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Reporting the Truth.
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Hannah-Kate Williams Sues SBC Leaders, Alleging Sex Abuse Failures

By Megan Botel
Hannah-Kate Williams has faced online and physical harassment since becoming a leading voice for Southern Baptist sex abuse victims. (RNS Photo by Silas Walker)

Since 2019, when Hannah-Kate Williams told her harrowing allegations of sexual abuse by her pastor father to a handful of Southern Baptist Convention officials at its 2019 annual conference, she has been a key voice pushing the denomination toward a long-awaited reckoning.

For two years, Williams has advocated for sexual abuse survivors on social media and at SBC events, joining a growing chorus of voices accusing the nation’s largest Protestant denomination of mishandling abuse allegations.

Now, in her continuing bid to hold the denomination accountable, Williams is taking legal action.

“I’m hoping all abusers will be exposed and brought to justice so they can find redemption, that survivors can receive restitution, and the vulnerable can be protected,” Williams, 26, said. 

On Monday, Williams filed suit against a wide array of Southern Baptist institutions and leaders, including The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, where her father, James Williams, once worked; Lifeway Christian Resources; the SBC Executive Committee; and committee members Mike Stone and Rod Martin.

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The complaint, which also names her father as a defendant, alleges that church leaders failed to investigate Hannah-Kate Williams’ reports. It also says they defamed her as a liar and “conspired to protect the Baptist denomination from a problem of sexual abuse of minors or other vulnerable populations.”

James Williams and her mother, Gina, did not respond to multiple interview requests for this story. 

Filed in Franklin County Circuit Court in Kentucky, the complaint also cites leaked letters written by Russell Moore, former head of the SBC’s Ethics and Religion Liberty Commission, including one to then-SBC President J.D. Greear. The letter tells of Moore’s disappointment in the SBC for silencing victims and covering up misconduct.

“(T)here is a high likelihood that the reports made to the SBTS by Plaintiff were part of the discussions alluded to in the Moore-Greear correspondence,” the suit alleges. It adds that there are likely “other relevant documents and witnesses,” showing “attempts by the corporate Defendants to cover up their ‘passing along’ of Williams to unwitting congregations.”

Others, including Al Mohler, president of Southern seminary, are not named as defendants but are described in the complaint as individuals who failed to follow up on allegations of abuse. 

Mohler has said in a tweet that his seminary “is aware of this investigation of James R. Williams, a student some years ago.” It added: “We encourage everyone to cooperate fully in this investigation. This is important and if you know anything, you must come forward.”

Dan Carman, one of Hannah-Kate Williams’ lawyers, said the SBC needs to deal more openly with its own failings to handle abuse and to make amends for the harm done to survivors.

“The church needs to own it,” he said. “When you have the quantum and quality of claims that have been brought forth, it’s incumbent upon the church and associated institutions to handle this. They’ve got to open the book.”

The complaint alleges that James Williams sexually and physically abused Hannah-Kate while he was a student at Southern seminary, where he managed a bookstore owned by Lifeway and worked in security for the seminary in the early 2000s.

According to the complaint, the alleged abuse started when Hannah-Kate Williams was 4 or 5 years old and continued until she first left home at 16.

“A particularly despicable form given that Williams was studying to be a Christian pastor was that he would ’baptize’ the Plaintiff as a form of punishment. Williams would fill up the bathtub, place the Plaintiff on her back, and forcibly submerge her while telling her that her ‘sin’ meant she needed to be baptized again,” the complaint alleges.

Hannah-Kate Williams said she was 8 years old the first time she recalls reporting abuse, contacting Southern Baptist church staff where she was living in Kingston, Tennessee, and describing what she alleges her father had done to her.

“Is this normal?” she said she remembers asking various pastors and church leaders over the years in a series of Facebook messages and private conversations. “I felt like something was wrong but I literally had nothing to compare it to.”

In these conversations, Williams said, she described how her father had repeatedly raped and physically abused her. She described how she dreaded going to sleep, terrified her father would crawl into bed with her.

Their general response? “‘I’m praying for you,’” she recalled. “They wanted nothing to do with this situation.”

Williams, the oldest of six siblings, said she first contacted SBC local pastors and national leaders after she realized her father was also assaulting three of her younger siblings. Her mother severely beat her and her siblings and also sexually abused her two younger brothers, according to public statements by the four oldest siblings (the two youngest siblings are still in her parents’ custody).

The elder four siblings have filed police reports against their parents in several jurisdictions, alleging sexual and physical abuse. But in December, a detective in Jeffersontown, Kentucky, declined to prosecute, citing “factual issues and inconsistencies” among the siblings’ stories, according to the report.

Reports in more than 10 other jurisdictions in Kentucky, Indiana, and Tennessee remain under investigation.

Another attorney working on the case, Scott White, said that his law firm has conducted hours of interviews with church staff who worked with her father. Hannah-Kate Williams supplied Facebook messages from 2010-2012 in which she contacted pastors and other church staff, alleging her parents’ neglect.

“They called me crazy, said I have a mental illness, that I’m a sinner and the enemy of the church for saying such things,” Williams said.

Abuse in the SBC

Williams is among hundreds of people who have said they were sexually abused by pastors and other leaders associated with SBC churches. 

A landmark 2019 investigation by the Houston Chronicle found about 380 SBC church leaders and volunteers over a 20-year period who were involved in allegations of sexual misconduct. This figure “includes those who were convicted, credibly accused and successfully sued, and those who confessed or resigned,” leaving behind more than 700 victims, nearly all children.

The report also brought to light decades of public warnings from survivors and advocates that had gone largely ignored.

For a decade before the Houston Chronicle report, Wade Burleson, a prominent Oklahoma pastor, had been urging SBC leadership to establish a database of known abusers so member churches could perform background checks before hiring ministers and staff. His resolutions were twice voted down at annual meetings.

Hannah-Kate Williams first publicly shared her story of abuse in a 2019 Twitter post. In June 2021, Williams increased her abuse advocacy ahead of the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual conference in Nashville and helped organize a joint statement with other survivors. (RNS Photo by Silas Walker)

After the Chronicle report appeared, the SBC began to do more to address the problem. Russell Moore held a conference on sexual abuse while with the SBC, inviting prominent victim advocates. At the 2019 annual meeting, in Birmingham, Alabama, the denomination voted to allow its credentials committee to “disfellowship” churches that hired known sex offenders.

In June of this year, Hannah-Kate Williams went to the SBC annual conference in Nashville, Tennessee, with eight other alleged survivors of abuse in the SBC. They drafted a statement calling on SBC leaders to investigate years of misconduct.

Near dawn on the second day of the meeting, Williams placed a copy of the statement on each one of the hall’s nearly 17,000 chairs. Hours later, she stood beside Grant Gaines, a pastor in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, as he proposed a motion calling for a formal audit of sexual abuse allegations that had gone uninvestigated in the SBC’s more than 47,000 churches.

The next day, as Williams stood outside the meeting hall handing copies of the statement to passing delegates, Mike Stone, a candidate for president of the convention, confronted her.

“He said I’m causing more harm to the SBC than good, and I’m not doing right by survivors,” Williams said. “So many people in the SBC fall blindly on good faith in their leaders.”

Stone promptly released a statement, denying being “unkind” to Williams in this interaction, but their conversation had already become the talk of the convention.

And her advocacy proved successful: The “messengers” to the meeting nearly unanimously approved the third-party audit and authorized an investigation into the Executive Committee’s alleged mishandling of the issue over the past two decades.

Hannah-Kate Williams, center left, accompanies Tennessee pastor and messenger Grant Gaines as he introduces a motion for a sexual abuse task force during the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting, June 15, 2021, in Nashville, Tennessee. (RNS photo by Kit Doyle)

“That was the first time I’ve been in a room with SBC folks where I felt like the majority of the room was on the side of goodness, on the side of justice,” Williams said. “For the first time maybe ever, I have hope for this convention.”

Target of threats and bullying

While her outspokenness emboldened others to share their abuse stories and seek justice — and played a major role in decisions made at the June annual conference — it also left her vulnerable to harassment and bullying that only exploded after the meeting.

“There are pastors commenting online saying that I’m lying and that I deserve the death penalty,” Williams said. “They literally want me dead.”

After driving home to Lexington after the SBC annual meeting, Williams stayed off social media for a few days. When she eventually checked her accounts, she said, she found thousands of notifications. Many were expressions of solidarity from other sex abuse victims and advocates.

But more, she said, were fierce threats. After a long, exhausting week, the harassment drove her into a “mental collapse,” Williams said. “I just completely broke down reading what these people were saying about me.”

On June 19, after her appearance at the annual meeting, James Kip Farrar, a pastor at Aletheia Baptist Church in Indianapolis who had ministered alongside Williams’ father, released a 15-minute video on Facebook denying Williams’ allegation that he covered up her father’s abuse.

“Hannah-Kate is a liar,” Farrar said in the video. “She is lying to you. Why? I do not know.”

Another video, by popular Reformed Baptist theologian A.D. Robles, followed on YouTube days later, analyzing Williams’ claims. He said that, according to “God’s law,” the church “mustn’t entertain an accusation against an elder unless there are two or three firsthand witnesses.” His video goes on to say sex abuse should be a death penalty offense, according to the law of God, but if a false witness were to rise up, the person should receive the same punishment.

Abuse advocate Hannah-Kate Williams in Lexington, Kentucky, June 26, 2021. (Photo by Silas Walker)

“What kind of man thinks: ‘I need to go online and talk about how a rape victim needs to be murdered’?” Williams said about Robles’ video.

Farrar and Robles did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

The harassment weighs heavily on Williams, who suffers violent flashbacks that haunt her at night and frequent panic attacks.

But the bullying also poses physical danger: Late one recent night, Williams was kept awake by continual slams on her apartment’s front door. Fearing for her life amid the barrage of online bullying, she called the police for protection. Three officers patrolled outside her home between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m. each night for weeks, the Lexington Police Department confirmed.

Fear of harassment, bullying and retaliation plays a major role in keeping victims silent: More than two-thirds of sexual assault cases go unreported, with the majority of victims citing fear of retaliation, according to statistics analyzed by RAINN, an anti-sexual violence organization. Of those reported, fewer than 1% of sexual abuse cases lead to prison time for the perpetrator.

A culture that protects perpetrators

Experts like Rachael Denhollander and Diane Langberg say conservative evangelical denominations such as the SBC foster a culture that protects perpetrators and attacks victims.

“When something is raised, it is not believed because they think: ‘Our church is blessed by God, and our leader is blessed by God. If we look into it, we’re going to destroy God,’” said Langberg, a Christian psychologist who specializes in sexual abuse trauma.

During Williams’ childhood, James Williams ministered in more than 20 cities throughout Kentucky, Indiana and Tennessee, pushed from church to church for bad behavior, according to White, who said he corroborated employment with many of the institutions where James Williams allegedly worked.

Williams lived with her parents on and off until she was 24. She said she left many times — sometimes by her own choice or sometimes, she said, forced by her parents after they found out she had been talking. Her parents would cut off her communication from her siblings, she said, which is ultimately why she would return.

“My siblings were all I had through this living hell,” she said. “I would do anything to stay with them, even if it meant continuing dealing with my parents.”

In 2019, she left for the final time. Soon after, her sister, Maddie Rose Douglas, now 23, left too. Her two brothers, Micah and Joshua Williams, who have both alleged physical and sexual abuse by their parents, are now married and out of the house.

Their two youngest siblings, ages 13 and 10, are still in their parents’ custody. In 2019, Child Protective Services in Frankfort, Kentucky, conducted an assessment after receiving a complaint from a neighbor about potential physical and sexual abuse. CPS did not find any preliminary substantiated risk and declined to open an investigation, though the social worker reported she had “concerns of possible physical and sexual abuse,” according to the report, which Williams provided.

“They are both still in the house with my parents,” Douglas said. “They aren’t safe there. It breaks my heart.”

Williams credits Gaines, Slade, and other pastors defending sexual abuse survivors for getting the motion for the third-party audit passed.

“They stood up against all of these men who acted like it was in our heads,” Williams said. “We’ve been waiting for men of God to do this.”

Despite the bullying, Williams’ outspokenness on social media has also created a network of support, which has saved her life, she said.

“Before she started sharing online, I was just one of a few people who knew her story and were in her support system. I was just trying to help her stay alive,” said Williams’ friend and podcast host, Nick Laparra, who accompanied Williams, Douglas, and Micah Williams to file police reports against their parents in Frankfort in 2019.

Williams
Hannah-Kate Williams, left, poses for a portrait with her sister, Maddie Rose Douglas (previously Rachel Williams), on the University of Kentucky campus in Lexington, Kentucky, June 26, 2021. (Photo by Silas Walker)

Laparra recalled “countless” instances over the course of that year when he either physically or verbally stopped Williams from taking her own life. He spent hours almost every day on the phone with her for nearly nine months, he said.

“A year ago, she was hardly able to talk about this. This is a whole new Hannah,” Laparra said. “I’m just praying and hoping for her sake that the right people get prosecuted.”

This recent taste of justice offers Williams some comfort — and she is heartened to know her advocacy could spare others from abuse — but, she says, the damage has already been done.

“Every day is a battle of telling myself, I deserve to be alive,” she said. “That I deserve to have the things I need.”

Megan Botel is a Bay Area native and journalism master’s student at the University of Southern California.

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20 Responses

  1. Thank you for your bravery and perseverance, Hannah. I hate what they’ve done to you, but I’m so thankful that you’re still standing. I’m thankful for the team that has stood behind you. I pray that all the bullies will be cast out and will be replaced by those who truly do love God and others.

  2. Hannah, thank you for your courage and thank you for standing up against The Corporate Christian Machine. They may hate you but Jesus doesn’t and neither does the true Church.

    “Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or terrified of them for God goes with you. He will never leave you or forsake you”.

    From an old hymn, “It will be worth it all when we see Jesus”.

    1. Cathie Boucher, thanks for putting a name to this widespread but well hidden enemy of truth and righteousness – “The Corporate Christian Machine”. This familiar monster grinds away at the vulnerable within many streams of what we think of as God’s Church. Why is it always the females who will muster up the courage to step out & face this Goliath for the sake of others? So glad Hannah found at least a few men willing to stand by her. Joanna Casteel tried something similar in 2019 with her open letter to “The Lord’s Recovery Movement of Witness Lee”, and now she’s a widow. Read the similarities here: https://www.mylocalchurchexperience.com/jo-casteel-s-open-letter

      1. Why is it always the females who will muster up the courage to step out & face this Goliath for the sake of others?

        Because Men personally benefit from the arrangement. They get to be Second from the Bottom in the Great Chain of Being (lording it over the wimmen), and there is nobody as motivated to keep those on the Bottom on the Bottom than those who are Second from the Bottom. “ME MAN! WOMAN, SUBMIT! GAWD SAITH!”

  3. I can’t believe her brothers are still in the home, especially if there is a history of past abuse. Many years ago I worked for Child Protective Services in Kentucky. Past abuse was a huge indicator and a reason to remove other children. Hannah-Kate stay strong. I pray you have a loving church you attend in Lexington. I grew up in Lexington and attended UK.

  4. I was caught by the comment that an accusation against an elder required two witnesses, on the basis of a biblical reference.

    Now, let’s get this straight. When a criminal offence occurs it’s no longer a church discipline matter, its a Romans 13:2, 4 matter. And don’t you forget it.

    Happily, in my jurisdiction it is a criminal offence not to report an offense of child abuse, with up to 7 years in jail simply for not reporting, or even hindering an investigation (e.g. by pressuring a person not to report).

    Our church has very strict safety measures and training for all staff and volunteers in respect of child safety.

    1. So basically, what is done in shadows and darkness has to have at least two other witnesses? Are these witnesses going to stay in the house 24/7? These are men leading churches and spouting this crap?

  5. If the SBC is having an independent audit of its handling of these cases, what is the purpose of this suit?
    Will everyone who failed the victims in some way be sued?
    Does Paul’s condemnation of suing other believers in secular courts apply here?
    How is this restoring the church?

    1. Does Paul’s condemnation of suing other believers in secular courts apply here?
      Answer: No, it does not.

  6. I read this story with a combination of horror and awe: horror at the years of abuse and cover up of abuse in God’s name and awe at the bravery and persistence of Hannah-Kate calling her denomination to repentance.

    1. This is a horrific account of what can go terribly wrong when people are not held accountable for their actions. I also think you are slightly off-base…how does a denomination “repent”? Did the SBC fail this young lady, or did ego-driven people within the SBC (and yes, I believe that is an important distinction). I am part of the SBC. My church would never condone or support the minimizing or ignoring of abuse victims.

  7. Hannah Kate, I am so, so thankful of you and may I say as an older sister in Christ, so very, very proud of you. What a hard thing you have done for the Lord and His precious ones! As a biblical counselor who has had the wondrous, humbling privilege of standing side-by-side with others like you who have been deeply harmed by those God gave to love and protect you, I am in awe of the glory of Jesus revealed in you as you refuse to “stop speaking about what you have seen and heard.” I commit to pray for your continued strength, protection, provision, and deep comfort and help from the Lord.

    I pray that God’s expression of His heart towards those shepherds who abuse His sheep in Ezekiel 34 would comfort your heart, sister beloved of the Lord. As we have been trying to expose abuse at our (past) church and have failed (currently it is continues to be covered up, but we will not stop our efforts to expose it to protect the vulnerable) it has been a balm to my soul. God’s expression that He is against the shepherds and will feed them with judgment, and that He Himself will pasture the wounded and weak and abused is a promise that is yes and amen in Jesus. And I’m praying that even in the midst of this huge race ahead of you, you can trust He will allow you to graze and drink deeply from Him every step.

    Carrie Foldberg

  8. Godspeed Hannah Kate,
    Your Wisedom, Bravery and Tenacity in the face of incredible opposition is an inspiration.

  9. “What kind of man thinks: ‘I need to go online and talk about how a rape victim needs to be murdered’?” Williams said about Robles’ video.

    Good question.

    1. “What kind of man thinks: ‘I need to go online and talk about how a rape victim needs to be murdered’?”

      Taliban Religious Police.

  10. Their general response? “‘I’m praying for you,’” she recalled.

    In my experience, “Praying for you” is Christianese for doing nothing and feeling Oh-So-Pious about it.

    To paraphrase Babylon-5:
    “You have a saying: ‘I’m Praying for You.’
    We too have a saying: PUT YOUR MONEY WHERE YOUR MOUTH IS!”

    “When something is raised, it is not believed because they think: ‘Our church is blessed by God, and our leader is blessed by God. If we look into it, we’re going to destroy God,’”

    “PUNY GOD.”
    — The Incredible Hulk regarding Loki, The Avengers movie

    Actually, what’s described above sounds more like “Ignorance is Bliss and I Want Utopia!”

  11. “A particularly despicable form given that Williams was studying to be a Christian pastor was that he would ’baptize’ the Plaintiff as a form of punishment. Williams would fill up the bathtub, place the Plaintiff on her back, and forcibly submerge her while telling her that her ‘sin’ meant she needed to be baptized again,” the complaint alleges.

    Isn’t that usually called “attempted drowning”?
    Or “really putting the Water in Waterboarding”?

    Like a dark RL version of the skit where preacher-man flubs the baptism several times calling out “WHAT DO YOU TRULY BELIEVE?” until the baptizee bails out with “I BELIEVE YOU’RE TRYING TO DROWN ME!”

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