Education · Denver, CO Metro · September 10, 2026
Lawsuit: Denver Lutheran school dismissed 13-year-old's assault report, later moved assets
What Alinsky tactic is being used
2 of the thirteen rules are in play here — campaigns rarely run just one.
Rule 4
“Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.”
The lawsuit and the press coverage work by measuring the church against its own stated book: a Christian school's promise of care for children, and a pastor's ordinary duty to report. The reported line from Pastor Farhat — "I knew it was a lie so I wanted to squash it right away" — plus the allegation that the music director kept working until police were involved, and that the congregation held no sexual-abuse liability insurance while conveying $29.3 million in property for $10, is the gap being pressed. The church's letter to member families denies the allegations but reportedly says nothing about the transfer, which widens rather than closes the gap.
Counter-Rule 4 · Radical Integrity
Close the gap between stated values and actual practice before anyone else finds it. This tactic only works where the gap is real.
Close your own gap this month before anyone measures it: ask for your congregation's written child-protection policy, its number, and the date the board adopted it, and read it against what actually happens on a Sunday — is any adult ever alone with a child, are background checks current, does the abuse-reporting step name the Colorado hotline and a person responsible for calling. Where practice does not match the document, say so in writing to the board and ask for it to be fixed and minuted. Refuse to sign or circulate any statement of denial about your own church that you have not personally verified from records.
Rule 13
“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”
The mechanism the complaint describes is isolation of one person: a 13-year-old is singled out, her parents are told she is lying, and she is pressured to recant — one child set against the institution's leadership, with no one standing beside her. Freezing the dispute on the credibility of a single girl is what allowed the adult in question to keep working, according to the suit.
Counter-Rule 13 · Radical Solidarity
Stand publicly with whoever has been singled out. Isolation is the whole mechanism; refusing it disarms the tactic.
Solidarity here is procedural, not emotional. Ask your leadership to name in policy a designated child-safety contact who is not the accused person's supervisor, and to require that any child or parent making a report be accompanied and that the outside call — county human services or the state hotline, 1-844-CO-4-KIDS — be made regardless of internal judgment about credibility. If a family in your congregation ever reports, go with them, write down dates and names the same day, and refuse to participate in any conversation whose purpose is to get a child to take it back.
Chapter 3 sets out the rules; Chapter 15 answers each of them in turn. This is that pairing applied to this story.
Know where you stand
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