PORTLAND, Oregon — For decades, Tania Culver Humphrey, the daughter of the Mercy Corps co-founder Ellsworth Culver, tried to tell adults in powerful positions that her father had sexually abused her and other girls. She said it happened both in Portland and overseas and that one girl died as a result. She was ignored.
“It’s been an exhausting couple of years. I'm tired. I'm really tired,” she said sitting for an interview in a downtown Portland hotel lobby.
Mercy Corps is an international relief agency based in Portland that works on the front lines of crisis around the world. Co-founder Ellsworth Culver died in 2005.
Now, a year and a half after the Oregonian newspaper investigated Tania's allegations and found them credible, a second investigation paid for by Mercy Corps backed that up. Investigators interviewed Tania for 100 hours and forwarded the names of other possible perpetrators no longer with Mercy Corps to law enforcement and reviewed the way Mercy Corps had handled her earlier allegations.
“On the one hand I am really — I am really pleased that there’s accountability and validation and acknowledgement. That’s like, huge. Cause that’s what I wanted,” she said.
But Tania also wants more. She wants you to know international aid workers are in unique positions of power over the vulnerable and that it would be easy for a predator like her father to abuse children.
“I feel a huge weight of responsibility to keep telling their stories and my story,” she said.
Tania wants people to hear about a disturbing incident that happened while she was 9 years old and on a trip to Thailand with her father. The details are gruesome, and you may not want to read about it.
“At first another aid worker was involved with just me. Where he raped me and hurt me and then she was brought in,” she said.
Tania said she was told to be good at sex because it would help other children.
“The thing that I was told was that didn’t I want to be a good job, like they knew how much I cared about the refugees because I had just been at the refugee camp. I'd been let loose to play with these kids who had nothing. And I cared about them and I felt guilty that I was the only one with a bed,” she said.
Tania said a local 9-year-old girl was brought in and her father and the other man sexually abused them both and later turned violent.
“He choked me but I didn’t die. I saw them choking her. And never remember her waking up. They put her in the bed with me to take care of her which made me feel even worse because I felt like I was supposed to take care of her,” she said.
She spent the night next to the girl and that in the morning the girl was dead.
The most recent investigators said they could not verify the child's death but that the times and dates of a trip to Bangkok for her father with Mercy Corps did match Tania’s story.
The horrors lasted until Tania was in her teens.
Mercy Corps called the findings abhorrent. The current CEO, Tjada D’Oyen McKenna, thanked Tania for her courage and persistence, apologized for the actions of past leaders and promised to continue strengthening systems of accountability and integrity.
All these years later, Tania cannot forget, does not want to. The investigation is over but she is just beginning to warn the world about the dangers of people like her father, a pedophile hidden in an international relief agency.
"I feel so much responsibility. Like I want to get this right. I want to tell her story; I want to tell all the kids stories. I want people to listen because I shouldn’t be the only one who gets to say something,” said Tania.
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