We are Nivedhan Singh (age 30) and Eklan Singh (age 22). Our father is Episcopal Church Bishop Prince Singh.

Many people know Prince Singh as a highly charismatic preacher and inspiring leader in the church. Those much closer to our father experience him as a practiced manipulator and a functioning alcoholic who takes his anger out on his family, all while being repeatedly protected by and promoted in the Episcopal Church. In detailed public letters, we have disclosed the physical and emotional abuse experienced by our mother, Roja Singh, and us at the hands of our father. That abuse includes:

• Physical, drunken battery of Nivedhan on a regular basis
• Once waving a kitchen knife at our mother while screaming at her
• Throwing objects at us constantly
• Screaming at us on a daily basis
• Using his financial support and authority as bishop to silence and threaten us

You can read Nivedhan's open letter here, Eklan's open letter here, and Roja's open letter here.

We believe that our father’s role in the church and his upcoming remarriage puts him in a position to harm others. We have yet to see evidence of repentance indicating that he has dealt with the root issues and character flaws that generated decades of abuse. Abuse investigator Wade Mullen notes :“Saying "I'm sorry" while holding up a mirror to reflect all your good intentions, excuses, and justifications is not an apology. Self-promotion disguised as apology is about you, not the other person. The only appropriate mirror is one that reflects all the harm done to another.”

Why now? Now that we are adults with more experience in the world, we realize that the circumstances of our childhood were violent and unusual. Unfortunately, children of abusive parents often have no choice but to normalize their experiences to survive. That normalization began to unravel for us when our parents divorced.

People get divorced all the time, even priests and bishops, but our parents’ divorce process—and especially the public perception of it through our father’s image-management narratives—became tainted almost immediately by our father’s unchecked authority in the church. With the help of official church communication channels, he was able to publish a face-saving, image-managing narrative about how the divorce came to pass, not only violating our privacy but convincing others—including Presiding Bishop Curry—that we should be abandoned by the church in the name of “respecting our privacy.”

Once we disclosed the domestic violence directly to Presiding Bishop Curry and exposed our father’s public facade towards us and our mother regarding the divorce, the Presiding Bishop’s office responded with a substandard process that did not adhere to the Title IV of the Canons of the Episcopal Church. Rather than identifying allegations of decades worth of alcohol-fueled abuse and untruthful statements as Title IV offenses and launching an investigation, we were offered help in a “therapeutic setting” with a non-licensed “counselor” who happened to be a non-denominational clergyperson and close personal friend of our father.

Our father claimed that David Singh, his personal friend, was appointed by the Presiding Bishop as our counselor, but we received no communication from the office of the Presiding Bishop, Bishop Todd Ousley, or other members of the Presiding Bishop’s staff to confirm this or offer us other options. After one failed family counseling session, action halted. Our last communication with Presiding Bishop Curry was our mother’s Zoom call with him in February 2023, in which she shared some of her concerns and offered recommendations for how to care for the families of Bishops in the future. The subsequent silence was deafening.

After we finally went public, six months of inaction was transformed into Title IV action in only six days. That’s why we are coming forward publicly with more details now.

You can read more about this on our timeline page.

1. The deposition of Bishop Prince Singh.
2. A Title IV investigation of Presiding Bishop Michael Curry and Bishop Todd Ousley.
3. TEC has demonstrated that it is incapable of following its own Title IV procedures and is therefore incapable of adequately investigating its own national staff. They have shown a priority of institutional image management in their response to the Singh disclosures and they will continue to do so unless a 3rd party investigatory body (like GRACE or Pellucid ) is hired. Attorney client privilege would need to be waived due to the transactional nature of the hiring, the scope of the investigation would need to be set wide enough to review every Title IV case that PB Curry and Todd Ousley have supervised (at the very least, those involving bishops), and the letter of agreement/contract with the law firm must be published publicly so that the public is fully aware of the investigation parameters and process so that survivors can make an educated decision about whether it is safe and worthwhile for them to participate in the investigation.

We are moving forward with the Title IV complaint process and encourage others to do so. However, if the June 19 letter is any indication, our trust is limited. Given the troubled history of the Diocese of Eastern Michigan with episcopal misconduct, they should be eager to demonstrate that they are following best practices with respect to abuse allegations against their Bishop.

In our view, those diocesan leaders are now complicit in our abuse—what we experienced in the past, as well as the retraumatization and further harm from the response of leadership to our disclosures of abuse. Their complicity has compelled us to take further public action.

Likewise, Presiding Bishop Curry is also responsible for actively mishandling our abuse disclosures by failing to follow the guidelines of the Title IV canons. Curry has known of our suffering for months and has allowed our father undue oversight of the church’s response. Curry has upheld his full support for my father’s recent promotion, increased salary, and his recent engagement to be remarried. Only now—after the release of our letters, including the publication of a letter to Curry urging him to take action—has a Title IV investigation of Prince Singh's abusive history actually been launched.

These facts are not the hallmarks of an institution that is prepared to run a thorough and independent investigation of our claims. They suggest concern for optics and status rather than for survivors. They confirm that this is image management, and not a legitimate investigative process. Todd Ousley’s recusal of his role as Title IV Intake Officer only after we went public indicates that TEC knows that it has failed and is trying to retroactively save face. So far, we have seen no evidence to the contrary.

TEC has demonstrated that it is incapable of following its own Title IV procedures and is therefore incapable of adequately investigating its own national staff. They have shown a priority of institutional image management in their response to the Singh disclosures and they will continue to do so unless 3rd party investigatory body (like GRACE or Pellucid) is hired. Attorney client privilege would need to be waived due to the transactional nature of the hiring, the scope of the investigation would need to be set wide enough to review every Title IV case that PB Curry and Todd Ousley have supervised (at the very least, those involving bishops), and the letter of agreement/contract with the law firm must be published publicly so that the public is fully aware of the investigation parameters and process so that survivors can make an educated decision about whether it is safe and worthwhile for them to participate in the investigation.

Read the letters (Nivedhan's letter, Eklan's letter, and Roja's letter) closely, not as an Episcopalian, but as someone scrutinizing a potential abuser. You can see bold efforts to misdirect attention around this remarriage. Note the manipulative attempts to prey on your empathy, citing privacy and embarrassment. Consider the attempt to dismiss the courage it took for us to finally speak out with reductive statements like “divorce is messy.” This is a blatant attempt to silence us, which in turn will silence other domestic abuse survivors.

We are not bishops. We do not have a team of lawyers and the full support of a centuries-old institution—or an Episcopal Church communications team to hit hundreds of thousands of inboxes with the press of a button. TEC has chosen the side of the abuser, but we still have a voice. The appropriate time to call for an investigation into a bishop is when you learn from multiple adult survivors that this bishop has a prolonged pattern of abuse—not six months later. Not after a farcical mediation process, unlicensed “counseling,”and after details are posted on Facebook. TEC’s inaction has caused us, as survivors, to lose trust with the church’s process and to see public calls for accountability as the only way forward.

We will not stay silent.

Yes, although it is important to note that Bishop Stephan Lane (Provisional Bishop of Rochester) had already forwarded Nivedhan's complaint to the Title IV intake officer for Bishops on June 16th, 2023. In a June 19, 2023 letter to the Episcopal Dioceses of Eastern and Western Michigan, our father announced that he had called for a disciplinary investigation into himself, under the Episcopal Church’s Title IV procedures. However, anyone reading the letter should be left with substantial doubt about the independence and validity of that investigation. The letter also demonstrates that our father continues to emotionally abuse us in public even as he claims to be seeking therapeutic help for his problems.

There are several problems with this letter that we must highlight:

• Our father positions himself as a valid source of information about this process and its progress: “I will continue to be in conversation with the Presiding Bishop and our diocesan leaders to keep them apprised of this process and to check in along the way.”
• It is inappropriate for someone under investigation of domestic abuse to be responsible for providing updates to anyone about the progress of that investigation. Our father is, in fact, the last person who should be in conversation with Presiding Bishop Curry, diocesan leadership, and others about the process. That must be the charge of an independent investigator.
• Our father minimizes our allegations as that of a “family conflict” related to “the lack of privacy afforded to a family when one parent is a bishop.”
• Domestic abuse is not only a violation of ordination vows and the baptismal covenant, it is a crime and a sin. We have not accused our father of being a bishop who struggled to parent us due to the circumstances of his job. We have disclosed that he physically hit and verbally abused us throughout our childhoods.
• Our father publicly discloses details related to our mental and physical health as a means of speaking for us: “My older son was willing to do one therapy session before requesting to discontinue due to his tinnitus. My younger son said he was not ready to do this work.”
• It is inappropriate for anyone to discuss the mental and physical health of their family members in a public venue without consent. In this case, our father used his platform as a bishop to engage in victim-blaming and unethical medical disclosures. We gave him no permission to disclose private details about our health to anyone, let alone a public church audience. There is a key difference between an individual coming forward about legitimate abuse claims on social media, and a Bishop abusing his position of power to disclose the private health information of his own son on a religious platform.
• He describes our allegations as “serious” but then trivializes them by announcing his plans to take time off in response: “The Presiding Bishop’s Office has not called for a suspension or restriction on ministry. I will, however, take a week’s break to do the clinical evaluation, and will go on a reflective retreat during the week of July 4th.”
• It is unclear how a week in clinical evaluation and another week in “reflective retreat” is an appropriate response to allegations of physical and emotional abuse. Presiding Bishop Curry’s lack of action is not an indication of our father’s innocence so much as a symptom of institutional incompetence, but our father uses this fact to shield himself from what would have been appropriate: an immediate suspension of his ministry while an independent investigator works to determine if our claims are factual. Even if our allegations were untrue—and they are true—their gravity warrants suspension and investigation.

It is our mission to call for Provisional Bishop Prince Singh to be deposed and for a Title IV investigation into Presiding Bishop Michael Curry, and Bishop Todd Ousely for this gross negligence and victim blaming, and to protect current and future domestic violence survivors from forced silencing and retraumatization by The Episcopal Church. This investigation should be overseen by a 3rd party investigatory body, not by ordained TEC staff. If you are an Episcopalian who believes our story, we ask that you stop donating financially to a church that has repeatedly demonstrated that it is complicit with domestic abuse. Our case has been mishandled. It’s time for that to change, and for justice to emerge.

You can start by reading our letters and believing us. We seek to bring light to abuse we experienced in the hopes that it will help others inside and outside of the church, and that the church will take action to ensure our father cannot harm others while wearing a collar.

We have nothing to gain from going public. If anything, we stand to lose our inheritance. We want no part of this blood money, earned at the expense of the physical and emotional safety of women and children. Going through this process has been incredibly retraumatizing and embarrassing for us personally.

You can help by critically evaluating the narrative that would paint us as petulant boys afraid of our father’s new relationship and naïve to the nature of divorce—precisely what our father attempted to do in a video response on June 16, 2023. We are adults of 30 and 22 years. We do not speak from naivety. We speak the truth.

You can help by joining in our call for accountability. We have taken the difficult step of seeking accountability and now have enough distance from our father that we can hold him accountable without destroying ourselves. We believe that he is unfit for his office and that the same character traits that led him to abuse his power at home will also bring destruction in his capacity as bishop and to his new family. The behavioral patterns he manifested consistently in our lives do not just go away with surface displays of “going to therapy” or “saying sorry” that fail to address the roots of these pathological behaviors.

We openly ask Presiding Bishop Curry: What level of alcohol-fueled domestic abuse is acceptable in the House of Bishops? Precisely how much hitting and screaming by a Bishop does it take to prompt an investigation instead of a therapeutic process led by an abuser’s friend? And are clergy families of color not entitled to a bare minimum of institutional accountability because we are held to lower moral standards?

And we ask the same of you. Is this acceptable in your church?

Thank you for hearing our stories. Diligent documentation can be found here.