Years of ignored warnings freed a children’s pastor to sexually abuse girls, lawsuit says
This article is part of “Pastors and Prey,” a series investigating sex abuse allegations in the Assemblies of God.
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More than a decade before police found dozens of videos of naked children on the computer of longtime children’s pastor Tony Waller, girls at his Assemblies of God church in Arkansas repeatedly warned adults about what was happening behind closed doors, according to a lawsuit filed this week.
The sweeping civil complaint, filed by six women in Craighead County Circuit Court, accuses Refuge Church in Jonesboro, along with regional and national leaders of the Assemblies of God, of dismissing reports of Waller’s abuses — enabling him to groom, molest and secretly film girls for 15 years.
When they were still children, the women say, they told pastors about hidden cameras in a church bathroom. About Waller’s practice of making them strip naked and perform stretches. About the discomfort that shot through them when he put his hands on their bodies.
The earliest reports about Waller reached church leaders in 2000, according to the lawsuit. Again and again over the years that followed, the complaint alleges, church leaders took little action. A senior pastor briefly suspended Waller around 2004 after girls discovered a hidden camera pointing into a church bathroom, then promptly returned him to ministry, where he continued preying on children for another decade, the lawsuit says.
The abuse finally ended in 2015, when Waller’s wife went to police after finding images of naked children on his computer. A year later, Waller pleaded guilty to raping two girls and was sentenced to life in prison.
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Stephanie Davis, who says her family went to a senior pastor after Waller drugged and secretly recorded her naked around age 12, said she filed the lawsuit to hold church leaders accountable and force the Assemblies of God to adopt stricter policies to protect children.
“Tony’s in prison for the rest of his life, and that’s good,” Davis said in an interview. “But he’s not the only one responsible for what happened to us.”
NBC News uncovered many of the allegations in the lawsuit last year as part of a yearlong investigation into sexual abuse in the Assemblies of God, the world’s largest Pentecostal denomination. The reporting revealed a half-century pattern in which churches reinstated accused ministers, failed to alert police and quietly returned abusers to positions of authority. NBC News identified about 200 Assemblies of God pastors, church employees and volunteer leaders accused of sexual abuse over the past 50 years.
NBC News also found that the Assemblies of God repeatedly resisted imposing mandatory child protection measures — including background checks and requirements to report abuse — instead leaving such decisions to local churches.
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