Romney as church leader: Strict on sex, but caring to those needing help

Lani Gerson left the Mormon church long before Mitt Romney decided to excommunicate her.

Gerson, 65, grew up in Arizona and left the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as a teenager. When she moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, she began getting aggressive visitors from the church, urging her to return. She wrote to church officials asking them to stop contacting her.

One Sunday in 1982, she recalled, Romney, then a young bishop, and an assistant showed up on her doorstep to invite her to her excommunication trial.