New documentary details horrific abuse in Amish communities
Misty Griffin grew up being tortured and sexually abused. Now she wants the U.S. to enact legislation to protect children who are abused in religious communities and institutions.
Photos courtesy of Misty Griffin.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This article contains stories of sexualized violence that some readers may find retraumatizing.
Near the end of Misty Griffin’s memoir, she wakes up from what she can only assume is a fever dream. She was back in the Amish community, the same place where she was being sexually abused by a church leader.
In a moment of terror, Misty realized she didn’t escape the Amish and move away with her Aunty Laura and Uncle Bill, or successfully complete her GED after just four months of studying and a third-grade education.
Instead, she was back in the same apron and plain-coloured dress women are required to wear in Plain communities. She didn’t call the police on the Bishop after all, or try to save her Aunt Fanny and Grandma from her abusive mother and stepfather, who raised Misty and her sister, Samantha, in servitude.
But just when it seemed like all hope was lost, she woke up from her nightmare in her new home.
Misty’s story is being told in the Peacock documentary Sins of the Amish, a two-episode series that she also worked on as a consulting producer. After three-and-a-half years from conception to final product, the series premiered late last month.
In an interview with The Blueprint two days after the series premiere, Misty pointed out that there are many good Amish and Mennonite people who are too afraid to step up and speak out against the church out of fear of being shunned and silenced.
"They literally do not do anything. They don't take them out of the home. They just leave them in their homes and they drive by every Sunday [knowing] that those kids are being molested and beaten half to death every day."
How do Amish communities in the U.S. continue to thrive economically? As Misty explains, Lancaster Country, Pennsylvania makes $2 billion a year in tourism. This hard-working, Christian, down-to-earth narrative about the Amish, she adds, is a work of fiction. Rather than address the pedophilia and sexualized violence within their communities, "they let children be raped and they don’t do anything."
"I hate to say it, but these are some of the worst people," she admitted, noting that living in the 1600s offered little, if any, autonomy to women, children, and racialized communities.
As Misty explains, law enforcement often says "the Amish handle things among themselves" and writes off abuse allegations in the name of "religious freedom."
"They are not a sovereign nation," she said. "They should be subject to the laws of the United States or Canada or wherever they live, just like everybody else."
The abuse in Plain communities, Misty explains, isn’t exclusive to North America either. She pointed out that many missionary groups from Canada and the U.S. travel to South America to harm children.
"If those children come forward and say, ‘This Mennonite missionary raped me,’ is anybody going to care?"
How the police failed Misty and her loved ones
Unlike Misty, her sister never left the Amish. Instead, she got married, had three kids, and moved to a Plain community in Kentucky. Now, they stay in touch only a couple of times each year. Her children have never met their brave aunt Misty.
It wasn’t that Misty didn’t fight for her sister. It was that the police refused to do their job and investigate sexual abuse and torture when it came to the Amish.
The abdication of responsibility by the police directly played a role in the deaths of both Misty’s grandmother and aunt Fanny, who were tortured on the family farm until their bodies were discovered outside of a morgue. As far as Misty knows, no investigation was completed to determine who dropped off their bodies as though they were babies at a fire station.
Misty would never have known what happened to her aunt and grandmother had it not been for the release of her memoir. When a local woman read the harrowing story of Misty’s escape, she began to put the pieces together.
"I knew there was something wrong," the woman later told her. She was a Mennonite at the time and alerted social services after seeing Misty being beaten by her stepfather. But before anything could be done, Misty’s family sent the girls to live with an Amish leader.
After hearing from Misty about what really happened on the family farm, the woman called a friend that worked for the county coroner's office and inquired about two Amish women that were left at the morgue.
The response was horrifying.
"Yes," the coroner said. "One day, we opened the door and there was an elderly Amish woman. She was just lying in front of [the office]. And then, a few years later, there was another one. Nobody claimed them. Nobody."
The women were cremated, and no funerals were held in their honour. It’s something Misty still struggles to understand.
"There’s just a dead person there and nobody cares about what happened to them," she said. Misty’s mom would later tell her sister that their aunt died of a heart attack. Then the story changed to a fatal stroke.
It didn’t matter how many calls Misty made to the police. She couldn’t count on adult protection services either, who were supposed to be responsible for her disabled aunt. They did go up to the farm once, Misty noted, but never returned after her stepfather chased them off of their property while wielding a shotgun.
"My mom and my stepdad, they just had them for the government checks," Misty said. "They just had them to torture."
And while her parents still live on the family farm, there’s been no accountability or remorse for the torture they inflicted on Misty and her sister, aunt, and grandma. The closest her mom came to acknowledging it was one line in a letter to Misty’s sister: I’m sorry for all the bad stuff that happened.
To Misty, it was almost worse than no acknowledgment at all.
"Police need to understand that while freedom of religion is important, people are also trapped inside religious freedom," she explained. "How many wars have been waged in the name of religion?"
From Tears of the Silenced to Sins of the Amish
Five years after self-publishing her story, Misty released her memoir, Tears of the Silenced: An Amish True Crime Memoir of Childhood Sexual Abuse, Brutal Betrayal, and Ultimate Survival, in 2019. She hit half a million copies sold before the documentary debuted in late-May.
At the time, Misty wholeheartedly believed that if the book could convince even just one person experiencing the same kind of abuse she went through to leave the community, it would be worth it. Now, years later, she wonders if anything has changed.
In the last few years, documentary series like Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath and Wild, Wild Country have uncovered the horrific abuse and exploitation not just experienced in cults but also in the church. The success of these programs gave Misty a new way to reach people where they’re at: she decided to make her own documentary. Credited as a consulting producer, Misty stars in Sins of the Amish, where she details the crimes Amish leaders get away with as “freedom of religion.”
The documentary represented a full-circle moment for Misty, who finally met the person she credited as the inspiration to tell her story: Mary Byler.
After being raped more than 100 times by her brothers, Mary got the courage to go to the police. That decision to take the power back into her own hands resulted in a high-profile trial that saw more than one hundred members of the Amish community show up to support her rapist. Not one person showed up for Mary. But she never faltered in her effort to seek justice. Ultimately, that justice was denied when her rapist was sentenced to one year of nights in a local jail and ten years of probation. Worst of all, he was free to be with his wife and children during the day despite being a convicted sex offender.
Misty heard of Mary’s story when she left the Amish in 2005 and made the difficult decision to return to the Amish in order to get her sister out.
But when Misty told her sister about what happened to Mary, her sister’s response was devastating.
“Yeah, we got two guys like that in our community,” she said, as if there was nothing abnormal about their behaviour.
For more than 15 years after Misty’s encounter with her sister, she wondered about what happened to Mary, until the documentary.
For Misty, it’s both uplifting and comforting to have the support of other survivors navigating their healing journey together. It wasn’t easy finding survivors of sexual abuse who were comfortable sharing their stories on-camera, but the group that ultimately made the two-part documentary exemplified what it means to bring about change.
Growing up, Misty’s parents often warned her of how dangerous the outside world was.
“They’re all going to hell and we’re the only ones going to have heaven,” she said, noting she was told the outside world is full of three things: rapists, murderers, and debt.
When Misty left the Amish, she was on the lookout for all of the evil she had been warned about. Instead, she found love.
“As soon as I left, I met nice people who genuinely were kind and caring and wanted to help me,” she said. “It was just so surprising because in [Amish] culture, I never had that. I was just always put down.”
Within two years of leaving the Amish, Misty got married. She also fulfilled her childhood dream of helping patients with HIV/AIDS access medical treatment by becoming a registered nurse. And in 2019, just as the documentary was being picked up by the network, she had a child of her own.
She also created a petition, calling on President Joe Biden and the U.S. Congress to enact legislation that would protect children who are abused in religious communities and institutions.
Her petition cites the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) passed by Congress in 1974. That legislation required certain professionals to report cases of suspected child abuse and neglect.
As of June 22, nearly 11,000 people have signed the petition, a number Misty hopes will grow as more people watch the documentary. The kind of legislation she is fighting for isn’t exclusive to religious institutions. It would also include mandatory reporting of abuse and neglect of children who are homeschooled, do not attend public daycare, or rarely receive modern medical care.
It would also include private schools as nearly four out of five are religious-based.
“Some churches, religions, [and] organizations do not believe in reporting child abuse or child sexual assault to the authorities, and so they don't. Some of these children literally have no safe person to tell,” the petition reads. “To outsiders, these children are mere extensions of their parents' religion or organization; they are faceless, have no identity, and they are invisible to the outside world.”
Misty wants the U.S. to pass laws that would require every teacher to take mandated training on reporting suspected cases of child abuse and neglect. She also wants to see a law that would require teachers to be of legal age, as the Amish can start teaching at 15 or 16. Additionally, she believes every school should teach age-appropriate techniques for children to recognize and report sexual abuse to a trusted adult—a program created by Erin Merryn known as Erin’s Law that is currently being lobbied in every state across the country.
“The above actions must be enacted on the federal level to create real change and protect children,” the petition continues. “This cannot be left up to individual states. It must be standardized. Every state, every school, no exceptions or loopholes.”
Her drive to make a change grew even stronger with the birth of her son. In the documentary, she explains that Amish children begin being beaten as early as three months old.
“As he got older, I was watching and I was realizing, ‘Wow. When my sister was that age, she was beaten half to death,’” she said. “How could you do that to this little tiny, laughing, bubbly human being? I remember when I was a kid, the pain was excruciating. I had to disassociate from my body to live with it. I would literally leave my body and come back.”
Misty’s story teaches us that the Amish have more in common with the rest of society than we think. Too often, it’s not the act of sexual abuse that is the sin. The sin is in the victim's suffering out loud.