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Candidates for three other aldermanic seats are running unopposed.

A Republican state senator spent hours Wednesday trying to block the appointment of his former colleague to a county office over a grudge that goes back more than seven years.  Shortly after 1 a.m., the filibuster sputtered and the appointment was confirmed by the Missouri Senate. State Sen. Mike Moon, an Ash Grove Republican, sought […]

The House Ethics Committee found state Rep. Justin Sparks failed to make proper disclosures about a conflict of interest in an appropriation bill.

ST. LOUIS - A break from the rain and active weather to start our Thursday, but the cold front that led to the severe and tornadic storms Wednesday afternoon will stall out to the south. That will lead us to our next big weather concern, flooding rains. Several rounds of heavy rain are expected Thursday [...]

A Bond County woman was on her way down to the basement when a tornado struck her home.

by Jessica Schreifels, The Salt Lake Tribune

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Salt Lake Tribune. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

The last time Sam met with his therapist, Scott Owen, the session was nothing more than an hour of Owen sexually abusing him, he told a Provo, Utah, courtroom this week. Sam remembers sitting in his car afterward, screaming as loud as he could.

“I could feel him all over my skin,” he said. “I could not believe this was happening.”

It was October 2017, and Sam had been seeing Owen for therapy for more than a year. A faithful member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he was struggling with what he called “unwanted same-sex attraction.” Owen was a high-ranking leader in the LDS Church at that time, and Sam said Owen assured him that he had helped more than 200 men who felt similarly.

Instead, he said, Owen “meticulously leveraged” his two roles as a therapist and a church leader to assure him that the sexual touching during their sessions was key to helping him heal, learn how to accept intimacy and grow closer to God.

“He exploited my trust, he weaponized my faith and dismantled my confidence,” Sam told the courtroom. “What he did was not just unethical. It was calculated, predatory and destructive.”

Police began investigating Owen in 2023 only after The Salt Lake Tribune and ProPublica reported on a range of sex abuse allegations against Owen, who had built a reputation over his 20-year therapy career as a specialist who could help gay men who were members of the LDS Church. Some of the men who spoke to The Tribune said their bishop in the faith referred them to Owen and used church funds to pay for sessions where Owen allegedly also touched them inappropriately.

Austin Millet at his home in Oregon. Millet is one of several men who told The Salt Lake Tribune and ProPublica that Owen abused them during sessions paid for with funds from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. (Amanda Lucier for ProPublica)

In February, Owen pleaded guilty to three charges, admitting he sexually abused Sam and a second patient who also said he sought Owen’s help because he was struggling with his sexuality and Latter-day Saints faith. Owen also pleaded no contest in another case, saying prosecutors likely had enough evidence to convict him at a trial on an allegation that he had groped a young girl during a therapy session.

But the number of people who say that Owen harmed them is much larger — and they filled a Provo courtroom on Monday as Owen was sentenced to spend at least 15 years in prison.

One by one, they stood at a podium in court and told Owen how he had hurt them. Most were his patients, like Sam, a pseudonym to protect his identity from his community.

One man told the court Owen had abused him when Owen was a leader of a young men’s group organized by the LDS Church.

“He had sleepovers at his house,” Mike Bahr said. “I was there once, and I have lived in a nightmare since.”

Also speaking were family members of a man who had died by suicide, including his brother who said his sibling disclosed to him that Owen had abused him just days before he took his life.

And there was one of Owen’s own family members, his cousin, who alleges that Owen molested him on a family trip when he was a kid. After becoming more public with his own abuse allegations several years ago, James Cooper has worked to gather others who say his cousin victimized them.

James Cooper speaks during Owen’s sentencing hearing. Cooper is Owen’s cousin and alleges the man abused him when he was a child. (Francisco Kjolseth/The Salt Lake Tribune)

He spoke about the dynamics that allowed Owen to hurt others for so long without repercussions.

“Certainly, we know how charismatic he is, and what it’s like to be a victim of sexual assault. The shame you carry. The guilt you carry,” he said. “The fear of Scott. The fear of not being accepted by your family, your society, your church. All those things are enormous factors.”

One woman spoke about Owen touching her inappropriately during therapy when she was 13 years old, in 2007. During the hearing, the only woman to have publicly accused him said Owen had made her feel like something was wrong with her. Now, she added, “He no longer holds power over me.”

When Owen, 66, was given a chance to speak, he said there was no excuse or rationale for what he had done.

“I am so sorry,” he said. “All I have to offer is what’s left of my life. And I hope that in offering those years, justice will have been met in some small fashion, and those who I have hurt can disconnect from me and move forward with their healing.”

Defense attorney Earl Xaiz said Owen did not want leniency from the judge but mentioned in court that his client had been sexually abused himself as a child and had struggled with his sexuality.

Fourth District Judge Kraig Powell sentenced Owen on Monday to 15 years to life in prison. Given Owen’s age and the nature of his crimes, both prosecutors and the defense agreed it is likely he will spend the rest of his life in prison.

Powell became emotional as he handed down the sentence, telling Owen that he harmed not only those who spoke publicly on Monday, but all of those therapists and church leaders who are ethical and working to help people.

“Thousands and thousands of these people, I fear, will be affected by this terrible, abhorrent case,” the judge said.

Owen was sentenced to prison after he admitted he sexually abused patients during sessions. (Francisco Kjolseth/The Salt Lake Tribune)

While Owen gave up his therapy license in 2018 after several patients complained to state licensors that he had touched them inappropriately, the allegations were never investigated by the police and were not widely known.

Under a negotiated settlement with Utah’s licensing division, Owen was able to surrender his license without admitting to any inappropriate conduct, and the sexual nature of his patients’ allegations is not referenced in the documents he signed when he gave up his license. He continued to have an active role in his therapy business, Canyon Counseling, until The Tribune and ProPublica published their investigation.

Police interviewed more than a dozen former patients of Owen’s, all of whom reported that he touched them in ways they felt were inappropriate during therapy sessions. But Owen faced charges in connection with only three patients, because the type of touching that the other men alleged fell under parts of the criminal code that had a shorter window of time for prosecutors to file a case, called the statute of limitations. The crimes that Owen was charged with are all felonies that have no statute of limitations.

Both state licensors and local leaders in the LDS Church knew of inappropriate touching allegations against Owen as early as 2016, reporting by The Tribune and ProPublica showed, but neither would say whether they ever reported Owen to the police.

The church said in response to that reporting that it takes all matters of sexual misconduct seriously, and that in 2019 it confidentially annotated internal records to alert bishops that Owen’s conduct had threatened the well-being of other people or the church.

The church also said it has no process in place to vet the therapists its church leaders recommend and pay for using member donations. It is up to individual members, a church spokesperson has said, to “make their own decisions” about whether to see a specific therapist that their bishop recommends.

Michael, a former patient of Owen’s who agreed to be photographed but asked to be identified by only his first name, looks at his wife while speaking in court about the inappropriate touching he said happened in therapy sessions. (Francisco Kjolseth/The Salt Lake Tribune)

For some who accused Owen of abuse, Monday’s sentencing was the only chance they had to address Owen because charges could not be brought in their cases. That includes Michael, who asked to be identified by only his first name. He said he saw Owen for therapy on and off for about a decade, starting when he was 14. He read a letter to his younger self in court on Monday.

“I just learned on Thursday that we are beyond our legal opportunity to fix this problem,” he said. “And it broke my heart to learn that I can’t pursue a court case for you. … You’ll have to be strong. It’s going to be so hard, but you’re going to make it through.”

Editor’s note: Sam is identified only by a pseudonym because he requested anonymity. We have granted this request because of the risk to his standing in his community. The Salt Lake Tribune and ProPublica typically use sources’ full names in stories. But sometimes that isn’t possible, and we consider other approaches. That often takes the form of initials or middle names. In this case, we felt that we couldn’t fully protect our source by those means. We know his full name and have corroborated his accounts in documents and through interviews with others.

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band guitarist Nils Lofgren is giving fans a chance to own some of his personal equipment. The Rock & Roll Hall of Famer is…

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Republicans want to expand the CRA into much of what the executive branch does. They may live to regret that.

DOGE is not about waste and efficiency—it’s about privatization.

by Alec MacGillis

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

The first time I saw Andrew Rabinowitz, it was in April 2017 at Baltimore District Court, where he was representing a property management company owned by the family of Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law. That day, the company had three cases against tenants at Dutch Village, one of the many large apartment complexes the Kushner Companies owned in the Baltimore area.

One tenant was a Morgan State University student facing struggles typical of residents in the Kushner complexes. She had given notice that she was moving at the end of March, having tired of the perpetually clogged toilet and the ceiling leak in her closet. But when she paid March rent via the automated system tenants had to use, the money somehow ended up with an adjacent Kushner complex, and the company started eviction proceedings — even though she had already signaled her intent to leave a few weeks later.

A sheriff’s deputy changed the locks on her door when she was out of town, preventing her from moving her things out. She got her keys back, but by then she no longer had access to a moving truck. The company was also after her for April’s rent, despite the fact that it had physically barred her from being able to move before April.

In court, Rabinowitz, a 33-year-old in a jacket and tie, spoke to the judge in a polished, even-keeled tone, in contrast to the student, who grew more agitated as the hearing went on. The judge sided with Rabinowitz, ordering the student to pay $471.23 for part of April’s rent.

When I approached Rabinowitz as he was leaving the courthouse, to ask about the company’s aggressive approach, he looked startled. “What’s the article regarding?” he said. “I’m not inclined to give a statement.”

The next day, he was back in court to defend the company against the student’s criminal complaint over the unfounded eviction. This time, he offered a deal: He agreed to let her stay, rent-free, until the end of May to give her time to move out, as long as she paid for April. Afterward, she asked Rabinowitz if he could make sure that the hot water would be turned back on. “I’m just the attorney,” he demurred. (The hot water stayed off.)

The next time I saw Rabinowitz in court was in February, almost eight years later. Kushner’s father-in-law was back in the White House. But Rabinowitz’s situation had changed. He was no longer demanding payment from beleaguered tenants. Instead, he was defending them.

I had learned of his dramatic career shift when I ran into him once in downtown Baltimore. But I needed to see it to believe it. So I tracked him down one midday at the Landlord and Tenant Branch of the District of Columbia Courts, where he now spends his days. As I spotted him, he was in a hallway speaking to a fretful older man who was seeking assistance. “Give me four minutes. Let me just go check and see if I can serve you,” Rabinowitz said, before ducking into the office of his new employer, Rising for Justice, a nonprofit that provides free legal representation to low-income tenants facing eviction.

A moment later, after attending to the man, Rabinowitz came over to say hello. He still wore a tie, but now had long hair to go along with it. He was looking far less anxious than he had when I approached him back at the Baltimore courthouse. In fact, he was positively glowing.

So much has changed in this country and the world since 2017 — much of it, arguably, not for the better. I wanted to know: What had happened with Rabinowitz?

American culture is rife with glamorous depictions of high-stakes, high-paying Big Law firms, from “L.A. Law” to “Michael Clayton” to “Suits.” But there is a humbler realm more typically glimpsed via highway billboards and subway ads. This is the level at which millions of people encounter the justice system, for better or worse.

And this is the corner through which Rabinowitz entered the profession. He grew up in Ellicott City, Maryland, outside Baltimore. His mother was dean of admissions at the University of Maryland School of Nursing; his father was chief of social work at the Armed Forces Retirement Home in Washington. He attended Frostburg State University, in western Maryland. Interested in the law, he spent a couple years as a paralegal before heading to law school at Barry University in Orlando, Florida.

His aspiration was to become a criminal defense attorney, but the job he found after getting his degree was with Barry Glazer, a colorful Baltimore personal injury lawyer known for attention-getting ads. One script went like this: “I am sick and tired of these insurance companies telling you what good neighbors they are and how you’re in such good hands. If your car is totaled and you owe more than it’s worth, they give you the lesser amount and you continue to pay a finance company the difference. Don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining.” Under pressure from the Bar Association, Glazer changed “pee” to “urinate.”

It was an eye-opening experience, the first time Rabinowitz had come into regular contact with people on the lower rungs of the social ladder — people with big problems but unable to afford big firms. He left after a couple years for a small defense practice because he wanted to pursue his original aspiration. This proved disappointing. Criminal law, he found, turned out to be less a stirring quest for justice and more an exercise in squeezing fees out of poor clients in desperate circumstances.

Rabinowitz started looking around again, in 2015, and joined Jeffrey Tapper, whose small firm in the Baltimore suburb of Owings Mills specialized in representing landlords large and small as they pursued tenants.

At first, Rabinowitz liked the work. Despite his natural introversion, he had come to enjoy being in court, in front of a judge. And in this new job, he was in court a lot — as many as 10 hearings per day.

He prided himself on being able to negotiate settlements, getting landlords to accept less than what they believed they were owed and working out payment plans with tenants. This was what he recalled of the case where I had first met him — that he had been able to work out a deal with the college student to give her an extra month to move out of the Kushner unit.

He even gave some tenants his phone number, urging them to call if they ended up falling behind again, so they could work something out before it landed them back in court. He wasn’t really sure what to think when, one day, he heard a judge say to a tenant, “Step into the hallway with Mr. Rabinowitz. He’s the fairest debt collector in town.”

To many people, “fairest debt collector” sounds about as noble as “kindest executioner.” But the label was apt. A couple of times, he appeared opposite Joe Mack, a tenant’s rights attorney whom he had gone to camp with as a kid. Mack recalled Rabinowitz persuading a judge that Mack’s client had failed to provide enough notice before breaking a lease and thus owed the landlord a sizable sum. Making the loss easier to take, Mack said, was that Rabinowitz had been respectful in the courtroom. “I can imagine,” Mack added, “that some other things he was doing might have been rougher.”

My eventual 2017 article laid bare the harsher reality of many of the cases involving the Kushner complexes. The company pursued one woman for several years for about $3,000, eventually having her wages garnished, even though she had received written permission to break her lease. A second woman ended up in court after moving out from a unit with maggots coming out of the living-room carpet and raw sewage flowing out of the kitchen sink. Yet another was pursued for about $4,000 even though she had written permission to move out of a unit with black mold.

After the article appeared, the Maryland attorney general filed suit against the Kushner company, which in 2022 settled with the state for $3.25 million, though the company did not acknowledge wrongdoing. In March, a group of former tenants won class-action status in their own lawsuit against the company. The company, which denied wrongdoing in the class-action case, did not respond to a request for an interview for this article. Over the years, the company has sold most of the properties ProPublica originally reported on.

Back in 2017, a company executive had responded to questions by saying that it had a “fiduciary obligation” to its investment partners to collect as much revenue as possible from tenants, and that its practices in doing so were “consistent with industry standards.”

Rabinowitz offers a similar defense. The Kushner approach was not noticeably different from other big landlords, he said: “They were all the same.” He had no particular feelings for the company itself, and he had never actually met Kushner or any other executives. “They’re so disconnected from the property,” Rabinowitz told me. “It’s just money for them.” But he was protective of his boss, Tapper, who he felt had treated him fairly. (Tapper died last year.)

Rabinowitz himself had not set foot inside the Kushner complexes. The sorts of poor upkeep described in the article did not figure much in the cases, he said. “I know most people wouldn’t want to live in housing like that,” he said, “but I remember driving past those communities and I don’t remember being like, ‘Those were horrible places.’”

He insists he did not regret his years working for the Kushners and other landlords. There was a system in place, and he had played a part in that system. “I honestly felt that if every attorney could have had the same philosophy and treated people fair and put people in the position to take control of their life,” he said, “then debt collectors wouldn’t be such bad people. They’d be assistants to people paying off their debts.”

Still, the article instilled an unease that only grew with time. He was almost always facing off against people who lacked their own attorney, in a state with laws that were unusually favorable to landlords. “It was like a heavyweight sparring featherweights over and over again,” he said. “That’s just not satisfying.”

His longtime partner started to notice that he was agitated on nights before trials; sometimes he’d even mutter things like “objection!” in his sleep. “She could tell my mind was in court, constantly,” he said. To try and escape the burden, he went whitewater kayaking on weekends.

Around this time, his parents were nearing retirement. Accolades poured in from people they had served over the years, at the nursing schools and the retirement home. One man was wheeled in on his hospital bed to thank Rabinowitz’s father. “When I saw all the people who came out, I realized they had so much impact on so many people’s lives,” Rabinowitz said. He paused. “And I’m just putting money into rich people’s pockets.”

Then came the coronavirus pandemic. Maryland suspended evictions in March 2020, and, when the moratorium ended in 2021, it passed a law establishing (and funding) the right to an attorney for any tenant facing eviction.

Rabinowitz saw his chance. He applied for an entry-level opening in the Baltimore County office of Maryland Legal Aid. The organization recognized his experience and urged him to apply to be the supervisor of a staff of 20 in its newly expanded Baltimore City housing office. The job came with a “fairly significant” drop in pay, but he took it.

It wasn’t easy telling Tapper, who had recently offered to make him a partner in the firm before he retired. But Tapper understood. “I went to the enemy, on the one hand,” Rabinowitz said. “On the other hand, he was proud.”

The transition was awkward at first. Rabinowitz and his new colleagues at Legal Aid were occasionally facing off against a former colleague. And he could tell that some of his new colleagues were initially wary. After all, while many lawyers move from public-service roles to private practice, precious few head in the other direction. “People wanted to know if I was for real,” he said.

A few years later, Rabinowitz made his way to Rising for Justice, as director of the organization’s Tenant Justice Program. He now oversees four staff attorneys and a paralegal while supervising about nine law students from Georgetown University and the University of the District of Columbia.

It means a near-daily rail commute from Baltimore. But he likes working in the Washington court, which has such a nonconfrontational vibe that it makes do without bailiffs. The organization’s clients are grateful for the assistance, and he likes that it includes a social-service branch to help people find nonlegal help.

The law students assigned to him were surprised when they learned that their supervisor had once been on the other side. But they said it came in handy, too. “We get very emotional. It’s easy to get frustrated for your clients and wrapped up and involved,” said Savannah Myers, a Georgetown student, “and Drew has the unique perspective to say, ‘OK, well, this is what’s happening on your end, here’s probably what’s happening on the other end and here’s how you can proceed in the best way to help your client within the legal system.’”

One recent day, I watched in court as an older Ethiopian woman faced off against a landlord who was demanding back rent that she owed after having lost her job. The woman, who was using a walker, had an interpreter to assist her but no attorney. She tried to argue that the debt should be lowered because of a broken air conditioner and a problem with vermin in the rental.

After the judge, Sherry Trafford, ordered her to make monthly payments of $2,989 to the landlord, she also gently suggested that she seek out help from Rising for Justice in advance of the next hearing on her case.

“Where are they?” said the woman.

“It’s at the end of this hallway,” said Trafford.

The woman made her way slowly down, and it so happened that the person manning the intake desk at that moment was Andrew Rabinowitz. He welcomed her. “Do you have some court paperwork?” he asked through the interpreter, and then came back with a law student to assist her.

Later, Rabinowitz told me that it was poor housing conditions like the ones the woman was dealing with that were his ultimate goad these days. “That’s what motivates me,” he said. “I want people to have clean housing like mine.” Why had those conditions not registered so much with him back when he was on the other side? “I guess that stuff didn’t really get to me,” he said.

I was struck again by Rabinowitz’s reluctance to judge his earlier self. But there was no obscuring one effect of his new role. “I sleep well,” he said.

Colorado’s Democratic legislature is passing a bill to make worker organizations more feasible. But will the Democratic governor sign it?

Climate change is driving an explosion in dengue cases. Studying that connection is about to get much harder.

Students have big feelings about climate change. Most teachers don’t know how to help.

Just got done filling out your personal property tax forms this year? Today’s process likely has you thinking about motor vehicles, boats, and business equipment. Some now-obsolete Missouri personal property taxes may surprise you. Watches were among the earliest items subject to personal property tax in Missouri. Gottfried Duden, a German who lived in Missouri …

Continue reading "Obsolete Missouri Taxes: Watches"

Claudia Waller of Festus, MO joined the Real Rock Army today

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From CPWR – Center for Construction Research and Training:  As labor shortages continue in construction, it becomes even more important for the industry to monitor its number of aging workers. These workers may need additional support to stay in their jobs and/or may be considering retirement. Since 2015, the average age of workers in construction […]

From St. Louis Business Journal: Washington University is increasing its tuition price and considering changes to construction and hiring, as it remains uncertain about its standing with federal funding under the Trump administration. The per-year tuition cost for WashU students will rise more than $3,000 to $68,240 in the 2025-2026 academic year, from the current $64,500, Provost […]

From Senator Josh Hawley:  On April 1st U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) announced that he will introduce legislation to fully fund the replacement of all aging military family housing at Fort Leonard Wood. The bill comes after Hawley has already secured $113.5 million in federal funding for Fort Leonard Wood through FY2023 and FY2024 appropriations. Construction on […]

From Construction Dive:  St. Louis-based McCarthy Building Cos. has completed construction of the $650 million Houston Methodist Cypress Hospital campus, according to a March 31 news release. The structure is the builder’s ninth completed hospital project in the greater Houston area. The 570,000-square-foot, seven-story hospital encompasses 100 licensed beds, nine operating rooms and nine imaging modalities, […]