Serious Inquiries Only SIO195: A Mormon #metoo Reckoning, with Colleen Dietz
This week my guest is Colleen Dietz, who is the host of the Mormon Happy Hour podcast. On her show, Colleen does a great job discussing important and sometimes heavy topics while still maintaining laughter and good spirits. She'll need that skill today because unfortunately we're here to discuss a traumatic assault that happened years ago when she was a new student at BYU, and the woefully inadequate response by the school and the church. We don't into too much gory detail, but if you want the full weight of her awful experience she has written more about it here. BYU's victim blaming response was in her opinion almost worse than the assault itself. It took her a long time to come to terms with what happened and why her Mormon faith was not just wrong but how their unhealthy and repressive relationship to sex actually made her more vulnerable to her attacker. However, she's in a much better place now, and she's doing amazing work trying to reform the church from without, and helping others reform it from within.