By Annelise Hanshaw
Jane Doe, who is concealing her name because of the sensitive nature of the allegations, filed the lawsuit Monday in Taney County Circuit Court. She is represented by the same attorneys who represented Logan Yandell, another survivor of Newman’s abuse.
Newman worked for the Branson-based Christian summer camp for over two decades. He was director of Kanakuk’s “K-Kountry” camp for ages 6 to 11 in 2009 before he was fired and later convicted of sexual abuse. Newman initially pleaded guilty to seven counts of sexual abuse, but the case’s prosecutor estimated the number of survivors to be in the hundreds.
Doe was nine years old when she attended K-Kountry in 2008. She was placed in a cabin with older girls and was “bullied” and “taunted,” according to the lawsuit.
She met Newman, who began to “isolate her away from other campers.” He forced Doe into sexual acts, the lawsuit alleges, and told her “if she didn’t do such acts or (if she) said anything to anyone, she would not get to go home.”
Doe repressed what happened until 2024, when the memories came back. She began to question camp leadership’s responsibility in causing “severe emotional trauma.”
The timing of the discovery is important in personal injury claims. Missouri law limits claims to five years from the incident or five years from discovery of the injury, in some cases.
A Christian County Circuit Court judge ruled against Yandell in January in a fraud case he brought against Kanakuk alleged the camp’s CEO lied to his parents and pushed them to sign a settlement and non-disclosure agreement for $250,000 that they otherwise would have continued to fight. The judge ruled Yandell should have known about the camp’s misstatements more than five years prior to his lawsuit.
Newman’s abuse has been well documented, with reports in local and national news outlets and a page on Kanankuk’s website acknowledging the abuse and naming Newman a “master of deception.”
But according to Doe’s lawsuit, Kanakuk leaders knew about Newman’s misdeeds years before she attended camp. Parents had told the camp as far back as 1999 that Newman was behaving inappropriately, such as swimming and four-wheeling nude.
Years prior to Doe’s abuse, Newman’s supervisor recommended that he be fired, the lawsuit says. Instead, he was promoted in 2005.
In 2006, Kanakuk CEO Joe White learned that Newman was “ministering” to children in the evenings in his hot tub, the lawsuit states.
“White felt this was enough of a problem to issue a corrective action. The correction, however, was not to prohibit hot tub encounters, but merely an encouragement to Newman to assess the amount of time he was spending with his family,” says the lawsuit.
White and the camp had a duty to protect campers after repeated reports of sexual abuse, Doe’s attorney Reed Martens argues.
“Despite having explicit knowledge of the particular sexual danger Newman posed to (Doe) prior to the onset of his abuse,” Martens wrote, “Kanakuk defendants did nothing to supervise Newman’s interactions with (Doe), nothing to control Newman and nothing to protect (Doe).”
Kanakuk did not respond to a request for comment.
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