Martha Nibley Beck was on Good Morning America yesterday and, when asked about her resentment against Latter-day Saints, Beck replied, astonishingly, that “I love Mormons.” What about the gross inaccuracies in the book that are calculated to make the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints an object of nationwide ridicule? It’s good to know that Beck loves Mormons.
Also, she is setting the record straight about her recovered memories on her website. We’ll see if the Sunstone reviewer of Beck’s book has to read the book a third time now to convince herself that Beck’s claims don’t add up. Nevermind the statements of Beck’s seven siblings and her mother that such activity did not occur in their tiny Provo home. Nevermind also that Beck conveniently left out the episode of her childhood where her father rescued her from being molested by a teenage neighbor boy. There is plenty to impeach this witness, but the American reading public, I am sorry to observe, doesn’t much care about such trivialities if there is a juicy anti-Mormon story to be had in the package of a juicy ritual sexual abuse narrative.
ABEV: a bird's eye view 
you’re right, you’re right you’re right!!!
It’s too bad that the reading (and media) public is so willing to accept anything negative they are willing to “overlook” the actual facts.
The media should take a lesson from Dan Rather.
I read reports of the ABC visit but not the CBS visit. Anyone hear of that one?
The phrase that keeps coming to mind with Beck’s publicity tour is “with friends like these who needs enemies?” But it reminds me of anti-Mormons who spout how much they love us as they try to “save us” all the while providing caricatures and distortions of our beliefs.
Martha Beck keeps talking about “evidence” and how important it is to her. Well its important to me too. If I could, I would ask her to show us evidence of the following:
1. Vaginal scarring. Martha, please show us the complete medical records and provide medical testimony that verifies your scarring establishes that it is not consistent with your childbirthing experiences. Show us the “evidence” that you “had never torn in childbirth.” Identify the obstetrician that diagnosed your “extensive ragged tearing.”
2. Other pelvic trauma. You claim “a university health services intern, after performing a pelvic exam . . . wanted to prescribe birth control pills” for you and “laughed” when you said you were a virgin. Who is this intern? It should be easy enough to provide medical records, and to find and provide the identity of the treating “intern”. Your story, if true, could be so easily confirmed. Why do you not share with us the precious “evidence” you claim to value so highly?
3. Corroboration of any of your claimed “evidence” by any other living soul. You claim “a family member who knew me throughout my childhood and with whom I confided and who has spoken to both my parents many times over the years, corroborated that I have been dealing with these traumas for years.” Identify this person and have them corroborate to us even a single shred of “evidence” for which your tall tales are not the only source.
As preposterous-sounding as many consider Joseph Smith’s “stories” to be, at least he produced named living witnesses willing to corroborate his accounts of supernatural experience with their own honor to the public at large. Tales of paternal sexual abuse are commonplace and widely accepted and believed, yet you have not produced any living person to verify your claims. Why?
In sum, Martha, please, let’s see the “evidence” that you do not have an overactive imagination and have not been caught in a lie too embarrasing to reverse course in, and one that now promises to be quite profitable. We want to see “evidence” that you are not simply making up a series of false tales like the one in your book about musing on the possibility of your therapist being related to Heber J. Grant even though you have never had a therapist with the last name “Grant”.
Good point Peter. We have a “love affair with evidence” too.
Wish you luck with your new job!
Keep up that love affair with evidence.
Beck’s medical records will probably come out in the slander suit that she will fall into with her statements about her family.
Sigh. Her ex-husband disagrees with her, though it was interesting that their marriage broke up over her affair.
John and Jordan,
Spencer here. You may have heard about another claim in Martha Beck’s claim about how the Lee Library purged all references to Sonia Johnson from its materials.
I did a little research on this and posted my findings and thoughts here:
http://www.fairboards.org/index.php?showtopic=7424
Take a look and let me know what you think.
-Spencer Macdonald
Martha has been an unreliable author long before this book. Anyone read “Expecting Adam”? Her whole gimmick in that book is that she is going to tell the entire, unbelievable truth about her miraculous spiritual experiences while pregnant, no matter how it makes her look. Let the chips fall where they may, she will be fully honest. Then she goes on to tell us that she was shocked, shocked to discover as a grad student at Harvard that other students and even professors were faking being knowledgeable, and what a revelation this was for her. I’m sorry, but given her father’s work, she simply can’t pretend this was a brand-new idea for her, one she had never supposed. But, it’s one of her main points of the book, and it wouldn’t be very impressive if it wasn’t her idea.
She mis-represents the church and it’s place in her life as well. She pretends she’s all alone, away from her family, friends, and culture in big bad Boston, and never mentions any contact with the church. She talks about the inspired help she receives from two friends, one of whom she meets at a “cocktail party”. Well, we discussed this in a book club, and one woman in the group grew up friends with one of the Nibley grandchildren, another had been in a ward with one of the ‘inspired friends’. The women were Martha’s visiting teachers, and Martha was apparently her ward’s gospel doctrine teacher at the time. (I know this is unsubstantiated gossip, but I feel confident of the source on the visiting teachers, and I am also confident that Martha was active in her ward at the time.)
Even when the church isn’t the main point of her story, and even when she is claiming to tell the absolute truth, she can’t help but warp things so that neither her family or the church look good. On these topics she is unwilling and unable to be reliable, and she has a history of this beyond her new book.
Shame this woman is trying so hard to make Mormons look bad. She has to much time on her hands. Non of the things she said are even close to being true, this woman is a joke. We all should just laugh at her and move on.
Posted by Matthew Eubanks