ADA, Mich. — An Ada family is suing Grace Christian University and two other individuals named in the lawsuit. The family claims their daughter, during a for-credit internship with the couple, was convinced that her father sexually assaulted her as a child and that her family was part of a “murder-sex-human trafficking ring,” accusations the family vehemently denies.
David and Loreen Roskamp live on a quiet cul-de-sac at the end of a tree-lined street in Ada. Over their fireplace hangs an oil painting of three young children perched on top of a striped couch.
David Roskamp points them out one-by-one: Elizabeth, the oldest. Charlie, the youngest. And Elle, the middle.
Where the family is now seems very far-flung from the day that oil painting captures. Once close, they haven’t seen Elle in almost four years and are now embroiled in litigation with her former university, and the two individuals they say drove a wedge between Elle and the rest of the family.
David and Loreen described the upbringing of their children as normal. Their relationships were close with each of their children, who in turn had close relationships with one another. Elle was their lively child, David said, their “bubbly spirit.”
“She was just go, go, go,” David added. “She kept us on our toes.”
“She was very creative, and we always had to stay one or two steps in front of her,” said Loreen.
Elle, from a young age, was musically gifted and often sang while Loreen played piano and her brother Charlie, the guitar. Through her grade school years and high school, Elle’s parents say she maintained a close relationship with many friends and her entire family, especially with her older sister Elizabeth.
“Two peas in a pod,” David said, showing off a picture of the two at Elizabeth’s wedding.
In the fall of 2016, Elle entered Grace Christian University as a freshman and began exhibiting behaviors her parents noted as strange. The lawsuit, filed in 17th Circuit Court on Tuesday, noted she was “naïve” and “malleable and vulnerable to the predations of outsiders.”
The same court filing claims that, alongside glowing writings about her family, Elle also began to “outwardly manifest mildly delusional behavior with increasing frequency.”
Loreen and David say Elle claimed to be prophetic, that God spoke directly to her. They began to worry.
“I think we thought that, as she matured, and going into college, that she would outgrow that,” said Loreen. “She was naïve about a lot of things.”
During her junior year in the spring of 2018, according to the lawsuit, Elle met James Cooley and his wife, Morgan Wolffis, at a speaking event on campus.
The lawsuit says Elle began spending a “substantial amount of time talking” to Cooley and began “secluding herself from prior friends and family.”
In June of 2018, Elle allegedly moved in with the couple and began performing “household chores as a live-in maid” for the pair and their newborn baby.
During that time, her parents claim Elle participated in weeks-long fasts, sleep deprivation, and began experiencing increased isolation from her friends and family – blocking longtime friends online and refusing to see her parents and siblings.
“She started having these dreams and visions,” said Loreen, “and Morgan and James interpreted them and told Elle what all of that meant, detail by detail, by detail. And it was all against Dave, and Elizabeth, and Charlie.”
The lawsuit states that James and Morgan told Elle that her dreams meant her father had “sexually abused her as a young child,” and had also “passed her around a criminal sex ring over a course of years.”
According to the lawsuit, they also claimed her dreams meant “that her mother, sister Elizabeth, brother Charlie, Aunt…Uncle (and many others) all participated in rape, murder, human trafficking and other evil conduct.”
“Horrific things, horrific things that never happened,” said Loreen. “Never.”
The Roskamps vehemently deny those claims. Their lawyer said a judge had also denied a personal protective order request Elle had filed against her father during that time.
David and Loreen believe Elle was undergoing “recovered memory theory” under the guidance of James and Morgan. The widely discredited practice entails hypnosis, fasting, sleep deprivation and dream interpretation to recover repressed memories.
“If the Roskamp family had operated a pedophilic human trafficking and sex ring involving child murder…which is so false as to be preposterous…someone nearby would have noticed,” reads the lawsuit. “It never happened.”
It also notes that David, Loreen, Elizabeth and Charlie Roskamp have no prior criminal records or law enforcement convictions.
Despite their best efforts to see Elle, it’s now been over three years since she crossed their doorway.
“We don’t know if we’ll ever get her back,” said Loreen. “They’ve ripped our family to bits, and how do you put that back together again?”
“Each one of our family members brings something to that table,” added David. “And we have an empty chair at the table that is not being filled.”
The lawsuit was filed early on Tuesday morning. In an online chat later that same day, Cooley said the Roskamp’s accusations that he’s aware of are false, but he hadn’t viewed the lawsuit, even on Wednesday. Attempts to reach Elle Roskamp directly were unsuccessful.
Varnum Law Firm, which represents Grace Christian University, responded late-Wednesday to a request for comment, claiming the school had no comment at the time.
The connection between GCU and James Cooley and Morgan Wolffis is still unclear – they are not listed on the school’s staff page.
The Roskamps say the school should’ve had better oversight over their internship program, and over their students.
“The college, Grace Christian University, did nothing to prevent the harm that they did,” said Loreen. “We trusted them with [Elle] and we trusted that it was a safe environment.”
