DALLAS (TX)
DMagazine [Dallas, TX]
March 14, 2025
By Claire Collins
Many of the most prominent families in Dallas send their children to Kanakuk, even as hundreds of cases of sexual abuse have come to light. One woman is on a mission to seek justice—for those families and for survivors all across the country.
Tucked between the low hills of the Missouri countryside, the maximum-security Jefferson City Correctional Center spans a massive parcel of pastoral land that seemed too pleasant to house nearly 2,000 violent criminals. Maybe it was the time we were there, late afternoon on a cloudless day in April, but it didn’t look like a terrible place to be detained.
We’d had a bit of difficulty finding it. While prison addresses are public information, this one is slightly off the beaten path. We were tired after having spent the previous 48 hours pounding the halls of the Missouri State Capitol, and driving a rental car seemingly designed for Keebler elves added to our navigational challenges. After lots of twists and reroutes, Elizabeth Carlock Phillips and I had arrived.
Elizabeth looked entirely too chic for a prison parking lot. Wearing a blue blazer that matched the azure sky, she had long, black hair that moved like she was a stand-in for a Pantene commercial. She seemed taller than she actually is, and that had nothing to do with her shoes. She moved with a confidence that most women in their 30s haven’t yet mastered.
As she emerged from our little car, she clutched a framed picture of her baby brother, Trey, that she’d brought with her from Dallas. His tousled light brown hair framed the youthful face of a twentysomething who looked ready for a bright future. His face stood in stark contrast to Elizabeth’s, steady and fixed and familiar with grief.
“I’ve had the address memorized for years—8200 No More Victims Road—but I’ve never come,” Elizabeth said. “Other victims’ families ask me all the time if I have. We’ll take a picture so they can see it, too.”
We hadn’t been out of the car for more than two minutes when a prison guard came power walking toward us, telling us we couldn’t be there. We didn’t stay to talk. We climbed back into our teeny-tiny car and zoomed off. Apparently it is frowned upon to take pictures in front of a prison, even on such a pretty day.
For almost a century, Kanakuk has been the Kamp of choice for the evangelical elite of Dallas. Generations of families have loaded their young Kampers onto a bus in a NorthPark parking lot early on a summer morning for the six-hour ride to Branson, Missouri. (At Kanakuk, a K oftentimes shows up where you’d expect to find a C; I’ll dispense with this convention moving forward.) Founded in 1926 by a Dallasite named C.L. Ford, Kanakuk was originally called Kugaho Kamp. Since then, ownership has changed hands only three times. The last two sets of owners, who are related, also have Dallas and Texas ties, making this Missouri camp very much a Texas satellite.
The second owner, Bill Lantz, was a renowned high school track coach in Tulsa and former Kanakuk director who wanted to continue the Christian sports camp ethos. Under his direction, the “I’m Third” credo was introduced to campers. “I’m Third” is a construct for leading a virtuous life: put God first, others second, and yourself third. It had been established as a core tenet of camp life when, in 1955, Kanakuk was purchased by a couple, Spike and Darnell White, beginning a dynasty of ownership that proved to be transformational for the small summer camp focused on athletic competition and character development. Spike had been a camp counselor at Kanakuk in its early days, when it was still called Kugaho Kamp. When he and Darnell bought it, they opened a sister camp, Kanakomo, bringing summer fun and faith to girls. Kanakomo was eventually phased out, and today all five of Kanakuk’s overnight campuses are co-ed, but girls are still referred to as Komos and boys as Kuks.
In 1976, Spike and Darnell’s son Joe, an SMU graduate, and Joe’s second wife, Debbie-Jo, bought the camp. Under Joe and Debbie-Jo’s leadership, Kanakuk grew into the behemoth it is today, a multipronged evangelical empire with international reach and missions such as Kanakuk Haiti, a joint effort between Kanakuk and Cross International (another of Joe White’s affiliated organizations) to bring food and Jesus to the children of Haiti.
In 2015, Kanakuk was recognized as a church by the IRS, freeing it from having to make certain financial disclosures. However, as stated in its 2023 Form 990 filing, Kanakuk chooses to release some information to foster transparency around its business dealings. It reports serving more than 20,000 campers each summer and generating annual revenues of nearly $35 million domestically. With all the usual trappings of a camp—a blob, water sports, rustic cabins, campfire traditions—Kanakuk looks like a perfect summer retreat for those who can afford $3,241 for a two-week session (or $5,929 for a month). Many alumni say Kanakuk was one of the most positive, formative parts of their youth. But for others—perhaps thousands of former campers—it brought unimaginable suffering.
Elizabeth introduced me to Selby Perkins, now 30 years old and working as a therapist in the Atlanta area. She was the model camper at Kanakuk. One of her parents had attended, and Perkins and her sisters were thrilled to follow in their footsteps. She went to camp from 2003 to 2014.
“I didn’t have a ton of friends at home,” Perkins says. “At camp, we were told our very best friends were our camp friends, that they were the only real ones. That made sense to me, since I had a hard time at home.” Perkins says the rhetoric about camp friendships made her fearful of the outside world and created an atmosphere in which campers believed everyone and every place outside of Kanakuk was worldly and lacking righteousness. “Basically, you needed to go home and save people, but otherwise you want to be removed from the outside world. Everywhere outside of camp is the mission field,” Perkins says. “Camp was very ritualized, very hierarchical. You were taught to never question leadership. They were infallible. If camp is where Jesus is, then basically the leadership is representing God.”
Also, camp director Joe White got crucified at each session of camp. At Kanakuk, the various campuses serve different age groups. White was crucified for 13- to 18-year-old campers. For the other camps, college-age men assumed the role of Christ and Roman guards to reenact the crucifixion of Jesus Christ for children as young as 6.
“It’s Joe White in a loin cloth, walking through the dead of night, followed by fake Roman guards, with every camper following, till you get to a cross Joe has built,” Perkins says.
White would sometimes build the cross while proselytizing to the awestruck campers. Other times, he’d climb up on a preassembled cross. Perkins describes the ceremony as intense. (By 2021, White’s legs were amputated due to severe nerve pain. He no longer represents Christ in these reenactments. College kids do it at each campus.)
“Then, after a sermon and final death of Jesus, they give you popsicles and send you back to your cabin for bedtime,” Perkins says.
On non-crucifixion evenings, kids hear talks about creationism, with a debunking of evolution and an explanation that the world is only a few thousand years old. There’s Purity Night, at which children are given shiny pennies and encouraged to keep their bodies in a similar state (i.e., pure). They’re told to save those pennies and give them to their future spouses on their wedding nights. And there is Goals Night, at which young children are instructed to set goals for holiness for when they leave camp.
Perkins loved camp. Her greatest desire was to be voted as her tribe’s princess and then become a camp counselor one day. There are two tribes for girls and boys at each age-level camp: Kiowas and Kickapoos for girls and Cherokee and Choctaw for boys. The highest camp honor is to be elected princess or chief of your tribe after a session-long campaign, with the winner assuming the role at the following year’s camp.
“I was princess twice,” Perkins says. “Every day it’s like you are auditioning to be hired as a counselor.”
As part of her campaign for camp success, she worked during the school year to raise $20,000, some of it to accompany Joe White to Kanakuk Haiti. She hosted a talent show and bake sales, and she sold t-shirts to earn a spot on one of these coveted mission trips. While in Haiti, Perkins had the opportunity to help shoot a music video featuring Christian rapper Nasa Sete, who milled about with schoolchildren while Kanakuk volunteers gave out high-fives and Christmas gifts.
Despite her dedication and election as a princess, Perkins was not viewed as counselor material. Away from camp, when she was younger, Perkins had been abused by someone she knew. The summer she was 17, she was still receiving letters at camp from her abuser, and the trauma overwhelmed her. She disclosed the abuse to camp leadership, and they notified her parents, as well as the Childrenʼs Division of the Missouri Department of Social Services, as required by the applicable law for mandated reporters, which includes camp counselors.
But then Kanakuk went a step further.
“They made me give my testimony in front of the whole camp on Cross Talk Night,” she says. “I had a panic attack.”
Perkins had to stand on a small stage that had a door frame constructed on it and share her abuse story with about 600 campers. After giving her testimony, she was instructed to use red paint, symbolizing blood, to paint the door frame in a Passover-style display. Campers were then ushered to another stage to hear another talk of “fall and redemption.” Perkins collapsed, retraumatized at having to disclose her abuse. Her two younger sisters, also campers and present at Cross Talk that night, heard about her abuse as she announced it from the stage.
The word “cult” is overused. But Kanakuk exhibits the telltale signs. It instills groupthink and blind adherence to leadership. It isolates its followers with an us-versus-them mindset. It eliminates sense of self in its adherents by telling them they are third, robbing them of agency. This is an ideal environment for abuse to occur.
Since the White family has owned Kanakuk—from Spike and Darnell’s purchase in 1955, through the sale to Joe and Debbie-Jo in 1976, up until current day—more than 200 reports of sexual abuse by 65 alleged perpetrators have been made. These allegations have been made public largely because of the work of one Dallas woman.
Elizabeth grew up in Highland Park, on Lakeside Drive. Her earliest days were spent at an exclusive private school, Providence Christian School, and she went on to graduate from Highland Park High School in 2006, serving as senior class president for such notables as Dodgers pitcher Clayton Kershaw and Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford.
She enrolled at SMU, pledged Kappa Kappa Gamma, served as the sorority’s philanthropy chair, and met her future husband, Kevin. After graduating early in 2009, she spent much of what would have been her senior year in Uganda. There, she was the founding designer of the Akola Project, a global company whose goal is to bring employment and financial freedom to some of the most under-resourced women in the world.
Her now husband, Kevin, graduated from SMU in 2010 and proposed that summer. Today, the couple has three children and runs the Phillips Foundation, a private family enterprise founded in 2002 by her late father-in-law, the North Carolina developer Kermit Phillips II.
Still an active SMU alumni, Elizabeth co-chaired Kappa Tablescapes last year, one of Dallas’ biggest annual “ladies who lunch” events. She also serves on the board of the Maguire Center for Ethics and Public Responsibility at SMU and was recently tapped as vice chair of the Dallas Foundation board.
She is the only sister to younger brothers Trey and Barker. All three Carlock siblings attended Kanakuk.
“It was the youth pastor at Preston Road Church of Christ, who was the dad of my best childhood friend, that told my family about Kanakuk,” Elizabeth says. “I started going when I was 7.”
Brother Trey followed as soon as he was old enough, in 1998. Though he was a first-year camper that summer, Trey was already well known by a rising star among Kanakuk leadership. A young counselor named Pete Newman began a relationship with Trey when his older sister was picked up from camp in years prior.
“Pete would find my brother and pull him aside, ask him to eat alone with him,” Elizabeth says. “We know now that was the start of the grooming process for our whole family.”
From 1997 to 2007, Newman ingratiated himself with the Carlock family, becoming so close that he slept in their home on numerous trips to Dallas. “Pete loved a house with a hot tub and a convertible. We had both,” Elizabeth says. “He’d come to Dallas and stay with us and drive my dad’s car all over. He was like a family member.”
It is standard practice for Kanakuk staff to travel during the year to visit “Kamp families” across the country. Dallas was and is a major focus of visits for camp, as staff were dispatched to further their ties with the prominent families they cater to.
“It was really a symbiotic relationship Joe White and Pete Newman had,” Elizabeth says. “Pete would come to Dallas to see the kids and do what he wanted, and Joe would count on great fundraising success as a result.” Fundraising is a major part of Kanakuk’s model. This is how Kanakuk supports its more than 40 affiliated nonprofits and organizations under its umbrella. All fundraising dollars are purportedly funneled to these initiatives and their training organization for young adults, the Kanakuk Institute.
Families like the Carlocks were given special treatment at camp. Their children received accolades—Elizabeth was awarded the coveted Kickapoo Princess title one summer—and Trey was favored by Newman, the most popular staffer at Kanakuk and heir apparent to Joe White’s throne. In fact, Newman had a house on Kanakuk property. The Carlocks were thrilled that Trey was being mentored by him. Trey was an usher at Newman’s wedding. The family hosted a baby shower for Newman and his wife in their Dallas home. Their youngest son, Barker, was baptized by Newman at camp.
All the while, under their roof, at camp, on Kanakuk-sanctioned trips both domestic and abroad, Newman was raping and abusing their son Trey from the age of 10 to 17. When Newman wasn’t with Trey, he could call him. On his cell. On the house line. He could email him. He had unfettered access to a young man who had been taught that he was third, that his only true friends were at Kanakuk, that people who worked there were almost divine. Trey never disclosed the abuse to his family or closest friends. He suffered silently for years while living in an environment saturated with love for Kanakuk.
It is worth noting how enmeshed Kanakuk is within the Park Cities at large. People like the Carlocks are recruited as camp families because of their prominence, but Kanakuk casts a wide net. In 1991, a young pastor named Todd Wagner brought KLIFE, a Kanakuk offshoot that operates local high school-centered ministry groups, to the Park Cities. Wagner has a long history with Kanakuk, serving on the teaching faculty at the Kanakuk Institute and as a Kanakuk counselor and director. Wagner is also the co-founder and former senior elder at Watermark Community Church. In 2021, he was asked to leave by the Watermark leadership team. He cited a “sin of pride” as the reason for his departure.
Since arriving in Highland Park, KLIFE has been housed in a private residence there. From its website: “One of the things that has always been unique to KLIFE is our house. That’s because our house sits directly across the street from the front door of the Highland Park High School. This proximity has made a huge difference in providing the contact, services, and relationships for students. We’re able to have small groups before and after school, with no inconvenience for the student.”
Elizabeth and her brothers all participated in Highland Park KLIFE, and her parents were dedicated donors.
Pete Newman, who now lives at the Jefferson City Correctional Center, on No More Victims Road, has been described as charismatic. Today, the only images you’ll find of him online are mug shots, but in the early aughts, he was the poster boy for Kanakuk, featured in camp brochures. Newman was a member of the Phi Gamma Delta (Fiji) fraternity at Auburn and was active in youth ministry on campus. He was hired for the 1995 session at Kanakuk with an incomplete application, no recommendations, and no background check, three years before Trey arrived. Almost immediately, his interactions with campers raised eyebrows. As early as 1999, parents were mailing and calling Joe White about “weird” behavior that their children described.
A performance plan was put in place for Newman in 2003 and documented in his personnel file. It shows camp leadership, including Joe White, was aware of Newman’s “indiscretions” with children, which included playing naked basketball, naked four-wheeling, streaking through camp, and “hot tub Bible studies,” all with campers. In his performance plan, the following bullet-pointed guidelines were listed:
“Never spend the night alone with a child. Never be involved in sexual humor. Never suggest or be involved with any sexual or nude behavior.”
Under the heading “summertime boundaries,” it stated: “No further visits from out-of-state kids. No ‘sleepovers’ (i.e. events that require Pete to spend the night alone with one or more kids. Period.) A noticeable change in the way Pete budgets his time (i.e. regular time with Katie (his wife), regular time with peers … as opposed to a lopsided, inordinate amount of time spent with kids).”
Newman signed the document on October 22, 2003, six years before he would be held accountable for any violations of these rules. In that time, he would continue to violate Trey and dozens of other boys, many of whom we will never know about because Kanakuk has systematically silenced victims by coercing them into nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) when formal charges were threatened.
The bottom line: Joe White and leadership at Kanakuk knew as early as 1999 that Pete Newman was, at the very least, engaging in deviant behavior with boys. Yet they promoted him among their ranks.
While Kanakuk knew what Pete Newman was doing, the Carlocks did not. In March 2009, under intense pressure and threat of being reported by a parent to federal officials, Newman “voluntarily” confessed to Kanakuk leadership, providing a list of names of his victims, including Trey’s. As Kanakuk leadership tells it, this was the first time they’d heard about his abuse, action was taken swiftly, and Newman was fired. Instead of turning Newman over to the authorities, though, Kanakuk leadership let him leave and began damage control, contacting families on Newman’s list of victims. Newman was not arrested until September 2009. (Kanakuk did not respond to multiple emails and voicemails requesting comment on this story.)
Joe White flew to Dallas to let the Carlocks know Trey’s name was on Newman’s list. White met with Trey and his father, Byron, and downplayed the extent of the abuse. He told Byron it was just a few boys and that camp had it under control. White offered to counsel Trey, even though Trey hadn’t intended to disclose the abuse to anyone at that time.
“I remember Trey’s silence,” Byron says. “I should have known it spoke volumes.”
Criminal charges were brought against Newman later that year, on behalf of several John Does. Trey was not part of the proceedings. In the end, Newman took a plea deal rather than go to trial, and in 2010 he received two life sentences plus 30 years in prison based on multiple counts of statutory sodomy and child enticement involving child abuse on Kanakuk property. At the time of his sentencing, prosecutors were aware of nearly 60 victims; child-abuse experts who testified at the sentencing estimated that Newman may have had more than 2,000 victims.
Two years after Newman’s conviction, during Trey’s junior year in college, he suffered the first of several major emotional breakdowns that required in-patient care. The family sent Trey to Sierra Tucson on advice from White, who said several of the boys from “the list” had gone there for help. White even contributed financially to help cover the cost of Trey’s treatment.
It wasn’t until a few years later, when Trey was receiving treatment at The Menninger Clinic, in Houston, that the family learned they had been deceived by White. Trey called home and said he was ready to get a lawyer. He told his dad there were many more victims.
Trey’s civil case was settled out of court and resulted in Trey signing a nondisclosure agreement under pressure from Kanakuk, the details of which his family still doesn’t know to this day. “Attorneys who are not trauma-informed often offer the advice to just sign and put this whole thing behind you, not understanding that the forced silence of an NDA further traumatizes victims,” Elizabeth says.
Child advocacy professionals say that the majority of victims of child sexual abuse will never disclose their abuse. For those who do disclose, it is often much later in life. A recent report issued by Child USA says that if victims do disclose their abuse at all, they tend to do so in adulthood. Many victims are so tortured that they are unable to disclose their suffering for decades; those who have signed an NDA never can.
Caleb Powell says his first memories of life include Trey. They were born four days apart, and he jokes that they might have met in the hospital. The two were inseparable—riding bikes, normal kid stuff. The boys attended Kanakuk together. Powell knew Newman but didn’t like him.
“We didn’t connect. I thought he was a bit weird, actually,” Powell says.
As young teens, Powell and Trey made commitments to follow their faith. They shared a goal of not drinking in high school, steadfastly attending church, and maintaining pure dating relationships. They spent their high school days hunting and fishing together, writing songs (Trey was a talented musician), mudding down at the Trinity bottoms, going to shows, and talking a lot about theology and apologetics.
“Trey was always the smartest, most athletic, most talented,” Powell says. “On paper, he was the most perfect.”
In hindsight, though, Powell can see that his friend was suffering. Trey strayed from some of the promises they’d made, engaging in behaviors that were out of character. Powell remembers that during the Christmas break of their freshman year of college, Trey announced he was going to travel the country, speaking to victims of abuse at Kanakuk. That was in 2009, just months after Newman had been arrested.
“We were in a drugstore picking out Christmas cards when he told me what he was going to do, and it just occurred to me in that moment: Trey had been abused,” Powell says. “He never told me, and I never asked, but in that moment I knew, and it shattered my world. It also explained so many of Trey’s behaviors.”
Throughout his 20s, Trey became more erratic. There were stints in rehab and periods of going silent, when he detached from his closest friends. But outwardly, he was flourishing. After graduating as a National Merit Scholar from Highland Park High School in 2009, he attended Harding University, where he prepared for a career in neuroscience. Postgrad, he had research internships at Harvard and MIT. He did research in Dallas at the Center for BrainHealth and enrolled in a master’s program at UTD in 2019. During his time in Boston, shortly before returning to Dallas, he worked at the Langer Lab, a joint program created by Harvard and MIT. His focus of study was on how brain chemistry is related to happiness.
Trey ended his life in August 2019. To date, there have been 17 suicides tied to Newman’s abuse. Trey’s parents were so bereft that they couldn’t bring themselves to have a funeral for their son, just a private family service. They did find the courage, though, to name Kanakuk in Trey’s obituary, saying his abuse there had led to his death. That decision would prove pivotal.
Before Elizabeth and I traveled together to Missouri, we met at the Phillips Foundation office at Old Parkland. Sitting at a long conference table, I’d come prepared with a list of questions, but I didn’t do any of the talking. As if she’d been waiting for someone to show up, willing to listen and talk, Elizabeth explained how her life has been transformed by her brother’s death.
“My therapist told me to take a year to grieve,” she said. “For a person like me, I want to take action right away, but I did what the doctor said. I grieved for a whole year.”
A month before what would have been Trey’s 30th birthday, in 2020, Elizabeth started digging, searching online for information about the abuse her brother had endured, about Pete Newman, about Kanakuk. She found nothing.
“The web had been scrubbed; there was nothing until like the ninth page of my Google search,” she said. “I have worked in media. It costs millions to scrub information like that.”
Other Kanakuk victims had been reaching out to the Carlock family in response to Trey’s obituary. When Elizabeth discovered so much of the case against Newman had been buried on the internet, she knew there was more to uncover.
Working with fellow victims’ families, Elizabeth organized and helped found Facts About Kanakuk, a website that chronicles how the camp has conducted its business and why there has been so little coverage of it. What has been published—mostly in small Missouri newspapers and one excellent long-form story by Nancy French in an online publication called The Dispatch—has not garnered the attention one might expect. Facts About Kanakuk has been the vanguard in advancing the story. Elizabeth described the creation of the site as opening Pandora’s box. Allegations started flooding in—and not just regarding Pete Newman.
“We are essentially running a hotline at this point,” Elizabeth said. “We received hundreds of tips about alleged abusers and how camp repeatedly dismissed staff without reporting allegations to the authorities. Many were dismissed for ‘inappropriate behavior,’ but, really, it’s behavior most of us would call a felony.”
It became apparent to Elizabeth that dozens of victims had been coerced into signing NDAs and settling out of court. Additionally, the laws in Missouri—and lack thereof—make it almost impossible for victims to seek civil recourse. The state does not require camps to be licensed, so they’re totally unregulated. Coupled with restrictive statutes of limitations, it’s a difficult place to achieve civil justice for victims of abuse.
They cannot file a civil action against an individual after they turn 31. Given that victims who actually disclose abuse wait an average of at least 20 years to do so, those statutes of limitations work in the abusers’ favor. So while Pete Newman was convicted of criminal charges, Kanakuk and its leadership have never been held accountable in civil court.
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The Watermark Connection
When Todd Wagner helped found Dallas’ Watermark Community Church in 1999, he had close ties to Kanakuk. Since 1999, there have been at least 31 former Kanakuk employees and/or Kanakuk Institute alumni employed by Watermark in positions ranging from administrative all the way up to senior pastoral leadership. I spoke with elder and campus pastor Blake Holmes in June 2024. I wanted to know his stance on the abuses that occurred at Kanakuk, given Watermark’s historical ties and the number of current and former staff who are products of Kanakuk.
“There has never been an official partnership,” Holmes said. “What has happened at Kanakuk is a tragedy.”
Holmes himself has been a guest speaker at the Kanakuk Institute and part of Watermark since its early days. He said he recognizes the scourge of child abuse is something that impacts our community, and, as a church, they’d be naive not to address it.
“My greatest responsibility is what happens on my campus,” Holmes said. “It’s not happening in any one place. [Child abuse] is everywhere our members’ kids are, so we have to empower parents with knowledge of threats so they can teach their kids to advocate for themselves.”
Holmes said he has control of only what happens on his campus. Recognizing the importance of staff being fully trained and above reproach when it comes to child abuse, Holmes said Watermark has strict policies on hiring and training. He compared child-abuse predators to terrorists.
“They know we are training our people to identify them, so they have to become more sophisticated in their tactics,” Holmes said.
Six months after I talked with Holmes, news reports revealed that a registered sex offender was working at Watermark, with the knowledge of the church. Chuck Adair has been a Watermark congregant since 2017. He volunteers in their prison ministry and with Watermark’s adult recovery ministry. He is also a part-time employee with Watermark Resources, a division within the church that helps other churches implement Watermark’s recovery program. The church was quick to point out that his work at Watermark does not involve children.
Adair served 10 years in prison for sexually abusing a 15-year-old girl he met at a church in Midland, Texas, in 1992. He must register as a sex offender for the rest of his life. —C.C.
Elizabeth was focused on accountability when she made that April trip to Missouri to testify before a Senate committee. The members were considering a resolution to extend civil statutes of limitations to match criminal ones. In Missouri, all Class A felonies, which include child abuse and child sex abuse, have no statute of limitations. Therefore, the proposed resolution would give Kanakuk victims all the time they need to seek justice.
The one caveat relates to the principle of retroactivity. Without making the resolution retroactive, any changes to the law would not apply to past claims already barred by the old limitations. In other words, existing victims over the age of 31 would still have no recourse. During our day at the Capitol, Rep. Brian Seitz, from Taney County, Missouri, where Kanakuk’s main camp is located, proposed such a retroactive resolution. (Known as Superman Seitz because of his fandom for the Man of Steel, he has a full cape and suit hanging in his office.)
As we waited to enter the hearing room, light flooded the halls of the Missouri Capitol. I wondered if Elizabeth could have ever imagined she’d spend time in Missouri like this. After years of summers in the Ozarks, she is now a regular visitor to the halls of the Capitol, with polished talking points. But ask her about her brother, and her face changes. Her eyes go blank. She struggles to answer questions, partly because it’s so painful and partly because she wants to protect Trey.
Today, it is standard practice in managing child abuse cases to avoid retraumatizing the child at all costs. Children’s Advocacy Centers serve as child-abuse emergency rooms of sorts, welcoming victims and shepherding them to a safe space where they can be forensically interviewed—ideally only once—by a trained expert. However, there is no protection against retraumatization for victims’ families.
As Elizabeth pounded the halls of the Capitol, visiting with state reps and senators, speaking to whomever would take her appointment, for 10 hours without a break, she told her story over and over. She undoubtedly relived the pain of losing Trey with each telling, of having to revisit the horrors that happened to her brother in her own childhood home, of facing the fact that her whole family was fooled by an evil man. There is no protection for her.
The executive director of Child USAdvocacy, Kathryn Robb, whom Elizabeth works with closely on all policy action, spoke first to the committee. (Robb now works at The Children’s Justice Campaign.) She has helped get 21 states to pass similar amendments to their state constitutions, eliminating statutes of limitations in cases regarding child sex abuse.
“Not only does it not cause an overflow of cases, backlogging the courts, as opposition would want you to believe, but it also uncovers abusers hiding in plain sight,” Robb told the committee.
A variety of other supporters, many victims of the Catholic church scandal, were there to speak in support of the proposed resolution. Elizabeth was the last to take a turn at the microphone. “I am here asking you to remember my brother Trey and seeking justice for the children silenced by Kanakuk,” she said.
Only one opponent presented, a Missouri attorney and lobbyist working on behalf of the insurance industry named Rich AuBuchon. AuBuchon said that the removal of civil statutes of limitations for child sex abuse victims would be unfair to businesses, which may not have even been owned by the same leadership at the time a crime was committed.
“This will send a chilling effect, making it impossible for businesses to be insured,” AuBuchon said.
Among AuBuchon’s clients are the Kansas City Chiefs, owned by Dallas’ Clark Hunt and his three siblings. Hunt and his wife, Tavia, are die-hard Kanakuk supporters, having sent their three children there, and they publicly maintain a close friendship with Joe White. In 2021, at the Dallas Country Club, Clark was a keynote speaker at the Highland Park KLIFE men’s breakfast, an annual fundraiser. Tavia has been vocal on social media about their unwavering support of Kanakuk despite any “challenges and criticism” it has faced.
At 6:20 pm, Elizabeth sat behind a mic for the last time to speak to a second House committee filled with many people she’d seen earlier in the day. As she began to speak, her voice wavered as she said Trey’s name—only for a second, and perhaps it wasn’t noticeable if you hadn’t heard her tell her story dozens of times. But for a second, her pain was visible.
True to form, she quickly composed herself, displaying a ferocious but measured tenacity as she conveyed the urgency of the proposed amendment to a rapt audience.
After she finished, Robb approached with these closing words: “Why should bad actors be protected by passage of time and victims suffer in perpetuity?”
Since her appearance at the Missouri session, Elizabeth has turned her attention to Texas. Though somewhat better than Missouri, requiring regulation for camps and child-serving organizations, Texas still has woefully restrictive statutes of limitations on child abuse cases.
Texas House Rep. Jeff Leach from Collin County started supporting Elizabeth’s work last year. If passed, Trey’s Law would eliminate the use of NDAs in cases of child sex abuse, and Texas would join Tennessee as the only two states to have such provisions in place.
Leach has a personal stake in this work. His wife is a survivor of child sex abuse and championed a bill in 2019 that extended the statute of limitations on civil cases of child sexual abuse to the age of 48. Today, alongside Leach and Rep. Morgan Meyer of the Park Cities, Elizabeth is advocating for a bill that would eliminate statutes of limitations in these cases altogether. Rep. Ann Johnson from Houston has filed a similar reform bill.
Elizabeth’s work at the legislative level is as an advocate and private citizen. However, as the head of a large family foundation, she has resources to research and investigate the impacts of child sexual abuse more broadly—even globally. The Phillips Foundation is dedicated to generational investments and creating systemic, life-changing impact. As its investing principle, the foundation takes an entrepreneurial approach and scans the environment for gaps in the social-impact ecosystem.Advertisement
As the foundation began pursuing this subject area, it looked for other foundations that were tackling this issue to collaborate with and found only a handful. Though the group of involved organizations is small, they are mighty. One group they discovered is the Oak Foundation, based in Geneva, Switzerland. It is the largest funder in the space of child protection in the world, and it has launched a donor collaborative called To Zero, which the Phillips Foundation is now part of. The mission is to explore how foundations can collectively bring more donors together to fund this critical space.
National statistics show that one in eight children will be abused by their 18th birthday; in Texas, according to a 2024 report by Child Advocacy Centers of Texas, one in six will experience abuse.
“Public dollars follow private dollars and proof of concept,” Elizabeth says. “We hope that by collaborating with groups internationally and infusing our own capital alongside a scalable formula, we can garner funding at the federal and international level that this issue deserves.
“We see it in the news constantly. Camps, churches, schools, sports—they are failing our children and often protect the institutions more than the kids they steward,” Elizabeth says. “I’ll also add, I think child sex abuse and trafficking prevention has a bystander problem.”
She believes many people assume there is plenty of money going toward these issues and lots of organizations effectively addressing it, when, in fact, it is not a priority for many grantmakers or government budgets. “A lot of smart, dedicated people are getting by on shoestring budgets in a field prone to burnout,” she says. “We as a culture need to prioritize kids and their safety first and foremost. We have a long way to go.”
Elizabeth appears ready for that journey. In 2023, she received her certificate as a crime victims advocate to better support and steward the people who continue to make outcries to her to this day. In December, she and Kevin were invited to Sweden by Queen Silvia, who founded the World Childhood Foundation in 1999, to be part of a summit of global private foundations committed to the alleviation of childhood abuse. The Phillips Foundation was one of only three U.S. foundations present.
“The work,” she says, “it gives my pain purpose.”
In May, a man named Matthew Harmon was arrested on a charge of sexually assaulting a child in 2007, when he was a teacher and coach at Providence Christian School, where Elizabeth once attended. Harmon also worked at the now-defunct Kanakuk in Durango, Colorado, and also in Branson, Missouri, from 1995 through the mid-2000s. And he worked with youth at Highland Park KLIFE. Harmon’s parents are close friends of Joe and Debbie-Jo White.
Pete Newman was denied parole on October 1, 2024. His next hearing will be in September 2029. Elizabeth and other families have launched the site protestpetesparole.com to make sure he never receives it.
None of the proposed Missouri legislation was passed, but State Representative Brian Seitz has already filed three new bills in 2025, again seeking to eliminate the statute of limitations for child sex abuse, allow certain laws to be applied retroactively, and prevent the use of NDAs against abuse survivors.
Joe White remains CEO of Kanakuk. Neither he nor any other Kanakuk leader has been removed from their position. Kanakuk will celebrate its 100th anniversary this summer, claiming to have served half a million children.
To report child sexual abuse in Texas call 800-252-5400; in Missouri call 800-392-3783. Call or text 988 if you are experiencing thoughts of suicide.
This story originally appeared in the March issue of D Magazine. Write to feedback@dmagazine.com.