TANIA CULVER HUMPHREY has spent most of her life grappling with her father’s secrets.
In public, her father, Ellsworth Culver, cultivated a reputation as a globetrotting Christian do-gooder. He taught schoolchildren in Cuba, ran missionary programs in the Philippines, and, in the early 1980s, co-founded the humanitarian nonprofit Mercy Corps with friends from the international aid world. At Mercy Corps, including the nine years he spent as its president, he built programs across three continents, conducted informal diplomacy in conflict zones, and received a medal from North Korea for organizing food and medical aid.
In private, he was sexually abusing Humphrey, his youngest daughter—at times raping her, choking her, and taking explicit photos of her, according to a lawsuit she eventually filed. The abuse, she says, began as far back as she can remember and lasted through her late teens.
Her father would sometimes take her on business trips to developing countries, where his violence continued. He told her that if she reported him, she’d be hurting his humanitarian work and the people who relied on it, she remembers. “I was told as a kid that I was helping to save refugees,” Humphrey says. “Like, ‘Don’t I want to be a good girl? I’m part of the team.’”
Mercy Corps workers from the late 1980s and early ’90s remember her as a thin, sad young woman who often visited the company’s small Portland, Oregon, headquarters, then occupied by about 20 people. (Today, the organization has some 6,000 employees globally.) Her horrific ordeal first became known to other Mercy Corps leadership in 1992, when she sought comfort from members of her prayer group. Word made it back to a board member, who launched an internal investigation with two colleagues, including one of her father’s close friends. They appear to have swiftly accepted Culver’s claim that his daughter was experiencing a false memory. They confronted her in a hostile interview, and only after another employee learned of the allegations did they demote him to vice president, without reducing his pay. (They told Humphrey the title change was due to her father’s poor management.) Culver would remain a Mercy Corps executive until his death in 2005.
At the height of the MeToo movement, in 2018, Humphrey contacted a Mercy Corps “integrity hotline” set up to receive employee reports of misconduct. She asked that the organization review her case from a contemporary perspective. But a lawyer brushed her off, informing her that the 1990s probe had found “insufficient evidence.”
The response echoed her father’s message: Mercy Corps’ reputation was more important than the truth. She decided to go to the media, and in October 2019, the Oregonian published a bombshell investigation that uncovered multiple witnesses to her childhood abuse and revealed how Mercy Corps had buried her allegations.
Mercy Corps leaders resigned one after another. “We failed her with our response. We failed her with our tone,” the then-CEO told the Oregonian before stepping down. “We were too legalistic instead of engaging in good faith, and I fear through that we added to her suffering.” Employees chalked Humphrey’s name on the sidewalk outside headquarters. “We believe you,” they wrote. “We stand with you.” After decades living estranged from much of her family, suffering PTSD and panic attacks, she went to see the messages herself. “I had to touch it,” she says. “There were no slots in my brain, from my life experience, to know that that could be real.”
Mercy Corps’ actions in the wake of the Oregonian article suggested to Humphrey that the organization was finally ready to reckon with the past. So she wrote to the board of directors, making a new, disturbing allegation: There were more Mercy Corps–linked child abusers, and more victims. Other men working with her father had abused not only her, but other children in the United States and abroad—allegations that amount to sex trafficking.
Humphrey has since said in court documents that the perpetrators included former Mercy Corps leaders, powerful Christian affiliates,
