that just happened, being so thankful to have a warm shower.”
Staffers gave him a new pair of jeans, new underwear and a yellow shirt, the lowest of the rankings. And then took him to the doctor.
His new shirt and jeans were already spotted with blood from his head wound.
Another staffer, one who wasn’t involved in the incident, first talked privately with the doctor. The story was, Britt said, that he was elbowed while playing basketball.
“He sat in there, like literally, while I was getting stitches,” Britt said of the staff member. “He was in a chair in the room.”
If Britt tried to say anything to the doctor, he said he knew it would only bring him more pain.
When they returned to the school, the staff gave Britt a brown shirt. It was the first time, he said, he was put in the boot camp where kids in trouble were sent.
For two weeks, he stayed with the other “brown shirts.” They weren’t allowed to do school work. They couldn’t talk to each other and had to do extreme workouts to the point of exhaustion. If they couldn’t do those workouts, Britt said, staffers forced boys’ eyes open and held their arms behind their backs while someone sprayed what appeared to be soapy water in their face.
A few weeks after the assault, Britt said his parents came for their first visit.
He knew he couldn’t tell them what had happened. He didn’t think they’d believe him and worried he’d be punished at the school if he did say something.
“So when my parents were there to visit, I asked if we could go see that room,” he said. “That was the only thing I could think of, that was like, maybe if they see that room they’ll be like, ‘Why does that room have all that stuff in there?’”
But when the three went to the room, he said, everything had changed. No more padded walls. Just children’s toys scattered around.
“They said it was a place where they babysat staff members’ kids,” Britt said.
But ultimately, he said he didn’t need that room to show his parents what the school was really like.
His mom took a hard look at the facility she had never seen in person. Plus, her son’s appearance was shocking.
He entered Agape in the spring of 2010, a standout high school running back and safety weighing about 175 pounds. Just five months later, he was down to 145 pounds, his self confidence and spark no longer there.
“I was horrified,” Kathleen Britt told The Star, her voice beginning to crack. “I didn’t even recognize my son.”
During their visit, Kathleen and her husband had walked into the dining hall to complete silence. Some kids were facing the wall, forced to eat while standing up.
And for the rest of the weekend, she said, she couldn’t get her son to talk above a whisper because talking wasn’t allowed in many cases.
She had seen enough. They pulled him from the school that day and took him home to Washington.
It would be nearly six years before he would reveal to his family what he said he went through inside the padded room.
Highway Patrol investigation
A state trooper investigating abuse allegations at Agape called Britt on April 26. By then, the patrol had been interviewing current and former students for weeks.
In late February, more than a dozen troopers were brought in to conduct interviews and gather possible evidence. Many students still at Agape were interviewed in patrol cars in the parking lot of the Christian reform school.
Three weeks later, authorities obtained a search warrant for the property after receiving a call from an anonymous staffer saying records were being destroyed.
The trooper told Britt in late April that during their other interviews they hadn’t heard of anything “sexual in nature.”
Within a couple of minutes, Britt said he realized the criminal investigation into his attack likely would go nowhere.
“It seemed like he wrote me off before he even heard my story,” Britt said.
But Britt continued to recount what happened in 2010. The letter. Staffers hauling him off to the basement room. The restraints. And subsequent gang rape.
“I told him myself, ‘Guy to guy, you know that you’re not going to say something like that right off the bat,’” Britt said. “I was like, ‘It took me six years to tell my own parents.’”
The investigator, Britt said, responded quickly:
“Well, if something like that happened to me, I would say something immediately.”
Britt said he told the investigator, “If you’d walk a mile in my shoes, I guarantee you wouldn’t have.”
A spokesman with the patrol referred all questions to the attorney general. The AG’s office said it could not comment on a pending investigation.
Kathleen Britt described the patrol’s investigation of her son’s ordeal as “shoddy work.”
“To shame my son for not coming forward sooner, that is beyond crossing the line,” she said. “It’s absolutely appalling.”
What also stood out to Jason Britt isn’t just what the investigator asked him. But what he didn’t.
Britt named three people who he said assaulted him. He couldn’t recall the full names of the other two. But the investigator, he said, didn’t offer to show him any pictures and have him identify them.
“You could give me a thousand different people and if just one of them was in the lineup, I could pick them out 100 percent,” Britt said.
In a second interview with The Star, reporters texted Britt a group photo of Agape staff members from the school’s 2010 yearbook. The photo didn’t include any names.
Britt immediately began pointing out the men he said assaulted him.
“One hundred percent,” he said as he picked out four of the five men. “No doubt.”
The photos matched the names of the men he said took him to the room that day.
The fifth person — who allegedly helped restrain him but didn’t sexually assault him — wasn’t in the group photo. But Britt identified him from a recent picture.
“I saw some stuff that happened to other kids too, would you like to hear about that?” Britt said he asked the investigator. “He literally said, ‘No.’”
The trooper ended the call after 20 minutes, Britt told The Star.
So the former student never got the chance to tell him everything he saw inside the walls of Agape, like the suicide attempts, the constant abuse of certain students and how staff would spray soapy water in boys’ eyes when they couldn’t handle extreme workouts.
“The real details get a little bit difficult,” Britt said. “But especially when you tell that story and someone is essentially calling you a liar.”
Why they’re speaking out
Britt recounts the details and the pain from Agape with little to no emotion. His voice remains steady.
But when he talks about why he’s coming forward with his story, he breaks down. Apologizes for getting emotional.
“It’d be very fulfilling to me to just make sure that, you know, something like this didn’t happen to another kid,” he said. “That would be most worth it to me.”
He said he’s not looking for anything else.
“Everybody has bad things happen in their lives. I don’t want people’s pity, and I don’t want people to think of me differently,” Britt said. “I just feel like it’s my job, my responsibility, to tell my story.
“It would help me heal as well.”
And, he said, it may help “my psyche.” Only in recent days has Britt been able to share with a counselor about the day he says he was gang raped at Agape.
By talking about what happened, Britt hopes it encourages others to come forward.
He’s read stories in The Star about the abuse allegations and the attorney general’s investigation. But he’s kept out of the social media conversation and shied away from being an activist like other former students have done.
For him, the focus has been on his health. Two years ago, he was diagnosed with a rare kidney disease caused by high blood pressure which he attributes, in part, to the panic attacks and PTSD symptoms he suffers from his five months at Agape.
He’s working to get on the list for a kidney transplant.
“I want my book to have a good ending, not a bad ending,” Britt said. “So I’m trying to do whatever I can to work through it.”
He’s thought about what he would say if he could talk to the men who sexually assaulted him and tried to “break my spirit.”
“Some of them have kids; some of them have family members,” Britt said. “I would like to know how they would feel if someone did that to one of their own? Sit there and really answer it. How would you feel?
“And how do you feel, you know, about all these young men’s lives that you …”
Britt’s voice trailed off.
Dudley said when he saw The Star’s stories about alleged abuse at Agape, he thought, “‘I gotta say something. Somebody’s got to know what’s going on.’”
“Sometimes I hate that it took me this long to really say something,” Dudley said. “But sometimes, you know, we got to stand as a group. It’s hard for you to come forward when you’re just one person after for years and years nobody believed me.”
Like Britt, Dudley said the only reason he’s sharing his private pain now is to keep other kids from suffering. He’s not about vengeance or settling a score.
“Because with all honesty, there’s no court ruling that could give justice for what they did,” Dudley said. “There’s no courtroom in America that can make me feel OK about what they did or feel as if they can serve justice.
“But as long as it don’t happen to that next baby boy in there, who needs just a kinder touch, just a gentler hand, I’m happy. I just don’t want you all to hurt nobody else.”
This story was originally published June 13, 2021 5:00 AM.
Judy L Thomas
The Kansas City Star
