Members of the jury, before you examine a single piece of evidence in this trial, you are entitled to know one thing: Why does this case exist at all?
Why would a man voluntarily place the most painful chapters of his life on public record – naming names, citing dates, submitting wounds as exhibits – when silence would be so much easier?
The answer is not complicated. It is this:
Truth requires a witness. And I am the witness.
I did not choose the experiences that qualify me to stand here. I did not choose a father who expressed hatred through his fists. I did not choose a priest who used sacred trust as a hunting blind. I did not choose the succession of churches that took what I offered and returned betrayal. I did not choose any of it.
But I am choosing this.
I am choosing to speak because silence is not neutrality. Silence, when you know what I know, is permission. It is the same permission that allowed Father Camille Léger to abuse over 250 boys across two decades while an entire village looked the other way. It is the same permission that allowed the men who harmed me in church after church to move freely, their reputations intact, their victims scattered and quiet.
I will not be quiet.
This trial is not built for one kind of reader. It is built for all of them.
If you have never set foot in a church – or left one long ago – I am not asking you to adopt a position. I am asking you to serve as a juror: hear the evidence, weigh it honestly, and reach your own verdict. What happened to me did not occur in a vacuum. It occurred inside systems – systems of authority, deference, and silence – that exist far beyond religion. You will recognize them.
If you are a Christian – and particularly if the church has been a source of genuine good in your life – I ask something harder of you. I ask you to resist the reflex to protect the institution before you have heard the case. I had good moments in the church too. I served faithfully, led worship, gave years of my life, and experienced real community. I do not pretend otherwise.
But I also experienced this: when I needed the people who claimed to embody Christ's love to demonstrate something beyond ordinary human behaviour – something that would justify the extraordinary claims they made – they were not there. Not once. Not in any of the five churches this trial examines.
If the evidence of faith is its fruit, as Scripture itself declares, then the fruit of these institutions must be examined. I am not the prosecution. The evidence is.
If you are a survivor – of religious abuse, of childhood trauma, of institutions that promised safety and delivered harm – this trial was built with you in mind above all others. You already know what I know. What I hope to give you is the thing no one gave me for decades: a witness who refused to be silent, and a record that says plainly – what happened to you was wrong, it was not your fault, and it was not an accident.
This is not a vendetta. I do not profit from naming these people and these institutions. I gain nothing except the weight of having told the truth, which is lighter than the weight of having stayed silent.
This is not a blanket condemnation of every person who has ever held faith. There were individuals in my story who showed genuine kindness – and where that is true, I have said so. Integrity demands accounting for both sides of the ledger.
This is not an argument that God does not exist. That question is above my jurisdiction. What is within my jurisdiction is the institution that claims to represent him – and the documented, specific, named ways in which that institution has failed the people it promised to serve.
Christianity does not present itself modestly. It claims to be the way, the truth, and the life. It claims to be the channel of a love so extraordinary it surpasses human understanding. It claims that its people, filled with the Holy Spirit, should demonstrate power, mercy, and transformation that the world cannot replicate.
Those are the claims. This trial holds the institution to them.
If a witness takes the stand and claims to be the most reliable source of truth in the room, that witness must survive cross-examination. Christianity has enjoyed centuries of deference – protected by social pressure, political power, and the very human reluctance to question what comforts us.
That deference ends here.
The standard is simple: does the evidence support the claim? In case after case, exhibit after exhibit, the answer this trial will demonstrate is no.
I am sixty-four years old. I have spent more years inside Christian institutions than outside them. I have led worship, built ministries, served congregations, and given more than I can calculate in time, money, and trust.
I have also been sexually abused by a priest, publicly humiliated by pastors, falsely accused without recourse, discarded after years of faithful service, and left suicidal by the very communities that preached unconditional love.
I survived. Not because of the church. Often, in spite of it.
I am standing here now – not broken, not bitter, but precise – because precision is what truth requires. This is not a cry of pain dressed as an argument. This is an argument, supported by a life's worth of evidence, presented to you in the structure of a court because that is the only framework adequate to the weight of what I am submitting.
You are the jury. I am asking you to do what no one in Cap Pelé, no one at Wellspring, no one at Southridge, no one at Christ Community, and no one at Rice Road was willing to do:
Look at the evidence. All of it. Without flinching.
The court may now proceed.
– Joseph Donald Cormier