Back at the compound, Kim became increasingly withdrawn and isolated. “I wasn’t allowed to talk about it,” she says. “We were told it was over and done with: Move on.” The other missionaries blamed Kim and her family for driving away the compound’s most revered leader. “Donn is needed here,” a few told Kim to her face. “You aren’t.”

Worst of all, Kim felt betrayed by her own parents. “It almost killed me to see my mom and dad hug Donn and Kit, like nothing had ever happened,” she recalls. She tried telling herself they were just being dutiful Baptists, “doing what they thought God would do: God wouldn’t slap the crap out of him. God would turn the other cheek.” But deep down, it was hard not to wish they had come to her defense. She stopped talking to them. She stopped eating. In 1991, two years after she told her pastor about Ketcham, she attempted suicide, taking an overdose of the Paxil she’d been prescribed. “I just felt alone,” she says. “I told God if I could talk to him, I’d rather be there with him than down here not able to talk.”

The family returned to Indiana, but Kim’s downward slide continued. She repeatedly cut herself, requiring emergency runs to the hospital. She developed multiple eating disorders, at one point shrinking to 96 pounds. She tried repeatedly to kill herself. She enrolled in community college, but couldn’t keep up. She couldn’t hold a job. She couldn’t make a life.

Sexual abuse often derails the lives of its victims in painful and lasting ways. But when the abuse happens in a church setting, there’s an additional burden—a kind of spiritual abuse, the sense that religious leaders have betrayed the power bestowed on them by God. “It really rattles people at their core in terms of faith,” says Diane Langberg, a psychologist and seminary professor who serves on the board of GRACE. “People walk away thinking that God is a perp or complicit.”

Ketcham, now 86, is facing a life sentence for molesting a six-year-old patient. Ken Kolker/WOOD TV

That’s precisely how it felt to Kim. “God,” she prayed, “you’re a sick God to allow this to happen.” But she was losing more than her faith; she was losing her entire world, the close-knit missionary community that had served as her extended family. ABWE was her whole life—the only one she had ever known. So when the organization finally reached out and offered to help her, Kim jumped at the chance.

In the summer of 2002, unbeknownst to the Jameses, a group of Bangladesh MKs gathered for a reunion in Pennsylvania. Nine of them asked to meet with Michael Loftis, ABWE’s then-president, to discuss Donn Ketcham. The meeting lasted for three hours, until 1:30 in the morning. Seven of the women told nearly identical stories of how Ketcham had molested them as children, often under the same guise that he used with Kim: breast and pelvic exams, sometimes conducted with their mothers sitting unaware in the room. One former MK recalled going on a trip with Ketcham and blacking out, leading her to wonder whether she had been drugged and molested. ABWE officials, the women told Loftis, had “always protected Uncle Donn”—and poor Kim James had been blamed for her own abuse.

Loftis seemed shocked. He promised to launch an investigation and pay for any treatment the MKs needed. But the investigation went nowhere, and ABWE still neglected to report Ketcham to the authorities. Loftis did take action on one front, though: He called Kim and invited her to come to ABWE headquarters in Pennsylvania for free medical assistance and counseling. Kim, who was unemployed and living with her boyfriend at the time, had heard of a program for eating disorders that she wanted to try. What did she have to lose?

In a bizarre reprise of the events 13 years earlier, Kim’s parents had no idea what was happening. One Sunday morning in July, Sue got a call from their pastor. “Kim’s in Harrisburg,” he told her. “Russ Ebersole wants to call you.” Later that day, when the family reached Ebersole and Russell Lloyd in Pennsylvania, the two Russes told them that Kim was once again with them. And she had something to say. Then Kim’s voice came on the line. “I got saved!” she told her parents.

When the abuse happens in a church setting, there’s a kind of spiritual abuse, the sense that religious leaders have betrayed the power bestowed on them by God.

ABWE, they feared, had taken over Kim’s life again. The Russes told the family to meet them a few days later at the airport; they were flying to Indiana with Kim to go to her boyfriend’s apartment when he wasn’t home and clean out her possessions. When they showed up, Ken and Sue thought their daughter looked dazed, out of it. They couldn’t understand why she was being rushed out of her apartment, but the Russes were adamant. “Kim,” her father told her, “you don’t have to go. I’ll tell them you’re not going.” But Kim said she wanted to.

This was the start of what the family refers to as the “Bermuda Triangle years.” For nearly two years, ABWE blocked almost all contact with Kim. When she arrived in Harrisburg, Kim says, officials took away her cell phone, telling her not to contact her family so she could focus on getting well. When her parents tried to check on her, she was only allowed to speak to them with the church’s staff or lawyers monitoring the call. They begged her to come home, but the ABWE handlers would cut in, telling them not to interfere with Kim’s “recovery.” Then the calls stopped.

Kim remembers little about the next 22 months. She was bounced between Pennsylvania and North Carolina, where she lived at one point with Lloyd and his family. Ken and Sue James received occasional letters, which didn’t sound like they were written by Kim. Then the letters stopped, too. Ken tried to track her down in North Carolina, to no avail. Finally, in a panic, he called ABWE and threatened to “get in the pulpit of every church in the country and say what’s going on” unless he heard from Kim immediately.

That week, Kim called. She was in a homeless shelter in Asheville, North Carolina. Her sister Diana was living about 70 minutes away in South Carolina, and a shelter worker drove Kim to her house. She was disheveled and confused. She didn’t want to talk about what had happened—partly out of embarrassment, Diana suspected. The next day, Kim called her old boyfriend back in Indiana, who bought her a plane ticket home.

Over the next five years, Kim continued to struggle. She still cut herself, still had eating problems. Whatever had happened to her during her time with ABWE, it hadn’t helped. She had not been saved.

Then, one day in 2010, Kim got a call from a former MK named Susannah Beals Baker. The gathering at the reunion eight years earlier hadn’t forced ABWE to reform itself—but it had gotten former MKs talking about Donn Ketcham and remembering things that they thought were similar to what happened to Kim. Talking to Baker, Kim knew for the first time in her life that she hadn’t been the only one. It gave her an unfamiliar burst of empowerment.

At the urging of a new counselor, Kim demanded that ABWE hand over all the documents it had on her case. Not surprisingly, officials resisted at first. But Kim told them that her counselor needed to have her history to help her. “If you want to talk to my lawyer,” she added, “feel free.” That did the trick. ABWE didn’t send all the documents, but they did include portions of Lloyd’s diary, a copy of Kim’s “confession,” and the correspondence that allowed Ketcham to reestablish himself in the United States. ABWE, for all its efforts to bury Ketcham’s crimes, was finally losing control of the story.

In 2011, Kim helped Baker launch a blog, Bangladesh MKs Speak. They began publishing testimonies of those who had suffered sexual abuse at the hands of Ketcham—and, most explosively, the ABWE documents Kim had obtained. Within the first week, the blog attracted some 1,600 comments, including stricken responses from ABWE parents and former MKs, and a horrified testimony from Ketcham’s pastor in Michigan, who said ABWE had grossly misled him about why Ketcham had left the mission.

The blog sparked new allegations of abuse. One day, as it was preparing to launch, Diana called an old missionary friend to talk about how best to be supportive of her sister’s project. As they chatted about Ketcham, Diana recalled the time she’d stayed at Uncle Donn’s house while her parents were away. She was in bed, fading in and out of consciousness. Ketcham, leaning over her, told her she had typhoid fever. The rest was a blur.

Like many evangelical victims, Kim James, now 42, felt abused not only by her rapist, but by her church. Her name is now on federal legislation to require overseas organizations to report abuse. Photograph by Morgan Rachel Levy

Her friend was stunned. “The same thing happened to me,” she said. Left with the Ketchams, the friend had also been diagnosed with “typhoid.” She woke up foggy-headed and troubled by strange dreams, with symptoms of a urinary tract infection. Soon thereafter, she began to experience insomnia, depression, and severe anxiety—symptoms of PTSD that would last into early adulthood.

ABWE officials were undone by the public revelations on the blog. They posted their own “confession,” acknowledging that “a precious 14-year-old should never have been asked to sign a confession,” and asking—nine times—that the MKs “please, please forgive us.” They held a bizarre “sackcloth and ash” ceremony, captured on video, in which Loftis, the ABWE president, prostrated himself before a representative MK and cut his hair and clothes as he confessed the church’s failure to protect children from Ketcham. (The MK to whom he confessed later called the episode a “freak show,” and said she just sat there “frozen in shock and horror, disbelief.”) More important, ABWE finally reported Ketcham to the Michigan Medical Licensing Board. Twenty-three years after he’d admitted to child sex abuse, Ketcham, who was still practicing medicine in his early eighties, forfeited his license.

But ABWE wasn’t done with the coverup. To placate the Jameses and the MKs, the group hired GRACE to dig up the whole story. Then, when GRACE was only two weeks away from publishing its report, ABWE abruptly fired the group. The MKs and their families were livid. ABWE announced it had hired a private investigative firm, Professional Investigators International, to replace GRACE. But PII, the MKs quickly discovered, had been founded by a Mormon couple who also ran an image-consulting business. The former missionaries were convinced that this “investigation” would amount to nothing more than a whitewash. Kim and Diana declined to be interviewed.

Last spring, however, PII published 280 pages of findings, drawn from 204 interviews. Even for the MKs, the report was a bombshell. Donn Ketcham, the firm found, had been molesting girls and women at the Bangladesh mission as far back as the 1960s. Investigators identified at least 23 missionaries who had been molested or raped, 18 of them children. “Donn Ketcham engaged in a wide range of sexual misconduct,” PII determined, including “sexual harassment, consensual extramarital affairs with adult women, sexual abuse of minors and adults under the guise of medical care, rape, and statutory rape.”

In exhaustive detail, the investigators confirmed both Kim’s story of abuse— finding she had “a minimum of 10 to 15 sexual encounters” with Ketcham—as well as her subsequent mistreatment by ABWE, which “treated the victim as if she were complicit.” Other former missionaries told stories that were sickeningly similar to Kim’s. Several said that Ketcham had started giving them breast and pelvic exams when they were as young as three. In 1969, an eight-year-old girl had come down with a bad case of shingles—rare among children—after seeing Ketcham and possibly having sexual contact. In 1970, one victim said Ketcham raped her during a physical. In 1975, an MK ran away to another family’s home rather than go to her physical with Ketcham. And over the years, several former MKs had said they’d received injections from Ketcham and blacked out during exams; medical staff at the mission’s hospital had speculated that Ketcham might have administered ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, and molested the girls. The hospital eventually stopped using ketamine, in fact, because multiple women had reported that after surgical procedures, they “dreamed” they had been raped.

The mission’s leader, undone by the blog’s revelations of abuse, held a bizarre “sack- cloth and ash” ritual to beg forgiveness.

The investigators were unsparing in their description of Ketcham, a “confessed pedophile” who expertly practiced “manipulation, deceit, and sociopathic behaviors.” But they came down hardest on ABWE, which gave Ketcham “preferential treatment,” blamed his victims, and failed to dismiss him from the mission field years sooner. By 1974, they found, ABWE officials had more than enough evidence to warrant Ketcham’s removal, “which would have preempted his access to many of his victims.” While other missionaries were banished for minor infractions—one man for being “cocky,” a woman for showing a “lack of essential reserve” in dealing with Bengali men—Ketcham went unpunished. Instead, ABWE kept missionaries silent about his abuses by requiring an “unquestioning compliance with authority”—an approach that drew on the “prevailing attitude toward authority in evangelical circles.” To cover up the scandal, the group had burned files related to Ketcham, and redacted huge portions of the documents it did turn over. ABWE administrators had even proposed creating a “Dark Information Book” to hide similar scandals. As a result, PII concluded, “children were ‘sacrificed’ so that the ministry would not be ‘discredited.’ ”

ABWE officials who dealt with Ketcham, including Loftis and Russ Ebersole, refused to comment for this story (Russ Lloyd could not be reached for comment). The group’s current president, Al Cockrell, responded to questions by issuing a statement. He suggested that PII’s report may include unspecified “misinterpretations or errors,” but acknowledged that it contains “absolute facts” showing that “past ABWE leadership failed to act with integrity and accountability in our handling of abuse perpetrated by Don Ketcham,” and “utterly failed in our response to his victims.”

The report was undoubtedly incomplete; the number of Ketcham’s victims had almost certainly been higher, and investigators made no attempt to interview the Bengali “nationals” who were his main patients at the hospital. But for the MKs and their families, it was enough. “I was frankly shocked that ABWE actually released the report,” says Diana. “It was accurate for the most part, as far as how the mission covered it up, how they treated our family.”

For the Jameses, the report underscored just how much they’d been kept in the dark for decades. They never saw Kim’s “confession” until it was posted on the blog, and didn’t know that Ketcham had raped her until they read her account of what happened. “We saw it when everybody else did,” Diana says. “It was absolutely, completely devastating.” But after the initial shock, Diana started asking Kim questions about what Ketcham had done to her. It was the first time the two sisters had discussed it in detail. “She started answering and we just cried,” Diana recalls. “She thought our parents knew.”

Now Sue and Ken finally understood why their daughter had struggled so much. “Kim thought we were choosing God’s work and the mission over her,” she says. ABWE had lied to them. If only they’d known, perhaps Kim could have moved on. “The knowledge of that would have changed the last 22 years,” Diana says. “It would have changed her life if my parents had been told the truth.”

The explosive findings about Donn Ketcham’s serial abuse, and ABWE’s role in covering it up, did not make big headlines. Such stories rarely do. It’s another product of the sprawling, disparate world of Christian fundamentalism: Even the ugliest story about a relatively obscure Baptist denomination isn’t going to get Catholic scandal–level attention. But the report that finally emerged, almost three decades after Kim James was raped in Bangladesh, added to the growing evidence of a widespread crisis of sexual abuse in conservative Protestantism.

Kim’s name is now on legislation that would close the legal loophole that helped Ketcham evade punishment. The Kimberly Doe Act, drafted by GRACE founder Boz Tchividjian and conservative activist Michael Reagan, would hold U.S. citizens overseas to the same requirement to report suspected child sexual abuse that applies stateside. (If such a law had existed in 1989, ABWE officials, doctors, nurses, and parents would have been obligated to report what happened to Kim.) The bill would also hold organizations like ABWE responsible if they don’t train their employees to report sexual abuse.

While officials covered up his crimes to protect the church, Ketcham had molested or raped at least 18 girls at the mission.

“Someone asked me: Are you more mad at ABWE or Donn?” says Sue James. “Donn Ketcham, yes, we’re very angry at him. But in some ways it’s a different anger at ABWE. All these kids would have been safe if they’d taken the guy off the field when these things first happened. Think how many MKs would have not been hurt.” (Ketcham, who refused to cooperate with PII’s investigation, did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this story.)

Even if Kim’s law passes, it won’t enable her or other MKs to hold Ketcham accountable for his crimes in Bangladesh. But the accounts from the blog and the PII report may yet result in the doctor receiving a measure of justice. Last August, Ketcham was charged with abusing a six-year-old patient in Michigan while conducting a medical exam. The alleged abuse, which took place in 1999, came to light after the patient’s mother happened on the blog and read Kim’s documents. In February, Ketcham was ordered to stand trial in Michigan District Court. At 86, he faces a life sentence for first-degree sexual assault—half a century after he started abusing women and girls in Bangladesh. Twenty-eight years after he raped Kim. Eighteen years after he allegedly molested a six-year-old.

Within that timeline is a world of blame—and warning. Sexual abuse among the nation’s thousands of evangelical denominations may never come into focus the way it has in the Catholic Church. But more and more cases will inevitably come to light—revelation by revelation, report by report, headline after headline—even as conservative churches cling to their happy-family images, no matter who gets hurt. Boz Tchividjian, the founder of GRACE, says his fellow Protestants should reject the impulse to view the scandal the way many Catholics did for years: as a matter of a few bad apples being belatedly punished. “Protestants are going to have to accept the fact that we have many more similarities than differences with our Catholic brothers and sisters when it comes to how we have failed to protect and serve God’s children,” he says.

Kim, who’s now 42, still can’t bring herself to read the PII report. Her parents can only manage to digest small portions at a time. But the family can talk now. “My daughter and I are mending for the first time, because the truth came out,” says Sue. Kim still struggles. This past summer, she cut deep gashes in her legs. She doesn’t have full-time work, but she helps her boyfriend with his car-detailing business and volunteers in the doctor’s office where her mother works—a small way, she says, of finding her way back to the medical field that she loved as a child.

Not long ago, Kim’s sister Diana was back in Indiana to attend a wedding. She and her two daughters, ages twelve and 14, took Kim out to eat. Staring at her two young nieces, she was suddenly struck by a thought: Do you realize this girl here is the age you were when Donn started molesting you? And the girl next to you is 14—the age you were when you brought it to light?

The moment had the impact of a revelation. “I looked at the twelve-year-old and I was like: I was that young? It just hit me.” It really hadn’t been her fault. “I never saw that before, I never did. It’s a shame it took me this long.”