This is the second in a series of stories about sexual abuse that took place within churches affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention. A recent independent report highlighted many cases.
One local family has been hit particularly hard by a new report concerning sexual abuse by clergy in churches affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention.
The report also maintains that some senior convention staffers knew what was happening and did little to discipline the abusers – a scenario Aldwin Yarborough knows too well.
Yarborough says he finally feels some degree of closure, but he added that he and his family will never get over the betrayal by Augusta church leaders who allowed a pedophile to have contact with children and then protected him in order to spare the church’s reputation.
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Yarborough and his family were longtime members of First Baptist Church of Augusta from the 1970s through the 1990s. Yarborough’s son, Mark Yarborough, was an enthusiastic member of the church’s youth program, he said.
At the time, a man by the name of Robert Dorsett was a youth minister and training director at First Baptist Church, and he coordinated many of the activities for boys. According to Aldwin Yarborough, Dorsett became a trusted family friend.
“He was nice and charismatic, and we all really liked him. We invited him to our home for Thanksgiving dinner,” Aldwin Yarborough said.
Unbeknownst to anyone, however, Dorsett was slowly grooming a young Mark Yarborough and many of his friends to become victims of Dorsett. The former minister would admit in court decades later that he plied the boys with alcohol, instigated “shaving cream” fights in the showers and provided them with pornography before beginning to sexually assault them.
According to Dr. Jody Frey, a veteran clinical psychologist, what happened to Mark Yarborough and his friends is a textbook case of how child predators operate.
“These are smart people; they start out with things that seem innocent and then slowly escalate it further and further. By the time the sexual assaults actually happen, the kids are confused and not able to fully grasp what is happening to them. They feel they can’t tell anyone out of shame,” Frey said.
As he matured, Mark Yarborough harbored that deep, dark secret until well into adulthood when he finally disclosed to his father what had happened to him and admitted that the abuse resulted in deep depression.
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Upon learning of the assaults, Aldwin Yarborough did what any good father would do. He went straight to leaders of his church at the time, but he was rebuffed. Dorsett had been already allowed to quietly resign and move to Aiken, where he later admitted in court that the abuse against young boys continued.
Aldwin Yarborough then went to the Richmond County Sheriff’s Office to report the abuse but was told it had been seven years, and there was a statute of limitations that prevented them from taking action. Knowing that Dorsett was now living in Aiken, Yarborough took the extra step to alert the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division about the predator in their midst.
Meanwhile, Mark Yarborough attempted to control his pain by dedicating his life to helping children. He graduated with a biology degree from Georgia Tech, graduated medical school at Emory University and landed a residency at the prestigious New York Presbyterian Hospital.
However, despite his attempts to put the childhood abuse behind him, Mark Yarborough still experienced crushing depression and continued to see a therapist.
“I fully believe that Mark ended up on his career path as a way to cope with what had happened to him by helping children,” Aldwin Yarborough said.
In 1998, when Mark Yarborough was working on a fellowship in child psychiatry through New York Presbyterian Hospital, Dorsett was finally arrested after assaulting a child who lived in his neighborhood.
After the arrest, scores of victims began coming forward, and it was then that officials realized they had a serial predator in custody.
As Dorsett’s trial neared, Mark Yarborough gave a deposition and agreed to testify against his attacker.
However, two weeks prior to the trial, Mark Yarborough took his own life. He was only 30 years old.
“He was supposed to meet some friends in Martha’s Vineyard for a short vacation, and he never showed up. His body was later recovered in a hotel room where he had died,” Aldwin Yarborough said.
Frey says that Yarborough’s death doesn’t surprise him as many victims find themselves in a place where they cannot any longer handle the pain.
“Many suicides are the person lashing out at the ones around them or attempting to make a statement, but the research shows that is not the case with child sexual abuse survivers. For them, they simply reach a point where they feel it is the only option to make the pain go away,” Frey said.
Aldwin Yarborough and his daughter Lora Baxley would testify in Mark Yarborough’s place, and Dorsett, who was 65 at the time, was sentenced to 30 years in prison. Dorsett pled guilty to 15 counts of aggravated sexual assault against a minor. He admitted to abusing seven children, but there were others, including Mark Yarborough.
However, the nightmare would not end there for the Yarborough family. Once Dorsett was eligible for parole, the family began having to travel to Columbia every two years to try and keep the predator behind bars.
“We went there to the prison every two years, and thank God we didn’t have to sit in the same room with him. He was just a face on a TV monitor,” Baxley said.
Dorsett was eventually paroled and moved to Greenville, S.C., where he died in 2020.
Meanwhile, the major barrier that prevented Dorsett from being prosecuted much earlier for his crimes, the seven-year statute of limitations, was overturned in the state of Georgia in 2011. The legislature voted almost unanimously on a reform package that eliminated the statute of limitations.
Scott Hudson is the senior reporter for The Augusta Press. Reach him at scott@theaugustapress.com
