Missing Athens County teen escapes reported sex abuse, ‘cult’-like family
When Serah Bellar ran away from her Amesville home in April 2020, few questioned her disappearance.
Serah, 16 at the time, was labeled by the Ohio Attorney General’s Office as an “endangered runaway” in its database of missing people. Some members of her enormous family whispered about her absence in private. Beyond that, silence.
“Serah isn’t dead, I’d know by now at (sic), she’s smarter than people give her credit for, but she is gone, if she ever contacts dad and mom or any of us it will be on her terms,” her eldest sibling Benjamin Bellar, who’s incarcerated, wrote to a relative last year in a prison text messaging system, according to indictments from The Athens County Prosecutor’s Office.
Her family, the Bellars, have 18 biological children and one who’s adopted. Speaking to law enforcement, Serah’s mother, Deborah Bellar, once said “God would give her all the children she was meant to have,” according to court documents.
The Bellars were all forced by their parents, including Serah’s father, Robert “Bob” Bellar, to attend the Waverly-based Dove Outreach “church” run by their uncle James “Jim” Bellar who preached that siblings are meant procreate with one another in the face of the apocalypse to repopulate the planet, documents show.
Jim, a self-proclaimed apostle, reportedly rewrote chapters of the Bible to fit his religious beliefs that were passed on to the Bellar kids. He was very selective about who he permitted at Dove Outreach, which some have described as a cult, documents said.
In an interview, Serah called the church a cult.
“All the kids would have to go, whether they wanted to or not— even if you were sick, you had to go, it didn’t matter,” she said. “Anytime he’d say anything, I’d just kind of repeat it in my head, like, how messed up it kind of sounded.”
“He’d always talk about the end of the world and how you’d reproduce with your siblings.”
The recently obtained indictments of Serah’s parents and two brothers, Josiah and Jonathan Bellar, from the Athens County Prosecutor’s Office paints a picture of several county agencies being informed of abuse and failing to protect members of the Bellar family, who were being sexually and physically harmed — often in the name of cult-like religious beliefs.
Brothers sexually abusing younger siblings was allegedly commonplace within the house, according to the documents. Robert allegedly physically abused Serah and both he and his wife went to great lengths to protect the family from becoming exposed by outside agencies. As of Tuesday, Deborah was arrested and is in custody. Robert was at large with a nationwide warrant out for his arrest for about 24 hours before turning himself in on Wednesday.
Multiple sexual abuse reports were filed with Athens County Children Services between February 2017 and April 2020, with one report, according to the prosecutor’s office, providing text messages of family members discussing brothers sexually abusing a younger sibling. The Athens Messenger and The Athens NEWS were unable to obtain child services reports since they aren’t public record, as minors were involved.
When asked about the multiple reports involving the Bellar family, Robin Webb, public relations and community events coordinator for Athens County Children Services declined to comment, saying the office takes investigations “seriously.”
“We stand by the hard work that our caseworkers do,” Webb said.
https://www.athensnews.com/news/local/missing-athens-county-teen-escapes-reported-sex-abuse-cult–like-family/article_748bbb41-fcfa-5848-a49f-6f2948bf7e6e.html