The IFB leaders might be fifty-five-year-old men in their chronological age, but their spiritual maturity—what I deem their “grace age”—is much younger. Once I explained this, those accusations stopped. It was another lesson to me in the language barrier between our progressive culture and a cult.
Despite the relentless assault, we held our ground. We kept talking and we kept telling the truth. Eventually hundreds, then thousands of victims started speaking up about the abuse they had suffered at the hands of IFB leaders and ministries. One of the greatest accusations against us by the cult was that we were “broad brushing” all the IFB churches, but with an estimated eight to ten thousand survivors speaking out on the Internet, telling the same stories from their experiences within IFB churches from all over the country, we finally put that accusation to rest. Dozens of public and private Facebook groups and blogs are now highlighting their abuses. That was precisely what the mob bosses feared: We could prove the entire cult was rife with sexual abuse cover-ups and we had a mountain of evidence to back up our assertions. To my knowledge there is no religious cult anywhere with more people speaking out through social media about their physical, emotional, sexual, and spiritual abuse than the former members of the IFB.
16
TAKING THE CAUSE NATIONWIDE
Fully forgiving offenders brings genuine joy.
—“Dr.” Bill Gothard
Two months before the aborted trial with my father, a former member of Trinity Baptist Church in Concord, New Hampshire, shared a story on our Facebook cult survivor site about a fifteen-year-old girl who had been raped and then ushered out of the state in an effort to protect the rapist from prosecution. Whenever a new case surfaced on our groups, I contacted the cult survivor who posted the story and asked if he or she would be willing to get in touch with the police along with me. In this case, the person’s name was Matt Barnhart, and he agreed.
The next day, we both called Detective Chris DeAngelis of the Concord Police Department and the investigation began. As the situation unfolded, it revealed one of the most horrendous clergy sex abuse cover-ups I had ever seen. Tina Anderson would later write police statements claiming that in 1997 she had been raped repeatedly by Ernie Willis, a thirty-eight-year-old married father in her IFB church. At the time, she was a babysitter for the Willises, whose oldest children were close to her age.
Tina sought help from her IFB pastor, Chuck Phelps, but instead of offering it, he forced her to stand up in front of the entire IFB congregation and apologize for her immorality, just as I had done my senior year at Silver State. Tina said that she was forbidden from mentioning the word “rape” in her public apology; Phelps even told her that a woman in her situation would have been stoned to death in Old Testament times because she hadn’t immediately told anyone what had happened; according to Tina’s testimony, Phelps’s wife had gone so far as to ask her if she “enjoyed it,” a common IFB technique meant to inspire guilt in the victim. Naturally, Tina answered, “No!” but the mere suggestion of pleasure when discussing a rape can sometimes plant seeds of doubt and confusion in a victim’s mind. Normally, it works like a charm when an abuser wants to intimidate a victim.
By the time she “confessed” publicly, Tina knew she was pregnant, and Phelps orchestrated her transfer to Westminster, Colorado, where Pastor Matt Olson of Tri-City Baptist Church arranged for her to live in the home of his head deacon. While rapist Ernie Willis went untouched, protected by the IFB community, Tina was forced to give her baby up for adoption within the cult and was homeschooled by IFB members in Colorado for the next few years. Matt Olson, you may remember, was the same man who, almost a decade later, would scream at me and Joseph in my last meeting at Northland—and accuse me of lying about my history of sexual abuse. Small world. No wonder Olson didn’t believe me, I thought.
Six weeks after our initial call to the police to report the crime, Tina Anderson contacted me through Facebook to ask if I could help her. Because my role was to be an advocate for victims’ rights, I never tried to contact victims. I knew how deeply wounded they were, and the last thing I wanted was to cause additional harm by making them think their story was being circulated throughout the country. I always waited for them to seek me out.
When I saw Tina’s message, I was so consumed with emotion that I collapsed on my bedroom floor, crying just as I had done in the dark days before leaving the cult. But these were tears of hope, not grief. The crimes against Tina had happened recently enough that, unlike me, she couldn’t be thwarted by a statue of limitations. And unlike my poor daughters, who lacked DNA evidence to corroborate their stories, Tina had living, breathing proof of her rape in the form of a child, who was now twelve years old. If Tina was willing to tell her story, we might be able to prosecute the man responsible.
When Tina and I talked on the phone for the first time we felt an instant bond, having endured such similar journeys of sexual abuse, trauma, shame, and victimization. She still thought the rape was her fault, so she was carrying a heavy burden of false guilt. I had done some babysitting during our years at Northland and, in a strange twist, I realized that her baby was one of the children I had cared for, because the adoptive parents were on staff at the college. The adoptive mother and I had become friendly, and I was able to reassure Tina that her child was well taken care of. I was able to give her details that even she didn’t know about her baby, because the child had been a playmate of my own children when we were at the college.
When Trent Spiner at the Concord Monitor broke the Tina Anderson story in New Hampshire, it hit the networks fast and furious. Tina had no desire to be in the media spotlight, so she asked me to be her family spokesperson. Dozens of programs contacted me asking for interviews with her. She finally said yes to The Early Show at CBS. There, she spoke for the first time about the systematic brainwashing she had gotten from her IFB pastors, both graduates of Bob Jones University.
We flew to New York together, where my sister Melissa met us. CBS had me check in under the fictitious name Millie Dillmount as a safeguard against competing networks finding us and scooping them. My sister and Tina had a ball chiding me about my alias. It seemed trite in light of what we were all going through, but it relieved the tension. Though Tina was shaking and deathly afraid to speak, she mustered her courage and described her abuse in detail, knowing her story might help other women and children still trapped in the cult. The second the cameras stopped rolling, she sprinted back to me, threw her arms around my neck, and broke into sobs. It was a moment I’ll never forget. I felt like I was comforting my own sister. Everyone on the set stopped and stared. A few welled up themselves and praised Tina for her bravery.
We had just gotten back to our hotel when a representative from 20/20 called and asked to meet us. Tina had seen a few episodes of the program and knew it had integrity, so the next morning we met with senior producer Lisa Soloway and her assistant. Lisa was convinced there was a bigger story to tell and she wanted to get other stories of IFB abuse into the spotlight. She and her colleagues were willing to spend nearly a year investigating the cult with the goal of airing an in-depth report that would expose the abuses it was perpetrating. Lisa said they were planning to put one of their best producers on the story. Soon after, we met 20/20 producer Alan B. Goldberg and his assistant Sean Dooley. Tina and I treated them all to a rendition of Patch the Pirate’s “I Want to Marry Daddy When I Grow Up” to give them a window into the mind-set of the cult. It was fascinating to watch their repulsed expressions when they heard those lyrics. Clearly, I wasn’t the only one who found the song creepy.
Alan called after we returned home and asked if I would grant him an interview for the documentary. I told him that I had already told Lisa Soloway I would do the background work, but I didn’t want to be interviewed on the program. The lawsuit had just ended, and I didn’t feel I could face another onslaught. But Alan persisted and said the story wouldn’t be as effective without the details an insider like me coul
d provide. “My family’s safety is my primary concern,” I explained, but Alan assured me that he would do his best to keep us safe. I finally agreed and that fall Tina and I flew back to New York together for interviews with anchor Elizabeth Vargas. I also contacted Rachel Griffiths, another IFB abuse victim, and she bravely agreed to be interviewed for the progras as well.
About six weeks later, Oprah’s producer got wind of our efforts and called me to ask if we’d be willing to give her an exclusive. I was within inches of realizing my longtime dream of meeting my TV heroine, but we had already committed to 20/20. The 20/20 team had put countless hours into researching the IFB with us, we had a great rapport with them, and we respected their work ethic and their high standards tremendously. In the end we had to decline. I was sad, but I knew we were doing the right thing.
As soon as the 20/20 program aired, cult members pounced on us, accusing Tina and me of speaking out “for money.” The truth is, neither Tina nor I have ever received a dime for any of our interviews in the national media. We were both loath to step into the spotlight, but someone had to speak out to help the children still trapped in the nightmare we had escaped. We knew that without help from the national media, the IFB’s abuses would never be exposed and the laws would never change.
Every day, Tina and I would talk on the phone and encourage each other to ignore the relentlessly vicious accusations against us. “We are doing this for the children,” I reminded her—and myself—countless times. We couldn’t give up even if the odds seemed insurmountable.
Over the next year Alan, Sean, and I collaborated on the project and they started collecting footage. We worked through reams of documents about the IFB. I spent countless hours compiling pages of research from government organizations, Web sites dedicated to church history, books, academic articles, blogs, Facebook pages, survivor groups, and other sources for 20/20, doing my part to help them lift the cult’s veil of secrecy. I did all I could to help the producers understand the indoctrination, the cover-ups, and the countless links back to Bob Jones University. The producers quickly grasped how dangerous this religious group was for women and children and became emotionally invested in the cause, working tirelessly with us to expose the truth.
Brian Fuller, who had been a student at BJU with Joseph and was now senior pastor of Tina’s old IFB church—Trinity Baptist in Concord, New Hampshire—was the only IFB pastor who would agree to grant Alan B. Goldberg and Elizabeth Vargas an interview. When he met with the 20/20 team, one of the first things Fuller said to Alan was, “I always liked Joseph Zichterman, but are you aware that there’s a nationwide rumor that his wife, Jocelyn, faked a brain tumor?”
Even after the court had vetted all my medical records, the cult was still on a smear campaign against me. I had already told 20/20 about the allegations and released my medical records to them, but I shouldn’t have been surprised. We later heard through friends that board members from BJU had flown to New Hampshire to help Fuller prepare for his interview.
In the months before 20/20’s investigation aired, the IFB tried repeatedly to sabotage the program. Somehow they persuaded Facebook to shut down our cult-survivor site, which was the key to our networking against the powerful IFB leaders. We got nowhere contacting Facebook, so I called a few of my contacts in the media and before we knew it, the site was back online.
Cult members even harassed Joseph’s new employers, making anonymous calls and pressuring them to intervene. One caller threatened that if the university administration wouldn’t force me to stop speaking out against the IFB, he would contact its donors and persuade them to stop giving to the school. Fortunately, the university refused to get involved, which flummoxed the IFB. This was a ridiculous request because I wasn’t even an employee of the school. The IFB wasn’t used to dealing with people who followed the law.
“Shattered Faith” aired on ABC’s 20/20 on April 8, 2011, and I consider it a masterpiece. Alan and his producer team (Gayle Deutsch and Sean Dooley) managed to take a mammoth cult, with organizations and churches that spanned the country, and create a documentary that gave the public a concise, yet comprehensive birds’-eye view of its many factions, all in a forty-seven-minute time frame. I was amazed. Our hard work had paid off.
IFB pastor Brian Fuller deftly skirted the issues in his televised interview, though he made a blunder when Elizabeth Vargas asked him whether the “independent” Fundamental Baptist churches were all tightly interconnected.
“You do move from church to church,” Elizabeth said in the interview. “To say that you’re all islands is a little disingenuous, isn’t it?”
“No, I don’t think it’s disingenuous at all,” Fuller replied. “This isn’t a network and it just happens you get educated at places that hold many of the same principles that you’re going to use in ministry.”
This ludicrous statement sent survivors into a frenzy. One of them created a diagram, showing all the connections within IFB churches and all pointing back to Bob Jones University and its “preacher boys.” IFB survivors affectionately called it the “notwork” after Brian Fuller’s absurd claims.
The genius of the Bob Jones empire was that the system gave the university control without accountability. IFB leaders claimed every church was independent, and technically that was true, so if someone did something wrong, no one could legally connect the university to it. But every insider knew BJU was the linchpin and that its word was law all over the cult, for all intents and purposes.
I realized the only way to illustrate the interconnectivity of IFB churches and, by extension, to expose the cults web of power would be to collect a mountain of evidence. We would need thousands more stories from survivors like Tina and me.
Within twenty-four hours of “Shattered Faith” airing, I received more than twelve thousand e-mails and posts filled with stories of abuse on our IFB Cult Survivors’ Facebook group. People came out of the woodwork to talk about abuse they had suffered growing up in the cult. The 20/20 episode included part of my own story and a rumor soon reached me that Jason had stood up in church the following Sunday and publicly admitted molesting me. He never contacted me about it, though, so the story might be apocryphal.
Not everyone was as pleased with ABC as I was. “Shattered Faith” so infuriated Indiana megachurch pastor “Dr.” Jack Schaap that he delivered a public rant against 20/20 after the program aired, using it as an excuse to condemn womankind:
“ABC News called me this week and said, we heard that you believe that men should be in charge of their wives. I says [sic], no sir, no sir, I didn’t say that. I said God said that. He said, husbands are the head of the wife.… Don’t you ever worry about your pastor being rattled, or worried or unsettled or unnerved. I sleep fine.… Somebody asked me the other day, this reporter said, I heard you said it would be a cold day in Hell before you get your theology from a woman. He said, don’t you kinda think that’s demeaning to the genders [sic]. I said, ask Adam what he thought about getting his theology from a woman. I said it damned the whole world. I said the reason your sorry soul is going to Hell is because a woman told Adam what God thinks about things.”
At the end of May 2011, Tina headed bravely into her trial against the man who had raped her. Prosecutor Wayne Coull led the jury through the cult network brilliantly and illustrated the incredible abuse Tina had suffered at the hands of the IFB. As expected, Chuck Phelps, former pastor of Trinity Baptist church and BJU graduate, countered as a witness, trying to paint Tina as a liar whose credibility could not be trusted. Numerous cult members showed up in their suits and ties and Sunday dresses, just like always, to back Phelps.
Expecting no less, I had implored our Facebook group members to attend the trial too—to support Tina. Almost thirty of them came in from all over the country, to lend her moral support for the week, which buoyed her spirits enormously. Emotions ran high in the courtroom and several of Tina’s supporters left to weep in private when the case triggered flashbacks of their own
abuse—along with painful reminders that their own abusers had never been brought to justice.
Tina soldiered through and fielded every question the defense team hurled at her. Their goal was to get Willis off on the forcible rape part of the charges, suggesting that a fifteen-year-old virgin was capable of seducing a thirty-eight-year-old married man. It was appalling, but it was typical IFB Eve-the-temptress thinking, even though Tina had never even been allowed to hold a boy’s hand at the time of her rape. She had been much like I was at fifteen, in her ankle-length floral dresses, bobby socks, and tennis shoes, completely naive about sexual relationships. Now she was fighting back on behalf of all the survivors who had ever been blamed for participating in their own abuse. We desperately needed a victory to give countless other victims courage.
The jury came back on May 27, 2011, with a guilty verdict on every count against Ernie Willis. We were exhausted but elated. At long last, a group of IFB survivors had banded together and proved to the cult leaders that they did not have absolute power. The truth could come out no matter how hard they tried to suppress it.
I Fired God Page 30