Shame and a culture of secrecy kept them from speaking, they say
By Jack Styler
Oct 7, 2026
ORLEANS — When Greta MacMillan needed urgent gynecological surgery in 2025, she demanded assurances in writing that there would be no men in the room for the procedure.
That’s because she’s still traumatized from a sexual assault by a doctor that she said happened in 1989, when she was 16 years old and living at the Community of Jesus (CoJ) in the Rock Harbor section of Orleans.
MacMillan is one of five women who say that Dr. William Velie, a Community of Jesus member, sexually assaulted them under the guise of performing “virginity tests” or other “exams” at his office at 107 Rock Harbor Road, adjacent to the CoJ compound. Velie died in 2021. According to the women and an obituary posted online, he served as the group’s primary care doctor for more than 35 years.
The Community of Jesus in numerous publications calls itself “an ecumenical Christian community in the Benedictine monastic tradition.” It is not affiliated with the Catholic Church. In the CoJ, members follow a “Rule of Life,” which is described on the group’s website as drawing on Christian monasticism. But 31 former members and residents have described the community in interviews with the Independent as a coercive, high-control group. More than 50 have become involved with an advocacy organization called Rock Harbor Truth devoted to former residents’ recovery. They call themselves survivors.
The five accounts of what happened in Velie’s office describe abuse carried out in a tightly controlled environment where adults obsessed over sexuality, where children were separated from their parents, and where fear and shame led to silence, even when the young people knew what was happening was wrong.
A ‘Virginity Test’
Greta MacMillan attended Orleans Elementary School and Nauset Middle School and remembers being sent to Velie’s clinic for the first time in middle school. She had previously seen Orleans pediatrician Alan Cahill, who died in 2018.
After finishing eighth grade in 1986, MacMillan was sent to Grenville Christian College, a private boarding school in Canada that closed in 2007 amid charges of child abuse. Many children raised in the CoJ were sent to the Canadian school, she said.
By the time she left for Canada, MacMillan had grown accustomed to being away from her parents. She was four years old when her family moved to the CoJ in 1976. When she was nine, she was separated from her parents and placed in a communal house — a common practice in the CoJ, according to more than 30 former residents. She saw her parents only a couple of times a week, she said.
At Grenville, MacMillan developed a crush on a boy. They never had sex, she said, but word got out about their relationship, and she was expelled. Her parents picked her up, she said, and a few weeks after her return to Orleans, they took her, against her objections, to Velie’s office.
“They more or less carried me in,” said MacMillan. “I was kicking and screaming and fighting.”
What she said happened next was not anything recognized as legitimate medical practice.
Alone with Velie in the exam room, MacMillan said, she was told that “this is what happens” to girls who have sex as he examined her vagina with his ungloved hands. MacMillan, who was 16 at the time, said there was no nurse or parent in the room.
Afterward, MacMillan went home and “stood in the shower for a very long time,” she said. She never told anyone what happened.
Last year, preparing for a hysterectomy following years of debilitating endometriosis, MacMillan could not stop crying, thinking about what had happened 36 years earlier. “It’s one of those things that never leaves you,” she said.
A Culture of Secrecy and Silence
MacMillan and more than a dozen other former CoJ residents interviewed by the Independent described adults in the compound as focused on sexuality as evil. Both girls and boys were often interrogated about whether they had sexual fantasies; girls and women wore long dresses for modesty, and teens were not allowed to date without permission from the group’s leaders.
But men like Velie did not always manage the enforcement of these norms, according to the five women who have described his assaults. It was also women in the tight-knit community who warned girls about the sinfulness of crushes, teaching them to fear sexual thoughts, reporting on their behavior, and organizing visits to the doctor. The appointments would typically come when girls reached their teens, showed interest in boys, or after they took vows of celibacy to become “sisters” in the group.
Secrecy and silence surrounded what happened in the doctor’s office. But that was not the end of the story for the women who spoke with the Independent about their experiences. They said the abuse has had lasting effects, including nightmares, flashbacks, and nausea. Some said they avoided seeing doctors entirely for decades after the alleged assaults.
MacMillan left the CoJ when she was 19 and is now a licensed clinical therapist living in Connecticut. She’s undergone years of therapy to heal from the trauma she experienced, she said.
Two of the five women who said Velie abused them, Bonnie Zampino and Elizabeth Alina, have been working with lawyers at the Boston firm Sweeney Merrigan to file civil suits in federal court against the Orleans commune.
Their lawyer, Korey Kajko, said that the firm was committed to “holding the Community of Jesus accountable for its role in enabling and concealing” sexual abuse that happened in an “environment where leaders controlled nearly every aspect of their lives, and where questioning authority, let alone reporting abuse, was not a realistic option.”
The Independent reported last year that the CoJ is being sued in U.S. District Court for alleged child labor violations.
Jeffrey Robbins, the CoJ’s longtime lawyer, said that the allegations against Velie and the CoJ amounted to a “blend of character assassination and guilt by association.”
Robbins said that Velie ran an independent medical practice separate from the CoJ, and that there had been no reports of such assaults to a court or medical board when Velie was alive.
Patterns of Control
All five of the women had been separated from their parents by the leaders of the Rock Harbor enclave, a practice they said was common there.
Christina Swidrak’s family moved from Granby to the CoJ when she was eight. Within a year, she was moved out of her parents’ home, she told the Independent, and was shuffled between homes on the community’s compound 22 more times before she left at 21.
In the spring of 1980, around her 14th birthday, Swidrak became interested in a boy at the CoJ. “He wrote me a note,” she said, and the two met in the church auditorium, where they “fooled around a little bit” but did not have sex. “We were just curious,” she said.
One of Swidrak’s roommates discovered the boy’s note and reported it to adults. Soon after that, she said, she was surrounded by seven women, one of whom was her mother. The women aggressively questioned her, she said, and then drove her to Velie’s office.
In the examination room, Velie used his fingers and a speculum on Swidrak and gave the seven women, who were there watching, his verdict: he said he thought she’d been penetrated.
“It hurt like hell,” said Swidrak. “I just kept saying ‘No.’ ”
Swidrak said she never told anyone what happened.
“I knew what he did to me was wrong, but I thought it was just me,” she said. “I was so embarrassed that he treated me that way, and the women that were there — I had to see them every day.
“I took that whole experience and shoved it down so far so that I could never feel that way again,” she said.
Bonnie Zampino, whose parents left her to live in the enclave from 1983 to 1986 while they worked to establish the Life in Jesus Community, a religious group modeled on the CoJ in Maryland, said Velie conducted a “virginity exam” on her, too.
Zampino said that in the summer of 1983, when she was 13 years old and preparing to start ninth grade at Nauset High School, she was told she would need to see Velie for a checkup.
Her experience in the doctor’s office started with questioning. He asked Zampino if she was a virgin, and when she said that she was, he reached under her skirt, pulled her underwear to the side, and digitally penetrated her. He did not wear gloves, Zampino said. There was no nurse or parent present.
“Are you sure you’ve never had sex?” Velie said. “It doesn’t feel like it.”
Afterward, Zampino said, she hid from Velie whenever she saw him around the CoJ campus. “I didn’t want him to see me,” she said.
An ‘Obsession’ With Sex
From a very young age, Elizabeth Alina told the Independent, she was aware that sex was “a prevailing obsession” in the CoJ. She had been called Liz until she was three, when adults decided that name was “too sexual” and began calling her Beth, she said.
Alina said that she was “born into the community.” At 12, she was separated from her parents and moved into a series of communal houses. That same year, 1987, she saw Velie for the first time, she said.
Alone with her in the examination room, Velie approached and, without introducing himself or providing any explanation of what he was about to do, touched her breasts through her gown, she said.
She remembers leaving the exam room unable to speak.
She must have looked upset, she said, because later that afternoon another girl, Polly Jackson, asked her what was wrong.
“I could barely talk at that point,” said Alina. Then her friend asked, “Oh, did he touch your chest?” She nodded her head but told no one else what had happened, she said.
Alina was taken by her parents to Velie every year for the next five years. Every time, he touched her breasts without explanation or her consent, she said.
“He never talked,” she said. “He just did whatever he did without saying anything, and I hated him for that.”
Alina saw Dr. Velie again in 1994, when she was 19. Alina said she had been living as a “sister” at the CoJ for two years when a woman she knew as Sister Mary told her it was time for her to have her first pap smear. Velie used a speculum so large, she said, that she believes he meant to cause pain.
“I was just gasping and crying,” she said.
Unlike at the earlier exams, Velie’s longtime nurse, Lori Witter, was present for that exam, Alina said. Witter, now 71, is listed on the website of Rock Harbor Health, a clinic at the CoJ, as a family practice nurse practitioner.
After several phone calls from the Independent, a receptionist at the clinic said that no one there would talk to a reporter, then hung up.
Decades of Pain
All of the women interviewed for this article described emotionally painful lasting effects from Velie’s sexual assaults. At the time, the pain was also physical for at least three of the girls.
Susan Wilkins said that she, too, had to see Velie for a physical after she took vows as a “sister” when she was 18. In that first visit with him, which she said was in October 1983, his use of a large speculum left her crying in pain.
“He just said that he had a test to do, and then all of a sudden my legs were being spread,” said Wilkins. “He shoved this huge thing up me,” said Wilkins, now 62.
“I was sobbing, and I was asking him to stop,” she said. “I didn’t know what was going on, which made it scarier.”
After she left, Wilkins realized she was bleeding, she said. She went to her superior in the convent, Sister Rachel, for help. That led to the CoJ leaders at the time, Cay Andersen and Judy Sorensen, allowing Wilkins to see a different doctor for gynecology appointments.
Still, Wilkins said, for 20 years after the assault, she felt terrible stomach pains before any gynecological exam.
Breaking the Silence
There were at least some whispers inside the CoJ about what was happening in Velie’s office. Wilkins, who was assaulted in October 1983, said she had heard about the “virginity test” Swidrak had endured a few years before.
Still, all five of the women who spoke with the Independent said they maintained a silence born of deep shame for decades.
Zampino appears to have been the first to contact the authorities about Velie’s acts. In 2007, when she was 38, she said, she called the Orleans Police Dept. to file a complaint against Velie — who at that time was still seeing patients — for what happened when she was 13.
Zampino said the police told her that because the assault had happened more than two decades earlier, there was nothing they could do.
In response to records requests from the Independent, the Orleans police said they could find no written record of a call from Zampino in 2007.
Zampino sent an email in 2008 to the lawyers representing students at Grenville Christian College in a class-action lawsuit. In that email, which she provided to the Independent, she offered to testify and wrote: “I was sexually molested by the community’s doctor, Bill Velie.”
Zampino and Alina said they had been awaiting possible changes to state law before filing their lawsuit. Before a change to state law in 2014, the statute of limitations for alleged child sexual abuse in Massachusetts gave adult survivors only three years after turning 18 to file suit. That window is now 35 years, although legislation that would eliminate the statute of limitations for child sexual abuse is now in conference committee in the state legislature. Current law caps liability for churches in child sexual abuse cases at $20,000.
Criminal cases can be opened at any time, according to state law, but charges that come 27 years after the crime — currently, that would be any event before October 1999 — must include independent evidence that supports the victim’s claims.
Kajko, the attorney representing Alina and Zampino, said Mass. law “reflects an outdated understanding of how trauma affects survivors and how long it can take them to come forward. Too often, by the time a survivor is ready to speak, the courthouse doors have already closed.”
Rock Harbor Health
Beginning in 1978, Velie ran his medical practice in a squat, gray-shingled building at 107 Rock Harbor Road. His house was next door. The clinic, now called Rock Harbor Health, is still open to the public.
Velie ran the practice until 2016, when Dr. Seppo Rapo became the medical supervisor there. Velie’s longtime nurse practitioner Marianne Wierzbinski took over the practice in 2022, state incorporation documents show.
Velie stopped practicing in 2016, resigned as the registered agent of Rock Harbor Health the next year, and died in 2021; Rapo died in March 2026.
At least two of Velie’s longtime nurses still work at the clinic, Wierzbinski and nurse practitioner Lori Witter, the clinic’s website, phone calls, and state records show.
The CoJ’s lawyer did not respond to the Independent’s requests for interviews with the two practitioners.
A spokesperson for the Mass. Dept. of Health told the Independent that Rock Harbor Health is not licensed by the state and that it has no record of a licensed clinic ever being registered at 107 Rock Harbor Road.
But that’s not necessarily unusual. State law has carved out a statutory exemption from licensing rules for clinics that are solely owned and operated by a doctor or, following a 2021 law change, by a nurse practitioner.
The clinic remains the primary health provider for most CoJ members, especially the sworn “brothers” and “sisters” who live in separate communal dormitories on the group’s campus, according to several former residents and one person who lives in the enclave.
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