Canada: congregation elder convicted of sexually assaulting a disabled member of his own congregation
Request a correction or replyRecord class
Core record
Evidence status
Convicted
Authority role
elder/bishop, Victoria First Ward congregation
Organization
Victoria First Ward congregation
Archive classification
This is the archive's application of its published inclusion test. The cited record appears below.
The victim's vulnerability was heightened by disability, and Nelson's access to her came through his standing as her congregation's leader — the role that put him in a position of unsupervised trust over her.
- Pastoral or clerical authority
Evidence structure
Proceedings
1989-05-27 · guilty plea and sentence
British Columbia Provincial Court, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Robert Kenneth Nelson, a congregation leader in Victoria's First Ward since being assigned to the role in 1979, pleaded guilty on 27 May 1989 to sexual assault of a member of his congregation described in press coverage as 'mentally handicapped.' He was sentenced to two years' probation, 150 hours of community service, and ordered to take a conducted tour of a local jail. He was subsequently removed from his congregational role over the offence.
Documented coercion mechanisms
- congregational leadership standing over a member with a mental disability, giving him access and unquestioned trust
Cited record
Sources
- case documentation database sentencing report aggregation FLOODLIT case file on Robert Kenneth Nelson, citing Times Colonist, 'Former Mormon bishop guilty of sexual assault' (27 May 1989) and 'Former bishop on probation for sex assault' (30 May 1989).
Case-documentation aggregator's summary with links to the original Times Colonist newspaper reports of the guilty plea and sentence.
Source provenance
Source access and integrity log
This log records source retrieval and file integrity. It does not mean that an automated process independently confirmed every statement in the source.
- Source and tier basis
- https://floodlit.org/a/a642/ Corpus classification: case-documentation-database; evidentiary role: sentencing-report-aggregation. SHA-256 7ca7216a1519979d318c438880a5f947e8f88f6f4c8c2db488d4f2c55ac9ae06
- Retrieval
- 2026-07-20 · Preserved
- Bound by Fear automated source-preservation ledger
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Related record
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