Longtime Mercy Corps CEO Neal Keny-Guyer resigned Thursday hours after outraged employees demanded a more forceful response to an Oregonian/OregonLive investigation that showed executives at the international relief agency twice dismissed sexual abuse allegations against one of its founders.

Keny-Guyer, 65, had led Portland-based Mercy Corps since 1994 and helped transform it into a preeminent humanitarian organization.

“The events of this past week have caused me to think deeply about a lot of things — especially about what is best for Mercy Corps, what promotes healing, and what is the right act of authentic leadership for me,” he wrote in his resignation letter.

“If I am going to morally own this — and I believe this in my soul — then I need to take the ultimate action,” he wrote.

Read the resignation letter and a statement from the Mercy Corps board

His abrupt departure is a stunning development for the $471-million-a-year charity and is the result of intense pressure from Mercy Corps workers furious over its handling in the early 1990s and again last year of credible allegations that co-founder Ellsworth Culver abused his daughter throughout her childhood.

The Oregonian/OregonLive reported this week that Culver raped and sodomized Tania Culver Humphrey starting in preschool and continuing to her high school years. Humphrey told three Mercy Corps leaders in 1992, but they determined her account and medical records weren’t enough to remove Culver. They kept him in a senior vice president’s role and allowed him to travel the world as the public face of Mercy Corps.

Then last year, Humphrey and her husband asked Mercy Corps to revisit her allegations and its original inquiry under the organization’s more recent ethics policies. Mercy Corps’ senior legal counsel, Barnes Ellis, said records no longer existed but told Humphrey that the men involved back then “believed they made every effort to look into and understand the facts. … Based on their review, they concluded that there was insufficient evidence to require any further action by Mercy Corps.”

Ellis also has resigned, Mercy Corps officials said.

Ellis apologized to Humphrey in his resignation letter. Ellis had been with Mercy Corps since 2010.

“No one was more shocked" by the findings “than I was,” he said. “And no one is feeling more humbled in light of what has unfolded.”

Keny-Guyer said he didn’t know of the allegations in the 1990s but did know about them last fall when Humphrey reached out to Mercy Corps.

“But if I had paid more attention, if I had focused more, if I were a fully attentive leader, the outcome could have been different,” he wrote. “This has caused great harm to the organization I love. Most importantly, this has exacerbated the pain of a survivor. For that, my soul will always be seared. I truly hope my decision helps promote healing in some way.”

Humphrey, now 48 and living in Portland, said she is glad Keny-Guyer is “taking personal responsibility.”

“It’s important because he is, was, the head of this institution,” she said. “He knew things that happened and he made choices that break my heart.”

She said she was touched and overwhelmed by the employees’ support and their push for change at the top.

“I have a lot of feelings, and words are hard to come by,” she said. “I am overcome with a lot of emotion. … It’s a place that has carried massive pain for me but it also felt like a part of my home.”

Humphrey’s allegations and how longtime Mercy Corps executives mishandled them rocked the humanitarian organization. Mercy Corps employs 5,500 people and oversees operations in more than 40 countries from disaster relief to food and safe drinking water programs.

Robert Newell, a Portland lawyer and one of the Mercy Corps board members involved in the initial sexual abuse inquiry, resigned earlier this week as The Oregonian/OregonLive prepared to publish its investigation. Mercy Corps took down photos of Culver from the walls of its headquarters in Portland and took down tributes to him on its website.

But that apparently wasn’t enough for many Mercy Corps workers who heard Thursday morning from Keny-Guyer and board member Gisel Kordestani in person at a meeting in Portland and worldwide via webcast.

Kordestani said the board “today heard global Mercy Corps employees’ demands for accountability and responsibility.”

People asked pointed questions, said Trevor Hunt, a Mercy Corps learning technology manager.

“There was just growing dissatisfaction with what was being said," Hunt said. "We wanted to know who knew what in 2018, and he (Keny-Guyer) was being very evasive.”

Hunt said employees want to “convey to Tania just how horrified we are by how she was treated” and described a lack of confidence in the Mercy Corps board.

"We don’t trust this elitist group that’s been orchestrating this disaster,” he said.

Staff members said they worry about whether Mercy Corps can survive the damage to its reputation and work around the world.

“People are angry and really heartbroken,” said Amy Ibold, Mercy Corps senior adviser for adolescent girls and youth.

Manasi Patwardhan, a senior program officer, said the decisions by “a select few” who responded to Humphrey last year do not represent Mercy Corps’ employees.

She said the organization’s work is rooted in helping people around the globe. “Our mission is about giving them a voice,” she said. “We are here to serve them and it breaks our heart that we failed to do that in our own community.”

Patwardhan and her colleagues “want accountability” for the people who didn’t help Humphrey, she said. That includes a reevaluation of the legacies of Newell and co-founder Dan O’Neill, she said.

“They failed a child who was abused,” she said.

As part of its 10-month investigation, The Oregonian/OregonLive reviewed Humphrey’s medical and mental health records from her teen years, as well as two child abuse reports to the state and hundreds of pages of her personal records, including journal entries, poems and drafts of letters. All of those documents are replete with references to Culver’s sexual abuse of his daughter.

The news organization also identified eight friends from Humphrey’s childhood and teen years who confirmed that Humphrey told them about the abuse at the time. Three said they saw Culver grope or molest her. One of her friends from St. Mary’s Academy in Portland came forward in the course of reporting this story with her own account of sexual abuse by Culver.

Humphrey was in her early 20s when she disclosed her abuse to a prayer group and it got back to Newell. In 1993, Newell, O’Neill and board chairman Raymond Vath arranged to interview Humphrey.

Humphrey said the men, all friends of her father, pressed her on details of the abuse. Humphrey said she told them that her father touched her inappropriately, masturbated on her and forced her to engage in oral sex.

But they ultimately concluded they had insufficient evidence to remove her father. He was reassigned but remained a globe-trotting emissary for Mercy Corps for another decade until his death in 2005.

Newell has declined to answer questions about his interactions with Humphrey but said in a written statement that the board took Humphrey’s allegations “very seriously when they were brought to our attention.” He said the inquiry was challenging and that it was unclear at the time why state child welfare authorities had not intervened. He said “no one should endure what she has described, especially not as a child at the hands of her father.”

O’Neill has declined to answer questions.

In a letter this week, Vath said he is now 88 and doesn’t remember some details of what happened in the 1990s. But he said he was contacted by Mercy Corps last year after Humphrey asked for a review of the original inquiry.

“I gave what memories I had of the series of events,” he wrote. At the time, he wrote, Mercy Corps “had to deal with the accusations by Mr. Culver’s daughter along with the near bankruptcy of Mercy Corps that Mr. Culver’s mismanagement of funds caused.”

Mercy Corps’ response to The Oregonian/OregonLive’s reporting has evolved since the relief agency was first contacted early last week. At first, Mercy Corps issued a three-paragraph statement, saying Humphrey’s allegations “could not be substantiated” in the 1990s.

Then after the news organization sent detailed questions to Keny-Guyer and others involved in the matter, Keny-Guyer issued a more detailed statement saying board members in the 1990s “took the allegations seriously and thoroughly investigated them.” He commended Humphrey for speaking out about her experience and apologized “for any pain Ms. Humphrey has endured.”

It was not until this week, after an Oregonian/OregonLive reporter presented detailed findings of its investigation, that Keny-Guyer agreed to sit down for an interview.

He said he would ask for an outside review of Mercy Corps’ response last year “and to look back if there’s anything we can learn from those earlier days.”

He said then: “I have spent so much of my life traveling into war zones and conflict zones and trying to do work on behalf of vulnerable, marginalized people and to miss this right under your nose in your own backyard -- it feels particularly painful.”

Mercy Corps touts $4 billion in assistance to more than 220 million people in the last 40 years, making it a heavyweight in the world of humanitarian relief. According to its latest financial statements, the organization received $174 million in U.S. government grants and the rest from grants, contributions and other sources.

Keny-Guyer was paid an annual salary of $470,000, records show.

He began his career working with at-risk youths in Washington, D.C., and Atlanta and in 1980 worked with CARE and UNICEF along the Thai-Cambodia border in response to Cambodia’s Killing Fields, according to his biography on the organization’s website.

He started with Save the Children in 1981, living in Somalia and Lebanon before becoming director of Middle East, North Africa and Europe. He holds a number of prominent appointments, including serving on the Yale President’s Council on International Affairs and the Council on Foreign Relations. He is married to Democratic state Rep. Alissa Keny-Guyer of Portland.

The Mercy Corps board said Keny-Guyer had immediately relinquished his responsibilities. It is launching a search for a replacement and plans to announce interim leadership soon.

The board also has initiated an external review to examine how Mercy Corps handled Humphrey’s request last year to review the original inquiry.

Oregonian staffers Elliot Njus and Beth Nakamura contributed to this report.

-- Noelle Crombie

503-276-7184

@noellecrombie

ncrombie@oregonian.com

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