Sexual Abuse & Domestic Violence

S. can’t remember how many times she has been hit in the head, but she remembers vividly the time she was choked. Those are two categories of injury she has survived over the course of her abusive marriages, and they are distinct because they can cause or contribute to traumatic brain injury.

“I attract sociopaths, not abusers,” she said from her art-filled room in permanent supportive housing in Interior Alaska. “Sociopaths.”

One of her husbands threw her down a flight of stairs. Her last boyfriend tried to strangle her. The Alaska Beacon is not naming her for safety reasons — one of her abusers has tracked her to her new home before. S. speaks quickly, but pauses frequently and often cannot remember where she left off. “Brain stop,” she said at one point, or, another time, “I apologize, my brain is like—” and then muddled her fingers together in a jumbled gesture.

S.’s body is a map of scars from abuse that spans from childhood until she made it to shelter just under a decade ago. She is visibly wracked with pain, and said she rarely sleeps.

“I’m brain damaged from abuse. I don’t claim the brain damage, though,” she said. “It’s not on my medical record. I don’t want another disability. I’ve got too many going on.”

Alaska has the highest rate of deaths from traumatic brain injury in the nation and among the highest rates of domestic violence, but it is only recently that advocates and caregivers began to link the two. And as S.’s story bears out, as high as the Alaska rates are for both traumatic brain injury and domestic violence, experts have said they are undercounted.

 ‘They’re not going crazy. This is a real medical diagnosis.’

Few people who provide services understand the link between traumatic brain injury and domestic violence better than Kimberly Sumner, who manages the state’s Traumatic and Acquired Brain Injury grant program in Juneau. She identifies as a survivor of both TBI and of domestic violence. Now she helps other people who have sustained trauma.

“I knew that the lack of services in the community for people with traumatic brain injuries was huge, but I didn’t know how huge it was. And I also saw a great need for it,” she said.

Sumner worked in victim’s services with Juneau’s domestic violence shelter for more than a dozen years. She said she saw evidence of brain injury among many of the people she helped, but there wasn’t a specific screening that might help them get a diagnosis. Now, she works with Southeast Alaska Independent Living and can connect clients to resources, like the state grant she manages and a number of support groups she runs.

Since 2003, the state has managed a program that awards grants to support people who have sustained traumatic brain injuries. One-year grants can be up to $2,500 or awardees can receive up to $5,000 over five years.

The grant program is not new, but Sumner’s approach is, said her supervisor, Bridget Thompson.

“What the other agencies don’t do as much as we do here — and it’s because of Kim’s background — is that awareness around domestic violence,” she said. “Everything that Kim brought to the traumatic and acquired brain injury program is from her lived experience.”

Thompson said that when people think of traumatic and acquired brain injuries, they consider causes like car accidents, strokes and concussions, “but very rarely are people thinking of domestic violence or any sort of emotional abuse. And that’s something that’s totally different than the other programs throughout the state.”

Another thing that Sumner does for clients sounds simple: She listens. But she listens without judgment, she said, because she has experienced trauma, and understands how devastating it can be.

Sumner also uses art as therapy. One afternoon, after hosting a small group at a support meeting, she sat among the leftover snacks, colored pencils and painting supplies.

“I think it just takes one voice at a time to get the word out there,” she said. “I want to be there for the survivors. I want them to know: They’re not alone. And they’re not going crazy. This is a real medical diagnosis. And they have lots of support out there.”

Invisible wound

Patty Raymond Turner, a traumatic brain injury expert with the University of Alaska’s Center for Human Development, has devoted her career to raising awareness about TBI.

As part of a statewide campaign, she compiled the numerous symptoms of TBI in a brochure. It reads like a list of common complaints from women who have experienced domestic violence or trauma, and there is overlap with the symptoms of post traumatic stress syndrome: trouble sleeping and concentrating, mood changes, memory issues.

There is data to track traumatic brain injury and data to track domestic violence, but not much that tracks the overlap, she said.

“It tends to be kept hidden, especially in Alaska,” she said of domestic violence.

Research in this area is scarce, but an Ohio study showed that among victims of domestic violence, 85% experienced blows to the head — of those, it happened to half of them more times than they could count. Further, 83% experienced strangulation, which can also cause traumatic brain injury. A national study found that 80% of domestic violence victims have sustained multiple traumatic brain injuries, but only about 20% sought medical attention at the time of an injury.

Raymond Turner’s mission is to make sure people with brain injuries know they have them and can get help, no matter the cause.

“TBIs, whether they’re mild or severe, can seriously disrupt people’s lives. And sometimes they don’t know what’s causing the issues,” she said.

“Sometimes people don’t know what’s causing it and they don’t know how to help make it better. And it can impact their personal lives. You know, relationships with their spouse or partner or kids.”

Raymond Turner added that not everybody has all of the symptoms. Some people only experience one or two of them. She said control by an abuser is one of the main reasons women do not or cannot report their injury, but other reasons include shame, and a lack of awareness about the link between the violence and brain injury symptoms.

“Maybe they’re having trouble concentrating, they’re having trouble remembering things, they feel really anxious,” she said. “Maybe they’re thinking, ‘That’s just my emotions, because of the quality of my relationship,’ and they’re not making the connection that it might be because they’ve been hit in the head over and over again.”

She said even though Alaska has very high rates of TBI, she knows it goes largely unreported.

 A tool for change

But that may soon change, as awareness grows. Kelley Hartleib, a project coordinator for the University of Alaska Anchorage’s Center for Human Development, is part of the team that is working on the Alaska State Plan for Brain Injury.

“Recognizing that survivors of interpersonal violence are people who experience brain injury at an increased rate, my part in the project is to develop a screening tool,” she said.

That facet of the work has taken off in the last two years, she said. The goal is for victim advocates to understand the intersection between domestic or intimate partner violence and brain injuries — and how to better help clients who have them.

The tool is called BASKETS, which is an acronym for the ways people might acquire a TBI or next steps they might take:

• Brain bumped, banged, beaten, bruised?
• Acquired and injured in other ways?
• Strangled, suffocated, stopped breathing?
• Knocked out?
• Emergency services ever encouraged?
• Trouble now?
• Support, services, self-advocacy, self-care.

Hartleib used to work with the Anchorage domestic violence shelter, and she said advocates didn’t know to screen people for traumatic brain injury. The tool she’s developing will allow them to do that.

Shelters can be noisy, busy, light-filled places, Hartleib said, which can be a painful environment to navigate for someone with traumatic brain injury, who may be sensitive to all of those factors.

Hartleib said the state and advocacy groups haven’t been tracking traumatic brain injury among people who survive domestic violence, even though blows to the head and strangulation are known to be very common injuries among that population.

“Usually it’s repeated concussive incidents that people get and that makes it harder and harder for them to recover. It makes them more and more vulnerable and susceptible to continued increasing injury,” she said. “Some of the impacts make them even more susceptible to abuse because it can often result in foggy memory or lack of attention span, forgetfulness, tiredness and fatigue and all of these symptoms that then the perpetrator can say, ‘You’re nuts. You’re crazy.’”

Her experience working with survivors taught her that perpetrators can use cognitive difficulties against their victims by telling them that they’re stupid, lazy or unfit to care for their children, when in reality the victims are trying to function after brain injury.

“They might think, ‘He’s right, because I can’t keep it together and I’m having trouble,’” Hartleib explained.  “It might be an ‘aha moment’ to say, ‘You know what? Maybe you’ve got something that you can get some support around. You’re not lazy or stupid. It’s the impact, potentially, of something going on in your brain.”

Hartleib has shown it to some people in the field, and said they are clamoring for the tool. It isn’t in use yet, but the Center for Human Development aims to have it in a pilot program in the Anchorage shelter by the end of the year.

This article was produced as a project for the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s 2023 Domestic Violence Impact Fund.

This story originally appeared in the Alaska Beacon and is republished here with permission.

This is the first in a series of articles the Alaska Beacon is publishing with the support of the University of Southern California Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s 2023 Domestic Violence Impact Fund. The stories that follow will explore the reach of Alaska’s funding to address domestic violence and show some areas where it succeeds, as well as where it falls short. They will also explore the ways that the state’s health, justice and education systems take on domestic violence’s lesser acknowledged effects.

T.’s relationship with her husband didn’t become violent until six months into her pregnancy with their first child.

“Then it turned ugly. It was like a mask came off,” T. said. “He was free to say or do whatever he wanted because I was pregnant, and where was I going to go?”

For safety reasons, the Alaska Beacon generally does not identify victims of abuse by name and is identifying T. by her initial with her agreement.

One night, after the baby was born, T.’s husband tried to stop her when she attempted to leave the house. She said they both ended up on the ground, but she had the baby in her arms. “I’m a big girl; I can defend myself,” she said. “But he wasn’t being mindful of the baby.” She left, for three months. But she said he convinced her to come back — this was her husband, and the father of her child. Then, she got pregnant again.

Like T., nearly half of women in the state of Alaska have experienced domestic violence in their lifetimes, according to a University of Alaska Anchorage survey. It can touch just about every aspect of their lives, so its full effects can be hard to fully comprehend and difficult to repair. Domestic violence is also referred to as intimate partner violence between couples. It is an urgent issue in Alaska, which has the third-highest rate of intimate partner violence against women among the states, where men kill women at a higher rate than anywhere else in the country, and where women are most likely to be murdered by their spouse or boyfriend.

The state spends millions each year to fund community programs aimed at treating and ending domestic violence, yet the groups that offer services often report they are limited by their budget. Dozens of nonprofits tend to the impacts of domestic violence and state departments and councils examine response methods, but state data shows that the rate of domestic violence is as high as it has been in a decade.

Time and money

The state’s Council on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault is part of the Department of Public Safety, but it also partners with the Department of Corrections to shepherd millions of dollars in state and federal money to communities and programs across the roughly 660,000 square miles of varied geographic and cultural terrain that makes up Alaska.

Diane Casto has led the council for the last six years as its executive director. She will retire on Nov. 2; the state has not yet named a successor. She works in a light-filled office in downtown Juneau, Alaska. Her salt and pepper hair is cropped and spiky; she wears tidy suits.

As she leaves her post, nearly three decades after beginning her public service career in the state, she said the rate of domestic violence remains high and she feels “burnt out,” a feeling she said is common among people who push against the prevailing attitudes that surround domestic violence.

“It takes years, generations, to change attitudes, beliefs and behaviors. And if you don’t give it that time, you’re not going to see change. And I think that’s where we have really failed in domestic violence,” she said. “We have failed and we are not alone. Alaska is not alone. There are very few states who have really made significant progress and reductions in rates across the whole state.”

The state puts millions of dollars towards the response to domestic violence each year.  In the 12 months that ended in June, the Council on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault had roughly $32 million to fight domestic violence — more than half of it came from the state.

“Many states around the country get no state funding [for domestic violence]. They get the federal formula funding and that’s it. We get significant state funding; we always have,” Casto said, adding that Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s administration has been supportive of funding for domestic violence.

But it isn’t enough, Casto said. Each year, she has to ask the Legislature for more money.

“The first question they asked me is: ‘Why haven’t you solved domestic violence and sexual assault? Why do we still have the rates that we have?’” she said. “Well, there’s many reasons. And part of it is money, but part of it is commitment. Part of it is time.”

Most of the money goes to victim services, rather than outreach, education and other prevention efforts.

“Part of the problem is, even though we give out a lot of money, shelter programs are very expensive,” Casto said. “So it’s not like they have a lot of extra money for kind of helping those who have been victimized get job skills, get financially secure or get [long-term] housing.”

A lack of security often will send people who have experienced domestic violence back to abusive situations, she said. That leaves the state and various nonprofits to address the cascading consequences of abuse: physical and mental health effects, housing needs, and police and court involvement.

The other issue — time — is a big one. The project of changing attitudes and beliefs around violence operates on a different timescale than the budget cycle, or the tenure of an elected official.  “Funding wants to see results and outcomes now,” Casto said.

She managed the council through a pandemic, steered it through years of erratic federal funding and will leave it with a detailed plan for the next several years of work. That management has helped programs statewide to direct services where they are needed most and in the hardest to reach parts of Alaska, and she said she hopes it has set up her successors to make serious inroads against violence and the prevailing cultural attitudes that support it.

“Change will happen at the local level,” she said. “If a community would gather together and get everyone on the same page and say, ‘We are no longer going to accept domestic violence in our community,’ then it would start slowing down.”

She said that hasn’t happened yet statewide.

Power and control

T. and her husband tried couples therapy.

He told her she had postpartum depression; she said he wasn’t carrying his weight with the baby. If he came home from work and saw lunch dishes in the sink, “I’d get accused of not doing anything all day,” she said. “To him, it doesn’t look like I did anything and I’m just laying around, leeching money off of him.”

Domestic violence can be accompanied by other abusive behavior like financial control and emotional manipulation, experts say. Women in households that experienced financial or employment problems during the pandemic were about twice as likely to experience violence.

“There was a lot of inequality with spending money,” she said.

In T.’s case, she would be financially unstable and unhoused if she were to leave her partner. She also experienced setbacks related to domestic violence – after one altercation, where T. said she was acting in self-defense, she was arrested and put in jail for several days, which later made it difficult for her to find housing and regain custody of her children.

Emotional and legal ties can keep unhealthy couples together until a dynamic that advocates call “power and control” escalates to the point of crisis. This can pose particular problems in much of Alaska, where the vast, often roadless geography makes access to safety, services and even law enforcement difficult or impossible.

T. is an Alaska Native woman, which means she is part of a population that is disproportionately affected by intimate partner violence.

Understanding abuse

Domestic violence usually originates from other violence. Perpetrators are often people who have been abused themselves. In a snapshot study from the Anchorage Police Department in 2019, half of all domestic violence calls involved people who had been arrested for domestic violence before. Nearly half of perpetrators had also been victims.

That premise underlies the disproportionate rates of Alaska Native families that are affected by domestic violence, according to experts like Charlene Aqpik Apok, the executive director of the research nonprofit Data for Indigenous Justice.

Apok maintains a database of missing and murdered Indigenous people and wrote a doctoral dissertation on Alaska Native masculinity — they spend a lot of time considering the origins and effects of violence. They said the violence perpetrated at colonial boarding schools and within churches is a root cause.

“In Alaska, the history of colonization is relatively recent, comparatively, to the Lower 48. And ongoing colonialism is active today. And I think that that often gets unsaid,” they said.

“The continued structural violence that was happening persists,” they said. “And that’s why we keep seeing more cases of missing and murdered folks.”

Eileen Arnold, the director of Tundra Women’s Coalition in Bethel, said she sees a link between colonization displacing subsistence culture with a cash economy, and the high rates of domestic violence  in the region.

“The reason for that is what’s happened historically, sort of the ghost echoes of that original sort of violence against the culture, against a way of life. A lot of people have internalized that and it also gets passed down historically, from generation to generation,” she said.

Community support, and the good news

The work advocates and state officials do may be expensive, difficult and time consuming, but they say it is working.

It took T. years, and another abusive relationship, before she gained independence through the shelter system and a housing program. She lives in supportive housing, which is low-cost housing that can be paired with services — in Alaska it is supported with vouchers from the Alaska Housing Finance Corp.

Housing stability helped T. regain custody of one of her children, despite her criminal record. She lives in the same building as a number of other survivors. Now, in the afternoons, she picks up one of their children from school with her own daughter and walks them to afterschool activities.

“The first day that I came in, people were helping me move furniture in and providing things that I didn’t have,” she said. “We all kind of support each other and it feels very much like a family.”

That family feeling is something T. said she had been seeking for a long time.

Support between survivors is one thing; they understand each others’ experiences firsthand. But building support from the wider Alaska community is more complicated; advocates observe that many people consider domestic violence to not be their business, even if its effects can last for generations.

It is well documented that the effects of domestic violence are deep and far-reaching — and that by stemming the flow of violence, the state could see improvements in social indicators like physical and mental health outcomes and student success.

There are dozens of groups already breaking trail to a less violent future for Alaska families. They include those who are tending to the immediate needs of domestic violence survivors, who are creating new pathways to safety, who are helping survivors rebuild their lives after violence, who are raising awareness of the issue and teaching future generations how to self-regulate and create healthy, violence-free relationships.

This series chronicles their work, digs into the lesser known effects of violence and reveals what remains to be done.

This article was produced as a project for the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s 2023 Domestic Violence Impact Fund.

Correction: This article has been corrected to reflect that the Council on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault is part of the Department of Public Safety.

This story originally appeared in the Alaska Beacon and is republished here with permission.

The trial for Jeffrey Fultz, a former Juneau-area chiropractor accused of sexually assaulting 14 patients, still has not been scheduled — more than two years after he was first charged. 

District Attorney Jessalyn Gillum told KTOO on Wednesday that the long wait is partly due to the fact that so many more victims have come forward.

“Every time someone new steps forward, you know, the investigation into their particular allegation has to be done, appropriately and thoroughly,” Gillum said.

Fultz worked for the Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium for seven years. After an initial accusation in 2021, a total of 14 women have come forward to say that Fultz assaulted them under the guise of medical care — most recently in March.

Fultz now faces 19 counts of felony sexual assault and misdemeanor harassment. Some of those charges are for alleged assaults that date back to 2014.

“We have a large interest in trying to get that finality for the victims and their families. But that’s not the only thing we can consider,” Gillum said. “We recognize that having the case open often causes the complainants’ ongoing stress and anxiety, of not really knowing when the case will go to trial.”

Gillum said another factor could delay the trial even more. The judge assigned to the case, Daniel Schally, is slated to retire at the end of August. Gillum said that means the case would be passed on to another judge.

Fultz, who left Juneau after the first accusations, was ordered not to practice medicine and to turn over his passport. He’s been living at his home in Durango, Colorado.

Though several accusers asked that Fultz be required to return to Juneau, Schally denied that request. Instead, a monitor in Colorado was assigned to check on whether Fultz is following his conditions of release. 

“Although it’s unusual for the DOC Pretrial Enforcement Division (PED) to oversee an individual outside the state, the Court has mandated it,” said Betsy Holley with the Department of Corrections in an email Thursday. 

Holley says the pre-trial monitoring officer is in regular contact with Durango police and with Fultz. 

“If any issues arise in Colorado, Mr. Fultz will be promptly returned to Alaska,” Holley said. 

Fultz’s next readiness hearing is Nov. 15. 

Content warning: This article includes mentions of sexual assault and abuse that may be uncomfortable for some readers. Resources are available at the bottom of this post.

Two California men have come forward to say that Bradley Earl Reger — a man the FBI suspects of abusing dozens if not hundreds of boys over a period of decades — abused them on trips to Juneau’s Echo Ranch Bible Camp when they were children. 

FBI charging documents refer to Reger taking boys on “camping trips he led in Alaska,” and Reger has a long and well-documented association with the camp. The men’s accounts are the first, though, to allege that abuse happened at the camp. 

Earlier this month, former Juneau resident Troy Wilson, who says that Reger abused him on trips to California, told KTOO that Reger used the camp as a “mechanism” — a place where he could gain the trust of families so he could later travel alone with their children. But Wilson said he did not know if Reger had ever abused anyone at the camp. 

Zack Winfrey, who spent time at Echo Ranch from 2003 to 2006, says that he did.

“I was definitely abused at Echo Ranch,” he told KTOO in an interview last week.

Winfrey’s account is supported by another California man, Derrick Fox, who spent time at Echo Ranch during the same time period and also said Reger abused him.

Both men described a trusted, prominent church member operating with no real oversight. They say Reger abused them for years, and that his trips to Echo Ranch gave him access to children with little or no supervision from other adults — and it’s not clear if there were any protocols for keeping children safe.

After KTOO contacted the camp director to ask about Winfrey’s and Fox’s accounts, the camp replied with a statement saying it was taking the allegations seriously.

“We recently learned that alleged abuse may have taken place at ERBC,” the statement read. “As a result, Avant Ministries immediately contacted law enforcement agencies in accordance with our organization’s Child Safety Protection Policies and Procedures.”

“He did what he wanted”

Federal investigators arrested Reger on July 6 and charged him with “engaging in illicit sexual activity abroad, transportation of a minor with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity, and coercion and enticement.” They alleged that Reger abused more than a dozen boys and young men, often under the guise of medical care. But federal investigators believe he could have hundreds of victims, the Sacramento Bee reported in July.

Winfrey is one of the witnesses cooperating with the FBI in its investigation into Reger. He shared some of his correspondence with the FBI with KTOO, along with photographs that place him at the camp. Winfrey remembers Fox from the Alaska trips — and Fox, too, showed KTOO correspondence with investigators about the case.

Winfrey also said that he remembers Mio Rhein, a former Echo Ranch staff member who now lives in Ketchikan. Rhein spoke with KTOO to corroborate some of the details about Reger’s trips to Alaska. 

Winfrey said he was 10 years old when Reger first abused him, under the guise of a physical exam. Winfrey’s family attended the Susanville Church of the Nazarene. Reger led the church’s youth programming, including a group called SuzNaz Youth. Winfrey was a member.

Winfrey said that for him, the trips to Alaska started a year later, in 2003.

Winfrey and Fox both told KTOO that Reger would take about a dozen members of SuzNaz Youth to Alaska, and the trips would last for several weeks. In Juneau, the group would spend some time at Echo Ranch Bible Camp and some time staying in a building on the grounds of Auke Bay Bible Church. 

They also traveled around Southeast. Winfrey remembers kayaking trips and hiking the Chilkoot Trail. His photos from the trips are typical snapshots — kayaks pulled up on a beach, boys hiking in the forest, and Southeast landmarks like the Mendenhall Glacier and Main Street in Skagway. They also show recognizable scenes from Echo Ranch, like the cross by the beach that is still featured on the camp’s Facebook page.

Both men said Reger would sometimes bring the group to Echo Ranch when other groups weren’t there. During their stays, Winfrey said they would help build cabins and do maintenance around the camp.

Winfrey said Reger abused him several times on that first trip — in the campers’ cabins and at a nurse’s station. 

Fox also went to Echo Ranch for the first time in 2003. Like Winfrey, Fox said Reger abused him repeatedly, and always under the guise of medical care. 

“The abuse was very short in duration for the most part,” Fox said. “But almost constant — like, multiple times a trip.” 

Winfrey and Fox both said other adults would drift in and out of the trips, but none stayed for the whole time. Often, they said, Reger was the only adult around.

And between the work at the camp and activities in the forest, Fox said there were always injuries and illnesses that Reger could use as an excuse to be alone with a child. And there seemed to be no rules at the camp preventing that.

“There was never anyone that would have ever said, ‘Hey, you can’t take that kid over to the clinic,’” Fox said. “He did what he wanted.”

Reger’s relationship with Echo Ranch remains unclear

Avant Ministries, the camp’s parent organization, told KTOO that Reger never worked for the camp — only that he volunteered there “in the 1970’s and sporadically over years that followed.” But a 2014 history of the camp, written for its 50th anniversary, calls Reger a “camp supporter” and describes an involvement that spanned decades. 

Reger enters the history as “a former camper” who “volunteered as a boy’s counselor for several years” in the 1970s. And in 1985, the book describes Reger bringing a California youth group to the camp to help “build a bathhouse, septic tank, and leach field.” 

Winfrey, Fox and Rhein — the former staff member — all said Reger was traveling to Echo Ranch regularly in the early 2000s.

Winfrey said that Reger often either helped parents pay for the trips or paid for them entirely. He said his parents paid around $150 for the first trip — and nothing for subsequent trips.  

“Obviously, a lot of people couldn’t afford to just fly up to Alaska and stay up there for a couple of weeks,” he said. “He had a deal for all the kids in the youth group.”

Rhein said he managed the camp’s horse program from 1996 to 2006. He remembers Reger’s trips with SuzNaz Youth. He also said that he remembers Reger acting as the camp’s nurse for part of one summer — a memory that other sources shared.

Rhein described Reger as a kind of benefactor who donated medical supplies and an ambulance to the camp.

“Brad was a donor and was identified as a significant donor,” he said.

That’s consistent with how the camp history describes Reger. The book mentions a “donation of a large truck by camp supporter Brad Reger” in the 1990s, and it says that “Brad donated, from his Emergency Medical Services Company, a used 4-wheel-drive ambulance.”

Rhein said he wanted to share what he knew about Reger because he believes Christian organizations have a history of denying past harm in Alaska.

“Accountability is important,” he said. “We have not done a good job being honest about the bad things that happened in the church.”

Camp Director Randy Alderfer, who has been with the camp since 2009, said Friday that he couldnʼt confirm any details about Regerʼs time at Echo Ranch, or whether he made any donations. And Brynden Wiens, Echo Ranch’s camp administrator, told KTOO in an email that the organization would not comment on Reger as a donor. 

“As a matter of policy, we are unable to share any details regarding individual (private) donations made to our organization,” Wiens wrote.

Alderfer did say that adults were never permitted to be alone with children at the camp, but he couldn’t say when that policy went into effect. Wiens’s email described child safety policies that are in place now, but he did not answer questions about what policies were in place when Winfrey and Fox visited the camp.

Echo Ranch has now updated its website to include a statement on Reger, along with a link to the FBI’s website for reporting possible abuse by Reger. 

“The same stuff from the very beginning”

Winfrey said that Reger continued to abuse him for nearly a decade, until he was 20. Fox said he was 17 when he had an exam from Reger that pushed him to start questioning what was happening. He called it “the first time I realized something was like — incredibly, incredibly wrong.” 

Fox said he told his parents, but they continued to hope that what he described was legitimate medical care. 

Both men described Reger as a respected and prominent member of the church. But both men also remember Reger behaving inappropriately in public during the trips — walking around in just his briefs, or walking into children’s hotel rooms unannounced.

“There have always been jokes,” Fox said. “Maybe everybody was uncomfortable with Brad.”

And there were reports of abuse over the years. Reger was first investigated in California in 1986 for child sex abuse, then again in 2003, 2006 and 2007. None of those investigations led to an arrest. 

The Susanville Church of the Nazarene did not respond to KTOO’s questions about Reger’s role in the church or any donations he might have made.

After federal authorities arrested Reger in July, Winfrey was one of the witnesses who testified that Reger should remain in custody until his trial.

“I’ve slept very uneasily for over a decade knowing that Brad was out there free and able to do whatever he wanted to do, whenever he wanted to do it,” Winfrey wrote in a statement to the FBI. “I’d like to know, for the first time in my entire existence, that the man who ruined my life is finally in a place where he can’t hurt anybody else.”

Winfrey said he’s been in touch with other people who say Reger abused them — at least one person from every decade dating back to the 1970s. He says their stories, beginning with Troy Wilson’s, are all eerily similar — befriending boys around the age of 10 or 11, traveling with them unsupervised, and finding ways to enmesh them in his life until they reached young adulthood.

“It seems like we could put together a pattern of like — Brad basically did the same stuff from the very beginning,” Winfrey said. “He just got way more sophisticated about it.”

The FBI has an online form for anyone who wants to report that they — or their minor dependent — may have been victimized by Bradley Reger. 

In Juneau, survivors of sexual abuse can call AWARE at 907-586-1090 to find resources for support. There is also a national 24-hour phone and online chat hotline that offers counseling and support. 

Content warning: This article includes mentions of sexual assault and abuse that may be uncomfortable for some readers. Resources are available at the bottom of this post.

A California man who was indicted last month on federal sexual abuse charges had a decades-long association with Juneau’s Echo Ranch Bible Camp. Bradley Earl Reger, 67, volunteered at the camp as a nurse and counselor starting in the 1970s.

The charging documents allege that Reger abused more than a dozen boys and young men, often under the guise of medical care and often during camping trips or church activities. But federal investigators believe he could have hundreds of victims, the Sacramento Bee reported in July.

In an interview Tuesday, former Juneau resident Troy Wilson told KTOO that he is one of them — that Reger befriended Wilson at Echo Ranch when he was a child and first abused him during a trip to California.

“He’s a monster. And now that I hear about the things that he’s done to other kids and other people, the stories are identical,” Wilson said. “I hope that my story and statement helps those people someday.” 

‘Sexual abuse in the guise of medical treatment’

A federal grand jury in Sacramento indicted Reger last month on charges of “illicit sexual activity abroad, transportation of a minor with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity, and coercion and enticement.” Reger lives in Susanville, California, where he’s owned a series of medical services companies.

According to the criminal complaint, Reger “enticed and induced multiple victims to travel out of California on camping trips or church-affiliated missions, where he would conduct unlawful sexual abuse in the guise of medical treatment.” 

The complaint says that some of the abuse took place during camping trips in Alaska, though it’s not clear where.

Reger pleaded not guilty to the charges on July 21. Investigators are still looking for other possible victims who have not come forward yet. 

Reger’s presence in Juneau dates back to the 70s

Avant Ministries, the parent organization of Echo Ranch Bible Camp, said in a statement that Reger was never employed by the camp, but that Reger volunteered there “in the 1970’s and sporadically over years that followed.”

A history of the camp written for its 50th anniversary in 2014 includes several references to Reger. It says he was a counselor there beginning in the early 70s and that, decades later, he donated an ambulance to the camp.

Reger, it says, “volunteered as a boy’s counselor for several years. He had not been to nursing school or become an EMT yet. But Brad saw the need for better medical equipment and trained medical staff, so he got his medical training and has been a big help.”

Avant’s statement says the organization is “grieved by the reports about sexual abuse by Bradley Reger and grieve for any and all children harmed” and that Reger can no longer be affiliated with Avant services or set foot on Avant property.

‘He was a friend – I was looking for help’

Troy Wilson is a familiar name in Juneau — he worked for the Juneau Police for nearly two decades, left the force, and then went to prison more than a decade ago after shooting at police during a mental health crisis.

Wilson said the standoff happened at a time when he was working to confront the trauma of Reger’s abuse. 

Wilson said he met Reger when he was a child in the late 1970s and his parents worked at Echo Ranch. His parents trusted Reger. So when Reger invited Wilson, then 12, and two other boys to go to California, Wilson’s parents said yes. They thought it was a chance for Wilson to go on a fun road trip and go to amusement parks, which his parents couldn’t afford to pay for themselves. 

“Now looking back, you know, he was grooming my parents and grooming us kids,” Wilson said. 

It was on that trip that Reger first assaulted Wilson, under the guise of checking for ticks, Wilson said. At the time, Wilson didn’t understand what had happened to him. 

“As time went on, we went back to Echo Ranch. Nothing ever came up — never said anything,” Wilson said.

Then, when Wilson was 18, he worked for and lived with Reger for a year in Susanville. He saw it as an opportunity to get into a career in emergency medical services. 

When Wilson started suffering from severe back pain, Reger offered to examine him. Instead, Wilson said, Reger assaulted him again under the guise of medical attention. 

“He was a nurse,” Wilson said. “I trusted him. He was a friend — I was looking for help.”

After the second assault, Wilson said he didn’t feel he could do anything about it and didn’t report it to police. 

But other people did report Reger — the criminal complaint says Reger was investigated at least as early as 1986, and that Susanville police investigations in 2003, 2006 and 2007 involving multiple victims did not result in criminal charges.

No known abuse at Echo Ranch

Echo Ranch Bible Camp Director Randy Alderfer said that Reger volunteered there before his time, and he didn’t know him.

In Avant’s statement, the organization said the crimes Reger is charged with “do not involve any of Avant’s domestic or international ministry locations”, but that the organization would “seek to respond responsibly and compassionately” if that changes.

Wilson stresses that Reger did not abuse him at Echo Ranch, and he doesn’t know if Reger abused anyone else there either. Rather, Wilson said he thinks Reger used places like the camp to befriend families and gain access to children.

“That’s what he does,” Wilson said. “It’s like Echo Ranch was a mechanism that introduced him to our family.”

Wilson, who now lives in Washington state, said that after he served his prison sentence, he started going to therapy to deal with his trauma. 

“I’ve had nightmares since I was in prison about him,” he said.

Wilson said that he hopes by sharing his story, it might make it easier for other victims to come forward. 

The FBI has an online form for anyone who wants to report that they — or their minor dependent — may have been victimized by Bradley Reger.

In Juneau, survivors of sexual abuse can call AWARE at 907-586-1090 to find resources for support. There is also a national 24-hour phone and online chat hotline that offers counseling and support. 

The Alaska Department of Public Safety has launched a new system that will let survivors track evidence kits used in sexual assault cases. The goal is to assure survivors that something is being done. 

The tracking system launched in June. Austin McDaniel, with the Department of Public Safety, said 48 kits have been logged into the system so far, and 33 survivors have used the system to track their status.

Jennifer Brown with Standing Together Against Rape, Inc. — a sexual assault support and prevention organization in Anchorage, also known as STAR — said the system was a long time coming.

“Survivors of sexual assault will be able to know that action is being taken on their kits,” she said.

The new system comes after the state finally cleared a years-long backlog of untested kits. And it comes after years of problems, as reported by Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica, with collecting evidence and investigating sexual assault cases in Alaska.

Brown said the new tracking process begins when survivors first get tested. They’re given a card with a code that corresponds to a testing kit, and a nurse or advocate can help them set up an account. 

The card also encourages safeguards for people who may be at risk from someone they live with — like avoiding autofill and saving passwords. For safety, survivors can also designate a family member, friend or an advocate from STAR to be the one to get updates on their kits. 

Brown said the process is like tracking a package. The initial clinic has seven days to send the kit out. Then law enforcement has 30 days to process it. Last, it goes to the state crime lab. 

“The limitations on those kits being tested is a maximum of six months, but we’re seeing that they’re being tested a lot faster than that,” Brown said. 

She said that it’s too soon to know how well the system is working. But for now, she’s eager to see how it will help survivors of sexual assault.

“That’s a big step in the right direction,” she said.