Controversy over Rachel Dolezal puts her Iowa brother in spotlight

An Iowa man has been thrust into the spotlight in a racial identity scandal involving his sister, Rachel Dolezal, who resigned as an NAACP chapter president in Washington state after her parents revealed she is a white woman pretending to be black.

Some of the attention the case has received is because of past claims of race-based harassment by Dolezal, 37 of Spokane, which are now being scrutinized.

Dolezal suggested her estranged parents went public to discredit her at a key point in a criminal case involving her brother, Joshua Dolezal, 39, who has been an associate professor of English at Central College in Pella since 2005.

The Clear Creek County District Attorney's Office in Colorado filed felony charges against Joshua Dolezal in 2013, accusing him of molesting their adopted minor sibling more than a decade ago, according to the Denver Post and other media reports.

Joshua Dolezal, who didn't return messages seeking comment, is free on $15,000 bail and is fighting the charges, the Post reported. The case is due for trial in August.

Parents Ruthanne and Larry Dolezal, who refuted the charges against their son, have implied in television interviews that Rachel Dolezal may have helped orchestrate the pressing of charges in the first place, the Washington Post wrote.

Another adopted sibling, Ezra Dolezal, 22, told People.com that Rachel became upset with Joshua after he opposed her taking her parents to court to assume guardianship of another adopted brother, Isaiah.

'Josh called Rachel out on that and told her it was wrong what she did, taking my parents to court over my brother, and Rachel didn't like that,” Ezra told People. 'Basically Rachel has been constantly trying to get at Josh since then.”

The Dolezals' story has gained international attention the past week, both for starting a conversation about racial identity as well as for the dynamics of the fractured family.

Insight into the family comes from Joshua Dolezal, who penned a memoir called 'Down from the Mountaintop: From Belief to Belonging,” published through the University of Iowa Press in 2014.

The memoir offers a glimpse into their shared childhood raised by 'Pentecostal homesteaders whose twenty-year experiment in subsistence living was closely tied to their faith,” according to a description on the UI Press website.

The family was raised in Montana and Idaho with a strong emphasis on religion and a distrust for the outside world, according to the memoir. But Joshua Dolezal also paints a picture of a close-knit family, in which he and his sister helped make chocolate-covered huckleberries to sell and picked green beans together.

Joshua Dolezal, who stated in the author's note that 'this is as truthful a story as my memory can tell,” also described an abusive first marriage of his sister and painted his role as one of a protector. Rachel Dolezal has offered similar accounts of her first marriage in previous interviews.

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