Salvation Army failed to stop a Kentucky music director from abusing a girl for years, lawsuit says
Joel Collier was fired from the Salvation Army a decade ago after sending graphic sexual messages to a child — only to be rehired the next year and accused of sexually abusing a teenager, according to a lawsuit.
A decade ago, the Salvation Army fired a talented young music director after discovering that he’d sent graphic sexual messages to a child — only for another branch of the ministry to hire him a year later to lead youth camps in a different part of the country, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday in Louisville, Kentucky.
Those camps are where the music director, Joel Collier, met then-14-year-old Riley Neville in 2017. In the years that followed, she alleges that he sexually groomed and abused her, leading her to attempt suicide. The alleged abuse included sexually explicit text messages, requests to describe her naked body, fondling and, after she turned 18, “non-consensual intercourse” and “perverse, violent, and obscene sexual acts,” according to the lawsuit.
Neville and her family only learned years later that the Salvation Army’s Eastern Territory, headquartered in New York, had in 2014 placed Collier on an internal registry of individuals reasonably suspected of child sex abuse, the lawsuit says. Officials overseeing the Salvation Army’s Southern Territory, based in Atlanta, knew Collier had been flagged as a possible danger to children, but they removed him from the list and hired him anyway, according to the complaint.
NBC News typically does not identify people who say they have been sexually abused, but Neville, who turns 23 this week, said she wanted her name included. She’s seeking damages from the Salvation Army and its subsidiary branches, alleging negligence in hiring and failures in their duty to protect children.
“They’re an organization whose fundamentals are caring for and serving the most vulnerable populations,” Neville said in an interview. “They can’t knowingly hire pedophiles and not be held accountable.”
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