LaVar Withers (1936 – 2005) was a Mormon church member and physician in Rexburg, Idaho; accused of sexually abusing at least 133 women and children, some as young as 13 years old, over a period of 30 years or more; admitted to sexual abuse; pleaded guilty in 1996 to a single count of misdemeanor battery; sentenced to 30 to 60 days in jail; the Mormon church placed him on probation and took his temple recommend; died in 2005.
“I may have said do not go to the police immediately.”
— G. Farrell Young, LDS stake president in Rexburg, to the Idaho Statesman, 1995, describing what he told a woman who reported Withers to him
Withers practiced in Rexburg, a town where roughly nine in ten residents were Latter-day Saints and where the mayor, city council members and much of local law enforcement belonged to the same church. So did most of the women who say he assaulted them.
He was not a stranger to church authority. He served as a counselor in a bishopric in the Blackfoot, Idaho Ninth Ward beginning in 1970, and later sat on a stake high council. Women who reported him were, in many cases, reporting a man who held priesthood office over them.
1965: A woman filed a complaint with Rexburg police saying Withers had touched her breasts and genitals during a prenatal exam. She later told the Idaho Statesman that police did not believe her and belittled her for being pregnant. Thirty more years of practice followed.
July 1995: Withers surrendered his medical license during a Board of Medicine investigation. The board never publicly explained why. Its chairman later told the Post Register that a negotiated surrender was simply the fastest way to close the practice down.
1995: A woman identified in news coverage only as “Joan” reported Withers to her stake president, G. Farrell Young, a Rexburg dentist. She said he asked her to hold off on calling police until he had dealt with it. She waited a month, heard nothing, then contacted church headquarters in Salt Lake City and went to police herself. On Oct. 12, 1995, church officials confirmed Withers had been placed on probation and stripped of his temple recommend.
November 1995: A year-long investigation by Madison County prosecutors and the Idaho attorney general’s office ended in a decision not to prosecute. The special prosecutor told the Post Register the cases were not winnable, largely because Idaho gave prosecutors only one year to bring charges for the conduct most of the women described.
September 1996: Special prosecutor Dan Hawkley took a different route. He charged felonies, then accepted a plea to a single misdemeanor battery count written to cover a 30-year span and numerous victims. The structure was deliberate: it gave women whose cases were time-barred the standing to testify at sentencing. More than 117 of them had contacted the Rape Response and Crime Victim Center in Idaho Falls by then. Withers began his jail term on Sept. 13, 1996.
Also September 1996: Bonneville County officials opened an investigation into whether an LDS bishop near Idaho Falls, Dean Andrus, tried to discourage a girl from testifying that Withers had abused her. Hawkley said the conduct may have violated Idaho’s witness intimidation statute, which carries up to five years in prison. Andrus denied it and declined further questions. FLOODLIT is seeking records showing whether that investigation ever produced a charge.
1997: Two women filed a class action alleging Withers may have molested as many as 500 patients between 1965 and 1995, and naming Madison Memorial Hospital and the Rexburg Medical Center Professional Association as defendants for allegedly knowing he was providing substandard care. Idaho civil case CV-1996-979 was dismissed without prejudice.
2005: Withers died in Rexburg.
The pattern in this case is the one FLOODLIT documents over and over. Women told their bishops. Women told other doctors. Women told police. The reports went to men who had reason to protect the institution, and the reports went nowhere until a rape crisis center faxed a press release to every newspaper in Idaho.
Idaho criminal case: CR-1996-531. Idaho civil class action: CV-1996-979.
If you were a patient of LaVar Withers, or if you reported him to an LDS bishop, stake president or anyone at church headquarters, please contact us. We are still trying to establish how many church officials received reports before 1995, and what they did with them.
