Culture of cover-ups: Tucson church has ignored child sexual abuse allegations for decades

Multiple allegations of sexual abuse of minors spanning several decades have been covered up or cast aside by leadership in a Tucson church, a Lee Enterprises Public Service Journalism Team and Arizona Daily Star investigation found. 

Golden Dawn Tabernacle pastor Isaac Noriega admitted that he knew and did not go to police about the alleged sexual abuse of an 11-year-old at the hands of a congregant who remains in good standing in the church. Interviews with nine former church members suggest a culture of silence surrounding sexual abuse has been pervasive in the church since the 1980s.

The former members identified two more incidents during which Noriega allegedly brushed aside allegations of other congregants sexually abusing minors. Also ignored were two allegations that the pastor's son engaged in unwanted physical contact with children when he was an adult. Potential victims say they were often ostracized, while alleged perpetrators were forgiven and welcomed back into the church community. 

Twenty former congregants have described Golden Dawn, which also goes by its formal name Tabernaculo Emanuel, as a "cult." The church claims to be part of a Christian religious sect called "The Message," which was started by a 20th-century preacher and some say prophet named William Branham. Some churches in the sect discourage contact with outsiders — and for extreme churches like Noriega's the religious beliefs can even preclude contact with doctors or police, former members say.

Noriega allegedly downplayed or dismissed the child sexual abuse allegations, allowed church members to shun victims, used victim-blaming language and screamed at an officer the one time that law enforcement became involved. 

“This stuff needs to stop,” former congregant Emmanuel Martinez said. “I’ve heard it time and time again, it happening here at the church, and nothing happens.”

“Jane” was a 15-year-old girl attending Golden Dawn Tabernacle in the early 2000s when a man at the church started writing her letters, she said. He brought her CDs and movies — items she wanted but was barred from having because they were too secular, she said.

The man was about 25, according to public records. Jane said she was “so sheltered” that she “didn’t even know that it’s not OK for a grown man to be talking to a girl that age.”

“(He) groomed me,” she said. “He definitely preyed on me.”

She asked that her identity be shielded — “Jane” is a pseudonym — because she doesn’t want to hurt her family who are still in the church or have her alleged abuse attached to her name publicly.

Lee Enterprises is also not identifying the man because Jane has not reported her allegations against him to police. She said she wanted to share her experience because she has heard of similar stories happening in the church, and there has been "no accountability."

The man convinced Jane to start sneaking out of her house to meet him, and his advances became more sexual, she said. Jane said he bought her vibrators and Victoria’s Secret thongs. He started touching her sexually, she said.

When Jane was 17, he came over to her house to give her a present, she said. She met him outside under her parents’ porch. The man came up to her and grabbed her from behind, Jane said.

“I didn’t even know how to say no,” Jane said. “I just didn’t know what to do.”

Jane said she “felt something” and “it didn’t feel good.” Later, she would come to understand that feeling as the man sexually assaulting her, she said.

“I started bleeding,” she said. “I didn’t know that was normal. I started crying. I was so scared because I knew that something had happened, and I didn’t know how I was going to tell my Mom. And that’s how I found out that I had lost my virginity. It happened that fast.”

Arizona law defines sexual assault as "intentionally or knowingly engaging in sexual intercourse or oral sexual contact" with someone without their consent. There's no statute of limitations for prosecuting the felony crime.

The age of consent in Arizona has been 18 since 1920. There is an exception for sexual activity between two consenting individuals between ages 15 and 19 who are no more than two years apart in age. The man who allegedly assaulted Jane is about a decade older than her.

Arizona also has a law against engaging in sexual intercourse or oral sexual contact with a minor — another felony that has no statute of limitations.

The man did not respond to calls and text messages requesting comment. He said through a third party that “the allegations are not true.”

Jane’s brother, who is a high-ranking member of the church, called her a liar in a brief phone call with a reporter.

“We don’t have time for your gossip or your lies or your twisted stories,” he said. “And you can tell (my sister) that she needs to stop her lies as well.”

But multiple people corroborated Jane’s story.

One of Jane’s friends, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Jane told him several years ago that the man from her church raped her outside of her parent's house when she was a teenager.

Martinez, who is about the same age as Jane and attended Golden Dawn at the same time, said the man would refer to Jane as his “girlfriend” when she was about 14 or 15. Martinez said Jane would often stay at her cousin’s house overnight when she was a teen, and the man would sneak in through the windows.

Luis Santos, who said he used to be close friends with the man when they attended Golden Dawn together, said the man identified Jane by her first and last name and bragged about taking her virginity. Because of his conversations with the man, Santos knew details about Jane’s alleged sexual assault that she only shared with a few people.

Santos said the man told him about romantic relationships he had with at least four underage girls as an adult. Martinez named one of those four girls and said the man started grooming her after Jane.

“It just became a bragging point for him that he had ‘done’ all the pretty girls in church,” Santos said.

‘Brushed under the rug’

Noriega initially denied any knowledge of those events in a July email. Asked whether he took any action to investigate claims that two men in church sexually abused minors, Noriega wrote that "these alleged events, if they happened, were not presented to me. Alleged victims of these allegations have never told me of the events."

But in a September phone interview, Noriega identified the man by his first name and said Jane’s father told him that Jane and the man “had sex” multiple times when she was 17 and 18.

“She never said, ‘He raped me.’ She never said such a thing. She said, ‘having sex,’” Noriega said, recalling his conversation with the father.

“Do you understand that if someone is 17 and an adult has sex with them, the 17-year-old cannot consent to that, and that is rape?” a reporter asked Noriega later during the phone interview.

“No, I don't understand that because I never knew that before,” Noriega responded. He added that he did eventually find out about that law. But earlier in the interview, he said he was “not aware” of the age of consent in Arizona.

For a long time, Jane described what happened to her as “the day that I lost my virginity,” even though now she said she “definitely would consider it sexual assault.”

“Maybe I just don’t like to label it that because I try to put it out of my mind so much,” she said.

Jane said she told her father about what happened, and neither he nor Noriega reported the allegations to police. Her father did not respond to a phone call and text message seeking comment.

“Once (my Dad) took it to the pastor, it was in the pastor’s hands,” she said. “And then the pastor just brushed it under the rug because the guy was the son of the top deacon there at the time.”

Noriega denied responsibility. He said it was up to the parents to go to the police. “I told the father, ‘Whatever you have to do,’” Noriega said.

Noriega said the father asked him to counsel Jane, so he spoke with her, but "we never even touched the issue of her having sex." He said they spoke about her future and where she would live if she left her father's home. 

Jane said Noriega was “very kind,” “understanding” and “nice.” Noriega told her something along the lines of: “'We’ll help you do whatever as long as you just stay,'” she said.

But Jane, 18 at the time, had already decided to leave the church. 

"I couldn't have a future in the church either because I wasn't a virgin anymore," she said. 

Women who lose their virginity before marriage are shunned, Jane and other former congregants said. Jane said she already couldn’t take communion anymore, a public signal of her impurity. She would have had to have a private wedding ceremony, another mark of shame.

Noriega said Jane was not excommunicated. But Jane said her family is not allowed to talk to her. She’s reached out to her parents a few times to try to talk with them, but they tell her she needs to get permission from Noriega. Aside from that, her family hasn’t spoken to her for roughly two decades.

“That’s the worst thing is not being able to talk to our families,” she said, although she respects her family's choice to remain in the church and wishes them well. 

Sometimes she even considers going back to church so she can see them. But it frustrates her that the man she said abused her is still accepted in the church community.

“People just mask it,” she said. “They’re like, ‘Oh, well she left, so she’s the bad one. He’s still in church; he’s the good one.’”

Jane said she wants her family to know she is happy. She has created a family of her own outside of the church. And she said she’s stronger. She was tired of being submissive to men — the way Golden Dawn taught her to be. She found her voice.

‘Wasn’t a big deal’

Allegations that the pastor’s son, Stephen Noriega, engaged in unwanted physical contact with children when he was a young adult were also brushed aside, former congregants say.

“I wasn't sexually abused by him, but in my mind, he— I guess I don't know what that would be called,” one woman said of Stephen. “I was about 12. … He made me kiss him.”

Stephen was 18 or 19 at the time, she said.

The woman, who is now 50, asked that her identity be shielded to prevent hurting family members still in the church. 

When she was 11, the pastor asked her parents to help support Stephen by including him in their family activities. So Stephen frequently came over to their house in the mid-‘80s.

“Stephen took advantage of that situation,” she said.

She said Stephen “started treating me like I was his girlfriend” and “trying to control me.” He would scold her for sitting or dressing in ways that would cause men to lust after her, she said. It made her uncomfortable.

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Before Stephen left for the Navy, she said, he got her alone and made her feel guilty that she would let him leave without giving him a kiss. She said he gave her a peck on the lips and she jumped away. It was Stephen’s attempt to claim her, she explained.

“There at that church, if you kiss someone, you have to marry that person,” she said. “And that was his deal, like, ‘OK, now you're mine. No one's gonna want you.’ That's what he told me.”

When the woman later got married to another man, she had to tell Pastor Noriega about anything sexual she had done before marriage, she said. She told him about the kiss, and how young she was, and he didn’t say anything about it, she said.

Asked if he remembered a woman telling him during pre-marriage counseling that Stephen kissed her when she was 12, Noriega said, “I don't remember anything like that.” But in a follow-up email, Noriega correctly identified the woman by her first and last name — information that Lee Enterprises never revealed to him. 

Stephen did not return phone calls or respond to text messages seeking comment on those allegations and others.

After Stephen returned from the military a few years later, there was allegedly another sexual incident with a different 12-year-old girl, according to Rey David Aguirre, a former Golden Dawn member.

Aguirre said the girl told him a few years after the incident happened. He told his dad, a top deacon in the church. His father took him to speak with Noriega.

Aguirre remembers Noriega telling him that “it wasn’t a big deal.” Aguirre said neither Noriega nor his father made a report to police.

“The pastor told me that she had already forgiven him,” Aguirre said. “It was swept under the rug.”

Aguirre said his father told him: “‘Well if you … don’t want to forgive the pastor’s son for it then there’s really no room for you here.’”

Noriega said he “never knew of such a thing,” but he found out recently what these allegations were about. He said he talked with the girl and “she told me that that was not true."

Several years after the alleged incidents with children, Stephen was arrested for alleged indecent exposure in May 1999, according to a Tucson Police Department report.

A woman told police she was walking in the Dillard’s parking lot at El Con Mall in Tucson when a man drove past her twice while exposing his penis. Another person reported a similar incident to Dillard’s management that day. The suspect vehicle’s license plate and description matched Stephen’s car.

About a week later, Stephen initially told police he might have been at the mall that day, then denied it, the report says. Stephen tried to claim his car was a different color than the suspect’s, but a detective got him to admit that wasn’t true. Stephen told the detective that no one else would have driven his car.

Records on the case’s conclusion were unavailable due to its age. The only other charges filed against Stephen were traffic violations.

Decades-old problem

Incidents of sexual abuse in Golden Dawn Tabernacle, and the pervasive silence over it, go back to the 1980s, one former member said.

David A. Gonzalez said two different church members sexually abused him when he was a child, including a relative.

“He would babysit me every Sunday afternoon where he would molest me at nap time by laying next to me and doing his dirty things,” Gonzalez said via email.

“Most of the time I would just act like I was asleep while he touched on me, or when he would unzip my pants and he would put his thing through my open zipper and hump on me while telling me if I loved him and God that I wouldn't tell anyone.

“I finally told my mom, as embarrassed and ashamed as I was, and I was told to never speak on that at all.”

Gonzalez said he did not tell the church what happened.

After Gonzalez got in trouble as a teen, church leaders ordered his family to cast him out, Gonzalez said in a letter. Excommunication meant cutting off ties to his family — at around 14 years old.

“I never saw my younger brother and sister again,” he said.

Noriega said congregants are never excommunicated, and families make their own choices on who they keep in touch with.

Gonzalez thinks that his sexual abuse, along with verbal and physical abuse from his father, and the abandonment by his family and church community led him to where he is today. He’s serving two life terms in Arizona state prison.

“I was pushed into the streets at such a young age where more sexual abuse happened, really sent me into a spiral of trouble and problems,” Gonzalez said.

“I was homeless and became a thief to survive and met all the wrong people who introduced me into the world of drugs, violence and just about every otherwise crime.”

Gonzalez was serving an 11-year term for burglary when he learned that a fellow inmate in his unit was imprisoned for child molestation. On June 16, 2018, Gonzalez attacked that inmate, John Nase, in a bathroom, and strangled him to death.

Gonzalez is seeking post-conviction relief from his conviction. Still, he said via email, “I only feel sorry for the children that had to suffer at that man's hands and sick acts.”

Cycle continues

A more recent incident of potential abuse in 2019 was reported to law enforcement, but not by the church.

Lee Enterprises and the Arizona Daily Star are shielding the identities of the 15-year-old girl and the alleged perpetrator, a 24-year-old man, because the girl told police nothing happened. No charges were filed.

But the case shows how the church responds to potential abuse victims: Pastor Noriega dismissed the allegations, yelled at those who reported them, refused to look at evidence and screamed at police, according to Martinez, another former congregant and law enforcement documents.

Martinez said he first heard the allegations from his 16-year-old employee. The teenager said his 15-year-old girlfriend was being groomed by a 24-year-old man who came over to the girl's house and forced oral and genital contact with her, Martinez recalled. 

Martinez said he called the girl to ask her about the allegations. He recorded the call and provided it to police.

Tucson police reviewed the recording and found that “you can hear (the girl) denying having a sexual relationship with” the 24-year-old man, according to a case report. But later in the conversation, Martinez told her “he knows she performed (redacted) on” the man, and she did not deny it that time.

The girl said she sent the man a picture of herself and her friend but denied sending any nude or sexual photos, police reported.

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A former Golden Dawn member who spoke on the condition of anonymity said she heard about the allegations from the girl’s friend and reported them to Noriega.

“The pastor did nothing about it at all,” the woman said. “He told me, ‘It was like two children fighting over a toy. What do you do?’ He goes, ‘(The girl’s friend) is saying this Brother did something. This Brother’s saying he’s never even spoken to (her). You have no proof, so it’s like two kids fighting.’

“And I told him, ‘Sex is not a toy. A sexual allegation is not a little play toy. It is something very serious and should be taken seriously.’”

Asked why he would dismiss such allegations or compare them to a toy, Noriega said “the whole premise of this question is based on falsehood” and “not worthy of further response.”

When Martinez tried to explain the allegations to the pastor, Martinez said, Noriega yelled at him and told him he needed to “get right with God.” Martinez said he tried to show him the recording, but Noriega and two deacons refused to listen to it. Martinez decided to leave the church after that.

Meanwhile, Andrew Loza, who left Golden Dawn in 1993, requested officers complete a welfare check on the girl after hearing a rumor that she was being abused by an older man.

Tucson police officers arrived in Golden Dawn Tabernacle's parking lot during a church service on July 24, 2019, according to a police report. Church leaders and the girl met the officers outside. She talked with police alone and “denied being molested or touched inappropriately,” the report says.

Shortly after talking with the girl, Tucson Officer Jose Donato called Noriega.

“Over the phone, Priest Isaac started screaming that we were not allowed at the church without a search warrant,” Donato said in a case report.

Noriega said he raised his voice because he is hard of hearing. He said he was “firm” with an officer because “officers entered the church premises without permission and contacted an underage female about false allegations.”

The 2019 case was closed “because the victim is not cooperative,” the police report said.

The 24-year-old man left the church of his own accord about two years ago, the anonymous woman said.

Loza said about six months after the incident, he got a Facebook message from the girl that said, “Thank you for speaking up for me."

Loza, who along with his wife has helped young people escape the church, said he sometimes talks over the phone with the girl. She told him the church ostracized her after the incident. A deacon told her she was “not worthy” and prevented her from taking communion by standing in her way and bumping her back, Loza said.

The anonymous woman said the girl’s friend was treated like a liar at the church school. Her teacher separated her from others and made her walk out a different door at the end of the school day.

The woman said it fills her with anguish that she and others have sought help from Noriega and gotten nothing. She said it’s a pattern of inaction from “the highest power, which to us is not police. It’s not a doctor. It’s the pastor. He’s God.”

“I don’t know if you can understand that feeling of despair when you go (to Noriega) thinking, ‘OK, I’m finally gonna tell, and something will get done.’ And then you get told it’s not a big deal. You just, you give up,” she said. “That’s how all the women and children are there right now today present. Just hopeless. … Why say anything? Nothing will get done.”

“It doesn’t matter if it’s our fault or not our fault,” she said. “It just teaches us to keep our mouths shut.”

About this series

Lee Enterprises investigative team and the Arizona Daily Star interviewed more than 50 former and current Message followers, experts and religious leaders for “Twisted Message.” The series examines the lack of accountability in a Christian religious sect called “The Message.” Some groups that claim to follow the faith have become controlling or destructive, including a Tucson church accused of being a “cult,” an Arizona trailer park commune that physically and sexually abused children in the 1960s and churches across the U.S. that allegedly treat women as “second-class citizens.” The year-long investigation is the first news-media account of The Message and its global influence.