Hidden In Plain Sight
Time|November 5,2018

A celebrated girls’ charity in Liberia was found to be a predator’s hunting ground. How did the scandal go unnoticed for so long?

Hidden In Plain Sight

JUNE 17, 2014, FOUND KATIE MEYLER IN New York City, talking to the world’s richest men about her work with some of its poorest girls. On little more than a sense of purpose and fit of inspiration, the New Jersey native founded More Than Me, a nonprofit to help girls offthe streets of Monrovia, Liberia, by paying for their school. Eventually, it would open its own academy and earn a contract from the Liberian government to operate 19 schools across the country.

Meyler had corralled $1 million in funding through her expert use of social media, but she was no less impressive in person. After her presentation at the Forbes 400 Summit on Philanthropy that June day, Berkshire Hathaway chairman Warren Buffett, the most admired investor in America, found her backstage, fell on bended knee and proposed marriage.

“He said no prenup too, lol,” Meyler later wrote on Twitter, linking to an Instagram post where the message was not entirely light: “Honestly need to slap myself sometimes bc this More Than Me journey feels like a dream and sometimes a nightmare but it’s not, and I’ll use every single thing that I can to make sure to do the most amount of good.”

There was indeed a nightmare, though. One day earlier and 4,500 miles away, the man Meyler had described as the charity’s co-founder had been arrested. The charge was raping the girls in their care. Ten students would testify against Macintosh Johnson, though the number of suspected victims approached 30.

They were girls who wanted the scholarships Meyler was offering. She had made a sexual predator the gatekeeper for a program that existed to help girls escape sexual exploitation. In a Liberian courtroom, the victims would describe being raped in the More Than Me school’s bathroom, library, guesthouse, classroom and car.

This story is from the November 5,2018 edition of Time.

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This story is from the November 5,2018 edition of Time.

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