Permissions not working with drupal forum content topic type

I have a setup wherein I need a forum where each thread is visible to only the original poster and members of a specific group of mods. My hope was that I could use the content access module to restrict view access to 'own' for authenticated users. The problem however is when I do so, the replies to that post are not displayed. In this case, absolutely no one can see the replies, not admin, not authenticated users, nor members of the mod group.

I tried relaxing the permissions to see if anything would help and ran across something strange. If I set it so that anonymous visitors can view forum topics, then all the replies show up if I am not logged in. But if I log back in as an authenticated user, I still cannot see the replies. I'm not sure what's going on, but there seems to be some kind of conflict with drupal's forum topic type and the way it uses comments and how content access manages permissions.