SALT LAKE CITY — John R. Miller asked his friend, who operates a program that helps child sex abuse victims, to read the manuscript for an upcoming book about his former wife.
The friend and another staff member read it, and the friend offered two thoughts for Miller.
“He said, ‘First off, you’re going to have a lot of people mad at you.’ And I said, ‘OK, what’s the second one? I can probably deal with that.’ He said, ‘We just hope you publish this book word for word,” Miller told KSL.com.
Nearly two years ago, Miller and a high-powered team he assembled that included retired federal prosecutor Richard Lambert, retired FBI special agent Mike Anderson and retired Utah Supreme Court Justice Christine Durham held a press conference to announce the results of their investigation into how the Utah Department of Public Safety mishandled its 1990 investigation into allegations that Miller’s wife, Valarie Clark Miller, was raped and threatened more than 50 years earlier when she was just 13 years old by a Utah Highway Patrol trooper. In 1990, that trooper was a UHP lieutenant.
According to Lambert and Anderson, the department’s internal affairs director at the time determined the allegations were “not sustained,” claiming that the trooper had passed a polygraph test and that Valarie Miller’s therapist said he did not believe the woman. The new investigation found that the state lied about giving the lieutenant a polygraph test and had never contacted Miller’s therapist as they claimed. In 2021, John Miller and his attorneys filed a notice of claim that they intended to sue the state for not conducting a proper internal affairs investigation and then lying to the Millers.
But just before the 2022 press conference, the current administration at the Utah Department of Public Safety issued an extremely rare apology after agreeing there was strong evidence of a cover-up.
Utah Department of Public Safety Commissioner Jess Anderson wrote a letter to the Miller family stating, “I have concluded that the factual allegations you raise in your notice of claim and subsequent communications about DPS actions in 1990 rest on a foundation of extensive and disturbing evidence. While it unfortunately appears that there is no legal recourse that I can take to right the wrong that was done to Mr. and Mrs. Miller more than three decades ago, the least I can do is to express my deep regret to John R. Miller and family members of Valarie Clark Miller for the emotional distress suffered by Mrs. Miller, Mr. Miller and the family as a result of the actions described in your notice of claim.”
Anderson further states in his letter that internal investigations are conducted much differently today than 30 years ago and said the department would be hiring an outside agency to review the department’s policies and procedures.
Now, more details of what happened are being released in a new book, “Hometown Betrayal: A Tragic Story of Secrecy and Sexual Abuse in Mormon Country.”
“The book gets into so much more detail. You can’t read the book without coming away with a better understanding of who Valarie was, the trauma within the family unit itself, and then the details of the cover-up. It’s just much more of a complete story. It’s like one episode vs. five seasons,” Miller said, comparing the 2022 press conference to the book.
A book launch party was held in Salt Lake City Tuesday. Miller and his family attended, as well as several prominent Utahns, including University of Utah Law School professor and former federal judge Paul Cassell, who worked with Miller’s legal team, and Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes.
Valarie Miller was born in 1954 and raised in Clarkston, Cache County. She was first sexually assaulted by two men at knifepoint in 1968 in the loft of a barn as a third man aided in the assault and watched. One of the men was her neighbor and a prominent resident in town, and at the time of the assault, he had just been hired as a UHP trooper.
Both men who allegedly assaulted Miller were never arrested or charged and have since died. The third man is currently serving a long prison sentence in Colorado.
In 1975, Valarie Clark married John Miller and by 1984 they had four children together. But in 1985, one of their daughters was hit by a truck and nearly killed. The emotionally traumatic event caused Valarie Miller to seek therapy. It was during that time when she told her therapist about the abuse that happened when she was a young teen. Miller ended up receiving treatment at a facility in Kansas for a year in 1989.
In 1990, fearing that someone else might be abused, the Millers filed a complaint with the Utah Department of Public Safety alleging that a man who was then a high-ranking member of the UHP was one of the men who sexually assaulted her more than 20 years earlier.
However, after the department determined the allegations to be “not sustained,” John Miller said the residents of Clarkston gossiped and turned on his wife. Her physical and mental health declined rapidly. She died at age 61 on July 7, 2017, from complications of multiple sclerosis, according to her obituary. But those investigating the case say she died “a physically broken and heartbroken woman.”
By releasing “Hometown Betrayal,” the Millers hope to raise awareness and help put an end to generational sexual abuse, and to help change a legal system that presents a lot of legal hurdles for victims of sex abuse.
“I think the hope is that we would more normalize these types of discussions so that you can actually tackle the generational trauma that follows,” Valarie Miller’s daughter, Brooke Miller Jacobs, said when talking about what she hopes will be accomplished with the book. “I just think it’s a really important story to share just given how reluctant people typically are to talk about this.
“To me, it is also really important to have her name cleared,” she continued. “Because when there was the cover-up, they destroyed her reputation. They made up all types of diagnoses that she didn’t have and she had to live the rest of her life bearing that burden that she should never had to in the first place.”
John Miller says what happened to Valarie Miller isn’t exclusive to Utah. But he says in conservative small-town communities, “People trust people. You go to church with somebody or a neighbor you think you’ve known for 20 years in these little communities; there’s more vulnerabilities.”
Miller says while he recognizes the book — which he says is not a happy read — may upset some people. “Unless you create controversy and discussion, there is no change,” he said.
Emily Benedek was selected by Miller to write the book. He said the goal was to “find a female author outside of the state, not familiar with our culture, not familiar with the state, have her come in cold. She could have access to all of my journals, access to the family, and write the story and we’ll see what happens.”
Although Miller said he had editorial control of the book, he doesn’t agree with everything Benedek wrote.
“In general, I’d say I got 90% of what I felt was important. But we didn’t agree on everything. I mean, there were some things that I didn’t think she had right. But you know what? It was her perception and that’s why we hired her,” he said.
The foreword to the book was written by Elizabeth Smart.
“It has now been more than 60 years since Valarie’s abuse. As heartbreaking as it is, we should use her story as a spark for change. Her reality is the norm for so many survivors. We must read these stories, not look away, even if it’s hard. We need to become the safe spaces in which to create healing,” Smart wrote.
All proceeds from the book will go to the Miller family’s newly created nonprofit organization, GenerationALL, aimed at minimizing the generational impact of sexual violence.
Brooke Jacobs says her reading of the first version of the book was “brutal,” taking her eight months to complete it. She said the process of reliving those moments was initially hard for her. But looking back now, she said it did more than just poke an old wound.
“I think it was really healing. I mean, there was definitely some poking of the wounds,” Miller admitted. “Going through this process and remember all the really good things about my mom, not remembering all the traumatic stuff, that was amazing.”
John Miller concurred that he rediscovered good memories during the process of making the book, even though he also found that he still had a lot of emotions that he thought he had stored away.
“My memory of Valarie was more the trauma, the illness, the suicide attempts, the anger. And through this process, I could kind of relive who she was as a young girl — 16, 17 and 18, the early years of our marriage — when she was more healthy. So that’s been a really nice thing because I had kind of forgotten about it. It kind of got buried in all the hard things that we experienced as a family and she particularly experienced as an individual,” he said.
“We hope we can get the story out and open it up so that communities — rather than bury it and worry about how it’s going to affect my congregation or how’s it going to affect my community — are willing to talk about those things, because unless we do, we continue to cover them up.”
