SEATTLE — A Kent man has sued the Mormon church, alleging it shielded a child molester for more than a decade while he victimized at least five other children.

Ken Fleming, 42, said he brought the case against The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints because he wanted to hold officials accountable after several families reported that Jack Loholt, the leader of a church-sponsored Boy Scout troop, had molested their children.

Fleming, an office administrator at a local sand and gravel company, told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that Loholt abused him hundreds of times between 1976 and 1980, making plaster casts of his genitals, posing him provocatively and sodomizing him.

"I remember begging him please not to do that,'' Fleming said, sobbing. "I remember praying my little heart out that something would happen to make it stop, but nothing ever did.''

Lawyers representing the church said Monday that they had not yet investigated the claims but would vigorously contest the allegations. Loholt said in an interview that he'd been "set up'' by Fleming, whose suit was filed Monday in King County Superior Court.

Unlike the Roman Catholic Church, in which priests are rigorously trained and live under numerous social restrictions, Mormon church leaders are chosen from the church's general membership. Congregations select men and boys older than 12 to serve as volunteer leaders. They hold regular day jobs and conduct most of their church duties at night or on weekends.

Fleming contends that the drive to maintain an image of propriety silenced church leaders who knew what was happening. Fear of being shunned by them — and of Loholt himself — discouraged him from reporting the abuse while it was happening, Fleming said. But at 19, before embarking on his own work as a missionary, he said he finally told Mormon Bishop Richard Petit.

"He apologized,'' Fleming recalled. "He said they'd known about Jack and then he specifically asked, ‘Do you know if he abused my children?' I couldn't believe it.''

The newspaper said efforts to reach Petit, whose last known address was in Nauvoo, Ill., were unsuccessful.

Though Fleming had long kept silent, others were speaking out. The lawsuit says that in the early 1970s, Loholt masturbated in front of a neighbor's 7-year-old son and when the boy's parents complained, Bishop Herman Allenbach, now deceased, assured them that he would "take care of it.''

Yet the bishop never reported Loholt to law enforcement authorities or warned church members, the suit alleges, and Loholt, a sometime-contractor and handyman, continued to serve as an assistant scoutmaster until 1980, even as more accusations emerged.

In 1973, the suit says, parents in the same church ward as Fleming complained that Loholt had molested their 13-year-old sons, and when church elders asked the Boy Scout leader about this, he denied the charges, though he admitted to abusing other children.

Contacted at his current residence in Lake La Hache, British Columbia, Loholt, now in his 50s, denied the bulk of Fleming's accusations, saying, "I don't know where Ken gets these ideas.''

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