The women can still picture the spaces where it happened: A church nursery. A childhood bedroom. His garage during a youth group sleepover.
They have spent decades trying to forget the way the children’s pastor wrapped them in his arms. The terrifying stories he told about demons and the warmth in his voice as he promised to protect them. The chill of his hands on parts of their bodies where no grown man’s hands should be.
This, they say, is the dark secret behind the public ministry of Joseph Lyle Campbell, a magnetic Pentecostal preacher who built a national following with fiery sermons on sin, salvation and America’s moral decline.
As he evangelized from church to church across the South and Midwest, Campbell has repeatedly faced accusations of child sexual abuse, an NBC News investigation found.
Cheryl Almond says he lured her to his home when she was a teenager, pushed her onto a bed and penetrated her with his finger. Kerri Jackson says he molested her once to twice a week for three years starting when she was about 9. In Arkansas, Lisa Ball says Campbell invited her to live with him after she became a teen mother, then raped her repeatedly. In Missouri, Kim Williams had just turned 15 when she says Campbell reached his hand up her shorts at his parsonage. In that same home, Phaedra Creed says Campbell sexually assaulted her night after night, at age 14, while his wife and children slept upstairs.
They had been taught as children that God hears all prayers, but getting adults to listen was another story. The pattern of missed warnings and failures to intervene repeated for decades.
