MOM AND GIRL FILE LAWSUIT AGAINST THE LDS CHURCH

An 11-year-old girl and her mother announced Tuesday they are filing a $750 million lawsuit against The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, alleging that it ignores its own guidelines on how to stop continuing child sexual abuse.

Their lawyer, Michael Sullivan, in a National Press Club press conference called to attract national attention, said church leaders knew about sexual abuse of the girl - listed only as "Jane Doe" in complaints that would be filed in West Virginia on Tuesday - and allowed it to continue for five years."We want to make the church change the way it does business. We want them to recognize the present system isn't working," Sullivan said.

Church spokesman Don Le-Fevre said the church had not seen the lawsuit and could not comment specifically on the case. "The church is not in the business of covering up," LeFevre told the Associated Press. "We teach our members to obey the law."

The suit charges that church bishops, stake presidents, church social workers and others knew about abuse by James F. Adams of Beckley, W.Va., beginning after a divorce in 1989, when he confessed it to them after a baby sitter threatened to expose abuse reported by children unless he paid her $20,000.

The suit says church officials helped Adams obtain counseling but did not seek to separate him from his children (which it says church guidelines call for) - and did not report the abuse to state officials as required by West Virginia law.

It said the officials instead ordained Adams as an elder in the church and allowed him to marry in its Washington Temple in April 1990 despite such problems.

The new wife divorced Adams two years later and reported that the children told her Adams was abusing them. Later, the suit says, Adams videotaped himself abusing the children.

After his first wife called police when the second wife told her about the abuse, Adams pleaded guilty to abuse charges and was sentenced to 75 to 187 years in prison.

However, the suit says Adams later was granted a new trial by contending he was influenced by church officials to plead guilty "so as not to embarrass the church" and to suppress evidence.

The suit alleges the church deviated from its "own guidelines for dealing with sex offenders and by suppressing evidence of sexual abuse of and by LDS Church members (and) ratified the father's conduct and granted him tacit approval of his continuing sexual abuse."