From a column about the sexual abuse trial of Pastor Mike Sperou.
Church loyalists and Steven J. Sherlag, Sperou’s attorney, argue that only memory has been corrupted here. Memory is “dynamic,” Sherlag claims, evolving or eroding each time a group of seven women compare notes on how often their pastor was drunk, drug-addled or making out with their mother.
But you only need to listen to Sperou’s defenders to realize how boundaries in this community were obliterated by the demand for subservience and the desire for acceptance, no matter how perverse.