Compassion International, a global Christian child sponsorship agency, has filed a lawsuit against Andrew Vesey, a former business analyst working for the agency, turned whistleblower.
Compassion is a favoured charity among many evangelical Christians because it integrates meeting the physical needs of Children living in poverty with sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Compassion serves 2.4 million children across the world.
A series of stories by the Roys Report, a Christian news agency, at the end of October, Vasey discovered “this promise of a personal relationship between donor and child could be an opportunity for predators to harm children.” Using an AI screening tool, Vezey, the former Compassion risk analyst-turned whistleblower, flagged 25,810 cases of suspected grooming among Compassion’s sponsors who wrote letters to children in the charity’s programs from August 2018 to May 2026.
Roys Report gave an example of a 75-year-old male sponsor writing to a Filipino teenager: “Would you send me picture of you wearing a bikini or a bathing suit?” he wrote the teen in August 2022. “Hope you don’t mind me flirting with you … But you’re so good-looking I can’t help it! I couldn’t help but notice your very pretty legs!!!”
Letter writing by sponsors to children is a key part of the Compassion program. The Compassion International lawsuit claims that Vesey shared confidential information with the Roys Report, damaging Compassion International’s reputation.
Vesey cited this report: “Sponsor Correspondence: Examined through the lens of child protection and safeguarding.” It describes the screening tool’s functions: “PATCH exists to operationalize Compassion’s digital safeguarding mandate through people screening, content screening, and technology-enabled prevention. This reinforces Compassion’s safeguarding policy commitments by translating its zero-tolerance stance, prevention-and-response obligations, partner accountability, and victim-centered protection principles into practical digital screening controls.” (This would seem to be in contrast with the Compassion statement below)
The Christian Post, another US-based Christian news source, reports that El Paso County District Court “granted Compassion a 14-day temporary restraining order barring Vezey from disclosing its confidential information, with a hearing on a preliminary injunction set for Nov. 13.”
Compassion International responded to the controversy, pointing out that commissioning the AI screening tool is evidence of their effort to protect children. “Protecting children is, and will always be, our highest priority. Compassion has and continues to develop an ever-evolving comprehensive safeguarding ecosystem that includes child protection policies, mandatory trainings, screening processes, correspondence reviews, reporting mechanisms, investigations, ongoing monitoring, and dedicated child protection professionals throughout our global ministry.
Recent media reports paint an incomplete and misleading portrayal of Compassion’s long-standing child protection and safeguarding efforts. In our commitment to transparency before and after publication, we provided the journalist with detailed information about Compassion’s entire safeguarding and child protection ecosystem, including how every sponsor letter is reviewed before delivery. Sadly, much of that information was not included in the articles, and most of our responses were buried in a link later in the first piece …
“The media reports blur the distinction between potential alerts flagged by an AI tool in development and confirmed safeguarding concerns that require follow up action. It’s easy to look at the numbers being used and think Compassion sponsor correspondence is harming children by the thousands. But that’s not true. Flags are not harms. They are an AI model asking a human to look at something to determine if there’s anything harmful there.”
In choosing to sue, The Other Cheek wonders whether Compassion will produce another example of the “Barbra Streisand effect.” She chose to sue photographer Kenneth Adelman and the website Pictopia.com for $50 million, demanding the removal of an aerial photograph that featured her Malibu mansion. The suit amplified the story and made the photo famous.